"Dun Roamin'"

 

 

I had planned to be in bed by ten o'clock last night to listen to the ABC's Late Night Live, but instead I stayed on in the warm library reading "D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul" by Joseph Davis until well past Late Night Live and I am now feeling more dead than alive.

The book is about D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda living at Thirroul, some 200 kilometres north of here, during the winter of 1922. There they rented Wyewurk, a holiday bungalow which overlooked the sea, although Lawrence wasn't simply on holidays: he was there to write his great Australian novel, "Kangaroo", in less than six weeks. The book tells the story of how "Kangaroo" was written, of the historic house Wyewurk and of the township of Thirroul, which was then a mining town and a key to understanding an important creative period in Lawrence's life.

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

It's been a while since I read my battered old copy, but I still remember its first chapter heading "Torestin" which left me wondering, as it did Richard Lovat Somers, the novel's semi-autobiographical protagonist (based on D.H. Lawrence himself), as to its meaning. It then dawned on me - and him - that it meant "To rest in" and harks back to a time when Australians gave their houses quirky, humorous, or often literal names.

Think of the most famous classic Australian house name of that era, "Emoh Ruo", which was simply "Our Home" spelled backwards. Or "Dun Roamin", a classic pun expressing that the owners are "done roamin'" and have settled down. A cheeky way of saying the modest house or block was quite enough for the owners used to be "Thislldome" (or This'll do me), while "Linga Longa" needed no explanation at all.

 

 

Remembering those humorous house names takes me back to a better, a gentler time in Australia, as does watching the movie that was made of D.H. Lawrence's novel. It's a wonderfully relaxing start to another wonderfully relaxing day at "Riverbend" which was already known by that name when I bought it. If not, I would've named it "Dun Roamin'".

 

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I will not weep nor make a scene, just say 'thank you, life' for having been

 

Evening at Dousko's Taverna on Hydra - October 1960
left-to-right: Klaus Merkel, Charles Heckstall, Leonard Cohen, Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Marianne Ihlen, David Goschen (standing), Axel Jensen, Inge Schneier.
"They are still singing down at Dousko's, sitting under the ancient pine tree, in the deep night of fixed and falling stars" - Leonard Cohen

 

Leonard Cohen, the world-famous Montreal-born Canadian poet, novelist, singer, songwriter and professional manic-depressive, died on this day ten years ago. Le monde de la musique a perdu un de ses visionnaires les plus prolifiques et vénérés.

What many people do not know is that Leonard Cohen learned the Greek language in his twenties, loved the Greek way of life and carried the komboloi; his home for twenty years was on Hydra. He gave concerts in front of tens of thousands of people, but the first concert he ever gave was in the back room of the Katsikas Brothers Grocery Store on the Hydra waterfront in 1960.

 

Hydra in 1962

 

What were the 'Greece years' and how did Leonard Cohen come to speak Greek and love the Greek way of life? In March of 1960 London was cold and wet. One day Leonard Cohen, then a young unknown Canadian poet, was returning to his apartment from a visit to the dentist when London decided to turn on one of those downpours that only London can. Seeking shelter from the rain he walked into a branch of the Bank of Greece. There he began talking to a teller who told him about Greece and its sun-drenched beaches.

 

Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen on Hydra

 

A few weeks later, Leonard arrived in Piraeus, where he boarded a ferry for Hydra, one of the Saronic islands, then 4 hours from Piraeus. When he arrived he discovered an English-speaking community of artists and writers headed by the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift. George and Charmian invited Leonard to stay in the spare room of their house which they had bought in 1955 and became known as the 'House by the Well' or 'The Australia House' by the bemused locals. Seven months later Leonard Cohen, aged 26, bought a house on the hill above Hydra town. This became his permanent home.

 

Leonard Cohen & Nancy Bacal - Hydra 1964

 

Leonard Cohen became a close friend of the Johnstons. As far as Cohen was concerned the Johnstons were doing exactly what Cohen wanted to do, live on an exotic Greek island and write novels.

 

Leonard Cohen on the terrace of his house on Hydra

 

As he said in an interview for ABC radio (Australia) in March 1980: ‘I knew George Johnston and his wife Charmian Clift very well because I lived in Greece in those days on the same island... I guess it was from 60 to maybe 65 on Hydra. The Johnstons were there. There were just a few foreigners there in those days. The Johnstons were central figures. They were older. They were doing what we all wanted to do which was to write and to make a living out of writing. They were very wonderful, colorful, hospitable people. They helped me settle in. They gave me a table and chair and bed and really helped me out. I heard a lot about Australia . You're on a little Greek island and there's nothing much to do but sit around and talk. George was a magnificent talker. He used to talk about his life here. He was Australian, there's no question about it. Now that I've come here, I see just how Australian he was. I don't know if I can characterize what an Australian is, but I know one when I meet one.'

 

A Postcard from Leonard Cohen to George Johnston - February 1962

 

At lunchtime they would sit outside the Katsikas Brothers store on the waterfront and wait for the ferry from Piraeus which brought mail and more artists and writers looking for adventure. At night they sat under the old pine tree at Douskos Taverna and talk philosophy, politics, religion, drink and sing.

 

 

It was here that Cohen began writing the song 'Bird On A Wire'. The song reflects the changing landscape on Hydra when telephone and electricity poles and wires were installed and Cohen saw birds sitting on the wires just outside his bedroom window.

 

In 1988 Leonard Cohen revisited his house in Hydra, where he wrote 'Bird on a Wire' ("and there's the wire"!) and many other songs. This is the house he shared with Marianne, his muse, and the Marianne of 'So long Marianne'. He is accompanied by his backing singers Perla Batalla and Julie Chistensen. Part of the 1988 film 'Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen'.

 

And it was here that George Johnston introduced Cohen to his most famous muse, Marianne Ihlen. It was on Hydra that Cohen lived with Marianne for nearly ten years. She was the inspiration for the song 'So Long Marianne' when the pair broke up.

 

Marianne and Leonard

 

Marianne Ihlen was diagnosed with leukemia in late July 2016. Her friends contacted Cohen to tell him she was dying. Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to her, writing: "Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road."

 

 

She died, aged 81, on 28 July 2016, in Oslo. Leonard Cohen followed her shortly after, dying on 7 November 2016.

 

 

Leonard Cohen was a classic gentleman with an incredible charm who had fallen under the spell of Hydra and its people just as I did when I visited it, time and again, during my not-quite-two years in Greece. I think of it every time I stroke my komboloi.

 

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My very first holiday in Australia

 

Click on the arrows in the right-hand bottom corner to view it on the full screen

 

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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