The Rest is History

 

 

We all have to find our own way to keep those demons at bay that assail us in the dark hours of the night when sleep won't come. I found my remedy in the 1980s when I started listening to Richard Ackland's lawyerly voice as he was hosting ABC's Late Night Live at ten past ten.

He was followed by Phillip Adams in - when was it? - 1991, whose lip-smacking and opinionated hosting of Late Night Live kept me sane for the next thirty-three years, until, in mid-2024, he handed over to David Marr. Since then the show's calibre and topics seem to have deteriorated - and I'm not saying this just because I recently read David Marr's book PANIC, where on page 2 he discusses panic and panic merchants, particularly those who repesent themselves as guardians of decency, which closes with the sentence "Perhaps I'm alert to the subject because I'm gay." Oops! - maybe it does; after all, I'm old-school.

Fortunately, I have found a replacement in the BBC's "The Rest is History", which is available on YouTube, from where I copy it with the nifty YouTube-to-MP3 Converter Y2Mate onto a memory stick before walking it back to my bedside radio for another fight with my demons.

The series has 825 episodes which should keep me going for quite some time even if I cheat a bit and have another helping for my afternoon snooze on the verandah, but just in case I run out of things to listen to, I already have another equally enthralling BBC production lined up, "In Our Time", which explores a wide variety of historical, scientific and philosophical topics and has already amassed an amazing 1089 episodes.

I'm all set up for 2026 as I report another bit of progress: after twenty-five years of marriage, I have finally persuaded Padma NOT to clean every plastic container and glass jar within an inch of its life before committing it to the recycle bin. Things can only get better from here!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The changeable world of the oyster

 

 

Perhaps no other creature's sex life has been so carefully scrutinised as that of the oyster, however, it wasn't until the early 1880s that a Dutch scientist named Hoek discovered the changeable nature of the oyster's sex.

Oysters have the unusual ability to switch their sex, continually during the warm months in some species, or once during the year in the winter months in other species. This fascinating phenomenon is known as protandrie hermaphroditism, from protos, meaning first, andros, a man; Hermes, Greek god of travel; and Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love.

The change of sex is controlled by a number of environmental factors. The most important of these is nutrition. Huge amounts of plankton appear to encourage the female state in oysters, while lesser quantities of food result in male oysters. The sex organ of an oyster is also activated by water temperature, tide, and the salinity of the water.

(I am happy to report that sex changes in humans are far simpler and are usually prompted by teachers using "inclusive" language when discussing gender identity and school policies focused on supporting gender-diverse students rather than the "Three R's", whereas in my days a boy turning up at school in a girl's dress would get a "dressing-down" and sent home to change, together with a stern note to his parents.)

 

Read it online here

 

I read about this in the book "The Changeable World of the Oyster" while Padma spent two days helping an oysterfarmer friend selling his oysters during the Christmas (c)rush. Not that this will ever let a 'trans' oyster cross my lips but it's interesting to read about the sexual proclivities of others, especially when one's own have turned into declivities.

 

Go to GOOGLE Maps

 

It also piqued my interest to visit our oysterfarmer friend at his depot on the Clyde River downriver from us at Chinaman's Point sometime in the new year. If only all my New Year's resolutions were so simple!

 

 

(I know I should be suffering from withdrawal symptoms if I stopped binge-watching WHITECHAPEL on iview; or stopped buying more and more books from my favourite op-shops; or weaned myself off drinking countless cups of tea; or ... so, no more New Year's resolutions for me!)

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

My resolution for 2026

 

Never met Lutz Preusche but I want to do what he did: stand in front of the super-sized photo of the entrance to the Bonegilla Reception Centre and have my picture taken

 

Muslims have their pilgrimage to Mecca; Australia's "assisted migrants" have their pilgrimage to Bonegilla. I have already made my resolution that in 2026 I will stand, like Lutz Preusche, in front of that super-sized photo of the entrance to the Bonegilla Reception Centre to have my photo taken.

 

 

I passed through those gates in early August 1965. As I wrote elsewhere:

"We disembarked in some sort of organised chaos at Port Melbourne and soon afterwards boarded a train for the inland town of Albury from where we were taken to the Migrant Centre at Bonegilla. Remember the movie "The Great Escape"? Well, Bonegilla was a camp along the lines of what you saw in that movie - except that Bonegilla was a darn sight worse. We were put into corrugated-iron huts in what had been an old Army Camp - and I believe the old Spartans enjoyed more comforts than did the inmates of the "Bonegilla Migrant Centre". Although we were in the depth of the Australian winter (which can be pretty cold in the Australian inland), there was no heating, and only a threadbare ex-Army blanket to ward off the cold at night. For somebody who had just avoided conscription into the German "Bundeswehr", it seemed a poor exchange.

Deep blue skies and brilliant sunshine during the day made up for the freezing nights. It was two days after I had arrived in camp and while I was "thawing" out in the midday sun when another German who had come off the ship with me, told me about a "German Lady", a Mrs Haermeyer, at the camp's reception centre who was offering to take three or four recently arrived German migrants back to Melbourne to board at her house. I had been "processed" by the camp's administration on the first day and knew that in all likelihood I was destined to be sent to Sydney to work as labourer for the Sydney Water Board. So what did I have to lose? In record time I had myself signed out by the "Camp Commandant", my few things packed, and was sitting, with three other former ship-mates, in a VW Beetle enroute back to Melbourne." (Read more about that house in Melbourne here.)

