Paul John Ellis, 65 years

"I was a typical young fella, I went to school at St. Catharine’s at Gymea and… an all-boys school at Caringbah and then finished off the last three years of my education at Gymea High School. I represented NSW combined high school’s rugby league. And worked a number of jobs until I found a niche in Qantas as a flight steward in those days, flight attendants now, and become a supervisor. I left that after 33 years and retired 5 years ago in 2012.

I do, you go into the training facility with a bunch of strangers and because of varying personalities you had to sort of find your place in the scheme of things and it went on from there.

The girl that I was going out with at the time her cousin was actually a flight steward with Qantas and she said she does all these wonderful things and goes overseas, it’s a bit of an adventure. My previous time with Qantas I’d been in customs for a short period. And prior to that id been a postman and was looking for something more permanent and settled and after I joined Qantas I found it really enjoyable. Loved it, I wouldn’t have stayed 33 years had I not.

Probably the most memorable is not a good one, I had a lady have esophageal varices, varicose veins in the throat and they burst in flight and she proceeded to vomit up two and a half litres of blood. We were coming from London to Bangkok and had to divert to Istanbul in turkey. We ended up doing like a 20-hour day but this lady survived the operation which saved her life virtually.

We were trained to deal with medical as well as in flight, other in flight situations, there’s been other things that you’ve had to arrest people on board. We’ve had some funny incidents and you get to meet a lot of different people. It was certainly an eye opener for me and an ongoing experience over that period of time.

Just before I turned 60 I was going to go part time which was available to us which meant you only worked a limited number of hours per two-month roster period. They offered a three-year redundancy package which I found pretty attractive and I thought if I need to I can get a casual job doing something else but it was a pretty good redundancy package and I decided to take it along with my wife of course. And yeah, I haven’t looked back.

Well it meant I got to spend a lot more time at home, but we have done a lot of travelling since then so whether I’m actually physically at home or not remains to be seen, but it certainly allowed me to do a lot more things that I’d missed out on when I was away because you were away… the longest trip I ever did with work was 19 days. So that’s quite a period of time to be away from your family.

I’ve got two children, sorry, my wife Elizabeth first, she was a flight attendant only for a short period. We’ve got two kids Mitchell and Tara… they’re both working full time now, they’re 27 and 24.

I get to sit on the other side of the situation now and with work I had to you know be at work and serving people now I get to sit on the plane and enjoy the service side of it, although I do miss some of the interactions that we used to have with passengers. And spending more time with the kids and that, we can go out for dinner regularly which didn’t occur because they were still growing up and at school when I was flying, yeah, we just get to do more things together.

You could write a book but it’d probably be incriminating (laughs) in a lot of circumstances, but it’s just the experience of meeting so many different people from comedians to royalty to famous business men and … I preferred to work in economy because people are people and you can joke and laugh at them. First class was you had to watch your p’s and q’s and business class people were honestly, they thought they were there by right… where they you know, most of the time they were using frequent flyer points and saw it as a right not a privilege that they thought they were the privilege class. Because first class people new that they were so you treated them with that respect.

One of the funniest people I’ve ever met was Billy Connolly the comedian. I spoke to him for quite a while between Los Angeles and Tahiti one time and he was just, there was just one on one in the first class galley, that was about 20 minutes, until the rest of the crew found out and then they came in and sort of spoiled the atmosphere and so he went back to his seat in first class.

I had a cancer problem about 9 and a half years ago. Which came back to be proven to be passive smoking related which, for the first 17 years of my flying career people were allowed to smoke on board aeroplanes. And it was like walking into a smoke screen, well it was virtually a smoke screen in certain sections of the aircraft. You weren’t allowed to smoke in other sections which you know smoke didn’t know where to stop so virtually the whole aircraft was covered in smoke. That legislation changed in 2006 I think it was uh… no it might have been a bit before that. And anyway, I underwent surgery, radiation and chemotherapy and I’ve been cleared… so that was 9 and a half years ago. Pretty traumatic… yeah.

Well, being a non-smoker I was overjoyed as were most of the crew. Commercially they thought, Qantas thought it would affect their customer base but It hasn’t had that affect I don’t think. Certainly, it was a lot more pleasant working without the smoke. People complained about the smoke, when they were supposed to be sitting in a non-smoking area but they were designated for example to row 65 and if you were sitting in row 64 there was no way to stop the smoke going forward. If you were sitting in row 66 you were right in the middle of it. It’s a bit more regimented now, I know the job is now.

As a retiree, I’m enjoying life and doing as much as we can. We’ve just come back from a two weeks’ holiday in New Zealand, prior to that we had three weeks in Bali, so life is good.

I would have to say the Pacific Islands like Tahiti and Hawaii. Although they are becoming expensive, especially when you’re on a limited budget now being retired, but Tahiti is especially beautiful. I’d like to go to Spain and Portugal and I haven’t been to Egypt. I’d love to see the pyramids… live."