An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

 

 

Do yourself a favour and listen to Konstantin Kisin - all of it! This man makes so much sense and says so many thing too many of us are too afraid to say! I bought the book and the audiobook and I keep reading it and listening to it to give me hope that not everyone is a woke idiot yet.

 

Read a preview of this book here

 

Konstantin Kisin is a journalist, comedian, voiceover actor and social commentator. Born in the Soviet Union, where he experienced both untold wealth and grinding poverty, he moved to the UK when he was 13 years old. Now an award-winning performer, he co-presents the popular YouTube series TRIGGERnometry alongside Francis Foster. Together, they've interviewed some of the most in-demand intellectuals of our age, such as Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and many others. "An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West" is his first book.

 

 

I could listen to this man all day long - and so can you; simply type KONSTANTIN KISIN into YouTube and hit ENTER. Erudition awaits you!

 

 

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I did a Laura Gibson before there even was one

 

In just 24 hours, corporate lawyer Laura Gibson's life is decimated. She is passed up for partnership, her son is expelled and she almost kills the family cat before discovering her husband has been arrested for fraud, squandering their life savings in the process ... not to mention sleeping with her sister. Desperate to escape her life, Laura accepts a job as magistrate of a small coastal town she has fond - ten years old - memories of. Packing her kids in the station wagon, Laura heads to Pearl Bay only to find a half-collapsed connecting bridge and laconic local, Diver Dan. On belated arrival, Laura discovers the solitude beach house she bought based on memory is now a dilapidated shack in the middle of a caravan park. Yet, staring out across the spectacular view from her new home, Laura decides maybe Pearl Bay is worth a chance.

 

SeaChange was an Australian television program that ran from 1998 to 2000 on the ABC. Soon afterwards, everyone wanted to do 'the Pearl Bay thing' and move to some small place that was less complicated, more laid back and more friendly.

Like Sigrid Thornton's character Laura Gibson, they longed to throw in their city jobs and drop out at a quirky seaside settlement where no one wore ties or high heels or remembered to lock their front doors.

By the time 'To do a Laura Gibson' had become part of the vernacular and Australians began to look not for cosmopolitan pleasures but for ordinariness, I'd already beaten them to it by having moved to Nelligen.

At the time, Nelligen was the sort of place even real estate agents had forgotten about. It had this permanent air of holiday without crimes and drug problems - except for the odd pothead who had chosen Nelligen for its low rents and long distance from work and the long arm of the law.

We have no Diver Dan, the handsome, laconic 'SeaChange' character played by David Wenham, but we do have - or, at least, did have - a cast of characters worthy of a television soap until the rising house prices and rising rents drove them away, and Nelligen was discovered by 'SeaChangers' from Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and even Tasmania.

Even in our little Sproxton's Lane - named in the days when apostrophes in place names were still allowed - with its twenty-five properties (seventeen waterfront and eight "inland"), we've seen all but three change ownership, some as often as three or four or even five times!

I did a Laura Gibson before there was a Laura Gibson, and I'm glad I did.

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Along the Sepik

 

 

Along the Sepik" is set on the Upper Sepik River in New Guinea. Filmed in 1963 and narrated by Des Martin, Patrol Officer/Kiap and Assistant District Officer for the Ambunti District, "Along the Sepik" records the day-to-day experiences of a "Kiap" (a one-man representative of the Australian government in regional areas) Barry Downes as he patrols an area that in 1963 had only recently been brought under control from headhunters.

 

 

As well as being a record of the role of the colonial administration, "Along the Sepik" offers insights into some tribal communities' cultures through depictions of their spirit houses and traditional 'sing sing' ceremonies. It also reminds me of my best friend, Noel Butler, who for more than two decades lived in the Sepik District just outside Wewak, and who would have lived out his days there, had not the country's sudden Independence in 1975 forced him to return to Australia.

 

 

The Sepik River is one of the most extraordinary places on earth – some environmentalists call it the second Amazon - which few outsiders ever get to see, and yet it's right on Australia’s northern doorstep. Noel loved this place, and so did I when I visited on several occasions, and it's no surprise that he never quite succeeded to settle back into Australia because, as he put it, after a lifetime spent there, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea" (although I doubt he would have liked what is going on there today as the days of the unspoilt Sepik are numbered).

 

 

I have been sharing Noel's struggles, and while his are over - he died in 1995 - I, too, still think almost every day about those many faraway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.

"Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein." [Hermann Hesse]

 

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P.S. It'd be amiss of me not to include "Walk into Paradise", an adventure movie filmed on and along the Sepik River, and starring Chips Rafferty. To watch this hour-and-a-half-long movie on YouTube, click here.

