My "Cabooltier" Past

 

What makes Caboolture real fruit yoghurt so much tastier?
Well out here the birds are chirpier, the air is cleanier
The grass is greenier, the cows are happier
They make it much creamier, with fruit that’s fruitier
In bits much chunkier, the breeze blows gentlier
The whole world’s friendlier, and things are less hastier
That’s why it’s tastier. Caboolture real fruit yoghurt.
There’s nothing artificial about Caboolture.

 

Before the internet, vacant positions were advertised in newspapers, and for financial positions none were better than the big display ads in the Australian Financial Review.

They were the only ones I responded to. The bigger the better! I mean, why reply to a small classified? If that's all they could afford, they couldn't afford me! ☺

Indeed, the only classified that ever got me a job was the one I placed myself in an issue of PIM, the Pacific Islands Monthly, in 1969. From memory, it ran something like this: "Young Accountant (still studying) seeks position in the Islands." (decades later I visited the National Library in Canberra and had all twelve 1969-issues of PIM sent up from their archives, but I couldn't find the ad again).

That tiny classified got me my first job in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea. The rest, as they say, is history because from then on it was display ads all the way through until 1979 when, having returned to Canberra from my last overseas assignment in Malaysia and finding life in suburbia wanting, I started a working holiday caravanning up and down the Australian east coast.

I travelled as far south as Melbourne, as far west as Mt Isa, and as far north as Cairns, and found myself in Brisbane by mid-June 1980. An old friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, had just bought himself a small acreage near Caboolture north of Brisbane, so when I saw an accounting job advertised with the Caboolture Co-operative, I applied even though the ad was not 'display' nor was the job.

 

Noel (on right) visiting me at my 'mobile home' in the Northern Star Caravan Park in Brisbane

 

This dairy co-operative, owned and operated by the cow cockies in the district, had started its life as the Caboolture butter factory in 1907 which was also the age of its Dickensian office to which I was invited for an interview at the crack of dawn.

 

Stopping at the same co-operative on a roadtrip to Queensland in December 1990.
I am standing in front of the 'Dickensian' office beside my recently purchased TOYOTA Camry; the Camry no longer exists today nor does the co-operative.

 

The interviewing panel was a bunch of cow cockies still wearing their cow-something-splattered wellies from the morning's milking. This was the real deal; there's nothing artificial about Caboolture!

They must've been wondering why this bright spark who'd just done a consulting job in Malaysia and been senior-this and chief-that in the past, wanted to be the accountant for an outfit whose only claim to fame, apart from their rightly famous yoghurt, was the production of a cheddar cheese speckled with peanuts and aptly named "Bjelke Blue". (Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the longest-serving and longest-lived as well as most controversial Premier of Queensland and also a peanut farmer - or, some might say, just a peanut!)

 

Noel's "shack" along Beachmere Road which was still there when I visited the place again in September 2003. By then it was already surrounded by suburbia on all sides.

 

Mercifully, the cow cockies turned me down which, for a fleeting moment, made the birds sound a little less 'chirpier' and me feeling a little more ‘saddier’ as I would've liked to have hung around for a little bit 'longier' with Noel who'd been my best friend since our first chance meeting on a Europe-bound ship in late 1967.

Still, before long I was once again responding to display ads and roaming the world, and Noel remained my very best friend until his untimely death in 1995.

 

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Snorkelling off Loloho Beach

 

 

This is a recent clip of Loloho Beach but it's timeless and could've been taken back in the 70s when we all lived in Camp 6 and had all that glorious beach right on our doorstep.

 

 

Did we appreciate it as much as we should have? Perhaps not, as many of us spent what little time there was left after a long ten-hour working day inside the "boozer" which, thankfully, was also on the beach.

 

 

Still, I am grateful for the memories - as is my dermatologist who earns a good living cutting out the countless melanomas on my back which I acquired while snorkelling for hours off the beach at Loloho.

(While watching the video clip, please keep your eyes open for a left rubber sandal which I lost among the coral back in 1970 ☺ )

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Hotel zum Letzten Kliff

 

 

Iwant 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?

