Santa never made it into Darwin ...

 

 

And I never made it to Ranger Uranium despite being already billeted by the company in a Sydney motel and just waiting for my marching orders. Ever since that Bougainville Copper Project in Papua New Guinea, mining - and oil exploration - projects had been in my blood. I had already spent a year in Burma, after which I had almost taken another job with a start-up tungsten mine at Mt Carbine in North Queensland and then another at a scheelite mine on King Island, when along came Ranger Uranium.

They offered me a job at their new uranium mine at Jabiru in the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. It sounded exciting and like another Bougainville Copper and I thought I give it a go. Just before they could ship me off, the big American engineering company Fluor Corporation made me the irresistible offer of becoming administration manager on a large coal mining project they were tendering for in Central Queensland, and so off I went to their Melbourne office.

After having booked into the grand old Majestic Private Hotel on St Kilda Road which was just a skip and a jump from the FLUOR office, I was "fluorised" into the intricacies of their company policies. St Kilda Road was a bit of a Red Light district and I remember on my way to work I used to walk past a nightclub called "My Bare Lady". FLUOR did not win the coalmine job but held out hope for other assignments. Never being one to wait for things to happen, I bowed out and travelled north again, this time to Townsville where I made my first attempt at domesticity by becoming the accountant for AV Jennings, buying a house on the beach, joining the local club, and becoming friendly with the people next door.

That's where it should have ended, with the closing line reading, "... and they lived happily ever after", which I did for for the rest of the year until, just before Christmas, the phone rang. Would I be interested in setting up the administration and accounting functions for the tug-and-barge operation up the Fly River to the new Ok Ted Mine in Papua New Guinea? The call of the wild again! I couldn't resist and so I went.

And on and on I went, from New Guinea to Saudi Arabia to Greece ... until my next attempt at domesticity three years later, after which I resisted all further attempts to unsettle me - and there were several - and I have since then lived - not altogether happily - in just one place.

When one is as old as I have grown, one wants to do more than just randomly recollect things of the past; one searches for a thread in one's life, something to get the story of one's life straight at least for oneself.

I haven't succeeded yet, but I keep trying ...

 

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Don't choke on your mango again!

 

 

Almost choked on my mango when reading your blog on the number of reading spots you so much enjoy at Riverbend", an old mate from my Rabaul days emailed me some years ago.

Well, don't eat a mango while you read this, or you may choke again when I tell you about "Melbourne", another peaceful reading room which I built some years ago near the very bend of "Riverbend".

 

 

I decided to call it "Melbourne", so that if the phone rings, Padma can tell the caller quite truthfully, "Sorry, but Peter's gone to Melbourne!"

 

 

I may go to Melbourne right now; why, I may even stay there overnight!

 

 

Don't choke on your mango again, mate! Lukim yu bihain pukpuk!

 

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Another flashback

 

 

This year is the 90th anniversary of Luna Park, that iconic amusement park by the Sydney Harbour Bridge which I will always remember every time I think of Sydney and relive in my mind those few short times I lived and worked there.

 

Sydney in 1954 - but not much had changed when I first went there in 1966

 

The very first time was when the ANZ Bank in Canberra sent me to a ledger-keeping course at their staff training college above one of their branches somewhere along George Street. That was sometime in 1966, only months after I had arrived in Australia, and my English was still pretty elementary, which didn't stop me from getting on like a house on fire with the only other student in the class, a young girl from Hungary who worked in one of the Sydney branches. This prompted the kind instructor, a middle-aged lady, to express with a twinkle in her eyes on more than one occasion her regrets that I wasn't also living in Sydney. As I said before, my English was still pretty elementary at the time and her remarks went straight over my head. Funny how this has always stuck in my mind, and I certainly remembered it when I walked past the same building in more recent years and discovered that it now houses a pub.

 

 

My second time in Sydney was in 1972 after I had completed two years on the Bougainville Copper Project in New Guinea, and I was looking for work and for a place to stay in Sydney. I still have my old Gregory's Street Directory in which I had marked the places affordable to me at the time, such as the Ritz Private Hotel just across from Hyde Park in Elizabeth Street for $3 a day and the Mansion Hotel a few blocks up for $3.50 a day, including breakfast. In the end, I finished up staying at a rambling old boarding house in McMahons Point at the bottom of Blues Point Road across from - yes, you guessed it! - good ol' Luna Park.

 

The roofline of the old boarding house has been preserved

 

The above photo, which I "stole" from a real estate advertisement, shows the unchanged rooftop of what was then a rundown mansion divided into some thirty or more rooms let out to the same number of boarders, but now houses half a dozen multi-million-dollar apartments.

