The things that kept me going

 

 

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.

 

Note my early PC, an APPLE ///, but most computing was still done in my head

 

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?)

 

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Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge

 

Wikipedia

 

Wie hatte ich den Schauspieler Joachim Fuchsberger vermisst? Er spielte doch schon in so vielen Filmen ehe ich in 1965 als Neunzehnjähriger das kalte Deutschland verlies.

Vielleicht lag es daran daß ich Wichtigeres im Kopf hatte als ins Kino zu gehen, denn der Ernst des Lebens hatte für mich schon angefangen als andere in meinem Alter noch Cowboy und Indianer spielten.

Aufgeschoben ist aber nicht aufgehoben, denn ich entdeckte ihn über zehn Jahre nach seinem Tod als ich begann mich mit diesem Thema zu beschäftigen und nach Büchern der Elke Heidenreich suchte. Und hier war Joachim Fuchsbergers Buch "Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge".

 

Read it online at archive.org

 

Und ich konnte mir sogar die Portokosten von Deutschland sparen denn es gab eine Kopie davon auf archive.org. Das hebe ich mir auf bis zum nächsten verregneten Tag den ich in "Bonniedoon" verbringen werde.

 

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P.S. Jetzt hörte icvh vom Hubert in Cooktown dass der Joachim Fuchsberger auch eine zweite australische Staatsbürgerschaft hatte und Sandy Bay in Tasmania sein zweites Zuhause war ehe schlechte Gesundheit ihn nach Deutschland zurücktrieb. Er war ein "Honorary Ambassador for Tourism" und filmte die "Terra Australis" Serie:

 

For more, click here.

 

Radio Okerwelle

 

Listen to Radio Okerwelle here

 

It's going to be a long night tomorrow night: a newfound friend in my old hometown of Braunschweig in Germany volunteers at the local community radio "Radio Okerwelle" and goes 'on air' at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning which is 9 o'clock late at night here.

He offered to send special greetings to Nelligen — "Falls Du zuhören solltest, schreibe kurz. Dann kommt ein Gruß nach Nelligen ..." — and while the choice of music in his "Früstückswelle" programme isn't what I grew up with, I agreed to stay up if he plays my listener's choice of ...

 

 

Not that "Radio Okerwelle" is only about music I can no longer relate to. Their facebook page also mentions cultural events, such as the release of the film "Amrum", of which all-knowing YouTube already has a trailer.

 

 

I live too far away from the (c)old country to "Mach dir ein paar schöne Stunden, geh ins Kino", but I'm going to keep an eye on ebay.de to find the DVD as soon as it becomes available. Thank you, Radio Okerwelle!

 

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A totally rained-out Saturday morning

 

 

It didn't just rain last night, it bucketted down! All night! The small fishpond by the house is overflowing; the big pond at the bottom of the property has doubled in size; the scientifically calibrated raingauge, the small dinghy in the river, is full to the gunwales.

To keep out the noise, I listened to the audio recording of Alexander McCall Smith's book "My Italian Bulldozer" which I had picked up months ago at an op-shop. Not that I was particularly interested in that particular story but years ago I had found his books set in Botswana and seen the movie "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency", and the scenery had brought back many memories of my time in neighbouring Namibia.

 

 

We woke up to grey skies and a water wonderland this morning, but the 6-knot speed sign on the other side of the river, which all the boaties and especially the pesky jetski drivers seem to ignore, is still well above the water even though we have a high tide right now. Not that there has ever been any flood threat in all the thirty-two years I have lived here by the river, but the possibility is always there if the rain continues.

 

 

Listening to this morning's news, the situation is Greenland is heating up, with the Danish government dispatching her best Lego soldiers to defend the world's largest island. There is still hope that the situation may be resolved peacefully, with Denmark offering to hand over the island to Trump if he can point to it on a map. "We are reasonable about it," a government spokesman said, "We will allow him three attempts."

In local news, following the cancellation of Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah's appearance at the Adelaide Writers' Festival and most other writers withdrawing as well, the organisers renamed it the Adelaide Writer's Festival to correctly reflect the numbers still left.

That's about all the news that's fit to print. And, yes, the 6-knot speed sign is still well above the water level. Back to "My Italian Bulldozer".

 

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If you're handy with a frypan, go and buy it!

 

 

To reach the extraordinary home of "King" Kai Hansen, owner, lord and master of remote Goat Island Lodge, you must take a two-hour drive from the city of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory, followed by an hour-long boat ride through crocodile-infested swamps.

 

 

Hansen was born in a tiny country town in Denmark, a fine-furniture maker by trade. He moved to Australia at the age of 20, then worked in construction. And then came Tracy. Not a lady, but Cyclone Tracy, an enormously powerful and destructive storm which ripped through Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1974. "After that, there was so much work and good money to be made, so I got stuck here", Hansen said.

 

"King" Kai Hansen acting as airport security officer

 

"I've been on the island for over twenty years and lived in a rural area for 25 years before that. It was all good there, but then they put in a supermarket and traffic lights around the corner. I'm a country boy, I don't want bloody traffic lights. That's for city people! In those days I still lived together with my darling wife, we sat around having drinks and she said, 'I'll buy an island and there will never be any traffic lights.' The next day there was an advert in the paper with an island for sale, this one, the only freehold island in the Northern Territory."

 

This is a clip from fourteen years ago

 

Now in his 70s, it seems "King" Kai is throwing in the frypan, as Goat Island is for sale at a 'mere' one-and-a-half million dollars - click here.

If you're handy with a frypan, Hubert, why don't you go and buy it? "King" Kai promised to chuck in the infamous frying pan for nothing.

 

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