The sound of silence

 

The best part of reading is that it emits absolutely no sound, except for the occasional subtle rustle of paper. Oh, for the joy of silence. As Publius Syrus murmured in the first century BC, "I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence."

One of the nicest pieces of music I ever heard was composed by John Cage. It's called "4 minutes 33 seconds", and represents that period of silence. At the performance a pianist crosses the stage to the piano, lifts the lid and sits down. He then bows his head for 4 minutes 33 seconds, stands up, drops a curtsy at the audience and walks off.

At one time, John Cage tried to sell his non-cacophonous composition to Muzak Co. which would have been so much better than all that bilious noise they're pumping into every restaurant, hotel, shop, supermarket, lift, railroad station and toilet (probably the only place that's fit for it).

So instead of treating your ear drums like rubbish bins, why not whisper a muffled "Encore!", click on the video and listen for another 4 minutes and 33 seconds to another performance of John Cage's composition?

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Travels in Greece on a cold and wintry day

Read a preview here

 

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are, and there's no better place to go than Greece with Charmian Clift's "Travels in Greece", and there's no better place to stay than beside Riverbend's roaring fireplace.

 

"Peel Me a Lotus"
Το ζευγάρι των συγγραφέων μετακομίζει από την Κάλυμνο στην Ύδρα, της δεκαετίας του 60, και εντάσσεται στην μποέμικη καλλιτεχνική κοινότητα που ζει τότε στο νησί.

 

In the 1950s Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston - he of "My Brother Jack" fame - took their family to live in the Greek islands. "Travels in Greece" is a beautifully repackaged hardcover edition of Charmian's "Mermaid Singing", which chronicles their life on Kalymnos, a bare, poor little island far from the tourist trail, and "Peel Me a Lotus", an evocative and warm-hearted tale of their daily life on the island of Hydra. It's about escapism and about people who have dreamed of islands, and about what happens when their dreams come true.

 

"Mermaid Singing"
Ένα ταξιδιωτικό memoir από μια Αυστραλή συγγραφέα που αγάπησε την Ελλάδα και έγινε μέρος της. Κάθε σελίδα σκορπάει χρώματα και αρώματα και τον ενθουσιασμό της συγγραφέα που παρασέρνει τον αναγνώστη.

 

With plenty of firewood and an almost-full bottle of 'Glühwein' beside me, I have plenty of time to travel through the next two hundred pages.

καλό ταξίδι!

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P.S. And while I was not successful in finding an online copy of "Travels in Greece" for you to read, I discovered a preview of "The End of the Morning", a never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift which even I had never heard of. And there is a copy of it for sale on ebay for $37.

 

From the mountain to the sea

 

As you know, I haven't had much luck with chimney sweeps lately, so in anticipation of a long and cold winter without a properly burning fireplace I placed an order on ebay for an electric throw rug. This rug was pulled from under me this morning when Rob from "Mountain To The Sea Home Services" phoned me to say he would be here within half an hour.

 

 

Which is about as long as it took him to push a brush up the chimney to dislodge a bucket full of creosote that had formed inside it like a plug.

 

 

I'm typing this while sitting close to a brightly burning fire which makes me feel soooo much better even though I'm a whole two-hundred-fifty dollars poorer. I don't begrudge Rob the money, he's earned every cent of it, coming all the way out to Nelligen and getting his hands dirty, but I am seriously considering becoming a chimney sweep in my next life.

I mean, what's the point of studying for many years, and continually keeping up your professional accreditations, and continually learning new things, if you can simply push a long-handled brush up and down a chimney and collect two-and-fifty dollars for half an hour's work?

Still, if you need your chimney cleaned - which is best done before the house burns down - I can recommend Rob: he's quick and efficient. As for the price, it's still cheaper than setting your whole house on fire.

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P.S. I've just checked the internet and found that I could've bought a flue cleaning brush kit for a fraction of what I paid for this expensive clean-out - see here. Something to think about before next winter!

