The year was 1979. I was still thrashing about, trying to figure out what to do with my life as everything I touched turned to ashes which is what happens after you've peaked too early in life. Life is all about luck: good luck and bad luck, and I was on a long stretch of self-inflicted bad luck.
I had hit the big time four years earlier when I had been hired as Chief Accountant for the Rangoon office of TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles. I earned thrice the salary I had earned in New Guinea - and all tax-free! - drove a fancy company car, and lived in a stately colonial house with domestic servants, all within earshot of a thousand tinkling bells from the Shwedagon Pagoda. At the time I had not yet experienced what I had experienced and so I chucked it all in on a whim!
Casting about for the next perfect job, I'd tried New Guinea again, then Thursday Island, then back to Canberra. Declined a job on King Island, was off to the Solomons, then to Samoa, before accepting a consulting job with the Penang Port Commission in Malaysia. Back to Canberra and a bit of 'suburban' accounting but I couldn't stick to anything for long!
So I hit the road again with a caravan, picking up work as I went along: Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Mackay, Townsville, and then Mt Isa where MIM (Mount Isa Mines) appointed me as their Construction Accountant.
I made it into the newspaper and even became a 'major' shareholder in the company, but five months was just about all I could take before the inevitable happend and I heard and followed the call of the wild again.
My old mate Noel must've been wondering when I would head off again and possibly call by at his sister's place in Bundaberg where he had holed up after his return from New Guinea where he had spent half a lifetime before Independence had forced him back to Australia.
He himself had planned to spend Christmas 1979 in the 'Big Smoke' and, just in case I had planned a similar move, he'd sent me this postcard telling me where to find him in Sydney: 41 Grosvenor Street, Woollahra.
I've just found it amongst the accumulated detritus from fifty years of moving from place to place, and I wonder who he knew in Woollahra?
Whoever it was sold up in January 1993 for a mere $280,000 - click here - thereby missing out on those massive price increases which happened around 2000, then again around 2010, and again now when similar properties in the area are selling for well over two million dollars.
All aboard the train of thought this old postcard has set in motion!
