Where are they all today?

 

 

From the air Bougainville is a romantic island. Lush and rugged, surrounded by reefs and an emerald sea. Cloud sits on the rain forest that mats the mountains. The tall volcanic cones of Bagana and Balbi smoke sullenly and glow at night.

But along the Crown Prince Range and down on the flat country, life was not always as romantic as it seems from a passenger's window.

Rain, mud, dust, heat, boredom. These are deep in the memories of the men who built the mine. But deeper in their consciousness is another feeling, almost of pride, that they were part of a tremendous and exciting adventure. That they were pioneers.

 

 

The Bougainville Copper Project in the then Territory of Papua New Guinea ran from 1966 to 1973 and cost some US$350 million. At its peak in mid-1971, it employed a labour force of some 10,700. The Bougainville Copper Project was not only the largest grass roots copper project undertaking in the world to that date - it was truly a monument to every man who turned his hand toward its successful completion.

 

 

As the Mine neared completion, so did Arawa, the "dormitory town" for most of the mine workers. What had been a beautiful copra plantation on the long sweep of a black-beach bay, became a bustling town with supermarket, tavern, post office, and a general hospital which was the best in the Territory. A total of 446 residences were completed in 20 months employing a labour force of some 600. Seven different houses were built ranging from 3- to 4-bedroom residences, some fully air conditioned.

 

 

But there was always Kieta with its hotel, the Kieta Club, the sailing club, a branch of Breckwoldts, several Chinese shops, and Green & Co on the waterfront. This shop as no other catered to the "touristy" needs of the mine population with postcards of 'maris' suckling pigs, carvings, grass skirts, and tee shirts. And beyond it, Aropa Airstrip, the 'Gateway to Freedom' after the daily 10-hour grind of the construction work.

The Loloho Powerhouse had already been built to supply power to the copper concentrator, mine, portsite facilities and townships of Arawa and Panguna via a 132 KV transmission system. Loloho Port was also nearing completion. What a moment when the first Japanese ore carrier tied up alongside it! The beach at Camp 6 was always an attraction for those of us who lived at the Minesite and had to endure daily downpours and mud and slush.

 

 

The construction of the new 16-mile 24 ft wide Mine Access Road t hrough the Crown Prince Range posed many problems and was the most spectacular of all the work undertaken. It became trafficable in October 1970 and, except for a few major deviations, followed the route of the first access road built by C.R.A. Building it involved a mammoth earth moving operation: ridge tops were cut off and sometimes used to fill ravines to provide a gradually ascending route. A complicated bench system often rising 200 ft. above the road was necessary in some sections to protect it against landslides and also to allow for the effect of earth tremors in the area.

 

Bougainville Island is 30 miles wide and 130 miles long with its dominant feature a range of mountains which rises to 8,000 ft. and runs the length of the island. This mountainous land is jungle covered and swampy in low lying coastal areas. The terrain formation for the most part consists of volcanic ash and fractured and weathered rock. The weather is tropical with coastal rainfall ranging from 100 in to 150 in. per year while the mountain areas receive from 150 in. to 300 in. per year.

 

Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, I want to hear from you! They aren't many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience.

Wouldn't it be great to revisit Bougainville, drive up to Panguna or swim at Loloho Beach? The Bougainville Copper Project shaped our lives as many of us continued in overseas projects. Others returned to suburbia and ordinary jobs but they, too, were forever changed by the experience.

Where are they all today? Many are settled back in Australia while others stayed on in New Guinea and some are still on the move. When were you on Bougainville? Who did you work for and what did you do? Have you photographs or memories to share which I could publish on the Bougainville Copper Project website? [Read some of the other comments here]

As one contributor put it so aptly, "You only have to scratch the surface and you bleed PNG..." So next time you bleed a little and feel a bout of "Bougainvilleitis" coming on, share your thoughts and memories with us. I very much look forward to hearing from you and any of your mates who may have spent time on the Bougainville Copper Project.

By the way, do you remember the rumours about the stuff they put in our tea in the camp, to keep our minds off it...? Well, 50 years later, I think mine's beginning to work.

 

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Happy 90th Birthday, Ben!

 

For more of Ben Cropp's documentaries, go to his YouTube channel

 

If you watch this video clip, Ben, it should bring back many happy memories. How old is this video? Peter Allen died in 1992, just forty-eight years old, which dates it at least thirty-five years old but not before 1979 when Ben Cropp opened his Shipwreck Museum in Port Douglas. He still lives there today (as Peter Allen once did when he owned a 'shack' at Oak Beach).

(The end of the video showing the onset of cyclone Eddie finally gives the age of this video away, as cycline Eddie occurred in February 1981.)

Ben is best known for his work as an Australian documentary filmmaker, conservationist, and shark hunter. He retired from that trade in 1962 to take up underwater filmmaking, producing some 150 documentaries.

