And then there were none

 

 

You will know by now that I hardly ever miss a chance to make a literary allusion, and what better chance is there than to allude to Agatha Christie's masterpiece. Which sprang to my mind when I came back from the Bay yesterday and saw a big fat SOLD sticker across the "For Sale" sign at # 31 Sproxton Lane, a 1719.9m2 block of vacant waterfront land that sold just now for $750,000.

 

 

It was the last piece of real estate for sale in the lane other than "Riverbend". So what price for twenty times the land size plus a huge two-storey house, library, cottage, workshop, horse shed, clubhouse by the pond, and all the fencing and landscaping done? Oh, and I almost forget the twenty-five benches!

 

 

Please form an orderly queue!

 

 

Spin me a dream woven silver and goldfrom sunshine and shadows and days long agowhere people are memories and stories unfoldfrom "The Wind in the Willows" song

Colleen had promised to send a photo of their monthly 'coffee klatsch' but reneged
at the last moment, citing her unbecoming hairstyle. We therefore apologise for only
being able to show you on this blog an artist's impression of her actual appearance

 

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 can only imagine how much licence was taken when John Burke, ANZ Bank's Chairman of the Bored, met with his personal assistant Colleen Moran (née Murray) over a cup of latte yesterday for their monthly 'Laugh-In' - "Say good night, John" - "Good night, John!" - to talk about 'the good ol' days' working with the ANZ Bank and living at Barton House, some of which I shared from 1965 to 1967 and again in 1969.

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 into the O/D-card bin to suppress a convulsive giggle.

Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969

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 (he wanted me to join some sort of party 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.

 

Remember when the Seekers came to Canberra in 1966 for the filming of their television program "The Seekers Down Under"? Those were the days of driving without seatbelts and listening to lyrics which were intelligible and intelligent. 'A World Of Our Own' indeed! I still have all their records, including their later "I am Australian" which ought to be our anthem

 

As for Colleen, my one mental picture of her is wearing her dark-blue bank uniform on a frosty Canberra morning with contrasting fluffy white finger-gloves which she now denies she ever owned. Who said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? Colleen was part of the soap opera that was Barton House while I was a 'New Australian', still struggling with a new language. And while others had girlfriends, I hadn't even had the experience yet of failing to get a girlfriend.

 

Have a listen to the Bitter Lemons singing "Canberra Blues" in the Albert Hall in 1965. The late Paul Lyneham - who would become a well-known political journo later - was their lead vocal. And take a good look at the self-conscious dancers on the floor, so typical of the time. As for myself, you'd have had to beat me unconscious to be dragged off to a dance like that.

 

At the time, everyone over the age of thirty looked middle-aged, and everyone over fifty looked absolutely antique (Mr Tillett did!) but here we are, fifty years later, belonging to the same category of the non-young, and 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.

They say that old bankers never die, they just lose interest. Colleen and John, I hope you never lose your interest in those 'good ol' days' and treasure them as much as I do. I may even come to one of your meetings and help you reopen some long-forgotten neural pathways; after all, "ve haff vays of making jew talk".

 

 

At least for the moment, the carnival is not over yet!!!

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P.S. Come on, treat yourself to some more of the Seekers - click here.

 

Not the 9 o'clock news

 

A man who smashed up make-up counters with a baseball bat inside a southwest Sydney shopping centre has been taken to hospital for a mental health assessment. Did his wife max out their credit card on new eye liners?

"The Sun" reports that the residents who lost their homes in the Grenfell Tower will be permanently housed in Kensington High Street in a £2 billion ($A3.3 billion) development with flats - with one, two or three bedrooms - that will be fully furnished. It gives the term 'social housing' a completely new meaning.

As barking mad as it may sound, a Dr Mark Reeve told ABC Radio Adelaide's Afternoons program that brushing your dog's teeth regularly could help you save a fortune in vet bills. Just don't use your own toothbrush.

Balinese authorities confirm the hole used by four inmates, including an Australian, to escape from Kerobokan jail could have been dug from either inside or outside the facility. Why? Was there a third option?

People living in regional Australia not only use social media more than those living in cities, but also encounter greater bullying and harassment, a new report has found. Why? Don't regional computers have a DELETE button?

A study suggests that Australians should show 'cultural sensitivity' towards migrant men who physically abuse their wife and children. Going one step further, a court put a teenager who had immigrated to Australia from Afghanistan on two years probation with no conviction after he had pleaded guilty to a series of sex attacks on a Surfers Paradise beach. The judge accepted that seeing girls in bikinis is different to the environment in which he grew up.

Boris Becker has been declared bankrupt by a British court after the former tennis player failed to pay a long-standing debt. His lawyer said Becker was “not a sophisticated individual when it comes to finances,” and that bankruptcy was likely to have an adverse effect on Becker’s image. “He should have thought about that a long time ago,” the registrar said.

And Sydney commuters take advantage of an Opal charge-card loophole by travelling to and from Sydney Airport for a mere $3.38: the system allows them to tap off with a negative balance and then throw the card away without having to pay the full fare of $18.62. Pure genius!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

Super(-ior) rules from 1st July

The fall and fall of BHP

 

Our politicians, having woken up from their usual slumber and discovered to their dismay that there are some undeserving ordinary citizens who have saved enough in their self-managed superannuation funds to equal or even exceed these fat-cats' non-contributory parliamentary super pay-outs, acted with uncommon speed to put a limit on those funds.

Anything in excess of this newly-imposed and quite arbitrary limit needs to be taken back out of the superfunds by 30th June or else be taxed at a higher rate as well as attract nasty fines.

Funny how this reminds me of the Burmese military junta who in 1975 stopped my employers, TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles, from ordering company cars for our expatriate staff - moi included - from Germany which, as they had rightly guessed, wouldn't have been Volkswagen Beetles. Only the president himself and his generals were allowed to drive through Rangoon's maddening traffic in shiny Mercedes limousines, and so we had to settle for Peugeot 504s from France.

Well, thanks to the calamitous state of the world and ever-nosediving commodity prices, the share market (and BHP) has been in a downward trend since late January. Yesterday's sharp drop really put the knife into it, which saves me from doing any transferring-out to comply with our politicians' fit-of-jealousy threshold. Thanks for small mercies!

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What's on the telly?

'There's a smell in here that will outlast religion.'
'There's another classic example of someone having a two inch arsehole and us having installed only one inch piping.'
[advice on getting married] 'Cut out the middle man; find someone you hate and buy them a house.'
'There's the urinal, and being a male, you have a prong on you that points forward, so I don't understand how they get it on their feet. They must point it down.'
'I'd love to be able to say "I plumb toilets" and have someone say "Now that is something I've always wanted to do"'.

 

Some time ago the wife left me in no doubt that "Dust!" was not the correct answer; however, there was plenty on it after two telly-free months when I finally switched it on last night to watch David Stratton's "Stories of Australian Cinema".

Lovers of Australian movies will adore this documentary series with its glimpses of the most moving moments, the most unforgettable scenes and the ones that caused us pain. The series also revisits some of those times when a line of dialogue was so often repeated that it eventually entered the lexicon. Think of 'You're terrible Muriel' and 'Tell him he's dreaming' and 'There’s a smell in here that will outlast religion'. Even 'How’s the serenity?' has now entered the real estate ads.

I am a lover of Australian movies and I thought I'd seen them all, but thanks to David I've now also discovered "Force of Destiny", "Man of Flowers", "Innocence", "The Home Song Stories, "Lonely Hearts", and a host of others, some of which I won't bother to track down on ebay as they're a bit too violent for my taste.

Thanks, David, for adding to my collection of Australian movies.

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