It was a double-storey building, with the communal television lounge and dining room and separate bathrooms taking up most of the ground floor, and a sweeping staircase leading up to a balustrated landing above, with our individual rooms down a dark hallway. In the evening a no-longer-quite-so-young lady would stand on the landing behind an ironing board. She was said to be doing the ironing for the boarders but even to my still innocent mind it seemed that she also had other ways by which she was earning herself an extra few dollars to pay the rent.

 

The roofline of the old boarding house can be seen two doors down from the red star

 

The whole place was run by an old man who always wore a greasy old singlet splattered with the residue of the eggs-on-toast he would serve us each morning, apart from which he did nothing much else except chase us for the rent. The place was grimy bordering on the verge of filthy but the views from its garden of the harbour and the still not-yet-finished Opera House made up for it all, even though there was no view from the window in my room which was obscured by a flyblown mirror above what would today be an expensive antique dressing table. Tipping on my toes, I could just get a glimpse of Luna Park and, if the window was left open which it always was as the room was stifling hot, I could also get a full blast of the terrified screams as the Big Dipper did its rounds while I was desperately trying to get some much-needed sleep.

That second stay in Sydney was not much longer than the first, and I soon returned to New Guinea, after which the same company, after only nine months, sent me back to Sydney in what they had held out to me as a big promotion as their Australia-wide group financial controller. I briefly stayed in that same boarding house again while I wasted my time doing little more than signing cheques all day in the company's head office in Crows Nest. No wonder I started looking for another job in the islands which I took up in 1973 as secretary of the electricity authority in Honiara in what was the British Protectorate of the Solomon Islands.

 

My own little pied-à-terre on Blues Point Road

 

In later years, I had come through Sydney several more times but never to live and work there again until finally, in 1985, I returned "home" from my last posting in Greece and decided - quite mistakenly, as it turned out only a few months later - to make Sydney my new home.

Strangely, my new employers were also located in Crows Nest which made me look for a place to live in nearby McMahons Point again. Luna Park had already been closed down and was slowly decaying (before its significant revitalisation and reopening in 1995) and the old boarding house had also long gone, but by then I was cashed up enough to buy my own pied-à-terre on Blues Point Road which I lived in just long enough to receive and pay the first quarterly electricity bill before deciding that Sydney was not for me, and I hurriedly relocated to Canberra.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

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BHP just fell off a cliff

 

Yesterday's trades in BHP shares

 

I'd already been looking forward to adding a slice of cheesecake to my next "Kaffeeklatsch" with my two German-speaking friends, but yesterday's sudden drop in BHP's share price may want me to cut back on this largesse, depending on what happens today.

After China ordered its steelmakers and major traders to halt new purchases of iron ore from BHP, its share price fell off a cliff. Iron ore is the backbone of Australia’s export economy, and shares in BHP are the backbone of my share portfolio, so the hole it left after yesterday's drop is a lot bigger than the price of a piece of cheesecake.

 

 

Of course, as the world's biggest miner, BHP isn't just about iron ore but also about copper, silver, zinc, molybdenum, uranium and gold, metallurgical coal and energy coal. One of its biggest and best acquisitions was its take-over in 2005 of Western Mining Corporation and the Olympic Dam mine. Maybe, instead of following the gyrations of the market today, I read David Upton's book again just to remind me of it.

 

Read an extract here

 

P.S. It's just a few minutes after ten o'clock and the market has opened - and, yes, BHP's share price is up again by 55 cents. Phew!

 

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Arrivals and Departures

 

Go to www.naa.gov.au

 

Remember those "Incoming Passenger Card" we used to fill in every time we entered Australia? Well, the National Archives of Australia has kept them all, or at least the ones from 1898 to 1972, to spin a good yarn for us old-time travellers.

My story begins in 1965 when, leaving Germany as an assisted migrant aboard the FLAVIA, I ticked the box "Settling in Australia" in answer to the question "Purpose of Journey to Australia" after arriving in Sydney.

 

 

Also on board the FLAVIA had been another German, Hans Dahl ...

 

 

... his wife Vlasta ...

 

 

... Vlasta's mother (whose card I could not find as I've forgotten her last name) and Hans and Vlasta's two-year-old daughter Sandra.

 

 

The Dahls got off the ship in Sydney from where they returned to their home in Canberra while I continued to Melbourne from where all assisted migrants were transported to the migrant camp at Bonegilla.

