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If you associate Omar Sharif with only two movies, "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago", then here's your chance to
see him in a totally different role while at the same time polishing up your French! (You can always cheat and look at the subtitles 😀)
Monsieur Ibrahim, also known as Les Fleurs Du Koran, is set in Paris during the early 1960s. As the old gave way to the new, everything was in flux and the city was filled with an energy that promised cultural shifts and social change. Against this background, in a working class neighbourhood, two unlikely characters - a young Jew and an elderly Muslim - begin a friendship.
When we meet Moise, also known as Momo, he is in effect an orphan even though he lives with prostitutes who treat him with genuine affection. Momo buys his groceries at the neighbourhood shop, a crowded dark space owned and run by Ibrahim, a silent exotic-looking man who sees and knows more than he lets on. After Momo is abandoned by his father, Ibrahim becomes the one grown-up in Momo's life. Together they begin a journey that will change their lives forever.
I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning. With only another two hours before we hit the pool again, there was no point in going back to bed, and so I started cooking my porridge, made a cup of tea (with soy milk) for the wife, put out the bins for tomorrow's collection, and waved to a pair of kindred spirits on the river.
The group of people in the pool every morning seems to be growing, as does our knowledge of their life stories. Having bared their bodies, they continue to bare their souls, with enough material to fill a few volumes of Maughamnesque stories. We left the group of talking heads floating in the pool for a cup of hot chocolate and a cupcake at the Pavilions Cafe.
Whatever did we do with our mornings before we joined the pool?
That was my first thought when I saw this photo of an old mate of mine from my Rabaul days and his wife, dressed up to the nines and sitting rigidly to attention under a portrait of Indonesia's President Joko Widodo. "They've changed their nationality and now live in Indonesia", I thought.
However, the rest of his email explained that this was not their Plan B (yet!), "Hello Peter. We had the opportunity to go on board the KRI BIMA SUCI
recently when visiting Cairns. She is an Indonesian training ship and was a sight to behold as she left with the sailors 'dressing the yard'."
With our new Labor Government handing out more money to the "needy" - so called because they think they don't need to work - and revealing their hidden agenda of changing the tax treatment of franking credits, self-managed superfunds, negative gearing on investment property, and the family home (in that order of priority and fiscal impact), emigrating to Indonesia - although not on board a KRI which stands for 'kapal perang Republik Indonesia' and is a prefix for Indonesian naval ships similar to our HMAS - no longer sounds like such a far-fetched Plan B.
It's still three months to go but ALDI in Ulladulla are already selling "Christmas Stollen"! Mind you, for me it felt like Christmas when I found another book by Robert Dessaix in Ulladulla's LIONS CLUB Bookshop, plus a slim volume of Solzhenitskyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", "The Vintage Quarterly" which is an anthology of Australian writing, and "The Last of the Bonegilla Girls" which I bought mainly for its description of life in the Bonegilla migrant camp in the 1950s where I had spent my first two nights on Australian soil.
While Padma emptied the shelves in ALDI, I spent a whole hour in the LIONS CLUB bookshop when a chap walked in and ask, "Do you still sell cakes?" I nearly called out, "Listen, mate, this is a bloody bookshop!" before realising that the LIONS CLUB also sells Christmas plum puddings as a fundraiser. Anyhow, they'd already sold out on cakes but there were plenty more books to choose from, and I walked out with a big bag full.
I'm back home. Padma has dashed off to catch the end of the weekly "Bitch & Stitch" meeting. I've made myself a cup of tea and am now sitting by the window overlooking the river and a pile of books. Bliss!
Today was my six-monthly check-up with my friendly dermatologist at Mollymook. He looked me up and down, then into his exotic car guide, and said, "That'll be two hundred dollars, thanks!" Seems I got off lightly this time!
Can you see that monogram in the centre of my back? Looks suspiciously like an M for Manfred, doesn't it? The P and G are yet to come (there was no room for them when he operated on my ear and right temple).
When I lived in the tropics, snorkelling in the ocean, and walking everywhere shirt-, hat-, and aimless(ly) without suncream and sunglasses, I had never heard the word melanoma (and certainly wouldn't have been able to spell it). Half a lifetime, two cataract operations and half a dozen melanoma surgeries later, I am reminded of it every six months (is that what the M on my back really stands for?)
