Where are 'Buddy' and his master now?

 

 

On our way back from Moruya where we had a beautiful lunch of chicken and chips at the Moruya Bowling Club, we briefly pulled up at Casey's Beach. As we sat there, watching the waves, I remembered that several years ago in the same spot we had met a chap in an old four-wheel drive with a trailer hitched up to it.

 

 

He and his dog 'Buddy' had just spent a comfortable night in that spot with a million-dollar view and no sound other than the surf - and not a cent to pay for it! The trailer was all that was left of the occupant's Jim's Mowing franchise, which he had bought and then tried to sell again to another sucker but couldn't because, as he told me, most of the money made from all the work always went straight to the franchisors.

 

 

So, he had chucked a comfy mattress onto it, covered the lot with a tarpaulin, and set off to travel round Australia, next stop Byron Bay. We had parted company when his fishing reel started screaming and he had to rush to the beach to take in his breakfast, a freshly-caught bream. Years later, I'm left wondering, "Where are 'Buddy' and his master now?"

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Memories of Bay Street

 

Toasting my new overseas job with my then neighbour before leaving for the airport.
He was the Tin Man I wrote about in "Dig here!".

 

It was early 1981. After more than ten years overseas and the last eighteen months on the road in Australia, I'd taken up a permanent accounting position with the construction company AV Jennings in Townsville. The work was easy and the pay adequate.

We had bought this small house on the beach at Pallarenda just ten minutes out of town. It was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers with holes in them, and I had begun to turn domestic with gusto.

 

The house is just to the left of the swimming enclosure and marked with a red dot

 

The house was just one block away from the beach and the shark-proof swimming enclosure. From the corner window we could see the ocean and Magnetic Island on the horizon. The sound of the surf was always in our ears, and brolgas and curlews walked the streets at night. So many happy memories! If it is true that we remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them, then happy memories are the worst. That is the trouble with real life: happiness is so rarely saved for the end.

 

Sales history: I bought it in 1981 for $35,000 and sold it again in 2000 for $115,000; it was rented out for $300 a week until 2016 when it was sold for $313,000. Its current estimated resale value is $690,000 to $940,000 - click here

 

One day we met a chubby Labrador walking down the road. We liked him and he liked us, and from then on he spent more time with us than with his owners. We called him "Labby" and he listed to it.

 

I named it KARAWEIK in remembrance of a dinner at a restaurant of the same name in Rangoon where I had decided to ask a certain person to share the ups and downs of this unpredictable life with me. I loved her without knowing how, blindly living married life as if I were still a single man. "Never say you know the last word about any human heart!"

 

 

Money was still tight and our furnishings were sparse and second-hand but we lived in the tropics and spent as much time outside as inside.

 

Even the washing machine was an old twintub with the lid missing (on far left)
which we bought for fifty dollars and for which I cut a wooden replacement lid

 

I had a water diviner sink a bore and instal a pump which was connected to a timer which started each morning at 5 o'clock to wake us up to another glorious morning in the tropics. I grew vegetables under the elderberry tree along the side of the house with amazing results.

 

It was an old house - even the toilet was downstairs - but it was solid and had survived several cyclones and, above all, it was comfortable.

 

 

I tried to be a handyman, with mixed results, and "Lubby" for company.

 

 

It was beautiful one day and perfect the next, and I couldn't wait to get back to our little house by the beach after a day's work in the city ...

 

 

... until eight months later the fatal phone call came in: did I want to work overseas again? The call of the wild again and a new challenge! So it was back to New Guinea and then Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Shades of Hermann Hesse: "But there is no centre in my life, my life hovers between poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there."

We left Pallarenda for New Guinea in January 1982. These oh-so-long-forgotten photos had been taken barely three months earlier. Then I found two more photographs with a strange car parked in the driveway.

 

 

I flipped them over, and on the back was my best friend's handwriting:

 

"Taken Dec. 1982" and printed in March 1983. By the time my old mate Noel had visited Townsville to see where I used to live I was already working in Saudi Arabia, and by the time these photographs reached me, my domestic bliss was over. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Happiness is like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

 

A little over three years later I was back in Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me. You can't step into the same river twice! --- to which a good friend added, "... but you can sure step into the same pile of shit more than once!" Je suis vraiment très très désolé, Daw Khin San Myint!

As Hermann Hesse wrote: "Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning."

Reluctantly, I sold the little house on the beach in December 1999 ...

 

 

... and here's a current street view of 3 Bay Street, courtesy of GOOGLE Map. They've cut down the frangipani and elderberry tree that used to shade my vegetable garden, and they've also removed the small palms I had planted on the nature strip. But it still looks very homely. If only ...

 

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Where the hell is Karragarra Island?

 

 

That's what we asked ourselves when many years ago a yachting couple, whom we had befriended while they lay at anchor off "Riverbend", sent us a postcard from Karragarra Island with the words, "We're settled here now!"

What is it about islands that has captivated millions of people around the world and through the centuries? Is it because the smallness of an island invites the illusion that here the complexities of continental societies can be avoided?

I think it's all of that, but also because they inspire feelings of great passion and serenity, because they give people the opportunity to find themselves, because they are revered as paradise, and because they provide a real, friendly community, as we found out when we visited Max and Judy in their island paradise a few months later.

