They don't make documentaries like these anymore

 

If you, like me, have travelled the world twice over, met the famous, saints and sinners, poets and artists, kings and queens, old stars and hopeful beginners, have been where no-one's been before, learned secrets from writers and cooks, all with one library ticket to the wonderful world of books, then you love "Bookmark", a BBC documentary about literature and writers.

 

Charles Bukowski

Boswell's Boswell

Muriel Spark

Rev W. Awdry

Brian Masters Dennis Nilsen

Mervyn Peake

JG Ballard ...

Roald Dahl

Kingsley Amis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1PGaBDV2nY

Edith Wharton

Cervantes Further Adventures of Don Quixote

 

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The sinking of the 'Wilhelm Gustloff'

 

In January of 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff sailed from the German port of Gotenhafen (now Polish Gdynia), heading westward and crammed with some ten thousand passengers, for the most part German civilians fleeing the advancing Red Army.

In the icy waters of the Baltic it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine under the command of Captain Aleksandr Marinesko. Some twelve hundred survivors were picked up; everyone else died. The death toll, estimated to be as high as 9,343 including 5,000 children, six times more than the Titanic, makes it the worst maritime disaster in history.

"History is written by the victors", and so the atrocities committed upon ethnic Germans in their flight from the east, the Schrecklichkeit of the fire-bombing of German cities, the raping of hundreds of thousands of German women and girls by the Red Army, the prolonged coldhearted indifference of the Allies to the sufferings of the population after the war, has been kept silent, a silence first imposed by outsiders, then adopted as a considered political measure by Germans themselves.

This taboo is today being re-examined in Germany: that ordinary Germans - not just those who perished in the camps or died opposing Hitler - have a claim to be numbered among the victims of World War II.

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Garbage in, garbage out!

Unfortunately, I had to remove this rather good photograph of an old-fashioned garbage truck from 1959 because the owner of this image, instead of being flattered that his fame had reached even far-away Australia and despite my having quite correctly attributed the photo to its source, threatened me as follows: "Machen wir es kurz. Sollten deine unerlaubt von der Seite unsere-alten-zeiten.de heruntergeladenen und an anderer Stelle (z.B. in deinem Blog) geposteten Fotos, an denen ich und andere Privatpersonen die Urheberrechte haben, nicht gelöscht werden, werde ich meine Hamburger Anwaltskanzlei einschalten, die sich speziell solcher Verletzungen (auch im Ausland!) gerne annimmt. Ich setze dir eine Frist bis zum 2.11.2022." Duzen tut er mich auch gleich obwohl wir uns gar nicht kennen! GOOGLE translation What makes him so angry? Is it the cold weather, or the fear of the Russians coming (again)? Padma urges me to visit the (c)old "Vaterland" once more. What, and to meet people like him? I seem to have displayed a great deal of foresight when I left Germany in 1965 before I turned into an angry German myself. 😀 Anyway, you can still see the photo by clicking on this link and moving to the centre picture in the eighth row.   P.S. This silly legal threat is a much better story than my "Garbage in, garbade out!" It tells you everything you need to know about Germany and German people. "Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein!"

This old photo from the 1960s happens to have been taken in my old hometown Braunschweig as indicated by the numberplate prefix "BS"
[Source]

 

I grew up in a group of tenement buildings, with each building consisting of six flats, and with all six flats sharing one metal garbage disposal tin which was collected weekly. I don't recall ever seeing that one metal garbage disposal tin completely full!

People were too poor to throw things away! Everything was used and used again. Recycling began at home. Unlike these days, when each household has its own albeit plastic garbage disposal bin which is usually filled to overflowing (several of our neighbours even have two bins - no idea how they managed that! - both of which are filled to overflowing).

All this came back to me when I found this old photo from the 1960s on GOOGLE. It shows the exact same metal garbage disposal tins in use in those days, and the manner in which they were handled: two men would jog ahead of the truck to position the tins along the kerbside while the truck, with two men riding the footplate on either side, would slowly follow, then stop to allow the two men to roll the heavy tins down from the kerbside and onto the lifting gear on the back of the truck, then drop the empty tins back along the kerb for a fifth man to roll them back to the front door, repeated endlessly up and down the suburban streets.

The garbage men's dexterity fascinated us kids, and we marvelled at the apparent ease with which they twirled the tins back and forth, their left palm covered in a leather patch to grip the knob on top, while their right hand twirled the tins from the house to the truck and back again.

More memories from the good (c)old days. Garbage in, garbage out!

