Michael Swift, a younger Tom Neale

 

Few people know that Tom Neale was not the only person to live alone on Suwarrow. In the summer of 1965, a 23-year old former art student from London, Michael Swift, began nearly a year of life as a hermit on the remote island.

He persuaded New Zealand brothers, John and David Glennie to put him ashore with his possessions after joining the crew of their trimaran, 'Highlight' at Tahiti in July, 1965. He spent the first two months living mostly on uto which is the nutritous kernal of the mature coconut because he didn't know what else was safe to eat. His home was the hut formerly occupied by Tom Neale.

But Swift was an illegal immigrant according to the Cook Islands government because he had no permission to stay on the island. On 2nd December, 1965, John Tariau - then MP for Pukapuka - sailed into Suwarrow lagoon on a mission to tell him so.

Photo of Michael Swift by Dr Koekoe Mokotupu

 

Swift told him he'd found peace and contentment on the island and under no circumstances was he returning to Europe. He signed an indemnity paper absolving the government of any responsiblitity to send a vessel to take him off the atoll, and before being left alone again he was presented with supplies and given tips on survival. He turned up in Rarotonga in April, 1966 and left a few days later for New Zealand. He said he intended to return to Suwarrow, but when he learned in 1970 that Neale was back on the atoll, he went to live on Aitutaki instead. He's reported to have said that Suwarrow wasn't big enough for both of them!

A summary of Michael Swift's stay on Suwarrow can be found in "Sisters in the Sun" by A.S. Helm and W.H. Percival (published by Robert Hale & Company, 1973) which has long gone out of print and is no longer obtainable.

The information itself is derived from contemporary reports in 'Pacific Islands Monthly' which I tracked down in the following old editions of the magazine:

 

Click on images to enlarge

 

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A walk on the (c)old side

 

Every so often Padma asks me, "Why don't you go and visit your old hometown?" Why? Where is home? We came from East to West Germany with the Berlin Airlift during the Soviet Blockade from June 1948 until May 1949 and ended up in Braunschweig. That's where I grew up, went to school, and served my articles before I left in 1963.

That's a sum total of fifteen years. Does that make Braunschweig my hometown? I mean, I lived longer in Canberra in Australia, and even longer in Nelligen since my retirement in 2000. Maybe Nelligen is my hometown now and I should just go across the river and visit the village.

However, to keep Padma happy I did go and visit my old hometown again with the help of YouTube, and, frankly, I found it less than inspiring ...

... although I did get a bit excited at 17:01 and screamed "Links, links!" for YouTube to turn left to see the office where I served my articles all those sixty years ago at # 2 Münzstraße but no one heard me. Schade!

And I screamed "Links, links!" one more time at 24:04 to see all of the imposing building of the Braunschweigische Staatsbank where I had worked in the "Auslandsabteilung" after my first return from Australia when I still thought it might be possible to settle back into life in (c)old Germany. But "der Duft der großen weiten Welt" was already well up my nostrils and, after only two months, I resigned and fled Germany again, first to South-West Africa, and then back to Australia. Nicht schade!

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Big Brother is watching you

Watch the movie "1984" here

 

There are probably dozens of classics most people pretend to have read. George Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is one of those classics that absolutely everyone should have read, especially in these troubled times of mass surveillance. Let me remind you of its beginning:

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran." [continue here]

 

 

And here's the Chinese version:

四月间,天气寒冷晴朗,钟敲了十三下。温斯顿史密斯为了要躲寒风,紧缩着脖子, 很快地溜进了胜利大厦的玻璃门,不过动作不够迅速,没有能够防止一阵沙土跟着他刮进 了门。

门厅里有一股熬白菜和旧地席的气味。门厅的一头,有一张彩色的招贴画钉在墙上, 在室内悬挂略为嫌大了一些。

画的是一张很大的面孔,有一米多宽。这是一个大约四十五岁的男人的脸,留着浓密 的黑胡子,面部线条粗犷英俊。温斯顿朝楼梯走去。用不着试电梯。即使最顺利的时候, 电梯也是很少开的,现在又是白天停电。这是为了筹备举行仇恨周而实行节约。温斯顿的 住所在七层楼上。他三十九岁,右脚脖子上患静脉曲张,因此爬得很慢,一路上休息了好 几次。每上一层楼,正对着电梯门的墙上就有那幅画着很大脸庞的招贴画凝视着。这是属 于这样的一类画,你不论走到哪里,画面中的眼光总是跟着你。下面的文字说明是: 老大 哥在看着你。 [continue here]