 

What a treat on a cold and wintry day

1-5 6-9 10-13

 

Civilisation - A Personal View by Kenneth Clark is a 1969 British television documentary series written and presented by the art historian Kenneth Clark.

 

 

Clark's book of the same title, based on the series, was published in 1969. It has never been out of print - click here. What a treat on a cold and wintry day.

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Rene Girard, where have you been all my life?

Read the transcript here

 

People don't fight over their differences. They fight because they are the same, and they want the same things. Not because they need the same things (food, sex, scarce material goods), but because they want what will earn others' envy.

Humans don't know in advance what to choose, so they look to others for cues. People can desire anything, as long as other people seem to desire it, too: that is the meaning of Girard's concept of "mimetic desire." Since people tend toward the same objects of desire, jealousy and rivalry are inevitable sources of social tension and eventually wars.

Curious to find out how well his "mimetic theory" of imitative behavior might explain the human past, Girard studied anthropology and myths from around the world. He was struck by another series of similarities: myth after myth told a story of collective violence. Only one man can be king, the most enviable individual, but everyone can share in the persecution of a victim. Societies unify themselves by focusing their imitative desires on the destruction of a scapegoat which is the origin of ritual sacrifice and the foundation of archaic religions and, again, wars.

So much to listen to, so much to read, so much to think about! Rene Girard, where have you been all my life?

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More "Rauhreif"

 

 

Winter is not my favourite season, even though winter at "Riverbend" is nothing like what's shown in this clip, and in any case, by ten o'clock enough "global warming" has kicked in which allows me to take off my puffer jacket.

What makes it more uncomfortable is that our fireplace is not drawing properly and the house fills up with smoke as soon as we light it. We rang the man who installed it several years ago, but his phone keeps ringing out, so we went to his house which looked a bit deserted too.

Peeping through a window, I noticed bare cupboards and a lonely cat stretched out on an unmade bed. Borrowing pen and paper from a neighbour who also gave me a strange look, I penned a short notice which I left under the door. His emailed reply was waiting for us when we got home, "I received your note today but unfortunately I am dealing with a personal problem. My apologies again but you will have to look elsewhere." His problem is obviously far greater than ours.

In German folklore, chimney sweeps - or "Schornsteinfeger", if you must know - are supposed to bring you good luck, but I was out of luck with two others I phoned. Surely, they can't all have a personal problem!

 

 

We had more luck when we visited the Country Women's Association in Moruya yesterday where we bumped into Roberto and Lois whom we had befriended in the warm-water pool a long time ago. I'm not much of a "sconeversation" man but we joined them for a long talk about the state of world and the state of our health, neither of which is quite what we wished it to be. Of course, I'd only relented to go inside because they also have a book section inside their craft shop but the selection was predictably limited to potboilers and heftier versions of Mills & Boon.

 

 

It's close to ten o'clock now; I've had my porridge and my cup of tea, and it's time to take off my puffer jacket and feed the ducks before another slow-motion Riverbend day of reading and listening to the radio and having lunch and a happy-hour nap on the verandah awaits me.

 

 

Oh, and "ayrozsells" sent me a message to say "Hi Manfred, your order is on its way!" Happy days and happy memories of Burma are here again!

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It's on my shopping list

 

Long before George Orwell wrote "Animal Farm" and "1984" — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen-year-old policeman in Burma serving the British Raj. Biographies skirt over this five year period, in part due to the absence of letters and diaries, but it was the making of the writer he became.

As George Orwell wrote, 'There is a short period in everyone's life when his character is fixed forever ...' For me, the short twelve months I worked for TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles in what was then called Rangoon in what was then called Burma was one of my most formative experiences which I have never forgotten. I was asked to stay on longer, and I should have stayed on longer, and I have always regretted not to have stayed on longer. Life is full of such regrets.

