Plan B

 

It's been five years since my cancer operation in 2018. Five years is the approximate survival rate they gave me, and I'm still here to tell the tale. In fact, I'm going to the LIFEHOUSE in Sydney for a final PET scan and check-up so they can wash their hands off me.

In the many weeks spent there after the operation and during the subsequent radiation treatment, our preferred accommodation had been the Quality Apartments in Missenden Road. I phoned to make a booking but while their website still exists, the apartments don't.

 

Click on map to enlarge. GOLDEN GROVE is at the red dot just off-centre to the left. It's an easy walk from Central Station in the upper right-hand corner; or an even quicker train ride to Newtown Station in the left-hand lower corner, and an easy stroll up King Street.

 

And so it's Plan B: two nights at the Golden Grove which we also know from previous stays. The best way to describe it is "homely" and its best feature is its proximity to the LIFEHOUSE and the hussle and bussle of Newtown's King Street which even made it into Wikipedia as follows:

"The residents include a higher-than-average concentration of students, LGBT people and artists, [which] are most visible on this street, sealing Newtown's reputation as Sydney's premier hub of subcultures."

[The Australian movie "Erskineville Kings" features King Street in its opening sequence.]

 

 

No subcultures for me: I just want some juicy chicken drum sticks and coleslaw from Clems Chicken Shop and in the evening a sit-down dinner at our favourite Vietnamese restaurant, Tre Viet - but only after I've checked out Vinnies across the street for interesting books and DVDs.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

"Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns."

 

Give me any beautiful and profound quote in French or Latin, even in gutteral German, and I happily requote it in its original, because translating it into English would take too much away from its original beauty and profundity.

Not so with "Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns", and not only because Danish - which sounds a bit like German on steroids - is spoken by a mere six million people but because "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" sounds so much better. As for its profundity, we can all relate to it, even though none of us has Søren Kierkegaard's linguistic facility to express it so elegantly.

What this beautifully poetic summation boils down to is this: that in those moments when you pause to reflect on what your life has been like, you may feel that you understand your life, but your understanding is only temporary, because life is a forward motion in which you must always take new actions and make new choices, which will have changed your understanding by the time you reflect on life again. In other words, there is no such thing as having a perfect understanding of your life prior to living your life.

 

 

So why bother to try and understand it at all? As Kierkegaard wrote, "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world's foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it ... Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."

That's probably a good summary of my own three-quarters of a century full of hyperactive living which I wished I could have come up with by myself - if I had Kiekegaard's linguistic facility to express it so elegantly.

Now it is time to pour myself a large glass of Oyster Bay Chardonnay, while you no doubt start googling to read up on Kierkegaard. Not that it matters all that much: do it or do not do it — you will regret both. 😀

Googlemap Riverbend

 

When a sailor can't go on anymore, he sets out for his final voyage, never to return.

Paul Johnson's monologue:

"At this moment in my life, I would actually be very happy to just stop. I've had enough. I've been riding storms and being silly. And I have terrified myself for years. I don't know why I did it, but I couldn't not do it. I've never lived on fucking land in my life, and I'm not sure that I want to try. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be let loose. I wanted out, I wanted freedom and I didn't want to be around people particularly anymore. I just didn't want to belong to anybody else except myself."

"I've spent a lot of my life on remote islands where there are no people, but just animals. I was maybe 10 years old, and I had my own dinghy, and I used to go up the river beyond where everybody was. After a while, all the strange animals that lived there they'd get used to you. And then they just aren't scared anymore. And they come to hang out with you."

"The boat I was born on was called 'Escape'. My mother died on the boat and so did my father. My sister and I were twins. I realy don't remember my sister very well. She was very young when she died. My parents were honestly really upset. When I arrived and tied up alongside their boat from Shetland, it took a while, before they said, 'Are you just on holiday?' And I said, 'No, I've quit.' And he said, 'Paul, you have one of the best jobs in the world. You're running a military base. Why did you quit?' 'Because', I said, 'I wanna go sailing.' And he couldn't understand."

