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 encountered him in 1965 - it was always an encounter, never a meeting - he was seventy-four years old and living in retirement at Barton House in Canberra. If it could be collect 'retirement' when living with a couple of hundred young Bank Johnnies and public servants who were at least half a century younger than him. I had just turned twenty myself and was as callous and careless 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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I wrote this story on this day 23 years ago

 

 

We were spending Padma's birthday at Moruya where we had an enjoyable midday lunch in the beergarden of the "Adelaide Hotel" overlooking the Moruya River when a man on a pushbike pulled up for a rest. He had a tiny Maltese puppy in his backpack which made us talk to him. He turned out to be an Austrian by the name of Robert Krenn who was pedalling from Melbourne to Sydney (a distance close to 1000 km) and who had ridden his bike all over the world with many stories to tell.

We invited Rob to stay with us at Riverbend and he turned up late that same afternoon to overnight in our guest cottage. We talked and talked and became very good friends. And his little Maltese puppy and our dog Malty became very good friends as well! So much so that when it was time for him to leave next day late in the afternoon, we suggested to him that if he ever needed a good home for his little puppy, we would be very happy to take care of him!

Late that same evening, Rob called us from Burrill Lake, some fifty kilometres north of Batemans Bay, to ask if we had been serious about wanting to take care of his little puppy as he felt we would give him a much better home than he ever could. Of course, we had been serious with our offer! So we got into our car and drove north to meet Rob at his campsite where we drank hot tea, walked along the beach and gazed at the stars, and talked some more. We returned home well after midnight with the new member of our family whom we have called "Rover" as he has already travelled so much!

Malty and Rover are now very good friends and the house is a very lively place with Rover exploring his new home. At night he sleeps on our bed between the two pillows, usually on his back with his four legs spread out in all directions. He is a dear little fellow and is a great addition to the family!"

And that's how the Riverbend Trio became a Quartet! Both Malty and Rover have since gone to Dog Heaven but their memory still lives on!

 

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Just saying ...

 

 

A lot of work is going on across the backfence on our neighbours' acreage where they are planting trees, moving earth, sinking septic tanks, installing toilets, building sheds, and erecting a huge marquee for their commercial venture, "Orange Grove Farm Weddings".

I wish them well but in view of our local demographics, wouldn't funerals be a better business? They could've even pencilled me in.

Just saying ...

 

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The floor has opened up

 

 

Life is first boredom, then fear", the poet Philip Larkin wrote.  The American satirist Edward Gorey put it even more graphically, "Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does, that's what makes it so boring."

Life certainly hasn't been boring ever since the world's greatest negotiator became the leader of the free world. Alas, even he has realised that starting a war with a hostile nation of 90 million people is more complicated than buying an apartment block in Manhattan.

After having spent billions of dollars firing off million-dollar missiles to shoot down thousand-dollar drones and having fucked up the oil market and ruined relationships with the Middle East and tanked the world's economy and set inflation rising and disrupted global trade and made the whole world less safe and tied the US military up for who knows how long, all he has achieved is to totally and comprehensively change the first name of Iran’s leader from Ali Khamenei to Mojtaba Khamenei.

Lesser things have set off a chain reaction: on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo. It started the war that was going to end all wars. The world's greatest negotiator has just started the war that may start many more wars.

"They'll think of something", I hear you say, "there's always a solution!" because that's what the world's politicians and power brokers want you to believe while privately they put their heads in their hands and weep.

The floor has opened up.

 

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"A philosopher I ain't!"

 

 

I don't know when they started, those questions about the whys and wherefores and the whole meaning of life, but they seem to have started a lot earlier with me than with my contemporaries who lived for the moment and whose drugs were sex and sports and drinking — and, in some cases, even drugs themselves.

My drug was work and I kept overdosing on it until I had to get off it, only to start again on the same drug somewhere else, hence my shifting from job to job and country to country. If there was any meaning to my life, then this was it: seeing the world while getting high on my work.

I have now lived long enough to realise that this "Lebensangst" was not unique to me but a universal human experience, although we hide it from each other, even from ourselves. We all need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Without that, we might not. We need a "why". Without it, the world becomes a hamster wheel, a road to nowhere, an existential cul-de-sac, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing at all.

"Don't worry, be happy!" is a popular answer to the meaning of life. It's what we all want. Even for people who enjoy being miserable (count me in on that one), misery is a form of happiness. But here's the paradox: happiness comes indirectly, not through seeking it directly, so how the heck do you search for it indirectly, if you know that’s what you want?

Perhaps my best friend for almost thirty years until his untimely death in 1995 had the answer. We seemed to live our lives vicariously through each other: he through my endless postcards and letters from far-away corners of the world while he was seemingly stuck in the remote Sepik District of New Guinea, and I through his contented domesticity for which I admired him, despite or perhaps because of my restless life.

There had been an Errol-Flynn-type agelessness about him, and it only became clear towards his end that he was much older than me, and only after his death did I find out that he had been twenty-five years older than me. In some Freudian way, that may have made him the father-figure that had been missing in my life, and made me the son he had never had, but we won't go there as it's merely conjecture on my part.

I had always hoped to exploit that age difference by bouncing off him some of the searching questions of life but always drew a blank. Maybe he knew the answer but thought it too banal or too difficult to answer, because his stock standard reply always was, "A philosopher I ain't!"

Having reached his age, maybe that's the answer I should give in the unlikely event that someone should question me about the whys and wherefores and the whole meaning of life, "A philosopher I ain't!"

 

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