In my native Germany ...

 

 

I almost started writing this post with the words, "My native Germany ...", however, after more than sixty years of having lived just about everywhere else but Germany — and proudly calling myself an Australian despite this country doing its level best to throw away everything that had once made it the best country in the world and embracing everything that will turn it into one of the worst; think diversity, multiculturalism, the Labor Party, and the list goes on — I am as much a native of Germany as I am of the planet Mars.

Anyway, as I was not going to write, my native Germany is a nation of specialists. It's a place where even qualifications have qualifications. Where you can study for seven years to become a window cleaner. That's fine but it left me, who'd been tossed out on the street after just eight years of primary school, nowhere to go but to Australia where I could reinvent myself and become anything I wanted to become.

I didn't need a vocational guidance councellor to tell me what I wanted to beome. In my native Germany I already had my commercial training with an insurance company and followed this up by being paymaster for a large construction company that built autobahns all over Germany.

Lacking any higher education I would never have been dull enough to become an accountant in my native Germany, but after only two years in Australia I became an accountant in South-West Africa, and then an audit clerk in a firm of chartered accountants in New Guinea and then, also in New Guinea, the senior accountant on what was at the time the biggest construction project in the world. Four years later I was chief accountant for a French oil company in Burma, and many years later, financial controller for a firm of commodity traders in Saudi Arabia.

 

 

Despite the unbroken column of "sehr gut" — except for religion which already then I thought was irrelevant, and Naturlehre which I knew was irrelevant after the teacher had answered my question "Why do I have a belly button" with an evasive "So your stomach can breathe" — in my native Germany they'd still look at my "only" primary school certificate even today and think, "This chap is only good enough for lion taming".

 

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

 

 

In his "Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't", John Atkinson summaries Leo Tolstoy's more than a thousand-pages long novel "War and Peace" very succinctly: "Everyone is sad. It snows."

He never attempted to summarise Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", perhaps because, at just over fifty pages, it's already short enough, or because its themes of death and the search for the meaning of life are a little more difficult to put into five words.

 

 

Actor and director Alexander Kaidanovsky made the only Russian movie adaptation, which includes Tolstoy's living voice reading his story "Wolf".

But back to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" which brings to our attention the unpleasant fact that we all have to die, and that we might have to suffer a whole lot first. Our medicines might be better than those of Ivan's doctors, but we haven't got any closer to escaping mortality, and many people still die only after a long and painful period of disease.

Perhaps Ivan Ilych will also get you thinking about what mortality means for you. Like Ivan, you might start wondering how you should live your life, and how you can find meaning in it - click here. It all ends soon enough some fifty pages later: "He drew in a deep breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched out his limbs, and died."

 

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Bougainville is in the news again

 

 

In so many ways, the years I spent working on the island of Bougainville shaped my life. The work experience I gained from being thrown headfirst into a job that was so big that it seemed impossible at first to get it done gave me the confidence to never be afraid of any challenges and indeed seek them out.

Eventually, that huge gold and copper mine sparked a catastrophic civil war in which many thousands were killed and which forced the closure of the mine in 1989. It's in the news again with talks about reopening it with another $40 billion to be generated over its life span - click here.

I've just come across this YouTube clip of an "expedition" to the crashed Betty bomber in which Admiral Yamamoto was killed in April 1943. It's a bit hyped up because it's far from being an expedition. We went there in 1971 by simply by chartering a plane and flying from Kieta to Buin ...

 

That's me on the left carrying a white bag full of mosquito repellent

 

... sleeping in a native hut on the beach near Buin ...

 

That's me - again - sitting down and calling for room service

 

... and trekking through the jungle next morning to the crash site.

 

That's me - again! - leaning on what's left of Yamamoto's Betty Bomber

 

The following day, we hired a 4WD to take us across the Crown Prince Range back to Panguna. Somewhere in all the dross I had stored for the next twenty years at a friend's place in Canberra, there is a photo of us crossing what was no doubt a crocodile-infested river which the 4WD was unable to cross and in which we then sat for hours, preferring to be eaten by a crocodile than to be dying of heatstroke. If I can find the photo, I'll add it to this post later. As I wrote, Bougainville gave us all the confidence not to be afraid of challenges but to seek them out.

 

Brian Herde with his beloved BRONICA

 

Postscript: All three photos are courtesy of Brian Herde who never went anywhere without his beloved BRONICA, a cheaper alternative to the famous Hasselblad. He died an untimely death in 1999 just 67 years old.

 

 

I never found out what killed him. Maybe he never took his ATABRINE.

 

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"Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

 

 

For all you lesser beings who were not born in a non-English-speaking country and ended up monolingual, let me explain: my thinly-disguised alter ego gripping that "AUSKUNFT" counter is asking the question, "Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

For most of my life, while I was chasing work and money around the world — although satisfaction in work always came before money in the bank — it never occurred to me that one day I would be gripping that counter asking the silly question, "What is the meaning of life?"

I was getting satisfaction in my work and I was getting money in the bank, so what else was there? I found out that nothing else was there when I retired. I had plenty of money but no more work, and "der Sinn des Lebens" had gone, leaving me gripping that "AUSKUNFT" counter.

For most of my life, I had an answer to the question "What do you do?" I was either becoming somebody or being somebody, but suddenly, that answer was gone. And with it went a huge chunk of who I thought I was.

So much of my identity was wrapped up in my work. My daily routine, my sense of contribution, even my social circles, they all revolved around my job. When retirement hit, I didn't just lose a pay cheque. I lost myself. Days blended together. Wednesdays felt like Sundays. Time became meaningless when every day became a weekend.

People said stay busy, but that busyness was just noise. It was a lot of movement without meaning. I could fill every hour of the day and still feel completely empty inside. Then there were the friendships at work. Thy evaporated once I had stopped work and I faced a social void.

I think I finally got a grip on it. That grip is firmly on the "AUSKUNFT" counter, still asking the silly question, "Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?"

 

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P.S. As one reader from far-away Cooktown wrote, "I’ve been pretty stupid in my time and the older I get the more it riles me. As for "Der Sinn des Lebens", I don’t think there is one. We’re born - most of us by accident - and then we start dying, and all we can do during that process is to focus on self-preservation. Many take others into consideration in their actions but many others don’t, and they are the ones that ruin life for the rest of us. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be football and karaoke and no tattoos nor any medical attention for recreational drug addicts. Ah, yes, and no cricket! Just thinking of this list has depressed me enough to get another cold beer from the fridge."

I agree on the cricket, and the recreational drug addicts; also on the tattoos and the karaoke (although I thought that fad had already faded). And I could live with the football on the condition that they don't show it on the telly night after night. Maybe I should invite my reader to write my next post while I get myself another cold beer from the fridge.

 

It's not hoarding if it's books

 

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Next to my favourite Vinnies shop is Dan Murphy's which always has plenty of undercover parking. I never enter Dan Murphy's, but the other day I found a $10 note in its carpark, and I thought to myself, "What would Jesus have done?" So I went inside and turned it into wine.

 

 

Wine prices being what they are, I was left with enough change to drop into Vinnies for a quick look at their bookshelves. I know I have already enough unread books to last me another lifetime, but I couldn't pass up Geoffrey Blainey's "A Short History of the 20th Century" in perfect mint condition, and "AMO, AMAS, AMAT ... and all that - How to become a Latin Lover" which had been ink-stamped by the Dickson College Library (barcode 1731753 / classification NF 470 MOU) but, judging by its clean condition, never left the lending library before ending up at Vinnies.

 

 

As any bibliophile will tell you, "It's not hoarding if it's books".

 

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