I don't know whether my friend Des Hudson kept this card all these years, only to mock me later since, despite what I had written on that card, I continued to roam the world for another five years, three of which in the very same spot he was living in at the time.
I had just completed an assignment with Mount Isa Mines, and accepted this job as accountant/office manager in Mackay's largest car dealership which was so run down and disorganised that I knew it would keep me challenged for several months to come, and after the first few months had passed, I had taken a liking to this little coastal town and all its beautiful scenic surroundings, hence my exclamation "Journey's End!"
In fact, we had been looking at buying our own piece of real estate. The agent, when hearing that I was German - as in past tense 'used to be' - introduced us to a German couple who lived out in the countryside at 48 Yakapari-Habana Road, next to which a block of land was for sale.
Klaus and Gaby Brenner lived a self-sufficient life that impressed me. Almost everything they ate they grew themselves; their chooks gave them meat and eggs, and from his occasional job as painter on building sites Klaus would bring back old timber from which he made furniture.
Some years before we met, they had bought this thirteen-something-acre block of land which had nothing more on it than a garage and a concrete watertank. By the time we met, Klaus had already turned the garage into a comfortable home and the concrete watertank into a bathroom and laundry - in fact, it was this unique bathroom-and-laundry-inside-a-concrete-watertank which allowed me to immediately identify the property when searching for it on realestate.com.au.
Their only major expense was their monthly electricity bill since, because of their then isolated location, they had to commit to a small minimum monthly payment regardless of their consumption before they could be connected to the grid. That was long before solar and wind, or else Klaus would have been self-sufficient with that as well, I'm sure.
Neither did they have a telephone but that, as he told me, was to keep the then CES (or Commonwealth Employment Service) at bay, as he wanted to stay on the dole rather than be stuck in regular work which would've been almost guaranteed as he was a qualified painter. Instead of a phone call to get him into town for a job interview, the CES had to send him a letter which took so long to write and send that by the time he received and deemed it "safe" to reply, the job was already gone.
I had not yet been hit with the huge tax bills that I would receive in later years and was therefore still inclined to tolerate, if not fully accept, the way other people were gaming the system, and so we remained good friends, during which time we talked about lots and lots of things but never about the way they had arrived in Australia. This only revealed itself during my recent search on naa.gov.au where I found these two arrival cards from January 1965. They had come on the same ship FLAVIA I had travelled on, albeit seven months before me!
But the surprises didn't end there, because I also found this registration card from the Bougainville Migrant Centre - the same centre I had been processed through; he in five days, I in two - which indicates that Klaus had come to Australia a whole five years earlier as a single man aboard the ship AURELIA, stayed for some years, and then returned home to Germany to marry Gaby and return as a married man in January 1965.
All this is now a long time ago and, of course, I have lost contact. For one thing, "Journey's End" turned out to be famous last words again because, like the day between morning and evening, my life has always been torn between my urge to travel and my wish to settle down, and it was only in 1985 that I finally shook off the urge to keep on travelling.
As for Klaus and Gaby, according to realestate.com.au, they sold their slice of paradise in 2001 for $179,500. The new owners sold it three years later for $300,000. Now its estimated value is well over $800,000.
Even good ol' self-sufficiency is now well beyond most people's dreams.
