Methinks she's addressing our Labor government

 

 

Not that you would hear any Australian whinge as well as she does. What happened to our own whinging? We've gone all woke and weak at the knees. Mustn't rock the boat. Mustn't complain. Well, look at what you ended up with: LABOR!

Separate toilets for binary "persons", our prime minister marching in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, and Labor's NDIS costing us more than defence, education, and Medicare COMBINED. We are sick!

Right! Got that off my chest, didn't I? Feeling better already! Perhaps we should send her a ticket to come here and stir up the place a bit.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

We are our memories

 

Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969 just before I flew to New Guinea

 

We don't just treasure our memories; we are our memories. And yet, memory is less like a collection of photographs than it is like a collection of impressionist paintings rendered by an artist who's taken considerable licence with his subject.

I wrote elsewhere about my years with the ANZ Bank - click here - and living at Barton House - click here - which shaped my future like no other period in my life, and I will always be grateful to the late Mr Robert Reid, the then manager of the ANZ Bank in Canberra, who hired me as a youngster, fresh off the boat from Europe, and gave me the chance of a new start in a new country.

While Mr Reid made the initial decision to hire me, it was John Burke as my immediate boss who had to make it work by putting up with my 'German-ness', both in accent and attitude, although he never took himself too seriously to make me feel that he was the boss. In fact, while I was just a lowly ledger examiner and trainee teller, John was a consummate teller - a teller of jokes, that is.

For us Germans jokes are no laughing matter. Maybe it's because we lack the flexibility of the English language whose vocabulary and grammar allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings, or because we killed all the funny people, but we simply fail to understand the rhetorical trifecta of irony, overstatement and understatement, of which John was - and still is - a past master. He just had to mention the war or say in a Monty Python-kind of voice "I haff a funny joke for jew and jew vill laugh" for my head to go down to suppress a convulsive giggle.

Back in those days I knew nothing, so John taught me all about the importance of the comma ("eats, roots and leaves") and how to know when "you're in love". He also introduced me to psychoanalysis ("I talk to the trees, that's why they put me away") and politics (I can't remember which party it was he wanted me to join as a country member) and let me in on a banking secret ("once you withdraw, you lose all your interest"). John was a fun-sort of a boss. He got things done not by cracking a whip but by cracking a joke! Under his tutelage, my compulsory two years in Australia simply flew by.

I still knew a good German joke - just the one but I won't repeat it here because I know you won't find it funny - and could compound nouns with the best of them, but slowly the voices in my head began to speak in English and I learnt that "I'm sorry but all the banknotes are the same size" wasn't the correct answer to a customer asking for larger ones.

At the time, everyone over the age of thirty looked middle-aged, and everyone over fifty looked absolutely ancient, but here we are, sixty years later, belonging to the same category of the non-young, turning our pasts into anecdotes which is one way of not losing the plot when you get old. I always thought growing old would take longer than this.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

 

Let's have a roof rack buy-back scheme!

 

 

Our useless Labor government is going into overdrive with a twenty-million-dollar advertising campaign which is full of motherhood statements. The only thing that campaign does not mention is for us to go on a diet so that our cars won't have to carry too much weight and hence use more fuel. I can almost see an extra fuel tax coming for overweight people!

Now here's a thought: could those hundreds of politicians, federal and state, not use our public transport - or at least 'communal' transport - instead of being chauffeur-driven all over Canberra and the country?

 

 

As for those terrible roof racks that are creating our fuel crisis, why not have a roof rack buy-back scheme? In fact, why not have a two-for-the-price-of-one and make it a roof rack AND firearms buy-back scheme?

As you can see, I'm full of it - as is this feckless government.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Bougainville Copper Project

 

 

This is a 1960s color movie about the Bougainville Copper Project in Papua New Guinea. Construction started in the late 1960s, and the mine was officially opened in 1972. My two years on this construction project, then the world's largest, forever shaped me and my future working career.

To this day, more than fifty years later, I still have a handful of friends with whom I regularly share memories of those exciting days. As one ex-engineer, now living in retirement in Kuala Lumpur, recently wrote:

 

"Until old age caught up with me very suddenly - it sneaked up on me without my realising it - work had been everything to me. I was in demand and there was one project after another. Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville. A lot of people worked there for lots of reasons; dollars were probably the main reason. I had just spent a year living in a boarding house in Melbourne run by Jews which was all right except that the cooked dinner was beef schnitzel and mashed potatoes every night, so a change of food and scenery was enough for me to sign up. Engineering-wise there was a lot of 'new' technology on Bougainville with little back-up information which taught me to innovate. Thanks to my time on Bougainville, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of."