 

The blessedness of being little

 

 

The childhood years are the best years of your life ..." Whoever said that didn't grow up in post-war Germany where the war had humpty-dumptied all our childhoods, never to be put back together again.

I never had a childhood. For me it was nothing more than a starting point from which I have never stopped running. Of course, I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper, but despite having had what would now be called a deprived childhood, I stopped well short of becoming a full-blown sociopath as I never felt the urge to smash windows or bash up old ladies to steal their hand-bags. Simply growing up fast seemed to be the best revenge.

Mind you, I wonder if any childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one seeking to recapture the unobtainable. To my mind, people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

Good or bad, we can't leave the past in the past because the past is who we are. Anyway, what else is there to talk about while standing in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems the natural choice since it’s the reason why most of us stand in line there to begin with.

Until we have nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with our whole life laid out in front of us, and our whole life left behind.

 

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My weekly outlook on the world

 

After years of bravado and beating of war drums in the call to arms against Russia while they have gutted their own militaries and have become almost defenceless against an aggressive Putin, the Europeans got the collective fright of their lives when Trump told them to get stuck in and go forth without American military might and the billions of dollars they'd been granted over the last fifty years. Which is why Trump seems to have chosen to ignore these once great countries, and end the war in Ukraine, which is possibly the biggest money-laundering operation in history - even Zelensky admits $100 Billion has gone ‘missing’ - without them.

Not that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's visit to Washington will make any difference. When Trump was asked what they would be discussing, he was unable to hide his contempt. 'I don’t know', he replied, 'ask him, he asked to come here, I didn’t'. One is left wondering if Starmer is bringing along his Foreign Secretary, the same David Lammy who called Trump a 'racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser' and 'tyrant and a women-hating neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath', and who, when asked on a quiz show what Hitler's first name was, replied 'Heil'.

Not that anyone could accuse Trump of not having compassion. When asked about any possibility of Prince Harry being deported for allegedly lying about drug-taking on his US Visa application, Trump replied, 'No', he said, 'that guy’s got enough problems with his wife ... she’s terrible!'

I think there's a method to Trump's madness: he simply throws out some ideas to see which ones will stick, but he also turns on a dime when a concept doesn’t work and a better solution emerges. Of course, Canada won't become the 51st state; of course, America is not going to rebuild Gaza; of course, Greenland won't become part of the United States. As for Mexico and Panama, the Mexicans are stopping the flow of migrants and Panama is putting a stop to China's undue influence over its ports. And holding the blowtorch to bloated US federal agencies and their staggering abuse, fraud, and waste has been long overdue. Thumbs up!

As for those Chinese live-fire manouvres in the Tasman Sea, Anthony Albanese has declared war on the Chinese but asked that the start date be pushed back to the mid 2040s when Australia will receive the first delivery of its new submarines. He's also pushed back the start of his Medicare bulk-billing pledge until after the election which he will lose anyway, and therefore he can't be blamed for the country going totally broke when visiting the local GP has become a totally cost-free national sport for anyone with nothing better to do. Another NDIS in the making!

Speaking of which, the two nurses Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, one of whom claimed to have sent Israeli patients to hell or "Jahannam", while the other said, "I won’t treat them, I will kill them", have been suspended - on full pay, no doubt; after all, we're the country of the soft touch! One of them, the "hellbent" Ahmad Rashad Nadir, is now a hospital patient himself and must be hoping he'd receive more compassionate care than he meted out. The solicitor acting for Sarah Abu Lebdeh, who has since been charged with several offences and is out on bail, said that his client had sent a "very sincere apology ... to the Jewish community as a whole". Ah well, that's all right then, isn't it?

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Another pourquoi story

 

 

Why Nelligen?" people ask me. "Why not?" is my short reply. Here's the full story: It all began sometime in 1991 when I helped an acquaintance at the HARMONIE German Club in Canberra with an income tax problem.

When I refused payment, not only because I was no longer a tax agent but also because we were both from the same (c)old country, he insisted I could stay in his holiday cottage at some little place called Nelligen. "It's on the Clyde River just before Batemans Bay", he said. "You'll love it!"

For several months, I didn't find the time to drive to the coast. When I eventually did I had almost forgotten the offer. Luckily, I didn't blink as I drove across the Nelligen bridge on the way to Batemans Bay and so spotted this tiny village nestled alongside the Clyde River.

At the General Store I asked for directions to the cottage "belonging to the German carpenter", and was shown to # 21 Sproxton Lane across the river. The cottage was locked but he had told me that the key was under the watertank and that I could make myself at home. Which I did and which set me on my own quest to find a little place in Nelligen.

