Another Simon Winchester classic

 

 

To my, a pre-owned book's antecedents are often as interesting as the book itself. Not that I expected to find any evidence of the previous owner's life when I picked up this beautifully kept hardcover copy of Simon Winchester's "Atlantic", which I had bought and read before but not as a hardcover, and so I picked it up for a mere three dollars at the local Vinnies shop.

I was a whole 300 pages into the book - which is 500 pages thick - before I discovered this business card stuck between the pages as a bookmark: "GLEAM DENTISTRY - Haifa Amin, BDS, Dental Surgeon".

Was it Haifa Amin herself - it is a "her" as I discovered on GOOGLE - who had placed it there or was it one of her patients who tried to take his mind off a throbbing toothache by reading Simon Winchester's classic?

 

 

Simon Winchester is a past master at turning even the driest subject into a thrilling story; indeed, he seems to have specialised in it by writing such books as "The Map That Changed the World", "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded", "Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World", and over thirty other non-fiction books, enough to take your mind off all your toothaches for the rest of your life.

 

 

Before I leave you alone on this foggy and slightly chilly Thursday morning, I just want to tell you that things in the Middle East are improving: in a first act of goodwill since the declaration of a ceasefire, yesterday Iran permitted a container ship loaded with copies of the Epstein files to pass through the Strait of Hormuz - see photo above.

 

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All my life's a circle

 

All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown The moon rolls through the night-time till the daybreak comes around All my life's a circle and I can't tell you why The seasons spinning round again, the years keep rolling by It seems like I've been here before, and I well remember when I've got this funny feeling that we'll all be together again There's no straight lines make up my life, all my roads have bends There's no clear-cut beginning and so far no dead ends I've found you a thousand times, I guess you've done the same But then we lose each other, it's just like a children's game And I see you here again the thought runs through my mind Love is like a circle, let's go round one more time

 

Remember the old Harry Chapin song "All my life's a circle"? The years had kept rolling by, and suddenly, in late 1985, after twenty years in a dozen other countries, I found myself back in Canberra where I had taken my first few tentative steps as a migrant just off the ship from Europe.

My return to Canberra had been as totally unplanned and unexpected as all my previous moves, with plenty of bends and no straight lines and even a few dead ends, but this time when I was back where I'd been before, I at least spoke the Queen's English (albeit still with a slight Teutonic accent) and had enough professional qualifications and experience to immediately start writing computer software in the PICK language for a large mailorder business for the next twelve months.

Personal computers were slowly making their presence felt, and I began to specialise in PC-based computerised accounting systems, selling and installing off-the-shelf ATTACHÉ, SYBIZ, NewViews, and other packages, and also writing custom-built solutions in TAS, under my registered business name Canberra Computer Accounting Systems.

 

I was indeed Canberra's only Accounting Software Specialist until accounting firms
realised that there was a buck to be made by setting up their own PC consultancies

 

It was strictly a one-man business, just me and a telephone answering service. Those invisible girls at the answering service did a wonderful job for me as their ever-changing voices made my clients think they were dealing with a large computer software house. Only a few knew that I was working out of the spare bedroom in my house (later TWO spare bedrooms, with the wall knocked out between them).

 

# 7 Fanning Place, Kambah A.C.T. 2902

 

Those were the days when an IBM computer with just 20MB of harddisk space retailed for around $8,000, when a monochrome monitor (you had a choice of green or amber display) cost some $700, and individual accounting software modules such as General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, or Inventory Control sold for close to a thousand dollars - EACH! Dot-matrix printers (remember dot-matrix printers?) sold for almost a thousand dollars and connecting several computers with the help of LANtastic or NOVELL took hours and hours, if not days, and meant several thousands of dollars in profit!

 

 

More years kept rolling by, and there was still very little competition as my combined expertise in accounting software, computer hardware, and networking plus a degree in accountancy wasn't matched by anybody. It took several more years before accounting firms realised there was a buck to be made by setting up their own PC consultancies.

 

I looked very different then, and so did the computers!

 

Of course, all good things must come to an end: hardware and software prices kept dropping. Who was going to stump up hundreds of dollars for installation and training after having bought a small-business accounting package such as 'Mind Your Own Business' for less than a hundred dollars?

 

 

The clear-cut beginning of the end came with WINDOWS! Computers were no longer a mystery with low-level formatting, interleaves, BIOS, interrupts, system and config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Accounting software became more "user-friendly" with pre-configured charts of accounts and financial reports. It was just a case of "switch on and go".

Suddenly everybody was a computer expert and Canberra Computer Accounting Systems was no more! I went round one more time when I rescued a university college from certain bankruptcy - click here - after which I decided to go into retirement. Life had finally come full circle!

 

 

What had once been at the forefront of my life is now stuck to the back of my workshop door at "Riverbend" in Nelligen: Canberra Computer Accounting Systems' car door signage with which I had driven my nile-blue Toyota Camry through Canberra's streets for more than ten years.

"All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown; the moon rolls through the night-time till the daybreak comes around; All my life's a circle I can't tell you why; Seasons spinning round again, the years keep rolling by."

 

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Why the Germans lost the war

 

 

Much has been written about why the Germans lost the war. Was it because the Spitfire was superior to the Messerschmitt? Was it because the British had cracked the Enigma Code? Or did the V2 come too late?

Taking into account the research by various eminent war historians and reading numerous Biggles books, the above video clip was compiled to sum up in thirty-five seconds why the Germans lost the war.

 

 

"There's no vay the vool you're pulling over our eyes."

