In memory of little Rover

Little Rover born November 2002 passed away 30 August 2017

 

On this day four years ago, the life force that had bounced little Rover - Mr Onederful! - through life for almost fifteen years, left him. We were both with him, talked to him, stroked him, and comforted him, and his big beautiful eyes were still looking up at us, as he took his last laboured breath.

We had one last day in the sunshine together, as he watched me prepare the vegetable garden, and he still enjoyed a large bowl of his favourite food, and we had come to accept that his seizures, sometimes just two a day (or night) but often more, would continue, but that he would always recover and be his beautiful, loving, wonderful self again.

This time it was not to be. Death is never pretty but his was as short and painless as any of us can ever hope for. From the time he lost consciousness until his eyes became unseeing, it was little more than a few short minutes. It was so quick, in fact, that the reality that the house will be so much emptier without him hasn't quite sunk in yet.

We placed him in his little sleeping box, covered him in his favourite jumper, and gave him a tearful burial minutes before midnight.

Good-bye, my friend, and rest in peace. We will never ever forget you.

 

The Rainbow Bridge ℬy the edge of the woods, at the foot of the hill, Is a lush green meadow where time stands still. Where the friends of man and woman do run, When their time on earth is over and done. For here, between this world and the next, Is a place where each beloved creature finds rest. On this golden land, they wait and they play, Till the Rainbow Bridge they cross over one day. No more do they suffer in pain or in sadness, For here they are whole, their lives filled with gladness. Their limbs are restored, their health renewed, Their bodies have healed with strength imbued. They romp through the grass, and sniff at the air, All ears prick forward, eyes dart front and back, Then all of a sudden, one breaks from the pack, For just at that instant, their eyes have met: Together again, both person and pet. So they run to each other, these friends from long past, The time of their parting is over at last. The sadness they felt while they were apart, Has turned into joy once more in each heart. They embrace with a love that will last forever, And then side by side, they cross over ... together.

 

 

The day the world exploded

 

On 27th August 1883 the most terrifying volcanic eruption occurred on the island of Krakatoa, five miles off the western tip of Java.

The island was destroyed and almost 40,000 people were killed. The impact was truly global: ships sailing in the Red Sea were covered in ash; barometers went haywire in Washington; the seas were disturbed in Devon; stunning sunsets burned over London; immense rafts of pumice floated to Africa.

The world shifted, geologically, politically and socially, and the word 'Krakatoa' became embedded in the consciousness of the modern world.

I have just read Simon Winchester's book by the same name and it was absolutely rivetting.

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What a difference two days make!

 

At the end of last week, BHP was still trading close to the AUS$53-mark (Thursday's high and close $52.99; Friday's high $52.95 and close $52.81). Then some economic figures came out of China which suggested a substantial slowdown in their economy, COVID-19 spiked in Australia, the Taliban took Kabul, and BHP disclosed that, "Oh, by the way, we almost forgot to tell you but we're considering a potential merger of our petroleum business with Woodside Petroleum Ltd." The end result: BHP closed down at $51.33!

That's a drop in the share price of $1.50 despite also announcing today results for the financial year ended 30 June 2021 which shows an 88% increase in earnings per share, and a fully franked dividend of US$2 per share (∼ AUS$2.70), payable 21 September. For full details, click here.

Operational excellence: Strong operational performance and free cash flow generation, with a margin of 64%  Strong underlying operational performance, with record volumes achieved at Western Australia Iron Ore (WAIO), Goonyella and Olympic Dam, and Escondida maintained average concentrator throughput at record levels.  Profit from operations of US$25.9 billion, up 80%, and Underlying EBITDA of US$37.4 billion at a record margin of 64%.  Attributable profit of US$11.3 billion (includes an exceptional loss of US$5.8 billion predominantly related to the impairments of our potash and energy coal assets, and the current year impact of the Samarco dam failure). Underlying attributable profit of US$17.1 billion, up 88% from the prior year.  Net operating cash flow of US$27.2 billion, above US$15 billion for the fifth consecutive year, and record free cash flow of US$19.4 billion, reflects higher iron ore and copper prices, and a strong operational performance.

Oh, and yes, BHP will merge its oil and gas business with Woodside to create the largest energy company listed on the ASX, with a global top-ten position in the LNG industry by production. Woodside will issue new shares to be distributed to BHP shareholders, with the expanded Woodside owned 52 per cent by existing Woodside shareholders and 48 per cent by existing BHP shareholders.

Exciting times are ahead of us. Let's hope it's reflected in a higher share price soon. I still trust Goldman Sachs whose target price is $57.70.

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P.S. 6.30 p.m. here, 9.30 a.m. in London. BHP is a dual-listed company, and in early trading in London is up 7% (but that may have something to do with the proposed end to BHP's dual-listing under which BHP Plc shareholders are entitled to receive one Ltd share for each Plc share).

