14Albany 1946
Dick Spooner, the West Australian Minister for Mines, lived in Albany, in the South West of the state. It was a strange place for a mining minister to live, Albany being famous for its whaling rather than earthmoving. d**k hated travelling up to the big smoke of Perth. He preferred the tranquillity of Albany, where he could sit at his desk in his little, timber cottage, and get on with the real work for his constituents.
He had been persuaded to enter politics by his boss at the Seal and Whaling Cooperative Pty Ltd. There, he had been employed in various jobs stripping the blubber from the hulking bodies brought to the town on the whaling ships. The foreman was impressed by d**k’s work ethic and by the fact that he was the only employee apparently capable of stringing any s
