SCHLIMM by name, schlimm by nature

 

For more empty cans to fill up your empty time, click here

 

Schlimm, of course, means 'terrible' in the language which we'd all be speaking if a certain Charlie Chaplin-like person had had his way all those many years ago. And Reinhold Schlimm is the name of a certain person who left a comment on my facebook page which led me to discover his collection of empty softdrink cans. Schlimm indeed!

I guess we all have the collecting instinct in us. I started collecting postage stamps when I was a boy in Germany. Selling that collection to raise the money for my fare out to Australia put a final stop to that.

For the next twenty years I travelled light and didn't collect anything other than work experience. Since settling down at "Riverbend" I have been collecting books, at first in mint condition and, after discovering op-shops, second-hand, and movies, first on videos and then on DVDs.

I've always felt a bit guilty about my collecting habit (although not as bad as a certain model railway collector in the U.K. whose collection grew so big that his family had to move out of the house), but seeing Sclimm's collection of empty softdrink cans makes me feel slightly better. His collection is really 'schlimm', but there's hope for me yet!

And just think, Des, what a big collection of empty COKE cans you would have by now, if back then in Camp 6 you had started "doing a Schlimm"!

 

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Julian Barnes' last book

 

 

I've been a fan of Julian Barnes' writing since I read his book "Flaubert's Parrot" - or was it "The Sense of an Ending"? - and have followed him through "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters" and "England, England" and "The Only Story", and several others.

He's just turned eighty two days ago, and "Departure(s)" is supposed to be his last book. It's all about looking back, facing the future, and coming to the end of life, written in Julian Barnes' inimitable style (no, not 'inimicable', Des; that means something totally different!)

 

 

My greatest pleasure when reading his books is simply being with Julian Barnes as he thinks on the page: wry, elegant, pragmatic and self-aware. He is a warm and generous writer, and he makes me feel as though I were in the room with him, pondering life’s big questions.

This book has only just been released and won't show up in my op-shop for years to come, if ever - after all, this is Batemans Bay, and who reads Julian Barnes in Batemans Bay? Indeed, who reads at all, which may explain why there are no more bookshops in the Bay. BOOKTOPIA sell it on ebay for $34.98 - that's less than the price of one share in BHP which is just recovering from yesterday's $1-drop - so I clicked here.

 

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The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis

 

 

Whenever I see a bookcover which displays the author's name in larger print than the book's title, I walk right past it. Not so Padma. She bought me Dan Brown's "Inferno" and, not wanting to let $29.95 go to waste, I began to read it. And what a page-turner and eye-opener it has been!

In it, Dante's Inferno, the Black Death, geometric progression, agathusia, transhumanism, Children of the Corn, Logan's Run, biological warfare, the world's overpopulation, and the Malthusian Theory of Population are all turned into an intellectual cliff-hanger which won't let you stop until you've reached the last page some 600 pages later.

Just consider this: if you picked up a piece of paper and ripped it in half and then placed the two halves on top of each other and then were to repeat the process ... hypothetically speaking, if the original sheet of paper is a mere one-tenth of a millimetre thick, and you were to repeat this process ... say, fifty times ... it would be one-tenth of a millimetre times two to the fiftieth power. It's called geometric progression and the stack of paper, after only fifty doublings would reach almost all the way ... to the sun! --- click here

 

 

And thus the book makes its point: that the history of our human population growth is even more dramatic. The earth's population, like the stack of paper, had very meagre beginnings but alarming potential. It took the earth's population thousands of years - from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s - to reach one billion people. Then, astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. Every day, rain or shine, we're adding another quarter-million people to planet Earth. Every year, we're adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany. Genesis 1:28 "Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth" has turned from a blessing to a curse.