P.P.S. Wednesday morning, and overnight BHP closed 3.4% up in London (2,358 GBP) and 7.9% down in New York (US$69.83). If the 7.9% drop in New York is a response to the merger with Woodside, it seems a little premature as it is still subject to various approvals, including by shareholders. I am confused, but I'm not alone as Goldman Sachs withdrew their BUY rating and came out with a "Not Rated" analysis - click here. Let's see how the market opens up in Sydney this morning.

P.P.P.S. It's 4 p.m. and the Australian market has closed. It's been my most disastrous day in the market EVER: BHP plunged a stomach-churning 7.07% to $47.70 which is close to NAV. Where to from here?

 

All Wouk and no play

 

We've all watched "The Caine Mutiny" starring Humphrey Bogart (sorry, no full movie on YouTube!); some who don't suffer from megalo-bibliophobia even read the 500-plus-page book - okay, I made up the word "megalobibliophobia" but the fear of reading large books is very real!

The author, Herman Wouk, produced "The Caine Mutiny" at age 36, and it became the biggest bestseller in America since "Gone With the Wind" and made him one of the most popular writers of the 20th century. Early in his career he had confidently proclaimed: "I am going to write novels for the rest of my life, each one better than the last."

True to his words, he immersed himself in the history of Word War II and the Holocaust, and produced not one but two novels, totalling nearly 2,000 pages, "The Winds of War", published in 1971, and followed it up in 1978 with a sequel, "War and Remembrance", 1,400 pages long.

Each epic was adapted by Wouk into an award-winning TV miniseries, with "The Winds of War" becoming one of the most-watched television programs in history. Courtesy of YouTube - and my efforts to collect each instalment into one blog 😀 - you can watch both here and here.

What a lockdown treat! Take off your mask, grab a glass of wine, and enjoy! To paraphrase C.S Lewis, "You can never get a glass of wine large enough or a miniseries long enough to suit me."

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What's up?

Chris in Camp 6 on Bougainville Island

 

I've forgotten now when I started my Bougainville Copper Project website in memory of the many thousands of men who built the Bougainville Copper mine and the most life-changing job I've ever had. Going by my copyright message at the bottom of the page, it must've been in 2003 which is now a whole fourteen years ago.

I started off the website by inviting comments and stories from all the oldtimers who had actually built the mine, either with slide rule and pen or by sheer brawn, asking them, "Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, we want to hear from you! There aren't many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience." Many replied - click here.

One of the first to heed the call was Chris, a Canadian from British Columbia, who wrote, "Hello, Just stumbled upon your site. Name is Chris and I lived and worked at Loloho assembling the drying plant. Lived at Camp 1 for a short while, but for the most part Loloho. Worked there from 1969 to Jan. '72 when I got the hell out to save my neck! Canadian and worked for MKF and Johns & Waygood. I don't have many more photos for the reason that the 'Pella' who was running the mail truck from Kieta, at that time, thought it was really fun to toss the mail out the window and watch it flutter away like the little birds, so a lot of us lost a considerable amount of correspondence and, of course, my return photos. Nothing surprising about that behavior, but doesn't help old memory lane. When I left Bougainville, I went to then Burma to work for Toshiba on a hydro project and there I was most definitely not permitted to even have a camera, (Vietnam time), so only memories there too. I would not trade my time in those places for anything; especially Bougainville, the Islands and Papua. Don't know that I would go back, given the opportunity, hard to say, and the likelihood of having that opportunity is little to none, so no point in conjecture. I don't know if this info is of any use to you, but there it is. Contact me if you have anything that you think that may interest me. Chris. P.S. As an aside, I see that they are talking of re-opening. Are they going to throw us a party to show us their appreciation for the good job we did of putting it together? I'm still wearing a damned hard hat and still busting my butt. What the hell have I done wrong?"

Although we had worked on the Bougainville Copper Project at about the same time and had even lived in the same camp, we'd never met there, and yet we seemed to have so much more in common than just Bougainville that it was as if we had known each other all our lives. I had only ever met one other Canadian who had been my neighbour in Camp 1 and was one of the most genuine guys I had ever come across, but Chris seemed to trump even him, and so an almost daily email exchange ensued which intensified with the coming of WhatsApp.

We both had led something of a "messy" single life before settling down, often looking back and wondering how things might have panned out had we come to our senses sooner. Then the unthinkable happened and Chris's wife passed away. When we are still young and healthy and strong, both physically and mentally, we seem to vastly overestimate our capability to live on our own. It must've come as a surprise to Chris as well just how much he missed his wife, because soon after that he was hospitalised, came back home, was hospitalised again, and came home again. Then a short message, "In hospital again fighting to stay alive. Not much interest in email or WhatsApp." That was on 31 July.

