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 ...