"I mostly stay as ripped as possible. I used to smoke a lot of weed. You're supposed to have fun. Life is supposed to be a kind of joke. I made a decision back in the sicties. I live just below the poverty level and I'm happy there."

"I have actually made a lot of money in my life. One time I had half a million dollars. I becamse a boat builder because it seemed to be that I didn't have to do anything except sell plans. And they were famous because I'd invented a new system of boat-building."

"If someone wants to build one of my boats, they have to pay me a thousand US dollars. But now with the internet, the people can get my plans off the fucking internet and they don't have to pay me anything. I've got a few thousand dollars in the bank at the moment. I didn't think I was gonna live this bloody long."

"I'm getting to the age truly where I can't really get up at two o'clock in the morning and start the engine and get the fucking anchor up and make a move. I need my motor. I never used to use it. I always sailed everywhere. It normally is suspended. I run it once a week. I turn it on and it goes, boom. And I really don't know what's wrong with it. I thought it was okay."

"I spent seven years living on a tiny boat thinking, trying to understand what the fuck was happening in this world because I realised the place was a crazy house. I eventually sailed across the Atlantic. I really didn't know that I had the courage to do it. So I never told anybody and I slipped away in the night. It was pretty scary. And then suddenly I rounded the bottom end of Martinique and the smell, the smell of the jungle was - it nearly killed me, it was so beautiful. After 40 days alone in the middle of the fucking ocean."

"I was so glad to get out of Europe, and all of the communists and the fucking fascists and all of the lunatics, and to get, you know, phew. A breath of fresh air. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful."

"I can't see why I should honestly stop drinking, but I don't drink more than usually half a bottle of rum a day or something. I mean, it's not excessive, 'cause if I'm doing nothing, I find it's very relaxing to have a few drinks, and let the world go by."

"In the sixties, we lived on a crazy island in the West Indies where everyone was really outta control. There were very wealthy girls, married to extraordinary wealthy Americans. They wanted to have crazy children. So they'd come and make babies with you. Adn what am I gonna say? I have probably quite a lot of children in America. I know this sounds terrible. I was only young then, but at the time it didn't really seem terrible."

"I wake up some mornings and I just cry for an hour because I really miss my children. Everything is a mess. It's just that I'm really not used to living alone. I'm used to having a woman in my life."

"It's so nice to spend months on the ocean with a beautiful woman. I have loved all of the women that I've lived with. I have loved them desperately. I don't blame them making a run for it. Most of them, it's been about 10 years. And instead of roaring around oceans in terrible storms, they want to go and be sensible and I don't blame them. And I wish I could go with them, but this is where I live."

"Whenever I felt like it, I would just sail out of here under full sail, just to scare the fuck out of everybody. And I'd go out and go fishing. And I was coming in on a Sunday evening just before dark and I was rounding up to come into the harbour here, and I was sitting in the hatch, no problems. And I'm pulling like fuck to get the main sail in so I can round up. And the block broke. That thing hit me so hard, it knocked me totally unconscious. And I woke up the next day, I didn't know where I was. And then I realised that I had hit a reef, went over the top, ripped the bottom out of the boat. I pumped for 24 hours without stopping to keep the water down. And then it was too much. So I managed up the beach. That was the last time I sailed alone."

"In the sixties, I had lived on a remote island that no one ever went to. I lived on St Barth. Now it's the most famous multimillionaire everybody. At that time, nobody ever went there. It was abandoned. So I lived there and built boats. Nobody was doing what I was doing. So I was kind of famous. A lot of people say that I pioneered the small-boat sailing in the world, but I don't think I did, but I certainly was one of the first people to actually live on a tiny boat."

"And when I did these huge, long voyages in a tiny dinghy, that changed everything. The first time I crossed the Atlantic, there were five boats that crossed the ocean that year. The last time there were 5,000 boats on the rally set up by some damn fool English person. I have been in huge storms in this tiny boat. That's why I created these boats, because they ride storms."

"They've been very good at it. I have driven these boats 200 miles a day, storms I've had the sails frozen up. Now I can take this boat of mine down to North Africa in five days. There's not another boat ever this size that could do what these boats do."

