If you want to know who of your family and friends went where and came back when.

 

 

If you want to know who of your family and friends went where and came back when, simply go to www.naa.gov.au. Click on "RecordSearch", then on "Passenger arrivals", and type in the "Family Name", and select from the displayed search results - which you can enlarge to 200 per page - by clicking on the displayed icon in the "Digital copy" column.

There's just one limitation: your family member or friend must've travelled BEFORE 1973 because, because of privacy reasons, later Incoming Passenger Cards are not yet available in the public domain.

 

 

I've just found my best friend's Incoming Passenger Card when on the 9th of October 1972 he flew down from New Guinea, where we both had lived, to Brisbane, from where he took the XPT to see me in Sydney.

 

 

After several years in New Guinea, I had just accepted a big promotion to Group Financial Controller in the head office of the company whose Bougainville contract I had helped to kick off. My mate Noel had come to Sydney to ask me to join him on an island-hopping adventure through the Indonesian archipelago. After all the hard work on Bougainville, I was due for a break and could easily have asked for a couple of months' leave but, as always, put my career first, and so Noel left without me.

Sydney never agreed with me, and I was soon back in the islands, that time in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. More than fifty years later, my career no longer counts for anything whereas two months hopping from island to island would still be a treasured memory today.

Regrets, I've had a few ...

 

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Autumn at "Riverbend"

 

 

Autumn at "Riverbend". The nights are getting a bit coolish, and the mornings are definitely no longer 'get-up-and-go early mornings' but 'stay-in-bed-until-the-sun-warms-up mornings', but the still long days are absolutely glorious.

And BHP had another good day as well, after China permitted their state-backed iron ore buyers to purchase some BHP cargoes. BHP promptly jumped 3.2% to $56.10 after an intra-day high of $56.42. It's still well down from its all-time high of $59.39 on 3 March, after which, on the same day, it dropped to $57.70, and kept dropping until it had bottomed at $46.06 but closed at $47.11 on 23 March. What a ride!

It's about all the excitement I get these days, apart from watching HARD QUIZ on the ABC and the Donald's psychopathic rantings. Now we have that Mexican stand-off of a double bluff in the Strait of Hormuz and a holy war with the Pope. Frankly, headline fatigue is beginning to set in and I want to stop hearing about all this s*"t and get back to normal.

 

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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 we ended up with: LABOR!

Funny new pronouns for 'non-binaries', 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.

 

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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 me to try 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.

 

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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.

 

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