Otterly delightful

 

 

I've just returned from another long afternoon at "Bonniedoon", happy and relaxed, and what better way to finish off the day than by watching the story of Gavin Maxwell's otter. I shall never tire of watching it again and again and again as it is so otterly delightful.

 

 

Gavin Maxwell's fireplace at Camusfearna is inscribed with the Latin words 'NON FATUUM HUC PERSECUTUS IGNEM' which, according to GOOGLE, means, "It is no will-o'-the-wisp that I have followed here".

What a thoughtful and deeply meaningful inscription. If "Bonniedoon" had a fireplace (now there's an idea for the next winter!) I'd borrow it.

 

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My view of the world

 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach" (Henry David Thoreau) - but he still went to his mother's house regularly for his meals and laundry in his Walden years.

 

It wasn't in his "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" but elsewhere that I read that Lawrence of Arabia - who was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 46 - was in the habit of riding his motorcycle at an excessive speed with the notion that an accident would end his life while he was still in full possession of his powers and so spare him the indignity of old age.

If this is true it shows a great weakness in that strange but otherwise amazing character, because a complete life includes old age as well as youth and maturity. I seem to have skipped maturity, but I make up for it now by enjoying my old age which has its own pleasures, which, although different, are no less than the pleasures of youth. Reflecting on my past as I sit in peaceful "Melbourne" is one of those pleasures.

 

Everything looks better by the light of a kerosene lamp, even my now ridiculous-looking Lawrence of Arabia headdress

 

For most of my life I was assailled by so many impressions, saw so many things, and met so many people, that I had no time to reflect. The very moment I lived was so absorbent that I had no notion for introspection.

In youth the years stretch out so long that it is hard to imagine they will ever pass. Even in middle age, with ever-increasing life expectancy, death is still something remote. I have never kept a diary, but as friends and acquaintances begin to disappear and I can no longer share those memories with them, I wish I had done so, to better reflect on those busy years now, to see for myself more distinctly what they were really all about, and in so doing get some sort of coherence into my life, because if my life lacked anything, anything at all, it was coherence.

 

ماشاء الله - God has willed it - in which case it's meant to have all made sense, my years in Saudi Arabia, my tme in the Solomon Islands ...

 

Reflecting on my life must seem egotistic but to me I am the most important person in the world despite the fact that, from the standpoint of common sense, my life has been of no consequence whatsoever, and it would have made no difference to the universe if I had never existed.

Not that I anticipate to cease to exist, as they say these days, "anytime soon" (and how I hate this phrase!) I keep posting these reflections the same way as I made my will after which I did not die immediately. That was many years ago, and I did it as a precaution, just as these reflections are meant to make sense of my life, so that I can afford to look the rest of it in the eye without too much concern about the past.

 

 

For far too long I have always lived in the future that now, even though the future is so short, I cannot get rid of the habit. This habit has been so strong that it may even outlive me, but for this short moment I live in the moment and enjoy my view of the world from inside "Melbourne", wishing that this moment may last forever, إن شاء الله .

 

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Ein Freund, ein guter Freund ...

 

 

You have to give it to the Germans for making a whole song-and-dance act out of the word "Freund", perhaps because to them — or at least to the Germans I used to knew — a "Freund" is so much more than a 'friend' is to an English-speaker who'd just as soon use the word 'acquaintance' if it weren't so much harder to spell.

An acquaintance whose neighbour I'd been in Camp 1 at Panguna on the Bougainville Copper Project found me through my Bougainville website, after which we kept writing emails, followed by an unexpected visit.

There was nothing much connecting us other than having worked - albeit in unrelated occupations: he an engineer, and I an accountant - on the same construction project, and having been neighbours in the same construction camp, but then so had thousands of others, and the connection slowly fizzled out. Until today when this email arrived:

"Been doing a lot of travel; early last year in the USA for five weeks, and recently eight weeks in New Zealand, of which four weeks were spent camping. End of the month, train to Bangkok for a week, then back to house maintenance issues which are never-ending. Healthwise pretty good but not getting any younger. Trust all is good with you."