 

"老大哥在注视着你"

 

So what happens to Winston Smith - or 温斯顿·史密斯 ? Maybe you want to jump straight to the ending where Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Café, with two gin-scented tears trickling down the sides of his nose:

他抬头看着那张庞大的脸。他花了四十年的功夫才知道那黑色的大胡子后面的笑容是 什么样的笑容。哦,残酷的、没有必要的误会!哦,背离慈爱胸怀的顽固不化的流亡者! 他鼻梁两侧流下了带着酒气的泪。但是没有事,一切都很好,斗争已经结束了。他战 胜了自己。他热爱老大哥。

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A depressing but necessary read

 

Douglas Murray's book "The Strange Deat of Europe" is not an easy read but it should be read by anybody who was brought up in the spirit of Voltaire and St Paul, Dante, Goethe and Bach. To all of them, Douglas Murray extends the only thing that he honestly could say without caveat: "Good luck."

 

 

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Bookshop Memories

 

Abookseller wins ten million dollars in the lottery. His ecstatic friends ask him what he plans to do with the money. With a huge smile on his face, he answers: "I'll keep selling books until the money runs out!"

I must confess there had been moments when I had dreamt of sitting comfortably in an upholstered armchair by a cash register, reading my favourite book, and occasionally ringing up a profitable sale. While the number of books I am collecting is increasing, the number of years in which I could possibly still sell them is not. Reading George Orwell's "Bookshop Memories" confirms that opening a bookshop is a bad idea.

 

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When I worked in a second-hand bookshop – so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios – the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money – stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough – it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps – used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library – the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was – Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.

In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another – the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years – is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole – in spite of my employer’s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop – no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for Boswell’s Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long – I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books – and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading – in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

 

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The unforgettable bookshop sketch with Marty Feldman

 

Notwithstanding paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles I still enjoy browsing bookshops, if I can find any. When George Orwell wrote, "The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman", he was right about the grocer and the milkman but he couldn't have foreseen the internet which squeezed the traditional bookshops out of existence. What's left are the many op-shops which do a great job in recycling second-hand book for a few dollars. Long may they continue to do so.

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My first cup of tea of the day

 

The origin of tea began, it is said, when Daruma, a Buddhist saint, irresponsibly fell asleep over his devotions, and, upon awakening, was so distraught that he cut off his eyelids and threw them to the ground where they took root and grew up as a bush, the leaves of which, when dried and infused in hot water, produced a beverage that would banish sleep.

It would take a lot more than the thought of cut-off eyelids to put me off my first cup of tea of the day, taken alone in quiet introspection by the window overlooking the river when it is still shrouded in the early-morning mist of another winter's day. A Chinese watercolour in motion!

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company. For many years I was bad company to myself but no longer. I now enjoy those quiet moments to reflect on all those years that have passed me by; on all the mistakes I have made, on all the stupidities I have committed; on all the shames and humiliations and treacheries and betrayals I have endured; but also on all the prides and accomplishments and brief moments of happiness I've lived through, which I now call experience.

They are the sum total of all the youth and the health and the energy I left behind as I bounced through life, spending more time on planning my next weekend than on how I might spend the rest of my life.

Winter at "Riverbend" is a time of hibernation, of introspection, and of sitting by the window overlooking the river and drinking cups of tea.

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Think pink!

 

I love retro, especially when it's still retro-fixed in its original state from the 1970s, so when a good friend suggested that Padma and I should combine our next dental visit to Ulladulla with a local holiday, I booked into the 1970s Mollymook Ocean View Motel.

When I rang the receptionist, she asked which ocean view queen deluxe room I wanted. What a silly question! The one with the pink bathroom, of course! I've booked and can't wait to get back to my twenties again!

