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Street Libraries are a beautiful home for books, planted in your front yard. They are accessible from the street, and are an invitation to share the joys of reading with your neighbours.
Street Libraries are a window into the mind of a community; books come and go; no-one needs to check them in or out. People can simply reach in and take what interests them; when they are done, they can return them to the Street Library network, or pass them on to friends.
If anyone has a book or two that they think others would enjoy, they can just pop it into any Street Library they happen to be walking past.
They are a symbol of trust and hope – a tiny vestibule of literary happiness.
On our visit to the Bay this morning we discovered yet another street library at 3A Crown Street - the first one is at the intersection of Orient Street and Beach Road - and I couldn't resist giving a beautiful Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of "The Sun Also Rises" a new home at Riverbend.
Should I put a street library outside the gate of "Riverbend" stuffed full with books written in German? (a copy of "Mein Kampf" springs to mind!)
I've just discovered the author Michael McGirr, a former Jesuit priest turned writer. "Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man" seems to have worked with him. After having read his book "Bypass", I've just now ordered "Books That Saved My Life", "Ideas to Save Your Life", and "Things You Get for Free".
All of which comes on top of the "re-homing" of books I did on Monday after I'd dried myself off from two hours spent in the warm-water pool and picked up "Strange Days Indeed" by Francis Wheen;
"12 Rules for Life - An Antidote to Chaos"; Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Antifragile - Things That Gain from Disorder" (which cost me a whole $12); and "Slouching Towards Utopis - An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" at two op-shops, one in Moruya, the other in the Bay. Of course, I could've read them online at archive.org but who can read 500 pages on the screen?
All I have to do now is find the time to read them all!
Nobody had heard of Cliff Young. In late 1982, his application to run in a foot race from Sydney to Melbourne turned up on Martin Noonan's desk. Noonan thought it was some kind of joke. Young was sixty-one years of age. He came from the western districts of Victoria. He was a potato farmer and still lived at home with his mother, Mary. She was eighty-nine and kept fit by cutting wood."
"Noonan was helping to organise an event for elite athletes. He was the state marketing manager for Westfield, an empire of shopping centres which made a fortune by providing places where people could be bored in comfort. Westfield was already contributing to the fitness of the nation by getting its citizens to push trolley loads of consumer goods from the checkout to the carpark. They got an extra workout when the wheels of the trolley went in four different directions at the same time."
"Noonan, a dedicated runner himself, wondered if Westfield could sponsor something in Melbourne a bit like Sydney's City to Surf, an annual race which attracts over 50,000 entrants."
"Melbourne used to call it the City to Sewer because the finishing point, Bondi Beach, had trouble in those days with effluent outflow. For various reasons, the City to Surf idea was not going to work in Melbourne. Melbourne had a city but no surf. A similar distance to the Sydney event would have taken runners from the city to the northern suburb of Fawkner, best known for its memorial park, but the City to Cemetery concept was hard to sell. This was despite the fact the City to Surf often kills at least one of its entrants, unsually somebody well on in years who has decided that by keeping fit they will live forever. The plan went on the shelf."
"... Westfield would put up a prize of $10,000 and meet the running costs for the race between Australia's two largest shopping centres, Westfield Parramatta, in Sydney's western suburbs, and Westfield Doncaster, in Melbourne's east. Before long, twelve competitors had come forward. Cliff Young was among them."
"Noonan, a serious runner, was on the Pritikin diet. Cliff Young wasn't. He told Noonan that he needed oil in his diet to keep his bones lubricated. He also said that he did most of his training running round the paddocks in gumboots."
"Young had been running seriously for only three years. Before that, he'd tried hang-gliding but found it was too dangerous. He had played football for his local team, Colac, until he was forty and was disappointed to have been retired on account of his age. When his application arrived, Noonan thought he better take Cliff out for a bit of a run to make sure he was up to the task."
"Not only was Cliff in remarkable physical condition but he was a natural wit. He had an answer to everything. He said that where he came from it rained for nine months of the year. Then the winter set in."
"A press release went out saying that one of the competitors trained in gumboots. From that moment, Young had a toehold in the public imagination. He was running against technology. At the media launch of the event, a journalist asked Cliff why he wasn't wearing gumboots today. Cliff said that he'd been given a pair of new-fangled fancy runners. They were so good, he said, that it took him 200 metres to slow down and stop."
"On 27 April 1983, the race began at a cracking pace along the road from Sydney to Melbourne. They did the first 42 kilometres, the length of a marathon, in less than three hours. Cliff took a wrong turn. He said later that he was lucky he didn't run to Darwin by mistake. Another competitor pointed him in the right direction."