"It would really upset me if I thought I'd been selfish. I can't imagine any reason to be selfish. Maybe I have been, you don't really know. Maybe I have been a dreadful person."

"Her name was Diana. I lived with her for nine months, following around in my mother's tummy, and so she's part of me. I still dream about her. Twins are sort of, they're glued together. She was totally tiny when she died. I grew up through a war. The Germans bombed the school, and then she disappeared before I even really got to know her. If my sister hadn't died, I wouldn't be who I am. Of course I wouldn't."

---

 

The Sailor" is a documentary about an 80-year-old, Paul Erling Johnson, who valued his freedom. This English sailor sacrificed everything so that he could live only at sea. He was a charmer, raconteur, boatbuilder, artist and one of life’s finest scoundrels.

He was born on the Hamble on a boat. After a short stint in the English Navy during the Falklands War, he bought a boat and sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He has never stopped and never truly lived on land.

This acclaimed film tells the extraordinary story of a man who loved, drank lots of vodka, and lived foolishly, terrifying himself on many occasions. He sailed his entire life and has now washed ashore on the island of Carriacou in the Caribbean. As he approaches his 80th birthday, he and his boat are no longer fit to sail.

What was the price of his freedom? Was he lonely? How does such extraordinary journey end? As he contemplates his life and his death, he plans for the final journey to eternity.

"I didn't think I was gonna live this bloody long", he ruminates in this documentary which was made shortly before he died on June 28, 2021, aged 83. Someone ought to publish his beautifully illustrated diary, kept as he clung to his past because the present held nothing more for him.

Take the time to watch this documentary which is probably the most poignant, beautiful film I've ever seen about a man who lived life on his own terms (I've been trying - unsuccessfully - to buy it on DVD to get away from those pesky commercial breaks).

Watch it, then buy a boat and go sailing ... if only on weekends.

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P.S. If you're into sailing and sailing movies, click here.

 

Faraway

Episode 32 Sailing to "Faraway" uploaded in January 2020: "We set sail from the island of Santa Cruz after completing the entry formalities of clearing into The Solomon Islands. We had heard about a fascinating group of islands about 30 miles away. The Reef Islands also known as Swallow Islands and Matema Islands are a group of 16 islands with a population of just over 5000 people. We were particularly interested in one of the small islands, where an English couple settled in the 1950's, obtained a lease, traded and raised a family."

 

I first heard about Pigeon Island and the Hepworth family when I tried to find work in the islands back in 1969. Tom Hepworth had written a very enticing letter in response to my classified advertisement in the backpages of the PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY, offering me a job as 'book-keeper' in his growing enterprise, Pigeon Island Traders.

He described to me in vivid colours the sort of life I would lead if I were to join him and his family on Pigeon Island. He wouldn't be able to pay me much but, as he put it, neither would I need much money and I would have plenty of time to pursue my own interests and continue my accountancy studies.

I was sorely tempted but I was also concerned about my professional career and what "career" would there be with something called "Pigeon Island Traders" located on one of the remotest islands in the South Pacific? Instead, I accepted another offer from a firm of chartered accountants in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea - and I have never looked back!

It was only in retirement that I began to recall my many wanderings throughout the South Pacific and around the world which led me to ponder what might have happened had I opted for one and not another of the many choices that had come my way. And so I also thought again about Pigeon Island and on the spur of the moment wrote a letter to "Tom Hepworth, care of Pigeon Island Traders, Pigeon Island, Reef Islands, Solomon Islands."

Some months went by and I thought no more of it until one day I received an envelope covered in a lot of colourful Solomon Islands stamps. In it was a letter from Ben Hepworth, the now grown-up son of Tom Hepworth, who told me that his father had passed away some years ago but that he and his twin brother Ross and his mother Diana were still living on the island. He had enclosed some photographs and told me a good deal about the island and invited me to visit them.