If you and I live for another nineteen years, we will have witnessed the population triple in our lifetime. The mathematics is as relentless - and as non-negotiable - as the law of gravity. - Animal species are going extinct at a precipitously accelerated rate. The demand for dwindling natural resources is skyrocketing. Clean water is harder and harder to come by. By any biological gauge, our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers. And the gatekeeper of the planet's health, the World Health Organization's feeble response is to dispense free condoms in Africa! They are followed by an army of Catholic missionaries sent out by the Vatican (who better than a bunch of celibate octogenarians to tell the world how to have sex?) that tell Africans if they use condoms, they go straight to hell. Africa's latest environmental problem are landfills overflowing with unused condoms.

Free condoms in Africa! It's like swinging a flyswatter at an incoming asteroid. The time bomb is no longer ticking. It has already gone off, and without drastic measures, exponential mathematics will become our new God ... a very vengeful God who will bring to you Dante's vision of hell right outside on Park Avenue ... huddled masses wallowing in their own excrement.

The world's politicians, power brokers, and environmentalists hold emergency summits, all trying to assess which of these problems are most severe and which they can actually hope to solve. The outcome? Privately, they put their heads in their hands and weep. Publicly, they assure us all that they are working on solutions - what solutions? solar power, recycling, and hybrid cars? - but that these are complex issues.

 

Complex? Bullshit! Lack of clean water, rising global temperatures, ozone depletion, rapidly dwindling ocean resources, species extinction, CO2 concentration, deforestation, rising global sea levels - it's all caused by one single variable: global population! If you want more clean water per capita, you need fewer people on earth. If you want to decrease vehicle emissions, you need fewer drivers. If you want the oceans to replenish their fish, you need fewer people eating fish!

 

I'm neither a 'connesewer' of doomsday books nor a Dan Brown aficionado. I tend to agree with a friend of mine who's banished all Dan Brown books to the darkest and coldest and most unlikely-ever-to-see-the-light-of-day-again corner of his library. But forget about literary merit! "Inferno" has hit so many buttons and made me scurry off into so many directions to seek out additional information that I challenge you to read this book. You can always go back to your state of denial and pious hand-wringing later.

 

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Going nutmeg!

 

To explore these islands on GOOGLE Map, click here
Read the book "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" here

 

It's been far too many years since my last island-hopping tour through the Indonesian archipelago - click here - and even longer since I had my last meal of 'gedämpfte Eier mit Muskatnuss', both of which bring back memories of the Spice Islands which I always wished I had visited but never did — and now it's too late anyway.

Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic nation ('archipelagic' means 'about island groups and their interconnected waters', Des), comprising over 17,000 islands. You would need several lifetimes to visit them all.

William Somerset Maugham writes about them in his novel "The Narrow Corner", whose principal setting is Kanda-Meria, based on the actual island of Banda Neira, once a wealthy centre of the nutmeg trade.

"The dawn slid between the low, wooded islands, gravely, with a deliberate calmness that seemed to conceal an inward apprehension," Maugham writes on page 85. "The virgin forests on each side of them still held the night, but then insensibly the grey of the sea was shot with the soft hues of a pigeon’s breast. There was a pause and with a smile the day broke. Sailing between those uninhabited islands, on that still sea, in a silence that caused you almost to hold your breath, you had a strange and exciting impression of the beginning of the world."

 

No idea who this chap is, but he's doing what I wished I could do

 

Of the island itself, Maugham lets Erik Christessen, a Dane representing a Danish company, speak, "It’s a fine place. It’s the most romantic spot in the East. They wanted to move me, but I begged them to let me stay on" ... "The place is dead. We live on our memories. That is what gives the island its character. In the old days, you know, there was so much traffic that sometimes the harbour was full and vessels had to wait outside till the departure of a fleet gave them a chance to enter. I hope you’ll stay here long enough to let me show you round. It’s lovely. An unsuspected isle in far-off seas." ... "The old Dutch merchants were so rich here in the great days of the spice trade, they didn’t know what to do with their money. There was no cargo for the ships to bring out and so they used to bring marble and use it for their houses. If you’re not in a hurry I’ll show you mine. It used to belong to one of the perkeniers. And sometimes, in winter, they’d bring a cargo of nothing but ice. Funny, isn’t it? That was the greatest luxury they could have. Just think of bringing ice all the way from Holland. It took six months, the journey. And they all had their carriages, and in the cool of the evening the smart thing was to drive along the shore and round and round the square. Someone ought to write about it. It was like a Dutch Arabian Nights' Tale." (Pages 94 & 95)

