My very first holiday in Australia

 

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I am wondering what's happened to global warming. Another three weeks, and we'll have our first day of summer, and yet only yesterday, Thredbo was down to minus-five-degrees and even down here at the coast it's cold and windy. I am happy to spend the whole day inside the warm library thinking of warmer climes such as when I went on my first holiday in Australia.

After my arrival in Australia in August 1965, there followed three months in which I first worked as a 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company in Melbourne, which meant refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their little Austin cars, and then as a storeman/driver in the hardware & plumbing supplies company of Ingram & Sons in Canberra's industrial suburb of Fyshwick.

During that time I drove an INTERNATIONAL truck, learnt how to tie a truckie's knot and operate that funny yellow plastic hand that served as indicator when turning left or right, and delivered anything from boxes of ceramic floor tiles to bathtubs and roofing iron to building sites all over Canberra, even though I had never driven a truck in my whole life.

I kept at this job for a few months but after I had almost burnt out the truck's diff at Deakin High School while bogged down in the mud with a full load on the back, and a slight but still very embarrassing collision with the rear-end of another vehicle just outside the British High Commission, I thought it best to cash in my chips while I was still ahead.

I had earlier on answered an advertisement by the Australia & New Zealand Bank for school-leavers to join their ranks and, to my total surprise and joy, was accepted. I joined the ANZ Bank sometime in late November or early December 1966 which, as it turned out, was excellent timing because I only had another three months to mess about with the British imperial system of pounds (£), shillings (s), and pence (d) before it was replaced with the decimal system of dollars and cents.

I was off to a flying start, and nine months later off to my very first holiday in Australia, which I decided I would spend in that fabled state that called itself "Beautiful one day, perfect the next", Queensland.

 

My then address in Canberra: BARTON HOUSE

 

Not having much money, I had already rejoined the Youth Hostels Association, of which I had been a member in Germany from an early age. I also decided to hitchhike. I had done it for years all over Europe and right down to North Africa, so how difficult could it be in Australia? As it turned out, it was very easy as I never waited for a lift any longer than half an hour, which I put down not only to my youthful good looks but also the fact that I was wearing my German boy scout uniform.

 

This clip from the above video reminded me of the longest I ever waited for a lift: the turn-off to Bundaberg where the driver dropped me as I didn't want to go there. Every car coming from that direction was heading south. Then some friendly soul explained to me that whoever was heading north would come out of the turn-off several kilometres north. He then took me there, and within minutes I got my next lift north to Rockhampton.

And here's something else: this turn-off to Bundaberg is today called Goodwood Road where more than two decades later my by then best friend from my New Guinea days had built his little house at the corner of Goodwood and Browns Road in the area highlighted in yellow. I visited him there in 1990 but never realised - until now - that that was the place where I had waited the longest for a lift in 1965. Doesn't life move in mysterious ways?

 

I remember staying at the Tullebudgera bird sanctuary where I saw my first Australian parrots, and spending a whole week on Magnetic Island, a memory which stayed with me until I bought a block of land on the island in the late 1970s — but that's another long story for another day.

 

Collection stamps in my Youth Hostel book: Tullebudgera 27/8/1966; National Fitness Camp Magnetic Island 31/8 - 5/9/1966; Tullebudgera (on the way back) 11/9/1966.

 

I didn't collect as many Youth Hostel stamps as I had expected because of the many times I was invited to stay at people's homes or was given permission by farmers to sleep in their barns. One time a commercial traveller asked me to drive his car so that he could take a snooze in the back. I remember driving for half a day until the heat got to me and I began to lurch all over the road. It must've woken him up because he took over from me and we drove the rest of way in total silence.

 

 

Worried that I may not repeat my sucess in hitchhiking on the way back, and wanting to be back at work on time, I booked a seat on what were then the REDLINE COACHES, which travelled up and down the east coast, but without air-conditioning and on-board toilets, which meant there were frequent stops when half the passengers disappeared behind the bushes. The time lost was made up for by having on board a second 'coach captain' who would always rest on the backbench and invite any willing female passenger to join him there once it had got dark enough.

Yes, I learned a lot during that short first holiday in Australia, and I learned a lot more from watching the above video clip which shows how beautiful Australia was in those long-ago and almost forgotten 1960s.

 

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Kurosawa's Meaning of Life

 

To watch 'Perfect Days', click here

 

A man has spent 30 years at a desk stamping documents that move in circles. He has never made anything, helped anyone, or changed the texture of a single life. He exists in the most minimal sense. He occupies space. He fills time.

And then in a hospital waiting room, a stranger describes the symptoms of stomach cancer and the comforting lies doctors tell patients who have it. Watonabe recognizes every symptom. When the doctor assures him that he has only a mild ulcer, he understands what the reassurance really means. He has less than a year and the bureaucrat for the first time becomes terrified not of death but of the life he has not yet lived.

 

 

Ikiru means to live and Akira Kurasawa's film is one of the most devastating cinematic arguments for existentialist authenticity ever constructed. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that existence precedes essence that we are not born with a nature or a purpose but arrive in the world as possibility responsible for choosing what we become.

Most people confronted with this responsibility retreat into roles. They become the bureaucrat, the mother, the respectable citizen. The role provides identity without requiring the terrifying work of actually choosing.

