Stasiland

 

Everyone seems to have watched the movie "The Lives of Others" - even my dermatologist talked about it as he glanced up and down my legs looking for lurking melanomas - but few would have read Anna Funder's harrowing book "Stasiland".

Reading it was a very personal experience to me as I imagined growing up in East Germany, the most intrusive surveillance state of all times, had it not been for my parents' act of courage when they escaped in 1949. I remember nothing of it as I was only four years old at the time.

 

Read a preview here
Listen to the full audiobook here

 

I found this 'there but for the grace of God go I' book while browsing at Vinnies yesterday. According to the price sticker on the back, someone had bought it for $24.99 at the Gateway Bookshop in Wagga Wagga.

 

The wonderful booksellers David and Fran Payne at the Gateway Bookshop

 

Thank you, David and Fran Payne, for stocking the book, and thank you to the anonymous buyer who donated it to Vinnies in Batemans Bay.

Thanks to the three of you I now know how thankful I ought to have been to my long-dead parents for their incredible act of courage to escape that brutal system of oppression three-quarters of a century ago.

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Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

 

 

He was a little boy at the time the "Great War", who then lived through the miseries of the Treaty of Versailles as a teenager; whose promising career as a "Volkswirt" was cut short by the next war, from which he then came back as a physically disabled and emotionally dead man.

This man was my father who was born on the 9th of December 1907 and who died on this day in 1984. I attended the funeral of this man whom I only ever knew as an emotionally dead man who never showed any sign of affection towards me. Once a year I would run home from school, excited to show him my top marks, and was met with his blank stare.

I built myself a new life in Australia, after which I revisited home and was greeted with an indifference as if I'd just been down to the corner store to buy him the one bottle of beer he held on to for the whole day as he sat, always in his dressing gown, by the window and unseeingly watched the world pass him by. He was the stranger that was my father.

I lived and worked in Athens in Greece in 1983 and flew to Germany to sit with him for a week but he no longer recognised me. I flew back a few months later to attend the funeral but I couldn't weep. I was as emotionally dead as he had been, and yet, as his coffin slowly moved towards the curtain, I shuddered with defiant disbelief that this was the end of his long and painful life.

Even if we understand that dying is but a token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime - that we are "3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms, and consist of 63.7 percent oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars", it is still hard to understand that in our cremation, "water evaporates; carbon and nitrogen combine with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floats skyward and mingles with the air, and most of our calcium and phosphorous bakes into a reddish brown residue which scatters in soil and in wind." ["Mr g" by Alan Lightman]

As Alan Lightman continues to write: "Released from their temporary confinement, the atoms slowly spread out and diffuse through the atmosphere. In sixty days' time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of the atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of the atoms were absorbed by light-utilising organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of the atoms. A year later, babies contained some of the atoms... Several years after the death, millions of children contained some of the atoms. And their children would contain some of the atoms as well. Their minds contained part of the mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this person? It is not likely. Will they feel what that person felt, will their memories have flickering strokes of that person's memories? No, it is not possible. But it will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment as they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.

And the individual atoms, cycled through the body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality."

Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds cannot grasp any of this. Perhaps this poem helps:

 

VATI born 9.12.1907 - died 31.1.1984     Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers of rain, I am the fields of ripening grain. I am in the morning hush, I am in the graceful rush Of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room. I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there. I did not die.

 

 

Round Ireland With A Fridge

 

As we walked the bridge this morning, we met this concreter putting the finishing touches to the handrails. Of course, we stopped and talked to him! He turned out to be a young Irishman with a brogue thick enough to cut with a knife.

"We went to see Foster and Allen when they came to the Bay a few years back", we told him. "Who are Foster and Allen?" he wanted to know. WHAT? An Irishman who hasn't heard of Foster and Allen?

"Have you read the book about that Irishman who hitchhiked round Ireland with a fridge?" I kept testing him. "No, never! When was that?"

So I told him of the time in 2005 when, sitting on the Federal Hotel's verandah looking down on Thursday Island's beachfront - a setting Graham Greene would have revelled in and Somerset Maugham did - I was joined by Alan, an Irishman on a working holiday in Australia.

He was reading Bill Bryson's A SHORT HISTORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING which I had read too; so we started talking about this book and some of the other big questions in life, such as 'Why is there a light in the fridge but not in the freezer?' and 'How come the Americans choose from just two people for President but fifty for Miss America?'