 

My Bonegilla Reception Centre registration card
Date of Arrival 8 Aug 1965; MOI (?) 10/8/65

 

"The "German Lady" had turned out to be a very enterprising roly-poly German housewife who with her German husband, a bricklayer, operated something of a boarding-house from their quaint little place at 456 Brunswick Road in West Brunswick in Melbourne. The place seemed already full to overflowing with young Germans from a previous intake, with bodies occupying the lounge-room sofa, a make-shift annex, and an egg-shaped plywood caravan in the backyard. My ship-mates joined that happy crowd but I was "farmed out" to a nice English lady across the road who had a spare room. The very next day the "German Lady" took me to the local Labour Exchange and in seemingly no time had secured me a job as 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company which had foodstores all over Melbourne. There I was, refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their Austin cars. I still joined the others for breakfast and dinner in the "German house" and also had my laundry looked after by the "German Lady" but I was already making my own way in Australia. Looking back, my life seems to have been full of such serendipitous encounters because more good luck was to follow!

 

Full of hope and full of myself in 1965

 

During the first days in Melbourne I had written to Hans in Canberra
[... Sometime during the voyage and under circumstances which I have long forgotten, I had made friends with a young German who had come out to Australia many years before with his parents as a child. He was now married and on his way back from a trip to Europe with his wife, baby, and mother-in-law with whom he had revisited his own hometown and that of his Yugoslav wife. This friendship was going to have a major impact on my future life in Australia, and to this day Hans and I have remained good friends ...] to let him know where I was, and before long he was on the 'phone to me suggesting that I might want to come up to Canberra. I didn't need much persuading! Hans got me a job as storeman/driver in the hardware & plumbing supplies company of Ingram & Sons in Canberra's industrial suburb of Fyshwick. I drove an INTERNATIONAL truck and delivered anything from ceramic floor tiles to bathtubs and roofing iron to building sites all over Canberra. Not that I had a driver's license for a truck or had ever driven a truck before in my life but this was Australia, a young and vigorous country still largely devoid of formalities, and an even younger city, Canberra, still in the making: Hans simply took me down to the local Police Station where everybody seemed very impressed with my elaborate German "Führerschein" and where I was promptly issued with a much simpler but oh so much more useful Australian driving license. I kept at this job for a few months but after I had almost burnt out the truck's diff at Deakin High School while bogged down in the mud with a full load on the back, and a slight but still embarrassing collision with the rear-end of another vehicle just outside the British High Commission, I thought it best to cash in my chips while I was still ahead.

I had earlier on answered an advertisement by the Australia & New Zealand Bank for school-leavers to join their ranks and, to my own surprise and joy, was accepted. I joined the ANZ Bank and, in keeping with my new "status" as a "Bank Johnny", moved from the migrant hostel on Capital Hill (now the site of the new Parliament House) into Barton House, one of Canberra's many boarding houses in those early years."

Well, as the saying goes, " ... and the rest is history." Today, fifty-five years later, the big WHAT IF questions in life have been replaced by "What's for dinner and what's on the telly tonight?" Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip all the same.

However, the trip won't be complete until I've come full-circle and made my pilgrimage to Bonegilla to stand in front of that super-sized photo of the entrance to the Bonegilla Reception Centre to have my photo taken.

 

 

I'll send you a postcard when I get there!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

 

P.S. Read the full story here.

 

Christmas 1975 at Noel Butler's place in Wewak

 

Yours truly somewhere in the wilds of the Sepik District

 

While I'm still in the Christmas spirit and before the mice start chewing on them, I thought it best to scan some of these old black-and-white photos and put them up on the net. They date back fifty years to Christmas 1975 when I visited my best mate Noel Butler in Wewak.

I had just come back from Burma after having - very unwisely - resigned from what was the perfect job, and was spending Christmas 1975 with Noel before jetting off to my next assignment in Tehran in Iran.

Noel had been one of the Territorians I met aboard the Greek ship PATRIS at the end of 1967. Our love of chess made Noel and me shipboard mates and we spent many hours hunched over the chess board as the ship ploughed its way towards Europe. And as we played game after game, I learnt about the Territory and listened to stories of some the Territory's 'old-timers', and my mind was made up that one day I too would go to the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea - click here.

 

Outside the post office, about to cable my ETA to my new employers in Iran

Noel Butler at his saksak house just outside Wewak

Noel (left) and yours truly

Noel and yours truly somewhere on a hill overlooking Wewak

Noel's old ute with yours truly in the back somewhere outside Wewak.

 

All good memories!

 

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Ein chemisch gereinigtes Weihnachtslied

 

 

Weihnachtslied, chemisch gereinigt Erich Kästner   Morgen, Kinder, wird's nichts geben! Nur wer hat, kriegt noch geschenkt. Mutter schenkte euch das Leben. Das genügt, wenn man's bedenkt. Einmal kommt auch Eure Zeit. Morgen ist's noch nicht so weit. Doch ihr dürft nicht traurig werden, Reiche haben Armut gern. Gänsebraten macht Beschwerden, Puppen sind nicht mehr modern. Morgen kommt der Weihnachtsmann. Allerdings nur nebenan. Lauft ein bisschen durch die Straßen! Dort gibt's Weihnachtsfest genug. Christentum, vom Turm geblasen, macht die kleinsten Kinder klug. Kopf gut schütteln vor Gebrauch! Ohne Christbaum geht es auch. Tannengrün mit Osrambirnen - lernt drauf pfeifen! Werdet stolz! Reißt die Bretter von den Stirnen, denn im Ofen fehlt's an Holz! Stille Nacht und heilge Nacht - Weint, wenn's geht, nicht! Sondern lacht! Morgen, Kinder, wird's nichts geben! Wer nichts kriegt, der kriegt Geduld! Morgen, Kinder, lernt fürs Leben! Gott ist nicht allein dran schuld. Gottes Güte reicht so weit . . . Ach, du liebe Weihnachtszeit!