What's $50,000 between friends?

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A sense of FOMO — fear of missing out — continues to be a major factor in spurring housing markets across the country, as buyer demand well outweighs available housing supply. We are just a few days shy of the end of the first quarter and so far this year the five capital cities have managed a strong overall gain of 4.7%.

Relative to its adjoining properties - after all, everything is relative - "Riverbend", in my opinion, has always been a bargain. Judging by the increase in inquiries in recent weeks, others seem to think so, too. To stop it from becoming a total give-away, I upped the price by $50,000.

 

Click on image to enlarge

An aerial view of just one-third of Riverbend's seven acres
A = Main House, B = Guest Cottage, C = Workshop/Laundry/Carport,
D = "Pizza Hut", E = "Horseshed", F = "Clubhouse", G = Library
1 sold for $950,000; 2 sold for $750,000; 3 sold for $750,000; 4 sold for $1,700,000

 

So, if you are ready for a tree- and seachange to a place where a stranger says good morning to you, where you have real grass to walk on, and where you kiss your kids goodnight without dead-bolting their windows before you leave the room, make me an offer I can't refuse.

Just make sure you add the extra $50,000!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

How one tiny $3-classified advert changed my life

 

After my 'compulsory' two years in Australia from 1965 to 1967 as an 'assisted migrant', I was free to leave again - and leave I did as it seemed impossible to live on what was initially a youth wage and later became the salary of a junior bank officer with the ANZ Bank.

I had booked a passage back to Europe aboard the Greek ship 'PATRIS' operated by Chandris Line which had been scheduled to leave Sydney and call at Port Moresby on its way through the Suez Canal. But history and the Eqypt-Israeli war of 1967 [the "6-Day War" which began on June 5, 1967] intervened and the Suez Canal was closed to all shipping.

So the 'PATRIS' never got to Port Moresby but sailed through the Great Australian Bight and around the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town) instead. However, a good number of 'Territorians' from the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea had already booked a passage and the shipping line at great expense flew them down to Sydney to join the ship. And so it came that I spent some four weeks aboard the 'PATRIS' in the company of a whole bunch of hard-drinking and boisterous 'Territorians'.

Having barely scraped together the fare, I had no money to spend on drinks but I did mix with the 'Territorians' night after night in the ship's Midnight Club to listen to Graham Bell and his Allstars. I was spellbound by the tall stories those 'larger-than-life' 'Territorians' told about the Territory which seemed to provide them with everything they wanted from life. My mind was made up that one day I would go there myself.

I spent the next few miserable winter months in Hamburg and then in Frankfurt before finding a way out again: I got a job in southern Africa which, as I saw it, was almost halfway to New Guinea. That is not to say that my career was a planned one. Lemmings have better plans than I've had for most of my life, but that's perhaps true of many people's lives.

After six months' work in South-West Africa (now called Namibia) I had saved enough money for the fare back, and in April 1969 I boarded the 'Ellinis' in Cape Town and sailed for Sydney, from where I took the train back to Canberra to resume my earlier work with the ANZ Bank.

But the die was cast and I knew I'd find a way to get to the Territory. I had heard about PIM, the Pacific Island Monthly which was read by one and all in the Territory. I bought a copy and decided to place in next month's issue a tiny classified ad which from memory ran something like this: "Young Accountant (24), still studying, seeks position in the Islands." It cost me $3 and got me two offers, one of which I accepted and which was the start of my life in the islands and all that followed.

Ever since then I have been trying to find a copy of that life-changing advertisement again. Some ten years ago, I even took a trip up to Canberra where I spent a couple of hours in the cavernous reading room of the National Library paging through all the twelve issues of the 1969 Pacific Islands Magazine, from January to December 1969, but no luck!

 

Each monthly issue carried one page full of classified ads. This one is the June 1969 issue. My classified advert would've been published sometime between June and December 1969

 

Since then, the National Library has digitised the entire run of the Pacific Islands Monthly magazine, from the first issue in 1930 to the last in 2000 - click here, and I've been able to search the same issues on the computer from the comfort of home. NOTHING! And yet it could've only been in PIM! Where is that tiny $3-classified that so changed my life?

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Our VERA-night

 

On Friday nights, after "Gardening Australia", we always settle in for our VERA-night when Brenda Blethyn returns to the ABC as the unorthodox but brilliant DCI Vera Stanhope, investigating more chilling crimes only she can solve.

