Jim's Book Series Chapter 1 interview with Jim Penman and host Joel Kleber

Hi, everyone, my name is Joel Cleaver from Jim's group. And today what we thought we'd kick off is our first in what we're going to call the Jim's Story series. The Jim's Story series. What we want to do is we want to get a lot more depth into Jim's life and his background based on the book, which is Jim's book, which is around. We're going to go 20 chapters and we're going to go chapter by chapter and we're going to ask questions about the chapter in there. So if you haven't read Jim's book, please get a copy. Obviously, every customer fan as well, which is Jim's autobiography on our website. And it goes in a lot more detail than that because as you said just previously, this is a lot more personal. A lot more personal. I think. I think when I read these. Again, the personal side in here, all the stories, especially of when you're teenage years and when you're younger, definitely do go on to form a lot of your interests today. So I thought it'd be interesting to go into that. So let's start it off. Okay. So the early years. So where were you born and where. And what? Sorry, what year? Sorry?

Well, I was born in 1952 and I'm ashamed to say I was born in England, but that does not make me English.

You're ashamed to say it. Right. Very handsome.

I'm not a pom. My mother was Australian. She was actually having a spending time over there in the uk and they met my father in a youth hostel in Wales.

So your father was Tom Penman and your mother was Margaret Moxham. And reading the book as well, it said that your great grand. So your name is David. So your great grandfather was actually David Penman.

My great, great grandfather was David Penman. He's my most famous ancestor. He was the. He actually rose from poverty to become the captain of a ship and developed some quite considerable wealth. And he actually died when the ship went down to Bay of Biscay in a storm.

Really? So he's a famous sea captain?

Well, not that famous, but he was successful in our family. He's very famous because he came from nothing to build and he had all these properties and he had only one son, Christopher, who actually never, never worked in his whole life and basically blew all the properties. Oh, really? Right.

Okay.

So he's like the example of the good ancestor and the not so good ancestor.

He's been a hero to you when you were younger. Yeah, yeah.

He's my exemplar.

And reading the book as well. It says your mother, Margaret was a bit of a maverick in her time. And actually I was quite surprised reading it. Was denied enlistment in World War II. She wanted to enlist in World War II?

Yeah, she wanted to enlist. It was a big adventure. Everybody was going off. But she was a teacher. It was a reverb profession. They wouldn't let her go.

Right.

So, yeah, she wanted to.

That's quite. Well, that's quite different at the time. I don't know how much that was a common thing or not. But you do describe as your mum and maverick in there. And was that just one that adventurous nature?

Yeah, well, very much so. She was different, my mum. She actually was one. I mean, going to the UK from Australia has become pretty normal in recent years, but she was one of the first that went out there immediately after the war and one of the first ships that actually went from Australia. And she was just a great spiritual adventure. And she's always been like that. Even when she was in her 70s, she was hitchhiking across Canada and all kinds of things.

She was hitchhiking across Canada? Yeah. Do you wanna talk about that? Maybe what was going on there?

Well, she just used to hitchhike around the world. My mother's an inveterate traveler. She traveled when she was young, as soon as she could, met my father that way and they used to go on trips. And then after she got divorced from her father, she went off hitchhiking herself all by herself all over the country. Actually, what Mum always said was that when she was young and single, she had no responsibility. She could take risks when she was a mother and, you know, she couldn't. But then when she was again free of all that, she was single, she could go off and take risks and hitch and do anything she liked.

Now, do you think it's quite ironic that you hate traveling, whereas your mum absolutely loved traveling? Hitchhiking around the world in seminary.

It is, isn't it? Yeah, I've got. It's famous. My mother is a great traveler. She was a terrific traveler and I hate it. Yes. Just an irony. But I'm different to all my family like that. And all the rest of my family love travel and I hate it.

Why do you think you hate travel so much?