There was a time when I would've envied him his travels, but all I could manage this time was a relieved, "Better you than me", because my travelling days are well and truly behind me. And not because I've become immobile and feeble - which I haven't, not yet, anyway - but because, for the first time in my life, I feel totally at home where I am.

Of course, at my age - particularly at my age - I can always do with another acquaintance, if not indeed a friend, to replenish the thinned-out ranks, and so I replied. Something may come of it, or nothing may come of it, it doesn't matter. That's the other thing about getting old: nothing matters other than watching the next morning's sunrise.

Perhaps I'll greet tomorrow morning's sunrise by singing along with Heinz Rühmann (who, incidentally, was my "Patenonkel" before he became too famous for poor people like us), "Ein Freund, ein guter Freund ..."

 

Sonniger Tag! Wonniger Tag! Klopfendes Herz und der Motor ein Schlag! Lachendes Ziel! Lachender Start und eine herrliche Fahrt! Rom und Madrid nehmen wir mit. So ging das Leben im Taumel zu dritt! Über das Meer, über das Land, haben wir eines erkannt: Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist das beste was es gibt auf der Welt. Ein Freund bleibt immer Freund und wenn die ganze Welt zusammenfällt. Drum sei auch nie betrübt,     wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt. Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, dass ist der größte Schatz, den's gibt. Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund, das ist doch das Größte und Beste und Schönste,     was es gibt auf der Welt. Ein Freund bleibt immer dir Freund, und wenn auch die ganze die schlechte     die große die schreckliche, alberne Welt vor den Augen zusammen dir fällt. Drum sei auch niemals betrübt,     wenn dein Schatz dich auch nicht mehr liebt. Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund, das ist der größte Schatz, den’s gibt.

 

 

I was wrong about the Germans being the only ones to make a sing-and-dance act out of the word "Freund". The French did the same out of the word "bon copain", and they seem to have made a better fist of it than did Heinz Rühmann. As for an English version, there simply isn't one.

 

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When in China ...

 

Found on the internet. Source unknown.

 

Remember Trump pointing to Iceland on a map while threatening Greenland with invasion? I bet not many of those rent-a-crowd people that cause all that trouble with their "Palestinian genocide" marches could even point to the place if a map was put under their snotty nose.

Having been a German I am supposed to be biased against the Jews, but even I cannot help but admire how they made the desert bloom while adjacent Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and - if it is a state - Palestine have remained very much the way they were when Jesus last saw them.

In any case, protests, like charity, should begin at home where we have plenty of things to fix before we waste our time and energy on all the problems in the world, most of which remain unfixable for the same reason pharmaceutical companies don't want to find permanent cures.

I don't know how true it is that China is locking up Muslims and turning their mosques into public toilets, but it occurred to me, a neutral bystander, that religion has a lot to answer for. As has had our religion, Christianity, which, thankfully, went through its Reformation which was started when Martin Luther published his 'Ninety-five Theses' in 1517.

That was fifteen hundred years after it got started, whereas Islam only got started in 610 AD (or, as they insist on calling it, CE) which suggests they'd have their own reformation sometime after the year 2100. It's a long time to wait! Should we wait that long? Can we wait that long?

As for those troublemakers who claim to have been hurt in their scuffles with police, give them the same medical opinion we used to get as kids when we hurt ourselves while doing something stupid; "You'll live!"

Don't blame the police who do a difficult job with people who not only want to provoke but also want to be provoked. Always blaming the police will lead to no-one wanting to do their job anymore, and who would protect our properties and lives then when it really matters?

 

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In my native Germany ...

 

 

I almost started writing this post with the words, "My native Germany ...", however, after more than sixty years of having lived just about everywhere else but Germany — and proudly calling myself an Australian despite this country doing its level best to throw away everything that had once made it the best country in the world and embracing everything that will turn it into one of the worst; think diversity, multiculturalism, the Labor Party, and the list goes on — I am as much a native of Germany as I am of the planet Mars.

