I've met a few Mr Simpkins in my time but I never aspired to follow in their footsteps.
Instead, I used the bit of parchment that suggested that I had qualified as an accountant as my passport to travel the world. Some 7,300 days nett and fifteen countries later, I finally settled down.
I did squash a few eclairs but I don't have 2.4 children nor do I keep a budgie although it's probably fair to say that I'm a total social failure.
The handwritten dedication on the flyleaf reads, "To my darling Lee, Happy Birthday, Love Sue 8/95", and to ensure that darling Lee would fully appreciate the gift, loving Sue had left the Chatswood ABC Bookshop's sales docket dated 27/08/95 for $75 as a handy bookmark inside the book.
It stayed there for over thirty years until I picked up the same book yesterday at Vinnies in Moruya for a mere two dollars. Wayne the Bookwhisperer, who prices all of Vinnies' books and thinks nothing of slapping a $10 price on a second-hand copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey", knows his fellow-Moruyans well enough to realise that an encyclopedia of the English language wouldn't exactly fly off the shelf, hence the cheap price for what is still an almost pristine copy which even darling Lee didn't seem to have looked at much in all those thirty years. Look, I don't mean to denigrate those who prefer "Fifty Shades of Grey" to this beautifully produced encyclopedia of the English language - and for those people who do, let me explain that denigrate means "put down" - but for me this was the find of the week.
I love reading about words; I love writing with words; I love listening to words; in fact, words are all we have, you and I, as you sit in front of your computer and I sit and tap at my keyboard, but words failed me as I listened to the news on the car radio on the drive home. According to one piece of news, an estimated 5.5 million, or close on 20% - TWENTY PERCENT!!! - of the entire Australian population has a disability and many are on the payroll with the euphemistically called and much abused National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS. Even the word "insurance" is an abuse because, according to the Oxford dictionary, "insurance" is "an arrangement with a company in which you pay them regular amounts of money and they agree to pay the costs, for example, if you die or are sick, or if you lose or damage something such as your health, your life, your possessions, etc." No-one pays any amount of money, regular or otherwise, into the NDIS, other than the other 80% of Australia's long-suffering taxpayers who are currently being hit with some $45 BILLION - a figure which is estimated to DOUBLE by 2031-2032 - so that little old ladies can fritter away their time playing bingo at the Returned and Services League Club while NDIS-provided personal carers dust their venetian blinds and clean their bathrooms and kitchens and mow their front lawns, and revoltingly obese men with tattoos all over them can come to the swimming pool attended by their NDIS-provided personal carers in a futile attempt to lose the excess weight they accumulated through an alcohol-induced lifestyle. I am not exaggerating - I have met several of both kinds! The NDIS has become the new #MeToo movement: where once they prided themselves on the number of pills they took, they now take pride that their NDIS-package is bigger than yours!
The NDIS was one of those Labor government ideas which, as well-meaning as it might have been, has completely gone off the rails, and is now almost impossible to rein back in. A recent case in point was an unsuccessful attempt to stop paying for sex workers attending to the "personal needs" of disabled people which resulted in a major outcry and the repeated mention of "human rights". I am all for looking after the nation's truly disabled but free sex workers? What next? Free P&O cruises? This is unaffordable and corrupting welfare on steroids!
Perhaps by the time the Chinese arrive on our shores to freshen up our sadly depleted gene pool, our nation will be girth by wheelchairs occupied by one half - many of whom would be better off if they tried to keep fit by walking - while the other half serves them caffé lattes and cleans their venetian blinds, if indeed they are not also attending to their more "personal needs". And there are supposed to be people who complain that we waste too much of taxpayers' money on the AUKUS submarine deal!
As for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language which has already entertained me for hours and re-activated brain cells I had almost forgotten I had, if you know someone called Lee whose birthday is in August, please give him my thanks for having left it in such pristine condition by hardly ever using it. I'm making up for all that lost time!
