I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That's why I'm in a wheelchair: I've been doing it physically - it's hard labour - throughout my life.
I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect-and, yes, wonder-at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter.
He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, - running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley-slave.
Not all the labour of the earth Is done by hardened hands.
Useful manual labour, intelligently performed, is the means par excellence for developing the intellect.
A labourer cannot sit at the table and write, but a man who has worked at the table all his life can certainly take to physical labour.
The labourer's muscle is that of a cart-horse, his motions lumbering and slow.
The energy that gets the baby in is the energy that gets the baby out.
We're removal men. It's hard labour. I've come to the conclusion being a forward is probably the worst thing in rugby. Looking at backs, they play kick and laugh, run and clap and we get absolutely flogged.
I spent two years working on building sites, working on the railways as a guard and in a racing stable, exercising racehorses. I learnt to build relationships. The experience of not being stuck in some middle-class bubble taught me things that being at university hadn't.
Being a young Kiwi lad, a young Polynesian boy, I was pretty close to my family. But when I moved to Sydney, I went from training twice a week, playing touch footy with my mates, to working full-time as a labourer and training professionally.