Anyway, the dermatologist went easy on the liquid nitrogen today, and I was able to enjoy our lunch at the Ulladulla bowling club and the foraging through Ulladulla's op-shops for any interesting books.
More of that later; right now I need to put my shirt back on.
Ian Paterson, AASA, ACIS, AAIM, grand-daddy of all accountants, used to say, "If the debits don't equal the credits - make 'em!"
The accountant of a large business had the same daily routine: on arriving at work, he would unlock the bottom drawer of his desk, peer at something inside, then close and lock the drawer. He had been doing this for thirty years.
The entire staff was intrigued but no-one was game to ask him what was in the drawer. Finally the time came for him to retire. There was a farewell party with speeches and a presentation. As soon as he had left the building, some of the staff rushed into his office, unlocked the bottom drawer and peered inside. Taped to the bottom of the drawer was a sheet of paper. It read, "Debit on the left, credit on the right". This joke isn't funny with Arabs - well, nothing is - whose debits and credits are vice versa.
I wonder if this joke made the rounds of accountants who in 1994 had gathered in the small Italian town of San Sepulcro to celebrate the publication five hundred years earlier of the first book on double-entry accounting by the Italian monk Luca Pacioli (pronounced pot-CHEE-oh-lee), who was born there circa 1445.
While Pacioli is often called the "Father of Accounting", he did not invent the system. Instead, he simply described a method used by merchants in Venice during the Italian Renaissance period. His system included most of the accounting routines as we know them today. For example, he described the use journals and ledgers, and he warned that "a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits!" His ledger included assets (including receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expense accounts. He demonstrated year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger. Also, his treatise alludes to a wide range of topics from accounting ethics to cost accounting -- see translation by J.B. Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping).
Practising Pacioli's teachings afforded me a comfortable living, and although my personal life was not always perfectly balanced, I never went to sleep at night until all the debits had equalled the credits (or, to get an early night, by adding the difference to a suspense account, as my friend Ganesh Sharma Krishna in Singapore shrewdly observed).
As I woke up early this morning, I turned to the wife and said, "Golf course or intercourse?" She said, "Don't forget the sweater!" Only kidding: I don't play golf. Instead, we were at the Aquatic Centre by six o'clock sharp to get into the pool before the water turned a funny colour.
We met a couple who had their first swim in the pool: Slobodan, or "Sloppy" for short, a Macedonian, and his Indonesian wife. While Sloppy and I had a heated discussion over whether Alexander the Great was Macedonian or Greek, Padma and her new Indonesian friend talked and talked in Bahasa Indonesia, with very little swimming getting done.
It was a good start to the day which got even better when we picked up a small parcel from the post office which turned out to be a belated birthday present from the booklady in Berlin. I had mentioned to her a long time ago that I was into Sergio Bambaren's books, and right on cue she had sent me a copy of "Die Stunde der Wale". Danke schön, Renate!
On the way out of town we quickly swung by Vinnies where two tanned youngsters with fuzzy hair were sorting through the bookshelves. "Are you from PNG?" I ask, which started another long conversation with Morea and Brian, two boys whose Papuan mother is married to an Australian who used to serve in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force.
I had already said "Lukim yu" when Morea ran after me to get my phone number. "I'm sure my father would like to meet up with you", he said.
In his iconic book, Donald Horne described Australia as 'a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck'. He went on to say that we 'live on other people's ideas' and that 'most of our leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise'.
The phrase 'the lucky country' quickly became part of the language, though its message was often misrepresented by people who had not even read the book, or had quickly skimmed through it and missed the irony of the title. Published in 1964, nothing much has changed.
Now, more than five decades later, internationally respected scientist and environmentalist Ian Lowe has added the missing questionmark to the title in a book of his own in which he shows just how little has changed after generations of short-sighted leadership.
In his frank and fearless way, Lowe assesses the state of Australia in four key areas: our environment, population and society, geographical position, and unrelenting pursuit of economic growth. Highlighting that the global economy and the environment are in crisis, Lowe illustrates the need - and the opportunity - to transform Australia into the world-leading model of sustainable development that we have the potential to become. It is a must-read and on my list of books to buy.
In the meantime, I am working my way through a second-hand copy of Donald Horne's "Money Made Us" which I picked up for very little money from Vinnies in the Bay (there's always the chance of finding a gem here and there amongst all the Wilbur Smith and Rosamunde Pilcher dross).