At the time, Nelligen was a place forgotten even by real estate agents and nothing was for sale except a few empty building blocks. One such block overlooked the Clyde River from its location in Nelligen Place. I could imagine sitting there on the verandah and taking in the views. Which is exactly what a chap was doing just two blocks away. I walked up and asked if I could join him.

Soon we were not only sharing the same views but also memories of people and places we both had known as "Sandy" Sandilands and his wife Betty had also lived and worked in Rabaul in New Guinea and on Thursday Island - in fact, in 1960 their daughter Fiona was born on the island! I felt at home at once! A few weeks later I was the proud owner of a block of land in Nelligen Place!

I wanted to build a beautiful little Classic Country Cottage. However, a retired public servant who occupied a small log cabin next to me did what public servants do: be a pain in the coccyx ! He objected to my building plans - TWICE! - on some obscure grounds. This delayed me long enough to find a much better place across the river. And that's how I came to buy "Riverbend"!

"Riverbend" had been auctioned in August 1992. I went to the auction as a spectator knowing that the reserve price was outside my range. It must have been outside everybody else's as well because it didn't sell. More than a year later, in November 1993, the owners, who had bought the property only four years earlier, accepted my much-reduced offer.

(Only after I had bought "Riverbend" did I find out that the previous owners had been forced out by some nasty neighbours. I swore to myself that if they ever tried the same with me, I wouldn't budge. They did, and I didn't! Oh, and I did go back to thank the public servant for objecting to my plans so that I could buy this much better and bigger and waterfront property. Last time I looked his mouth was still open!)

 

 

"Riverbend" has been my home now for over 30 years and all the friends I made when I first came here are dead - including the acquaintance from the HARMONIE German Club who started me on my quest to find a place in Nelligen - see here. Whether I join them or move on before that happens to me, only time - which is also no longer my friend - will tell.

 

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ماشاء الله

 

Words are the defining text of Islam, the Koran, and calligraphy is the art of beautifully forming words so as to bring an elevation of spirit to those who read them. God has willed it that today in Vinnies' Moruya shop I found this beautiful piece of Arabic calligraphy, which in fact reads "God has willed it".

I bought it even though I never learnt to read Arabic. A member of the Mofarrij family for whom I worked in Saudi Arabia, translated it, and I will hang it in my study to remind me of my three years spent there.

By sheer coincidence I also found a copy of the book "The Land Beyond - A Thousand Miles on Foot Through the Heart of the Middle East" by Leon McCarron. It was the cover that immediately drew me to it, as it depicts Al Khazneh in Petra, the ancient, rose-red city half as old as time in Jordan, which I wish I had visited but never got the chance to do so.

 

Read a preview here

 

And to top things off, I discovered another one of Julian Barnes' books, "Levels of Life", "a magnificent blast of unflinching prose", as the Daily Telegraph described it. I read its hundred-odd pages all in one sitting over lunch of roast beef washed down with a glass of red at the Moruya Bowling Club. It's been quite a wonderful day. "God has willed it".

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It makes you mown and grown!

 

In April 2017, Canturf erected a sign suggested by a Gundaroo farmer – ‘Putin the seed and it comes up Trumps’ – in reference to Russian digital manipulation of the 2016 US election.

 

There is a town or, as it is now styled in deference to its tourist potential, a 'village' just outside Canberra by the name of Bungendore. It is inhabited by urban refugees, Aussie battlers and people with cow-shit on their boots.

When I still commuted between Nelligen and Canberra in the late 1990s, I was always in too much of a hurry and used to do the trip in just over one hour - IF I wasn't stopped for speeding! - and the only thing that brought a smile to my face during the long and boring drive were Canturf's advertising signs on either side of Bungendore. Back then their signs were intentionally saucy with sexy inuendoes which today's wokism has put an end to, but it's still safe to engage in the odd political pun.

 

Other political puns were " It's Greener than Brown" and "Remains Green ... With No Labour" with a nod to Canberra which has a reputation for being Green.

 

As I wrote before, I was always in too much of a hurry to either get home or back to work to take any photographs but from memory I recall "Mown and Grown in Fyshwick" and "Feeling Lawnly? Pickup at Fyshwick" which were thinly disguised references to the capital city's brothels.

 

 

If you wonder who comes up with all those puns, the answer is, "You do!" If you come up with an original saying and think it would be a good Canturf sign, send it in to them via their webpage. You may pick up an easy $250 which you could spend in Fyshwick. Now, there's a challenge!