 

P.S. Nine months later, Sandra got a sister who must've been a 'stowaway'
- do your maths! 😀

 

After two days at Bonegilla I got a job as "Trainee Manager" with Coles in Heidelberg in Melbourne but when Hans phoned me from Canberra suggesting there would be better job prospects in Canberra, I prompted left and eventually joined the ANZ Bank in Canberra as a bank clerk.

Two years later, I was on board the PATRIS, heading back to the (c)old country. Also on board was Noel Butler who had come down from New Guinea to join the ship in Sydney. Our meeting turned into a lifelong friendship with resulted in my eventually also going to New Guinea.

 

13 November 1967
(The National Archives keep a string of cards in Noel's name as he was a 'frequent flyer' long before the marketing people had even coined that term. More of those cards later)

 

Noel and I parted company in Greece as he was heading to Istanbul and I was to take up a new job in Hamburg. The following year Noel returned to Sydney on board the AUSTRALIS and flew back to New Guinea ...

 

Fremantle 20 March 1968

 

... while I worked in Germany just long enough to earn the money for my return fare back to Australia which I did via South Africa where I worked for another six months before boarding the ELLINIS at Cape Town bound for Sydney. I was back in the old boarding-house, Barton House, and had rejoined the ANZ Bank in Canberra in early 1969.

 

 

Did you notice that I had written the word PERMANENT in answer to the question "Intended Length of Stay in Australia"? Well, I did lie because by that year's end I was on my way to New Guinea but that's an entirely different story and an entirely different set of cards - click here.

 

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Still for "Sale by Home Owner"

 

 

This is a rare chance to secure your own private waterfront sanctuary! Step into a life where the rhythm of the river sets the pace, where every day feels like a holiday - from your morning coffee on the verandah as the water sparkles with first light to sunset drinks on the jetty as reflections dance across the river. This home gives you the complete escape, the ultimate riverside lifestyle - and all priced at no more than land value!"

There are several properties in Nelligen for sale right now which in days gone by would have been snapped up in a matter of days, but which have been on the market now for months and months, which makes me wonder if the market hasn't been cooling off - and if so, it's about time too. To keep the heat up on "Riverbend", I have just added the above paragraph to my advertisement on www.realestate.com.au - click here.

I mean, if real estate agents can dazzle you with their hyperbole, so can this humble wordsmith, with the subtle difference that "water sparkling with first light" and "reflections dancing across the river" are perfectly true, especially when one has exhausted oneself after a whole day's grass-cutting or trimming the hedges or weeding the vegie garden.

 

 

I'm not even sure where I would want to go if and when "Riverbend" suddenly sold; all I know is what floorplan I want in my next house.

 

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What came first, the movie or the book?

 

 

The book "Wake in Fright" was first published in 1961 when Kenneth Cook was thirty-two. It was his second novel, the first having been withdrawn because of the threat of legal action. It was a publishing success, appearing in England and America, translated into several languages, and a prescribed text in schools.

Not in my German "Volksschule" though, and so it came that I saw the movie - the remastered version, after the original had almost been lost, see here - years before I read the book which is rare now and which I found while rummaging through my favourite op-shop. Read it here.

 

 

The book carries as much of a punch as does the movie with its opening sequence of the 360-degree panorama of a flat, empty landscape, the lonely, flyspotted and comfortless pub, the toy train inching across the plain, and the open-faced young man waiting on the crude platform.

It was released outside Australia under the name "Outback" and is said to have set back Australian tourism by at least twenty years.

"May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright."

 

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P.S. For some insightful commentary on the movie, click here and here .

 

Travels with Epicurus

 

 

When Daniel Klein goes to the dentist for a regular check-up, he is informed that he needs a section of his lower teeth removed and replaced with either a denture plate or implants. The implants would require frequent trips to the dentist over the course of a year, a lot of money and a lot of pain. The denture plate on the other hand would leave Klein with the unmistakable clunky smile of an old man.

Though Klein initially opts for the implants, he soon questions his decision. Is it better to a spend a precious year trying to extend the prime of his life, or to live an authentic old age, toothless grin and all? Klein decided the answer lay in a place where people seemed to know the secret to a long, happy and healthy life - Greece. He travels there with a library of his favourite philosophers and observes other septuagenarians and octogenarians, and contemplates his own life, particularly seeking out wisdom from renowned hedonist Epicurus. From that journey comes this sincere and humorous book on ageing and an Epicurean way of living.

 

Photographs from Hydra by Billy Hughes, who journeyed to Hydra, Greece, with author Dan Klein who was finishing his book "Travels With Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life".

