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Some days it feels like a toss-up between Kurtz's "The horror! The horror!" in "Heart of Darkness" and Edvard Munch's "The Scream".
It has never been explained what the scream was, but "The sameness! The sameness!" would've been my guess.
After all, we're all made of the same stuff, and while every caveman aspired to a bigger and better cave than his Neanderthal neighbour, which he then decorated with rock paintings and kept cosy with a fire and animal hides, there must've come a time when he just wanted to scream "The sameness! The sameness!" and chuck it all in and run off.
Of all the cities in the world, domesticity can be the worst of all, and for over twenty years I kept away from rock paintings and never kept animal hides. Unencumbered, I could always chuck it all in and run off.
Then "Riverbend" happened and I've been busy collecting rock paintings and animal hides - and books! - until, thirty years later, I look around me in horror and feel like screaming "The sameness! The sameness!"
All I know about Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" is that it contains the memorable quote "Wherever you go, you take yourself with you" which pretty much sums up Alain de Botton's antidote to all those picture-perfect guidebooks.
Travel doesn't really interests me; what interests me is different places but to get to them, I had to travel, which I did in between jobs because everyone of my over fifty jobs was always in a different place, often in a different country, and then almost always on a different continent.
And everywhere I went, my body and mind would travel with me and somehow threaten or even negate my full appreciation of the new destination. To quote the full quote: "It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you."
Unfortunately, Alain de Botton's eye-opening and thought-provoking "The Art of Travel" was only published in 2002, long after I had finished with my travels. If I had been able to read it earlier, I might've been happier on my journeys. Still, it is wonderful to listen to Alain de Botton now:
Yes, he is lucid, fluid, uplifting and can enrich and improve your life.
Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.
If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.
Noel Butler was such a friend. And today would've been his birthday which we never celebrated. We didn't know each other's birthday. Ours wasn't that kind of friendship. Our friendship was mainly an epistolary friendship which lasted for almost thirty years and was a meeting of the minds, rekindled when we met again in person, either in Wewak in New Guinea where Noel lived, or in one of my many corners of the world known to Noel only from the postage stamps on my many letters to him.
It smee again! Perhaps because of my more limited vocabulary I've never won a trip to Bali but I've visited it many times. It was during one of those visits when in 2006 I discovered a charming little hillside hotel in the north of Bali called Banjar Hills Retreat.
Click here to find Banjar Hills Retreat on GOOGLE Map
I spent several weeks over several years in this small piece of paradise, being often the only guest in this tiny four-bungalow retreat because for most pleasure-seeking tourists it was too quiet and too far out of the way. To me it was the perfect spot: absolute peace and quiet in which I could read my books all day and float in the swimming pool all night.
Reading FALSE ECONOMY by Alan Beattie
My first swim at Banjar Hills Retreat
Then, sometime in mid-2014, a middle-aged couple from Germany discovered it, too, and, not having the money to buy it outright, leased it with an option to buy. They had every intention to live there for ever but, as usual, reality intervened and less than two years later, in early 2016, they abandoned their tropical island dream and returned to Germany. I wrote about them under the heading "Der Traum ist aus!".
As they wrote (in German), "Am Ende ist halt nichts für ewig, so auch nicht Bali. Doch nichts wird mir das nehmen können, was wir hier gelebt und erfahren haben .... ausser vielleicht irgendwann die Demenz (lol). Und ich bin dankbar dafür ... Danke Bali !!" ["In the end nothing is for ever, not even Bali, but no-one can take away from us this unique experience ... except perhaps, at some time in the future, the onset of dementia (lol) ... and we're grateful for that ... Thank you, Bali!"]
In my mind I still walk through the village of Tegehe - click here - and sit down for a potong rambut at the local barber or hand out lollies to the local children, but my travelling days are over even if a radio station in Cork offered me the prize of a trip to Bali but thanks for the memories.
Now that I've succeeded to have your attention, I may even succeed in persuading you to read Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow", subtitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". As he goes on to explain:
"Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
Shades of Montaigne who observed that "to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago." Go on, click here and read the book.
The final scene in the 1937 version of 'Lost Horizon'
After many restless years when I simply couldn't stay put anywhere for more than six months to a year, I've been at "Riverbend" for thirty years, living on my memories and having grown old. It's not quite the Shangri-La I'd been searching for but it's as close as it will ever get.
During all those years of travel it was the people I met, the many colourful and swashbuckling characters, that left the most lasting impressions on me. And perhaps I did likewise to them, who knows? I just wished I had been a more widely-read person at that time which would've enabled me to gain a greater insight into the people I met and the places I visited.
