It allows us to meet up with all sorts of people! My travelogue of my trip to Thursday Island attracted many readers: American and Australian servicemen who were stationed there during the war, fellow-travellers, and some former residents of the island.
One such former resident is Balfour Ross who had gone to Thursday Island in 1964 as a young man of 27 and, apart from a four-year stint in equally remote Normanton and another four years in New Zealand, had spent all his life on Thursday Island. What's even more remarkable, however, is the fact that Balfour and his wife June, after a lifetime on T.I., have recently retired to Malaysia under the Malaysia My Second Home Programme. Amazing what you can do when you start to think outside the square!
Balfour now lives in Terengganu on Malaysia's beautiful east coast on the fourteenth floor of a modern apartment building with sweeping views of the town, its river and beaches, and out to the sea. Malaysia is a country of startling beauty and great ethnic and cultural variety with a lovely tropical climate and what's more, it offers a very affordable lifestyle for someone on an Australian pension. Smart move, Balfour!
Balfour also put me in touch with Stan Pedler on Thursday Island, a large, effusive fellow with a colossal colonial-style moustache, who runs the Christian bookshop on the island and I remember having gone into his shop to look for something by C.S Lewis and Stan and I striking up a conversation about all sorts of things.
The sign above his shop reads 'Sower Christian Bookstore, Agent for All Pest and Weed Control'. It obviously pays to diversify on T.I. where the newsagency sells kitchen utensils and the supermarket sells fridges, and Stan, apart from being an insecticidal Bible-thumper, also handles airfreight for TNT and sells plane tickets for Aero-Tropics ('If you want to get to the outer islands and you want God on your side, then I'm your man.')
He is a modern-day missionary with two life stories to tell: his own and Jesus's. A failed cotton farmer, he flew north in his little Cessna as far as he could, to Mer, in the eastern Torres Strait, where he felt the warmth of God's presence and cottoned on to Christianity. A year later he returned to Mer in his yacht "Temehani" laden with picture Bibles and Jesus videos. Calling himself New Light Ministries, he moved all around the Strait before setting up shop on T.I.
Don't we live in a small world? And it is full of unconventional characters, many of whom you can meet on Thursday Island.