 

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A picture is worth a thousand words

 

 

This old photo from the 'sixties of the Hotel Civic and its Civic Lounge (aka Star Crest Lounge) on the corner of Northbourne Avenue and Alinga Street in Canberra brings back many memories. Let's see if they amount to a thousand words:

 

Page 98 from the book "Pictorial History Canberra"

 

Somehow my memories of the Civic Lounge are not so much of alcoholic drinks as of milk because at the time I stayed at Barton House on the other side of the lake and, being a poorly paid Bank Johnny, relied on mates with cars to take me into Civic at night. One of those mates was a Danish cheesemaker whose name I only remembered after finding an old Barton House guestlist from 1967: "HANSEN Kurt milk plant foreman"

 

Taken from my other webpage riverbendnelligen.com/bartonhouse.html

 

Being fellow-migrants, Kurt and I hit it off almost immediately after we must've bumped into each other in the dark corridors of Barton House, although it was only after searching the National Archives recently that I came to realise how closely our migrant experiences had resembled each other: like me he had migrated at the tender age of twenty; like me he had arrived by ship from Bremerhaven; and like me he had gone through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, albeit five years before me.

 

Registration card from Bonegilla Migrant Centre

 

Unlike me who had spent only two nights there, he had lingered on for almost a month before being shipped off to Villawood, another migrant hostel in Sydney. By the time we met in 1966 in yet another hostel, this time the privately-run Barton House in Canberra, he had already been in Australia for six years and could afford a single room (I occupied a much cheaper share-room) as well as his own car which brings me back to the beginning of the story (I'm trying to flesh this out to a thousand words).

 

The stamp on the back of this Passenger Arrival Card reads "3 May 1968"

 

I'd been in Australia for less than a year, but perhaps because the years I had already been away from home had equipped me better to mix with people, or because Kurt while tending his cheeses never got much chance to practise his English, it was left to me to chat up the girls when we hit the Civic Hotel's Star Crest Lounge on a Saturday night.

To gain entry to this venue, one had to pass muster at the door guarded by László, a bald-headed bouncer of uncertain ethnic origin; and to gain acceptance with the girls inside, one ordered a bottle of Barossa Pearl.

 

For a more serious exploration of this bubbly wine which changed
not only Australia's drinking habits but also its demography, click here

 

I still remember the night we joined two girls at their table. They were young public service recruits, also new to Canberra - in those days everyone was "new" to Canberra - and staying at Gowrie Hostel, colloquially known as the "Twin Towers of Sin". For me, it was just another good night out and I don't remember anything else, not even the names of the girls, but it must've been more to Kurt because I heard later that one of the girls had changed her last name to "Hansen".

I left again for Germany in late 1967. When I came back in April 1969 and checked back into Barton House, Kurt was no longer there. The story went that they'd gone for their honeymoon to Europe and come back on separate flights, a month apart, as things hadn't worked out.

At just over five hundred words, this is perhaps only half the story; the other half is for Kurt to tell. So, Kurt, if you read this, let me know.

 

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Tick tick tick ...

 

My advertisement on realestate.com.au

 

Yesterday I received what may well have been my last inquiry from a prospective buyer for "Riverbend". I didn't take long to reply, "Aren't you overly optimistic? We may all be dead before you had a chance to inspect the property."

Since then, we haven't heard any more from that psychopath inside the White House after his last threat that Iran's 'civilisation will die'. While he runts and raves and plays high-stakes poker, the Iranians are playing an old Persian game that requires more brain: chess. Shah mate, Trump!

 

 

Beyond the idiotic rhetorics of this mad president, let me remind you that EVERY administration, from Carter, Reagan, Bush (senior), Clinton, Bush (junior), Obama, to Biden, and Trump, said that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. So why did it take until now? Because Iran kept moving the goalposts, and the world kept letting them. By May 2025, the IAEA reported that Iran’s cache of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium had surged by 50 percent in just three months, putting Tehran one step away from having enough material for ten nuclear weapons.

China, the other superpower, is not an innocent bystander in this story — but then they may have kept in mind the famous quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake". Iran is central to Beijing’s entire overland trade and energy strategy. Iran sits at the heart of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the infrastructure network connecting East Asia to Europe through land-based transport and Persian Gulf energy routes. Without stable access through Iranian territory, Beijing’s supply chains have no alternative. Iran exported more than 520 million barrels of crude oil to China in 2025 alone. China buys over 80 percent of Iran’s oil. This isn’t ideological solidarity. It’s a dependency that neither side wants disrupted.

Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 13 million barrels of oil per day moved through the Strait in 2025, about 31 percent of all seaborne crude in the world. About 45 percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. Iran has threatened to close it. And here’s what that threat actually produced: China is now in direct talks with Iran, pressing Tehran to allow crude oil and LNG vessels safe passage.

The United States didn’t stumble into this war because Israel asked nicely. It acted on a threat that five decades of American presidents had kicked down the road. The world needed someone to act. The better question isn’t why it happened. It’s why it took this long. Of course, less hyperbole from a mad president would've been far more effective.

If the ballon goes up in the next hour-and-a-half and we'll all be blown to smithereens, I console myself with having saved a lot of money on my ever-increasing medical bills. As for the inspection on Saturday, 11 April, I think it'll be a no-show. Tick tick tick ...

 

 

The clock just stopped, as Trump gave himself a two-week deadline to come up with a new distraction from the Epstein files, whith the Irians saying that "our hands are on the trigger, and as soon as the slightest mistake by the enemy is made, it will be responded to with full force."

 

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