 

Alan, the Irishman, on the verandah of the Federal Hotel on Thursday Island. The chap on the left was Col the Pom, a man of few words, a lot of them 'bloody'. He drank like a fish. Which would have been okay if he'd drunk what the fish drinks. Despite having been almost everywhere, including a short stint in Saudi Arabia, he had learned nothing and associated culture with beer brewing and thought Plato was a metal polish.

 

He looked a bit like an extra out of the movie HAIR but was really quite a decent chap, well-read and of a serious turn of mind. He surprised me by having read George Orwell's "1984." As he was working on the island and would be staying for a while longer, I was happy to furnish him from my book-bag with another George Orwell volume, Camus' "The Plague", and a copy of Joseph Conrad's stories, and he gave me a copy of "Round Ireland with a Fridge" which has since been made into a movie.

 

 

www.archive.org have the audiobook in English, but the book is only available in its German edition as "Mit dem Kühlschrank durch Irland".

It's your choice: spend the next five years to learn German to be able to read it, or spend the next five minutes on ebay to order an English copy. Unfortunately, I have already promised my own English copy to the Irish concreter whose name, incidentally, is neither Liam nor Sean but Gary.

How prosaic!

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From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage

 

If America had compulsory voting, Obama would never have become President, nor Hillary for that matter, and Trump would've been consiged to the dumpster of history a long time ago. Australia has compulsory voting and we're better off for it.

Compulsory voting forces both parties into the middle ground of politics. There's none of that American obsession with 'motivating the base' - focused on the need to get your own true believers down to the polling stations. With compulsory voting, the target shifts to the centre, not the edges. The aim is to find policies that most of us can live with.

Australia is one of just a handful of countries in the world that enforce this rule at election time, and the only English-speaking country that makes its citizens vote. Not only that, we embrace it. We celebrate compulsory voting with barbeques and cake stalls at polling stations, and election parties that spill over into Sunday morning.

But how did this come to be: when and why was voting in Australia made compulsory? How has this affected our politics? And how else is the way we vote different from other democracies?

The Australian way of voting, which seems entirely ordinary to us, is a singular miracle of innovation of which we can all be fiercely proud. To read more about it, grab a copy of Judith Bratt's book "From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage".

 

Read a preview here

 

Of course, you're not really forced to vote. The law effectively requires your name to be ticked off the roll. You could choose to leave the voting paper blank or even - as I sometimes do in those useless local elections - add a spicy graffito to show your opinion of the politicians on offer.

And sometimes I just write, "Bring back the free beer!" which would make the whole sausage sizzle almost perfect.

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This week I'm reading Bukowski

 

This week I'm reading Bukowski, not so much by choice but by chance because I came across a whole stack of his books at the local Vinnies shop. He was America's most infamous poet, and "Time" called him the "laureate of American lowlife".

 

 

Much of his work is auto-biographical as are the three movies based on his writing: "Barfly", "Tales of Ordinary Madness", and "Factotum".

 

 

Now it's back to my books. As he wrote, "Without literature, life is hell."

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Only the Wayback Machine shows the way back

Click here

 

I discovered Banjar Hills Retreat in the foothills of northern Bali in 2006, and I've visited it ever since. Often I was the only guest staying in one of its four beautiful bungalows. Just me and a few good books and fine food and drinks in total peace and privacy!

 

Click here for a look at Banjar Hills Retreat on GOOGLE Map

 

The retreat had changed hands a couple of times and was bought by a bunch of Australians from Canberra at about the time I discovered it. They were absentee owners who found it difficult to make the place pay its way, so when in early 2014 a German couple offered to lease it from them for two years, with an option to buy, they quickly accepted.

 

 

The German couple, all starry-eyed, explained on their since-gone-off-the-air website how they had always wanted to turn their back on Germany and how they had immediately fallen in love with Bali and Banjar Hills Retreat and how they wanted to stay forever (I saved the German text here).

 

 

Nothing is forever because less than two years later, in early 2016, they handed back the keys and returned to Germany. Their farewell message, written in German, read:

"DANKE BALI......