When I first came to Canberra, I moved into a place called Hillside Hostel because it sat on a hill, but not just any hill – it was on Capital Hill, which is where the New Parliament House now stands. The wide expanse of Capital Hill had been significant for Hillside because local residents had complained about the proposed construction of a men's hostel in their suburb. Capital Hill was a compromise; it kept the men away from the general populace, from the housewives across the city. It kept them safe.
Aside from its conspicuous location, Hillside was so notorious because it had the worst living conditions. The rooms were spartan apart from the dust and cobwebs. They smelt of linseed oil from the bulky brown linoleum tiles curling up on the floor. Dirty yellow newspaper sheets were laid out under the lino covering the pine floorboards. The mattresses were horse hair and riddled with fleas. The walls were one hundred percent pure unadulterated asbestos. Roofs were galvanised, with pools of water that collected in the corridors.
There was never any hot water, which meant that showers were taken cold. In the middle of a Canberra winter, this was especially bracing. The men were given one towel per week – holey, stained, malodorous – along with slivers of soap. The shower blocks had no tiles, doors, curtains or dividers.
In the mess, a bottle of black sauce half full of sediment sat in the middle of each table alongside two empty sauce bottles filled with salt and sugar. On Saturday mornings, the scrambled eggs – made from dried egg powder – tasted of fish fried in the same aluminium pan the night before. The porridge was sugary sweet and attracted swarms of blowflies.
The occupants were a chaos of cultures: Poles, Maltese, Yugoslavs, Balts, Greeks. When it came to the Italians and Germans, the memories of the war were still fresh in people's minds. I heard of a few Germans who were told to leave their worksites in the middle of the day simply because the foreman didn't approve of them.
I left Hillside Hostel after a few months when I joined the ANZ Bank who moved me into Barton House in nearby Brisbane Avenue, where most of their single men were billetted. Hillside Hostel finally closed in 1968.
It took another twelve years before work began on building the new Parliament House where the hostel once stood. While Hillside Hostel had seen the odd scuffle or bare-knuckle fistfight, it was nothing compared to the bloodsport that now takes place inside the new Parliament House.
All this came back to me when I discovered this Court Notice hidden away in the backpages of the Canberra Times of Wednesday, 11 June 1952:
Rudolf "Rudi" Klug had arrived in Melbourne as a "Jennings German" aboard the NAPOLI in 1951, and had like me lived in Hillside Hostel.
He had married, had become an Australian, and had divorced again ...
... and, despite his "criminal record", had become the owner of the multi-million-dollar businesses Canberra Roof Trusses (CRT), CFM Kitchens, and Canberra Fascia Boards by the time I met him sometime in the late 1980s after he had called me to computerise the accounting functions of all his businesses which saved him lots of money and made me quite a bit, too.
His business lives on as CRT Building Products but, judging by his date of birth, I doubt he's still "riding after dark a motor cycle that did not have a rear light showing". Having had you as a client, it's been good knowing you, Rudi, and I trust you enjoy the rest after a long and successful life.
No overweight people! This photo was taken in my (c)old hometown twenty-five years after the war. The years of starvation were over but it was still some time before the Golden Arches became omnipresent, and people still ate when they were hungry and not just out of boredom.
The building in the background housed the indoor pool. As pre-teen "Volksschüler" in the 1950s our teachers would take us there to teach us the art of survival in an alien element, commonly known as 'swimming', which culminated in a certificate from the Deutschen Lebens-Rettungs-Gesellschaft (DLRG) to say that we had managed to cross the length of the pool without filling our lungs completely with chlorinated water. This entitled us to wear this "Freischwimmer" badge on our swimtrunks.
Those were the days of what I hereby claim to be the German invention of the extra-short "Dreiecksbadehose", popularised by an Australian prime minister as 'budgie smugglers' but satirised well before then by the American author P.J. O'Rourke with these words: "The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German." As I grew older and began to hitchhike all over Europe and North Africa, I was always able to spot a German from miles away, long before I could even hear him, by his small "Badehose".
