He was the Tin Man I wrote about in "Dig here!".
It was early 1981. After more than ten years overseas and the last eighteen months on the road in Australia, I'd taken up a permanent accounting position with the construction company AV Jennings in Townsville. The work was easy and the pay adequate.
We had bought this small house on the beach at Pallarenda just ten minutes out of town. It was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers with holes in them, and I had begun to turn domestic with gusto.
The house was just one block away from the beach and the shark-proof swimming enclosure. From the corner window we could see the ocean and Magnetic Island on the horizon. The sound of the surf was always in our ears, and brolgas and curlews walked the streets at night. So many happy memories! If it is true that we remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them, then happy memories are the worst. That is the trouble with real life: the happiness is so rarely saved for the end.
Sales history: I bought it in 1981 for $35,000 and sold it again in 2000 for $115,000; it was rented out for $300 a week until 2016 when it was sold for $313,000. Its current estimated resale value is $405,000 to $530,000
I named it KARAWEIK in remembrance of a dinner at a restaurant of the same name in Rangoon where I had decided to ask a certain person to share the ups and downs of this unpredictable life with me. I loved her without knowing how, blindly living married life as if I were still a single man. "Never say you know the last word about any human heart!"
Even the washing machine was an old twintub with the lid missing (on far left)
which we bought for fifty dollars and for which I cut a wooden replacement lid
It was an old house - even the toilet was downstairs - but it was solid and had survived several cyclones and, above all, it was comfortable.
I tried to be a handyman, with mixed results, and "Lubby" for company.
It was beautiful one day and perfect the next, and I couldn't wait to get back to our little house by the beach after a day's work in the city ...
We left Pallarenda for New Guinea in January 1982. These oh-so-long-forgotten photos had been taken barely three months earlier. Then I found two more photographs with a strange car parked in the driveway.
I flipped them over, and on the back was my best friend's handwriting:
A little over three years later I was back in Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me. You can't step into the same river twice! --- to which a good friend added, "... but you can sure step into the same pile of shit more than once!" Je suis vraiment très très désolé, Daw Khin San Myint!
As Hermann Hesse wrote: "Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning."
Reluctantly, I sold the little house on the beach in December 1999 ...
... and here's a current street view of 3 Bay Street, courtesy of GOOGLE Map. They've cut down the frangipani and elderberry tree that used to shade my vegetable garden, and they've also removed the small palms I had planted on the nature strip. But it still looks very homely. If only ...