When I lived in Greece in the early 80s I visited the island of Hydra several times without ever knowing anything about George Johnston who with his wife Charmian Clift lived for some eight years on the island. George Johnston is of course best known for his book "My Brother Jack" and I have read every one of his many other books since.
When I worked in Port Moresby, one of the old accountants in my office was a Mr Chipps, and the whole office would chortle "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" every time he went home, without my ever realising that they were making a literary reference to James Hilton's famous book.
And of course the same James Hilton wrote "Lost Horizon" in which he gave us the word "Shangri-La". Indeed, the Shangri-La hotel chain bought the rights to his book and placed a copy on every bedside table in place of the usual Gideon Bible. I knew nothing of this when I stayed at various Shangri-La Hotels in Malaysia and Singapore and I had barely heard of Hermann Hesse when I spent a whole Christmas and New Year in the suite named after him in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
When working in Western Samoa, I visited Pago Pago without ever having read Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain", and I lived and worked in Rangoon before I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay". Even Saudi Arabia would've been of greater fascination to me had I had the time to read Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".
How much richer my travels would've been had I done all that reading earlier but of course as it was, I found just enough time to read the necessary technical literature to allow me to carry out my work. In those hectic days it was an almost unheard-of luxury to find the time to read a novel. Instead, I studied accountancy standards or IATA rule books, improved my laytime calculation skills, compared charter parties and worked through case studies in forensic auditing.
To this day I am still fascinated by books about unaccountable accounting or the world's worst maritime frauds. BUT I have also found time to dip into John Donne's "No Man is an Island" and Boethius's "The Consolation of Philosophy", so things are beginning to balance out.
Just last week I suggested that this was my last word on the subject - click here - but now the state of Victoria is at it again, with Chris Minns in New South Wales going the same way. Have taxpayers spent $450 million on the referendum all for nothing?
Okay, it's on ADH TV which is a bit right-wing but so what? Anything to counterbalance the taxpayer-funded lefties of the ABC must be a good thing. Maurice Newman, former stockbroker, former chair of the ABC, founded Australian Digital Holdings, and he signed on Alan Jones. And James Packer, one of the country's wealthiest men, has put an unspecified amount of money — several million at least — into it.
So, have we put the constitutional challenge safely behind us? If so, we still have to resolve the matter of bogus identity - click here.
I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back." So begins Robyn Davidson's perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company.
Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia's landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity.
Robyn Davidson was just 27 when she trekked across the Australian desert. This epic journey was captured in her 1980 memoir "Tracks", which became a national and international success. It's a good Sunday read over your Weet-Bix which you can even read in German here.
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known the "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day - and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution.
The quest for a solution had occupied scientists and their patrons for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, Parliament upped the ante by offering a king's ransom (£20,000) to anyone whose method or device proved successful. Countless quacks weighed in with preposterous suggestions. The scientific establishment throughout Europe - from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton - had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution - a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.
"Longitude" is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest, and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking.
Longitude is the measurement east or west of the prime meridian that runs through Greenwich, England. Half of the world, the Eastern Hemisphere, is measured in degrees east of the prime meridian. The other half, the Western Hemisphere, in degrees west of the prime meridian. Degrees of longitude are divided into 60 minutes. Each minute of longitude can be further divided into 60 seconds. For example, the longitude of Paris, France, is 2° 29' E (2 degrees, 29 minutes east). The longitude for Brasilia, Brazil, is 47° 55' W (47 degrees, 55 minutes west).
A degree of longitude is about 111 kilometers (69 miles) at its widest. The widest areas of longitude are near the Equator, where Earth bulges out. Because of Earth's curvature, the actual distance of a degrees, minutes, and seconds of longitude depends on its distance from the Equator. The greater the distance, the shorter the length between meridians. All meridians meet at the North and South Poles.
I picked up this beautifully turned-out hardcover edition of Dava Sobel's book at my favourite op-shop for a mere gold coin. I already have one copy, and this one is not for myself but for one of the lifeguards at the Aquatic Centre who with her partner will go a-sailing again on their yacht presently moored at Yorkey's Knob just north of Cairns.
Of course, they have a Global Positioning Sydney (GPS) on board which gives them their position on the ocean within metres at the press of a button. For all I know, they may not even know the meaning of latitude and longitude but they will after they've read "Longitude".
And so will you after you've read this book online at www.archive.org.
A bookseller wins ten million dollars in the lottery. His ecstatic friends ask him what he plans to do with the money. With a huge smile on his face, he answers: "I'll keep selling books until the money runs out!"