Of course, since those formative days I have read Orwell's "Burmese Days" and Emma Larkin's fascinating political travelogue "Finding George Orwell in Burma", so when I heard that another favourite author of mine, Paul Theroux, had written yet another fascinating, atmospheric novel inspired by George Orwell's years in Burma, I searched for it and discovered "Burma Sahib", released just months ago, in February 2024.

 

 

It's too soon to expect a pre-loved copy to appear on the shelves of my favourite op-shop, so I'm lashing out the thirty dollars for a brandnew copy. In the meantime, while I'm waiting for the book to arrive, I keep listening to a conversation with Paul Theroux about George Orwell and Burma and about reading and the life of a writer. I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

One down on my to-do list!

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My once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage is still going ahead

 

Never met Lutz Preusche but I want to do what he did: stand in front of the super-sized photo of the entrance to the Bonegilla Reception Centre and have my picture taken

 

Muslims have their pilgrimage to Mecca; Australia's "assisted migrants" have their pilgrimage to Bonegilla which they should go on at least once in their lifetime. I passed through those gates in early August 1965. As I wrote elsewhere:

"We disembarked in some sort of organised chaos at Port Melbourne and soon afterwards boarded a train for the inland town of Albury from where we were taken to the Migrant Centre at Bonegilla. Remember the movie "The Great Escape"? Well, Bonegilla was a camp along the lines of what you saw in that movie - except that Bonegilla was a darn sight worse. We were put into corrugated-iron huts in what had been an old Army Camp - and I believe the old Spartans enjoyed more comforts than did the inmates of the "Bonegilla Migrant Centre". Although we were in the depth of the Australian winter (which can be pretty cold in the Australian inland), there was no heating, and only a threadbare ex-Army blanket to ward off the cold at night. For somebody who had just avoided conscription into the German "Bundeswehr", it seemed a poor exchange.

Deep blue skies and brilliant sunshine during the day made up for the freezing nights. It was two days after I had arrived in camp and while I was "thawing" out in the midday sun when another German who had come off the ship with me, told me about a "German Lady", a Mrs Haermeyer, at the camp's reception centre who was offering to take three or four recently arrived German migrants back to Melbourne to board at her house. I had been "processed" by the camp's administration on the first day and knew that in all likelihood I was destined to be sent to Sydney to work as labourer for the Sydney Water Board. So what did I have to lose? In record time I had myself signed out by the "Camp Commandant", my few things packed, and was sitting, with three other former ship-mates, in a VW Beetle enroute back to Melbourne.

 

My Bonegilla Reception Centre registration card
Date of Arrival 8 Aug 1965; MOI (?) 10/8/65
(I think 'MOI' stands for 'Memorandum of Indemnity' which they made me sign
as I left after only two days, well before my 'indoctrination' had been completed)

 

The "German Lady" had turned out to be a very enterprising roly-poly German housewife who with her German husband, a bricklayer, operated something of a boarding-house from their quaint little place at 456 Brunswick Road in West Brunswick in Melbourne. The place seemed already full to overflowing with young Germans from a previous intake, with bodies occupying the lounge-room sofa, a make-shift annex, and an egg-shaped plywood caravan in the backyard. My ship-mates joined that happy crowd but I was "farmed out" to a nice English lady across the road who had a spare room. The very next day the "German Lady" took me to the local Labour Exchange and in seemingly no time had secured me a job as 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company which had foodstores all over Melbourne. There I was, refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their Austin cars. I still joined the others for breakfast and dinner in the "German house" and also had my laundry looked after by the "German Lady" but I was already making my own way in Australia. Looking back, my life seems to have been full of such serendipitous encounters because more good luck was to follow!

