Are the winters getting colder or am I just feeling it because I'm getting older? I've fed the possum and the ducks, after which I rushed back inside the house to sit just inches away from the electric oil heater. We have lots of firewood but I coudn't be bothered with lugging it into the house and lighting the fireplace.
It is at times like these that I wonder what insanity made me settle this far away from the endless summer of (say) Far North Queensland or the Torres Strait or other tropical abodes overseas I had previously lived in.
After returning from New Guinea in 1977, with a host of exotic overseas postings already under my belt, I took an accounting job on Thursday Island in Torres Strait. I've always enjoyed living in odd and colourful places, and few are odder or more colourful than the "Thirsty" Island.
The job was insultingly mundane but I could possibly have coped with that, had it not been for my boss, a dyed-in-the-wool ex-missionary - see the following Incoming Passenger Card - who, having discovered the difference between a debit and credit, managed to occupy the job he had just passed on to me, after which he was elevated to manager.
Although we both had spent several years in New Guinea (he many more years than I, as can be seen from the next card completed in 1968, nine years after the first one, on which he was still a "Christian Missionary" for the South Sea Evangelical Mission, even though married by then), we never talked about those times; in fact, we never hit it off at all.
He was no longer married when I took up my posting in 1977, and the best way to describe him, without being too unkind, was to call him a crotchety old bastard - and a wowser to boot who also played the organ in church on Sundays - and I'm surprised to find out now that he was born in 1929 which would've made him a mere forty-eight at the time of my encounter with him. Either way, whether he was forty-eight or the close-to-sixty which I then thought he was, I wasn't going to wait around for his retirement before taking over from him, and so, with the old cry "ON! ON!" of the "drinking club with a running problem", the Hash House Harriers, on my lips, I departed the "Thirsty" Island for bigger jobs.
Many more postings in the Solomon Islands, in Western Samoa, in Penang in Malaysia, a year-and-a-bit caravanning working holiday in Australia, two more assignments in New Guinea, and three years in Saudi Arabia and Greece followed before I again settled down but I've often thought back to the "Thirsty" Island in the Torres Strait and pondered "If only .."
Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living and so, to eliminate at least one of the many "if onlies" in my life 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, I revisited the island in 2005. You can read about it in this travelogue.
A short postscript: The former District Commissioner of Bougainville, Bill Brown, with whom I'm still in occasional contact, emailed me just now, "I knew your former 'dyed-in-the-wool ex-missionary' boss Cecil Burgess in 1966. I do not remember where Cecil was living when I was officer-in-charge of the Dreikirkir patrol post for a period in 1966, but Dreikikir was in his God-bothering circuit and he appeared about once a month to stay in the South Sea Evangelical Mission shack down the hill from the government station. He provided me with conversation when he climbed up the hill to visit, drank some home-made muli juiced and watched with horror when I drank the same laced with rum." (Read Bill Brown's description of Dreikikir here). Dreikikir was a very remote patrol post 45 km west of Maprik in a very remote corner of New Guinea - see map below - which was, after from the Solomon Islands, the hub of the South Sea Evangelical Mission's activities in New Guinea. Hubert Hofer, an Austrian long-time resident of Thursday Island who now in retirement lives in Cooktown, told me that Cecil Burgess made it to 95 which seems to validate the old saying that only the good die young. All that Bible-bashing, non-drinking, grumpy-old-man stuff must've worked for him.
An even shorter postscript: There are in fact TWO Cecil Burgesses, and all will be revealed in my post "A case of very much mistaken identity".
