Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal

 

 

My first impression was of a place so ramshackle, so poor, so scary, so unexpectedly filthy, that I began to understand the theory behind culture shock - something I had never truly experienced in its paralyzing and malignant form. The idea that this miserable-looking town could be regarded as a capital city seemed laughable."

I am quoting from chapter 8 of Paul Theroux's book "The Happy Isles of Oceania", headed up "The Solomons: Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal".

And he continues, "Why would anyone come here? It was not only hideous, it was expensive. Nearly all the food in Honiara's stores was imported - from Australia, New Zealand, Japan and America. It is often possible to gauge the prosperity of a place by looking at the central market. Honiara's central market was pathetic - a few old women selling little piles of blackened bananas and wilted leaves and some tiny fly-blown fish. "If I were a king, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons", Jack London wrote in his Pacific travel book, "The Cruise of the Snark". He added, "On second thoughts, king or no king, I don't think I'd have the heart to do it."

Paul Theroux wrote this in 1992. Jack London visited the Solomons much earlier in 1908, fifteen years after the archipelago had become a British protectorate. By the time I got there in 1972, Honiara could have won the "Tidy Town" award and I felt very comfortable there - as did the many friends I suddenly had who wasted no time in visiting me from neighbouring New Guinea where I had spent the previous three years.

 

My house on Lengakiki Ridge overlooking Honiara and the sea

 

I lived a gracious life in a big house on Lengakiki Ridge overlooking Honiara and the ocean beyond, all the way to Savo Island and Tulagi. I was member of the Point Cruz Yacht Club and every day by 4.30 sharp the offshore breeze would fill the sails of my CORSAIR dinghy. Wednesday nights was Chess Night on the terrace of the Mendana Hotel and there was always a big do on of a Saturday night at the Guadalcanal Club (commonly referred to as G-Club).

 

Mendana HotelGuadalcanal Club

 

I was the 'Secretary' (Commercial Manager) of the British Solomon Islands Electricity Authority (BSIEA) in Honiara. My boss, the meek-and-mild General Manager of the Authority, was a British civil servant 'Yes, Minister' type, who wanted to get through his contract with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of benefits for himself and his cohorts of expat time-servers.

I was bored by the ease and comfort and meaninglessness of it all. Those were my restless years and I still had places to go - more than thirty, as it turned out - and so this subject left Her Brittanic Majesty's Protectorate to return to reality (spelled PNG, then Burma, Iran, again PNG, Thursday Island, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, etc etc).

After eighty-five years, the British, too, left the Solomon Islands in 1978 to let it return to its old ways. Luckily, the British never left Australia.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Reading by Moonlight

 

 

After the big clean-up over the weekend, with a place for everything and everything in its place, my workship is now more organised than my life. I put it to the test by building a small floating wall shelf to hold a kerosene lamp as a reading light in the corner above my bed in "Melbourne" - ahem! - "Bonniedoon" (I must call it by its new name).

It turned out beautifully and, of course, I had to "test" it immediately by lying on the bed with the appropriately named book, "Reading by Moonlight". And then came the rain! Fast and furious like a tropical downpour which cut off my retreat to the house - and I loved it!

The warm light from the kerosene lamp and the rain drumming on the corrugated iron roof took me back to those nights on tropical islands when tropical downpours were a nightly feature. What a perfect excuse to prolong my solitude and dream of what had once been a reality.

 

In "Reading by Moonlight", the author describes the five stages of her cancer treatment and how different books by authors such as Dante, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Beckett and Dickens, helped her through the tumultuous process of recovery.

 

I must have fallen asleep because by the time I woke up it was already dark, with the light from the still dimly burning kerosene lamp the only illumination. I folded up the blanket, straightened out the bed, doused the kerosene lamp, and slowly walked back to the house in time for dinner. All along the way I thought to myself, "I am such a lucky man!"

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

"Do you want flies with that?"

 

230 King St, Newtown NSW 2042

 

During the six weeks in 2018 when I underwent cancer radiation at the Lifehouse in Newtown, I often walked past this shop without ever going inside to ask if they had heard of William Golding. I simply assumed that their name was a play on words on his famous book.

Book titles cannot be copyrighted or the copyright-holders to "Lord of the Flies" may already have tried but this didn't stop the rights holder of "Lord of the Rings", Middle-Earth Enterprises, to try to block this business from trading with those three key words "lord of the" - click here. But IP Australia's trademarks agency decided in favour of Lord of the Fries, saying the "niche vegan restaurant" operated in an entirely different world from the middle-earth enterprises. I still believe that theirs was a play on words on William Golding's 1954 novel which at one time was required reading in schools across the English-speaking world, its title having become shorthand for the breakdown of civilisation.

 

 

I had never heard of "Lord of the Flies" during my schooldays in Germany and nor did I need to, as I had just witnessed the biggest breakdown of civilisation of all times. I read the book and then saw the original black-and-white 1963 movie adaptation only after I had come to Australia.

 

 

William Golding's book suggests the inevitability of violence when all rules are abandoned, and he refers to the boys stranded on the island without adult supervision as "scaled down society". He remarked once that "anyone who believes he could not be a Nazi deludes himself".

The original black-and-white movie is still the best, although there have been several remakes, including "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio, which is often described as "Lord of the Flies for Generation X".

 

 

Perhaps they'll make one more at the end of the current US presidency, if they can find an actor who can act as ravingly mad as the real one.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Real Cost of Net Zero

 

 

Australia’s obsession with "net zero" is one of the most destructive political delusions of our time. Net zero has become a kind of civic religion, enforced by political elites and corporate interests. This is not science — it’s dogma. Worst of all, this is all for nothing because what Australia does is irrelevant to the climate but devastating to our economy.

The truth is, renewables can't do the job. Wind and solar aren't "generators" but “energy gatherers" ... like throwing a net into the ocean. It makes a less reliable system and it makes a more expensive system, and the more you build, the less stable and more expensive the system becomes. South Australia — with the highest proportion of renewables — also has the highest electricity prices in the nation.

Climate change is a problem but it is not an existential threat. The real existential threat is the collapse of our energy and economic systems.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Book of Disquiet

 

 

The Portuguese have a famous, untranslatable word called saudade, which is often translated as "nostalgia", specifically a melancholic and longing nostalgia, although it seems this scarcely suffices to explain this deep and complex emotion.

I briefly mentioned saudade in a previous post - click here - and I bring it up again not to test your memory (after all, there aren't too many times you'd get a chance to use it, are there?) but because Fernando Pessoa's book "The Book of Disquiet" is absolutely saturated with this saudade. I quote, almost at random, "Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief". Or consider the beautiful dictum, "I dream because I dream".

 

 

It's not an easy or even a pleasant read. I dip in and out of it because I have trouble sleeping - although I comfort myself with Elke Heidenreich saying that it's an "old-age-thing" - and because there's no-one who's written more passionately or more perceptively about the existential dimension of sleep than Fernando Pessoa in "The Book of Disquiet".

 

"The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel. Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, consisting of nocturnal negations. Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching — with the awareness of my body — a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things."

[…]

"When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping."

[…]

"All life is a dream. No one knows what he’s doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That’s why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything."

 

I don't expect you to read the book. I don't even expect to finish reading it myself, but at two dollars from my favourite op-shop it seemed like an interesting addition to my library of unread books.

 

Googlemap Riverbend