Just don't like it. I love books, I love traveling. My mind. I just dislike airplanes intensely. I just don't like it. I like home. I like being at home. I like being at my farm. I just like the normal pattern of domestic life.

Let's talk about something else. Was your dad was a 10 pound Pom, referred to back in the day as well. And his first job when he came to Australia was. He was actually a lecturer at Adelaide University.

He was a chemical engineer.

Chemical engineer, that's right.

So he. Interesting fact, my father. Yes, he was an engineer. He was a senior lecturer at Adelaide University and later got offered a job as a consultant, Austin Anderson in Sydney. We moved to Sydney when I was about 14 and then after that, after a year there he was made chief engineer of Carlton United Breweries.

Yeah, and that's a pretty good job if anyone is. I think that's the big factory in Abbotsford and in Richmond there's a big brewery there. So your dad was the chief engineer there.

Yes, and as he said at the time, he was the best paid engineer in the entire country. And my father was an exceptionally brilliant man. Very strong, very knowledgeable, but completely tactless. So it didn't take him long to get on the wrong side of the management. He used to mutter about 18th century management. So he, he lost that one but then lent it into business as a consultant, which was much better.

I was going to say. It's quite ironic as well. And there's another irony because your dad was the chief engineer at Carlton United Breweries. But I know you don't like alcohol whatsoever. You don't drink.

No, both my parents enjoy their wine and I'm a teetotaler. But that was partly reaction too. You know, I rebelled against my father or something fierce when I was a teenager. I wouldn't speak two months for six months. So becoming a teetotaler was kind of like a bit of a reaction in the beginning against him. Now I want to talk about, put that in perspective. I mean, I mean, I became very good friends with my father in later years and he's a great guy and I really appreciate what he did for me. But in my teenage years he's a pretty authoritarian character and we did not get on well.

Let's talk about that six months, because it is in the book, it says as you just said previously. Then you didn't talk to him for six months. What was the argument about?

Well, actually, what happened, we were at the dinner table one time and I said something. I must have been really needling me just he turned to me and said, shut up. So I shut up for six months. We don't speak to him.

Not a bad silent protest there for six months.

Yeah, well, I got in with my mum though, she was sort of like my best friend at that time and I was, she was great because I.

Was reading that and you said during school, obviously you probably didn't like school too much but your mum was really, as you said, you're really close with your mum, you could talk to her about other things and all that sort of stuff.

I used to come home from school and I'd walk up and pace up and down the kitchen because I was like pacing and just talk to my mother about things.

Let's go back to the age of eight because I think it's quite significant in your journey is this, well not this incident but this sort of that time is when you were joined the scouts and back then you were doing the bobber job type of thing.

Cub Scouts actually. Cub Scouts, Cub Scouts. So bobber job was the thing you go and knock on neighbors and you offer, do a small job and they give you a Bob $0.10. Which obviously was a lot more in those days. I mean put that in perspective. In those days you could buy a. What's now a big block of Cadbury chocolate for 20 cents for two shillings. This is pre decimal. So what happened was I knocked on the door of a. The guy behind Mr. Tapley and asked to do some work and he offered me this ongoing job which was 2 shillings per week. And mostly what I used to do was to break his driveway. Odd path like that. That took me about an hour. So it was because it had a gravel, gravel driveway.

There was a significant moment with Mr. Tapley which sort of maybe formed a lot of your passion in your business to this very day. And that was a situation where I think you had to pick up something and you dropped a few things and he came out and yeah, there wasn't.

Much to do in like the raking. He just said carry this rubbish from here to there. And I just dropped a bit on the way. I was like an 8 year old kid and he just. And my father used. He was very Fierce, so very. Mr. Tatley was very mild. So when he just, he just looked at me very sadly and said if you're going to do it like that I might as well do it myself. And didn't raise his voice at all. And I think it was that contrast that really made me feel so ashamed. I can still remember that feeling of shame and just so determined I would never let him down again. And as far as I know I never did. I was very careful.

