Are these early autumn morning getting colder or am I just getting older? I've fed the possum and the ducks, after which I rushed back inside the house to sit just inches away from the electric oil heater. We have lots of firewood im the shed but I coudn't be bothered with lugging it into the house and lighting the fireplace.
It is at times like these that I wonder what insanity made me settle this far away from the endless summer of (say) Far North Queensland or the Torres Strait or other tropical abodes overseas I had previously lived in.
After returning from New Guinea in 1977, with a host of exotic overseas postings already under my belt, I took an accounting job on Thursday Island in Torres Strait. I've always enjoyed living in odd and colourful places, and few are odder or more colourful than the "Thirsty" Island.
The job was insultingly mundane but I could possibly have coped with that, had it not been for my boss who was a crotchety old bastard. He had previously worked on a mission station for the Presbyterian Church somewhere in outback Far North Queensland, where he discovered the difference between a debit and a credit, after which he had come to Thursday Island in 1972 to occupy the job he had just passed on to me, to be elevated to become the manager and thus my boss. But not for long and not very successfully, as he was a difficult man to get along.
He was a wowser and a bit of a Biblebasher who played the church organ on Sundays and belonged to the Masonic Lodge. Given all those 'credentials', it was all the more surprising that just before my arrival on the island he had brought up his girlfriend from Perth and given her a job as secretary in the office. She lived in the company-duplex next to his and a carpenter was called in to cut a door into the dividing wall between the two, which became known as the 'Tunnel of Love'.
Long after I had left, I heard that he was born in Tasmania in 1914 which made him 63 years old when we met, and my appointment was timed for me to take over from him when he retired as manager in 1981, but I wasn't going to hang around that long. With the old cry "ON! ON!" of the "drinking club with a running problem", the Hash House Harriers, on my lips, I departed the "Thirsty" Island for many far bigger and better jobs.
Postings in the Solomon Islands, in Apia in Western Samoa, in Penang in Malaysia, a year-and-a-bit caravanning working holiday in Australia, two more assignments in New Guinea, and three years in Saudi Arabia and Greece followed, before I again settled down, but I've often thought back to the "Thirsty" Island in the Torres Strait and pondered "What if?"
Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living and so, to eliminate at least one of the many "what ifs" in my life and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard, I revisited the island in 2005. You can read about it in this travelogue.