So, nun heisst es Abschied nehmen von Banjar Hills in Bali. Zwei Jahre hier zu sein, war eine tolle Erfahrung. Schönes Wetter, tolle Landschaft, ständig lächelnde, freundliche Menschen, leckeren Fisch u.a., sprich das, was uns in Deutschland oft fehlt. Dennoch möchte ich hier auch nicht verschweigen, dass das 'Urlaubsfeeling', dass man zu Beginn hat, sich überraschend schnell verflüchtigt und es auch hier einen 'Alltag' gibt. Und plötzlich gibt es auch hier Stromrechnungen, Verkehrspolizisten und Behördengänge.... Ich möchte diese Erfahrung nicht missen, doch man merkt schon in sehr vielen Dingen, dass man mit Deutschland und auch seiner (Heimat)Kultur enger verbunden ist, als man es sich eingestehen möchte. Und ich möchte betonen, dass entgegen allen Gemeckers in Deutschland unser Land SO viele Vorzüge gegenüber so vielen anderen Ländern besitzt z.B. Gesundheitssystem, Bildung, soziale und rechtliche Sicherheit, Sicherheit im Allgemeinen (ja, immer noch), Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten, Chancengleichheit, um nur einige zu nennen. Wenn man dann, wie hier, in andere Kulturen eintauchen kann und an der Basis die Sorgen und Nöte der Menschen mitbekommt, muss ich feststellen, dass sich diese im Prinzip kaum von denen der unseren unterscheiden. Auch hier wollen die Menschen nur ein glückliches Leben mit ihren Familien führen, ihre Kinder gesund und mit Bildungschancen aufwachsen sehen, ihren Platz und ein Zuhause finden ..... Was wir aber lernen können, ist, dass auch ein 'einfaches' Leben glücklich machen kann, sprich, dass es nicht viel bedarf, um Glück zu empfinden. Die Hilfsbereitschaft untereinander und gegenüber Fremden(!) hier, der Zusammenhalt von 'Familie', Leichtigkeit zu leben und - vor allem - jedem Menschen erst einmal mit einem FREUNDLICHEN LÄCHELN zu begegnen ...... all das sind Dinge, die ich hier lernen konnte und hoffe, sie nicht zu vergessen.

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 !!"

For those few of you who were not invaded and therefore don't speak German, let me translate the gist of it into what used to the Queen's English but is now again the King's English but without his boring voice:

"The time has come to say goodbye to Banjar Hills Retreat. It's been two years and a beautiful experience. Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, beautiful fresh seafood, friendly, smiling people - in short, everything Germany is not. And yet, we were surprised how fast our initial holiday mood was replaced by the monotony of everyday life as we had to deal with utility bills, traffic police, and government bureaucracy ..."

 

Click here for more photos

 

And they continued, "... We wouldn't have missed this experience for the world but have to admit that there are many things that still tie us to Germany: its culture, excellent health care, stable social and legal system, boundless opportunities - to mention just a few. What we have learned from our Bali experience is that people the world over want the same: happiness for themselves and their children, a fair chance to get ahead, and a safe place they can call home. We also learnt that even a simple life can bring happiness, and that a sense of family and helping each other and meeting even strangers with a friendly smile are more important than material possessions. We've learned all this in Bali and we hope we won't forget it. Nothing is forever, not even Bali, but no one can take away our wonderful memories. Thank you, Bali, and goodbye!"

 

 

The Australian owners have since decided to close it down which comes as a bit of a personal loss to me. After having serendipitously found it all those years ago, I had come to regard it as my own piece of Bali.

 

Just reading books, looking at the sky, listening to the song of birds ...

... taking a swim at any hour of the day or night in the pool
(or in the ocean which is a short, death-defying bejak-ride away)...

... or enjoying an hour-long massage by my favourite masseuse, Ketut Anggreni (for the equivalent of a minibar Coca-Cola). Leisure with a capital L - a slob's holiday!

 

Nothing is forever! What's left of this beautiful dream is three captures - just three! - of an old website full of hope on the Wayback Machine!

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There are things that, once heard, can never be unheard

 

The no-fault divorce, introduced by the Whitlam government in 1975, is blamed by some people for the sudden increase in the divorce rate. Those who do seem to overlook the fact that at about the same time Australian houses began to display a new hitherto unknown feature: the ensuite.

This new feature, in which all our ablutions are performed behind a thin door as soundproof as a shower curtain, while our beloved lies in bed not two metres away, desperately squeezing a pillow over his/her/its ears, has, in addition to the call of nature, quite a lot to answer for.

It is true that Gough Whitlam, aloof and arrogant, ruled chaotically but only for two years and 11 months, not quite long enough to account for this sudden increase in the undoing of the "until death do us part".

