What came first, the movie or the book?

 

The book Wake in Fright was first published in 1961 when Kenneth Cook was thirty-two. It was his second novel, the first having been withdrawn because of the threat of legal action. It was a publishing success, appearing in England and America, translated into several languages, and a prescribed text in schools.

Not in my German "Volksschule" though, and so it came that I saw the movie - the remastered version, after the original had almost been lost, see here - years before I read the book which I found only today while rummaging through my favourite Vinnies shop. Read the book here.

 

 

The book carries as much of a punch as does the movie with its opening sequence of the 360-degree panorama of a flat, empty landscape, the lonely, flyspotted and comfortless pub, the toy train inching across the plain, and the open-faced young man waiting on the crude platform.

It was released outside Australia under the name "Outback" and is said to have set back Australian tourism by at least twenty years.

"May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright."

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P.S. For some insightful commentary on the movie, click here and here .

P.P.S. For an interesting remake of the original movie into a TV mini series, click here.

 

The Dragons and the Snakes: how the Rest learned to fight the West

‘Disturbingly brilliant. David Kilcullen, ever the thoughtful observer of wars and the people who wage them, captures the changes in warfare that already confound — and threaten to overwhelm us. He correctly shows that we are mentally and physically unprepared for the new nature of conflict, and will likely pay dearly for it.’

 

An Australian soldier who accidentally became a top security advisor to the US military has written a new book about the future of warfare.

It's called "The Dragons and The Snakes" and it documents the fall and rise of superpowers, and the emergence of small but highly dangerous guerilla and terrorist groups that learned how to take on the West with agile units and much cheaper and tech savvy equipment.

Author, David Kilcullen spoke with Zoe Daniel in The Drawing Room about his latest book, how Russia and China have been expanding while the US has been distracted by domestic politics, and the huge dangers coronavirus presents to global stability.

Listen to it here. For a preview of the book, click here.

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How to write a successful sales letter

Click on above image

 

The inquiries to my FOR SALE advert continue to come in. Looking for telltale signs of potential time-wasters, I reply to only a select few. One inquiry to which I didn't bother to reply came in about a month ago; however, they tracked down my phone number and called me yesterday.

Being comfortably ensconced in front of the blazing fireplace with - very appropriately - Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf", I suggested it would be better if I answered their questions by email:

 

Thank you for your inquiry, [name withheld to protect the innocent], before we go further into details, allow me to clarify one point which has put the dollar-sign into so many previous inquirers' eyes: while the property consists of eight separate titles which can be sold off separately, the chances of obtaining additional building permits are probably very slim. I have not explored the matter seriously, as these seven acres are my buffer against the outside world, but if building permits could be obtained, EACH of the blocks would be worth in excess of a million dollars (by comparison, the last vacant block in the lane, consisting of a mere 1500 square metres, sold for $750,000!) Having got this out of the way, I am happy to answer whatever questions you may have after you have read through my home-made website thisisaprivatesale.com. As to your question why it hasn't sold in all these years: perhaps it is because I am not using an agent, although I must say that I have had more genuine inquiries since I have listed the property myself than during the years while it was listed with an agent who brought me a succession of "potential" buyers whose only potential was that they had a vivid imagination and made some ludicrous offers, not only financially but also in terms of their conditions. One agent brought me a "cash buyer" who was going to put down 5% to lock me up contractually for 24 months during which time he would carry out "due diligence" (aka find another buyer he could sell it on to at an even higher price). If, at the end of the 24 months, he decided not to proceed, he would be entitled to a full refund of his 5%. When I refused, my agent was astonished, "But it's a cash contract!" Yet another agent introduced a crackpot who was going to put no money down but pay a "rent" until the property was paid off. Another agent did a back-to-back deal; the other deal fell through and so did the sale of "Riverbend". Will I ever use an agent again? No, but I may consider that, by comparison, politics is an honourable profession! :-) The last serious buyer was a very well-heeled Chinese to whom the asking price of $2 million-plus was mere pocket-money (his BMW i8, worth $360,000, would have been an adequate deposit). The trouble was that we both hit it off so well and became such good friends that he doesn't want me to leave which is what would happen if he bought the property (my wife is Indonesian and our current plans are to return to Kalimantan where I used to work when I was still a lot younger and fitter; I am now 75 and, never having been a physical person, would be quite contend to see my days out sitting in a comfy armchair by the window and reading the 5,000-plus books I've accumulated :-) In short, I am a serious seller but not a desperate one as every new day at "Riverbend" is a bonus. After half a lifetime overseas during which I had the good fortune to live and work in some extraordinarily beautiful places, this has been my first real home and I've lived here now since 1993 which must say something for this place. All this is my rather convoluted way of giving you some impression of why the place hasn't sold yet and why I am still here. Selling out from here is part of my estate planning which, of course, may never happen, so if I should suddenly drop dead, you would encounter a far more determined, if not desperate, seller in my wife who would find it difficult to live here on her own, so perhaps you may want to wait :-) With kind regards