 

Full of hope and full of myself in 1965

 

During the first days in Melbourne I had written to Hans in Canberra
[... Sometime during the voyage and under circumstances which I have long forgotten, I had made friends with a young German who had come out to Australia many years before with his parents as a child. He was now married and on his way back from a trip to Europe with his wife, baby, and mother-in-law with whom he had revisited his own hometown and that of his Yugoslav wife. This friendship was going to have a major impact on my future life in Australia, and to this day Hans and I have remained good friends ...] to let him know where I was, and before long he was on the 'phone to me suggesting that I might want to come up to Canberra. I didn't need much persuading! Hans got me a job as storeman/driver in the hardware & plumbing supplies company of Ingram & Sons in Canberra's industrial suburb of Fyshwick. I drove an INTERNATIONAL truck and delivered anything from ceramic floor tiles to bathtubs and roofing iron to building sites all over Canberra. Not that I had a driver's license for a truck or had ever driven a truck before in my life but this was Australia, a young and vigorous country still largely devoid of formalities, and an even younger city, Canberra, still in the making: Hans simply took me down to the local Police Station where everybody seemed very impressed with my elaborate German "Führerschein" and where I was promptly issued with a much simpler but oh so much more useful Australian driving license. I kept at this job for a few months but after I had almost burnt out the truck's diff at Deakin High School while bogged down in the mud with a full load on the back, and a slight but still embarrassing collision with the rear-end of another vehicle just outside the British High Commission, I thought it best to cash in my chips while I was still ahead.

I had earlier on answered an advertisement by the Australia & New Zealand Bank for school-leavers to join their ranks and, to my own surprise and joy, was accepted. I joined the ANZ Bank and, in keeping with my new "status" as a "Bank Johnny", moved from the migrant hostel on Capital Hill (now the site of the new Parliament House) into Barton House, one of Canberra's many boarding houses in those early years."

Well, as the saying goes, " ... and the rest is history." Today, almost sixty years later, the big WHAT IF questions in life have been replaced by "What's for dinner and what's on the telly tonight?" Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip all the same.

However, the trip won't be complete until I've come full-circle and made my pilgrimage to Bonegilla to stand in front of that super-sized photo of the entrance to the Bonegilla Reception Centre to have my photo taken.

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P.S. Read the full story here.

 

I read so I live more than one life in more than one place

Published in America under the title "The Sun Never Sets"

 

I shook off the shackles that tie me to "Riverbend" by sitting in the sunshine outside "Canberra" (which holds all my travel books as well as all my books on linguistics) and mentally travelling to Simon Winchester's "Outposts" which, as the cover states, is a fascinating book about the surviving relics of the British Empire.

 

This is "Canberra", as distinct from "Sydney" and "Melbourne"

 

Today I mentally travelled as far as St Helena in the South Atlantic - see page 129 - (you must JOIN UP - which is FREE! - and then LOG IN and BORROW to be able to read it) - partly because of Napoleon Bonaparte who was exiled to this lonely British outpost in 1815, and partly to find out about an old ex-Bougainvillean who had emailed me from there:

"Hi Peter

As your blog entry says ex-Bougainville employees are diminishing and last Saturday my father Richard Rummery passed away. He worked at the Loloho power house and my sister Kay and I went to Bovo primary. We were there 1972 to 1979. I am so grateful to my parents that I had a chance to grow up in such a wonderful place.

I now live on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. There is something special about living on islands and I am sure that I can trace a direct link between growing up on Bougainville and now living out here. Though a completely different environment there are some similarities and I hope in time our son Tobias will come to appreciate how lucky he is growing up on St Helena. And one day I hope to take my wife Belinda and Tobias out to Bougainville.

I could not get back to Australia to see Dad before he died but I spent a lot of time last week going through your website because our time on Bougainville was so special.

A few years back Graeme Wellington came on a cruise ship that stopped by for a few hours. He was one of the few people we knew from Bougainville that we stayed in touch with as he lived fairly close to us in Western Australia. But if any old BCL employees visit they are most welcome and I would be happy to show them around.

Take care
Ian Rummery
P.O. Box 112
St Helena Island
South Atlantic Ocean"

 

Of course, St Helena would barely merit a mention today if it hadn't been for Napoleon who was exiled on the 15th of October 1815 and died there on the 5th of May 1821 at 5.49pm at the age of fifty-one years.

