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Ich fand dieses Buch vom Horst Wolfram Geissler in einem Antiquariat. Damals in Deutschland hatten wir viele Bücher vom Bertelsmann Lesering und "Der liebe Augustin" war auch dabei. Und somit nahm ich dieses 50-jährige Buch mit nachhause denn der Anfang liest sich ganz nett:
"Es geht die Sage: Einst war die Welt freundlicher gewesen als heute. Und wenn ihr die alten illuminierten Kupferstiche betrachtet, scheint das wahrhaftig zu stimmen.
Was für zarte, lustige Farben und Linien damals in der Welt waren! Die Leute trugen grüne Fräcke und mattgelbe Hosen, die Akazien flimmerten sanft in den blauen Himmel hinein, der heiter war, als lächelte der liebe Gott alle Tage darüber hin.
Es gab noch keine Eisenbahnen, keine Dampfschiffe, keine Kraftwagen und also auch weder Ruß noch Lärm, noch aufgejagten Staub. Es gab nur eines in dieser alten Landschaft: Ruhe."
At the end of my radiotherapy treatment in September 2018
You have no maps for Cancerland and no idea if your passport has a valid exit permit. A guide gets in touch with you right at the very beginning. He makes sure he’s got your name and date of birth right and then says, 'I’m from the cancer police. You’ve got to come with me.'
So what do you do? You say, 'All right.' You have no real choice in the matter, as he says if you refuse to follow he’ll kill you. I said, 'I prefer to live. Take me where you will.' I’ve been following him ever since 2018.
I'm no longer being bombed with radiotherapy, and today's visit to Sydney is merely a quick check-up with the cancer police to find out if I've collected any speeding tickets. I'll let you know when I get back.
I've just come back from a late-afternoon walk up the lane to inspect the messiness the bringers of the sewerage and water reticulation have left behind after their first day on the job.
A fairly recent newcomer to the neighbourhood called out to me and we started talking. "Oh, you're that German from down the lane?" he asked. Whoops! It seems that my reputation has once again preceded me.
Yes, I'm that German from down the lane, and I image the reputation that preceded me was courtesy of a neighbour's wife who, whenever she could spy the Australian flag hoisted up my flagpole, screamed from the mercifully far away gate, "Just because you fly the Australian flag doesn't make you an Australian." There's one in every town and village.
(There's another character across the river who refuses to shop at ALDI. He's quite a jolly fellow and I admire his misguided conviction which costs him money as he's limited to shopping at Woolies and Coles.)
Like Socrates, I'd rather drink my hemlock than deny my German-ness which has stood me in good stead in all those years: industriousness, thoroughness, punctuality, honesty, and perhaps a bit of arrogance thrown in as well; after all, arrogance is still better than ignorance.
I am German by birth and Australian by choice - and happy with both.
Tonight at 8.30 ABC TV shows the first episode of "Doc Martin" Clunes' "Islands of Australia" with a very cameo appearance of David Glasheen, the Millionaire Castaway on Restoration Island. Are you reading this, Hubert Hofer in Cooktown?
"Doc Martin" with David Glasheen and his woman, Miranda the mannequin
Last time I spoke with Dave, he was missing female company.
Be careful what you're wishing for, Dave - click here
David Glasheen's house on Restoration Island
And, yes, "Doc Martin" then visits my old "home", Thursday Island, where I used to work and live in 1977 and for which I still have a soft spot. (Why do we miss people and places only when they are no longer around?) He meets Diver Dan outside Mona's souvenir shop of which I wrote about in my travelogue when I visited the island again in 2005:
"Doc Martin" with Diver Dan, born 1929, outside Mona's Bazaar
"I called in at a souvenir shop in the main street where I was met by a young Ethiopian, who had somehow got himself married to a T.I. girl. His wife's mother owned the shop which he now managed. They had three lovely children but after five years on T.I., he seemed to be getting restless. He was enrolled in some business studies and wanted to become an accountant but felt that the longer he stayed on T.I. the more his self-confidence eroded. He didn't know that he was suffering from - nor had he heard of the term - "rock fever" which originated among servicemen stationed in Hawaii during World War II. It meant a sudden and desperate need to escape to the mainland."
Mr Kazu welcomes Martin to Friday Island. Beyond Friday Island lies the weekend.
And he went across to Friday Island where Leo the Hun lived (and died) - click here - but where "Doc Martin" visited the Kazu Pearl Farm. More memories for me because during my time on Thursday Island in 1977 I befriended a Burmese marine biologist, Victor Aung, who had worked there. The sheer isolation and loneliness finally drove him away from there and the last I heard from him was decades ago when he had taken a job as a mail-sorter at the Sydney GPO. Where are you now, Victor?
Victor Aung on his visit to Thursday Island in 1977
If you're too busy tonight to watch "Islands of Australia", you can tune in again on Sunday at 3.55 in the afternoon or, if you have access to iview, go to iview and click on Episode 1.
Say hello to mad-as-a-cut-snake David Glasheen and his sidekick, the lovely Miranda. Tell him I sent you.