 

Click on the website of the luxurious phinisi yacht PRANA here

 

I wrote about the swap of Rhun Island for New Amsterdam (Manhattan) elsewhere - see "The real estate deal of the millennium" - so I needn't repeat it here. Instead, I just concentrate on the two videos above, which are arguably the best and most comprehensive ones I have seen.

And how much I would have loved to visit those exotic Banda Islands! But perhaps not on board the luxurious phinisi yacht PRANA, unless someone else paid the eyewatering daily charter rate of US$20,000.

 

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Those lovely op-shop ladies have done it again!

 

 

There I was, aimlessly browsing the bookshelf marked TRAVEL at my favourite op-shop when, wedged in tight between an outdated Lonely Planet guide of Australia and an equally outdated "Europe on 5 Dollars a Day" — $5 wouldn't buy you a cup of coffee now! — I saw this book with the spine that read "The Wonder Down Under".

 

 

"Great!" I thought. "Another book about Australia" — until I read the book's subtitle (which those op-shop ladies must've missed too).

 

 

Funny, I felt a bit like the chap in this BIG JUGS video clip, except the other way around. What did I do with the book? I bought it for two dollars and added it to the SELP-HELP section in my personal library.

 

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The view is always on the menu

 

 

Slow start to another week. We have had some rain overnight which is good, and the place is alive with a whole mob of kangaroos enjoying the new sprouts of grass. I'm not so much into grass — not even the psychedelic variety — and am tossing up between a jam toast and a cooked porridge.

My social 'colander', which is usually full of holes, is quite a busy one this week: a trip to the solicitor to discuss what to do when a loan I gave to a good friend matures next month; then a get-together for lunch at the Catalina Club with a bunch of Germans who, like me, are glad to be here and not there; and then a dash to the GP for another burn-off of various sun spots which are a constant reminder that I have spent too many years in hot climates without sun creme or even a hat.

Polonius was right when he said, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be", because the friend I lent money to when no bank would touch him is no longer a friend, which again proves Polonius right when he continued, "For loan oft loses both itself and friend". Another lesson learnt too late.

So what's for breakfast? Does it matter? The view is always on the menu.

 

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Where are they all today?

 

 

From the air Bougainville is a romantic island. Lush and rugged, surrounded by reefs and an emerald sea. Cloud sits on the rain forest that mats the mountains. The tall volcanic cones of Bagana and Balbi smoke sullenly and glow at night.

But along the Crown Prince Range and down on the flat country, life was not always as romantic as it seems from a passenger's window.

Rain, mud, dust, heat, boredom. These are deep in the memories of the men who built the mine. But deeper in their consciousness is another feeling, almost of pride, that they were part of a tremendous and exciting adventure. That they were pioneers.

 

 

The Bougainville Copper Project in the then Territory of Papua New Guinea ran from 1966 to 1973 and cost some US$350 million. At its peak in mid-1971, it employed a labour force of some 10,700. The Bougainville Copper Project was not only the largest grass roots copper project undertaking in the world to that date - it was truly a monument to every man who turned his hand toward its successful completion.

 

See the BFD markings on the wing? That was Brian Frank Darcey's plane - click here

 

As the Mine neared completion, so did Arawa, the "dormitory town" for most of the mine workers. What had been a beautiful copra plantation on the long sweep of a black-beach bay, became a bustling town with supermarket, tavern, post office, and a general hospital which was the best in the Territory. A total of 446 residences were completed in 20 months employing a labour force of some 600. Seven different houses were built ranging from 3- to 4-bedroom residences, some fully air conditioned.