John Laws' documentary of the now famous race
I hadn't heard of Cliff Young either until I read this story in Michael McGirr's book "Bypass - The Story of a Road", a funny, quirky, ironic, witty and intelligent description of the Hume Highway which runs for 875 kilometres that Cliff Young ran between Melbourne in the southwest of Victoria and Sydney in the northeast of New South Wales.
We have another "Cliffy" living in the village who's as tough as nails. Some time ago, I asked him if he had heard of his namesake, the potato farmer from Colac. He hadn't heard of him. I don't feel so bad now.
P.S. A good friend who's better versed in such matters as I am emailed me, "Cliff Young retired to the Sunshine Coast where he was seen to be an active chaser of nubile young ladies." He died in 2003 in Beerwah on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, aged 81 - click here.
The Cliff Young memorial "Gumboot" plaque at Beech Forest, Victoria (click on image)
Nina and Adrian Hoffmann went one better than the chap in this YouTube clip when they wrote their book Eine Insel nur für uns (An Island to Ourselves) in which they try to convince the reader that they lived like Robinson Crusoe in a primitive hut on a desert island.
Back in November 2010, Nina and Adrian (to say nothing of their dog Sunday) flew out to Tonga to house-sit Villa Mamana on the tiny island of Telekivava'u in Ha'apai in the Kingdom of Tonga.
They were just two in a long line of house-sitters, from Steve Gates to Claudia & Roland Pizarro and Roland Schwara and Horst Berger, who since 2003 had been hired by the owners, Kendall Struxness and Matt Muirhead, to keep an eye on the place and perhaps welcome guests who could book into this luxurious place at US$1,060 per night - click here.
None of the other house-sitters had thought of it but Nina and Adrian wrote several newspaper articles about their stay on the island which they turned into a Robinson Crusoe story. In reality they lived in the lap of luxury in a white villa facing a white sandy beach, spent their days reclining on a shady verandah gazing out to the blue South Pacific and their evenings curled up on a soft lounge watching DVDs, and in their private moments admired the imported marble in the bathroom, before retiring to their four-poster bed. For a reality check click here.
Indeed, they had felt so comfortable in this luxurious tropical island resort, that they came back for a second stint of house-sitting - when was it? - in 2013 but on that occasion they left again immediately because, as he complained to me by email, the toilets no longer flushed, the washing machine didn't work, and in any case they couldn't get the island's two generators started to have electricity. Boohoo!
Of course, according to their newspaper articles and in their recently published book, they were always fighting their way through the jungle, or cooking over a primitive fire in front of their palm-clad hut on the beach. The closest they came to admitting that the island was not just wilderness was when they showed a photo of the humble cookhouse which was a bit of a dead give-away. I mean, does every desert island come with a cute architect-designed cookhouse?
The humble cookhouse ("eine kleine Hütte")
They then published a book, Eine Insel nur für uns - eine wahre Geschichte von Einsamkeit und Zweisamkeit or, loosely translated into English, "An Island to Ourselves * - a true story of loneliness and togetherness" which has also been made into an audio book - click here. "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story" might have been a better title.
(* The title - in fact, the whole structure of Adrian's book - echoes Tom Neale's "An Island to Oneself" which is his favourite book according to his facebook page (oops! since deleted; I wonder why?). Glad to know you read what I sent you a few years ago, Adrian - click here.)
Things come apart so easily when they're held together with lies: in the book's chapter 4 they write that they met a forty-year-old South African in Fiji who told them about a 'secret island' (echoes of "The Beach"?); Adrian tells the TV interviewer that he found the island by making inquiries with the Tongan Ministry of Lands.
According to Telekivava'u's owners, they had been kicked off the island they'd been on in Fiji and, while looking for another option, found Villa Mamana's website. Having heard from the owners that the island was uninhabited at the time, they went there, totally uninvited and unannounced, to check it out. Of course, they liked it and offered to caretake it for free if they could stay in the luxurious guest house. The owners agreed and met them on the island six months later.
The book's frontipiece contains the words, "Vielleicht wäre es besser gewesen, wir hätten nie eine einsame Insel betreten" (Perhaps it would have been better, had we never set foot on a desert island). Perhaps it would have been better still, Nina and Adrian, had you truthfully reported of the existence of the luxurious Villa Mamana and, better yet, dedicated the true story to the owners of Villa Mamana who so generously made the island's luxurious facilities available to you.
They even used Tom Neale's book title "An Island To Oneself" wich I had emailed them - click here
They make no secret of having taken half a chemist shop with them ...
... nor of the fact that they bought all of Tonga's toilet paper ...
... but they certainly did not live, as they write, in a "kleine Hütte" (tiny hut). Their accommodation was the island owners' palatial residence. Does the white villa shown below look like a tiny hut?