 

Watch "Eagle in a Cage" here

 

"Outposts" is an interesting travel book about places that I will now never visit. And before I had read it, I had no idea that the "Great" in "Great Britain" was because across the channel in France is an area now called Brittany. In early days, this was "Little Britain" and the UK was "Great Britain". Now you know as well. Don't thank me. Simon said.

But wait, there's more!

 

 

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Every now and then we pop into Bomaderry

 

Padma caught the early-morning train to Sydney to donate eight home-made blanket to the LIFEHOUSE while I stayed behind in Bomaderry to pop into the nearby SALVOS op-shop in Nowra and the Animal Welfare League op-shop in Bomaberry.

 

 

I came away with a beautiful copy of "Explain That - 31 Intriguing Reasons Why"; a slim volume of "Wild Figments" by Michael Leunig; Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational - The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions"; a hardcover copy of Michael Lewis's "Boomerang - Travels in the New Third World - by now you will have noticed that I favour non-fiction books - and "A Very Short History of the World" by Geoffrey Blainey. I already have his "A Short History of the World" and thought this was different; it is but only by one word, the "Very" in the title.

With the train to and from Sydney taking well over six hours, I had plenty of time off the leash and prowled around Bomaderry to figure out if I still liked it as much on a cold wintry day as I had only a few months earlier. The charm had worn off a little, and despite some very slow gentrification the place still had quite a down-at-heel appearance.

To me, Bomaderry's main attraction is its train station as I have always loved train travel, perhaps because it's a metaphor for life, or at least life as I would like it to be: linear, uncluttered, and ever-progressing.

 

 

I certainly wouldn't like to be living next to Number 37 despite the prospect of being able to borrow a ride-on mower from them - if ever there was a need for one on the tiny six-hundred-square-metre blocks. The occupants of Number 37 clearly had obviated the need for a mower by covering their whole lawn with them. What a bunch of clever clogs!

(Domain.com.au puts a price estimate of $590,000 on the house with the broken-down mowers (are all those broken-down mowers included in the price?) - click here - and offers an intriguing bird's eye view of the back of the property: many, many, many more broken-down mowers!)

Then it was time for a quick Lunch Time Special at our friends' place who are the typical Aussie Battlers, except that they're Chinese and speak very little English: they work from nine o'clock until nine o'clock, seven days a week, and have been doing so for over ten years, just to pay off a mortgage and give their two children a better future. To top it all off, this was another really bad day with fewer than ten customers.

 

 

By this time Padma had sent me a photo of herself from Sydney Central Station to remind me that my free time was coming to an end ...

 

Padma's photo was lost in transmission Click here for a substitute

 

... and that I should get ready for the long drive home. One last photo of our friends and a promise to meet during the winter school holidays when their teenage son Kevin will be helping them in the restaurant.

 

 

The best part about going away is coming home (I never thought I would ever hear myself say that!)

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"Your coming here would give me a new lease of life"

 

Noel wrote, "It's as isolated as it looks, but plenty of crows and wallabies for company"

 

There's a fine line between solitude and loneliness, and my best mate Noel Butler must've crossed it when he'd asked me to join him at Mount Perry, a then almost-ghost town 360 km north-west of Brisbane, 100 km west of Bundaberg, and more than a million miles from almost anywhere else.

He'd sent me these photos while I was still working in Greece and after he'd just bought himself this small prefab on a five-acre plot. It was the sort of place where you went when you had no money and life hadn't been too good to you and you needed a bit of time to lick your wounds.

 

Noel wrote, "Home on the hill. That's Mt. Perry in the background"

 

I came back to Australia in 1985 and, after an unsuccessful attempt to find my feet again in Townsville, it was my turn to lick my wounds in Sydney which prompted Noel to invite me to join him at Mount Perry.

As he wrote, "Your coming here would give me a new lease of life", which was the nearest he'd ever come to admitting that his homecoming after a lifetime in New Guinea hadn't quite worked out the way he'd hoped, and he was feeling lonely and in need of like-minded company.