And do you think that's where you developed your. Because You've said in here that your emotional attitude towards customer service comes from probably that incident as an eight year old.

Well, it started from there, yeah. What makes a person's carriage risk? All kinds of things. But yeah, that's the first I can remember of being really concerned about customer service. But I used to do lots of stuff. I mean, I've always done gardening. We had this old push mower and I used to mow our lawn, which wasn't easy cause it was full of trees and twigs and stuff. So it was always getting stuck. And it was one of those old push mowers you push around. So that's one of my jobs. And then. Not that I like that too much. And I wasn't getting paid for that.

I was gonna say, cause it didn't come about. Cause you're doing this stuff for Mr. Tapley at another neighbour and your dad said you might as well do that.

No, no, no. We just did chores. I was a boy, so mowing the lawns and taking the. We had a wood fire. So I take the ash from the fire and get rid of it. And we had mallee roots and I'd put them into the store. So that was part of my work. And going out and getting my dad's paper in the morning and stuff, you know, we worked in those days, kids tend to do jobs more than perhaps they do these days.

And I'm reading as well. When you were 10, you went to England for a year, which was quite significant. You went there. Your dad was working at atomic research in Harwell.

Yes. In Berkshire. Yeah.

Yes. So tell us about that time that year you spent there.

Well, we lived in a little village called Aston Upthorpe, which is in Berkshire. And it was very historical. Just down the street from us, just a few, very short walk, was a church in which it said to King Ethelred, pray while his brother Alfred was fighting a battle against the Danes on a nearby hill. It was really chock full of history and by far there's a great, great history buff. So. And every weekend we'd go off traveling around the country and looking at cathedrals and churches and stuff. I can still remember, I can still tell you the age of an English church by looking at the. At the shape of the windows and the pillars. You can tell Roman from Gothic. And then you tell roughly when they were built. I can still remember that stuff. And then just going to Stonehenge and Avesbury and it was just an amazing thing, following Roman roads, looking for flints from the ancient British might have had just. It was an amazing year. I remember more that one year than I do the whole the rest of my childhood.

Yeah, that stood out to me when I read this again that was very significant that one year. But you say every weekend you're going to Stonehenge or you're going to art gallery, you go look at cathedrals. Yeah.

I think it's quite small so you can travel a long, long way. We had this old car which we used to just get up and go. My dad was just in bachelor in history. So my interest in history really stems from that time I think which is.

Quite significant because that's obviously the bio history and all that sort of stuff. Now that's where that love when you're a 10 year old in England.

It sort of started from that too. I used to read a lot too. I was a passionate reader. I always had my nose in the book. Not very social, complete nerd. If I was born in this day and age I'd have been a total computer geek. But fortunately I wasn't. So I just read and that was all I had was reading and reading and reading. And so for all that time I was reading books about history. And very quickly by the time I was 14, I was into adult books too. So I just read voraciously all the time. I read about a book a day for most of my teenage years on average.

That's still something you do today with the audiobooks, right? You just substituted it.

Yeah, well today I would read probably on average or listen to maybe three books a week. I've just finished Rising for the Third Reich which is a fascinating book that took me about close to a week because it's a big book.

Yeah. Now in 1966 then you moved back, you moved to Sydney. So I don't think a lot of people knew you spent some time in Sydney. And I think that something that even resonates to this day was a funny little funny thing. You had a fitness test or something and you found out that you're one of the most unfittest kids in the class. It was pulse rate, it was pulse rate. Okay.

We measured pulse rate and I can remember my pulse rate was 70 moment. It's about 50. Last time I mentioned it was 53. So at the age of 68. So I've actually improved a bit since then. But I was very shocked discover at the age of 14 I was one of the least fit kids in the class because I didn't like sport. I never, never, never liked group sport. And I just Determined at that stage that I was going to be fitter, I was not going to let myself be less fit than other kids. So I started jogging, which was very unusual. We're talking about 1966. I mean, nobody. People jog all the time now. Those days it was almost unknown, but I used to jog around the streets where I lived, which was difficult because the dogs come out and try and chase you and stuff.