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It's already five years ago

 

Chris Mellen with his charming wife

 

Pete, I met you in Saudi Arabia in the early '80s when I acted as a barley broker between various grain traders and Abdul Ghani. If this message reaches you it would be great to catch up, and I would like to get in touch with Abdul Ghani."

That email in October 2010 - see here - renewed an old acquaintance which morphed into a long friendship which lasted until - well, 'hier'.

Chris Mellen, with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Affairs from the University of Sussex and and a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, was a true renaissance man, multi-talented, multi-lingual, multi-marital (four at last count!), and, born a Jew and raised by the Jesuits and converting to Islam in 2000, even multi-religious.

 

Suave and flamboyant Chris in better days - taken from his LinkedIn profile

 

We shared many interests - apart from our past commodity trading in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - such as a love for the writings of Julian Barnes - we both subscribed to his sentiment in "The Sense of an Ending" that "... the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be" - and Hermann Hesse, with Chris sometimes calling himself Goldmund - as he confessed, "No savings left after a timetime of living beyond my means. My life has been rather self-indulgent. I rarely refused myself anything" - and, by inference, me being Narcissus.

More than a year ago, Chris was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer which confined him to months and months of hospitalisation and vicious chemotherapy as well as several bonemarrow transplants - "I'm due for my tenth spinal tap; the treatment costs so far are $750,000" - and a myriad of other 'medical advances', none of which worked.

 

 

As he wrote, "I'm struggling with the discomfort, the endless pain, and incipient depression." By 14 October 2019 he'd had enough. "I am home. The cancer has morphed into acute leukemia and is incurable. I hope to see another year but ... I am trying to seize the carp every day. It's challenging. I enjoy your news and admire your energy."

A fortnight later he'd found enough energy himself to get back in the saddle: "Took the old girl out for a spin today. It's my hormone replacement therapy."

 

 

But it was not to last and he was back in hospital for more treatment ...

 

 

On 31 December 2019 he WhatsApp-ed me, "Thank you for your messages and commentaries - much appreciated. The doctors have run out of ideas and I hope to be able to go home to die in the next few days. Sorry to admit this, but I love you old bastard, and I admire you, fucking fascist that you are ☺. I'm thinking of you, you crusty old dog."

And shortly afterwards, "I'm breaking out. I've had enough. My wife will take me home tonight. Halle-fucking-lujah. I wish we could celebrate the shit and derision of this dystopian disaster together. I feel so close to you, you miserable bastard."

 

 

Back in bucolic Bussy-sur-Moudon (population 198 which, until recently, he was still trying to improve on), Chris was a happy man: "I'm home, recovering from the trauma of the last year. I am a happy man. I am a satisfied man ... no regrets ... I have been true to myself and have accepted who I am and the choices I have made. My wife is the love of my life and my kids are very close to me. Good night, my dear friend."

We kept on exchanging thoughts and ideas and I told him about the devastating bushfires which had us almost wiped out as well, to which he replied in typical irreverent Chris Mellen fashion, "I'm praying for you, Christian, Jewish and Muslim ... I am mumbling incomprehensible guttural sounds on my hands and knees with my asshole aimed away from the south-east and towards the glittering heavens, all on your behalf. I have difficulty reading. These are the side effects of the chemo. I am damaged goods after ten cycles of chemo treatment. So my current challenge is to assess what's left and accept my new me and learn to live with both the cancer and the after-effects of the chemo instead of engaging in a head-on war with a disease that we do not understand. My treatment was not the fruit of a scientific analysis but the result of the doctors' hunches. I was unaware of the primitive methodology of this pseudo-science that we call medicine. I am planning to keep going for another decade. I am ready to make big compromises in order to remain active in this new life. It's the constant pain that prevents me from having a good laugh but if that's part of the deal, so be it. I'm far from ready to go."

Suddenly, on 4 February 2020, the decade had shrunk to just a few days, " I've been given a few days to live. I just want you to know how much I have appreciated your friendship. See you on the other side, brother."

What could I say to that, other than to pass it off light-heartedly, "Don't believe everything you're told, Chris. You'll probably still sell a few loads of barley before you go (although not to Abdulghani). 'See you on the other side'. That's what the surgical assistant said to me before they wheeled me into the operating theatre which confused me no end. When I woke up again and she was leaning over me, asking for my date of birth and how many fingers she was holding up, I was quite surprised because I had always been told that St. Peter had a long white beard."

Silence for a week, and then this morning's "Chris est mort hier", presumably from his wife. Je suis tellement, tellement désolé.

They say the only death we experience is other people's, and I've experienced Chris's slow demise for over a year. See you on the other side, you old bastard! We both know we're checking out just in time!