Born in 1946 in Ramsgate, Kent, England, she graduated from technical college and worked as a stenographer and bookkeeper with British Rail until her late twenties. Saving money during her time there, she took a risk and enrolled herself at the at The Guildford School of Acting in Guildford, Surrey, England and then left her British Rail years behind.

Brenda was nothing short of superb in "Little Voice" and hilarious in "Saving Grace", but she became part of our weekly routine as "Vera".

Some episodes may even be repeats but with the nights getting longer and my memory getting shorter, no repeat is ever a repeat (is that why I finished up with five copies of the same "Grumpy old men"?)

Light the fire, heat up the "Glühwein"; we're ready for our VERA-night.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Selective no more!

 

Frank Spencer is a lucky man! He has a whole video clip to show of his interview with the Australian immigration officer. I have no record at all of my interview nor any recollection of it.

It took a whole half-century before I was able to retrieve from the National Archives a copy of my original "Auswanderungsantrag nach Australien mit Fahrtunterstützung", dated by me 26.9.1964 ...

 

Under "Other comments" I wrote: "At first I would like to work on a farm, if possible,
with a German farmer, to learn English. Later I would like to return to an office job."

 

... and a copy of the three-page "Processing Sheet", dated and signed by the processing officer (Sergeant?) Schulze on 27.10.1964.

 

Note the "Suggested/proposed employment: factory worker" I proved them wrong!

"Appears good type. Understands employment prospects. Should settle without difficulties. Questions to the point. Neatly dressed. --- By sea not before June 65."

 

Until I retrieved those documents several years ago, I had absolutely no memory of what I had written on my application, nor any memory of the interview or the subsequent medical examination. For fifty-seven years, all I remembered was that small advert by the "Australische Auskunfts- und Auswanderungs-Büro" in the German   Bild Zeitung   which started it all. I cut it out, completed it, and mailed it in - and the rest is history!

 

Click on image to view full newspaper page

"Do you know Australia?
Information about Australia, a young and aspiring nation, and the opportunities awaiting you there, are available from the Australian Information and Immigration Agency
2 Hamburg 1, Mönckebergstrasse 11, Phone 33 49 82.
For more information complete this coupon (in block letters) and mail it to us."

 

More recently, I asked the good people at the German   Bild Zeitung   to find me a copy of this old advertisement - and within two days they did!

Now my memory is selective no more but complete!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

A small house with a big name

 

Here's another one of those confounded compound nouns Germans are so fond of: "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" (a short form of "Eisenbahnschrankenwärterhäuschen"). It describes the small cottage next to a level railway crossing which is lived in by the guard and his family.

It was the guard's job to crank down the barriers, to stop what little traffic there was from crossing the railway, whenever the one or two daily trains passed through. When I was a boy in Germany, there existed a surplus of cheap labour, men returned from the war who had to be given employment, and human labour had not yet been replaced by technology, and with railways criss-crossing the country, those little cottages were dotted all along the line.

In my days with the "Fahrenden Gesellen" I hiked all over the German countryside and passed many of those seemingly idyllic places, far away from anywhere, flower-boxes on the window-sills, children playing outside, and the guard relaxing in the sun, smoking a pipe or reading a paper. Other boys may have dreamt of one day driving a fire-engine but I always thought being a "Schrankenwärter" would be absolute bliss as it offered a contemplative life free of stress and with plenty of time to read and write and think.

All this came back to me when I recently discovered a whole website dedicated to the disappearing age of the "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" and I reflected on the different course my own life had taken: instead of a contemplative existence, I went from job to job, some fifty in all, in more than fifteen countries across four continents. However, all's well that ends well as I now live in my own small "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" at "Riverbend" where, instead of trains, I watch the boats go by.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Of today's 237,000 employees of the "Deutsche Bahn", only about seventy are still employed as "Schrankenwärter". Here's a clip of one of this dying breed, Schrankenwärter Laumann, filmed at Groß Düngen in deepest Lower Saxonia in 2006:

Click on box next to volume control for full-screen viewing

To lighten "Schrankenwärter" Laumann's 'tristesse', why not send him a pretty postcard? I did! Send it to

Schrankenwärter Laumann
Posten 'Hockeln'
D-31162 Groß Düngen
GERMANY

(No need to write in German; in the new Germany everybody understands English - those who don't will be shot! Just sprinkle your message with a bit of Schadenfreude, Gemütlichkeit, das Ding an sich, Kindergarten, Sauerkraut, Bratwurst, and Prost, and he'll know what you're talking about as there's very little else that matters - to a German anyway! - just don't mention the Blitzkrieg.)