Anyway, as I was not going to write, my native Germany is a nation of specialists. It's a place where even qualifications have qualifications. Where you can study for seven years to become a window cleaner. That's fine but it left me, who'd been tossed out on the street after just eight years of primary school, nowhere to go but to Australia where I could reinvent myself and become anything I wanted to become.

I didn't need a vocational guidance counsellor to tell me what I wanted to become. In my native Germany I already had my commercial training with an insurance company and followed this up by being paymaster for a large construction company that built autobahns all over Germany.

Lacking any higher education I would never have been dull enough to become an accountant in my native Germany, but after only two years in Australia I became an accountant in South-West Africa, and then an audit clerk in a firm of chartered accountants in New Guinea and then, also in New Guinea, the senior accountant on what was at the time the biggest construction project in the world. Four years later I was chief accountant for a French oil company in Burma, and years later yet, financial controller for a firm of commodity traders in Saudi Arabia.

 

 

Despite the unbroken column of "sehr gut" — except for religion which already then I thought was irrelevant, and Naturlehre which I knew was irrelevant after the teacher had answered my question "Why do I have a belly button" with an evasive "So your stomach can breathe" — in my native Germany they'd still look at my primary-school-only certificate even today and think, "This chap is only good enough for lion taming".

 

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

 

 

In his "Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't", John Atkinson summaries Leo Tolstoy's more than a thousand-pages long novel "War and Peace" very succinctly: "Everyone is sad. It snows."

He never attempted to summarise Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", perhaps because, at just over fifty pages, it's already short enough, or because its themes of death and the search for the meaning of life are a little more difficult to put into five words.

 

 

Actor and director Alexander Kaidanovsky made the only Russian movie adaptation, which includes Tolstoy's living voice reading his story "Wolf".

But back to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" which brings to our attention the unpleasant fact that we all have to die, and that we might have to suffer a whole lot first. Our medicines might be better than those of Ivan's doctors, but we haven't got any closer to escaping mortality, and many people still die only after a long and painful period of disease.

Perhaps Ivan Ilych will also get you thinking about what mortality means for you. Like Ivan, you might start wondering how you should live your life, and how you can find meaning in it - click here. It all ends soon enough some fifty pages later: "He drew in a deep breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched out his limbs, and died."

 

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Bougainville is in the news again

 

 

In so many ways, the years I spent working on the island of Bougainville shaped my life. The work experience I gained from being thrown headfirst into a job that was so big that it seemed impossible at first to get it done gave me the confidence to never be afraid of any challenges and indeed seek them out.

Eventually, that huge gold and copper mine sparked a catastrophic civil war in which many thousands were killed and which forced the closure of the mine in 1989. It's in the news again with talks about reopening it with another $40 billion to be generated over its life span - click here.

I've just come across this YouTube clip of an "expedition" to the crashed Betty bomber in which Admiral Yamamoto was killed in April 1943. It's a bit hyped up because it's far from being an expedition. We went there in 1971 by simply by chartering a plane and flying from Kieta to Buin ...

 

That's me on the left carrying a white bag full of mosquito repellent

 

... sleeping in a native hut on the beach near Buin ...

 

That's me - again - sitting down and calling for room service

 

... and trekking through the jungle next morning to the crash site.

 

That's me - again! - leaning on what's left of Yamamoto's Betty Bomber

 

The following day, we hired a 4WD to take us across the Crown Prince Range back to Panguna. Somewhere in all the dross I had stored for the next twenty years at a friend's place in Canberra, there is a photo of us crossing what was no doubt a crocodile-infested river which the 4WD was unable to cross and in which we then sat for hours, preferring to be eaten by a crocodile than to be dying of heatstroke. If I can find the photo, I'll add it to this post later. As I wrote, Bougainville gave us all the confidence not to be afraid of challenges but to seek them out.

 

Brian Herde with his beloved BRONICA

 

Postscript: All three photos are courtesy of Brian Herde who never went anywhere without his beloved BRONICA, a cheaper alternative to the famous Hasselblad. He died an untimely death in 1999 just 67 years old.

 

 

I never found out what killed him. Maybe he didn't take his ATABRINE.

