While surfing the net I came across these photos of my first real home in Australia: Number 3 Bay Street at Cape Pallarenda, Townsville's beachside suburb.
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, the pay adequate,and I had bought this small house on the beach, which was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers with holes in them, and turned domestic.
Until eight months later the fatal phone call came in: did I want to be part of the big Ok Tedi mining job in Papua New Guinea? The call of the wild again and a new challenge! So it was back to New Guinea - click here - , and then on to Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece - "The Magic Faraway Tree" gone pathological.
A little over three years later I was back in Townsville but the 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!" Well, Chris, my feet of clay have stepped into lots of them ☺
P.S. I eventually sold the little house on the beach in January 2000 for $115,000. It was given a bit of a make-over by the new owners and resold in February 2016 for $313,000 - click here. They must have picked the top of the market because a much bigger and better house next door, at # 5 Bay Street, sold eight months later for just $365,000, having been bought only five years earlier for $395,000. See also my old-neighbour-across-the-backfence, George Maxwell's house at 4 Dyer Street, which he sold only a few months before I did for $120,000. (And then the boom started: only five years later it sold again for $310,000)
