45 Hale Street, Townsville

 

The new owners did not change much of its outside appearance apart from giving it a 'cool' blue-and-white paint job.

 

The year was 1985. I had come back from my last posting in Greece. My Saudi boss, who was reluctant to see me go, had promised to let me continue my audit work from Australia, and so I bought this property on the edge of Townsville's CBD to be both office and home to me.

 

The inside has been quite stunningly renovated. The humble verandah has become an extension of the living-space.

 

I bought the place for something like $50,000-plus but the promised work never materialised and so I left, first for Sydney and sometime later back to Canberra from where I had started out twenty years ago.

I hung onto the place for some years as a rental property but the trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants was just too much bother and so I sold it again in April 1998 for a mere $87,000 - hardly the sort of rags-to-riches story so often touted by real estate agents.

 

The front room, once meant to have been my office, is now a beautifully appointed lounge.

Behind the lounge is another sitting-room. Its feature is the silky-oak room divider, repainted a gleaming white.

The garden has the city skyline as its backdrop, illustrating how close this ideal 'city pad' is to Townsville's mall and CBD.

 

The property resold four more times since I sold it in 1998, the last time in 2021 for $495,000. It's listed as a $500-a-week rental in January 2024.

 

 

The improvements continued. For all the latest photos, click here.

 

Townsville's Castle Hill in the background

 

Another example of my mad life and the equally mad property market!

 

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Youth, you son of a bitch, where did you go?

 

 

I didn't write this but WOW does it speak to me!!!

 

Barely the day started and it's already six in the evening. Barely Monday has arrived and it's already Friday again ... and the month is almost over ... and the year is almost over. ... and already 40, 50, 60, 70, or indeed 80 years of our lives have passed .. .and we realise that we lost our parents, our friends ... and we realise it's too late to go back.

So, let's try, despite everything, to enjoy the remaining time. Let's keep looking for activities that we like. Let's put some colour into our grey. Let's smile at the little things in life that put balm in our hearts. And despite everything, we must continue to enjoy with serenity this time we have left.

Let's try to eliminate the 'afters': I'll do it after; I'll say it after; I'll think about it after. Don't leave everything until 'after'.

Because what we don't understand is that:

Afterwards, the coffee gets cold.

Afterwards, priorities change.

Afterwards, the charm is broken.

Afterwards, health passes.

Afterwards, the kids grow up.

Afterwards, parents get old.

Afterwards, promises are forgotten.

Afterwards, the day becomes the night.

Afterwards, life ends.

And then it's too late.

So, let's leave nothing until 'after'. Because if we wait until 'after', we might lose the best moments, the best experiences, the best friends, the best family. The day is today. The moment is now. We are no longer at the age where we can afford to postpone what needs to be done right away.

 

It looks like an eternity, but it's a short trip. Enjoy life and always be kind.

 

 

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Happy Birthday to me!

 

 

Having been a rusted-on Liberal voter since I day I swore my allegiance to the Queen, the local branch of the Liberal Party wished me a Happy Birthday and thanked me for supporting Liberal values and good public policy in NSW.

 

Please don't blame me for Karl Marx. I gave away my German citizenship in 1971.

 

Not to be outdone, my socialist friend up the lane reminded me to get back to work, which I did by surreptitiously watching BHP's share price on my mobile phone while having lunch and a few chardies at the golf club. It must've worked because BHP broke a dizzying weeklong losing-streak, from $64.58 last Wednesday to $59.25 yesterday, by today going up 95 cents to $60.20. That's still well below BHP's all-time high of $68.77, but there's always "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow".

 

 

On the way home, we dropped in at the Botanical Gardens to inspect the two trees I had planted decades ago in memory of my late father and my best friend Noel Butler. Unfortunately, the old trees hadn't survive the 2019/2020 bushfires but have since then been replaced.

 

The famous memory trick 'i before e (except after c)' has so many exceptions that it shouldn't even be a spelling rule, least of all in German, but some friendly Anglo-Saxon soul changed my intended "mein" (meaning "my") to "mien" - or was he simply dyslexic? He also anglicised my father's last name by dropping the umlaut and the second 'n', even though, unlike me, 'mein Vater' never emigrated - except once, involuntarily, as POW to Russia.

 

And if that wasn't enough, Padma had baked me a traditional German cheese cake and there was also a birthday present waiting for me when we returned home: a beautiful PARKER pen given to me by our long-time friends across the river, Elaine and Neil. Some days are diamonds ...

