Johnno

 

Part 2 ** Part 3 ? ** Part 4 ? ** Part 5 ? ** Part 6 ? ** Part 7 ? ** Part 8 ?

 

David Malouf, Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist, died on 22 April 2026, aged 92. His first novel, "Johnno", a semi-autobiographical tale of a young man growing up in Brisbane during the Second World War, made him instantly famous.

 

 

I had read it decades ago, and was delighted to find this audiobook - beautifully read by Shane Porteous - on YouTube. With Padma having gone to a neighbour's place, I was blissfully alone and settled down to what promised to be an eight-part two-hour aural delight. Alas, Hippy Cryptid didn't upload parts 3 to 8. Hippy Cryptid, you've spoilt my day!

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

 

Just as I was to continue with the real book from where the audiobook had left off, "there was movement at the station", for the truck from Industrial Replacements had arrived, depositing my brandnew 'Husky' on the lawn - click here. Now I need that audiobook more than ever, as there's nothing nicer than sitting on a ride-one with the earphones on, listening to someone reading a book to me. Come on, Hippy Cryptid!

 

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My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know

 

At my house at Komin Kochin Avenue # 7 in Rangoon in 1975

 

I've been a reader all my life but I've only had my very own libary since I settled down here at "Riverbend" about thirty years ago; in fact, the mere existence of my library has kept me settled down.

Sometimes I feel guilty as I walk into my library and look at the ever-growing number of unread books. Those bookshelves, which seem to reproduce on their own, are a constant source of ribbing from friends.

"You’ll never read all of those", they say. And they’re right. I won’t. That’s not really the point. A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. In his book "The Black Swan", Nassim Taleb describes our relationship with books using the legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco:

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means ... allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."

 

 

There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time almost impossible to fully translate. Take the German word Schadenfreude, for example, or Backpfeifengesicht. And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my library. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.

 

As I write this, the post office emails me to say that Padma, who's in town, has collected another book parcel from my favourite online bookseller, booktopia. More tsundoku!

 

As with Japanese words like karaoke and tsunami, I think it’s high time that tsundoku enters the English language. It already has at "Riverbend"!

 

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If you can't spell it, don't buy it!

 

RRP (Recommended Retail Price) $10,499

 

Lucky for me, I speak Swedish almost as well as the Swedish chef in the Muppet Show, and I have also already run three 'Huskies' into the ground before this one became the object of my desire. This particular Husqvarna was one of two of the same model cluttering up the showroom at Industrial Replacements, and I was able to buy it for $7,950.00. Not that they sold it to me at a loss, so you can only image how huge the profit margin is on the full RRP.

 

I have attached their invoice just in case you feel like paying for it. 😀

 

Delivery should be sometime tomorrow, by which time I hope to have recovered some of the money on the share market. Not that today was much of a day, as my BHP shares are down by $1.25 apiece. But that's all right, too, as they are a wonderful cash cow. As the saying goes, "A cow for her milk, a stock for her dividend". I had put a SELL-order on my lithium shares LTR at $2.49 before we left home. I missed selling them by one cent. The sharemarket giveth and the sharemarket taketh away.

It's going to be a busy weekend going up and down my seven acres, trying to tame the grass that's been allowed to grow long and thick.

 

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The poem of my life

 

 

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past.

Images of the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realise the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveller. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold — for it's a commercial we've been watching — the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

 

 

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" - routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled" - by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognise the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognise any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognise a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken", and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture — and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem.

A poem which almost everyone gets wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken" — not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less travelled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." The road he will later call less travelled is actually the road equally travelled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

With so many forks in my path, with so many opportunities gained and lost, with some fifty job relocations across fifteen countries, "The Road Not Taken" became my favourite poem ever since I discovered it ages and ages ago. During all this time it served me as a means of my self-deception before becoming the source of all my regrets as well as my comfort in old age. It's the poem of my life. Thank you, Robert Frost.

 

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Buyer Beware!

 

 

After having spent more than ten thousand afternoons taking a nap and more than ten thousand mornings eating breakfast on the verandah, it's hard to believe that "Riverbend" didn't even have a verandah when I bought the place and immediately had one built.

That was thirty-three years ago, and the verandah is showing such signs of wear and tear that nothing short of a complete rebuild is needed.

I couldn't tell a good carpenter from a bad one if he hit me in the face with a claw hammer, and so I asked a friend if he had a friend who could do the job. He did, casually inspected it, and then quoted me $18,000.

 

 

I have little experience with tradesmen - of which most were bad - but I remembered the advice to always get three quotes. The next one was for $41,747.43 - I loved that 43 cents! - but didn't include an overhead beam which needed replacing, for which he quoted me $110 an hour. As I told him, "Not in my wildest dreams ..." He wasn't surprised at all.

 

 

The third one quoted me a not-quite-so-outrageous $24,499,20. It ticked all the boxes - as they say - and I thought I was on a winner!

 

 

But then came "Old School Quality Building" who had been the first one to show up for an inspection of the job but had been delayed giving me his quote, for which he apologised. $17,316.20. Old school indeed!

 

 

Four quotes; four vastly different prices:

Quote 1: $18,000.00 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 2: $41,747.43 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 3: $24,499.20

Quote 4: $17,316.20

No double-guessing whose quote I was going to accept, except that at the very last minute he and I had a disagreement over what was really a trifling matter and I decided not to go ahead with it. Instead, I decided to just buy all the material myself and then look for a carpenter - even a handyman could do it - who would do the work on an hourly basis.

 

 

The hardwood frame plus the new overhead beam cost $981.98.

 

 

480 lin/m of MERBAU decking plus 4 boxes of screws cost $2,965.40.

The guttering has been quoted to me at under $800, giving a total of $3,955,38, say $4,000, for the materials included in Quote 2 and 3.

Quotes 1 and 2 do not include the top beam ($219.60) nor the guttering $800); therefore, their materials can be reduced by $1,000 to $3,000.

Which leaves the following labour costs in the four quotes:

Quote 1: $15,000.00 ($18,000 minus $3,000)

Quote 2: $38,747.43 ($41,747.43 minus $3,000)

Quote 3: $20,499.20 ($24,499.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 4: $13,316.20 (17,316.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 2 suggests an hourly rate at $110; therefore, it allows for 352 hours (8.8 weeks!!!) Assuming the same hourly rate in all the other quotes, Quote 1 allows for 136 hours (3.4 weeks); Quote 3 for 186 hours (4.6 weeks); and even Quote 4 still allows for 121 hours (3 weeks).

All four tradesmen gave me a completion date of one week to ten days, so why do they want to bill me for three weeks or as many as eight? No wonder that not one of the quotes separated the cost of labour from the cost of the material, as the game would have been up at first glance.

Any carpenter wants to do a week's work for say $6,000 ? Call me now!

 

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