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The River Café Nelligen

Left to right: Davida, Dieidree, Padma with Dieidree's dog Rastus

 

Saturday morning at the River Café across the river. Deepblue skies and not a rain cloud in sight! We made the most of it, sipping a chai latte - and a hot chocolate for me - with neighbours and friends on the deck overlooking the river.

It's not my usual way of spending money which I usually do by ordering more books, and which I promptly did when I came back to "Riverbend".

 

Yes, two of them are available online - "Wanderlust - A History of Walking"
and "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" - but I need to hold the book in my hand

 

Speaking of money, there' still gold in them that hills which I noticed when looking up Nelligen's real estate webpage: both 54 Allards Lane and 1398 Kings Highway are now "under offer". Will "Riverbend" be next?

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P.S. 54 Allards Lane sold for $1,912,000 on 09 November 2022.

 

When is insurance not insurance?

 

When it's the National Disability Insurance Scheme! "Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to guarantee another party compensation in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. (Wikipedia)

However, under the National Disability Insurance Scheme, "The scheme entitles people with a 'permanent and significant' disability (under the age of 65), to full funding for any 'reasonable and necessary' support needs related to their disability (subject to certain restrictions). Funding is allocated to the individual, and the individual or their guardian chooses which providers supply the funded goods and services (subject to certain restrictions)".

"The scheme is entirely publicly funded: recipients do not purchase or contribute to an insurance policy. The scheme is not means-tested. The word 'insurance' refers to the scheme's use of proactive insurance principles to manage long-term financial sustainability, and that it aims to 'insure' any citizen will have costs covered in the event they are born with or acquire a disability." (Wikipedia)

 

Tips of a gigantic iceberg
As American philosopher Eric Hoffer famously wrote, ‘Every great cause starts as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.’

 

Ever since the euphemistically named "National Disability Insurance Scheme" was legislated in 2013 and finally fully rolled out in 2020, Australians have been flat out killing the golden goose. It's now said to blow out to well over a hundred billion dollars a year, twice the country's defence budget. "We shall fight them on the beaches" with crutches and in our mobility scooters and while high on the spectrum.

Perhaps it's the country's best defence. I mean, who would want to invade a country which, out of a total population of twenty-five million, has eight hundred thousand disabled, two million pensioners, four hundred thousand single mothers, five hundred thousand unemployed, and hundreds of thousands on a myriad of other government hand-outs?

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Swimming with a dolphin

 

Last Friday of the month which means free breakfast barbecue for members only at the Bay Pavilion Aquatic Centre. Of course, we stayed on long enough for a hotdog and a cold drink, as were Ron (pictured) and several others of our regular Friday-morning warm-water team.

 

Ron getting close and personal with a dolphin

 

Rodney the oyster farmer was too camera-shy to display all the band-aids he was covered in (the ones that hadn't already come off in the pool), and "Big Jake", the lifeguard, was again back patrolling the pool.

 

Yours truly

 

We're back home now and I'm about to hit the sack. Those early-morning pool sessions are taking it out of to me.

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Seventeen years ago already?

 

Looking at this video clip of Seaswift's "Trinity Bay" sailing up the Queensland coast to Thursday Island brought back many memories of my own trip aboard that ship in April 2005, now already an almost unbelievably long seventeen years ago.

Socrates is supposed to have said that the unexamined life isn't worth living, and I just wanted to revisit one of the many odd and fascinating places I used to live in - and they don't come any odder than T.I.!

 

 

There are two words I don't want to find myself uttering as an old man, and they are "If only ...". If only. We all have our own "if onlys". If only we had studied harder; if only we had stuck with that job ..." My trip to Thursday Island was to eliminate one "if only" and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard.

So jump aboard and follow me down memory lane by clicking here.

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Back from our morning walk

"Street Cricket" by d'Arcy W. Doyle (1932-2001)

 

We've just come back from our d'Arcy Doyle walk through the village. It's a hot and humid morning, and I'm sitting by the computer, slamming down an ice-cold Coke. (Funny how when I slam down a Coke, I'm back in Camp 6 on Bougainville, visualising a pair of legs sticking out from under the bed of a certain person who's groping for a pair of lost contact lenses)

I ought to be outdoors doing some much-needed work around the place. I mean, Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet - and even that's a very recent development - but the last few weeks have been too wet and today it's too hot, so it's back to reading.

