We worked together on the Bougainville Copper Project. Then we met again in mid-1974 in Port Moresby where I worked as internal auditor with AIR NIUGINI and he as accountant for Tutt Bryants. Then he visited me in Lae just before I flew out to Burma, and we spent Christmas 1975 at my friend's place in Wewak on my return.
Coming back from Iran and taking another job in Moresby in 1976, I spent many weekends with him, and when I left for another job on Thursday Island, he visited me there in 1977. Later that year I relocated to Honiara and he came to visit me there for Christmas. The following year, 1978, I took a posting in Penang in Malaysia and he invited himself there, too, for what was from memory a four-week-long holiday. Then I took a break from being his constant host, during which time I briefly met up with him again in Adelaide on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia, until my transfer to Piraeus in Greece in 1983, when he wrote to asked if I had a job for him there. I flew him out at company expense, put him up in a hotel in Piraeus, and paid him US$3,000 a month, and he set to work for me for three months.
That was Brian Herde: always good company, in exchange for which he demanded nothing more than full free board and lodging. After his last uninvited visit to my home in Canberra in 1992 - or was it 1993? - we lost contact and our twenty-five-year-long friendship had seemingly come to an end. During all this time we had never discussed financial matters other than those pertaining to our work, but you can't be a good friend with someone for all that time without having at least some inkling of his financial position, and my inkling of his financial position was what in the vernacular is best described as being "filthy rich!"
in the Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, which is where Brian grew up.
Which made it all the sadder when around this time last year I found on the internet this death notice. He had died just two years past his retirement age without ever enjoying all that accumulated wealth!
Still, wanting to know how he had met his untimely death, I wrote to Townsville Hospital. They asked me to pay a non-refundable $57.65 search fee — there was a time when fees were charged in round figures; now it's $49.95 or $57.65 as though someone had calculated with the help of some highly complicated formula the exact cost of the service — even though they couldn't guarantee that they would find anything.
All his free board-and-lodgings over twenty-five years had cost me plenty, so perhaps another fifty-seven dollars wouldn't have mattered, but then I thought, "Let dead friends lie", and just had a toast to his memory. As I will again today. Brian Herde, you've been one of a kind!
