AN inauspicious start in a skins store evolved into a 52-year wool industry career for Australian Wool Exchange's man in the west David Aslett.
The 30 June was Mr Aslett's last day as AWEX regional manager, wool technical controller and market analyst at the Western Wool Centre.
If you discount Army national service, Mr Aslett has had just three employers in that 52 years - AWEX for the past 22 and Wesfarmers for 28 before that.
He worked his way up from pushing a broom at the old South Fremantle wool store to become Wesfarmers' WA wool marketing manager.
Along the way he went north with a shearing team and survived the turbulent 1991 end of the wool reserve price scheme, before being head-hunted at a country pub.
Diplomacy skills acquired during 10 years as a WA National Football League (WANFL) umpire were put to the test at AWEX dealing with sectional interests and regional committees, and occasionally, disputes between brokers and buyers.
For Mr Aslett, looking back, it has been "an amazing, wonderful journey" literally on the sheep's back.
A city boy from Hamilton Hill, he followed friends into wool by good luck.
"My mates at school were Ron and Doug Myers - Ron went on to become Wesfarmers' wool operations manager - and they worked on weekends at Wenz & Co, a sheep skins merchant in Cockburn Road, and they encouraged me to join them," Mr Aslett recalled.
"When I left school at 15 there was no thought of going on to university or anything like that, it was find a job, so I started full time at Wenz.
"It was pretty in your face. The skins were bloodied, fresh off the sheep at the old Robbs Jetty abattoirs just down the road.
"It was smelly, it was dirty, but we were getting reasonable money for young boys."
The Myers brothers had started studying wool classing at Fremantle TAFE and both moved on to Wesfarmers in South Fremantle.
Mr Aslett followed, to Fremantle TAFE two nights a week studying to become a wool classer, and to Wesfarmers.
"I fronted up with a couple of family references in one hand, my junior high school certificate in the other and asked store manager Len Green for a job,'' he said.
"I was rewarded by being given a broom to sweep the show floor."
He progressed to bulk wool sorter and jute wool pack repairer.
A wool classer's certificate required six months' practical experience in shearing sheds as a rouseabout.
Wesfarmers assigned him to shearing contractor Frank Marks.
His first shed was on Nardlah, Broomehill, then he went north to the Gascoyne and Pilbara.
"We left from the Ozone Hotel near the causeway in Perth on the back of a flatbed truck with hard wooden bench seats - it was known as the ring burner," Mr Aslett recalled.
"But we went to some fantastic stations - Ningaloo was one of them, right on the beach, the presser could press a bale of wool then throw his fishing line out and catch a fish between bales.
"It was a fantastic experience and a real eye-opener for me."
But Mr Aslett was aiming higher than shed classer, his ambition was to join Wesfarmers' technical staff.
With mate Ron Myers as his boss, he joined the junior technical staff in the wool store, wearing a grey dustcoat and doing "hack work" preparing for sales - pre-sale lotting and getting samples and show floor ready.
He completed his TAFE studies, submitted three clips he classed for inspection by the Australian Wool Commission (AWC) and became a registered wool classer before being promoted to Wesfarmers' senior technical staff.
As a senior he wore a white dustcoat and became involved in sale day operations, valuing wool and starting as a trainee auctioneer.
"There was a distinction between grey coat and white coat - it was based on a bit of military rank, bearing in mind all your managers were probably ex-servicemen," Mr Aslett said.
"If you were a grey coat caught wearing a white coat, you were in trouble."
He also started being sent up the country to meet woolgrowers, learning the wool agent role, when, as a 21-year-old, his number came up in the conscription ballot and his career was on hold for 20 months.
Discharged soon after Gough Whitlam's 1972 federal election win, Mr Aslett returned to Wesfarmers and married his sweetheart Jan.
"It was that Myers connection again, Jan was a hairdresser in the city and a friend of Ron and Doug's sister Jill, we met at Ron's 21st birthday party," he explained.
Mr Aslett wanted to retain his Army fitness and, encouraged by his father-in-law, took up boundary umpiring.
He ran the boundary in 204 league games, including five WANFL grand finals.
In 1980 he moved his young family, children Paul, Nicole and Brooke, to Katanning with Wesfarmers.
"I loved Katanning, I really enjoyed my five years there, we had a really dedicated team, a highly-motivated manager and auctioneer Neil Brindley - one of the State's top livestock auctioneers," he said.
"For the last two years I was fortunate to be branch manager there - I was the first wool person to become a branch manager."
A series of management changes saw him return to Perth and the role of marketing manager, reporting firstly to Colin Major and then Ron Myers as wool manager.
He also dealt with key account customers, including the Heytesbury account for the Holmes ((xE0))à Court family.
But trouble was brewing in the industry by 1989 with the imminent collapse of the wool market and a massive wool stockpiles purchased by AWC to maintain a floor price.
"Like all brokers, we had wool coming out of our ears, there were terrific storage problems, we had so much wool we didn't know what to do with it," Mr Aslett said.
"It was a difficult time, wool was still coming in which generated income for brokers, but the sale situation was very difficult, there was very little actual market competition."
When the end of AWC and its floor price came, Mr Aslett was working the Moora, Three Springs and Dalwallinu area, while retaining some key accounts as a self-employed commissioned wool agent for Wesfarmers, which had franchised a lot of its operations.
While staying overnight at the Wubin hotel on one trip, hotel staff called him to the phone.
It was Peter Smith, chief executive officer of AWEX, formed by the wool industry in February 1994 to replace previous statutory bodies after the federal government deregulated the industry.
He offered a job.
"Both Jan and myself saw it as an exciting opportunity to get in on the ground floor," Mr Aslett said.
He started with AWEX in mid-1994 as the industry attempted to establish a new system for marketing the national clip.
"We decided not to use the AWC model - they did all their own appraisal and all of the market reporting," he said.
"AWEX chose a new model, we would utilise the broker appraiser and accredit those appraisers to apply a new wool standards system which was called AWEX ID.
"So the brokers all had to be trained and accredited and the broker members of the wool exchange provided the information that became the basis of our market reporting.
"This was controversial at the time because some of the buyers saw it as a move towards sale by description."
There were also sectional interests in the early days, he said, with regional committees before the creation of the National Auction Selling Committee.
"That was where my umpiring skills came in handy - separate, don't handle,'' Mr Aslett said.
"Because of my background I was seen as broker friendly because I'd come from that side of the industry.
"I had to earn some respect along the way and that took time."
Mr Aslett is rightly proud of his involvement in WA.
"When I first started out in wool somebody said to me it was a dying industry and wool would soon be replaced by synthetic fibres," he said.
"It hasn't happened in my time and I'm hoping, because of its amazing natural attributes, it will remain in demand for many years to come."