Martin's last night on Restoration Island, dining on freshly-caught trevally
We live in troubled times and the world’s largest economy is failing miserably in its role as 'global peacekeeper'. America once ruled as a moral leader, liberating Europe from Hitler’s Nazi regime and defeating the Japanese Empire which inflicted atrocities all across Asia.
While publicly preaching restraint, behind the curtains the US continues to hand out a colossal $95 billion in military aid to Israel alone which will no doubt fatten the purse strings of the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others.
All this will be highly inflationary and affect the supply of basic minerals over the coming years. The outbreak of WW1 witnessed one of the most prolific price surges on record for copper. The graphic above shows its 120-year price history, adjusted for inflation. Copper reached the equivalent of US$9,878 per tonne in 1914 as the demand for bullets and other war munitions rose. The same thing occurred over the Vietnam War throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Demand for copper is currently outstripping supply, driving up prices. Copper supply has been strained by operational and political instability in regions where it is mined, including Congo, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Latin America. There are no quick fixes as copper's supply response is notoriously slow. A typical copper mine takes about 10-15 years to explore, develop and bring online.
Today's copper price is $9,654
Proof that metals will be a strong performer amid political chaos and geopolitical chest beating. While I truly wish the reasons were different, history tells us that major geopolitical tensions and the build-up to war are extremely bullish for metals. These are the real reasons commodity prices are embarking on a new era of price inflation. I'm buying BHP!
You are travelling along in Germany, and suddenly on the side of the railway tracks there is a cluster of fenced-in tiny houses surrounded by small gardens. Are these actual homes? Are they camping grounds for seasonal workers? Or is this where the garden gnomes live when they aren't in your garden?
Actually, these little plots of land are called "Schrebergarten" but how did this idea for tiny gardens get started? Because so many Germans live in apartments without yards, the Schrebergarten, a little plot of land usually at the edge of a city, gives them a chance to get out in the fresh air and work in the garden.
This movement, which is now nationwide, was the brainchild of Dr Moritz Schreber, a Leipzig University Professor who specialised in childen's health. He worried that the children growing up in the cities would be stunted physically and emotionally if they could not go out to play in the countryside, and insisted that playgrounds be built to ensure that childen would properly socialise.
After his death in 1861, Leipzig school principal Ernst Innozenz Hauschild established the first Schrebergarten as a playground for children on the outskirts of Leipzig. To supplement the healthy air and exercise, vegetable gardens were planted. Slowly, the adults took control of the green spaces, and planted family gardens in the plots. Then fences went up to make sure that their place was theirs alone.
The Schrebergarten movement spread all over Germany and beyond, with pieces of land on the edge of cities zoned for Schrebergartens which were leased out to families. There they could spent their evenings or weekends puttering away, growing their own vegetables and watching the sun set over their little patch of land. My Opa would sit there in his shorts and socks and sandals watching the world go by while Oma tended her flowers and served us "Muckefuck" and "Kuchen".
Each little plot had its own "Gartenlaube" or tiny house. It wasn't meant for sleep-overs but many people did sleep over on warm summer nights, as did my Opa whom I sometimes accompanied on his trips out to his Schrebergarten. That was in the 1950s. Much later, Schrebergarten were thought to be antiquated "Kitsch" where garden gnomes multiplied.
However, there has been a renaissance in Schrebergarten, not only in Germany but also here at "Riverbend" where I have my own little Schrebergarten and sleep-out on my own acreage - click here - where I can wear my socks and sandals and practise my German orderliness.
As I've mentioned earlier, my pre-Deceased Estate Sale is now up and running! So far the online advertisement at www.realestate.com.au had 510 hits, of which some 400 are probably my own as I keep admiring my handiwork.
As I put in parentheses at the bottom of the advertisement: (This is a pre-Deceased Estate Sale by the owner himself who wants to sell while he can still drive his own car before being driven out in a hearse. His negotiating skills are hopeless, so to save himself all the frustrations, he's set a very realistic sales price. His photography is also pretty crappy, so you will be pleasantly surprised when you see the real thing.)
The resulting inquiries were just four: a promising one from a real estate mogul in Milton who seemed to be interested in adding to his portfolio, and another three from people whose arithmetic must've been way off when reading "most residential properties sell at a price ratio of 75% for the house and 25% for the land; 'Riverbend' has an inverse ratio of 25% for the house and 75% for the land (1 July 2022 Valuer-General's Valuation of the LAND ONLY was $2,637,000)". They never replied after I had told them that the price would be over $3 million.
Perhaps my home-made advertisement lacks the misleading hyperbole employed by fast-talking real estate agents; it also lacks all that tricky photography employed by fast-talking real estate agents that makes the sky look bluer and the grass look greener and the house look bigger.
It's just an honest advertisement for a house which over thirty years has become a home which I will be reluctant to leave but leave I will while I'm still able to drive my own car instead of being driven out in a hearse.
