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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.
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 ...
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.
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!
At age 0, they give you 79.3 years, but when you get to age 81, they give you another 7.9 years. Noticed something? The longer you live, the longer you live! And studies have shown that those who have more birthdays also live longer! I'll drink to that in four days' time.
In a few days I'll turn 81. It feels like a transposition error, except when I look in the mirror and see more hair growing out of my nose and ears than on my head. Think of the money I save on haircuts!
Having swapped the life of an actuary for the life of an accountant because I couldn't handle the excitement that went with the former, I am a strong believer in statistics, and they tell me that I have another two thousand eight hundred and eighty-three days to go! Actually, it's 7.9 x 365 days = 2,883.5 days, but being the lifelong pessimist that I am, I rounded it down to 2,833 days. (Of course, I could have a sex change to gain those extra 1.5 years but who wants to be that greedy?)
I mean, although it wasn't always cricket, I have had some pretty good innings. Yes, there was some underarm bowling and ball tampering going on and I got caught out a few times but, although I dropped quite a few, I also had some brilliant catches, and it's catches that win matches.
Still, it's a bit of an untidy number, isn't it? Maybe I cut back on coffee and Coke and marshmellows and retsina to round it out to an even 3000.
Medieval philosophers kept a human skull on their desk as a memento mori to remind them that they too would one day die. I think that if we have an awareness of our own mortality it can help us to focus on what really matters. When we begin each day knowing that it is a unique opportunity, that this day has never happened before and will never happen again, then we will be more deliberate in how we spend it.
Skulls are a bit hard to come by and even harder to carry around with us. Why not print out a life expectancy table to carry in your wallet?
I absolutely enjoyed watching "The Efficiency Expert", set in the Australia of the 1960s, the one I fell in love with when I arrived here in 1965. It all came back in a sudden rush: the way people dressed and spoke back then; the way people worked (or not!); and all those walnut-coloured furnishings that surrounded them.
But what really got my attention was the noticeboard on the wall that had diagonally-placed straps across to hold in place whatever was on it.
Front of BARTON HOUSE facing Brisbane Avenue in Canberra
One such now old-fashioned noticeboard was in the entrance hall of Barton House (I nearly wrote 'foyer' but it wasn't that kind of place). The manager would place all incoming letters on that board, roughly in alphabetical order, with the A's in the top left-hand corner and the Z's at the bottom right, and each evening on coming "home" from work, we would check the noticeboard for mail before heading to our rooms.
Since it is too late to sack me now, I might as well admit that I used the bank's stationery for my personal correspondence. I had used this particular aerogramme to impress my first-ever girlfriend I had left behind in Germany. She returned it to me, together with a whole box full of other letters I had written to her, before her untimely death in 2022. You know you're old when your first-ever girlfriend dies before you. "That's just half of them; if you want the rest, tell me and I courier them as well", she had written - in German, of course. I never had a chance to reply.
For some of us, including 'yours truly', "mail" was often nothing more than a plain-looking envelope containing a note from the manager that we had (once again!) fallen behind paying our boarding-house fees.
I never forget the day a fat envelope was waiting for me which, like an hour-glass, leaked a slow trickle of sand from a damaged corner. I had just returned to Australia after six months in the Namib Desert in South-West Africa, and my former colleagues had sent me a "souvenir" from "Sandhausen"; "in case you're missing all that sand", they'd written.
That's how it was in those days: there were no postal secrets and yet an unspoken "untouchability" of one's mail, even if it stayed on the board for days and weeks on end, even months if the recipient was on holiday. I knew of boarders who had cash money sent to them through the mail!
It's unthinkable in today's Australia, just as unthinkable as those same boarding-houses which have all disappeared. As for the slowly-leaking envelope, it would today be confiscated by Customs on suspicion of containing a prohibited substance. How I long for those innocent 60s!
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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