 

 

But there was always Kieta with its hotel, the Kieta Club, the sailing club, a branch of Breckwoldts, several Chinese shops, and Green & Co on the waterfront. This shop as no other catered to the "touristy" needs of the mine population with postcards of 'maris' suckling pigs, carvings, grass skirts, and tee shirts. And beyond it, Aropa Airstrip, the 'Gateway to Freedom' after the daily 10-hour grind of the construction work.

The Loloho Powerhouse had already been built to supply power to the copper concentrator, mine, portsite facilities and townships of Arawa and Panguna via a 132 KV transmission system. Loloho Port was also nearing completion. What a moment when the first Japanese ore carrier tied up alongside it! The beach at Camp 6 was always an attraction for those of us who lived at the Minesite and had to endure daily downpours and mud and slush.

 

 

The construction of the new 16-mile 24 ft wide Mine Access Road through the Crown Prince Range posed many problems and was the most spectacular of all the work undertaken. It became trafficable in October 1970 and, except for a few major deviations, followed the route of the first access road built by C.R.A. Building it involved a mammoth earth moving operation: ridge tops were cut off and sometimes used to fill ravines to provide a gradually ascending route. A complicated bench system often rising 200 ft. above the road was necessary in some sections to protect it against landslides and also to allow for the effect of earth tremors in the area.

 

Bougainville Island is 30 miles wide and 130 miles long with its dominant feature a range of mountains which rises to 8,000 ft. and runs the length of the island. This mountainous land is jungle covered and swampy in low lying coastal areas. The terrain formation for the most part consists of volcanic ash and fractured and weathered rock. The weather is tropical with coastal rainfall ranging from 100 in to 150 in. per year while the mountain areas receive from 150 in. to 300 in. per year.

 

Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, I want to hear from you! They aren't many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience.

Wouldn't it be great to revisit Bougainville, drive up to Panguna or swim at Loloho Beach? The Bougainville Copper Project shaped our lives as many of us continued in overseas projects. Others returned to suburbia and ordinary jobs but they, too, were forever changed by the experience.

Where are they all today? Many are settled back in Australia while others stayed on in New Guinea and some are still on the move. When were you on Bougainville? Who did you work for and what did you do? Have you photographs or memories to share which I could publish on the Bougainville Copper Project website? [Read some of the other comments here]

As one contributor put it so aptly, "You only have to scratch the surface and you bleed PNG..." So next time you bleed a little and feel a bout of "Bougainvilleitis" coming on, share your thoughts and memories with us. I very much look forward to hearing from you and any of your mates who may have spent time on the Bougainville Copper Project.

By the way, do you remember the rumours about the stuff they put in our tea in the camp, to keep our minds off it...? Well, 50 years later, I think mine's beginning to work.

 

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Happy 90th Birthday, Ben!

 

For more of Ben Cropp's documentaries, go to his YouTube channel

 

If you watch this video clip, Ben, it should bring back many happy memories. How old is this video? Peter Allen died in 1992, just forty-eight years old, which dates it at least thirty-five years old but not before 1979 when Ben Cropp opened his Shipwreck Museum in Port Douglas. He still lives there today (as Peter Allen once did when he owned a 'shack' at Oak Beach).

(The end of the video showing the onset of cyclone Eddie finally gives the age of this video away, as cycline Eddie happened in February 1981.)

Ben is best known for his work as an Australian documentary filmmaker, conservationist, and shark hunter. He retired from that trade in 1962 to take up underwater filmmaking, producing some 150 documentaries.