While never admitting it to myself or others, I'd experienced my own bouts of loneliness, although the excitement of forever chasing work around the world had always cut them short. And there's the other thing about loneliness: it's like a bad toothache which at the time makes you think it's the end of the world. Then, when it's all over, you can't even remember the pain, which is why Noel's cri de coeur never registered.

Not until now because not only didn't we have the same 'toothache' at the same time, but Noel had also already reached retirement age while I still had twenty-five years of work ahead of me. And what work would there have been for someone like me in a dying town where the local mechanic had already left, the post office was on the verge of closing down, and the only shop was struggling to keep its creaking doors open?

 

Noel's home on the edge of Childers in December 1990

 

As so often happens, the story had a happy ending for both of us: I left Sydney for Canberra where I was able to establish my own practice, and Noel could sell his isolated plot with "plenty of crows and wallabies for company" and resettle on the edge of Childers, within walking distance of shops and pubs and medical facilities, where I revisited him in 1990 to spend our last Christmas together before he passed away in 1995.

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The Lotus Eater

Robert Duncanson's 'Land of the Lotus Eaters' (1861)

 

After having spent so many years in remote and exotic parts of the world, it seems quite prosaic and counter-intuitive (been trying to use this word for some time ☺), and a whole lot of other adjectives to finish up living the last few of them in as pedestrian a place as "Riverbend".

On my drives home along Rangoon's U Wizara Road I used to encounter a tall, European-looking Buddhist monk. He was said to be an Italian who'd come to Burma as a tourist, converted to Buddhism, and never left. I never stopped to talk to him but now wished I had. In what was a sleepy Port Dickson in Malaysia I met a retired British civil servant in a deserted very 'pukka sahib' club. He had come out as a young man and never left.

And there were dozens more places and dozens more encounters but it never crossed my mind that perhaps one day I, too, would be old and would need to decide where to retire. In the end, that steamroller they call life simply made the decision for me and here I am at "Riverbend".

And yet I would probably have felt just as much at home in any of the other places I worked and lived in. Well, perhaps not any of them, not in Saudi Arabia or Iran or what's now Namibia, but in some small water-front town in the Maluku Islands or in some small place in Upper Burma.

And so I'm intrigued whenever I read about people, fictitious or not, who have boldly taken the course of their lives into their own hands as did a learned gentleman in Australia in the 1930s who clearly foresaw that a great war was about to break over the world. He had no desire to participate in this foolish war, but he had to conclude from his studies that Europe was going to explode and that the resulting fires would involve Africa and much of Asia. With extraordinary clairvoyance he deduced that Australia, left unprotected because the military men were preoccupied with Europe, would surely become a temptation to Asia and would probably be overrun.

Wishing to avoid such a debacle, he spent considerable time in determining what course a sensible man should follow if he wanted to escape the onrushing cataclysm. He considered flight into the dead heart of Australia, but concluded that although he could probably hide out in that forbidden region, life without adequate water would be intolerable. Next he contemplated removal to America, but dismissed this as impractical in view of the certainty that America would also be involved in the war.

Finally, by a process of the most careful logic, he decided that his only secure refuge from the world's insanity lay on some tropical island. He reasoned, "There I will find adequate water from the rains, food from the breadfruit and coconut trees, and fish from the lagoons. There will be safety from the airplanes which will be bombing important cities. And thanks to the missionaries, the natives will probably not eat me."

Fortified with such conclusions, he studied the Pacific and narrowed his choice of islands to the one that offered every advantage: remoteness, security, a good life, and a storm cellar until the universal hurricane had subsided.

Thereupon, in the late summer of 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, this wise Australian fled to his particular South Pacific refuge. He went to the almost unknown island of Guadalcanal --- which, as we now know, saw some of the bloodiest fighting in WWII.

And, if you're a Somerset Maugham reader, you would know of Wilson of whom he writes in his short story "The Lotus Eater":

"Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circum-stances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."

 

 

Go on then, have a good look; read the full story here.

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