 

As you may have gathered, I did not consult a "How to write a successful sales letter" manual to write this reply, and I expect to be left in peace long enough to finish Hermann Hesse's book.

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Stormy weather

 

Wild winds and stormy weather following torrential rains caused a giant tree to fall across our powerline. ESSENTIAL ENERGY were on the job the very same day.

 

 

Reconnecting our house to the last power pole was a private matter which required a so-called Level 2 electrician and two days' waiting time during which we made use of the brandnew generator acquired after the New Year's Eve bushfires. If nothing else, it kept the fridge and freezer going and allowed us to made the occasional cup of tea.

 

 

Joel and his offsider Sunny of South Coast Level 2 - an odd name for a very efficient operator - were on the job and within a few hours had us up and humming again.

It wasn't cheap but certainly worth the wait; after all, what's life worth without television, the radio, or - God help us! - without the internet?

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A bridge (not) too far

 

While we're still waiting for work on the replacement bridge at Nelligen to start, the new bridge in Batemans Bay is moving ahead in leaps and bounds - well, piles and trusses, but you know what I mean, don't you?

 

 

I "stole" these amazing aerial photos from Wet and Windy Photo's [sic] who, I am sure, won't mind as this is more free advertising for them.

 

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I've been negative all my life and won't change now!

Please note:
When this virus is over, I still want some of you to stay away from me.

 

A dear friend in the Bay got caught up in the COVID-19 scare at the Batemans Bay Soldiers' Club where she had played bingo last week and, having had coffee with Padma since then, suggested we should both get tested and so we did.

An eye-watering jab up the nose and the results are in: "Your COVID-19 test result for a sample collected on 22/07/2020 is NEGATIVE. If you are in isolation, this result does not necessarily mean these measures can be ceased." Am I surprised? Not at all. I've been negative all my life and won't change now!

 

 

Apart from all that self-isolation that's going on, someone on Radio National asked for suggestions of what should replace the hand-shaking and hugging now that we have to learn to live with this invisible virus.

I am sure our neighbours could help! They've been ahead of this virus by giving us their stiff middle-finger birdie-sign from far away for years.

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"What would Noel have done?"

Rest in Peace, Noel! Your memory lives on at "Riverbend"

 

Almost no day goes by when I haven't pondered something or faced some decision and asked myself, "What would Noel have made of this?" or "What would Noel have done?"

Marcel Proust believed that spending an hour with a friend was "to sacrifice a reality for something that does not exist; our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive" and that friendship in the end is no more than "a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

My friendship with Noel was more akin to Proust's comparison to reading --- "In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original parity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to" --- because, while we first met aboard the liner PATRIS in late 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany, much of the next twenty-seven years until his untimely death in 1995 was spent in writing letters, he from his home in Wewak in what was then the Territory of Papua New Guinea, and I from my countless abodes around the world.

My friendship with Noel played no small part in my resolve in 1969 to leave a promising and secure career with the Australia & New Zealand Bank for the wilds of New Guinea. I worked there for several years, during which time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland. Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea", which was the closest he ever came to complain about his life which had been full of hardship.

We never talked about the past, I because I didn't have one yet and Noel because, as he once confided, "Talking about it makes it more real", and so I knew nothing about his joining the Army when still in his late teens and being sent up to New Guinea to take part in the Bougainville Campaign, his unsuccessful attempts to grow coffee and tea in the New Guinea Highlands, and the subsequent years spent in mainly lowly-paid casual jobs with various government departments. As he once quipped, "I must be the longest-serving casual public servant in the Territory."

He epitomised the typical 'Territorian' with his Devil-may-care attitude and his unconcern about the future, about money, and about a career. Somehow, for him, the Territory provided everything he wanted from life and the rest of the world was a place that he visited once every so many years after he had saved up enough money for the fare.

