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.
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).
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?