I was going to say, do you get some dogs chasing? Do you have any weird looks doing it? Because you said it wouldn't have been a common thing back in the day.

Yeah, I could remember, I can remember being chased by dogs and I'm kicking at them to get away from me. This was so unusual. But I never liked sport except I played squash, which I got from my father. But I became much fitter and something.

Significant as well happened. When you're about to move back, I know you don't like gifts that much, but you got a gift from someone called Harold Richards as a goodbye present, which was the book called the Peloponnesian Wards.

Yeah. By Thucydides.

Yeah. That's a significant, significant time or significant moment.

Well, I was always interested in history and he gave me this book which is quite heavy going actually for a 14 year old. But I was, you know, a very nerdy 14 year old and I just fascinated by it. I was just enthralled by it. Under the spell. There's this incredible story of this wonderful, magnificent city, Athens. And even though Thucydides was an Athenian who was exiled by his, he was very critical of how his city, his love of his own city comes through. It was just amazing. And the horror of what happened, how this incredibly great, creative, wonderful city producing such magnificent minds, not only as Thucydides, who is one of the greatest historians of all time, but also in terms of architecture and theater and philosophy in so many ways, such an incredible city. And they went to this dreadful, dreadful, damaging war and then eventually lost, largely through stupid reasons and never, never recovered again. Though for two and a half thousand years we'd been in awe of the culture that it created and why that happened, what happened, what went wrong, that really got to me. And from there I got to Rome. You know, why did Rome fall? Why did a civilization so powerful? It was absolutely obsession to me. I was reading book after book after book after book on this subject and I remember we had to, for school, we were supposed to show we were doing some reading and I used to read, of course, everything, science fiction, anything but Then for any book, I'd always put down my history books. And I remember my history teacher, my English teacher looking at. He said, why don't you read something like naughty for a change? Because there was all these incredibly heavy history gnomes, you know, the history of the late Roman Empire from 280 to 370 AD. This is my typical adolescent reading. But there's this question, what happened? Why?

So that question you've gone on to form a whole. Obviously, biohistory is based. It's based on that initial question back when you're 14.

I asked myself a question at the age of 14, why does it happen? And I spent. I spent basically the rest of my life, in effect, trying to work out what happened, which I think I understand now, and what to do about it. Because the same thing is happening to our own society.

I know you don't like gifts, but that was from a gift back when you were 14 from Harold Richards. So.

And the other book that I read, too, I think. I don't know if I mentioned that was the Naked Eight by Desmond Morris.

Okay.

Which was basically. Even though I looked at it more recently, and there's virtually nothing I would agree with, but the. It's very outdated in certain ways. But the whole idea that you can understand human behavior in terms of biology. And I would have been actually, I remember buying that book in Sydney. I actually hitchhiked up to Sydney. That's what I used to do when I was hitchhiked to Sydney. I hitchhiked the city because I had a lot of relatives in Sydney.

How old were you then?

I would have been about 15.

15. You hitchhiked to Sydney? Yeah. Wow.

I did that several times, actually.

Really? Yeah.

I used to just head off hitchhike.

Which is unheard of now. It would be absolutely unheard of now.

My parents didn't think it's like a family tradition. I remember I was 15 years old, I think I was in Sydney, and I came and I saw this book. And it's got like naked peeks on people on it. That was interesting enough. But, you know, and I read it and I was fascinated by the idea that you could understand human behavior in terms of biology. So those two ideas, the fascination with history and the decline of civilizations, and also the idea that biology had some part of it. And that was another question that occurred to me in those days, too. This is stunning questions. Why does selection decline? And the second thing, why is it that for any animal, kind of animal, the more food they have, the more fast population grows? In humans it's the absolute opposite. The wealthier you become, the more the population tends to shrink. That's happened during the Roman Empire, for example. The population actually went down and it was obvious even then that the wealthier populations tend to decline.