Villa Mamana on the island of Telekivava'u in the Kingdom of Tonga
Not to mention the four-poster bed and marble-clad ensuite bathroom (one of two) ...
... or the comfortable lounge and polished verandahs.
You see, the true story is that Nina und Adrian lived in what the Lonely Planet Travel Guide rated as "probably the most exclusive and beautiful accommodation in Tonga ... one for celebrities".
They lived in this exclusive and beautiful accommodation free of charge in exchange for 'house-sitting' the place in the American owner's absence. Robinson Crusoe with his Girl Friday? Far from it!
The world is a weird and wonderful place full of weird and wonderful people, and the thing that connects those people and their places to us are documentaries. Lucky for us, there are so many for us to enjoy but they are far too many to list.
And there are few documentaries that can better BBC Select. I've just watched BBC's Order and Disorder presented by Professor Jim Al-Khalili:
The first episode reveal many interesting things about Thermodynamics and throws light on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Carnot theorem and entropy.For someone who has even a little bit knowledge about thermodynamics it will be very interesting and all the interesting and fascinating facts about the scientists make it more enjoyable.
The second episode is about Information and it's significance in science and technology it very successfully explains what information means and how powerful it can be.The best part was about Maxwell's Demon.
The tendency to look back contemplatively on one's life as one gets nearer to the end of it is a natural human instinct which I indulged in last night as I sat up late to watch the old German movie "Ich denke oft an Piroschka" (I often think of Piroschka). I had last seen it as a boy of 10 or 12 accompanied by my sisters, in a Sunday afternoon movie matinée.
And how the memories came back! Of my boyhood and youth and of the Piroschkas in my own life and the Hódmezővásárhelykutasipusztas I've been to! (Can I speak Hungarian? No, but I can be silent in several other languages!)
I don't think Hugo Hartung's book has ever been translated, so unless you speak German (if not, why not?), you may safely ignore the following:
Ich denke oft an Piroschka. Oft höre ich ihre Stimme, nachts: "Kérem, Andi! mach Signal!" und meine, ihre drollige Stirnlocke an meinem Gesicht zu spüren. Aber dann werde ich wach ... Wie es dazu kam --- das freilich kann ich nicht in jedem Traum wiederholen. Es ist eine zu lange Geschichte. Doch einmal muß sie erzählt werden. Inzwischen hat sich ja so viel geändert da unten in Ungarn. Vielleicht hat Piroschka selbst wieder eine Piroschka, die heute so alt ist, wie sie damals gewesen ist. Ich darf es jetzt erzählen - alles! Ganz von Anfang an ... So hat es begonnen:[Lese weiter!]
Luckily, it was only my computer's screensaver; still, it was a subtle reminder that it's still winter down here, even if the temperature is a mild and (almost) agreeable 18 degrees.
A quick feeding of the wild ducks by the pond and a quick look-around - yes, the yacht that anchored opposite from us is still there! - and then a quick dash back inside for a hot cup of tea by the blazing fireplace.
With all those wintry mornings and the strong winds yesterday, we haven't been to "God's wading pool" at the Aquatic Centre lately.
Instead, I've been watching some old movies and reading some long-forgotten books. As W. Somerset Maugham said, "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
When Charles Carruthers accepts an invitation for a yachting and duck-shooting trip to the Frisian Islands from Arthur Davies, an old chum from his Oxford days, he has no idea their holiday will become an investigation into a German plot to invade Britain.
Out of context, the story of Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands" sounds like a bog-standard thriller, but that's because so many books are pale echoes of this exceptional novel.
Published in 1903, it predicted the threat of war with Germany and was so prescient in its identification of the British coast's defensive weaknesses that it influenced the siting of new naval bases.
It is also credited as an inspiration to everyone from John Buchan to Ken Follett. The writing is gripping and it's a marvel that Childers manages to make the minutiae of sailing and navigation so engrossing.
Although "Riddle" was an instant bestseller, Childers never wrote another novel, concentrating instead on military strategy manuals before entering politics and eventually becoming a fervent Irish nationalist.
Carruthers and Davies are wonderful characters, the former a fop from the Foreign Office, the latter an eccentric sailing fanatic.
Davies is based on the author and reading about his courageous struggles for king and country is particularly poignant when you know that Childers was considered a traitor by the British government at the time of his death. He was executed by a firing squad in 1922, by order of the Irish Free State.
A gripping book in its own right; even more fascinating in the context of the life and times of its author. Click here to read the book online.
It was also made into a movie - both a German and an English version, each with a different ending - which appears full-length on YouTube once in while, so keep looking here.
(The completely remade German version has the literally translated title "Das Rätsel der Sandbank" whereas the original English version dubbed in German was released under the totally unrelated title "Bei Nacht und Nebel" and is available here.)