 

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"Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

 

 

For all you lesser beings who were not born in a non-English-speaking country and ended up monolingual, let me explain: my thinly-disguised alter ego gripping that "AUSKUNFT" counter is asking the question, "Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

For most of my life, while I was chasing work and money around the world — although satisfaction in work always came before money in the bank — it never occurred to me that one day I would be gripping that counter asking the silly question, "What is the meaning of life?"

I was getting satisfaction in my work and I was getting money in the bank, so what else was there? I found out that nothing else was there when I retired. I had plenty of money but no more work, and "der Sinn des Lebens" had gone, leaving me gripping that "AUSKUNFT" counter.

For most of my life, I had an answer to the question "What do you do?" I was either becoming somebody or being somebody, but suddenly, that answer was gone. And with it went a huge chunk of who I thought I was.

So much of my identity was wrapped up in my work. My daily routine, my sense of contribution, even my social circles, they all revolved around my job. When retirement hit, I didn't just lose a pay cheque. I lost myself. Days blended together. Wednesdays felt like Sundays. Time became meaningless when every day became a weekend.

People said stay busy, but that busyness was just noise. It was a lot of movement without meaning. I could fill every hour of the day and still feel completely empty inside. Then there were the friendships at work. Thy evaporated once I had stopped work and I faced a social void.

I think I finally got a grip on it. That grip is firmly on the "AUSKUNFT" counter, still asking the silly question, "Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

 

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P.S. As one reader from far-away Cooktown wrote, "I’ve been pretty stupid in my time and the older I get the more it riles me. As for "Der Sinn des Lebens", I don’t think there is one. We’re born - most of us by accident - and then we start dying, and all we can do during that process is to focus on self-preservation. Many take others into consideration in their actions but many others don’t, and they are the ones that ruin life for the rest of us. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be football and karaoke and no tattoos nor any medical attention for recreational drug addicts. Ah, yes, and no cricket! Just thinking of this list has depressed me enough to get another cold beer from the fridge."

I agree on the cricket, and the recreational drug addicts; also on the tattoos and the karaoke (although I thought that fad had already faded). And I could live with the football on the condition that they don't show it on the telly night after night. Maybe I should invite my reader to write my next post while I get myself another cold beer from the fridge.

 

It's not hoarding if it's books

 

GOOGLE Map

 

Next to my favourite Vinnies shop is Dan Murphy's which always has plenty of undercover parking. I never enter Dan Murphy's, but the other day I found a $10 note in its carpark, and I thought to myself, "What would Jesus have done?" So I went inside and turned it into wine.

 

 

Wine prices being what they are, I was left with enough change to drop into Vinnies for a quick look at their bookshelves. I know I have already enough unread books to last me another lifetime, but I couldn't pass up Geoffrey Blainey's "A Short History of the 20th Century" in perfect mint condition, and "AMO, AMAS, AMAT ... and all that - How to become a Latin Lover" which had been ink-stamped by the Dickson College Library (barcode 1731753 / classification NF 470 MOU) but, judging by its clean condition, never left the lending library before ending up at Vinnies.

 

 

As any bibliophile will tell you, "It's not hoarding if it's books".

 

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"Willst du immer weiter schweifen? Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah."

 

 

I had barely spent two years in Australia before I went overseas again. I lived on many other islands and on the edge of at least two other deserts, and yet, if I had followed Goethe's famous 'Vierzeiler', I could have done all this right here in Australia.

 .

 

Australia isn't just Sydney, the Opera House and the harbour, and the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, nor is it all 'Crocodile Dundee', but something far bigger and better and far more wonderful. I haven't seen all that much of it - although I did manage to squeeze in some out-of-the way places like Mornington Island, Thursday Island, and King Island - and it's now too late to get too far from the nearest medical centre, but there's always YouTube to show me what I missed out on.

I'm going back to watching that YouTube video while you can click here to see what you missed out when you did not let us win that last war.