I think Annette Freeman, the author of this charming little book, could relate to this joke which became reality to her less than eighteen months after she had opened her bookshop "Tea in the Library" in Sydney's York Street opposite the Queen Victoria Building.
"Tea in the Library" opened in November 2003 and closed in March 2005, with debts of $260,000 on the initial fitout. The shop lease had another eighteen months to run but she found new lessees who took over the lease at a lower rent, with her paying the difference for the remaining term of the lease in a lump sum direct to the landlord.
And she considered herself lucky as otherwise she would have been stuck with a $10,000-a-month outlay for an empty shop, plus the obligation to "make good" the premises at the end of the lease, i.e. rip out all the fittings and return the premises to its pre-bookshop state.
In the end, the new lessees paid her less than 10% of the original cost for the entire bookshop fitout, including all those expensive shelves, carpeting, lighting, office fitout, a five-computer network, safe, filing cabinets, front counter, audio, alarm and security system.
Although "Tea in the Library" was never so much about sales targets as it was about making a significant contribution to Sydney’s intellectual landscape - read more about it here - it's still a cautionary but also heart-warming tale for all wannabe booksellers, including yours truly who has for years dreamt of sitting comfortably in an upholstered armchair by a cash register, reading his favourite book, and occasionally ringing up a profitable sale.
According to condescending and sneering Waleed Aly I'm uneducated because I voted "NO" in the referendum which cost taxpayers $450 million and would've created division and opened up the country to unintended consequences.
Discussing the failure of the Yes campaign, Waleed Aly explained that "the biggest dividing line seems to have been education." He went on to say that the "style" of the messaging from the Yes campaign failed to resonate with many voters from the lower socio-economic groups.
Yes, Waleed Aly, it certainly failed to resonate with me but not because of a lack of education. I voted with my feet when I left South Africa in 1969 because I didn't like their 'apartheid', and I voted "No" on Saturday the 14th because I don't want another 'apartheid' in my adopted home.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the referendum was that the ordinary Australians raised their voice collectively to tell The Australian Establishment — comprising political leaders, corporations, academia and the mainstream media — that they were totally out of touch.
They had the gall to tell the public that they voted wrong because of misinformation! Celebrities came out and expressed their outrage and browbeat the public because of the majority who didn’t agree with them. Their sheer hubris in the face of a crushing defeat was amazing.
Albonese, by presenting a blank cheque to the Aboriginal grievance industry, treated the choice of how to vote not as a simple academic binary proposition as did Mr Howard in the republican referendum of 1999, but rather as a test of each individual's moral worth and value as a human being. Albo was perfectly happy to stand by and see No voters described as 'stupid', 'racist', 'dickheads' and 'dinosaurs'. Thanks, Albo, you arrogant, lazy, moralising, and posturing lightweight politician!
Aly the Wa---leed best summed up how insufferable the elites are and the contempt they hold us in when he claimed that the messaging for the campaign was too complicated for the ordinary Australian, because there was a strong correlation between the level of education attained with how they voted. Put bluntly, he suggested that 60.7%, the majority of us, were too bloody stupid to vote as the elites had hoped we would.
Most of us would find this insulting, Waleed Aly, so take a running jump!
Located on one quarter of an acre in the very popular village in the rainforest is this classic Queenslander home. With everything you need literally minutes from your front door, trade your city life of hustle and bustle for a village life where the trees rustle."
Did David Hall swap his real estate licence for a poetic one? "Trade your city life of hustle and bustle for a village life where the trees rustle." I can hear Wordsworth turning over in his grave! Not that David Hall has to convince me, as I've had my eyes on the village of Kuranda in the hills west of Cairns for more than a decade. Back then I could've bought a nice house in the village for under $300,000 and even the extraordinary Barron Lodge sold as late as 2020 for as little as $850,000 - click here.
For a video of the cablecar and scenic railway to Kuranda, click here
With all the good properties already picked over, there isn't much left but that's all right, too, because we aren't ready yet to move anyway and even if we were, we'd now probably opt for a downsizer. Something small because we've grown tired of endless cleaning and gardening!
There are some beautiful properties within walking distance of the village but they are all on small acreages and maybe at our age that distance is no longer walking distance anyway - or, as a friend from Sydney emailed, "don’t even think about anything with steps or stairs" - so I keep my eyes on something suitable in the village such as this cutie at 6 Morong Street (which has plenty of stairs at the front and back):
It's already UNDER OFFER but that's all right, too, as we're not ready yet. So while Angela Martin waxes lyrical about that simple brickwall downstairs, I keep following the market which has gone through some amazing leaps and bounds in recent years: 6 Morong Street last sold in 2016 for $390,000, now they want offers over $600,000; similarly, 7 Barang Street also sold in 2016 for $350,000, now they're advertising it at "Over $549,000" (after an initial price range of $580,000 to $620,000).