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Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)

 

 

Uncertainty is a universal human predicament: 'the future’s not ours to see', as this song, popular in the 1950s, put it. In Germany, a whole generation grew up with the refrain in their ears - in German, of course: ""Was kann schöner sein / Viel schöner als Ruhm und Geld? / Für mich gibt's auf dieser Welt / Doch nur dich allein! / Was kann schöner sein?"

 

 

And what could've been more uncertain than growing up in post-war Germany? Perhaps that's why this song was so popular: it reflected resignation, acceptance, sometimes even optimism about the future; in any case, its fatalism made light of the dark situation we all were in.

Even after the more existential worries have been taking care of - food, a roof over our head, a job, etc. - we still worry. I certainly did as no period of my life was ever totally free of dread-filled apprehensions.

What we seldom ever get around to doing – once the dreaded event is past – is to pause and compare the scale of the worry with what actually happened in the end. We are too taken up with the next topic of alarm ever to return for a "worry audit". If we did, a strange realisation would dawn on us: that our worries are nearly always completely – and deeply – out of line with reality. Extended out across a year, such a "worry audit" would, I am sure, yield similar conclusions. Perhaps the world is not – for all its dangers – as awful as we presume. Perhaps most of the drama is ultimately unfolding only in our own minds.

Looking back over a lifetime of worrying about the future, it helps to remember Mark Twain’s famous dictum: ‘I have lived through many disasters; only a few of which actually happened’. "Que Sera, Sera."

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The poem of my life

 

 

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past.

Images of the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realise the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveller. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold — for it's a commercial we've been watching — the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" - routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled" - by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognise the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognise any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognise a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken", and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture — and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem.

A poem which almost everyone gets wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken" — not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less travelled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." The road he will later call less travelled is actually the road equally travelled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

With so many forks in my path, with so many opportunities gained and lost, with some fifty job relocations across fifteen countries, "The Road Not Taken" became my favourite poem ever since I discovered it ages and ages ago. During all this time it served me as a means of my self-deception before becoming the source of all my regrets as well as my comfort in old age. It's the poem of my life. Thank you, Robert Frost.

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Walk into Paradise

 

<
Also available on DVD from Papua New Guinea Association of Australia
The story in a nutshell: A small expedition led by Steve McAllister (Chips Rafferty)
walks towards Paradise Valley, beyond the Sepik River, where an Australian adventurer
Sharkeye Kelly (Reg Lye) claims to have discovered oil. Running time: 93 mins
If the video has been removed from YouTube (again), watch it here

 

The movie's voice-over tells us: "Today a gallant band of young Australian administrators are bringing civilisation to the most primitive people left on the face of the earth", while thousands of warriors, plumed, painted and bedecked with feathers and boars' tusks pour into the valley, their spears taller and sharper than the kunai grass around them.

"Walk into Paradise" is no cinematic masterpiece, but it's a good yarn and in 1956 it offered audiences the chance to see, in glorious colour, the beauty of the Sepik and the Western Highlands, and be reminded that here was a Neolithic people being brought into the 20th century by the Australian administration.

Chips Rafferty produced and starred in this Franco-Australian film as a patrol officer who leads a party into a previously unexplored valley where oil has been found. The gathering in the valley occurs when Rafferty decides that he needs to flatten the grass in the valley to build an airstrip and so he calls for "the biggest singsing that's ever been heard in New Guinea".

While there are moments in the film which will make anybody familiar with the place and time chuckle, the film was not always a long way from the facts. The singsing incident was based on a real event involving the Leahy brothers, the Australian administration was pushing into new areas in the Highlands, and the film features two genuine participants in that work, Regimental Sergeant Major Somu, who plays RSM Towalaka, and District Officer Fred Kaad.

"Walk into Paradise" was just one of many influences on the way most Australians saw Papua New Guinea. I was one of the fortunate few who could experience it first-hand, the Sepik, the Highlands, the singsings ...

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April Fool's Day

 

 

April Fool's Day is cancelled this year because no made-up prank could match the unbelievable shit-show going on in the world right now. Sorry about that.

Having just renamed the Gulf of Mexico, didn't Trump miss something? What about New Mexico? Shouldn't that be called New America now?