Anyway, now that I'm approaching 80 - unfortunately, from the wrong direction - all that work is becoming a bit too much for me, and as I intimated elsewhere, early next year may be as good a time as any to find someone else to sit on the ride-on mower for a couple of days every few weeks, cut down trees and split firewood, or clean the gutters.

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More culture than a penicillin factory

 

Being, by his own admission, Australia's answer to Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Sir Trevor McDonald, Sir Les Patterson is Australia’s finest diplomat, diversity watchdog and cultural icon, dropping the occasional double innuendo.

He's a stickler for political correctness and openly heterosexual and doesn't care who knows it. As for some courageous folk who claim that they were born in the body of the wrong sex, Les Patterson has this to say: "I've been there, guys. I know. I need to get into the body of the opposite sex on a regular basis."

At eighty-eight years of age, he's outlived most of his more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion. He was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others, and has more culture than a penicillin factory.

 

Overweight, middle-aged, full-time alcoholic and lifelong politician Sir Les Patterson (Barry Humphries), "former cultural attaché to the Court of St. James" and the "Henry Kissinger of the Antipodes", represents Australia at the UN where his drunken, baked bean-fuelled fart literally incinerates an Arab ambassador. Patterson is reassigned to the Middle East so he can be tortured to death by the ruler of Abu Nivea, a rich US proxy Gulf state, thus ensuring the previously agreed one billion petrodollar loan to Australia. Patterson's arrival triggers a long-planned coup d'etat by the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, and his life is spared. At an illegal backroom tavern bar, Patterson meets a similarly dishevelled and booze-soaked bioweapons scientist who has developed a horrific viral pathogen for the KGB, along with the antidote. Soviet intelligence plans to distribute the pathogen to the Pentagon and other key government and military locations via infected toilet seats and ultimately paralyse the West. Patterson, though far too inebriated and incompetent to fully understand anything happening around him, teams up with Dame Edna Everage, international megastar and top CIA operative (also played by Humphries), to save the world.

 

For all my overseas readers who want to imbibe more of that Australian culture, I suggest watching the (un-)forgettable "Les Patterson Saves the World", included by Australian film critic Michael Adams on his list of the worst-ever Australian films. David Stratton wrote in 1990, "The gala opening was an embarrassing occasion, and it is still rumoured in the industry today that the Federal Treasurer Paul Keating, who attended, was so angry that he decide to end rorts in the film industry."

Enjoy - or not!

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P.S. Couldn't get enough of it? For more, click here.

 

Looking through the rearvision mirror of life

 

An old friend from my days on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait some forty-five years ago has just sent a link to this video clip of the pearl shell divers of the Torres Strait.

Thanks, Hubert! It brought back lots of memories!

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Appointment in Samarra

 

A parable almost as old as time itself was retold by one of my favourite writers, Somerset W. Maugham, in 1933. It sounds like something out of "One Thousand and One Nights", and it is one of those stories that a lot of people vaguely know, without quite knowing why ... .

 

 

An old friend - old in both senses of the word - in Greece reminded me of it today, although, at my age, I don't need any reminding, Bozenna.

My next appointmwnt will be on Wednesday, the 9th of November, not in Samarra but in Ulladulla, with my favourite dentist. I hope I make it.

One day at a time ...

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Ten Canoes

 

This film came about partly as an act of remembering. David Gulpilil, who worked with director Rolf de Heer on "The Tracker" invited de Heer to visit his home in Arnhem Land.

While there, he suggested they should make a film about this place. Gulpilil told him they would need ten canoes. He then showed de Heer a photograph, taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson during the 1930s, showing ten men in canoes on the Arafura Swamp, collecting magpie-goose eggs.

 

"The Goose Hunters of the Arafura Swamp" (1937), photo by Donald Thomson, showing Ramingining men on the Arafura Swamp

 

The Ramingining community were keen to dramatise this traditional food gathering, but it required skills that had almost died out. Only a few of the senior men knew how to construct bark canoes, so the sequence in the film where they do this is partly an exercise in renewal.

"Ten Canoes" is a strange beast, both ethnographic document and high-spirited flight of whimsy: a curious mixture of entertainment and anthropology. Any notion that this is “high” or “low” art can be quickly dispelled; this is quintessentially a film about people and storytelling.

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"And now, the end is near ..." Frank Sinatra

 

 

Who are better qualified than the Germans to make a documentary about a fictional Third World War?