 

CAMAY soap brings back memories - click here

 

I hope they also provide free toiletries - pink CAMAY soap, of course!

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Awaiting Collection

 

Another eclectic mix of books awaits collection at the post office. It's one of several parcels I expect to arrive over the next couple of weeks from Angus & Robertson, the Book Depository, Booktopia, and ebay. Happy days await me!

My library is my sanctuary, full of books, some profound originals, others obscure little books that appeared out of nowhere, all of a kind that I hesitate to lend out for fear I might miss their company.

They are books which once I have read them, I will never go completely back to where I was before. They whisper of some ancient knowing and from a time forgotten that life may be more than it seems, and less.

I shall await those collections until the final day when they collect me.

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Don't judge a book by its movie

Read the original book at www.archive.org

 

Age teaches us a lot of things. We start to realise that we might never be the person we thought we'd be when we were young. The years go by, slowly at first and then faster, and we start to lose more and gain less. Is that the story of "The Old Man and the Sea", an old man raging like Dylan Thomas against the night?

I've read the book by Ernest Hemingway, and I watched more than once the movie with Anthony Quinn which was a feast for the eyes. I've just now discovered the above read-along audio book which combines the joy of reading with the pleasure of listening, word for word, through the whole 120 pages of this classic story of courage in the face of defeat.

 

The book was made into a great movie, so perhaps you should judge it by its movie

 

Reading classic literature helps us to gain an understaning of the world and the human condition. Reading can help us to answer the difficult questions that life present. "The Old Man and the Sea" is one such book.

"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

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Equity markets are again in retreat

BHP is down to $37.50 - again! - from its recent high of $49.55
on 11 April 2011

 

This could have been written yesterday but I wrote it eleven years ago - click here. And I added: Don't let any of this push you into panic. This too will pass, and those with a patient, long-term outlook will win. On the bright side, we're closer to the bottom than we were yesterday.

With BHP languishing under forty dollars, the war in Ukraine dragging on, varroa mite, monkey pox and foot-and-mouth disease adding to COVID, endless talk about climate change, floods and bushfires, rising inflation fears, the USA economy stalling, China's all-important real estate market on the brink of collapse, and the World Bank predicting the worst recession in fifty years - did I leave anything out? -, I may retreat to my library and read as the world crashes all around me.

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Want to get rich overnight for free in three easy steps with no risk?

 

Then don't buy P.J. O'Rourke's "None of My Business". (Actually, if you believe there's a book that can do that, you shouldn't buy any books because you probably can't read.)

P.J.'s approach to business, investment, finance, and innovation is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter 'How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other', detailing the economic lessons he learned while reporting in some of the most turbulent combat zones across the world. P.J. has his eye on the present as well as the past. He explores the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on the Internet, which poses the question, 'whose idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?'

P.J. is baffled by bitcoin, which seems to him 'like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club'. And he writes a fanciful short story about the morning he wakes up to find that all the world's goods and services are free - with disastrous (and hilarious) results for the rule of law and the harmony of society.

This is P.J. at his finest, a book that reminds us that when everything around us is Liar's Poker, all we can do is fold - with laughter.

Sorry, I couldn't find a free online copy at archive.org, so you'll just have to do what I did and go and buy it on ebay.com.au or booktopia.com.au.

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Every picture is worth a story

 

This picture shows Roy, an old mate from my New Guinea days who has since retired in Malaysia, lounging rejectedly under a sign that reads, "Tawaran hari ini" (or "Offer of the day" for those who don't speak Bahasa Malaysia) outside the entrance to a large department store in Kuala Lumpur.

For those of you who have never been to Malaysia, let me explain: in order to attract female shoppers, department stores in Kuala Lumpur provide comfortable sofas outside their main entrance where desperate housewives may leave their unwanted husbands while they go shopping.

It's an arrangement that seems to benefit both parties: the longer the desperate housewife stays in the shop, the more the shop sells; and the longer the husband sits under the sign, the greater the chances that an even more desperate housewife may take up the "Offer of the day".

I am told - although there is no mention of it on the sign - that some department stores even offer free gift-wrapping. Mind you, Roy's missus already increased her chances by having told him to keep his mask on.

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