My first landfall in Australia and for some 229 other "Auswanderer" aboard the ship FLAVIA was Sydney. Together with another young German I ventured just far enough from the ship to explore the Rocks and to sit on the steps leading up to the Harbour Bridge.
We still had some distance to go before we would finally disembark in Melbourne and be processed through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, but we had already decided there and then to come back to Sydney and to that very spot to wait there every Sunday for the other one to turn up.
That was in August 1965, and I never did return to Sydney until a year later the ANZ Bank, for whom I had begun to work in Canberra, sent me on a two-week training course at their Haymarket staff training centre.
The next time I was in Sydney was in 1972 when Camp Catering Services, whom I had helped to set up their catering operations on Bougainville Island in New Guinea, transferred me to their Crows Nest head office as their Group Financial Controller, during which time I lived in a ramshackle boarding-house at Blues Point with views of the bridge at which I had promised to meet up again with the other young German.
My final - and longest - stay in Australia's famous "Harbour City" was in 1985 after I had come back from my last overseas assignment in Saudi Arabia and Greece, and thought that Sydney would be the answer to all my prayers. It wasn't! Contrary to what former prime minister Paul Keating once said, I preferred to camp out and left after six months.
Reading about Sydney in Louis Nowra's book "Sydney - A Biography" was far more interesting and a lot easier than actually living there, and I learned a great deal about some of the buildings and places that I quite thoughtlessly and indeed ignorantly walk past back in 1972 and 1985.
What I still don't know is how many Sundays the other young German may have sat on those Harbour Bridge stairs waiting for me to turn up.