And just before I turned off all that shit-show news, I thought I heard Trump saying he was going for a third term - or was it "Third Reich"?

Anyway, we're off to the warm-water pool in the Bay now where we all look like fools with our clothes off whatever the day of the year.

 

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Life was so simple then

 

My office on the top floor of the Al Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

 

I've previously reflected on my past stripped-down working life. I liked it that way and my employers did too as it meant that no domestic chores distracted me from giving my full attention to their business affairs.

 

My office was behind the window on the top floor on the far right

 

My work was my life and my office was my home, and there was little else besides. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was how I coped with life in the world's largest sandbox (a.k.a. Saudi Arabia).

 

Note my portable OLYMPIA typewriter, bought in Kieta in New Guinea in 1972. It travelled the world with me for many years

 

Not that there was much to play with: the television reception consisted of little more than re-runs of Walt Disney's "Bambi" and so-called 'newsflashes' of members of the royal family travelling to or returning from the fleshpots of the West denied to their own citizens. As for alcohol, there was none - but you could get stoned anytime.

 

 

My hotel room was equally spartan, trimmed down as it was to the basics of sleeping, eating and work brought back from the office.

 

The view from the room with no view

 

It was a room with no view and the only diversion was the men-only swimming pool, as long as the scorching sun had set behind the Red Sea and the hot desert wind didn't sandblast the skin off your face.

All up, it was an assignment that came at a huge personal cost to me and yet it contributed to what I am today. Thanks for the memories!

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The Demon-Haunted World

 

Read the book online here

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..." [Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World"]

 

 

Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan predicted what the USA would be like in the future. He died far too early in December 1996, just sixty-two years old and just seven months after the above interview was recorded. Carl Sagan spent much of his adult life inspiring others, and the human race lost one of its finest. What a legacy he left behind!

 

 

The above audiobook is AI-generated but perhaps still better than reading the whole 400-plus pages online (unless you want to buy it on ebay for $30 or, if you're lucky, find it at your local op-shop for a mere two dollars). Reading it is time well spent because, as he said here ...

 

 

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

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Good listening!

 

 

... and for plenty more of them same, click here.

 

Why I am not rich!

 

The address says it all: PO Box 187, Rabaul, New Guinea

 :

Remember the Poseidon boom in Australia in the late 1960s when some nickel stocks experienced spectacular increases in price? The best-known, Poseidon, rose from $1.85 on 26 September 1969 to its high of $280 on 10 January 1970. Some years later it went off the board. Its shares were worthless.

In 1969 I'd just come back from South West Africa, rejoined the ANZ Bank in Canberra and then gone to Papua New Guinea to escape the hand-to-mouth existence of a banking career. I was totally ignorant of the Poseidon boom but my new colleagues in the chartered accounting firm of Hancock, Woodward & Neill in Rabaul talked of nothing else - when they weren't drinking which was most of the time!

 

PO Box 12, Kieta, Bougainville, New Guinea

 

First out of sympathy and then as a convert, I spent what little money I earned on VAM and Kambalda shares which, after I had bought them at several dollars each, went down to just a few cents and then to nothing.

Are those early years called the formative years because during that time one forms one's financial base? Well, my shiny VAM and Kambalda share certificates weren't even pliable and absorbent enough for the most obvious use, which is perhaps why I still have a few of them today. As the saying goes: I started out with nothing and I still got most of it left.

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Don't leave home without it

 

I show you mine ...

 

Leave home without your iqama in Saudi Arabia and you are in serious shit. Not quite a beheading but you're getting closer. I'll never forget the day a friend and I drove out of Jeddah for a day on the beach along the Red Sea.

Halfway there, he almost lost his head when he tapped his shirt pocket. "Oh shit, I forgot my iqama!" he yelled and drove straight back home to retrieve it (actually, he didn't yell Oh shit! because in over fifty years I've never heard him swear; put it down to bad parenting). Here he is:

 

... if you show me yours (click on image)

 

The iqama, of course, is a Saudi Arabian residency permit and you take it everywhere - to work, to the beach, to the shops, even to the toilet - because if you're caught without it, you're taken away first and released later - MUCH LATER!