Kanji Watonabe has done this for three decades and the diagnosis strips the role away leaving only the question Sartre believed was always underneath it. What are you actually going to do with the time you have left?

What follows is not a dramatic reinvention. Watanabe does not become someone extraordinary. He simply decides to fight for a park, a small park on a piece of muddy reclaimed land in a poor neighborhood where children could play. He knows he has very little time left to see it finished. He fights for it anyway. Not because it is large enough to matter in any cosmic sense, but because it is something he is actually choosing with his own hands before his time runs out.

Watanabi dies and the park he fought for survives him. Through the memories of those who knew him, we see him sitting on a swing in the snow, gently moving, humming to himself. He looks like a man who found out what it means to be alive very late and it was enough.

But the film does not end there. His colleagues return to their desks, to their routines, to the same machinery he struggled against. The park remains. The system remains and the question of what it means to live passes quietly to everyone he has left behind.

 

 

At first, I could only find trailers on YouTube, but at long last I found two parts of this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie on www.archive.org. DVDs are still for sale on ebay.com.au, ranging from $28 to $71.

 

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The Art of Living with Idiots

 

The playback of this video on other websites has been disabled. To watch it on YouTube, click here

 

To quote from the YouTube download: "Charles Bukowski spent his life surrounded by idiots — at the post office, in bars, on the streets of Los Angeles. Instead of fighting them, he turned them into literature. This is a raw, unfiltered essay about surviving in a world full of noise without losing yourself.

From the smell of stale beer to the hum of the city at night, this piece captures Bukowski’s sharp wit, quiet revenge, and his simple philosophy: the world doesn’t have to change for you to survive in it. You just have to learn how to move through it without tripping too much."

 

 

I discovered Charles Bukowski too late in life to corrupt my respectable, middle-class-aspiring mind, but the moment I had picked up a second-hand copy of "Post Office, his first novel, and read the first sentence, "It began as a mistake", I was hooked. "It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought." What writing, I thought. It wasn't just the words that got to me. It was the awkwardness of the writing, its closeness to speech.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

"Post Office" is the story of Henry (Hank) Chinaski, a lowlife loser with a hand-to-mouth existence and the fictional alter ego of Charles Bukowski, who joins the U.S. Postal Service as a sub-contractor, was made a regular after three years, but somehow was not happy, and so decided to quit. Little did he know that in two years he would be back for nearly twelve years. As he wrote, "I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power."

 

 

Bukowski's writing is inarticulate, but deliberately so. Each word clings tight to the next; there is no room for any more. It is a tightly choreographed clumsiness. And it is great. However, you may not be into reading as much as I am, so here's the full-length movie "Barfly", a semi-autobiography of Charles Bukowski during the time he spent drinking heavily in Los Angeles, presented by his alter ego Henry Chinaski.

 

Want more of the same? Watch "Factotum"

 

To use the standalone, one-word imperative so commonly used now by all our waiting staff, "Enjoy!", to which I always reply, "Enjoy what?"

 

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My antilibrary

 

 

For the second day in a row I am sitting in my library, because for the second day in a row it's an unseasonally cold and windy day and I need somewhere warm and comfortable and quiet to sit.

 

 

For the first time I have turned on the electric heater and it smells of burned dust from the dust that accumulated on and in it since the last time I turned it on, but I love the smell because I feel the warmth that emanates from it and from the thousands of books that surround me.

In his book "The Black Swan", Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularised the concept of the 'antilibrary', a collection of unread books that serves as our humbling, constant reminder of everything we have yet to learn.

My library is one of those 'antilibraries' Taleb described in "The Black Swan", full of books which are full of ideas and knowledge I still want to read about and learn from. I hope there will still be enough days left to read them all, especially on cold and windy days which will induce me to turn on the heater and feel indescribably warm and comfortable.

 

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It's typical Macaulay. It's typical Australian. And I love it!

 

 

There was a man who had a cross and his name was Macauley. He put Australia at his feet, he said, in the only way he knew how. His boots spun the dust from its roads and his body waded its streams. The black lines on the map, and the red, he knew them well. He built his fires in a thousand places and slept on the banks of rivers. The grass grew over his tracks, but he knew where they were when he came again.

He had two swags, one of them with legs and a cabbage-tree hat, and that one was the main difference between him and others who take to the road, following the sun for their bread and butter. Some have dogs. Some have horses. Some have women. And they all have mates and companions, or for this reason and that, all of some use. But with Macauley it was this way: he had a child and the only reason he had it was because he was stuck with it."

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

There are many iconic Australian movies - think of "The Adventures of Barry McKenzie", "Crocodile Dundee", "The Man from Snowy River"; the list goes on and on - but when I think back to the Australia I fell in love with when I first stepped off the boat, I think of "They're a Weird Mob".

And there are no nicer people I would like to have as my neighbours than the Kerrigan family in "The Castle", but when it comes to a bit of a tearjerker, I will never forget the ending in "The Shiralee", when the doctor tells Jim Macauley that his daughter has pulled through, but "She keeps asking for something ... or somebody by the name of ... well ... it sounds like Gooby. Does that make sense to you?" In D'Arcy Niland's book, Macaulay simply says, "I'll go and get it", but in the movie he says, "Bloody kid's spoilt. Always wanting toys. Time she grew out of it."

 

Fast-forward to 3:00:20

 

It's typical Macaulay. It's typical Australian. And I love it!

 

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