I'm back home after my two hours in the pool this morning, and with the sharemarket having been king-hit once again by world events, it may be a good time to take a nostalgic look back in time in this book from 1976.
Click on Watch on YouTube (telling you the obvious is all part of my Community Service)
Always mindful of a handful of old friends from my days overseas who never made it back to this Big Brown Land, who linger on in Trumpland, oscillate between Kuala Lumpur and Penang, or were stupid enough to take out PNG citizenship and can't even get a visa to Australia, I've taken it onto myself to keep them in close contact with Australian culture.
Of course, sending them a tub of yoghurt could have also done the trick, but would it have got there? There's a so much better chance that this full-length copy of "A Few Best Men" stays long enough on YouTube for those exiles, who shall remain nameless, to be reminded of home.
It may also convince them that they haven't really missed much. Enjoy!
My travelling days are over, but back in 2011 I had booked myself onto the Sunlander's premium all-inclusive Queenslander Class from Brisbane to Cairns, enjoying first class Twin Sleeper accommodation, fine dining in the Restaurant Car, a Lounge and Bar, and a host of other extras.
To get to Brisbane, I took the overnight XPT from Sydney. At first it looked like I would have my twinette sleeper compartment all to myself but at Strathfield a companion joined me: Ian, a retired school teacher from St. Ives, who had spent half a lifetime in tiny schools out west, including Walgett. He was good company and we talked until late into the night about the woes of the world. I wanted to ask him if he had seen a certain Aussie movie which starred a young schoolteacher who had been posted to the fictious town of Tiboonda way, way out west.
Ian, the retired school teacher
He knew it but neither of us could remember its name. Well, not until three o'clock in the morning when I was awoken by a tap-tap-tap on my arm. Opening my eyes, I saw Ian's face looking down from the top bunk.
The best-laid plans of mice and men...and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone."
"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."
Lay it on, Mr Putin! You can't scare me, as I've just ordered a spare pair of reading glasses. See you in the Twilight Zone! (Season 1, Episode 8)
Süd-West Afrika, Neu-Guinea, die Solomon-Inseln, Birma, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi-Arabien, Griechenland, und so weiter und so fort - they all left their impressions on me; they all shaped me and made me into what I became and am today.
Ooops! Here I was, deliberately writing in German for all my German friends in Germany and the former German colony of South-West Africa, and without even realising it, I've lapsed back into English. It would never have happened had I stayed in South-West Africa where German is one of the three official languages, where a lot of architecture is of the Wilhelminian era long forgotten in Germany itself, and where Germans still speak the German language as pure as it was before globalisation.
Click on the image and follow the red arrow
With the help of Google Map I've just found the staff house I used to occupy in Lüderitz and, just to be sure, had it confirmed by some nice people in Lüderitz that I found on facebook. Not that all that much has changed in Lüderitz in a physical sense; the really big change has been politically and spiritually with the demise of the dreaded Apartheid.
My room with a view
The view from my then staff flat along Hamburger Straße is still as desolate today as it was when I was there in 1968/69, and I can almost still hear my neighbour Karl-Heinz Herzberg playing his nightly dirge "As tears go by". Both Marianne Faithful and Miriam Makeba's more upbeat "Click Song" helped to drown out the endlessly blowing wind from either the ocean in the west or the desert in the east. Sand was everywhere - sand and boredom - and it was almost a relief to go to the Dickensian "kantoor", even though it was just as bleak inside as it was outside.
My place of work
The whole time I was there, I never spoke anything but German and never needed the "Afrikaans-Duitse en Duits-Afrikaanse Woordeboek" which I'd bought at the Callesen bookshop in Windhoek for Rand 1.75.
More than fifty years later, the same dictionary is still in my library, in almost mint condition, together with dictionaries of Arabic, Burmese, Farsi, French, Greek, Indonesian, Malay, Samoan, and Pidgin Inglis.
On a more cheerful note, here's a beautifully made video clip of Luderitz and its natural surroundings. Baie goed gedoen, Liska!!
Tony's grave at the Gungahlin Cemetery in Canberra
Some people ask me why I retired at Nelligen, to which I reply, "Why not?" (I sometimes ask myself why I retired, full-stop, but that's a different story altogether.)
It all started in Canberra while I was still running my small computer consultancy Canberra Computer Accounting Systems and dabbling in tax and accounting work on the side. After I had solved a tax problem for a German friend, Tony Finsterer, for which I refused payment, he insisted that I stay at his weekend cottage at Nelligen.