Ben, who was some five years old when I had been offered a job on the island by his father, was now in his late 30s and, apart from his secondary schooling in New Zeland and a short-lived attempt at a career with the Mendana Hotel in Honiara, had never lived away from the island. I was amazed at how this family had clung to their dream of living on a small South Pacific island for so long! From the time they set sail from England in November 1947, times had not been easy: their daughter Tasha, born 1958, was mentally retarded and is living today in an institution in New Zealand; they have had several fall-outs with their two sons, Ross and Ben; there has been continued trouble with traditional land-owners over their 2-pound-a-year lease of the island (signed Christmas 1958) which officially runs out in 2052; then there was the destruction caused by Cyclone Nina 1993 and again by Cyclon Danny in 1999 ... the list goes on and the words 'CAN'T GO ON MUCH LONGER' and 'SEEM TO HAVE RUN OUT OF STEAM' appear in Tom's diary more than once.

They tried to attract caretakers to the island but failed repeatedly (the Austrian Wien family in 1964 was a particularly dismal failure; the Pearce family family ran off at the beginning of 1980 leaving the message 'JUST COULDN'T GO ON' hung in a bag on the cargo-shed door); they tried to sell the island in the mid-80s for five hundred thousand US dollars but 'the chains of Pigeon' kept Tom until his death in 1994 at the age of 84. 'Blue skies, fair winds, hot sun and beaches by the miles,' Tom once wrote about Pigeon, but 36 years was a long time for a man with cultural leanings to spend on an isolated island. We all have our fantasies but for most of us reality intervenes - but not so for the Hepworths!

 

Imagine living on a South Sea Island, far from civilisation's worries, and MAKING MONEY from it! Ngarando-Faraway is For Sale! This small resort on beautiful Pigeon Island only needs capital to become a money spinner. Uniquely, Pigeon is leased until 2052; Tourism will take off when an airfield only 3 miles away is completed in 1988, and NOW is the time to invest. US$500,000 will purchase everything on the island, including a profitable store, bar one acre to be used in their retirement by Tom and Diana Hepworth.

Tom's advertisement in the mid-1980s
Click here for a GOOGLE-view of Pigeon Island

 

Thankfully, they were now in contact with the world through the Internet and we began to send each other emails. Ben's mother, Diana, emailed me to suggest that I should come and 'house-sit' the island while she and Ben would go on what she felt may be her last chance of a 'round-the-world trip, planned for the year 2003. Again, reality intervened for me but I did offer to put up a webpage for them to try to attract some other suitable 'house-sitters'. She mentioned that in early 1998 a Lucy Irvine had come to Pigeon Island and during her year-long stay on Pigeon Island written the book "FARAWAY".

 

In 1999, Lucy Irvine took her three children to the farthest corner of the Solomons to live for a year on remote Pigeon Island. The invitation came from an intrepid 80-year-old, Diana Hepworth, who set sail from England in search of a faraway paradise. This work tells of both their experiences. Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

Had I heard of Lucy Irvine? I had indeed! I myself had spent ten months on tiny Thursday Island in the Torres Strait to the north of Australia in 1977. Lucy had 'marooned' herself and her 'husband' on even tinier Tuin Island just north of Thursday Island, for over a year from May 1981 to June 1982 and written a book about it. I had read that book, "CASTAWAY", and also seen the movie. Now I rushed out to get her book "FARAWAY" to read about Pigeon Island. After having read the book, I was somewhat relieved that I hadn't gone to Pigeon all those many years ago because far from living in a 'tropical paradise', the Hepworth family seems to have had more than their fair share of troubles. I have since had an email from one of the Pearces mentioned in Lucy's book: Another Pigeon Island tale.

Since I heard from Ben in late 2001, I have been in regular contact with Pigeon Island. Diana was able to find some suitable 'house-sitters' and in June 2003, she and Ben and his daughter went on their overseas trip during which they contacted me from the U.K. and the US.

