Let's have a roof rack buy-back scheme!

 

 

Our useless Labor government is going into overdrive with a twenty-million-dollar advertising campaign which is full of motherhood statements. The only thing that campaign does not mention is for us to go on a diet so that our cars won't have to carry too much weight and hence use more fuel. I can almost see an extra fuel tax coming for overweight people!

Now here's a thought: could those hundreds of politicians, federal and state, not use our public transport - or at least 'communal' transport - instead of being chauffeur-driven all over Canberra and the country?

 

 

As for those terrible roof racks that are creating our fuel crisis, why not have a roof rack buy-back scheme? In fact, why not have a two-for-the-price-of-one and make it a roof rack AND firearms buy-back scheme?

As you can see, I'm full of it - as is this feckless government.

 

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The Bougainville Copper Project

 

 

This is a 1960s color movie about the Bougainville Copper Project in Papua New Guinea. Construction started in the late 1960s, and the mine was officially opened in 1972. My two years on this construction project, then the world's largest, forever shaped me and my future working career.

To this day, more than fifty years later, I still have a handful of friends with whom I regularly share memories of those exciting days. As one ex-engineer, now living in retirement in Kuala Lumpur, recently wrote:

 

"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 on Bougainville, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of."

 

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 spotted their Jewish menorah on the sideboard before they spotted my German passport! - 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 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 when it was the turn of the other two, they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest on beer.

When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for audit personnel on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in October 1970. I was hired on the spot, returned to Rabaul to give notice, and within a few weeks was back on what was then the biggest construction project in the world. Woo-hoo!

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 challenge that kept me there for two 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 our brains 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 came as a shock. 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 even leave Aropa airstrip and took the next morning's plane back out. Then there were those who, after having run up an adding-machine striplist from 365 down to zero which they stuck on the wall, would slowly cross off their one-year contract. Needless to say, not many endured this mental torture for the whole 365 days.

As for me, and a select group of others, we revelled in the challenge, in the comraderie, and in the opportunities that, thanks to our time on Bougainville, eventually came our way on other projects and in other countries.

As he said in his email, "Thanks to my time on Bougainville, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of." And so say all of us!

 

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P.S. For more, go to "The Bougainville Copper Project" and its blog.

 

My spiritual home will always be New Guinea

 

The building next to my former office in Park Street in Rabaul, New Guinea

 

It's a cold morning at "Riverbend" and I've just jump-started my heart with a strong coffee — "International Roast", of course; old habits die hard — and now sit by the window and look at the falling leaves and wonder what insanity made me settle in these forbidding climes. Roy in Penang, Grahame in Port Moresby, Hubert in Cooktown, Peter and Ida in Cairns, do you read me?

Having been sent, in reply to a question I had posed on the facebook-page "I used to live in Papua New Guinea", this evocative painting of what looks like the building of my first employers in New Guinea, the chartered accountants' firm of Hancock Woodward & Neil in Rabaul, but which was in fact an almost identical-looking building next to it, only increased my longing to be back in the tropics. As my best friend from those days used to say, "My spiritual home will always be New Guinea."

 

I still need someone to point out to me the location of Park Street in this photograph.
I am looking at two possible locations but am confused.

 

It was in that modest building in Park Street where in 1970 I had my modest start — on an even more modest annual salary of $2,000 plus free but very sub-standard accommodation — to an accounting career that took me all over the world and back. I will always be grateful to the manager, Barry Weir, who hired me, literally sight unseen, from my mundane job as a bank officer in Canberra to enter the world of Luca Pacioli and to learn to tell the difference between a debit and a credit.

I am also grateful to Stephen Dowling who sent me a copy of this very evocative painting. He is, of course, the son of John Dowling, who was then reverentially referred to as 'the uncrowned king of Rabaul', since his company Plantation Holdings Limited (PHL), in addition to several plantations, also owned a string of businesses around town. In fact, Plantation Holdings Limited was the main client of the accounting firm Hancock Woodward & Neil, for whom I worked in that modest building.

They were all good memories as I sat by the window and looked at the falling leaves. It's time for another strong coffee — "International Roast", of course. Like old memories of New Guinea, old habits also die hard.

 

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Mirror, mirror on the wall ...

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote the majority of his personal notebooks, diaries, and scientific notes in mirror writing, so I decided to follow in his footsteps. You know him best for his painting of the MONA LISA, so keep smiling and keep reading.

 

It's another one of those early saudade mornings at "Riverbend" when this haunting, beautiful ache comes on. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s more than grief. It’s the ache for a moment you once lived, or perhaps only dreamed of. Something that touched you deeply. Have you ever felt saudade for a person, a place, or a time that left a permanent mark on your heart? Philosophers have likened saudade to a kind of spiritual homesickness - not just for people or places, but for a part of ourselves we left behind. It reminds us that to love deeply is also to long deeply. And that longing is saudade. It's the kind of sadness that reminds you ... you have lived.

 

 

What's the problem? You had no problem reading AMBULANCE, did you?

 

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"Don't sell Riverbend; that would be the ultimate sin."

 

Noel's framed message, a postcard, is standing on the far left in front of the Burmese harp

 

Thus wrote my old mate Noel Butler back in April 1995. Eighteen months earlier, in a sudden rush of blood to the head, I had bought Riverbend even though I had never lived on an acreage and barely knew the business end of a shovel, let alone what to do with it on an acreage.

Of course, we all have such dreams. Many years before, I had already bought DIY-books on how to build a cabin in the woods, on how to milk a cow, and how to build a chicken coop. They never made it to the top of my bookshelf which was occupied by 'The Practice of Modern Internal Auditing', 'Petroleum Accounting: Principles, Procedures & Issues', 'Ship Operations and Management', and 'Pick Basic: A Programmer's Guide', and other esoteric works on accountancy standards, IATA rules, laytime calculations, charter parties, and case studies in forensic auditing.

Noel, too, on coming back to Australia after a lifetime spent in New Guinea, had tried to follow his dream of a bucolic life in the country, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally in Childers. He knew as much - or rather, as little - about it as I did, since he'd conveniently forgotten that in New Guinea he'd never held more than a cold beer in his hand as he oversaw a small army of kanakas doing the hard work.

I, too, had conveniently forgotten that life in the country does not mix easily with computer code, spreadsheets, internal rates of return, and public rulings by the tax office, and had toyed with the idea of selling up again almost as soon as the ink had dried on the settlement cheque.

 

Riverbend's original auction advertisement in 1992

 

Noel had known of this, and as his life slipped slowly from autumn into winter and, just a few months later, into permanent hibernation, his last message admonished me not to give up on the dream because, as he so clearly foresaw, "... that would be the ultimate sin."

Noel Butler never had enough time left to visit "Riverbend" but to this day his message sits on my mantelpiece to remind me of a wonderful friend, a wonderful friendship, and a wonderful piece of advice.

 

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