 

Hubert, perhaps Ben can throw some light on where this is and who she is!
[Photo courtesy State Library of NSW]

 

As he said of himself in a radio interview in 2012, " I was born on Buka Island, which is just off Bougainville, back in 1936. My father was a Methodist missionary up there. I was christened Benjamin, which in the Bible means 'last of the tribe', but two more came after me. Let's face it - it was a beautiful tropical place, no TV though. Being a minister, my father had moved to a lot of different parishes - ah, Casino, Ballina, Bellingen - but he also bought a property down in Lennox Head - a beachfront there - and that's really where I grew up. And that's where I began my love of fishing. I was obsessed with spearfishing in those days. Though, you must appreciate, that people only went in the water to spear fish. Hans Haas, Cousteau - we all started as spearfishermen. Scuba diving came later. Wreck diving, underwater photography - all that came later. And that was the beginning of diving. I started to look at the possibility of earning an income out of it. And I decided, OK, the best thing is I take up underwater filming, and go north in the tropics and film sharks. But I was not a cameraman. I knew nothing about cameras. So, I teamed up with Ron Taylor, who was an underwater cameraman, and that's where we began an association. And our first film, 'Shark Hunters', was an enormous success. We released this film worldwide, before Cousteau had started his TV series, and after Hans Haas had retired from underwater filming. There was this gap. And we filled that gap. In '64, I was named the World Underwater Photographer of the Year. And appreciate that that was only three years after I started my shark hunting. I met Van Laman, and she became my first wife. She was a very good diver. Six months after I started teaching her how to spearfish, she was the Australian champion. And that's an awfully big - quick jump. Unfortunately, that marriage didn't last very long. We were just too young. And then I met my second wife, who was Eva - Eva Patt. And Eva was another Miss Gold Coast, or Miss Gold Coast charity Queen. And she was a diver already and we just hit it off. After eight years, Eva and I broke up. She wanted to go out and live - see the world in her own right. So, we parted. And I would say that my happiest times was when I was married. My unhappiest times was when I wasn't married. So, then I met my third wife, Lynn. And that was Lynn Patterson, she was a Canadian. We had eighteen years of wonderful marriage, yes. And two children. And I never regret in one iota that marriage and bringing up two kids. It was the best part and the most contented part of my life. Both my sons - they grew up in the film business, and in the diving. They tagged along everywhere we went, they became part of the films. In fact, the public enjoyed it, because they were seeing in every film my kids a little bit taller. And now that they're adults, they still want to come and join me on a trip every year. They love the adventure life that they led and still want to lead. Which is great - they're still in the film business."

 

Here are another three of Ben Cropp's many videos introduced by Peter Allen
Click on Watch on YouTube to view them

Untamed Gulf Trecherous Strait Exploring Cape York

 

A long life well lived! Happy 90th birthday, Ben!

 

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"Bald geht es los!"

 

Ralf Götte wie er leibt und lebt

 

Bald geht es los!" teilte er mir durch das WhatsApp mit, und da saß ich dann gespannt vor dem Bildschirm um mir den Gruß vom Ralf Götte von der Okerwelle in Braunschweig anzuhören.

Deren "Frühstückswelle" hat den Untertitel "Musik nur für Erwachsene — oder die es werden wollen", aber ehrlich gesagt, wenn das die Musik für Erwachsene ist, dann ist für die Jugendlichen gar keine Hoffnung mehr.

 

Listen to Radio Okerwelle here

 

Ich saß ganz erschüttert vor dem Bildschirm und bereute es gar nicht daß ich schon vor mehr als fünfzig Jahren meinen deutschen Reisepass gegen einen australischen eingetauscht hatte. Ich bereute es aber diese Sendung mit meinem 'smartphone' gefilmt zu haben, denn die 360MB die dabei herauskamen wollte keine Email an meinen Computer schicken.

 

 

So blieb mir nichts anderes übrig als nur die Stimme vom Ralf Götte abzuspeichern. Dann brauchst Du Dir die "Musik nur für Erwachsene" gar nicht anhören. Vielleicht würdest Du mir dafür sogar noch dankbar sein.