 

Can't we all relate to this? I certainly can! After my first and futile attempt to rent a furnished room with a family in a Canberra suburb - I spotted their Jewish menorah on the sideboard before they spotted my German passport! - I also had moved into a boarding house - click here - with an also very predictable menu - "if it's Chicken Maryland, it must be Friday!" - after which I went to Rabaul where I shared a house with two other chartered accountants - click here.

I'd gone to Rabaul just for the adventure on a much reduced pay and an even more reduced menu because, as each one of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping, and when it was the turn of the other two, they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest on beer.

When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for audit personnel on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in October 1970. I was hired on the spot, returned to Rabaul to give notice, and within a few weeks was back on what was then the biggest construction project in the world. Woo-hoo!

Seeking adventure had been my main reason for coming to New Guinea, seeking more money was an added reason for going to Bougainville - I went from $2,000 to $7,500 a year, plus full board and lodging and a beat-up Toyota Landcruiser - , but it was the professional challenge that kept me there for two years.

"Auditing" meant checking contractors' monthly progress claims against contractual terms and conditions. Those contracts had been written not by accountants but by engineers in far-away Melbourne, often with little or no regard to the practicalities on the ground.

Pitting our brains against those of the contractors' representatives whose aim it was to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime chance, interpreting contractual clauses and, where necessary, pushing through essential contract changes which could save vast sums of money, made those long ten-hour days often seem not long enough.

Of course, there were those to whom Bougainville came as a shock. There was one who had arrived on the island and, taking one look at those cloud-covered mountains behind which Panguna was supposed to be, refused to even leave Aropa airstrip and took the next morning's plane back out. Then there were those who, after having run up an adding-machine striplist from 365 down to zero which they stuck on the wall, would slowly cross off their one-year contract. Needless to say, not many endured this mental torture for the whole 365 days.

As for me, and a select group of others, we revelled in the challenge, in the comraderie, and in the opportunities that, thanks to our time on Bougainville, eventually came our way on other projects and in other countries.

As he said in his email, "Thanks to my time on Bougainville, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of." And so say all of us!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. For more, go to "The Bougainville Copper Project" and its blog.

 

My spiritual home will always be New Guinea

 

The building next to my former office in Park Street in Rabaul, New Guinea

 

It's a cold morning at "Riverbend" and I've just jump-started my heart with a strong coffee — "International Roast", of course; old habits die hard — and now sit by the window and look at the falling leaves and wonder what insanity made me settle in these forbidding climes. Roy in Penang, Grahame in Port Moresby, Hubert in Cooktown, Peter and Ida in Cairns, do you read me?

Having been sent, in reply to a question I had posed on the facebook-page "I used to live in Papua New Guinea", this evocative painting of what looks like the building of my first employers in New Guinea, the chartered accountants' firm of Hancock Woodward & Neil in Rabaul, but which was in fact an almost identical-looking building next to it, only increased my longing to be back in the tropics. As my best friend from those days used to say, "My spiritual home will always be New Guinea."

 

I still need someone to point out to me the location of Park Street in this photograph.
I am looking at two possible locations but am confused.

 

It was in that modest building in Park Street where in 1970 I had my modest start — on an even more modest annual salary of $2,000 plus free but very sub-standard accommodation — to an accounting career that took me all over the world and back. I will always be grateful to the manager, Barry Weir, who hired me, literally sight unseen, from my mundane job as a bank officer in Canberra to enter the world of Luca Pacioli and to learn to tell the difference between a debit and a credit.

I am also grateful to Stephen Dowling who sent me a copy of this very evocative painting. He is, of course, the son of John Dowling, who was then reverentially referred to as 'the uncrowned king of Rabaul', since his company Plantation Holdings Limited (PHL), in addition to several plantations, also owned a string of businesses around town. In fact, Plantation Holdings Limited was the main client of the accounting firm Hancock Woodward & Neil, for whom I worked in that modest building.

They were all good memories as I sat by the window and looked at the falling leaves. It's time for another strong coffee — "International Roast", of course. Like old memories of New Guinea, old habits also die hard.

 

Googlemap Riverbend