from left to right: Neil "Jacko" Jackson, yours truly, Bob Green.
"Jacko" was later knighted for his services to the brewing industry
and became Sir Osis of the Liver and presumbaly succumbed to it.
We didn't use the word 'Christmas' then. Christmas came with too much emotional baggage. It reminded us of families and homes which we were far away from or didn't even have.
Of course, I'm talking of those many years - decades, in fact - spent in boarding houses, construction camps, hotels, and company housing. Come Christmastime, those who had families and homes had gone; those who didn't hadn't.
My last Christmas in Germany in 1964 was spent in a mobile construction office which was both my office and my "bedroom", and yet preferable to the folding bed in the lounge room I usually occupied at home. It was a lonely Christmas as the construction site had closed down for the long winter. The company thought themselves lucky to have me copying technical drawings for the coming spring's reopening while also acting as unpaid "night watchman". It prepared me well for what was to come!
There was Lüderitz in what was then South-West Africa and is now Namibia, a former German colony where I spent a lonely Christmas after my flatmate, another young German, had decided to travel up to the Etoscha National Park. I would have loved to have gone too but was determined to save money to get out of the place as soon as possible.
The natives called it "the land God made in anger", and this depressing view from the back of my flat tells you why. Three months later I was on my way to Cape Town where I boarded the next ship back to Australia.
Then there was Barton House in Canberra, throbbing with life from its 300-odd - and some very odd - inmates, which turned into a morgue by Christmastime. The dining room was roped off except for one table next to the kitchen. That one table was large enough for those left behind.
It's hard not to be reminded of something when you're surrounded by half a dozen gloomy faces. So for my last Christmas in Canberra in 1969, just before I flew to my next job in New Guinea, I hitched and hiked to Angle Crossing where I spent a solitary weekend writing letters, the only device known to man that combines solitude with good company.
Years later, and just one day before Christmas, I booked myself into hospital on Bougainville Island with acute appendicitis . "You'd better get on the next plane out and into a hospital at home", the doctor told me. He was already deep into his medicinal alcohol and had trouble remembering which side my appendix was on. "This is my home", I said. He made one long incision just to make sure he wouldn't miss it.
What I had missed was that my best friend Noel Butler was coming over from Wewak to spend - ahem! - Christmas with me. He must have got there while I was still under the anaesthetic, because there he was standing at the foot of my bed. He'd gone to my donga and waited and finally asked the hous boi where I was. "Masta bagarap long haus sik".
We tried again the following year by which time I had moved to Lae on the north coast of the New Guinea mainland. By the time Christmas and Noel had come, there was just enough time left for a drink at the club and a game of chess before I flew out to my next job in Burma.
And so it went on, year after year, either coming or going or laid up with something, deftly avoiding Christmas. It's no longer so easy anymore!
