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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How many times can one watch 'Casablanca'?

 

 

Retirement would be a lot harder, were it not for ABC Radio National, my large collection of books, and my equally large collection of movies, but how many times can one watch even as good a film as 'Casablanca'?

Radio National gets me through the night when sleep won't come, and my growing number of unread books give me something to look forward to, while those timeless movies of yesteryears are a welcome relief from TV's tedious cooking shows and home renovation programs (not to mention 'Midsomer Murders' with its endless supply of dead bodies).

It's the beginning of another beautiful day in retirement and I might watch 'Casablanca" for just one more time.

 

 

Brian Herde, you've been one of a kind!

 

 

We worked together on the Bougainville Copper Project. Then we met again in mid-1974 in Port Moresby where I worked as internal auditor with AIR NIUGINI and he as accountant for Tutt Bryants. Then he visited me in Lae just before I flew out to Burma, and we spent Christmas 1975 at my friend's place in Wewak on my return.

Coming back from Iran and taking another job in Moresby in 1976, I spent many weekends with him, and when I left for another job on Thursday Island, he visited me there in 1977. Later that year I relocated to Honiara and he came to visit me there for Christmas. The following year, 1978, I took a posting in Penang in Malaysia and he invited himself there, too, for what was from memory a four-week-long holiday. Then I took a break from being his constant host, during which time I briefly met up with him again in Adelaide on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia, until my transfer to Piraeus in Greece in 1983, when he wrote to asked if I had a job for him there. I flew him out at company expense, put him up in a hotel in Piraeus, and paid him US$3,000 a month, and he set to work for me for three months.

That was Brian Herde: always good company, in exchange for which he demanded nothing more than full free board and lodging. After his last uninvited visit to my home in Canberra in 1992 - or was it 1993? - we lost contact and our twenty-five-year-long friendship had seemingly come to an end. During all this time we had never discussed financial matters other than those pertaining to our work, but you can't be a good friend with someone for all that time without having at least some inkling of his financial position, and my inkling of his financial position was what in the vernacular is best described as being "filthy rich!"

 

Searching the Ryerson Index shows that the official death notice was published
in the Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, which is where Brian grew up.

 

Which made it all the sadder when around this time last year I found on the internet this death notice. He had died just two years past his retirement age without ever enjoying all that accumulated wealth!

Still, wanting to know how he had met his untimely death, I wrote to Townsville Hospital. They asked me to pay a non-refundable $57.65 search fee — there was a time when fees were charged in round figures; now it's $49.95 or $57.65 as though someone had calculated with the help of some highly complicated formula the exact cost of the service — even though they couldn't guarantee that they would find anything.

 

 

All his free board-and-lodgings over twenty-five years had cost me plenty, so perhaps another fifty-seven dollars wouldn't have mattered, but then I thought, "Let dead friends lie", and just had a toast to his memory. As I will again today. Brian Herde, you've been one of a kind!

 

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A Speck in the ocean

 

 

During one of my usual visits to Vinnies, the little old lady behind the counter complained about the miserable weather. Listening to her accent, I said, "Well, not as miserable as the weather in England." "English?" she remonstrated. "I'm Irish!"

And so began our conversation during which she wanted to know what my accent was. Hearing that I had been a German in the past, she piped up, "Did you know about that chap who paddled all the way from Germany to Australia?" She was a passionate ABC Radio National listener and had heard about Oskar Speck on "Conversations with Richard Fidler".

Very few people in Germany have ever heard of Oskar Speck, and here's this little old lady in an op-shop in Batemans Bay who seems to know all about him, on top of which she's like me a dedicated ABC Radio National listener. A friend for life -or at least whenever we'll meet at Vinnies!

 

Illustration from "mare" magazine; they got the idea for the article from me;
I get this illustration from their article; it seems like a fair exchange

 

I had first heard about Oskar Speck when I lived and worked on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait where he had made landfall after having spent seven years paddling his tiny kayak from Germany to Australia. There was no internet in those days and it was impossible to find out more.

Only in recent years could I put together enough information to do a write-up in April 2005 - click here. Kayakers from Germany contacted me and I was happy to share with them the material for their own publication. I also suggested to the German magazine "mare" that they publicise Oskar Speck's amazing feat. I had no reply but was pleased to see this article appear in their December 2021/January 2022 issue.

 

"Odyssee im Kajak - Von Ulm nach Australien"

 

Since those early days when I could find hardly anything about Oskar Speck on the internet, I've been pleased to note that the number of entries has steadily increased as this man deserves a whole lot more publicity. Wikipedia now mentions him, and the NSW Sea Kayak Club has turned it into a three-part story.

 

 

The Australian Maritime Museum, which still keeps some Oskar Speck memoribilia, devotes a whole webpage to him, and I could even locate the ABC Radio National recording that the little old lady in Vinnies had listened to just four days ago - click here.

 

 

Oskar Speck never left Australia again, and was perhaps too busy getting rich from dealing in precious stones to ever write the hoped-for book.

 

Sydney Airport Arrival Card after Oskar Speck returned from a three-month-trip to Germany on 17 August 1970. There are several papers documenting Oskar Speck's arrival on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait and his subsequent internment at the Tatura Camp in Victoria on naa.gov.au. Click on "Explore the Collection", then on "RecordSearch", type in keyword "Speck", and click on "Digital copy" of any of the four entries marked Oskar Speck.

