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 transporting 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.
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?)