If you can't get enough of the romance of the "Schrankenwärter" 's job, here's the three-part clip "Auf verlorenem Posten":

Part 1 56132 Miellen an der Lahn, Stefan Löhr, Posten 55
Part 2 5420 Friedrichssegen-Ost an der Lahn, Uwe Ortner
Part 3 65558 Balduinstein an der Lahn, Udo Meister

But wait, there's more:

Bahnhofs Atmosphäre 1973 - Teil 1
Bahnhofs Atmosphäre 1973 - Teil 2

 

On this day in 1827

Unfortunately, just a trailer; the full-length documentary has again disappeared from YouTube but you may want to keep looking and get lucky again.

 

On this day in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven died, aged 56. He's supposed to have said on his deathbed, "Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est" - "Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over".

The documentary "In Search Of Beethoven" digs deeper than the image of Beethoven's tortured, crabby and unhinged personality to reveal a very different and more interesting person. It brings together the worlds of leading Beethoven artists and experts to reveal new insights into this legendary composer. It is considered the best film ever made about Beethoven.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The (articled) year my voice did not break

An excursion by the office staff to the head office in Hamburg.
'Yours truly' is at the far right in a shiny new suit and glasses.
Click on image to enlarge.

 

My biggest cock-up in life was to have allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen to become an articled clerk in an insurance company.

For three years, my fellow-articled clerks and I worked a six-day week, practically for nothing, while being force-fed on subjects such as accounting, commercial law, economics, business ethics, and more.

Being much older and better educated, they'd already gone through puberty, dealt with acne, and were shaving daily, while I was still a complete baby face who unsuccessfully tried to fill out his first shiny business suit and was yet to spend his first Deutschmark on razor blades.

 

 

At home I was known as "der Dünne" - "Skinny" - but at work I was already "Herr Görmann" and entrusted with more and more professional work despite the pittance I was paid as an indentured articled clerk. We were cheap labour, the price we paid to get our professional training.

My reference at the end of the gruelling three years mentions my 'way with words': "Viel Freude bereitete es ihm, den dazuhörigen Schrift-wechsel zu bearbeiten. Wir konnten ihm schon während der Lehrzeit gelegentlich auch schwierigeren Schriftwechsel übertragen." see Google

We were trained to dictate our correspondence, complete with full punctuation and spelling of particularly difficult words, to a typist who took it down in shorthand, or onto a tape with a GRUNDIG Stenorette.

All the typists knew my age, and were used to my prepubescent voice. Things became a bit more tricky when one client, in answer to one of my written 'masterpieces', called me on the phone. After a lengthy talk concerning his insurance claim, he followed it up with a letter which opened with the very embarrassing salutation, "Dear Miss Görmann ..."

I never lived this down with my fellow-articled clerks. I completed my articles and eventually found a new voice and new home in Australia.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Building Australia's tallest firewood shed

Click on image to enlarge

 

People ask me what I do all day! I've never been busier! Right now I'm building Australia's tallest firewood shed! I "stole" the design from Melbourne Cricket Ground's Grandstand: 3700mm wide, 1600m deep, and a very tall 2900m high.

I'm waiting to have the corrugated COLORBOND® iron for the roof and the three walls delivered, after which I shall be splitting and stacking firewood for the next winter. Just don't ask me what I'm doing all day!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Reading changed my life!

  Bild Zeitung   dated Thursday, 30 Jan 1964
the advertisement in the bottom right-hand corner changed my life!

 

 

All my life I've been what they call a 'buveur d'encre' in French, or a 'kutu buku' in Indonesian, or a 'Leseratte' in German, or, in the good ol' Queen's English, a bookworm!

Reading is a drug of which I am a slave; deprive me of printed matter and I grow nervous, moody and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, I will make do with the label on a can of soup or a tin of paint or the telephone directory; I will even make do with a newspaper several years old.

Today I read a newspaper that's fifty-seven years old, all thanks to the nice people - and two very nice people, Frau Katja Hinrichs and Herr Matthias Winkler, in particular - at the German   Bild Zeitung  .

Remember how I'd asked them to find me the old advertisement that made me decide to emigrate to Australia in 1965? (read the story here)

Well, "deutsche Gründlichkeit" is alive and well because just two days later Frau Hinrichs sent me the exact copy of the advertisement which fifty-seven years ago I had cut out, filled with my name and address, and mailed to the "Australische Auskunfts- und Auswanderungs-Büro":

 

"Do you know Australia?
Information about Australia, a young and aspiring nation, and the opportunities awaiting you there, are available from the Australian Information and Immigration Agency
2 Hamburg 1, Mönckebergstrasse 11, Phone 33 49 82.
For more information complete this coupon (in block letters) and mail it to us."