 

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage. Without her you would have never set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.                                    --Constantine P. Cavafy

 

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Remember Poseidon?

 

Nickel Queen, released April 1971

 

It was the summer of '69. It was a time of 'free love', the Vietnam War and ... a nickel mining boom. The company was Poseidon – Australia’s legendary boom stock. Poseidon’s shares went above $280; then they tanked. They went from zero to superhero to bombed-out crater, all in six months.

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!

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.

 

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

 

All this came back to me as I watched Nickel Queen which I've just discovered on YouTube. It's loosely based on the Poseidon boom and worth watching, if only for those sounds and scenes from a bygone era.

 

PO Box 12, Kieta, Bougainville, New Guinea

 

As they say, "I started out with nothing and I've still got most of it left".

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346 minutes of on-the-edge-of-your-seat viewing

 

 

I have always thought my John Le Carré days were behind me, but his 1993 espionage novel "The Night Manager" pulled me back in again - and its BBC dramatisation is even better. It's a whole 346 minutes of the most intense on-the-edge-of-your-seat viewing, which means you have to be retired to have the time to watch it all in one sitting bceause you won't be able to stop.

All I could find on YouTube is the above audiobook. If you want to watch the gripping BBC dramatisation, you may have to visit your local Vinnies shop, which is where I found my 6-episode-DVD, all for a $2-gold coin.

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"What did you do last week?"

 

All US federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday. Musk said that employees will be receiving an email "shortly" requesting to "understand what they got done last week". A lack of response, Musk said, "will be taken as a resignation."

What a pity there was no Elon Musk around when I did a six-month-contract with a government department in Canberra - which shall remain unnamed to protect the living dead! - which, while supposed to detect fraud, was euphemistically called the Fraud AWARENESS Unit.

The only frauds that I was aware of were the half-a-dozen highly paid public servants who never worked but instead, in all earnesty, discussed the colour and flavour of the donuts one of them would be sent out to buy for the next coffee break. Despite them trying very hard, this didn't quite fill the entire day, and so they also evolved their own parlour game of inventing collective nouns which lasted for the rest of the day.

My own suggestion of 'a sinecure of public servants' didn't pass muster as its etymological Latin roots of 'sine cura' (‘without care') didn't mention what their daily routines were totally devoid of, namely work, although the director, no less, of the unit had written his PhD thesis on the economies in the Middle East entirely in company time, as it were. He had never been to the Middle East, and so when he became aware that I had actually lived and worked there, he in all seriousness asked me to proof-read his thesis, again in company time. Naturally, I declined.

Despite their long training in doing absolutely nothing and doing so with absolute dedication, there was only so much time they could waste discussing the colour and flavour of the donuts however frequent the coffee breaks, and they were even getting close to running out of new collective nouns, when each week the Government Gazette arrived.

This driest-of-dry publication advertised all the vacant positions in the public service which were perused by all public servants not so much for the nature of the job or the required qualifications but the advertised pay grade. A position with a pay grade above their own was immediately applied for and thus a sense of work and achievement was restored.

What a pity we have no Elon Musk to oversee our public service! He could've turned Canberra into a ghost town by the end of this week!

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The man who doesn't read has no advantage over the man who can't read

 

Chapters 1 to 8

 

Everyone - well, almost everyone - knows "Brave New World". Some may even have read it. But how many have heard of, let alone read, Aldous Husley's counterpoint to "Brave New World", his vision of a better world, a society that is sane and conducive to human happiness, a place that never existed, except in his novel "Island"?

This relatively unknown novel was written by Huxley at the end of his life, in 1962, and it depicts a world that exists only in the Kingdom of Pala, an island halfway between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, where for a hundred and twenty years an ideal society has flourished.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

Aldous Huxley died of cancer a year after "Island", his last novel, was published. Perhaps the passage "Lightly", spoken by a character in this final book could be the author speaking from, or to, himself — a reminder of how he felt he should approach dying. He died on November 22nd, 1963, the same day the American President Kennedy was assassinated, and so Huxley's death never even made the news.

 

 

It's Sunday morning, and it looks like it's going to be another hot day, so what better way to spend it than relaxing on the old sofa on the veranda and listening to the audiobook of "Island"? Absolute bliss!

 

Chapters 9 to 15

 

(You may have noticed that I've just now spelled 'veranda' without an 'h' which seems to have been standard in the US since the 1850s while British English kept the 'h' for about a hundred more years. These days veranda seems to be more common everywhere and I decided to comply but no-one is going to make me call the Gulf of Mexico anything else. The Gulf of America will be consigned to history in four years' time.)

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