Buy them up, knock them down!

 

The waterfront property at 3 Sproxton Lane went under the hammer but failed to sell; a few months later it sold in a private sale for an even two million dollars. Now it's gone under the hammer again - literally! - as the new owners are giving it a complete overhaul and facelift.

House by house, sleepy little Nelligen is dragged into the 21st century!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

People die only when we forget them

 

Hans Moehrke and I had met when he stayed at the SAVOY HOTEL in Piraeus where I was a permanent resident during my "Greek days". We breasted the bar on many nights and over many drinks, bemoaning the state of the world and our place in it, in three languages: Afrikaans, English and German.

We were both in commodity trading: I mainly in grains, in lots of 20,000, 30,000, even 50,000 tonnes at a time, whereas Hans was more into pork bellies for which there wasn't much demand from my Saudi masters.

We stayed in touch after my return to Australia in 1985, sometimes through an occasional phone call but more often through letters which became more sporadic after Hans had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease which made it impossible for him to write.

His last message was a small parcel containing a detective novel by Colin Dexter with the prescient title, "Death Is Now My Neighbour", because less than a year later, on this day in 2015, Hans passed away at his home in beautiful Constantia just outside Cape Town. Totsiens, Hans!

Rest in Peace, Hans.
People die only when we forget them.
I shan't forget you.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

My "Cabooltier" Past

 

What makes Caboolture real fruit yoghurt so much tastier?
Well out here the birds are chirpier, the air is cleanier
The grass is greenier, the cows are happier
They make it much creamier, with fruit that’s fruitier
In bits much chunkier, the breeze blows gentlier
The whole world’s friendlier, and things are less hastier
That’s why it’s tastier. Caboolture real fruit yoghurt.
There’s nothing artificial about Caboolture.

 

Before the internet, vacant positions were advertised in newspapers, and for financial positions none were better than the big display ads in the Australian Financial Review.

They were the only ones I responded to. The bigger the better! I mean, why reply to a small classified? If that's all they could afford, they couldn't afford me! ☺

Indeed, the only classified that ever got me a job was the one I placed myself in an issue of PIM, the Pacific Islands Monthly, in 1969. From memory, it ran something like this: "Young Accountant (still studying) seeks position in the Islands." (decades later I visited the National Library in Canberra and had all twelve 1969-issues of PIM sent up from their archives, but I couldn't find the ad again).

That tiny classified got me my first job in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea. The rest, as they say, is history because from then on it was display ads all the way through until 1979 when, having returned to Canberra from my last overseas assignment in Malaysia and finding life in suburbia wanting, I started a working holiday caravanning up and down the Australian east coast.

I travelled as far south as Melbourne, as far west as Mt Isa, and as far north as Cairns, and found myself in Brisbane by mid-June 1980. An old friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, had just bought himself a small acreage near Caboolture north of Brisbane, so when I saw an accounting job advertised with the Caboolture Co-operative, I applied even though the ad was not 'display' nor was the job.

 

Noel (on right) visiting me at my 'mobile home' in the Northern Star Caravan Park in Brisbane

 

This dairy co-operative, owned and operated by the cow cockies in the district, had started its life as the Caboolture butter factory in 1907 which was also the age of its Dickensian office to which I was invited for an interview at the crack of dawn.

The interviewing panel was a bunch of cow cockies still wearing their cow-something-splattered wellies from the morning's milking. This was the real deal; there's nothing artificial about Caboolture!

They must've been wondering why this bright spark who'd just done a consulting job in Malaysia and been senior-this and chief-that in the past, wanted to be the accountant for an outfit whose only claim to fame, apart from their rightly famous yoghurt, was the production of a cheddar cheese speckled with peanuts and aptly named "Bjelke Blue". (Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the longest-serving and longest-lived as well as most controversial Premier of Queensland and also a peanut farmer - or, some might say, just a peanut!)

Mercifully, the cow cockies turned me down which, for a fleeting moment, made the birds sound a little less 'chirpier' and me feeling a little more ‘saddier’ as I would've had liked to hang around for a little bit 'longier' with Noel who'd been my best friend since our first chance meeting on a Europe-bound ship in late 1967.

Still, before long I was once again responding to display ads and roaming the world, and Noel remained my very best friend until his untimely death in 1995.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Rise and Fall of Australia

 

Everyone has heard of Donald Horne's "The Lucky Country" but hands up who's actually read it? Yep, thought so! Well, here's your chance to read its updated edition "The Rise and Fall of Australia - How a great nation lost its way" by Nick Bryant.

 

Read a preview here

 

In this thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking book, dealing with politics, racism, sexism, the country’s place in the region and the world, culture and sport, the author argues that Australia needs to discard the out-dated language used to describe itself, to push back against Lucky Country thinking, to celebrate how the cultural creep has replaced the cultural cringe and to stop negatively typecasting itself. Rejecting most of the national stereotypes, Nick Bryant sets out to describe the new Australia rather than the mythic country so often misunderstood not just by foreigners but Australians themselves.

Fail to read it at your own peril.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

 

Book titles are not protected by copyright laws

 

Or else Nick Bryant would've already been sued by Joe Haldeman and Dexter Filkins when he published his latest book "The Forever War", which tells the story of how America’s political polarisation is 250 years in the making, and argues that the roots of its modern-day malaise are to be found in its troubled past.

 

 

It's on my list of books to read as soon as I've finished with Nick Bryant's equally spellbinding book "The Rise and Fall of Australia - How a great nation lost its way"; after all, all reading should begin about home.

Googlemap Riverbend