That must be laid at the front of the waferthin door between bedroom and ensuite. There are things that, once heard, can never be unheard.

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Thumbs up to Senator Alex Antic!

 

As Australia Day approaches, I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate the symbol of our shared land and history that is the Australian Flag.

Our flag, based on the British Blue Ensign and showcasing the Union Jack, Commonwealth Star, and Southern Cross, has for many years been a symbol intended to represent every Australian, whether they be of European, Indigenous, or any other heritage.

As Tony Abbot has said, Australia is a young nation with an “immigrant character.” Our flag is intended to encapsulate that character and represent us all.

However, since 1995, the Aboriginal Flag and Torres Strait Islander Flag have been flown as official flags of Australia. This was largely done as a gesture of “reconciliation” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and has arguably fostered a sense of division rather than unity.

This seems inevitable, as having multiple official flags implies multiple nations, rather than the fact that we are all Australians. Indeed, the term “First Nations” suggests that Indigenous Australians belong to a separate nation, which I suspect contributed to the defeat of the Voice to Parliament proposal at the recent referendum.

Now, many local councils fly a vast range of flags, even related to one’s sexual preferences, further breaking us down into increasingly obscure identity groups.

Every Australia Day, the inevitable debate about celebrating Australia Day and the Australian Flag reoccurs, largely because the media amplifies the voice of a relatively small group of activists. So, I’ve taken the opportunity to create a video discussing our flag as a symbol of unity, and how absurd the division has become.

As we head into Australia Day, my hope is that we can all celebrate the blessings of living in Australia, whatever our heritage may be.

Your sincerely,
Alex Antic
Liberal Senator for South Australia"

 

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Who Cooked this one up?

 

The metal Captain Cook sculpture on Jacka Boulevard in Catani Gardens, in St Kilda, was sawn off at the ankles at 3.30am on Thursday, with the vandals spray-painting "the colony will fall" on the statue’s granite plinth.

Did VERA and her forensic pathologist Malcolm Donahue establish the precise time of the ankle-cutting or did someone watch the hooligans in action? If the latter, why weren't they stopped?

This is taking Australia Day celebrations to a new low - literally! I hope they find the perpetrators and cut off their unemployment benefits because they're claiming them under false pretences: there are plenty of scrap metal recycling places where their talents could be used.

Although I haven't it checked yet with the Thought Police at the ABC, I wish you all a possibly politically totally incorrect "Happy Australia Day".

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The fickle finger of fate!

 

Ian and I worked as accountants for PDF Holdings on Bougainville Island in 1973 and kept in touch for many years. After leaving Bougainville, Ian and his family settled at Nambucca Heads on the North Coast of New South Wales. When I asked him why, he said it reminded him of Bougainville. A bout of "Bougainvilleitis"?

On my way up north in 1979 to another assignment with Mount Isa Mines, I called in at his office, squeezed in between a delicatessen and a laundromat. We talked about his work and he suggested I should join him as partner. The proposition sounded less appealling after he told me that much of his work consisted of filling in unemployment forms for the cow cockies in the district and that if it hadn't been for the shoe shop his wife had opened in town, he may not have lasted as long as he had.

 

Travelling North 1979-style - moi and caravan outside Ian's office

 

Either things improved with his accounting practice or his wife's shoe shop was doing extremely well because Ian was still there after my return from Saudi Arabia in early 1985. Then, some years later, he wrote that he had finally packed it in and relocated to Brisbane where he had gone into public practice again at Suite 1, Level 8, 141 Queen Street.

That must've been sometime before December 1990 because when I came through Nambucca Heads again on my first trip to Queensland since 1985, his office had already become an AMP Planner's office (although the laundromat was still there proving that even a town as small as Nambucca Heads has plenty of dirty linen to wash in public).

 

My then brandnew Nile-blue TOYOTA Camry parked around the corner in December 1990

 

Somehow we must've lost contact again until some years ago the internet yielded up an "Ian Paterson, A.A.S.A., A.C.I.S., A.A.I.M." who was selling commercial real estate. A quick phone call pretending my interest in a warehouse on the Sunshine Coast where Ian was then living and operating from, had us both in stitches and we kept reminiscing about the 'good ol' days' when he had still been married and I still hadn't, and we followed it up with a meeting in 2015 - click here.

