Just as the previous two years spent with the ANZ Bank set me up for a commercial career in Australia, the ten months spent with Hancock Woodward & Neill started me in my accounting career in Papua New Guinea and across a dozen different countries.
Thank you, Mark Henderson, for your kind words, and you will be happy to know that I've remained diligent all my working life, having had to learn and perform new duties across a score of different industries.
And it all began in 1970 when I got a foot in the door with Hancock Woodward & Neill in Rabaul. I still treasure the memories and remain grateful for having been given the chance to enter a new profession.
Returning to more prosaic language, can anyone point out to me the location of Hancock Woodward & Neill's office in Park Street in the above pre-1994-eruption aerial photo?
Those were the days of expensive cameras and the equally expensive developing-and-printing of rolls of films, which meant I had no camera then and not one photograph today to remind me of my time in Rabaul.
And while Peter Langley is trying to pin the tail on the office in Park Street, perhaps Peter Logan could mark with a cross the donga we lived in at the Public Works Department mess hall in Malaguna Road?
P.S. Six months into my stay, history was made just a hundred metres away at Queen Elizabeth Park when Prime Minister John Gorton addressed the crowd on 9 July 1970 - click here. Watch this footage of Oscar Tamur, John Kaputin, and Damien Kereku. I missed it all as I sat inside the office in Park Street, balancing the books of Kessa Plantation.