This is a fake historical documentary which imagines a worst-case scenario of how the Cold War might have ended had history taken a different course. Employing a massive amount of archival imagery from military training films from both East and West, fake news reports, fake interviews, public statements by real historical figures (Bush, Thatcher, Kohl, etc.) and a wide variety of other original and archival material, it is a film unlike any other, both in its making and in its use of true pictures to illustrate an alternative vision of the past. Presented as if it where actually true and involving the actual political leaders of the time, World War Three makes real the ultimate horror of the Cold War, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Two-and-a-half years in the making, this international co-production was developed in consultation with military advisors from both NATO and the former Soviet Union. It is a realistic exploration of what might have been as it was imagined by those who were trained to fight World War Three.

A 1998 TV movie which has suddenly become very real again.

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Don't choke on your mango again, Peter!

 

Almost choked on my mango when reading your blog on the number of reading spots you so much enjoy at Riverbend", emailed Peter Logan, an old friend from my Rabaul days.

Well, don't eat a mango while you read this, Peter, or you may choke again when I tell you about "Melbourne", my peaceful reading room I built at the back of "Riverbend" last year (or was it the year before?)

I decided to call it "Melbourne", so that if the phone rings, Padma can tell the caller quite truthfully, "Sorry, but Peter's gone to Melbourne!"

I may go to Melbourne right now; why, I may even stay there overnight!

Don't choke on your mango again, Peter! Lukim yu bihain pukpuk!

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A library with a view

Painted a bright red, I call it the "Red House" in memory of Hermann Hesse

 

The overcast weather and intermittent rain continues, and so, instead of being cooped up in the house, I use my libraries - plural! - to keep the blues away. Today I'm spending most of my time in the "Red House" which contains my library of travel books as well as all my foreign-language books and books on linguistics.

 

The green building is our former guest cottage which is now our 'Haus Piksa'

 

It is also a wonderful writing room with a view which, whether overcast or raining, allows me to dream big enough for anything to come true.

 

 

And that doesn't even include the evenings when I light the kerosene lamp (the "Red House" is 'off-grid', as they say) and pretend that I am back in some remote outpost of Papua New Guinea. Lukim yu bihain!

 

 

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Age of Consent

 

There are only trailers on YouTube of the 1969 Australian movie "Age of Consent", but I've just discovered the above full-length recording on www.archive.org. What a wonderful find on a rained-out day like today, and just listen to Peter Sculthorpe's haunting opening score!

The location for Norman Lindsay's semi-autobiographical book is somewhere around Bermagui on New South Wales' South Coast which may not been been 'sexy' enough for the movie which, other than that, follows the book quite closely.

The movie's location is the Great Barrier Reef's pin-up island Dunk. Now well known for its luxurious holiday resorts, it was already made famous in the early 1900s when Australia's own Robert Louis Stevenson - he once took the pen-name 'Rob Krusoe'! - E.J. Banfield left Townsville in 1897 to pursue a simpler existence on Dunk Island.

Banfield was one of the early seekers of an alternative lifestyle when, accompanied by his wife, he settled 'far from the haunts of men' on this then uninhabited island off the coast of northern Queensland.

His legacy are three Australian classics, The Confessions of a Beachcomber, "Further Confessions of a Beachcomber", and his posthumous book, Last Leaves from Dunk Island, which starts with the following introduction:

"On the 5th of June, 1923, the small steamer Innisfail was passing between Dunk Island and the coast of northern Queensland, when the captain noticed a figure waving from the island beach. Interpreting the signal as a greeting, he merely waved a response. Then, as the vessel proceeded, the figure on the beach collapsed. At once the Innisfail was stopped and a party went to investigate. It was in this manner that the world learned of the death of E. J. Banfield, self-styled 'Beachcomber' of Dunk Island, the most renowned literary man of his kind in Australian history, and, perhaps, the most striking naturalist-recluse of modern times. The signaller on the beach was Mrs. Banfield, who had been alone with her dead for three days. So ended a tropic idyll of twenty-five years' duration."

"An odd little book that appears out of nowhere ... and once you have read it, you will never go completely back to where you were before. The kind of book you may hesitate to lend for fear you might miss its company."

 

Which is how I feel about Norman Lindsay's whimsical Age of Consent and, in a more profound way, Edmund J. Banfield's The Confessions of a Beachcomber and Last Leaves from Dunk Island, so don't even ask me to lend them to you.

They've become my own 'age of consent', the life I would've consented to, had I been born into a different world at a different time. All I can do now is read "the kind of book that echoes from the heart of some ancient knowing, and whispers from time's forgotten cave that life may be more than it seems, and less".

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