Since then, Ian has lived in Cairns, Port Douglas, Gladstone, Brisbane, Rockhampton, and several other places up and down the Queensland coast, signing leases on semi-furnished bedsitters for six months before moving on again, while I've stayed at "Riverbend" like a shag on a rock.

The fickle finger of fate! Has he sometimes wondered, as I sometimes have, what life would have been like if we could have swapped places?

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German Harry

Aerial View from the North of Deliverance Island, called Warul Kawa (Island of Turtles) in the Torres Strait language. " ... we reached the welcome shelter of Deliverance Island. Perhaps half a mile or so in circumference, ringed with a beach of white coral sand, crowned with coconut palms dancing in the breeze, and surrounded by a wide fringing reef, it resembled an island such as might be imagined in a boyhood adventure book ..."

 

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works."

So begins W. Somerset Maugham's short story "The Book Bag" as the author equates the need for books to the addict's need for drugs. The narrator especially cannot conceive of why a traveler might venture out without a large supply of reading material at the ready. Having learned his lesson once while imprisoned by illness in a hill-town in Java without enough to read, he now carries a giant laundry bag of books with him everywhere in his travels through colonial outposts.

It so happened that on a trip to Thursday Island I carried my own book bag with me which contained Volume 4 of W. Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories. I had gone there to recapture memories of my wasted youth which I had spent moving from place to place and never feeling at home or happy. Sitting on the verandah of the Federal Hotel next to which I had once worked - click here, I came across Maugham's story "German Harry" which immediately hit a nerve with me, and not only because it is based, as so many of his stories, on true events.

 

Map of Torres Strait - Deliverance Island about 80 km south of Papua New Guinea and 200 km north of Thursday Island

 

