Dedicated to Paul Erling Johnson and all the wandering souls out there

 

Click on FULL SCREEN and enjoy!
This is a cautionary tale. By the time this movie was made, Paul Eling Johnson had become a bit of a sad sack who still lived on his boat alone, had nobody and no-one and his boat was in a barely floating condition, and he didn't sail anymore. He had found an accepting and non-judgemental community who treated him lovingly and with respect, despite his addiction and often wandering about in an inebriated state. A story of freedom bounded by alcohol and poverty. As the filmmakers stated, "This film is a contemplation about his choices after a lifetime of freedom before he embarked on his final journey of no return."

 

You know, when you go to youtube.com's front page to search for something and you see a whole list of their latest "suggestions" which you normally ignore and move on from? ("This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put", I hear you whisper.)

This morning I was going to type in "Yuval Noah Harari" to see if I could find something about his latest book "Unstoppable Us - How Humans Took Over the World", when I was facing their latest "suggestion" of "The Sailor | Full Movie - What is the price of freedom? Paul Johnson sailed the world all his life. He loved, drank, and lived foolish, never truly living on land. Now he is turning eighty. What is at the end of such a journey? Is there loneliness?", uploaded as recently as Oct 18, 2022. I hope YouTube won't delete it because, while this world-renowned sailor and builder of boats died in June 2021, aged 83, his legend lives on.

My own sailing-days are well and truly over! The nearest I ever got to casting off completely was in 1974 when I worked for AIR NIUGINI in Port Moresby and saw a wooden yacht, "Spirit of Barbary", advertised for sale at Popondetta on the north coast of New Guinea. An old mate from my Bougainville days, Brian Herde, was also interested, and we flew across to spend a couple of days sailing and living aboard it, after which our minds seemed made up. I had just enough saved up to pay for my half of the boat, but Brian was notoriously reluctant to spend money and to sell even a tiny fraction of his many SANTOS shares, and so the deal was off.

I've had a variety of small sailing boats ever since: in Port Moresby, in Lae, in Honiara - I even owned a small LASER on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra! - and until a few years ago sailed my small motor-sailer, the "Lady Anne", on the Clyde River, but now my sailing-days are over!

But I can dream, can't I? And so I keep a large library of sailing books, from Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World" and Francis Chichester's "Gipsy Moth Circles The World" to "The Long Way" by Bernard Moitessier and Robin Knox-Johnston's "A World of My Own".

However, even that library is thinning out as I pass on the books before they become my funeral pyre. One of the lifeguards at the Aquatic Centre, Sam, owns a yacht with her partner, and before they headed north again, and I've been feeding them with Alan Lucas's sailing instructions and "Fitting Out Below Decks" and "Fitting Out Above Decks".

No more fitting out for me, but there's still time to watch this most poignant, beautiful film of this amazing sailor whose motto in life was "Never be afraid to be terrified."

 

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P.S. And here's the documentary of the making of the movie:

 

It is a dark and stormy night ...

 

Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday A Monday, a Monday is very, very good Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday A Tuesday, a Tuesday, in fact I wish you would Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday A Thursday, a Friday and Saturday is best But never, never on a Sunday A Sunday, a Sunday, 'cause that's my day of rest Most any day you can be my guest Any day you say, but my day of rest Just name the day that you like the best Only stay away on my day of rest Oh, you can kiss me on a cool day, a hot day A wet day, which everyone you choose Or try to kiss me on a gray day, a May day A pay day, and see if I refuse And if you make it on a bleak day A freak day, a week day, why you can be my guest But never, never on a Sunday Indulge yourself and listen to the soundtracks here

 

... and I want to be transported back to a time when both the world and I were still young - and decidedly warmer than tonight's "Riverbend".

Greece may still be envisioned by some as old guys in sheets wandering around the Acropolis spouting wisdom before somebody pours hemlock in their ear, but my guess is that they will change their minds after having watched Melina Mercouri do her stuff in "Never on Sunday".

The film is a mix of Pygmalion plus "hooker with a heart of gold", and tells the story of Ilya, a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist and classical scholar who is enamored of all things Greek.