 

Another German adventurer of his time, Heinz Helfgen, had from 1951 to 1953 cycled round the world and written a hugely popular book, "Ich radle um die Welt" (I cycle around the world), which Oskar Speck could easily have bettered with his very own "I paddle round the world".

Luckily, a Tobias Friedrich has stepped into the breach, and wrote a fictionalised version of Oskar Speck's record-making paddle under the name "Der Flussregenpfeifer" which has just now appeared in German bookshops. For a "Leseprobe" (if your German is up to it), click here.

 

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Oskar Speck died on 28 Mar 1993, aged 86, in Gosford on the Central Coast, and is buried at the Point Clare Cemetery, Sect. Lwn 7 Row 38 Plot 30. His gravestone was erected by his partner Nancy Jean Steele who occupies the plot next to him. A beautiful story right to the end.

 

 

Where are 'Buddy' and his master now?

 

 

On our way back from Moruya where we had a beautiful lunch of chicken and chips at the Moruya Bowling Club, we briefly pulled up at Casey's Beach. As we sat there, watching the waves, I remembered that several years ago in the same spot we had met a chap in an old four-wheel drive with a trailer hitched up to it.

 

 

He and his dog 'Buddy' had just spent a comfortable night in that spot with a million-dollar view and no sound other than the surf - and not a cent to pay for it! The trailer was all that was left of the occupant's Jim's Mowing franchise, which he had bought and then tried to sell again to another sucker but couldn't because, as he told me, most of the money made from all the work always went straight to the franchisors.

 

 

So, he had chucked a comfy mattress onto it, covered the lot with a tarpaulin, and set off to travel round Australia, next stop Byron Bay. We had parted company when his fishing reel started screaming and he had to rush to the beach to take in his breakfast, a freshly-caught bream. Years later, I'm left wondering, "Where are 'Buddy' and his master now?"

 

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Memories of Bay Street

 

Toasting my new overseas job with my then neighbour before leaving for the airport.
He was the Tin Man I wrote about in "Dig here!".

 

It was early 1981. After more than ten years overseas and the last eighteen months on the road in Australia, I'd taken up a permanent accounting position with the construction company AV Jennings in Townsville. The work was easy and the pay adequate.

We had bought this small house on the beach at Pallarenda just ten minutes out of town. It was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers with holes in them, and I had begun to turn domestic with gusto.

 

The house is just to the left of the swimming enclosure and marked with a red dot

 

The house was just one block away from the beach and the shark-proof swimming enclosure. From the corner window we could see the ocean and Magnetic Island on the horizon. The sound of the surf was always in our ears, and brolgas and curlews walked the streets at night. So many happy memories! If it is true that we remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them, then happy memories are the worst. That is the trouble with real life: happiness is so rarely saved for the end.

 

Sales history: I bought it in 1981 for $35,000 and sold it again in 2000 for $115,000; it was rented out for $300 a week until 2016 when it was sold for $313,000. Its current estimated resale value is $690,000 to $940,000 - click here

 

One day we met a chubby Labrador walking down the road. We liked him and he liked us, and from then on he spent more time with us than with his owners. We called him "Labby" and he listed to it.

 

I named it KARAWEIK in remembrance of a dinner at a restaurant of the same name in Rangoon where I had decided to ask a certain person to share the ups and downs of this unpredictable life with me. I loved her without knowing how, blindly living married life as if I were still a single man. "Never say you know the last word about any human heart!"

 

 

Money was still tight and our furnishings were sparse and second-hand but we lived in the tropics and spent as much time outside as inside.

 

Even the washing machine was an old twintub with the lid missing (on far left)
which we bought for fifty dollars and for which I cut a wooden replacement lid

 

I had a water diviner sink a bore and instal a pump which was connected to a timer which started each morning at 5 o'clock to wake us up to another glorious morning in the tropics. I grew vegetables under the elderberry tree along the side of the house with amazing results.

 

It was an old house - even the toilet was downstairs - but it was solid and had survived several cyclones and, above all, it was comfortable.

 

 

I tried to be a handyman, with mixed results, and "Lubby" for company.

 

 

It was beautiful one day and perfect the next, and I couldn't wait to get back to our little house by the beach after a day's work in the city ...

 

 

... until eight months later the fatal phone call came in: did I want to work overseas again? The call of the wild again and a new challenge! So it was back to New Guinea and then Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Shades of Hermann Hesse: "But there is no centre in my life, my life hovers between poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there."

We left Pallarenda for New Guinea in January 1982. These oh-so-long-forgotten photos had been taken barely three months earlier. Then I found two more photographs with a strange car parked in the driveway.

 

 

I flipped them over, and on the back was my best friend's handwriting:

 

"Taken Dec. 1982" and printed in March 1983. By the time my old mate Noel had visited Townsville to see where I used to live I was already working in Saudi Arabia, and by the time these photographs reached me, my domestic bliss was over. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Happiness is like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

 

A little over three years later I was back in Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me. You can't step into the same river twice! --- to which a good friend added, "... but you can sure step into the same pile of shit more than once!" Je suis vraiment très très désolé, Daw Khin San Myint!

As Hermann Hesse wrote: "Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning."

Reluctantly, I sold the little house on the beach in December 1999 ...

 

 

... and here's a current street view of 3 Bay Street, courtesy of GOOGLE Map. They've cut down the frangipani and elderberry tree that used to shade my vegetable garden, and they've also removed the small palms I had planted on the nature strip. But it still looks very homely. If only ...

 

 

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