To find an arrival card, click on www.naa.gov.au, then on "RecordSearch",
then move to "Passenger arrivals", and type in the "Family Name" and nothing else.
For a faster search, change "Display 20 search results per page" to "200"
The District Commissioner of Bougainville during my time on the island, Bill Brown (am I not a shameless name-dropper?), had read through some of my blogs, after which he emailed me to ask the question, "What happened to the Manfred?"
I wondered where he had found out about that Teutonic part of my name. "I picked up your Manfred from the aircraft passenger lists in the National Archives", he replied. I must've been in and out of the www.naa.gov.au website a hundred times but I had never paid any attention to those "Passenger arrivals". Remember those "Incoming Passenger Card" we used to fill in every time we entered Australia? Well, the National Archives of Australia has kept them all, or at least the ones from 1898 to 1972, to spin a good yarn for us old-time travellers.
What a find! And what stories lie behind those long-forgotten cards! Here's one such story behind the above Incoming Passenger Card":
Back in 1972, after almost three years on Bougainville Island already, I'd been appointed office manager/accountant of Camp Catering Services on what was then the biggest logistics and catering contract anywhere.
Against all the odds we had wrenched a multi-million-dollar catering contract from the incumbent contractors, B.F. Browns, on what was then the world's largest open-cut copper mine . They had held the contract since construction began several years earlier and were so confident we would fail that they kept their management team on the island for several more months.
Under Merv Nightingale's inspired leadership, we gave it all we got, saw off the challenge, and settled into a successful operation which became the jewel in the crown of Camp Catering Services' contracts in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. For me, the prospect of endless routine after the adrenaline-filled first few months was daunting enough to gladly accept the promotion to Group Financial Controller in the company's head office in Sydney five months later.
I was totally absorbed in my new job in the big city when my best mate, Noel Butler, who every two or three years would embark on an African safari or an overland trip from London back to Australia, came down to Sydney from New Guinea - see above Passenger Arrival Card - to suggest I join him on an adventure tour of Indonesia, taking bumboat rides from island to island across this amazing archipelago of over 17,000 islands.
Of course, I was tempted, but I was also equally committed to making a success of what had until then been my biggest job as Group Financial Controller of a multi-million-dollar company with operations in the iron ore fields of Western Australia, on the Savage River project in Tasmania, and the coal fields of Central Queensland, and so Noel left on his own.
As it turned out, Sydney didn't agree with me nor was the work all it had promised to be. Instead of breaking new grounds and applying what I had learned on the successful Bougainville Project to the company's other operations, I was bogged down with the daily signing of hundreds of cheques and the minutiae of office politics. Within months I had moved on to bigger and better things but I've always regretted not having accompanied my mate Noel on the adventure of a lifetime.
Mark Twain was right: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
It's now more than fifty years ago and I still am!