For several months, I didn't find the time to drive to the coast. When I eventually did I had almost forgotten Tony's offer. Luckily, I didn't blink as I drove across the Nelligen bridge on the way to Batemans Bay and so spotted this tiny village nestled alongside the Clyde River.
I asked for directions to Tony's cottage at the General Store and was shown to # 21 Sproxton Lane across the river. (Tony has since died and his cottage has changed hands twice.)
The cottage was locked and Tony in Canberra. I phoned him and was told to look for the keys under the watertank and to make myself at home. Which I did and which set me on my own quest to find a little place in Nelligen.
At the time, Nelligen was a place forgotten even by real estate agents and nothing was for sale except a few empty building blocks. One such block overlooked the Clyde River from its location in Nelligen Place. I could imagine sitting there on the verandah and taking in the views. Which is exactly what a chap was doing just two blocks away. I walked up and asked if I could join him.
Soon we were not only sharing the same views but also memories of people and places we both had known as "Sandy" Sandilands and his wife Betty had also lived and worked in Rabaul in New Guinea and on Thursday Island - in fact, their daughter was born there! I felt at home at once! A few weeks later I was the proud owner of a block of land in Nelligen Place! (Sandy and Betty have since then died, too, and their little home is now another happy family's happy home.)
I wanted to build a beautiful little Classic Country Cottage. However, a retired public servant who occupied a small log cabin next to me did what public servants do: be a pain in the coccyx ! He objected to my building plans - TWICE! - on some obscure grounds. This delayed me long enough to find a much better place across the river. And that's how I came to buy "Riverbend"!
"Riverbend" had been auctioned in August 1992. I went to the auction as a spectator knowing that the reserve price was outside my range. It must have been outside everybody else's as well because it didn't sell. More than a year later, in November 1993, the owners, who had bought the property only four years earlier, accepted my much-reduced offer.
(Only after I had bought "Riverbend" I found out that the previous owners had sold out because of some nasty neighbours. I swore to myself that if they ever tried the same with me, I wouldn't budge. They did, and I didn't! Oh, and I did go back to thank the public servant for objecting to my plans so that I could buy this much better and bigger and waterfront property. Last time I looked his mouth was still open!)
Where the first exclamation mark is for pronunciation,
and the second exclamation mark is for punctuation.
Fifty-four years ago, I lived and worked in Lüderitz, a small town on the Atlantic coast surrounded by the diamond-rich "Sperrgebiet" in the Namib Desert in what was then the ex-German colony of South-West Africa and is now Namibia.
The "kantoor" in Lüderitz in which I had to spend my entire day was straight out of Dickens: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who treated the blacks abominably. Apartheid sucked and the job was completely dead-end! Dis 'n lekker lewe, tussen die Bucht se krewe! I didn't think so. Check it on GOOGLE Map
South-West Africa was then governed by South Africa under its inhuman Apartheid regime which turned the white minority into an elite simply because of the colour of their skin. It couldn't last - and it didn't! - and I had enough foresight to leave again before things turned ugly - which, surprisingly, they never did, except for small changes like now calling Lüderitz by its local name !Nami≠Nüs. Luckily, they have no brewery; imagine asking for a pint of !Nami≠Nüs Beer, even before you got drunk!
We've just come back from our morning walk through the village, and noticed Council workers installing the above new sign. Not as bad as !Nami≠Nüs but why not leave it as it has always been: "Nelligen" full-stop? At least, we all know how that name came about, don't we?
A certain Nelligen butcher had a wife by the name of Nell. Apparently, he did away with her and threw the body in the river. Unlucky for him, the Clyde is a tidal river and on every rising tide her body would float back up again, prompting locals to exclaim, “Here comes Nell again”.
While the West is convulsing itself in culture wars, the real war in Eastern Europe has already slipped off the headlines. Maybe their coming winter will decide what's important: keeping warm and keeping the wheels of industry moving or teaching little boys at school that it's all right to wear a skirt.
While watching the above video with Dr Jordan Peterson, a controversial Canadian academic, you may wish to keep in mind what author Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote in 1906 in "The Friends of Voltaire": "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Personally, I don't hold out too much hope for the decadent West. This photo, emailed to me by a friend in Cooktown, seems to bear it out:
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
Notice to North American readers:
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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