We found it very much to our liking, so much so that we inspected several island properties that were for sale at the time. If the truth be known, had there been a ready buyer for "Riverbend" at the time, I'd probably be blogging this from Karragarra Island right now, but there wasn't and I'm not.

And neither are Max and Judy who left Karragarra Island again a long time ago. Reality always intervenes.

 

Googlemap Riverbend  .

 

Wandering the world yet sleeping in your own bed

 

Steve arriving at Gizo in the Solomons in November 2011. Note the "PT 109 Gizo Yacht Club", named after the torpedo boat skippered by JF Kennedy which sank off Gizo during WWII

 

I first heard of Steve Gates, owner and captain of the Searunner 37 trimaran Manu-O-Ku, when I became involved with Villa Mamana on the tiny island of Telekivava'u in Tonga through its previous owners Joe Altenhein and Matt Muirhead - see here.

Steve had lived in Hawaii for 31 years, raised two children, and been building one-off epoxy composite boats in his own Tradewind Island Boatworks (a long name for a small company), before sailing to Tonga in late 2003 to become the paid caretaker of the very remote 40-acre private island of Telekivava'u in the remote island group of Ha’apai.

 

Sunset over the lagoon on Telekivava'u, August 2005

Steve's trimaran Manu-O-Ku anchored off Telekivava'u

 

Think of spending whole weeks at a time totally alone on an idyllic, pristine island with your yacht anchored in the lagoon ... no wonder, Steve sat it out for a whole three years. It was a wonderful lifestyle but, as he said, "security is overrated, and the nomadic lifestyle was calling ...", and so he sailed north to the Vava’u Group where he ran a charter business for the next 4½ years.

 

Steve Gates made this video clip on Telekivava'u in Tonga in 2005. As the island's previous owner, Matt Muirhead, wrote, "It was bittersweet to watch the video, knowing each tree intimately, but I'm a changed and better man for having had the experience."
Remeet Steve Gates during a visit by SY HARMONICA in October 2005 - click here.

 

For nearly eight years Tonga gave him an incredibly comfortable life which he lived "one moment at a time" and which he found very hard to leave. However, he did so finally in June 2011, first sailing back to the Ha’apai Group for a week to revisit the remote island he had lived on for three years, and then singlehandedly to Savusavu in Fiji where he arrived on July 1, 2011. On to Vanuatu in September, then the Solomon Islands in November. In February 2012 he made the 2000 nm passage to Palau in western Micronesia before finally arriving in the Philippines on New Year’s Eve 2012.

His trimaran is his only home. As he writes, "This lifestyle works for me, a nomadic self-reliant lifestyle, on the oceans, among islands, sailing your home, wandering the world yet sleeping in your own bed."

 

 

He's been in the Philippines ever since, running his charter business Manu-O-Ku Sailing Adventures out of Port Barton, one of the last few untouched gems of the Philippines (the website is long gone - so where is Steve Gates now? - but there's still an archived copy here). It's a 45-minute flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa, and from there an easy ride to Port Barton, a sleepy fishing village, unspoiled and authentic, where life goes at its own pace and which Steve is in no hurry to leave.

 

 

Joe Altenhein, the creator of Villa Mamana on Telekivava'u, described Steve as "a nice man, doing what I wish I could do" --- and so think all of us. The nearest I ever got to Palawan was Boracay and, oh boy, am I still itching to go again!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The salt of the earth

 

John and Elizabeth at their wedding in 1965

 

After my return to Australia in 1985, I tried to settle back into beachside suburbia at Cape Pallarenda just north of Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me.

I eventually landed a job large enough for my ambitions in far-away Sydney, but not before I had made friends with two Townsville locals, Elizabeth and John, who at the time were the heart and soul of the budding German Club. I spent many happy hours at their crowded home in Railway Estate, with Elizabeth trying to encourage me to stay in town because, as she put it, "something always turns up".

Which was pretty much how she viewed the world because for her something - or someone - always turned up, just as twenty years earlier a young migrant from Austria on a round-Australia-trip had ridden his motorbike into Home Hill, a small place a hundred kilometres south of Townsville, and swept her off her feet. Not that everything went exactly to plan because, as she once wistfully remarked. "I married a migrant in the hope of seeing the world and got as far as Townsville".

 

Populate or perish: the Gamauf family sometime in the early 80s

 

That migrant became her husband John who'd come out, just like me but eight years earlier and slightly older, as an 'assisted migrant' from his native Salzburg aboard the TOSCANA. Whether six children had been part of his plan is unknown but it certainly fitted in with Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell's post-WWII rallying cry of 'populate or perish'.

 

 

I stayed in touch with Elizabeth and John, and briefly enjoyed their Austro-Australian hospitality again during a short visit in 1999, but, sadly, they have both since passed away, Elizabeth far too soon in August 2004, only weeks after her 57th birthday, and John in September 2015.

 

"Auch für immer in meinem Herzen. Danke für eure Freundschaft, Elizabeth und John"

They have both been laid to rest in the Home Hill Cemetery in Elizabeth's old home town Home Hill, approximately 98 kilometres south of Townsville. Home at last!

 

Thanks to them and their six children and many more grandchildren, Australia is not likely to perish, and nor am I likely to forget them. They were the salt of the earth with hearts of gold. May they rest in peace!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. In memory of a good friend I have obtained John's immigration details from the National Archives to send to his children and grandchildren:

\

His Bonegilla registration card (front and back):

‘REI’ indicates return from temporary employment