Then, while Padma and I were holidaying in Bundaberg in 2003, Ben called us from a motel in Brisbane before leaving on the next day's flight to Honiara. It came therefore as a complete shock to us when a few days later we received the following email:

 

Dear All, My mother passed away at about 2.30pm on the 27th of August 2003. We were in a canoe, having left Lata about 15 minutes earlier, heading back to Pigeon Island after a 3 month around-the-world trip. We were still within the sheltered waters of Graciosa Bay when her spirit was taken. Mum and I had been talking 5 minutes earlier, but she left in a manner she had always wished for, suddenly. To me she appeared asleep, so it took a minute or so to realise what had happened. I felt her presence close by me as the others in the boat and myself tried to find her pulse. She was buried next to Dad on Pigeon Island, according to her wish, in a funeral which reflected her long standing in the Reef Island community, with an overflowing of grief. Ross took quite a lot of video tape of the event. Many of us have known the death of a loved one, like a hole that cannot quite be filled, a loss that cannot quite be redeemed, a reminder of man's mortality and God's omnipotence. Those of us who have a hope in eternal life can nonetheless put our trust in that some day, these tears will be wiped away forever. It has been several days since Mum passed away, but I have not been able to inform anyone but our closest relatives until now. To end on a bright note, Mum was able to see many of her friends, and her sisters, on the three month trip before departing this earth. It is a pity she did not get back to Pigeon Island before leaving this world, but our choice to leave is rarely left up to us. God bless, Ben Hepworth

 

With Tom and Diana gone, that should have been the end of Pigeon Island, but according to the above YouTube clip which was uploaded in January 2020, one of the Hepworth twins, Ross, still lives on Pigeon Island. Perhaps I should write another letter, this time addressed to "Ross Hepworth, care of Pigeon Island Traders, Pigeon Island, Reef Islands, Solomon Islands."

 

Drumming up business for Ben? Why not! He could use it! Click here
(h4e241a@sailmail.com no longer works; try hepworth_ben@yahoo.com)
(for a brochure, click here)

 

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Some mornings I feel like Auggie Wren

 

You remember Auggie Wren who lives in Brooklyn and runs a tobacconist shop on the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue? Every day he takes his Canon 35mm SLR camera out into the street at 8.00 am and takes a shot of the same street corner, his corner, day after day.

 

 

"They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings; your fog mornings; you’ve got your summer light and your autumn light; you’ve got your weekdays and your weekends; you’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes and you’ve got your people in t-shirts and shorts. Sometimes same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun and every day the light from the sun hits the earth from a different angle."

 

 

People walking to work. The 7-Eleven truck making a morning delivery. The old guy walking his dog. And there, more than once, is Paul’s late wife, Ellen. Alive, lithe, and now dead. What is the meaning of Auggie’s odyssey? Why take the same picture every day? Auster does not give us a direct answer, at least not by way of straightforward exposition.

However, the clues are all there in the screenplay. While Auggie seems to record the same scene day after day, never varying his routine, it is not in fact always the same. The cityscape Auggie frames in his lens is subject to constant change: variations in weather and light and the constant, ever-changing stream of humanity passing by.

The city, just like the lives of the people who inhabit it, has a veneer of permanence: on Auggie’s corner the days, seasons, years come and go with tedious repetition. But look a little closer and we see that the city is in the throes of constant, dynamic change and we, Auster implies, are an integral part of that ever-changing city.

We are all in the process of dying, whatever journey we choose to take through life, or whatever course is determined for us, each of us is marching forward towards our inevitable demise. So it is with cities, even as New York City grows it decays, its demise is built into the steel and concrete of its very bones. All cities rise and fall, the apparent solidity of Manhattan is but a flickering candle destined to be snuffed out in the maw of entropy.

Instinctively, perhaps, Auggie realises this and so presses ahead with his photographic project with no specific aim or intended destination. It will only be brought to a conclusion, we infer, when his own life reaches the end of its final reel.

It's time for me to do my Auggie Wren stuff and take a shot of my "corner". "It's my corner, after all. To me it's just one little part of the world but things take place there too, just like everywhere else."

Some mornings I feel like Auggie Wren.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Another day, another book

Read a preview here

 

The moment I go to bed I switch on the radio to listen to ABC Radio National. Sometime during the night - and I never know when - I fall asleep to the sound of ABC Radio National, and sometime around 3 or 4 a.m., that hour of lowest ebb in the energy of mankind when babies are born and people die (but, thankfully, not I), I wake up again to the sound of ABC Radio National.

And so it was again last night when I awoke to someone called Frank Dikötter talking about his new book "China after Mao" - to listen to the podcast, click here - which was preceded by his books "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe" and "The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957".

