Sunday morning coming down

 

The red square is "Riverbend"; the yellow line our morning walk through the village

 

Nelligen on a Sunday morning looks like a TV advert for a retirement village where everyone is ageless and smiling and playing tennis and there's no crime or illness or disease and everybody is permanently high on happiness.

As we walked the loop from Braidwood Street to Runnyford Road to Currawong Street to Clyde Boulevard to Maisies Lane, everything looked lovely and sunny in the fresh morning air, with early-risers tending their gardens, waving to neighbours, and patting their dogs.

Hemmed in by the river and the mountains, and surrounded by State Forests and National Parks, Nelligen will always be the size it is now. It has no need for a shopping mall, or a Burger King, or the golden arches of McDonald's. Yes, there is a Nelligen Progress Association but it does its best to keep progress at the Bay.

There are a couple of McMansions but they're on the Riverbend side where waterfront blocks (only one vacant one left!) have been selling for three-quarter of a million and a couple of owners felt compelled to spend another million on their own versions of a prostrate Trump Tower, but the rest of Nelligen still has that country-feel-and-look about it, with even new houses blending in nicely with the old.

It takes about two hours for day-trippers from Canberra to come down the mountain, and before the seemingly endless cavalcade of shiny four-wheel-drives arrives, the village still looks like something time forgot. For the last 171 years.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Amazing footage of Tom Neale

 

 

We all had our choldhood heroes. Mine were Dr Albert Schweitzer who built a leper hospital at Lambaréné, Heinrich Harrer who lived for seven years in Tibet, Heinz Helfgen who "radelt um die Welt", and Thor Heyerdahl and his five companions on the "Kon-Tiki".

When I lived in what is today Namibia in the late 1960s, I added Henno Martin who, along with Hermann Korn, lived for two-and-a-half years in the inhospitable Namib Desert to avoid internment during the Second World War, and while I worked on Thursday Island in 1977, I added Oskar Speck who paddled a tiny 'faltboot' from Germany to the Torres Strait.

And then, sometime in my sixties, I found in an obscure little op-shop on the shores of Burril Lake a small book that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, from the pen of some obscure storyteller, who had spent sixteen years totally alone on a tropical atoll in the South Pacific.

 

To read the book on the internet, click here
For a preview of the audiobook, click here

 

That man was Tom Neale and the book is "An Island to Oneself". Trying to describe the book to those who haven't read it can be difficult. It is not just a book about living on a desert island. Its essence is larger than that. It's a book about a passion for simplicity; it's about being alone and doing alone. It tells us that life is incomplete without dreams and risk. It teaches the important and hard to appreciate truths that the ocean is beautiful and violent, that soil is precious and that there is a use for a bicycle pump on a desert island. It's a book about how to dream and how we might live. It is a book that became a place — Suwarrow Atoll.

 

 

I've read this little book a dozen times already, and I pick it up again every time I find another piece of the puzzle that was Tom Neale. A few years ago, I read of a recording made of Tom's voice by the German single-handed circumnavigator Rollo Gebhard - click here - and wrote to his widow Angelika for a copy which she graciously made available to me, but which I am not allowed to make public for copyright reasons.

Today I found this amazing footage of Tom Neale uploaded on YouTube about a year ago. It is in Russian and was filmed by the crew of a Soviet oceanographic vessel in 1977, which seems rather fitting since Suwarrow was first discovered by the Russian-American Company ship Suvorov, which reportedly followed clouds of birds to the atoll on 17 September 1814. The ship was named after Russian general Alexander Suvorov and the atoll that now bears his name has variously been spelled Souvorow, Souwaroff, and Souworoff. "Suwarrow" is today's official spelling.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Christmas in Australia

 

 

According to my chocolate advent calendar, there are only three days left to Christmas, so I'd better hurry and find out where they're holding the ALDI and COLES staff Christmas parties. I've been using their self-checkouts all year round and am definitely entitled to attend them.

Not that I am in any hurry to leave the house as, right on cue, outside a heatwave is raging with temperatures in the high thirties, while inside the temperature is an almost air-conditioned comfortable mid-twenties without any air-conditioning, thanks to the house being two-storeyed.

