The last time I looked at that top balcony was in 2011 when a fellow-German had waved me good-bye from there. We had run into each other in this small town on the Atherton Tablelands and in the course of a couple of days had become good friends before I beat a hasty retreat to fix up some domestic problems down south.
Only a few months earlier, he had made the reverse move from down south but to escape domestic problems. That was almost exactly fifty years after he had come to Australia and done "the full catastrophe" - wife, children, house, everything - before waking up one morning and realising, at the advanced age of 72, that "until death do us part" no longer cut it for him. He split things down the middle and did a runner!
In this little town on the Atherton Tablelands he found friends and a free flat in exchange for looking after several more, and I admired and even envied him for the ease with which he had escaped from half a century of domesticity. There he was, all cashed up, ready to live his dreams. What would be next? Lotus-eating in Bali or skinny-dipping on Bora Bora?
But we all seem to be creatures of habit because a few months later he had bought himself a house and turned fully domestic again, and a few years later he was dead. He had died with his song still inside him.
