After I had chucked in a promising but predictable career as a bank officer with the ANZ Bank, I entered my "Zwang & Drang Jahre" during which I tried to squeeze a whole lifetime's worth of living into just a short few years.
That was long before the internet and mail was still without the 'e' in front. Moving from job to job and country to country, no mail could ever have caught up with me had I not had at least a permanent postal address which a friend in Canberra arranged for me by renting a postbox at a tiny post office agency run by an English couple, Margaret and Steve Dow. And so, for almost twenty years, my postal address became P.O. Box 42, Duffy A.C.T. 2611, to which all my incoming mail was sent, to be stuffed into a jiffy bag by Margaret and Steve every two weeks and mailed off to whatever corner of the world I inhabited at the time.
When I eventually returned to Canberra in 1985 to lick my wounds from too much wandering and wondering what to do with the rest of my life, I met up with Steve. Steve was a likeable Pom although his wife hadn't thought so because she'd left him which, she being the "housekeeper", had left him without a house. The only solution, according to him, was to buy something much cheaper in remote little Captains Flat which, in a round-about way, gets me to "Boom to bust - and back again" (which, on reflection, is an apt title for my memoirs if ever they get written), a charming little book(let) which its author introduces as follows:
"The ironic thing about Captain's Flat is that if it had become a ghost town it would probably be immortalised in some coffee-table picture-book by now. Historians and photographers can't resist an abandoned town. But Captain's Flat never became a ghost town. It missed its chance to be remembered. 'Boom To Bust and Back Again' is the book that should have been written years ago."
I've always had a yearning for odd and remote places, and fewer could be odder and remoter than Captains Flat despite its proximity to Australia's capital city, as I was to find out as soon as I had found the time to visit it some time after Steve had first mentioned it to me.
"A sleepy little village, it still nestled in its hilly retreat. The big-dollar mining days have long gone and life moves at a much slower pace. The hotel still quenches the thirsts of locals and visitors alike. The swimming pool still attracts children on hot summer afternoons and the Post Office still delivers the mail. From the hills above, the village looks like any other little Australian town, it is only when one spends time here, walking the streets, chatting with the older residents, that the rich and lively past is revealed. It is an enigma, a town built on the fickles of mining and little else. But through all the ups and downs, the highs and lows, Captain's Flat has tenaciously clung to life." Quoted from the "Welcome to Captains Flat" website.
Needless to say, in the years to come, I visited Captains Flat several more times, always dropping in at the Captains Flat Hotel for a drink (or two) and to admire Goya's Nude Maja hung on the wall behind the bar.
It may since have fallen victim to these politically-correct times as I can't seen it on the hotel's website where it deserves to be seen. Still, another visit to Captains Flat, with an overnight in one of the hotel's rooms straight out of the 1930s, is on my rapidly leaking bucket-list.
As for Steve Dow, he never bought that cheap house in Captains Flat - anyway, not so cheap anymore, click here - ; instead, he was given a comfortable upstairs-downstairs Housing Commission flat within walking distance to the Austrian Club, won a car in that club's raffle, sold it, and handed the money back to the club --- one schooner at a time.