Not that all of us poor and underprivileged "Volksschüler" had the means to buy this then 'de rigueur' swimwear; some of us had a loose-fitting version stitched together by our mothers from leftover material, with one really poor one even showing up in - blessedly clean - underpants.
To get into the indoor pool, we received a metal token and a coloured elastic band. The metal token went into a meter which made the hot water flow and, after just a short few minutes, made it stop again, which wasn't surprising as few of us had the luxury of a bathroom at home and would've happily spent hours under those hot showers.
The coloured elastic had to be worn on the wrist to indicate when we entered the pool. A large "clock" hung over the pool which, instead of numerals, was divided into various colour zones, and as soon as the large hand ever so slowly entered "our" colour zone, we had to leave the pool and return to the change-room. All very orderly and very "German".
I've forgotten if there was the chance of a second shower on the way out. What I haven't forgotten is the day my mother stitched that highly coveted "Freischwimmer" badge onto my swim shorts which were short but never as short as the extra-short "Dreiecksbadehose" which to this day I have spurned to wear despite having voted Liberals all my life.
Our guest cottage, in which the original owners of "Riverbend" are said to have lived while they built the 'Big House', has always been empty, and so we were happy to hand it over to anyone who wanted to spend a relaxing week by the river - free of charge, of course.
During my time with the Australian National University, I took scores of foreign students down to "Riverbend" for a bit of a taste of Australian beaches and the countryside, by which they could kindly remember their time in Australia after they had returned to their home countries.
At one time, I even handed the key to the cottage to a barman at the Austrian Club who wanted to give his son a holiday of canoeing and swimming in the Clyde River but lacked the money to do so. They spent an enjoyable week at "Riverbend", at the end of which they left the key under the mat and a message scribbled hastily on the bottom of a pizza box, "Thanks, Peter!" From memory, it was a "Hawaiian Supreme".
Not everyone was as thoughtless as that, and we still fondly remember Joan and Ron Hogan who were good friends from our time with the Eurobodalla Country Music and Social Club. They spent a week - or was it two? - in our guest cottage sometime in 2006. A few weeks after they had left, a big parcel arrived. In it was the above watercolour of Riverbend's jetty, painted by Joan Hogan during their stay with us.
The painting now has pride of place in "Bonniedoon", and every time I open my eyes after a refreshing afternoon nap, I look at it again. Joan and Ron are both dead now but their memory lives on at "Riverbend".
Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common that they had believed they had."
So begins the Prologue to James Hilton's Lost Horizon which is perhaps best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La, a fictional utopian lamasery high in the mountains of Tibet.
I first read the book after I had come down from Burma to Singapore in 1975 and stayed in the newly-opened Shangri-La Hotel on Orchard Road. There, on the bedside table in my deluxe room in the Garden Wing, was a complimentary copy with the hotel's inscription "Inspired by the legendary land featured in James Hilton's 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, the name Shangri-La encapsulates the serenity and service for which our hotels and resorts are renowned worldwide" on its cover.
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"This captivating story you are about to read was written in 1933 by an English novelist who wrote of an idyllic settlement high in the mountains of Tibet. Today, even amongst those who have never heard of Lost Horizon, the words 'Shangri-La' stand as a synonym for paradise. In 1971, a deluxe hotel was founded in the thriving city of Singapore in Southeast Asia. In choosing the name Shangri-La, there was a desire to set a standard, to create an identity that would eventually produce a group of hotels unique in the world. As the group expanded, it has sought to retain all the ideals of its mythical namesake. Serenity, harmony and natural beauty, all characteristics of the Shangri-La group. This enchanting book will give you a glimpse of this world. A world once imagined, a dream that has become a reality. We hope you enjoy it."
