Ohne Worte

 

"I just want to sit here and relax!"

 

Sunday afternoon at "Riverbend". A little overcast and a little cool. I don't think a translation is needed but if you insist, ask Padma. Meantime, I just quietly sit here and read my book.

 

 

It's a special edition with an introduction by Anne Boleyn, left unfinished due to circumstances beyond her control.

 

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No news from happy Ha'apai

 

'Yours truly' on the left, and the bearded Austrian on the right, in September 2006

 

Take one part of sun-soaked, palm-lined beach, add a hammock stretched between two palm trees, a dash of ice-cold beer, and a pinch of gentle tradewinds, and finish with a twist of tropical sunset. It's easy to lose track of time in the land where time begins. Welcome to the South Sea Island Paradise of Ha'apai in the tiny Kingdom of Tonga!

There are so many romantic beaches to wander at sunrise and sunset, or in fact, all day long! You can explore on foot or mountain-bike too - just bring along a change of clothes, beach towel, and snorkel and mask. As you stay in a traditional fale on a deserted beach or uninhabited island, you may think for a moment you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real. And you can live this dream lifestyle for a fraction of what it costs to live anywhere else.

Which is what a man from Austria (not Australia but Austria, that little country in Central Europe where they speak German with a funny accent) had done in 1995 at the ripe old age of 39, following a workplace accident in Vienna which gave him a small pension to live on.

By the time I met him in Pangai on the island of Lifuka in 2006, he had already fully succumbed to the siren song of these remote and soporific islands which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life counts for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered.

His one accomplishment since coming to Tonga had been to marry a local girl and sire two kids. By the time we met, his wife had already separated again but he was still paying for her and the two kids which made his small pension even smaller. Suddenly, paradise seemed more like paradise lost!

He didn't seem to be ever struck by homesickness. And why would he want to leave? He subscribes to Louis Becke's sentiments - of whom he knows nothing - who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?"

 

 

We kept up a correspondence over many years, sporadic at best because of the unreliable mail service in Tonga, but in recent years I heard nothing from him. He'd be 69 years old now which, given the sort of life he has led for the past thirty years and the restricted diet and even worse health service in the islands, would have make him an old man.

We had talked about this back in 2006, and he seemed to accept the fact that if he ever grew old or sick, he would be far away from any help. He seemed to accept his eventual fate with the stoicism of a man still in the prime of his life, but I wonder if he was still as accepting of his fate today.

As Somerset Maugham wrote in his story "The Lotus Eater" about a certain Thomas Wilson who had moved to the island of Capri with an annuity that would last him for twenty-five years: "Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."

In the story, Wilson is asked, "Have you never regretted?", to which he replies, "Never. I've had my money's worth already. And I've got ten years more. Don't you think after twenty-five years of perfect happiness one ought to be satisfied to call it a day?" In short, when the money had run out he was going to commit suicide. As the author observed, "Wilson's plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to him that after twenty-five years of complete happiness, in this quiet backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one's desires, because one has placed one's desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one's hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson's annuity expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy tranquility. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what my friend told me and afterwards from others, that he wanted courage. It was just that he couldn't make up his mind. He put it off from day to day."

 

 

I lost contact with the Austrian a long time ago and don't know if he's still living his lotus-eating existence, but I do know what happened to poor old Wilson. And so will you after you've read "The Lotus Eater".

 

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P.S. I've sent this cautionary tale to a friend in wintry Hamburg who is still dreaming of tropical islands without ever having set foot on one.

 

The Broken Book

 

 

Neglect is a relative term. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknown today. However, in Australia, she and her husband, the novelist George Johnston are major figures in the country’s cultural history.

I wrote elsewhere about the Johnston family — see "In the footsteps of the Johnston family" — and always thought I had read everything ever written by or about George Johnston and Charmian Clift since my years in Greece during which I visited their old home on the island of Hydra.

 

 

Imagine my surprise and delight when, during some aimless 'googling' today, I came across "The Broken Book" which is a fictionalisation of Charmian Clift's life. And it is available on ebay both as a paperbook and audiobook. Of course, I ordered both, even though I could not help myself already dipping into the online book at www.archive.org.

 

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Pondering the problems of the world

 

 

Sitting on the jetty and pondering the problems of the world, I suddenly realise that, at my age, I don't really give a rat's ass anymore. I mean, if walking is good for your health, the postman would be immortal. A whale swims all day, only eats fish, and drinks water, but is still fat. A rabbit runs, and hops, and only lives fifteen years; a tortoise doesn't run, and does mostly nothing, yet it lives for 150 years. And they tell us to exercise? I don't think so.

Now that I'm older, here's what I've discovered:

• I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
• My wild oats are mostly enjoyed with prunes and all-bran.
• Funny, I don't remember being absent-minded.
• Funny, I don't remember being absent-minded.
• If all is not lost, then where the heck is it?
• It was a whole lot easier to get older than it was to get wiser.
• Some days, you're the top dog, some days you're the hydrant.
• I wish the buck really did stop here; I sure could use a few of them.
• Kids in the back seat cause accidents.
• Accidents in the back seat cause kids.
• It is hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere.
• The world only beats a path to your door when you're in the bathroom.
• If God wanted me to touch my toes, he'd have put them on my knees.
• When I'm finally holding all the right cards, everyone wants to play chess.
• It is not hard to meet expenses ... they're everywhere.
• The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth..
• Funny, I don't remember being absent-minded.

Have I sent this message to you before? Or did I get it from you?

 

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We used to call him "The Colonel"

 

 

And what variety of people I met, and what interesting friends I made! Some of the names I still remember are ... the retired dotty surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who spoke to no-one and always walked about with his own cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal shower cubicles and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower beyond what he considered was a reasonable time." [Extract from "Welcome to BARTON HOUSE!"]

 

 

There, I mentioned him one more and perhaps not for the last time: "The Colonel". His real name was Ernest John Dowling, and his final rank had been Private. He worked as an assistant surveyor in Canberra from at least 1910 and lived at Acton, until he enlisted with the 3rd Division Pioneers on 7 October 1916 in Melbourne. He arrived in France in March 1918 and was admitted to hospital in December with tuberculosis. He returned to Australia in June 1919 and was discharged on 27 July 1919.

 

Back row on right

 

He again worked in Canberra after the war, and when I ran into him in 1965 - it was always a run-in, never a meeting - he was a very cranky seventy-four-year-old living in retirement at Barton House in Canberra, if putting up with a couple of hundred young Bank Johnnies and public servants who were at least half a century younger than him could be called 'retirement'. I had just turned twenty myself and was as callous and uncaring as the rest of them, and it is only in my own retirement, after I have grown as old as he was then, that I feel slightly ashamed of how I and the rest of us used to make a figure of fun of an old man who had served in both wars, had always done his duty and, by choice or through circumstance, lived out the rest of his life in a boarding-house.

 

 

Born in Geelong on 20 March 1891, he died, alone and without a next of kin, on 13 August 1971. He is buried in Woden Cemetery in Canberra.

 

Mount Dowling. Photo courtesy of John Evans

 

Still, "The Colonel", old and dotty as he may have been, seems to have the last laugh because today there is in the Australian Capital Territory a mountain that bears his name and a trig station is also named after him.

 

Trig station on top of Mount Dowling. Photo courtesy of John Evans

 

Im sure that's more immortality than most of us could ever hope for.

 

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