The axiom in joking is, a person's favourite joke is the key to that person's character; and so it is for a culture (however, you won't trick me into discussing with you Australian culture which is mainly agriculture and horticulture).
Instead, I want to tell you about the failed attempt to introduce a German version of Fawlty Towers to the Germans. A pilot episode of the show, called 'Zum Letzten Kliff' ('To the Last Cliff'), was broadcast in December 2001. In it, Basil and Sybil became Victor and Helga, an unhappily-married couple who presided over a chaotically awful hotel called 'Zum letzten Kliff' which was relocated to a North Sea island called Sylt (pronounced 'Zoolt'). The hotel also featured a young waitress called Polly, while the Manuel character was reinvented as a waiter named Igor from the Republic of Kazakhstan.
It never caught on in Germany, perhaps because it didn't include the phrase which anyone who has seen the original now uses to sum up the terrible anxiety we all have about trying, and failing, to not say the wrong thing: 'Don't mention the war!' It was so tasteless, it was hilarious.
I don't care if you don't care for it. Who won the bloody war, anyway?
We all know how to sink an Irish submarine, don't we? HINT: Knock on the door! What we don't know is how the TITAN submersible imploded. Had a faulty $30 Logitech video game controller something to do with it?
In 2022, CBS journalist David Pogue took an in-depth look at the TITAN, noting his disbelief at "how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components.”
A previous passenger of the OceanGate submersible, when it lost contact for a few hours, Pogue said that the chilling waiver signed by potential passengers read: "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death." After which they paid US$250,000 for the privilege! Am I missing something?
So how do you sink an Irish submarine again? You knock on the door and they will open the window and say "I'm not
falling for that one again!"
It has never been shown that human emissions of the gas of life drive global warming. Large bodies of science that don't fit the narrative have been ignored by IPCC, COP and self-interested scientists paid by taxpayers.
A huge subsidised industry of intermittent unreliable wind and solar electricity has been created based on unsubstantiated science. The same hucksters now want subsidised hydrogen, costly inefficient EVs, subsidised mega-batteries and other horribly expensive tried and failed schemes to impoverish people, create unemployment, transfer wealth and enrich China. Germany, Texas, California and the UK had a glimpse of Net Zero with blackouts, astronomically high electricity costs and hundreds of deaths. We once had reliable cheap electricity and now that governments have gone green, we are heading for hard economic times.
In this book Professor Ian Plimer charges the greens with murder. They murder humans who are kept in eternal poverty without coal-fired electricity. They support slavery and early deaths of black child miners. They murder forests and their wildlife by clear-felling for mining and wind turbines. They murder forests and wildlife with their bushfire policies. They murder economies producing unemployment, hopelessness, collapse of communities, disrupted social cohesion and suicide.
They murder free speech and freedoms and their takeover of the education system has ended up in the murdering of the intellectual and economic future of young people. They terrify children into mental illness with their apocalyptic death cult lies and exaggerations. They try to divide a nation. They are hypocrites and such angry ignorant people should never touch other people's money.
The greens are guilty of murder. The sentence is life with no parole in a cave in the bush enjoying the benefits of Net Zero.
Just say No', was the catchphrase of Nancy Reagan back in the 1980s. The slogan was used to encourage people to stay away from drugs. It was in response to the ‘crack’ epidemic, which saw a cheap but highly addictive derivative of cocaine flooding schools and universities, not to mention the streets of major cities. The premise behind the Reagan campaign was simple: you don’t need a raft of complicated reasons or arguments against this drug. A one-word No will suffice."
"The slogan could equally apply to the proposal for an Indigenous Voice to parliament, which Australians have been asked to vote on in a referendum later this year. For many well-meaning Australians, the idea of voting Yes to the Voice is as tempting as those cheap, feel-good drugs were to 1980s teens. Get a warm inner glow as you assuage any guilt about the plight of Aborigines in Australia, and show your friends, family and colleagues just how cool you are. It’s a pretty cheap fix."
Which is how this article begins, published in the SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA. I hope I don't infringe any copyright by quoting its first two paragraphs, and I hope you will read the rest of it here (maybe I can even persuade you to subscribe to the SPECTATOR - try the first ten weeks for just $10)
And it continues, "Already, legislation being enacted under state Labor governments – who assume that the Voice will soon be a reality – points to a radically different Australia in the not-too-distant future. One where you can’t dig up your backyard without consulting the local indigenous bureaucrats; where a new layer of permits is required for any number of agricultural and commercial activities; where access to parts of the country is reserved for certain racial groups; and where property, land and water rights are all up for legal reinterpretation."
Make your VOICE heard: just say NO - and don't let those activists get away with their deceptions: share this article with everyone you know.
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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