 

 

In der Zwischenzeit lese ich lieber weiter in meinem Buch "Double Entry" um mich daran zu erinnern wie ich einst mein Brot verdiente.

 

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The Narrow Corner

 

 

There's nothing like the pitter patter of rain drops on a corruagted iron roof to send me off to sleep, so after my lunch of what Padma calls her "home-made pizza" - slices of salami and shredded cheese on a piece of Lebanese bread lightly toasted - I doubled down on my retirement by retiring to "Bonniedoon" for an afternoon snooze.

Woken up after an hour or so by the rustling of leaves and something else rustling somewhere under the floorboards, I was reluctant to return to the "real" world and grabbed the nearest book within reach which transported me once again to another and even more exotic location.

 

 

W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Narrow Corner" is set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, where a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. A quote from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells", gives it its title.

In addition to drifting away from the here-and-now, the story allowed me to fantasize to the many possible "what might have beens?" had I stayed longer in New Guinea, settled on Thursday Island, retired - as I once thought I might - at Port Dickson in Malaysia, or never left Greece. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which Adam Phillips, the Freudian existentialist, countered with "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?"

Playing the "what ifs?" is not a gratifying way to live. And it is definitely not the way in which to have a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is the exact opposite of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. And yet it is, I am sure, what we all do late in life.

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." There go about half the things I used to feel bad about. As for the rest, I take consolation from the fact that so many of the extraordinary characters I encounters in my life seem to have finished up just like me: holed up in deepest domesticity and with no more "what next?" ahead of them - well, except for the most obvious one (which some reached already).

The human mind - at least mine - tends to work from the concrete to the abstract, from personal experiences to principles suggested by these experiences. I am sure that if I sat in the lotus position for days on end on some remote mountaintop and tried to come up with a meaning of life, my mind would soon turn toward something concrete, like the rumbling in my stomach. I would probably then declare that life is another slice of "homemade pizza" washed down with a cold beer.

I leave you with a YouTube clip of the radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, and broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Green as Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols, as well as a copy of Maugham's book to read here.

 

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The things that kept me going

 

 

After three years overseas, first in Saudia Arabia and then in Greece, my memories of that mythical place called home — meaning Australia — had grown as blurred as these images on the corkboard above the desk in my office in Piraeus.

While dozens of ships were carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo across the seas, I was left to second-guess and piece together from the names of ships and copies of telexes and entries appearing on bank statements my boss's commodity trading deals in far-away Jeddah.

 

Note my early PC, an APPLE ///, but most computing was still done in my head

 

Accounting depends on paperwork, not guesswork, and my patience was often sorely tested as I had to rely on hearsay and word-of-mouth to offset one Letter of Credit against another and settle charter parties on little more than a brief phone call. I didn't always sleep well at night.

The things that kept me going were those photos and picture postcards pinned to the corkboard above me desk, photos of my first home in cold Canberra, photos of my last home in tropical Far North Queensland at Cape Pallarenda, and postcards of Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island where I owned a block of land and hoped to one day build my permanent home.

 

 

I had already paid a very high personal price in taking on and continuing this job, so that when, through a great deal of 'extracurricular' forensic auditing of trades done before I had even started this job, I was able to recover vast sums of money, only to be 'rewarded' by my boss with a "What took you so long?", the things that kept me going no longer did.

I impulsively resigned from a job that others would have killed for, to return to that mythical place called home where it took me the best part of another ten years to bring back into focus those blurred images, not in cold Canberra and not in tropical Far North Queensland, but in little Nelligen which has now been my home for over thirty years.

Journey's End! (should that be with a question mark?)

 

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Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge

 

Wikipedia

 

Wie hatte ich den Schauspieler Joachim Fuchsberger vermisst? Er spielte doch schon in so vielen Filmen ehe ich in 1965 als Neunzehnjähriger das kalte Deutschland verlies.