I still have mine, and occasionally still tap my shirt pocket. Occasionally, I also tap my forehead and wonder why I went there.

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Never again

 

This is the full-length movie 'Never on Sunday'. Enjoy!

 

Remember the American tourist Homer Thrace who, having gone to Greece in search of its ancient philosophers but becoming disillusioned, interrogates a prostitute named Ilya (played by Melina Mercouri) about what has gone wrong?

‘No society ever reached the heights that were attained by ancient Greece! It was the cradle of culture. It was a happy country. What happened? What made it fall?’ he pleads with her - click here.

But was there ever such a Greek Golden Age? When, exactly, was Greece great? In fact, nostalgia for a lost greatness can be found in the so-called Golden Age itself. Even in the mid-fifth century BCE, Athenians were already looking back with longing. And so it goes for the rest of us: we all look back with longing to our own 'Golden Age' and, in doing so, proclaim our own decline.

I think I just sit back and watch 'Never on Sunday' to remind myself of my own personal 'Golden Age' in Greece which will never come again.

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I have regrets, but I don't regret having them

 

 

One of my many regrets is not having stayed longer on Thursday Island. The year was 1977 and I had come down from New Guinea to work as an accountant on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait in Far North Queensland.

I've always been drawn to remote and isolated places, and there were few as remote and isolated as Thursday Island. The location suited me perfectly and I should've been set for at least a couple of years before ambition and wanderlust would've got the better of me again.

However, I was working under the dick-tatorship of a former missionary-type who, having discovered the difference between a debit and a credit, had passed himself off as an accountant and then became the manager - and my boss - of what was then the Island Industries Board.

Had it not been for his reign of terror, I might have stayed longer, much longer, maybe even forever, as, according to 'Banjo' Paterson's "Thirsty Island", 'the heat, the thirst, the beer, and the Islanders may be trusted to do the rest.'

Of course, professionally speaking, I would have signed my own death warrant because Thursday Island was a dead-end, whereas I went on to bigger and better jobs in the Solomons (again!), Samoa, Malaysia, Australia, New Guinea (again and again!), Saudi Arabia, Greece ...

It was a case of Thursday Island versus the World, and the world won!

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A trip back in time for fifty cents

 

6th Edition, February 1998

 

Most people buy their Lonely Planet Guide at full retail price to plan their next trip; I bought this old 1998 edition for a mere fifty cents at the local op-shop to take a trip down memory lane. And I discovered so much!

Only the very back of the guidebook, the last three pages 359-361, is dedicated to the place where I had spent most of my time in New Guinea. It begins with the explanation, "The following information is included in case the situation in Bougainville dramatically improves and travel onto the island is once again allowed. But this information is likely to be out of date since Bougainville has been off-limits for eight years and there's been considerable damage to the towns in the south."

And equally so about the first place I had lived and worked in: "Rabaul is a weird wasteland, buried in deep black volcanic ash. The broken frames of its buildings poke out of the mud like the wings of a dead bird. Almost the entire old town is buried and barren and looks like a movie set for an apocalyse film. Streets and streets of rubble and ruined buildings recede in every direction. The scale of what happened to Rabaul cannot be appreciated until you see it. If you were fortunate enough to walk its busy, noisy and colourful streets before September 1994, be prepared for a shock."

With the help of the old town map on page 315 I was able to walk, in my mind, from my office in Park Street to Casuarina Avenue, across Court Street, Namanula Road and Tavur Street, before turning left into Vulcan Street to arrive at the company-supplied accommodation, a converted Chinese trade store which I shared with two other accountants, one of whom stayed for another twenty-four years until the aforesaid volcanic eruption wiped out his business. There but for the grace of God go I.

Then there is the Port Moresby City map on page 112 which also shows Cuthbertson Street where I used to sit in my parked car in the sweltering heat on a Sunday morning, waiting for the newspapers from "down south" to arrive at the news agency. You had to be quick to grab one of the few copies of the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review which always advertised the best job vacancies. Then a quick check of my mailbox at the post office on the opposite side of the street for letters from "down south" (they used to sort incoming mail on a Sunday back then), but especially for any job offer in response to any of my applications.