 

 

Someone sent me an email, "Hi there. I'm interested to have a look at your property and if we could arrange a suitable time to meet please let me know. Thank you Justine". I don't use agents and can vet inquiries myself, and much can be gleaned from people's names, the way they write, but also their email addresses. Nothing much to see here but the email address is a bit, well, shall we say 'juvenile'? Anyway, I shall ignore this one for the time being and wait until they write a second time.

It's my way of 'prequalifying' them: if they don't bother emailing a second time, they are not really interested. It reminds me of the many times when useless agents brought in scores of useless 'tyrekickers'. I finally terminated their services when one day they phoned and asked if they could bring someone out in less than half an hour. "Have you 'prequalified' them?" I asked. "Oh yes, they are really interested", was their reply. "In that case, could they come later this afternoon?" I suggested. "Oh, they'll be gone by then", I was told. Q.E.D., I think!

With Christmas so close, we won't be going anywhere to avoid the holidaymakers already crowding the Bay and the beaches. Anyway, as Homer said — no, not THAT Homer but Homer of the Simpsons — "What's the point of going out? We're just going to wind up back here anyway."

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

What day is it?

 

 

It's today", squeaked Piglet. "My favorite day", said Pooh. I can relate to that because even on an overcast morning like this, it's still my favourite day. People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

This week has two high points: yesterday was Garbage Collection Day and I wheeled out the red and yellow bin, and tomorrow is Nelligen Market Day when I wheel myself across the bridge to perhaps find an interesting book or just have a late Rural-Fire-Brigade-Sausage-Sizzle breakfast. Or just listen to the local gossip. It's so much more fun to listen to people who don't use long, difficult words.

Words like 'dunandunate' which I shall be dunandunating all day long because it's a recent addition to my vocabulary. It reminds me of 'penultimate' which had infested our writing during my days on Bougainville. People added entire paragraphs to their letters so as to be able to refer to the penultimate one even before they had written it.

Today's word craze is much less demanding. Take awesome. "Could you please tell me what time it is?" "It's a quarter to ten." "Awesome!!!" What's awesome about that??? Deceased is another one. In police parlance people - the loved-ones - never die. They decease. And the relatives then seek closure even if the loved-one was their mother-in-law. (I think it started many years ago when we all started showcasing our dichotomies and paradigms. We so oftenly use words irregardless of their correctivity.)

What seems like a long time ago, sitting on the jetty with little Rover, there was no need for words. We just sat there and looked at the river because the river knows: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

 

 

Snoopy doesn't sound all that funny in German, does he? But then nothing does when spoken in German. 'Funny' isn't funny in German.

 

 

Whereas in French, it adds a certain 'je ne sais quoi', don't you think?

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Before you tell me that 'dunandunate' has been 'made up', let me remind you that all words are 'made up' ever since some caveman at some prehistoric time used some unintelligible grunt to indicate to his cavewoman that he liked her cavecooking. Shakespeare did the rest.

 

Another one of those early saudade mornings

 

 

It's another one of those early saudade mornings at "Riverbend" when this haunting, beautiful ache comes on. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s more than grief. It’s the ache for a moment you once lived, or perhaps only dreamed of. Something that touched you deeply. Have you ever felt saudade for a person, a place, or a time that left a permanent mark on your heart?

Philosophers have likened saudade to a kind of spiritual homesickness - not just for people or places, but for a part of ourselves we left behind. It reminds us that to love deeply is also to long deeply. And that longing is saudade. It's the kind of sadness that reminds you ... you have lived.

The German language has a word which comes close, "Sehnsucht", but not quite. Have you ever felt saudade for a person, a place, or a time that left a permanent mark on you? Have you ever missed someone or something so deeply that it feels more like a presence than an absence? If you have never experienced this sweet and painful feeling, then you presumably have never lived and loved --- or you are an accountant.

I've just finished my first cup of tea of the day and bitten off the head of a Cadbury Marshmellow Santa, which is as close as I will get this year to Christmas and as close as I will get to biting off somebody's head.

I shall savour that sausade feeling a little longer before the Friday morning garbage truck rumbles down the lane and before a certain person reminds me that sausade doesn't cook the bacon and eggs.

 

Googlemap Riverbend