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"Lost Horizon" had been published in 1933, a year in which the world needed romance and adventure more than ever. As the dark clouds of another war gathered on the horizon, and as unemployment and near-starvation added to the gloom, Hilton's novel offered readers a welcome means of escape - escape into a sanctuary hidden from the cruel world. Shangri-La is not a retreat from the future men cannot endure; it is a shelter against conditions that already existed in 1932.
If Shangri-La is a utopia, it is smaller than most in both size and idealistic vision. Except for semi-immortality, it offers nothing that the world does not already possess. Happy natives provided food and clothing. The valley had its own gold mine, and the High Lama imported only carefully selected luxuries deemed truly beneficial to health and happiness. The monks had discovered the key to longevity, and devoted their extra years to the appreciation of life and the pursuit of wisdom. Rejecting the virtues of hard work and ambition, they adopted a philosophy of moderation in all things, "avoiding excess of all kinds - even excess of virtue itself".
Shangri-La is modelled on the classical Greek view of moderation, including moderation to immortality. Hilton realised that absolute immortality was unlikely to be believed by his readers. Instead, he wins them over with a more plausible dream: a long life, enhanced by good health, spent in quiet contentment. Conway, the main protagonist in the book, realises that, for all its allure, Shangri-La is a prison and he must choose between a long life as its supreme ruler and freedom at the risk of death.
Conway's dilemma is our dilemma because we all have the need for such a place, even if only in our imagination.
Here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La!
P.S. I even have some of my shirts still wrapped up in Shangri-La laundry bags, and never worn since. How's that for a souvenir from long ago?
P.P.S. The long-forgotten Lux Radio Theatre broadcast "Lost Horizon" and other radio-plays. It's what you get when you wash with Lux toilet soap ☺
No other novel in the canon of Hermann Hesse's fiction matches the immense appeal pf "Siddhartha". Inspired by Hesse's profound regard for Indian philosophy and written in prose of almost biblical simplicity, it chronicles the quest of the Brahmin Siddhartha for the conquest of suffering and fear.
His tortuous road leads him through the temptations of luxury and wealth, the delights of sensual love, and the sinister threat of death-dealing snakes, towards fulfilment of his destiny as a ferryman guided by the all-knowing voice of the running river ...
To read the book, click here; or listen to the audio book here.
It's low tide in the river, and I'm in need of some refreshments as well.
I was unwashed, unshaven, and unprepared when a strange man with a white beard came strolling down the driveway, taking photos as he went. We value our privacy and I was in no mood to tolerate anyone invading it. "You seem to be lost!" I challenged him. "Hello, Peter", he replied, "I'm Bill Crowle from Canberra".
That took me back, quite a few years back, to my time in Canberra when I was still operating Canberra Computer Accounting Systems and Bill's wife Mary had been the accountant with one of my clients. I have had good relations with all my clients, and enduring friendships with some of them, but somehow Bill and Mary had dropped off the radar.
I don't know what made Bill drop in on me after almost three decades. Perhaps it was because, as he told me, his wife Mary had died a few years ago, and he was trying to re-connect with some people from the past. I expressed my condolences and we exchanged pleasantries, even though I still felt uncomfortable in my unwashed and unshaven state.
He left shortly afterwards but left his email address for future contact. He also left links to some YouTube clips of trips he and Mary had taken after he'd retired in 2001. The one above was of their trip to Thursday Island where I had lived and worked in 1977, and it brought back many happy memories for me, although Bill's wonky camera work didn't help.
Thanks for letting me see this clip, Bill, but don't give up your day job!
P.S. Those memories made me dust of some of my old photos, including the ones I took on my return trip to Thursday Island in 2005 - click here.
This famous line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" pretty much sums up the Arabian Peninsula: while it is gifted with a fabulous hydrocarbon endowment worth trillions of dollars, it has almost no water and relies on nearly 450 desalination plants to stop everyone from going thirsty.
