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Urban tribes

Uniforms

Some people who wear uniforms (or other specialised clothing for work) are very obvious. The presence of police and other emergency service workers always makes me wonder what’s wrong. Other uniforms are less obvious.

Someone called Elly Lukas apparently runs a beauty school. There seems to be no end of girls with their hair tied up wearing Elly Lukas special beautician tops on the train and around Collins Street, nattering away to each other or sharing their iPod headphones.

Early morning and early afternoon you see tradies on the train, going to/from their early shifts. Painters whose clothes and shoes are thoroughly covered in paint. Some carrying gear with them, some not.

Around the suburbs, at least the well-to-do ones, you’ll see young adults going to and from their split-shift jobs, wearing polo shirts with the names of the outsourced school childcare operations, such as Camp Australia. Few of them seem to last long in those jobs, presumably being a stopgap, not very well paid and crap hours. (At least, early mornings involved, which personally I’d call crap hours.) They seem to have boundless enthusiasm though, which is good, since for many families, the children are entrusted to them for many hours a week.

In the streets of my suburb in the evenings and weekends, young people in black and white can be seen, walking to and from their after-hours jobs at Safeway. They usually don’t put on the tie/scarf until they get to work.

On CBD streets are charity collectors… though most of them seem to be overseas backpackers with a charity de jour du jour t-shirt on, armed with clipboards and collection tins. You can see them from a long way off because the t-shirts are invariably garish and don’t match the clothes they’re wearing.

I’m sure there’s plenty of others that I can’t think of right now.

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

5 replies on “Uniforms”

I read this in the morning and what did I see in the afternoon that I had never seen before? Yep,Elly Lucas girls, about ten of them together at the corner of Swanston and Collins.

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