On leaving Thursday Island in the Torres Strait in late 1977, Donald Gubbay in Noumea had suggested that he had work for me in his trading company in Honiara in what was then still the British Solomon Islands Protectorate.
I had lived and worked in Honiara in 1973 as commercial manager for the British Solomon Islands Electricity Authority and had liked the place and going back there would be like coming home!
After a few uncertain months spent in Canberra while waiting for my travel papers, I finally moved into my bungalow in November 1977 ...
... which overlooked the Ironbottom Sound ...
... and had its own swimming pool ...
... and a native couple as domestic servants.
Brian Herde who had a knack for inviting himself whenever he could stay somewhere for free, came across from Port Moresby for Christmas.
There are plenty of people, and certainly many accountants, who like nothing better than to find an agreeable place in which to while away their years with the least amount of effort, but I was not your average accountant and still in my early-thirties which were my "Sturm und Drang Jahre" and I was intent on changing the world and my place in it.
I was totally unprepared for the sheer mundaneness and repetitiveness of the job, so when the Pacific Forum Line in Western Samoa ask me to assist in the formation of this new shipping line, I jumped on a plane in mid-January 1978. Just before I left, I got myself some carvings from the Betikama SDA Mission, a beautiful nguzu nguzu head and a sign in ebony with my name inlaid in mother-of-pearl so I won't forget it.
Forty-seven years later, with my "Sturm und Drang Jahre" long behind me, I sometimes wonder why I didn't linger a little longer. Those were, to quote Shakespeare, "my salad days, when I was green in judgment."
The rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
P.S. Forty-seven years later I discovered in an op-shop in Batemans Bay the beautifully bound coffee table book "The Lost Ships of Guadalcanal" which for the first time allows me to read up on all those places I used to walk on and past: Red Beach, Iron Bottom Sound, Henderson Field, Lunga Point, etc.