 

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Memories on a rainy morning

 

 

I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little café, whose glass doors were shut. The café reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because of the cold outside. Five or six seamen, who had spent the night there, muffled in their brown goat-skin reefer-jackets, were drinking coffee or sage and gazing out of the misty windows at the sea."

 

To listen to the full audiobook. click here and here

 

Many a morning, when I was still too early for my office near Agio Nicholaos, I would sit in one or the other kafenion along the quayside of Piraeus, drinking my thick Greek coffee and gazing out at the sea, just as Basil had done on that morning he met Zorba the Greek.

 

 

It always comes back to me on a grey and rainy morning like this morning. Then I wonder why I ever left Greece, and I dip into my much-read copy of "Zorba the Greek" which is full of Zorba’s practical wisdom and zest for life. Zorba manages to see everything and everybody as a miracle worth celebrating, while at the same time recognising that we're all just sacks of bones and flesh and flaws, and that everything we do is probably meaningless in the end.

I was happy then but I didn't know it. As Basil explains at the beginning of chapter VI: "I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been." [click here]

 

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The Sheltering Desert

 

 

My list of boyhood heroes - Doctor Albert Schweitzer, Thor Heyerdahl ("The Kon-Tiki Expedition"), Heinrich Harrer ("Seven Years in Tibet"), and Heinz Helfgen ("Ich radle um die Welt") - has kept growing well into adult life.

When I lived and worked on Thursday Island, I added Oskar Speck who paddled in a tiny "Faltboot" all the way from Germany to the Torres Strait, and even in my retirement I found new inspirations when in an op-shop I picked up a copy of Tom Neale's book "An Island To Oneself".

Long before then though, I added to my list the amazing story of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn who for two years hid out in the waterless Namib desert to avoid being interned during the Second World War.

I first came across the Afrikaans translation of their book "The Sheltering Desert" under its Afrikaans title "Vlug in die Namib" in 1968 when I lived and worked in South-West Africa, or what is now called Namibia.

 

END OF THE ROAD
The heavy iron gates of Windhoek Prison fell to behind us with a clang. I turned round for a moment. Above the inner arch of the gates was an inscription, a little faded but still legible: "Alles zur Besserung!" Those reassuring words had obviously been left over from the days of German rule. So we were to be improved, reformed, rehabilitated as its inmates! In the ordinary way I should have laughed, but we didn't feel much like laughing.
The formalities were soon settled. Our names: Hermann Korn and Henno Martin. Profession: geologists. Then our belts and bootlaces were taken away. After that the cell doors closed behind us.
We were separated now and my sick comrade lay in the next cell. I didn't feel too good myself; we had been on the move all day in order to reach our destination before nightfall. The feeble light of a lamp in the prison yard fell through the bars of my cell window. I could not sleep.
I lay on my back and stared into the semi-darkness. How narrow and confined this small space was after the wide horizons and the high heavens of the desert in which we had lived for so long!

 

 

Its German original, "Wenn es Krieg gibt, gehen wir in die Wüste" ("We hide in the desert when war comes"), seemed to be little-known beyond the borders of South-West Africa then, and is lost in total obscurity now.

 

 

However, its English translation is now long out of copyright and freely available on the internet - click here. And, best of all, this classic tale of African adventure and man's survival in brutal circumstances was made into a movie in 1992 which is also freely available on YouTube.

Enjoy!

 

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A quiet Wednesday

 

 

Padma is taking a friend to the cinema in the Bay to watch "Rental Family". Would I mind being left alone at "Riverbend"? Are you kidding me? Being left alone at "Riverbend" is as close as it gets to bliss! I even told her to charge it to VISA-card!

 

 

It seems that the concept of companies that will rent out platonic companions to lonely locals has bubbled along in Japanese popular culture for more than thirty years. And the industry is likely to continue growing, with no end in sight to Japan’s demographic and social needs.

What a pity the trend hadn't already started when I left Germany, as I would have gladly let them hire my family. They were one of several reasons why I emigrated to Australia. People usually start life by being born. Not me though. I started life when I arrived here in Australia.

Something to reflect on, as I enjoy this quiet Wednesday all by myself.

 

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