German Harry by W. Somerset Maugham I was in Thursday Island and I wanted very much to go to New Guinea. Now the only way in which I could do this was by getting a pearling lugger to take me across the Arafura Sea. The pearl fishery at that time was in a bad way and a flock of neat little craft lay anchored in the harbour. I found a skipper with nothing much to do (the journey to Merauke and back could hardly take him less than a month) and with him I made the necessary arrangements. He engaged four Torres Straits islanders as crew (the boat was but nineteen tons) and we ransacked the local store for canned goods. A day or two before I sailed a man who owned a number of pearlers came to me and asked whether on my way I would stop at the island of Trebucket and leave a sack of flour, another of rice, and some magazines for the hermit who lived there. I pricked up my ears. It appeared that the hermit had lived by himself on this remote and tiny island for thirty years, and when opportunity occurred provisions were sent to him by kindly souls. He said that he was a Dane, but in the Torres Straits he was known as German Harry. His history went back a long way. Thirty years before, he had been an able seaman on a sailing vessel that was wrecked in those treacherous waters. Two boats managed to get away and eventually hit upon the desert island of Trebucket. This is well out of the line of traffic and it was three years before any ship sighted the castaways. Sixteen men had landed on the island, but when at last a schooner, driven from her course by stress of weather, put in for shelter, no more than five were left. When the storm abated the skipper took four of these on board and eventually landed them at Sydney. German Harry refused to go with them. He said that during those three years he had seen such terrible things that he had a horror of his fellow-men and wished never to live with them again. He would say no more. He was absolutely fixed in his determination to stay, entirely by himself, in that lonely place. Though now and then opportunity had been given him to leave he had never taken it. A strange man and a strange story. I learned more about him as we sailed across the desolate sea. The Torres Straits are peppered with islands and at night we anchored on the lee of one or other of them. Of late new pearling grounds have been discovered near Trebucket and in the autumn pearlers, visiting it now and then, have given German Harry various necessities so that he has been able to make himself sufficiently comfortable. They bring him papers, bags of flour and rice, and canned meats. He has a whale boat and used to go fishing in it, but now he is no longer strong enough to manage its unwieldy bulk. There is abundant pearl shell on the reef that surrounds his island and this he used to collect and sell to the pearlers for tobacco, and sometimes he found a good pearl for which he got a considerable sum. It is believed that he has, hidden away somewhere, a collection of magnificent pearls. During the war no pearlers came out and for years he never saw a living soul. For all he knew, a terrible epidemic had killed off the entire human race and he was the only man alive. He was asked later what he thought. "I thought something had happened," he said. He ran out of matches and was afraid that his fire would go out, so he only slept in snatches, putting wood on his fire from time to time all day and all night. He came to the end of his provisions and lived on chickens, fish and coconuts. Sometimes he got a turtle. During the last four months of the year there may be two or three pearlers about and not infrequently after the day`s work they will row in and spend an evening with him. They try to make him drunk and then they ask him what happened during those three years after the two boat-loads came to the island. How was it that sixteen landed and at the end of that time only five were left? He never says a word. Drunk or sober he is equally silent on that subject and if they insist grows angry and leaves them. I forget if it was four or five days before we sighted the hermit`s little kingdom. We had been driven by bad weather to take shelter and had spent a couple of days at an island on the way. Trebucket is a low island, perhaps a mile round, covered with coconuts, just raised above the level of the sea and surrounded by a reef so that it can be approached only on one side. There is no opening in the reef and the lugger had to anchor a mile from the shore. We got into a dinghy with the provisions. It was a stiff pull and even within the reef the sea was choppy. I saw the little hut, sheltered by trees, in which German Harry lived, and as we approached he sauntered down slowly to the water`s edge. We shouted a greeting, but he did not answer. He was a man of over seventy, very bald, hatchet-faced, with a grey beard, and he walked with a roll so that you could never have taken him for anything but a sea-faring man. His sunburn made his blue eyes look very pale and they were surrounded by wrinkles as though for long years he had spent interminable hours scanning the vacant sea. He wore dungarees and a singlet, patched, but neat and clean. The house to which he presently led us consisted of a single room with a roof of corrugated iron. There was a bed in it, some rough stools which he himself had made, a table, and his various household utensils. Under a tree in front of it was a table and a bench. Behind was an enclosed run for his chickens. I cannot say that he was pleased to see us. He accepted our gifts as a right, without thanks, and grumbled a little because something or other he needed had not been brought. He was silent and morose. He was not interested in the news we had to give him, for the outside world was no concern of his: the only thing he cared about was his island. He looked upon it with a jealous, proprietary right; he called it "my health resort" and he feared that the coconuts that covered it would tempt some enterprising trader. He looked at me with suspicion. He was sombrely curious to know what I was doing in these seas. He used words with difficulty, talking to himself rather than to us, and it was a little uncanny to hear him mumble away as though we were not there. But he was moved when my skipper told him that an old man of his own age whom he had known for a long time was dead. "Old Charlie dead - that`s too bad. Old Charlie dead." He repeated it over and over again. I asked him if he read. "Not much," he answered indifferently. He seemed to be occupied with nothing but his food, his dogs and his chickens. If what they tell us in books were true his long communion with nature and the sea should have taught him many subtle secrets. It hadn`t. He was a savage. He was nothing but a narrow, ignorant and cantankerous seafaring man. As I looked at the wrinkled, mean old face I wondered what was the story of those three dreadful years that had made him welcome this long imprisonment. I sought to see behind those pale blue eyes of his what secrets they were that he would carry to his grave. And then I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water`s edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognisable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man. Perhaps then he would hunt high and low for the great mass of pearls that has haunted the fancy of so many adventurers. But I do not believe he would find it: German Harry would have seen to it that none should discover the treasure, and the pearls would rot in their hiding place. Then the pearl fisher would go back into his dinghy and the island once more be deserted of man.

 

As I wrote, Maugham almost always based his stories on real people, and there was indeed a "German Harry", as evidenced by this article which appeared in the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD on the 24 November 1951:

 

Click here for the pdf document, then press the CTRL button and, without taking your finger off, press the + button, which will enlarge the text. Keep doing it until you have a comfortable reading size. (Use the - button to reduce the size)

 

As the article states, "German Harry", born in Denmark in 1849, died on Deliverance Island in January 1928, aged 79. And it ends with the words, "German Harry was the last of the old New Guinea beachcombers, and his likes will not be seen again", but I beg to differ. I have met with several similar characters in similar places in more recent times.

I leave their stories for another day.

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P.S. Over ten years ago, I received this reply from Sweden - click here.

P.P.S. "German Harry" gets a mention on pages 281 through to 285 in Barry Smith's "The Island in Imagination and Experience" - click here.

 

Behind every man there's a smart woman - or three!

 

Renowned American broadcast journalist and television personality Barbara Jill Walters did a story on gender roles in Afghanistan several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

When she returned to Afghanistan several years later, she observed that women were still walking behind their husbands. Despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women seemed happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms Walters approached one of the women and asked, "Why do you still follow the old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?"

The woman looked her straight in the eyes, and replied, "Landmines."

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