 

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PNG's Independence Day 16 September

 

 

It was in the dying days of 1974 when I received an urgent telegram from TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles to fly to what was then called Burma to take up a new position as chief accountant in their exploration office in Rangoon.

I was at the time working in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea, putting the finishing touches on Air Niugini's internal audit department, as the country was hurdling towards independence the following year.

When the then Chief Minister Michael Somare - soon to be Sir Michael and Prime Minister of the independent country of Papua New Guinea - heard of my impending departure, he expressed his regrets that I wouldn't be there for this momentous occasion. "However," he said, "the least we can do is make our Independence Day the same as your birthday."

And so it came to pass that my birthday and Papua New Guinea's Independence Day are celebrated on the same day each year.

 

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"Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret"

 

 

It was Benjamin Disraeli who is supposed to have said this. I have reached old age, and should start to regret, but I don't. Of course, I made mistakes - far too many mistakes! - but when I think of the frailty of human nature, of the many pitfalls that surround us, and the crazy world that we live in - I was going to shorten it to 'the vicissitudes of life' but I didn't want to confuse you, Des! - , I merely wonder how I managed not to have made even more mistakes.

One thing that I have noticed is that, whereas during all those past struggles I hardly ever looked back, I now look back all the time. As there is no future to speak of, I live in the past, before the struggle began - a harking back to youth which, alas! has departed for ever.

An email received from an ex-colleague of my days on the Bougainville Copper Project makes me think that I am not so different from others:

 

"Until old age caught up with me very suddenly - it sneaked up on me without my realising it - work had been everything to me. I was in demand and there was one project after another. Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville. A lot of people worked there for lots of reasons; dollars were probably the main reason. I had just spent a year living in a boarding house in Melbourne run by Jews which was all right except that the cooked dinner was beef schnitzel and mashed potatoes every night, so a change of food and scenery was enough for me to sign up. Engineering-wise there was a lot of "new" technology on Bougainville with little back-up information which taught me to innovate. Thanks to my time there, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of."

 

And can't we all relate to this? I certainly can! After my first and futile attempt to rent a furnished room with a family in a Canberra suburb - I recognised the Jewish menorah on the sideboard before they recognised my German accent - I also had moved into a boarding house - click here - with an also very predictable menu - "if it's Chicken Maryland, it must be Friday!" - after which I went to Rabaul where I shared a company-supplied house with two other chartered accountants - click here.

I'd gone to Rabaul just for the adventure, on a much reduced pay and an even more reduced menu, because, as each one of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping and it was the turn of the other two, they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest on beer.

 

I had answered a similar ad when I worked and lived in Rabaul, except mine gave Bechtel's Kieta postal address to which I replied. By return mail, I received a return ticket to present myself at Panguna for an interview which I did and, as they say, the rest is history ...

 

When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for accountants on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in September 1970. I was hired on the spot, returned to Rabaul to give notice, and within weeks was back on what was the biggest construction project in the world. Woo-hoo!

 

AUSTRALIA'S MOST WANTED accountant
For more revealing photos, click here

 

Seeking adventure had been my main reason for coming to New Guinea, seeking more money was an added reason for going to Bougainville - I went from $2,000 to $7,500 a year, plus full board and lodging and a beat-up Toyota Landcruiser - , but it was the professional challenges that kept me there for several years.

"Auditing" meant checking contractors' monthly progress claims against contractual terms and conditions. Those contracts had been written not by accountants but by engineers in far-away Melbourne, often with little or no regard to the practicalities on the ground.

 

 

Pitting my brain against those of the contractors' representatives whose aim it was to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime chance, interpreting contractual clauses and, where necessary, pushing through essential contract changes which could save vast sums of money, made those long ten-hour days often seem not long enough.

Of course, there were those to whom Bougainville was just a great disappointment. There was one who had arrived on the island and, taking one look at those cloud-covered mountains behind which Panguna was supposed to be, refused to leave Aropa airstrip and took the next morning's plane back out. Another one, having scored the much-coveted trip to Bechtel's Melbourne office to hand-deliver the monthly batch of computer punched cards (remember punched cards?), was never seen again. This act became known as 'doing a Joslin' (take a bow, Frank!)

Then there were those who, having signed a twelve-month contract, on their first day at work ran up an adding-machine striplist from 365 days down to zero and taped it to the wall above their desk. Then, each morning, they would cross off another number. Not many endured this mental torture long enough to reach the much longed-for Day Zero.

As for me and many others, we revelled in the challenges, in the comraderie, and eventually in the opportunities that, thanks to our time on Bougainville, came our way on other projects in other countries.

 

 

As my former colleague wrote, "Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville." And so say all of us!

 

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