Memories of Bay Street

Toasting my new overseas job with my then neighbour before leaving for the airport.
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 is just to the left of the swimming enclosure and marked with a red dot

 

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.

One day we met a chubby Labrador walking down the road. We liked him and he liked us, and from then on he spent more time with us than with his owners. We called him "Labby" and he listed to it.

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!"

Money was still tight and our furnishings were sparse and second-hand but we lived in the tropics and spent as much time outside as inside.

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

 

I had a water diviner sink a bore and instal a pump which was connected to a timer which started each morning at 5 o'clock to wake us up to another glorious morning in the tropics. I grew vegetables under the elderberry tree along the side of the house with amazing results.

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 ...

... until eight months later the fatal phone call came in: did I want to work overseas again? The call of the wild again and a new challenge! So it was back to New Guinea and then Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Shades of Hermann Hesse: "But there is no centre in my life, my life hovers between poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there."

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:

"Taken Dec. 1982" and printed in March 1983. By the time my old mate Noel had visited Townsville to see where I used to live I was already working in Saudi Arabia, and by the time these photographs reached me, my domestic bliss was over. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Happiness is like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

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."

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