Page 131 reminded me of trips to Yule Island where "the missionaries who arrived at Yule Island in 1885 were some of the first European visitors to the Papuan coast of New Guinea." On the way there I would stop over at a small trade store at Hisiu, then run by an Australian and his local wife.

Then there were those many trips out to Idler's Bay to the west, Bootless Inlet to the east, and north to Brown River, or up to Rouna Falls. One time, sailing my CORSAIR dinghy from the Royal Papuan Yacht Club all the way out of Fairfax Harbour far out to sea to Gemo Island and Lolorua Island, I had to tack. My inexperienced crew, Brian Herde, failed to respond to my command of "Lee ho!" to shift his body to the other side of the dinghy, and we promptly capsized. He redeemed himself by diving under the boat and pushing the centreboard back through the slot so that I could grap it as I sat astride the upturned hull to pull the waterlogged boat and mast and sail upright again. I would never have been able to do this on my own and may well have ended up as shark food - but then again, I probably also would have never capsized on my own. Did we have life jackets or emergency flares? Are you kidding me? We were in our twenties and indestructible. Besides, sharks are not deterred by life jackets and we were too far out to sea for anyone to have seen our flares. I lost my precious wristwatch and we lost all our beer but only very nearly our lives.

The map of Lae on page 176 shows the corner of 7th Street and Huon Road where I lived and spent my last Christmas in the country in 1974 before flying out to my next assignment in Burma. My old friend Noel had flown across from Wewak to spend that Christmas with me, only to help me stencil my shipping box with "M.P. GOERMAN / RANGOON / BURMA".

I still remember talking with him about another job I had been offered eighteen months earlier as manager of a thriving co-operative at Angoram on the banks of the mighty Sepik River. Angoram was no more than a couple of hours' drive away from Wewak and I had been tempted to accept to be near my friend but how different things may have turned out because only a few months later, again at Christmas time, I developed accute appendicitis which was quickly and successfully dealt with through a hurried operation at the newly-built hospital at Arawa but which would've been impossible to handle in the remote wilds of the Sepik District. And, of course, no access to the Australian Financial Review, one of whose advertisements had just then secured me my next assignment in Burma. We are so often the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in.

And then there is Wewak itself, described on the guidebook's page 254 as "an attractive town where you can happily spend a day or two in transit to the Sepik or Irian Jaya." Well, that was then: today Weak is a very unsafe and run-down place and the border to Irian Jaya is also closed. The town map on page 256 still mentions the Windjammer Hotel which burnt down many years ago. The larger district map on the facing pages 250 and 251 shows the road to Cape Wom and the Hawain River where my friend Noel used to live before Independence and the unruly natives forced him out.

A great trip back in time for a mere fifty cents!

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Some of my best friends were acquaintances

 

 

It's been some months since I invested in a new address book, and I have been occupied with the somewhat saddening task of copying out names and adresses from the old.

It's a very old book indeed, since it accompanied me in all my travels around and around and around the world for more than thirty years. Who were all those people crammed into the pages of this battered old book? Every page is absolutely jam-packed with names and numbers, sometimes underlined or with marginal notations 'See page so-and-so'.

There are names that belong to boat voyages, or train travels, or hotel encounters; people who seemed so charming that one promised to 'keep in touch'. I never offered them to 'look in and see me if you are passing through' as I usually was, as they say, of no fixed abode which spared me a lot of trouble as they were absolute strangers with whom I had nothing in common except a shared voyage or some talk in a bar or dining room.

Of course, there are some names and addresses that I am transcribing into my new book that belong to people who were once just passers-by or brief encounters somewhere, but who have come to justify the word 'friend' and have gone on meaning that through many years of absence.

 

 

With email and the internet, it's now much easier to keep in touch, and also to know when no longer to keep in touch, such as when one's email is returned with the mail delivery message 'mailbox for user is full'. It probably means that an old friend has gone 'off-line', metaphorically or, more likely, physically, and no amount of emailing will reach him again.

Perhaps future death certificates should include an instruction to shut down the email account so as to remove any doubt in a sender's mind.

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