Some of my best ideas come to me during the night which is why I used to go to bed with pen and paper on the bedside table when I was still working. I am no longer working and I no longer go to bed with pen and paper, but since my bladder told me that it was time to get up anyway, I switched on the computer and googled Dikötter and "China after Mao".

With a cup of hot ginger-and-lemon tea beside me and my breakfast porridge bubbling away on the stove, I placed the order with ebay. $32.50 is a small price to pay to learn about our masters of tomorrow.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Available online at archive.org is another one of Frank Dikötter's books, "The Cultural Revolution : A People's History, 1962-1976".

 

The late PM Bob Hawke's VOICE from the grave!

 

There remains one vital factor in the answer to the question 'Who is an Australian?' and that factor is a commitment to Australia and to its future. It is that common commitment which binds the Australian-born of the seventh or eighth generation and all those of their fellow-Australians born in any of the one hundred thirty countries from which our people are drawn. In Australia there is no hierarchy of descent; there must be no privilege of origin. The commitment is all! The commitment to Australia is the one thing needful to be a true Australian."

Robert James Lee Hawke AC, GCL, would turn in his grave if he had to listen to Albanese today! His voice from the grave says 'No' to the VOICE!

The only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The VOICE would normalise instead of overcome racial separation. I am sick and tired of having to pay respect to elders past and present and being welcomed to my own country. We all came from somewhere else. What if Indians claimed 'original inhabitant' status because their country was once part of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland? Let's not open this can of worms!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

We walked the bridge today - twice!

 

Not the Bridge Walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge which would have meant taking along several clean underpants as I'm absolutely scared of heights, but across Nelligen's new bridge which we took instead of our round-the-village walk.

Dismantling the old bridge may take as long as building the new one ...

... but already its elegant sweep across the river dominates the view.

Nelligen is a town in transition what with town water and sewerage to be connected before the end of next year. What next? KFC and Big Mac?

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Another Seven Years in Tibet

Cover of 1956 documentary

 

When I was a boy in Germany, I had three heroes in my life: Dr Albert Schweitzer, Heinz Helfgen, and Heinrich Harrer, a swashbuckling explorer who told of his magical life of conquering the world's highest peaks and tutoring the young Dalai Lama when Tibet seemed as exotic as Mars.

He died, aged 93, on 7 January 2006 in his native Austraia, but not before the news of his Nazi past marred his final years.

We've all seen the 1997 Brad Pitt version in which Harrer is hailed as a 'German hero', and replies "Thank you, but I'm Austrian". To have said that in 1939 would have been extremely bold, since Austria had been part of Greater Germany since the Anschluss of April 1938. In his book, Harrer says nothing about any such remark. Harrer at the train station in 1939 appears hostile to the Nazi Party, taking their flag with reluctance wheras the real-life Heinrich Harrer was a committed Nazi Schutzstaffel officer.

Heinrich Harrer was born on July 6, 1912, at Hüttenberg, Austria, near the Alps, and grew up mountain-climbing and skiing. The son of a postman, he majored in geography and physical education at Graz University. He won a place on the Austrian Olympic ski team in 1936, and the next year won the downhill race in the world students' championship.

After he and three companions climbed the Eiger, he joined an expedition to climb Nanga Parbat, a 26,600-foot peak in what is now Pakistan. When World War II began, the British captured them and confined them, as Germans and Austrians, to a prison camp.

While he was in captivity, he and his wife divorced. Harrer is survived by their son, Peter, as well as his third wife, the former Katharina Haarhaus.

Harrer escaped from the camp after several attempts. He, a companion and a yak took 20 months to reach Tibet. It was the only avenue of escape, one that would have been impossible to all but trained mountaineers.

They arrived in Lhasa on Jan. 15, 1946, and squatted in the courtyard of a wealthy citizen who welcomed them. They evaded another order to leave by making themselves useful; Harrer worked as a gardener, his friend as an engineer.