Vielleicht lag es daran daß ich Wichtigeres im Kopf hatte als ins Kino zu gehen, denn der Ernst des Lebens hatte für mich schon angefangen als andere in meinem Alter noch Cowboy und Indianer spielten.

Aufgeschoben ist aber nicht aufgehoben, denn ich entdeckte ihn über zehn Jahre nach seinem Tod als ich begann mich mit diesem Thema zu beschäftigen und nach Büchern der Elke Heidenreich suchte. Und hier war Joachim Fuchsbergers Buch "Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge".

 

Read it online at archive.org

 

Und ich konnte mir sogar die Portokosten von Deutschland sparen denn es gab eine Kopie davon auf archive.org. Das hebe ich mir auf bis zum nächsten verregneten Tag den ich in "Bonniedoon" verbringen werde.

 

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P.S. Jetzt hörte ich gerade vom Hubert in Cooktown dass der Joachim Fuchsberger auch eine zweite Staatsbürgerschaft in Australien hatte und Sandy Bay in Tasmania sein zweites Zuhause war ehe gesundheitliche Probleme ihn nach Deutschland zurücktrieben. Er war ein "Honorary Ambassador for Tourism" und filmte die "Terra Australis" Serie hier:

 

Für mehr, drücke hier.

 

Radio Okerwelle

 

Listen to Radio Okerwelle here

 

It's going to be a long night tomorrow night: a newfound friend in my old hometown of Braunschweig in Germany volunteers at the local community radio "Radio Okerwelle" and goes 'on air' at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning which is 9 o'clock late at night here.

He offered to send special greetings to Nelligen — "Falls Du zuhören solltest, schreibe kurz. Dann kommt ein Gruß nach Nelligen ..." — and while the choice of music in his "Früstückswelle" programme isn't what I grew up with, I agreed to stay up if he plays my listener's choice of ...

 

 

Not that "Radio Okerwelle" is only about music I can no longer relate to. Their facebook page also mentions cultural events, such as the release of the film "Amrum", of which all-knowing YouTube already has a trailer.

 

 

I live too far away from the (c)old country to "Mach dir ein paar schöne Stunden, geh ins Kino", but I'm going to keep an eye on ebay.de to find the DVD as soon as it becomes available. Thank you, Radio Okerwelle!

 

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A totally rained-out Saturday morning

 

 

It didn't just rain last night, it bucketted down! All night! The small fishpond by the house is overflowing; the big pond at the bottom of the property has doubled in size; the scientifically calibrated raingauge, the small dinghy in the river, is full to the gunwales.

To keep out the noise, I listened to the audio recording of Alexander McCall Smith's book "My Italian Bulldozer" which I had picked up months ago at an op-shop. Not that I was particularly interested in that particular story but years ago I had found his books set in Botswana and seen the movie "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency", and the scenery had brought back many memories of my time in neighbouring Namibia.

 

 

We woke up to grey skies and a water wonderland this morning, but the 6-knot speed sign on the other side of the river, which all the boaties and especially the pesky jetski drivers seem to ignore, is still well above the water even though we have a high tide right now. Not that there has ever been any flood threat in all the thirty-two years I have lived here by the river, but the possibility is always there if the rain continues.

 

 

Listening to this morning's news, the situation is Greenland is heating up, with the Danish government dispatching her best Lego soldiers to defend the world's largest island. There is still hope that the situation may be resolved peacefully, with Denmark offering to hand over the island to Trump if he can point to it on a map. "We are reasonable about it," a government spokesman said, "We will allow him three attempts."

In local news, following the cancellation of Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah's appearance at the Adelaide Writers' Festival and most other writers withdrawing as well, the organisers renamed it the Adelaide Writer's Festival to correctly reflect the numbers still left.

That's about all the news that's fit to print. And, yes, the 6-knot speed sign is still well above the water level. Back to "My Italian Bulldozer".

 

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