May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright

 

This is the original full-length movie. Click to view in full screen
Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

New to the Yabba?" It was the inevitable question asked of a stranger to the Australian outback town of Bundanyabba. Then would follow round after round of drinks and a recital of The Yabba's virtues. You could rob your host, sleep with his wife or rape his daughters and Bundanyabba would welcome you. But refuse a drink or despise The Yabba and you were an outcast.

John Grant came from Sydney. He was serving his mandatory time as a schoolteacher in the outback. Bundanyabba was the essence of what he hated most about the region: its meaningless generosity and utter shallowness; its stifling hospitality and complete callousness; its scorching, relentless, horrible heat. And yet John, who was on his way to see his girl in Sydney, was stuck there - flat broke, dependent on these friendly, loathsome people. He gambled with them, drank with them, shot with them. He was trapped in a nightmare like the man cursed to dream of the Devil and wake in fright. Afterwards he realized it was enough to be awake, to be alive.

In spare, telling prose, Kenneth Cook creates a terrifying picture of the degradation to which men can sink and of the second chance given to one man to come back to life. "Wake in Fright" is a remarkable achievement in the genre of the taut novel of suspense.

Every bit as good as the book, the movie was shot in 1970 in the mining town of Broken Hill (the area which had inspired Kenneth Cook for the setting of his novel), with interiors shot at the Ajax Studios in the Sydney beachside suburb of Bondi. It was the last film to feature the veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack prior to "Wake in Fright"'s release, and the first film with Jack Thompson, the future Australian cinema star, among its cast members. Coincidentally, Rafferty (real name John William Pilbean Goffage) had been born in Broken Hill, the film's stand-in for the Yabba, in 1909.

If this isn't a great piece of Australiana, what is? Enjoy!

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. For some insightful commentary on the movie, click here and here.

 

 

On the Trail of Genghis Khan

 

This video is in English, so don't worry about the Danish sub-titles even if you,
unlike me, did not have the benefit of having learnt a smattering of Danish
through having had a nice Danish girlfriend during your pubescent stage.

 

I didn't tell you, did I, that yesterday I also brought home this $1-DVD which I had found at the Salvos shortly after I had a long talk in their furniture section with another op-shop aficionado who, with his wife, was relaxing on an impressive-looking $100-sofa which was still in such almost-new conditions that it could easily have cost ten times that much not all that long ago.

I joined them on the sofa - which was a three-seater - and we jointly regretted already having furnished our houses long before we had discovered the joys of op-shopping, and now had no more room for anything bigger than perhaps an occasional $2-book or this $1-DVD.

Of course, if it be left to Padma she'd be calling this DVD another dust-collector but I watched its whole 187 minutes today while she was in the Bay, and so can you because its full-length copy is also on YouTube.

 

For a preview of the book, click here

 

Inspired by the Mongols of the thirteenth century who, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history, a young Australian adventurer, Tim Cope, embarked on a journey that hadn’t been successfully completed since those times: to travel on horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine to the Danube River in Hungary.

 

 

From horse-riding novice to travelling three years and 10,000 kilometres on horseback, accompanied by his dog Tigon, Tim learnt to fend off wolves and would-be horse-thieves, and grapple with the extremes of the steppe as he crossed sub-zero plateaux, the scorching deserts of Kazakhstan and the high-mountain passes of the Carpathians.

Along the way, he was taken in by people who taught him the traditional ways and told him their recent history: Stalin's push for industrialisation brought calamity to the steepe and forced collectivism that in Kazakhstan alone led to the loss of several million livestock and the starvation of more than a million nomads. Today Cope bears witness to how the traditional ways hang precariously in the balance in the post-Soviet world.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

I'm all smiles

 

After a London physician diagnosed Mona Lisa's inscrutable smile as being due to her pregnant condition, an American doctor replied that such a smug, sly smile could have only one explanation: Mona Lisa had just discovered that she was not pregnant.

Perhaps because their last pregnancies were at least thirty years behind them, the ladies at the CWA Tea Room in Moruya welcomed us with warm and genuine smiles as we sat down to some home-made scones with cream and strawberry jam and a real pot of good ol' BUSHELLS tea.

 

 

They also had a book sale on where I found Hugh Mackay's "Generations - Baby Boomer, their parents & their children", and "Beyond the Blue Horizon" by Alexander Frater, which turned out to be an entertaining read about the legendary Imperial Airways Eastbound Empire service, the world's longest and most adventurous scheduled air route.

Padma spent some more on bits and pieces of craft which I call "dust-collectors" - she calls my books the same - all of which added up to a sizeable donation to this now already more than a hundred-year-old worthwhile organisation, but it's tipota after the multitude of tests my newly found German doctor signed me up to, after I had told him about my recent fall from a 100% vertical to a 100% horizontal. Of course, it had to happen on the hard, tiled floor in the hallwall, and, of course, my nose was between my face and the floor. Luckily, I didn't break my nose nor anything else, but there was blood on the floor and the skirting boards, and Padma said she'd never seen such a dazed look on my face.

I'm scheduled for another blood test, a chest x-ray, a brain scan, and a stress test, all of which will set me back $815. I tried to get out of the stress test by claiming to be already married to Padma, but the doctor - being German and humourless to the last - wanted to hear nothing of it.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Don't try this at home

 

 

In 1989, Costa Rican fisherman Gilberto "Chito" Shedden found a wounded crocodile, shot in the head, on the Reventazón River. Chito nursed the croc, named Pocho, back to health for 6 months.

When released, Pocho returned to Chito, forming an inseparable bond. For over 20 years, they swam and played together, capturing worldwide attention.

 

 

Pocho lived peacefully with Chito's family until his death in 2011. Their story is beautifully captured in the documentary "Touching the Dragon".

Googlemap Riverbend

 

We are our memories

 

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

 

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 - he died last year - 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 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, 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.

Googlemap Riverbend