All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown
The moon rolls through the night-time till the daybreak comes around
All my life's a circle and I can't tell you why
The seasons spinning round again, the years keep rolling by
It seems like I've been here before, and I well remember when
I've got this funny feeling that we'll all be together again
There's no straight lines make up my life, all my roads have bends
There's no clear-cut beginning and so far no dead ends
I've found you a thousand times, I guess you've done the same
But then we lose each other, it's just like a children's game
And I see you here again the thought runs through my mind
Love is like a circle, let's go round one more time
Remember the old Harry Chapin song "All my life's a circle"? The years had kept rolling by, and suddenly, in late 1985, after twenty years in a dozen other countries, I found myself back in Canberra where I had taken my first few tentative steps as a migrant just off the ship from Europe.
My return to Canberra had been as totally unplanned and unexpected as all my previous moves, with plenty of bends and no straight lines and even a few dead ends, but this time when I was back where I'd been before, I at least spoke the Queen's English (albeit still with a slight Teutonic accent) and had enough professional qualifications and experience to immediately start writing computer software in the PICK language for a large mailorder business for the next twelve months.
Personal computers were slowly making their presence felt, and I began to specialise in PC-based computerised accounting systems, selling and installing off-the-shelf ATTACHÉ, SYBIZ, NewViews, and other packages, and also writing custom-built solutions in TAS, under my registered business name Canberra Computer Accounting Systems.
I was indeed Canberra's only Accounting Software Specialist until accounting firms realised that there was a buck to be made by setting up their own PC consultancies
It was strictly a one-man business, just me and a telephone answering service. Those invisible girls at the answering service did a wonderful job for me as their ever-changing voices made my clients think they were dealing with a large computer software house. Only a few knew that I was working out of the spare bedroom in my house (later TWO spare bedrooms, with the wall knocked out between them).
# 7 Fanning Place, Kambah A.C.T. 2902
Those were the days when an IBM computer with just 20MB of harddisk space retailed for around $8,000, when a monochrome monitor (you had a choice of green or amber display) cost some $700, and individual accounting software modules such as General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, or Inventory Control sold for close to a thousand dollars - EACH! Dot-matrix printers (remember dot-matrix printers?) sold for almost a thousand dollars and connecting several computers with the help of LANtastic or NOVELL took hours and hours, if not days, and meant several thousands of dollars in profit!
More years kept rolling by, and there was still very little competition as my combined expertise in accounting software, computer hardware, and networking plus a degree in accountancy wasn't matched by anybody. It took several more years before accounting firms realised there was a buck to be made by setting up their own PC consultancies.
I looked very different then, and so did the computers!
Of course, all good things must come to an end: hardware and software prices kept dropping. Who was going to stump up hundreds of dollars for installation and training after having bought a small-business accounting package such as 'Mind Your Own Business' for less than a hundred dollars?
The clear-cut beginning of the end came with WINDOWS! Computers were no longer a mystery with low-level formatting, interleaves, BIOS, interrupts, system and config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Accounting software became more "user-friendly" with pre-configured charts of accounts and financial reports. It was just a case of "switch on and go".
Suddenly everybody was a computer expert and Canberra Computer Accounting Systems was no more! I went round one more time when I rescued a university college from certain bankruptcy - click here - after which I decided to go into retirement. Life had finally come full circle!
What had once been at the forefront of my life is now stuck to the back of my workshop door at "Riverbend" in Nelligen: Canberra Computer Accounting Systems' car door signage with which I had driven my nile-blue Toyota Camry through Canberra's streets for more than ten years.
"All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown;
the moon rolls through the night-time till the daybreak comes around;
All my life's a circle I can't tell you why;
Seasons spinning round again, the years keep rolling by."
Well, the bottom gate, to be more precise! It's the coming of the sewerage system, to be followed some time later by the mains water. They call it progress! I call it a nuisance because the septic tank never failed us in over thirty years, and who wants to drink the town water laced with chemicals anyway?
As for that puny sewerage pipe which is just 40mm in diameter, we may want to go easy on the Indian curry! Short of bringing back the 100mm PVC pipe, the neighbourhood will have to take turns going to the loo.
Instead of all that marching and parading and myth-making that goes with ANZAC Day, we could do a whole lot better by watching and quietly reflecting on the message in this, the most anti-war movie of all anti-war movies, "All Quiet on the Western Front".
Read the book online at www.archive.org For a more authentic experience, read the book in its German original here or listen to the German audiobook:
Not that I have much faith in us ever being able to defend Australia against a determined aggressor, certainly not since our defence forces are marching in Gay Pride parades and little boys, still too young to drive a car or vote in an election, are told they can be little girls.
Let's hope we can depend on Geoffrey Blailey's "Tyranny of Distance" to leave Australia unconquerable - although, becoming 100% reliant on imported petroleum by 2030, all they'd have to do is blockade the sea lanes and we'd all be watching television by candle light (not that this would matter all that much any more as by that stage our all-important world-wide internet access would already have been cut anyway).
As for the ANZAC spirit, I never thought I'd see signs on empty shelves in supermarkets saying 'Aggressive and abusive behaviour will not be tolerated; our team is here to help, not to be hurt', as panic-buying shoppers stripped shelves bare and fought over rolls of toilet paper.
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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