About 100 million people live in the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – all now under Iranian attack. Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are, for all practical purposes, completely dependent on the desalination plants, particularly for metropolises such as Dubai. Saudi Arabia, and especially its capital, Riyadh, also relies on them.
Take the Jubail desalination plant, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. It supplies Riyadh, via a roughly 500-kilometre-long pipeline system, with more than 90 per cent of its drinking water. If this plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed, Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week.
Any direct attack on them by Iran would be considered a massive escalation, so perhaps it is a step too far for Tehran. Still, they don’t have many other options to prevail. Its only options are to hunker down, in the hope that a long-lasting conflict becomes economically too painful for its enemies, or go after so-called soft targets like energy sites, airports and water installations. Let’s hope the Islamic Republic, feeling cornered and fighting for its survival, doesn’t take this last step because, while oil is essential, water is irreplaceable.
So far, "Operation Epic Fury" has been a stunning aerial success, but have Trump and America the willpower and the military power to fight a prolonged war against a desperate regime fighting for its very survival? Or will they, after having bombed the place back into the stone-age, pull out again, as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?
Friedrich Nietzsche lived a troubled adolescence, stemming from the intense difficulty he had in spelling his own name. This difficulty has continued to this day in the spelling of his name in bathroom graffiti and on t-shirts proclaiming "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger" (neither does arthritis but it doesn't make me stronger).
As for pronouncing his name, I much rather talk about Freud - whose name is also easier to spell - but a useful mnemonic is to cast your mind back to your first girlfriend and the time when you whispered into her ear "I Nietzsche more than ever!" just before she stood you up.
Now that we have both the spelling and the pronunciation out of the way, enjoy the movie "When Nietzsche Wept" which is based on Irvin D. Yalom's book of the same name. It blends both fact and fiction and offers you the chance to nod knowingly next time someone mentions Nietzsche to you or drops the word 'limerence' (look it up, Des!)
For my money, the passage "It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!" gives me my much-needed excuse because, you see, I did my children a favour by not having them!
If you disagree with the land value on your notice of valuation or land tax assessment, you can lodge an objection. You will need to provide sales evidence from around 1 July in the valuing year to support your objection. If you do not provide supporting evidence, your objection will be disallowed."
Thus wrote the Valuer-General when he sent me these two Notices of Valuation which total $2,880,000. That value EXcludes the house and all other structures, and is $250,000 higher than the previous valuations three years ago, and is used to calculate the annual council rates.
Yes, I would very much like to object to the Valuer-General's assessment as I already pay council rates of about $500 A MONTH, which is far too much to pay for the privilege of living on my own piece of dirt. But how do I provide the required "sales evidence from around 1 July in the valuing year" when "Riverbend" is so unique that no similar property of this size and in this location has been sold since I bought it in 1993?
I guess I will be stuck with it until I sell it — at no more than land value.
Only the Germans would, or could, have a word with a double-h in the middle of it. It was one of the first words I learnt in post-war Germany: "Durchhalten!" Don't give up! Things will get better! And things did get better! Much better! Not through luck but through hard work.
"Durchhalten!" has been my motto all my life, and I am happy I grew up then instead of now. I am no longer a German and I no longer speak German except when necessary, but when I get into a tight spot, I still tell myself, "Durchhalten!". It helped me then, and it helps me now!
The year was 1985. I had come back from my last posting to Greece. My Saudi boss, reluctant to let me go, had promised to let me continue my work from Australia, and so I bought this property on the edge of Townsville's CBD, which was going to be both office and home to me.
I bought it for something like $50,000-plus but then left town as the promised work never materialised. I hung onto the place for some years as a rental property but the trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants was just too much bother and so I sold it in April 1998, a whole thirteen years later, for a mere $90,000 - hardly the sort of rags-to-riches story so often touted by real estate agents.
What was it Heraclitus had said about rivers? It is not possible to step in the same river twice? Well, I haven't been back to Townsville since then.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
For a translation, click here.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