 

Read a preview here

 

I love this little book! Apart from offering very age-appropriate advice, it reminds me of Greece and the island of Hydra, of George Johnston and his family on Hydra, of sunkissed days and warm nights drinking retsina and listening to bouzouki music. It all comes back to me now!

 

Aegean islanders like to tell a joke about a properous Greek American who visits one of the islands on vacation. Out on a walk, the affluent Greek American comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old man who the trees belong to. "They're mine", the Greek replies. "Don't you gather the olives?" the American asks. "I just pick one when I want one", the old man says. "But don't you realise that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? In America everybody is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a damned good price for it." "What would I do with the money?" the old Greeks asks. "Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you." "And then what would I do?" "You could do anything you want!" "You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?"

 

Joseph Coté hasn't got the best reading voice (and he only reads the Prologue and Chapter One), but in the absence of anything better --- the online copy of "Travels with Epicurus" I could find is in French; click here ) -- - it will have to do until I can lend my friend in Canberra my much-read and much-loved copy when we meet again over a coffee.

(My BHP shares have gone up by more than two dollars since our last meeting at the club on the 21st July, Roman, so it'll be my shout! 😀 )

 

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P.S. I've since then bought a few thousand shares in the lithium hotshot Pilbara Minerals - the very same shares I had recommended to a bloke who was going to cut my grass but then discovered that he can make more money by spending a few minutes pressing the 'BUY' and 'SELL' buttons on the CommSec screen (which I had shown him how to use) instead of sitting for hours on a ride-on mower - and notched up a few extra dollars, so that coffee may come with a piece of cheesecake!

 

Now you know why I didn't stay in South Africa

 

"SKIN" is one of the most bizarre and moving true stories to emerge from apartheid South Africa: Sandra Laing was a black child born in the 1950s to two white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. Her parents were rural shopkeepers serving the local black community, who lovingly brought her up as their 'white' little girl. But at the age of ten, Sandra was driven out of white society. The film follows Sandra's thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance, betrayal to reconciliation, as she struggles to define her place in a changing world - and triumphs against all odds.

 

I was searching YouTube for a trailer, perhaps even a full-length copy of the Australian movie "The Skin of Others" when I came across this one, "Skin", a British-South African 2008 biographical film about Sandra Laing, a South African woman born to white parents, who was classified as "Coloured" during the apartheid era, presumably due to a genetic case of atavism.

 

Click here to read the online book (SIGN UP - it's free! - LOG IN, and BORROW)

 

Based on the book "When She Was White - The True Story of a Family Divided by Race" by Judith Stone, it displays all the ugliness of the apartheid era. This horrible and often quite arbitrary racial segregation still existed when I lived and worked in South-West Africa in 1968/69, and it made me leave again despite the great beauty of the country.

When apartheid came to an end, there was renewed interest in Sandra's story by the media. Sandra's mother saw Sandra interviewed on television and wrote to her to tell her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provided no return address nor any other clue as to her whereabouts, but receiving it prompted Sandra to renew her search. She found her mother living in a nursing home and the two were happily reunited (although her two brothers continued to refuse to see her).

Oh, and Sam Neill does a passable imitation of the Afrikaner accent!

 

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Today I went back to Burma

 

https://archive.org/details/ghosttraintoeast00ther_0/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ghosttraintoeast00ther_0/page/264/mode/2up

 

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller."

So begins Paul Theroux's book "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star", a repeat journey of what he wrote about in "The Great Railway Bazaar" thirty years earlier when he travelled across Asia and back again by train. On that first trip he must have visited Rangoon in Burma at about the same time I lived and worked there, but we never met and so his worst nightmare never came true. Instead, my worst nightmare came true when I read about his revisiting Rangoon in the early 2000s and facing in total disbelief the unreality of seeing that hardly anything had changed.

 

 

I lived and worked in Burma in 1975, when the people, frustrated by the military repression, had already taken their refuge in Buddhism, which preached patience and compassion. Thirty years later, their patience and compassion had remained unrewarded, and Burma was still as decrepit and low on morale as it has been since General Ne Win and his dreaded Tatmadaw had turned it into a brutal dictatorship in 1962.

I had not only loved the country and its soft-tempered and helpful people of slender, soft-voiced beauty with creamy skin and the loveliest smiles and gentlest manner, but also fallen in love with one very special person whom to this day I still remember with deepest fondness and profound gratitude for the truly wonderful five years she has given me.

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. I'm still trying.

 

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