A story of tropical deterioration

 

 

I still remember the story about a learned gentleman in Australia who in the 1930s foresaw that a great war was about to break over the world and, not wanting to participate in this foolish war, fled to the then almost unknown island of Guadalcanal — which, as we now all know, saw some of the bloodiest fighting in WWII.

I remember having written about this story some years ago - click here. I don't remember whether it was W. Somerset Maugham or James A. Michener who wrote it, although chronologically it must've been the latter as Maugham was already retired when World War II broke out.

I lived on Guadalcanal twice: once to work for a statutory body as secretary (which is what they called their commercial manager), and the second time to sort out the finances of a large trading company.

The company was managed by an Englishman well into the second half of his life - the sort of man Graham Greene once called "a burnt out case" - who kept coming back to work in the islands because his wife back in England liked the money he was making there but not him.

He being more than twice my age but only half the energy I applied to this urgent job meant that we had nothing in common other than our loneliness, and so I accepted his invitation to dinner at his house.

As we sat at the large dinner table in front of a fake fireplace with a large painting of London Bridge hanging above it, and the haus boi brought in dish after dish, punctuated by gin and tonics, his sorry story of morbid decay called tropical deterioration slowly unravelled.

I was unable to relate to any of it, as life hadn't kicked me around yet as much as it has since, and I found the setting quite pathetic: that fake fireplace with a large painting of London Bridge hanging above it, and his getting all soppy about a home he only saw every couple of years.

The image stayed with me and probably influenced me in quitting my last expatriate job ten years later which still gave me time to settle down to a regular job at home before tropical deterioration set in.

 

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I didn't have to read this book!

 

To listen to a sample of the audiobook, click here

 

Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, selfimportant, and self-serving. He has his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power."

This is a quote from the book which ends with the consensus that Trump poses a great danger to the future of humanity and the planet. It is supposed to be a chilling read but I won't bother to buy it as I already said during his first presidency that this would not end well.

 

Since the 2017 book, there has been this updated version which describes a man who could not even pass a basic fitness test because of his pattern of psychological deficits and dysfunctions, who scored extremely high on a dangerousness risk assessment, and whose impairments are only growing more severe with time. I won't bother to buy this one either since my earlier professional assessment "mad as a cut snake" still stands.

 

I said so to a neighbour who was espousing the merits of this madman. He hasn't spoken to me since and I can live with that. What I can't live with - and neither can the world - is another four years of his madness.

 

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Happy Australia Day!

 

 

There's a story of a conversation Bill Clinton had with Edward de Bono when they were both in Hong Kong. Bill asked Ed his opinion of what in an ideal world the perfect nation would look like.

De Bono replied, "It would have an ethnically diverse population of twenty to twenty-five million people. English would be the national language. It would be religiously and economically liberated, have a democratic form of government and a vigorous free press. I'd locate it somewhere along the Pacific Rim. It would have a young history and an optimistic outlook. And a generous climate that lent itself to encouraging all its people - rich or poor - to enjoy the wonderful free gifts nature has to offer".

"Sounds wonderful", Clinton wistfully remarked. "What would you call it?" he asked.

"Oh, I wouldn't change its name", De Bono replied, "'Australia' will do fine".

Apocryphal or not, De Bono is right and I, like him, love Australia. I'm not saying it is perfect. We, too, have to put up with lying politicians, nasty neighbours, stifling bureaucracies, even bad weather, but nothing could ever persuade me to return to the northern hemisphere.

 

 

I am German by birth, Australian by choice - and happy with both.

 

 

South Australian farmer Harry Schuster surprised the country with Australia's intricate Coat of Arms tilled into the family's farmland.

 

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY!

 

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What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?

 

The quote is from the book "Post Office"

 

Being alone never feels right. Sometimes it feels good, but it never feels right. And yet, looking back on the life I have lived, alone for most of the time, it now seems to have felt better; it seems as if I have lived my life more deliberately.

It's like travelling solo, which gives you the freedom to go where you want to go and when you want to go. It also makes you meet other people which makes you learn more about them as well as yourself.

Being alone, you don't get asked at nine o'clock in the morning what you want to have for lunch. You don't even know if you're going to be hungry. You simply go to the fridge when you are hungry and see what's there. If you are like me and have nothing else in the fridge but some beer and a chunk of cheese, you go down the street or down to the club and see what's there. Each day is a blank page for you to write your own story.

The company you keep are also single men because somehow you don't quite fit in the company of married men whose wives think that you might give their husbands the wrong idea and regard you a threat.

Your friends have either always been single or become single again, in which case they are ahead of you because they have already accepted loneliness as the price to pay for not getting asked at nine o'clock in the morning what they want to have for lunch.

I had better stop writing this post because it's nine o'clock in the morning and I've just got asked what I want to have for lunch.

 

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"There but for the grace of God ..."

 

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A.A.S.A, A.C.I.S, A.A.I.M
PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT

 

Remember the Australian Tax Office's simple "S" form for wage and salary earners? Or the equally simple forms for trusts, businesses, and companies? Simple two-page forms: half an hour to fill in the blanks, and you were done for the year!

Things have become so much more complicated since then. No wonder that even the smallest town has a resident accountant even before it gets a Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, or - Heaven forbid! - Dan Murphy's. Every time I see one of those small-town accountants displaying their trade, I keep thinking to myself, "There but for the grace of God ..."

There was a time when I would've thought it the pinnacle of my career to run my own accounting practice, but the fickle finger of fate pointed me in a different direction which saved me from sitting behind the same desk and looking out the same window for the next thirty-odd years.

Instead, I sat at hundreds of different desks and looked out of hundreds of different windows, often not even long enough to use the toilet (those were the days before liquid lunches worked like a diuretic).

The above signage hung over one of those small-town accounting offices. It belonged to a friend from my Bougainville days who, after having left New Guinea and travelling down the east coast of Australia, came to this little coastal town and said, "This reminds me so much of Bougainville", and settled down to open his own accounting practice.

His wife opened a shoe shop, which was just as well because his own office, squeezed in between a delicatessen and a laundromat, catered mainly to cow cockies who needed his help with the filling-in of their unemployment forms, which alone would never have fed his family. Years later, having barely recovered the cost of the signage above the door, he left his office and his family and bummed around Australia.

When I last heard from him several years ago, he'd just moved from a bedsitter in Cairns to another one in Port Douglas, and already thought of moving on again. I guess he was trying to make up for all that time lost while he had filled in unemployment forms for those cow cockies.

"There but for the grace of God ..."

 

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