His stoicism, his strength in the face of adversity, were a role model for me as I tried to make my own way through life. From afar, he observed my stumbling, my going from bust to boom and back again, which once prompted him to compare me to the proverbial cat with nine lives.

Noel was my last connection with a time in which I became what I am today, and my memories of that time are inseparable from my memories of him, and so thinking of him has become a kind of code for thinking of many other things that happened to me during those years and which I would rather forget because talking about them make them more real.

What would Noel have done? I think he would've done the same!

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The mail's in!

 

I looked at this view down Cuthbertson Street towards Fairfax Harbour most Sundays when I lived and worked in Port Moresby in 1974 and again in 1976 and for the third and last time in 1982.

On Sunday mornings the mail came in from Australia together with the weekend's newspapers. The mail was delivered to the post office in the building with the little "hat" on the roof, and the newspapers were sold from the newsagency inside the flat-roofed building across the road.

There was always a mad dash for the newspapers before they sold out, after which we waited patiently in the sweltering heat for our mail which was usually delivered into our private mailboxes before midday.

Being on contract work, I always bought the FINANCIAL REVIEW which regularly advertised in its Friday edition financial jobs I could apply for, and I always waited for a reply to an application I'd previously sent off.

Which is how I read about and applied for and got the advertised job of chief accountant in Burma in 1974, and again read about and applied for and got the advertised job of accountant on Thursday Island in 1976.

Those two jobs alone had been worth waiting for in the sweltering heat.

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The Willows in Winter

Read the online book here

 

The Mole sat toasting his toes in front of the fire. The winter wind howled safely outside, sending occasional flurries of soot down his chimney. He was thinking that things were nearly perfect, but not quite."

In an act of homage and celebration, William Horwood brought to life once more the four most-loved characters in English literature: the loyal mole, the resourceful Water Rat, the stern but wise Badger, and, of course, the exasperating, irresistible Toad. And right now, sitting here in front of my blazing fireplace, I feel a bit like Mole who has to endure his nephew's visit:

"But he could not bring himself to say what he would like, which was to be left alone and snug in his cosy home, free to potter through the winter evening, free to make himself a warming drink - or not, as the case may be - but certainly free not to have to think about someone else. Free not just for this evening, but for every evening to come!"

 

Noel's "little house on the Prairie" at Mount Perry
He wrote, "It's as isolated as it looks, but plenty of crows and wallabies for company"
It was still under construction and the KODAK processing-mark dated it March 1983

 

I am reminded of just such an evening in the cold Canberra winter of 1986 when my best friend Noel Butler came to visit. Just like Mole who'd told his nephew, "Well then, since you're family, you can stay here as long as you want", while wishing "if only he had said 'Till next Friday' or something like that", I had suggested to Noel that he could stay as long as he wanted. That was before he'd told me that he'd sold his "little house on the Prairie" at Mount Perry, and was likely to stay for months. "The longest months of the year, that's how long he's going to be here."

For "as long as you want" soon felt like a life sentence for the bachelor I was then, unused to sharing my house with another for more than an evening at a time. "O, how distant those days seemed when he had been alone in his home, and happy! How far off those wonderful days!"

Best friend that he was, Noel did not stay as long as he had wanted, and for a long time afterwards I told myself how uncharitable I had been, and that I deserved none of the many good things life had brought me, if I could not have shown a little tolerance to even my best friend.

 

Noel's home on the edge of Childers in December 1990

 

Soon afterwards I visited Noel in his new home at Childers where, smilingly and without rancour, he received me back. By some unspoken agreement, we never mentioned that Canberra winternight again, and remained best friends until his sudden and untimely death in August '95.

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A Fortunate Life

 

After watching the screen adaptation, I read A.B. Facey's autobiographical novel "A Fortunate Life" again, which he began writing in later life at the urging of his wife and children. It was published in 1981, just nine months before his death, and became an instant best-seller.

The book ends with these words, "I now wish to end this story ... I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back."

What a lovely note on which to end a book and a life. When my time comes, I hope someone will put the same words on my tombstone. I wouldn't change a word, except to replace the comma with a semicolon.

 

"I have lived a very good life; it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back."

 

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Lockdown Humour

The new corona vaccine developed in Russia is said to have no side effects. I'd put it on facebook but they took it down saying, "Your post goes against our Community Standards"