The Dalai Lama, then a 10-year-old god king, looked down from his palace and observed Mr. Harrer teaching ice-skating to Tibetans, who called the new sport "walking on knives." Harrer soon became a government employee with responsibilities that included translating foreign news and directing a flood control project. He received a salary, a home and stable and several servants.

He became the Dalai Lama's tutor when he was 37 and his pupil was 14, teaching him about topics ranging from Soviet politics to how a jet engine works. The young man was an eager student: Harrer wrote in his book that when he assigned him 10 sentences to translate, he routinely did 20. The two discussed Buddhism and Western science incessantly.

When Chinese troops invaded Tibet in 1951, Harrer crossed into India by way of Sikkim, shortly before the Dalai Lama himself had to flee. The two met periodically over the years, but the Dalai Lama did not learn of Mr. Harrer's Nazi past until it appeared in the news.

The Dalai Lama told his friend that if his conscience was clear, he had nothing to fear, The Independent, the London newspaper, reported. Harrer said that it was.

 

 

Much of this is contained in the 1956 documentary of the same name as the glamourised Brad Pitt version. Give me the documentary any day!

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Where is Steve Gates now?

To read more about Telekivava'u, click here

 

I first heard about Steve Gates and Telekivava'u Island during my visit to Tonga in 2006. Steve arrived on Telekivava'u in November 2003 aboard his own Searunner 37 trimaran "Manu-O-Ku".

 

GOOGLE Map

 

Steve became the island's longest-serving caretaker, staying there for three years. As wrote on his website: "I sailed to Tonga in 2003 for a unique job to be caretaker of a very remote 40 acre private island in the already remote central group of Tonga, Ha’apai. It was rather idyllic, pristine island, Manu-O-Ku anchored in the lagoon, spending weeks at a time totally alone on the island. I did that for 3 years ..."

 

Steve's boat 'Manu-O-Ku'

 

Afterwards he ran a charter business for some 4-1/2 years in Vava'u and finally left Tonga in June 2011 (after category-4 cyclone Rene in February 2010) for Fiji (July 2011), Vanuatu (September 2011), Solomons (November 2011), and Palau (February 2012). He arrived at Port Barton in the Philippines on New Year's Eve 2012 where he then lived to continue his charter business "Manu-O-Ku Sailing Adventures". His website has since gone "off air" and so I quote from it here:

"Originally, I created this website in 2008 for the business I began in Vava’u Tonga, taking couples on 3-7 day sailing trips. I singlehandedly operated the business until June of 2011, when I sailed out of Tonga, returning to a nomadic lifestyle, and headed west: Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Palau, Philippines. During this period of cruising I had the pleasure of sharing it with a few different old and new guests.

Manu-O-Ku is a Searunner 37' trimaran designed by Jim Brown. I have owned her 30 years, have sailed her over 35,000 nautical miles, and is my only home. This lifestyle works for me ... a nomadic self-reliant lifestyle, on the oceans, among islands ... sailing your home, wandering the world yet sleeping in your own bed."

 

Steve's 'Manu-O-Ku' somewhere in the Philippines

 

On another page of his now defunct website, he wrote: "I have always tried to live one day at a time.  I lived in Tonga for nearly eight years, but it took me only the first six months for me to 'upgrade' that life philosophy to 'one moment at a time'.  The Tongans truly live this way, and the western world could learn a lot from them. Plans? Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

His latest YouTube clip in 2021 was from the Philippines which suggests that Steve is still "wandering the world yet sleeping in [his] own bed":

 

 

To watch the clip, click here.

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P.S. I hope Steve doesn't finish up like this: click here

 

My adopted tongue

You can read the book online at www.archive.org

 

For a long time, there were two ways to become an Australian citizen. The first, the trickier but paradoxically much the more common method, was to find your way into an Australian womb and wait for nine months.

The other way was to get an assisted passage out by signing an undertaking to stay for at least two years ...

... and then wait for five years ...

... or having it reduced to three by sitting for a dictation test ...

... after which you swore an oath of allegiance.

All this happened at the other end of my life, when I was still quite young, nineteen going on twenty. Having become an Australian the other way, English was never my mother tongue but it became my adopted tongue. As I read Bill Bryson's book, I'm surprised it happened at all.

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