 

All in "Blockbuchstaben" (block letters), of course! A year later I was in Australia; six years later I was an Australian. Reading changed my life!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Read also "10 Pfennig BILD Zeitung"

 

Thanks, DEUTSCHE WELLE!

It’s a remote paradise between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Only a few thousand people live on the islands in the Torres Strait. They depend on a supply ship that sails to their isolated archipelago once a week. There are 274 islands in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea, their white coral-sand beaches rising from warm, shallow waters. Around 20 of the islands are inhabited, with many several kilometers apart. The main island, Thursday Island, sounds like it could have been lifted from the pages of Robinson Crusoe. Residents who want to visit family or friends must do so by boat, having to deal with unpredictable tidal currents. Cargo ships from the mainland supply the islands with everything from food and medicine to cars and spare parts - and they don't always arrive on schedule. But Torres Strait Islanders have always used their great ingenuity to cope with the scarcity of resources. They include Ken, who’s currently working on a sculpture for the reopening of a local church, Paula, a midwife, and Sylvia, who reads the weather reports on local radio.

The house I used to live in - area highlighted in yellow - has been replaced by something much larger, but the one to the left of it which was my then neighbour's house, "Bluey" Douglas, skipper of MV Melbidir, is still standing. My office was a short walk away to the left of the red roof at the waterfront (which is, also conveniently, the FEDERAL HOTEL).

 

My serendipitous discovery of this excellent documentary by DEUTSCHE WELLE brought back many memories of a quaint place I lived and worked in for less than a year in 1977 but which I shall never forget: Thursday Island!

There are two little words I don't want to find myself uttering as an old man, and they are "If only ...". If only! We all have our own "if onlys". If only we had studied harder; if only we had stuck with that job ..."

And so, in early 2005, I travelled back to Thursday Island, if only to eliminate one "if only" and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard - click here.

Socrates said that the unexamined life isn't worth living - what he actually said looked something like this ...

... to which Plato is said to have replied, "Keep it in the jar with the lid on or it will all dry up!"

Well, before it all dried up, and following Socrates' advice, I undertook that trip to T.I. for another examination of my own past: click here.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. You may also wish to read
"In search for meaninglessness"
"Who was German Harry?"
"Another flashback to Thursday Island"
"The World of Charmian Clift
"French Joe"
"Every boy's dream come true"
"The Thirsty Island"

 

TAREing my hair out

 

Rudyard Kipling's poem "I keep six honest serving-men" has long been my favourite. So much so that I had a calligrapher inscribe it on a piece of vellum which I framed and hung above my office desk wherever I worked.

So when I became financial controller for a big commodity trader in Saudi Arabia who regularly bought grain in bulk, shipped it to Singapore for bagging, and then sold it in 50kg-bags, it didn't take me long to ask why 20,000 metric tonnes of grain, bought in bulk, should still be only 20,000 metric tonnes after it had been stuffed into 400,000 bags.

How could that be? What about each bag's tare weight of 500 grams? Where had the 200 metric tonnes of grain gone that had been displaced by the weight of the bags? And who had taken them?

Asking my Arab boss was of little help as he had never heard of tare weight. It took me a whole day - and a lot of TAREing-out of hair while sipping dozens of thimble-sized cups of cardamom-flavoured coffee - to convince him that there was something missing. A whole 200 metric tonnes of grain, in fact, from each shipment!

As it turned out, the Chinese bagging contractor in Singapore had not only been handsomely paid by us for the cost of the bags and the labour and the equipment hire but he had also profiteered from the 200 metric tonnes of grain displaced by the weight of the bags which he quietly sold off on his own account - several times a year and at a time when the grain sold for as much as US$800 a metric tonne!

And there was nothing we could do about it as my Arab boss had allowed him to write his own bagging contract which stated - ever so innocently - that each bulk shipment would be reshipped "gross for nett".

Arabs (and many other people, I am sure) don't like to be outsmarted and they like even less to be found out to have been outsmarted. So, yes, we did engage a new bagging contractor and, yes, this time we did write our own contract terms, but, no, my boss never thanked me for having put a stop to this outrageous rip-off. (I never received a Christmas card from the previous bagging contractor either!)

I reflected on this and many other work experiences as I idly paged through my collection of employers' references. Once so highly treasured, they are now, in my retirement, just so many pieces of paper. The mere tare weight of an engrossing career in commerce.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. See related story Look what I found on the Internet.