 

Homer Thrace: She killed them. Medea herself, does she not say, “I killed my children”? Ilya: And you believe her? You don’t understand the women. Medea loves her husband, yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: Her husband is interested in another woman? Yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: So she said to her husband that she has killed her children to frighten him, to get him back. Homer Thrace: No! Ilya: Yes. She gets him back, and everybody go away and everybody is happy and they go to the seashore. And that’s all! Homer Thrace: If I show you that everything that was ever written about Medea talks of her killing her children. If you ask 10 out of 10 people who saw the play and they tell you it’s true, then by simple logic. . .You’re a Greek, you should be logical. Ilya: Why? Homer Thrace: Because the greatest Greek of them all, Aristotle, invented logic. He said – Ilya: Who? Homer Thrace: Aristotle. . . Ilya: Aristotle! The one that the Captain said thinks men are everything and women are nothing? I don’t care what he said, Aristotle. Homer Thrace: It's extraordinary. Where do you learn all those languages? Ilya: In bed.

 

Both Greece’s film industry and the entire nation took centre stage when the film was released in October of 1960, and it led to massive increases in tourism and location-shooting there.

Some twenty years later, I lived and worked in Piraeus by which time Melina Mercouri was already a not-so-sprightly 64 years old. Piraeus was still as lively and, in parts, as bawdy as shown in this movie, but never on Monday when I went back to work in my office at # 3 Agiou Nikolaou to manage my Saudi boss's commodity trading and fleet of bulk carriers.

 

 

 

"And everybody is happy and they go to the seashore." Some memories can get you through even the darkest and stormiest night.

 

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P.S. See also Armchair-travelling on a windy day

 

Remembering "The Colonel"

 

Anyone who recognises me in this photo gets a year's free subscription to this blog

 

Canberra's Barton House in the sixties was a place for young people or anyone who could not afford more than the weekly £11/10s for a shared room, shared facilties, breakfast and dinner, and a brown-paper-bag full of soggy lunchtime sandwiches. Our average age was well below thirty as you had to be young to survive the late-night drinking and partying.

Pity the retired old surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who lived alone in a room, just him and a copy of every Canberra Times ever printed. He spoke to no-one and yet, if you met him in the corridor, he would stop and stare, daring you to go past him. You could hear him before you saw him as he always carried his own set of cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal showers and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower for longer than what he considered was a reasonably long enough time.

According to the archives, "The Colonel" - who only ever made it to sergeant - came to Canberra in 1913 to work as surveyor for the Commonwealth. His real name was Ernest John Dowling and he was born in Geelong on 20 March 1891 (which would've made him 74 years old the first time he rapped his walking-stick on my shower cubicle).

Mercifully, he died on 13 August 1971, long before his "home", Barton House, was demolished in 1981. A trig station on a hill near Uriarra in the A.C.T. is named after him, which is more than any of us callous youngsters achieved who so mercilessly made fun of him in the sixties.

 

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Taking a leek inside Woolies

 

 

Padma is again considering a trip home to Indonesia and took me along for some grocery shopping so that I will know where everything is and where all the specials are while she's away. After all that mental overload, I couldn't help myself but had to take a leek - well, two, actually.

Before he could call the woman with the mob and bucket and the police, I explained to the manager that this was just one of my occasional outbursts of the oxymoronic 'German humour' which had followed me halfway around the world, but all he wanted to know was the meaning of 'oxymoronic'. I told him to ask my friend Des.

To all my old friends from the Bougainville days, this is merely a photographic confirmation that all that lovely CAMAY soap we were given in the camps did nothing for my complexion, and neither have the ravages of time passed me by, so if you run into me at Woolies, you'd probably won't recognise me - unless you see me taking a leek.

 

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The Berlin Lift

 

Click on Watch on YouTube to view this clip

 

They say history repeats itself, and none is more similar to what's happening in Ukraine right now than the eleven-month-long Berlin Airlift when Soviet forces blockaded rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas of Berlin from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949.

 

Yours truly before we were airlifted out of Berlin

 

I, together with my mother and three sisters, was amongst the 48,000 people that were airlifted out of Berlin during the Russian Blockade. Ours was a freight plane that had landed tons of coal. As soon as the coal had been unloaded, we were flown out to a new life in the West.

 

Commemorative postage stamp of the Berlin Memorial, first issued on September 1, 1948

The "Notopfer Berlin" postal tax stamp was introduced as a consequence of the Berlin blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949). The 2 pfennigs that were collected were intended to benefit the West Berlin population who suffered economic hardship. This stamp was in obligatory use until 31.3.1954 but was still used when I began my articled years in 1960.

 

Maybe Montgomery Clift as pilot Danny MacCullough in "The Big Lift" tells a better story than any documentary ever could:

 

 

That was in 1949. Sixteen years later, I made an even better escape to Australia, but you already know of this as I'm still here to tell the tale.

 

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