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.
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.
"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!