Acting on David Hall's motto "Keeping real estate real!" and reducing the price to below $500,000 would keep this real estate offering real!
I have this "On Golden Pond" moment every morning as I look out the window and see the river shining in the early-morning sunlight. I look at it and am reminded of all the people who have brightened my life and who are no longer here. I look at it and I am taken back to those many magical moments in my life.
And as the early-morning sunlight loses its golden sheen, I am also reminded of how fleeting life is and how much we should hold on to those precious moments before they are no longer here, before we are no longer here! Then it is time to feed the ducks on my own golden pond and give the possum in the possum penthouse his banana and then to brew myself my first lemongrass-and-ginger cup of tea of the day.
The movie "Exodus" (1960), based on Leon Uris's book of the same name, is the saga of a ship laden with Jewish European refugees sailing to British-ruled Palestine, and the story of the Zionist struggle against the British up to the beginning of the 1948 war between the Arabs and the Jews.
Because of the movie's popularity - it broke all box office records in the United States after "Gone with the Wind" - and the way it portrayed historical events, "Exodus" changed history in a number of ways. The film's plot ingredients and their sequence diverge significantly from what really happened.
"Exodus" had an enormous influence on the presentation of history, but Paul Newman is no substitute for a history teacher. This documentary by Deutsche Welle tells the complex story of how the state of Israel was founded – a story that lies at the heart of the violence and conflict in the region to this day.
If you're interested in a balanced and informed opinion about the current situation, you could do worse than read the FOREIGN AFFAIRS webpage.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief: the VOICE is dead and buried although Labor may claim the corpse is not dead but only sleeping. To make absolutely sure that the corpse stays buried, we had better make sure we also bury Labor when their three-year term finishes in 2025.
A friend emailed that he had heard some ABC-type explain that the YES-vote was highest in areas populated by higher-educated people. So why then did the A.C.T., which is populated by dim-witted public servants, vote overwhelmingly YES?
Another friend remarked, "What a bloody tragedy: with the backlash we are now really going to see the racial divide increase exponentially! And what a bloody waste of money: with the $450 miillion spent on this unnecessary referendum - plus
the chartered RAAF flights and all the other lobbying costs - they could have built three or four schools in remote areas to enhance the indigenous learning opportunity. That would have really helped to close the gap!"
Following this resounding defeat, Albanese is now a dead man walking. He was first elected to parliament as the federal member for Grayndler in 1996, which means he is covered under the old defined benefit scheme and will be on a huge indexed pension when he retires.
The maximum pension any retired MP can receive is currently $337,185. Mr Albanese’s current entitlement is about $250,000. This pension is of course funded by the taxpayer, is indexed each year and never runs out. Add the taxpayer-funded office, Com car, staffers, allowances, and free air travel, and the music never dies for our former prime ministers.
Dave and I on the platform of Babinda Railway Station
when I was on my way to Cairns in early 2011
Just received this bit of sad news: "Peter, letting you know that David Richardson, married to June's mother, ex Thursday Island, now of Babinda, passed away on Monday 15th Oct. He was 82."
Dave and I had been friends since my time on Thursday Island in 1977 where he worked as carpenter for the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs (DAIA) and also renovated the company house I occupied while working for the Island Industries Board (IIB).
He was a tough little 'Pommie bastard' who'd come out east with the British army fighting the insurgents in what was then Malaya. After demob he moved to Australia and for many years worked on Thursday Island. He kept a shack on Prince of Wales Island (POW) which we sometimes visited. All good memories!
Dave was with the British Army as a 19-year-old in what was then Malaya during the Emergency in 1949. He described this photo as "we lived in tents, four persons to one tent, with electric lights and paved floors; local workmen having a meal in front"
Dave on his dinghy in April 1977 on Country Women's Beach, Prince of Wales Island
Dave on holidays in Sarawak (Borneo) in 1976 in a longhouse at Rumah Panjang
Dave at his last home at 22 Eastwood Street in Babinda which he described as "My favourite corner close to the fridge and tea and coffee and Milo."
Dave in his dinghy; beach at Hospital Point in background (1977)
Dave's shack on Prince of Wales Island (1977)
Waterfall behind Dave's shack during wet season (1977)
I'd only just mailed a postcard to him a few days ago. It'll no doubt come back as he's moved to a place even Australia Post can't reach. It was good having known you, Dave! Rest in Peace.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien war der Anfang und auch das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
Notice to North American readers:
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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