Now this, now this sort of curiosity for a 15 year old that's quite. I would say it's very advanced. I'm just comparing what I was doing at 15. Was that something that your parents built into you, that curiosity? They always giving you books to read or obviously when you were 10 they took you to historical sites and educated you about it?

Oh yeah, my family was very, very intellectually strong. You know, we'd watch it in those days we didn't get a television till I was probably about 16 or 17, but when we did we'd go and watch something on tv, perhaps some historical thing. And during the ads, which of course we had to watch in those days, my father would grab the encyclopedia and he'd read to us what was happening really. So I got the habit too. I still do it actually. I annoy the hell out of everybody but I always tell them what's wrong with the history they're watching. This didn't happen. That wasn't that and that's why I didn't do that and stuff like that. So that's a pattern from my early stage. But our family dinner table was a hotbed of discussion and all kinds of things like that. Sometimes argument too, obviously, which is why. And not speaking to my father for six months. But.

But did you look back on that and see how good that was and how influential that was into who you are now?

Very important, extremely important. It's not just so much that, it's not the appearance. I said you should read something. It's just they were interested, especially my father, they were interested in these things. My father would always talk about, you know, why the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans and so forth and what the lessons were from that and those kinds of things. It was just part of my childhood growing up. It was just normal to us to discuss such matters.

Now I want to talk about your time in Melbourne. So your dad was at the Cub and then lost his job and because of the 18th century management style, then went into. What I found was very interesting reading was the consulting business side of it where he was investigating murders and fire investigations which I think was quite standard.

Forensic engineer, he was particularly good on fires. So he would actually bring home a whole lot of stuff and set fire to it in the Car, Really? Yes, all these weird plastic things. He set fire to see whether they burn or not. And one time, and he used to, one time after I learned to drive, he actually got me to drive down the road past our place and then put the brakes on and to just see how long it would take me to stop from a certain speed and whether there was any skid marks and stuff. So you remember helping dad with that kind of stuff too, and solving murders? I don't know if they talk about it in the book, but there was one case where this young guy, young man was actually, he'd been to. He was in an accident and he was, according to the police, he was drunk, he was driving too fast, he smashed into a tree and his fiance, who was with him was killed. So this was basically open and shut case. This is negligent homicide. You're going to spend a decade in jail. And the defence lawyer just said, look, I'll call Tom Penman to see if he's got anything to say about this. And dad went and investigated it and he found a few interesting things. First of all, he'd been having dinner with his wife's fiance's parents, who were meth. His father was a Methodist minister, so you can imagine how much alcohol he was drinking. And then my father got him to ask the lawyer to ask the person who came and did the blood test at the site of the accident. I said, when you took the blood test, did you swipe the area with alcohol which you normally would for an injection to stop infection? He did. Well, that completely accounts for the alcohol reading in the injection, because when you're taking a blood alcohol, you can't use alcohol on the skin because it messes it up. And the other thing did, he worked out. Now, the police said that he was speeding at such and such a rate. My dad actually showed that he could have been traveling well within the speed limit. It was an accident with the car. The guy got completely off. His life would have been totally ruined if it hadn't been for my dad. Hmm.

That's very, very significant. It's quite. I don't know, just take it back to that thing. I could imagine you're driving down the street and slamming the brakes on, then you come in and measure the skid marks, right? And then say, what speed were you doing in the car? Did the neighbors any say anything about that? Because you're in Northbourne at the time, which is quite an affluent area. Did they say, what the hell is this guy doing at the front?

No, it wasn't that obvious, really. The thing that actually one of my neighbors got up interested one time was when I was actually, I was auditioning to be the villain in the. In the school play, right? And so one thing I had to do was a fiendish laughter. So I went into the shed under the house and into the workshop and.