From the two blue ticks against my WhatsApp messages I knew that he was still reading them, but then finally, on 4 August, this last message:

Things mustn't have improved because there were no more blue ticks against my messages. It's been a fortnight since then. I still hope that, Mark Twain-like, I will one day receive a message from him that reads, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The remnants of an Army, Jellalabad, January 13, 1842. This painting depicts William Brydon, assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, arriving at the gates of Jalalabad in January 1842. The walls of Jalalabad loom over a desolate plain and riders from the garrison gallop from the gate to reach the solitary figure bringing the first word of the fate of the "Army of Afghanistan". Supposedly Brydon was the last survivor of the approximately 16,000 soldiers and camp followers from the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and is shown toiling the last few miles to safety on an exhausted and dying horse.

 

Kabul has become another Saigon, another shameful betrayal. The military-industrial complex, the network of individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons and military technologies, enriched themselves beyond their wildest dreams, the members of the Afghan puppet regime stuffed their Swiss bank accounts to overflowing and left, and it is the Afghan people who trusted the Americans who will pay the final price.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", said the philosopher George Santayana. He might as well have referred to the 1842 Retreat from Kabual or the Second Anglo-Afghan War or the Third Anglo-Afghan War or even the Soviet-Afghan War. The Afghans saw off the British again and again, they saw off the Russians, and now they've seen off the Americans. History has again repeated itself.

 

Watch these excellent video clips "The Great Game", narrated by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart asked, "Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there?",
a whole ten years ago!!!

 

It must've been a wise man who coined and associated the sobriquet "the graveyard of empires" with Afghanistan. The British and the Russians were defeated, and now the Americans have joined their ranks.

Having treated the world like a giant chessboard, they've made their last move which resulted in neither a check mate nor even a draw for them. Instead, they've suffered a humiliating and demoralising defeat of their own making. Pity the poor Afghan people who put their trust in the Americans! For them life will now be so much worse than ever before!

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P.S. For some background reading, I recommend "Return of a King", or even Rudyard Kipling's famous novel "Kim" which popularised the expression "The Big Game" (although it's been no game for the Afghan people). Read Rory Stewart's insightful book "The Places In Between". For even more of a mental overload, watch his YouTube clip here. Still not enough? Watch the true story of "Charlie Wilson's War" here.

 

Something to cheer you up during lockdown

 

 

Things could be a whole lot worse

My old mate Roy's view of the world from his highrise flat in Kuala Lumpur

 

The good people at the Nelligen Bridge Replacement Project just dropped a note into my letterbox, informing me that they will be pouring concrete on Saturday 14 August, until 6 pm. To minimise impacts to residents, they "... will use squawkers rather than beepers on reversing vehicles."

By the time all that beeping-converted-to-squawking filters down to us, it will have been drowned out by the squawking of ducks, the humming of bees, and the tweeting of birds here at tucked-away "Riverbend".

Things could be a whole lot worse. Roy, an old mate from my Bougainville days emailed me from Kuala Lumpur, "Here are four buildings being constructed within 100-150m from my apartment, and each with its own concrete pump that always seems to operate on different days. At your distance the muffled noise of the pile driver is nothing like the continuous bangs we hear of the concrete pumps forcing concrete from the truck mixer up dozens of floors – due to the weight of concrete the HP required is enormous – once they start to pour a floor they cannot stop until the pour is complete."

Roy, it's been over two years since you visited "Riverbend"! Whenever you need a respite from downtown K.L., come to "Riverbend". The guest cottage - which you helped to rewire; click here - is waiting for you!

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P.S. Within hours of the first mail drop, another leaflet appeared in our mailbox:

P.P.S. My old mate Roy is also an (albeit now retired) electrical engineer, and you know what they say about engineers, don't you? They don't just talk to you but they vibrate the air molecules using they vocal chords so that it disturbs your eardrums, and they don't just show you something but they direct the reflected electromagnetic radiations from the surface of the object towards your eyes. So when he detected my interest in his view of the world from the balcony of his apartment in Kuala Lumpur, he sent me these very detailed explanations:

Could you imagine a world without electrical engineers? Thanks, Roy! You're lucky to live in K.L. as it is still cold down here. I've just put on a second shirt to create a dielectric medium between the two shirts so that the heat generated by my body will not go out, and I stay warm 😀

 

 

From "Midnight Express" to "The Untold History of the United States"

 

As one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters and directors, multiple Academy award winning director, Oliver Stone has just penned the first instalment of his auto-biography. Listen to ABC RN Late Night Live podcast here.

"Chasing the Light - How I Fought My Way into Hollywood from the 1960s to Platoon" details what drove him to write, enlist for Vietnam, and produce some of Hollywood's most exciting and penetrating films, from "Midnight Express", "Platoon", and "El Salvador" to "JFK", "Born on the Fourth of July", "Nixon", "Wall Street", and his controversial interviews with Fidel Castro and President Vladimir Putin. For more, click here.

I've watched the spine-chilling movie "Midnight Express"; now it's back to ebay for a copy of "The Untold History of the United States". Thanks, Phillip Adams and ABC Radio Late Night Live, for making me aware of it.

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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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Something to laugh about during lockdown