 

Hubert, perhaps Ben can throw some light on where this is and who she is!
[Photo courtesy State Library of NSW]

 

As he said of himself in a radio interview in 2012, " I was born on Buka Island, which is just off Bougainville, back in 1936. My father was a Methodist missionary up there. I was christened Benjamin, which in the Bible means 'last of the tribe', but two more came after me. Let's face it - it was a beautiful tropical place, no TV though. Being a minister, my father had moved to a lot of different parishes - ah, Casino, Ballina, Bellingen - but he also bought a property down in Lennox Head - a beachfront there - and that's really where I grew up. And that's where I began my love of fishing. I was obsessed with spearfishing in those days. Though, you must appreciate, that people only went in the water to spear fish. Hans Haas, Cousteau - we all started as spearfishermen. Scuba diving came later. Wreck diving, underwater photography - all that came later. And that was the beginning of diving. I started to look at the possibility of earning an income out of it. And I decided, OK, the best thing is I take up underwater filming, and go north in the tropics and film sharks. But I was not a cameraman. I knew nothing about cameras. So, I teamed up with Ron Taylor, who was an underwater cameraman, and that's where we began an association. And our first film, 'Shark Hunters', was an enormous success. We released this film worldwide, before Cousteau had started his TV series, and after Hans Haas had retired from underwater filming. There was this gap. And we filled that gap. In '64, I was named the World Underwater Photographer of the Year. And appreciate that that was only three years after I started my shark hunting. I met Van Laman, and she became my first wife. She was a very good diver. Six months after I started teaching her how to spearfish, she was the Australian champion. And that's an awfully big - quick jump. Unfortunately, that marriage didn't last very long. We were just too young. And then I met my second wife, who was Eva - Eva Patt. And Eva was another Miss Gold Coast, or Miss Gold Coast charity Queen. And she was a diver already and we just hit it off. After eight years, Eva and I broke up. She wanted to go out and live - see the world in her own right. So, we parted. And I would say that my happiest times was when I was married. My unhappiest times was when I wasn't married. So, then I met my third wife, Lynn. And that was Lynn Patterson, she was a Canadian. We had eighteen years of wonderful marriage, yes. And two children. And I never regret in one iota that marriage and bringing up two kids. It was the best part and the most contented part of my life. Both my sons - they grew up in the film business, and in the diving. They tagged along everywhere we went, they became part of the films. In fact, the public enjoyed it, because they were seeing in every film my kids a little bit taller. And now that they're adults, they still want to come and join me on a trip every year. They love the adventure life that they led and still want to lead. Which is great - they're still in the film business."

 

Here are another three of Ben Cropp's many videos introduced by Peter Allen
Click on Watch on YouTube to view them

Untamed Gulf Trecherous Strait Exploring Cape York

 

A life well lived! Happy 90th birthday, Ben!

 

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"Bald geht es los!"

 

Ralf Götte wie er leibt und lebt

 

Bald geht es los!" teilte er mir durch das WhatsApp mit, und da saß ich dann gespannt vor dem Bildschirm um mir den Gruß vom Ralf Götte von der Okerwelle in Braunschweig anzuhören.

Deren "Frühstückswelle" hat den Untertitel "Musik nur für Erwachsene — oder die es werden wollen", aber ehrlich gesagt, wenn das die Musik für Erwachsene ist, dann ist für die Jugendlichen gar keine Hoffnung mehr.

 

Listen to Radio Okerwelle here

 

Ich saß ganz erschüttert vor dem Bildschirm und bereute es gar nicht daß ich schon vor mehr als fünfzig Jahren meinen deutschen Reisepass gegen einen australischen eingetauscht hatte. Ich bereute es aber diese Sendung mit meinem 'smartphone' gefilmt zu haben, denn die 360MB die dabei herauskamen wollte keine Email an meinen Computer schicken.

 

 

So blieb mir nichts anderes übrig als nur die Stimme vom Ralf Götte abzuspeichern. Dann brauchst Du Dir die "Musik nur für Erwachsene" gar nicht anhören. Vielleicht würdest Du mir dafür sogar noch dankbar sein.

 

 

In der Zwischenzeit lese ich lieber weiter in meinem Buch "Double Entry" um mich daran zu erinnern wie ich einst mein Brot verdiente.

 

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The Narrow Corner

 

 

There's nothing like the pitter patter of rain drops on a corruagted iron roof to send me off to sleep, so after my lunch of what Padma calls her "home-made pizza" - slices of salami and shredded cheese on a piece of Lebanese bread lightly toasted - I doubled down on my retirement by retiring to "Bonniedoon" for an afternoon snooze.

Woken up after an hour or so by the rustling of leaves and something else rustling somewhere under the floorboards, I was reluctant to return to the "real" world and grabbed the nearest book within reach which transported me once again to another and even more exotic location.

 

 

W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Narrow Corner" is set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, where a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. A quote from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells", gives it its title.

In addition to drifting away from the here-and-now, the story allowed me to fantasize to the many possible "what might have beens?" had I stayed longer in New Guinea, settled on Thursday Island, retired - as I once thought I might - at Port Dickson in Malaysia, or never left Greece. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which Adam Phillips, the Freudian existentialist, countered with "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?"

Playing the "what ifs?" is not a gratifying way to live. And it is definitely not the way in which to have a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is the exact opposite of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. And yet it is, I am sure, what we all do late in life.

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." There go about half the things I used to feel bad about. As for the rest, I take consolation from the fact that so many of the extraordinary characters I encounters in my life seem to have finished up just like me: holed up in deepest domesticity and with no more "what next?" ahead of them - well, except for the most obvious one (which some reached already).

The human mind - at least mine - tends to work from the concrete to the abstract, from personal experiences to principles suggested by these experiences. I am sure that if I sat in the lotus position for days on end on some remote mountaintop and tried to come up with a meaning of life, my mind would soon turn toward something concrete, like the rumbling in my stomach. I would probably then declare that life is another slice of "homemade pizza" washed down with a cold beer.

I leave you with a YouTube clip of the radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, and broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Green as Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols, as well as a copy of Maugham's book to read here.

 

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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 carrying 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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