Happy Australia Day!

 

 

There's a story of a conversation Bill Clinton had with Edward de Bono when they were both in Hong Kong. Bill asked Ed his opinion of what in an ideal world the perfect nation would look like.

De Bono replied, "It would have an ethnically diverse population of twenty to twenty-five million people. English would be the national language. It would be religiously and economically liberated, have a democratic form of government and a vigorous free press. I'd locate it somewhere along the Pacific Rim. It would have a young history and an optimistic outlook. And a generous climate that lent itself to encouraging all its people - rich or poor - to enjoy the wonderful free gifts nature has to offer".

"Sounds wonderful", Clinton wistfully remarked. "What would you call it?" he asked.

"Oh, I wouldn't change its name", De Bono replied, "'Australia' will do fine".

Apocryphal or not, De Bono is right and I, like him, love Australia. I'm not saying it is perfect. We, too, have to put up with lying politicians, nasty neighbours, occasionally stifling bureaucracies, sometimes even bad weather, but nothing could ever persuade me to return to the northern hemisphere.

 

 

I am German by birth, Australian by choice - and happy with both.

 

 

South Australian farmer Harry Schuster surprised the country with Australia's intricate Coat of Arms tilled into the family's farmland.

 

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY!

 

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What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?

 

The quote is from the book "Post Office"

 

Being alone never feels right. Sometimes it feels good, but it never feels right. And yet, looking back on the life I have lived, alone for most of the time, it now seems to have felt better; it seems as if I have lived my life more deliberately.

It's like travelling solo, which gives you the freedom to go where you want to go and when you want to go. It also makes you meet other people which makes you learn more about them as well as yourself.

Being alone, you don't get asked at nine o'clock in the morning what you want to have for lunch. You don't even know if you're going to be hungry. You simply go to the fridge when you are hungry and see what's there. If you are like me and have nothing else in the fridge but some beer and a chunk of cheese, you go down the street or down to the club and see what's there. Each day is a blank page for you to write your own story.

The company you keep are also single men because somehow you don't quite fit in the company of married men whose wives think that you might give their husbands the wrong idea and regard you a threat.

Your friends have either always been single or become single again, in which case they are ahead of you because they have already accepted loneliness as the price to pay for not getting asked at nine o'clock in the morning what they want to have for lunch.

I had better stop writing this post because it's nine o'clock in the morning and I've just got asked what I want to have for lunch.

 

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"There but for the grace of God ..."

 

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A.A.S.A, A.C.I.S, A.A.I.M
PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT

 

Remember the Australian Tax Office's simple "S" form for wage and salary earners? Or the equally simple forms for trusts, businesses, and companies? Simple two-page forms: half an hour to fill in the blanks, and you were done for the year!

Things have become so much more complicated since then. No wonder that even the smallest town has a resident accountant even before it gets a Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, or - Heaven forbid! - Dan Murphy's. Every time I see one of those small-town accountants displaying their trade, I keep thinking to myself, "There but for the grace of God ..."

There was a time when I would've thought it the pinnacle of my career to run my own accounting practice, but the fickle finger of fate pointed me in a different direction which saved me from sitting behind the same desk and looking out the same window for the next thirty-odd years.

Instead, I sat at hundreds of different desks and looked out of hundreds of different windows, often not even long enough to use the toilet (those were the days before liquid lunches worked like a diuretic).

The above signage hung over one of those small-town accounting offices. It belonged to a friend from my Bougainville days who, after having left New Guinea and travelling down the east coast of Australia, came to this little coastal town and said, "This reminds me so much of Bougainville", and settled down to open his own accounting practice.

His wife opened a shoe shop, which was just as well because his own office, squeezed in between a delicatessen and a laundromat, catered mainly to cow cockies who needed his help with the filling-in of their unemployment forms, which alone would never have fed his family. Years later, having barely recovered the cost of the signage above the door, he left his office and his family and bummed around Australia.

When I last heard from him several years ago, he'd just moved from a bedsitter in Cairns to another one in Port Douglas, and already thought of moving on again. I guess he was trying to make up for all that time lost while he had filled in unemployment forms for those cow cockies.

"There but for the grace of God ..."

 

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The War on the West

 

Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4 — Part 5 — Part 6
Part 7 — Part 8 — Part 9 — Part 10 — Part 11

 

It is now fashionable to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. In doing so, we undermine the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilisation in the world (notwithstanding the momentary Trump aberration).

In his book "The War on the West", Murray tackles some of the worst consequences of "woke" culture in the world today. He asks: "If the history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it?"

 

 

The book commences with a brief history of the origins of political correctness and wokeism and progresses through the ways in which woke has infiltrated academia, art, literature, religion and society in general, his comments well-argued, thought provoking and insightful.

I may not agree with everything Douglas Murray writes (and says in his audiobook) but, as Elizabeth Beatrice Hall writes in her book "The Friends of Voltaire", "... I will defend to the death [his] right to say it".

A perfect book to read - or to listen to - on "Invasion Day". And to all of those who hate Australia Day (but not the benefits that flow from it)"

 

Happy Australia Day!

 

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Dreaming in my donga

 

 

True isolation is very hard to find these days. Go backpacking in the Himalayas, and there'll be an internet café waiting for you at the end of the track. Take a boat down the Amazon River, and you'll still have reception on your mobile phone.

There's still reception in "Melbourne" but I won't take my mobile phone with me when I go there. I go there to relax or read or write, with the only disturbance being an occasional soft-footed thump-thump from a nearby mob of kangaroos moving from one grazing spot to another.

 

 

If I'm not immediately taken back to my time on Bougainville Island where we all lived in "dongas" on Loloho Beach, then I'm reminded of it when I open my eyes after a short nap and look at the photos on the wall. "Millionaires Row Dongas" says one of them, and "A quiet day at Loloho Camp 6 beach" the other. We'd never heard the word "donga" - which is Australian slang for a portable, modular building - but we all used it from the day we got there. "See you at my donga after dinner!"

 

... because, Roy, an electrical engineer, forgot to plug it in!
Photo courtesy of Roy Goldsworthy, now residing in Malaysia

 

We were happy without telephones, newspapers, and only a scratchy radio reception, but there was almost a riot on that night the "boozer" didn't open because they had run out of beer. Life was so simple then!

 

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