The District Commissioner of Bougainville during my time on the island, Bill Brown (am I not a shameless name-dropper?), had read through some of my blogs, after which he emailed me to ask the question, "What happened to the Manfred?"
I wondered where he had found out about that Teutonic part of my name. "I picked up your Manfred from the aircraft passenger lists in the National Archives", he replied. I must've been in and out of the www.naa.gov.au website a hundred times but I had never paid any attention to those "Passenger arrivals". What a find! And what stories lay behind all those once familiar but now almost-forgotten names!
I had already retraced my own first arrival in Australia in 1965 and my subsequent return in 1969 in "Arrivals and Departures - Part I". Here now are the comings and goings after I had gone up to New Guinea in 1970:
There was my first boss in the firm of chartered accountants in Rabaul, Barry Weir ...
... who left soon after my arrival, to be replaced by Mark Henderson.
There were three of us in the office, all the same age: myself (a would-be accountant), Grahame Ward (who would never leave New Guinea) ...
... and Peter Langley who took a cruise to Australia on the MV CHITRAL:
My company-supplied accommodation was an old Chinese trade store in Vulcan Street in Rabaul which I shared with Grahame Ward and Gerry Carr-Boyd who, according to the following Incoming Passenger Card from the first half of 1969, had already been in the Territory since at least 1968, and who had ticked - surprise, surprise! - the box "NOW MARRIED". I had always thought that all three of us were happy-go-lucky bachelors, with Gerry very much the man-about-town as he drove off in his brandnew wine-red ALFA ROMEO for another night of carousing.
Then the Bougainville Copper Project started recruiting. I flew across to Bougainville and was immediately hired by the manager, Sid Lhotka.
Sid Lhotka was later replaced not by one but by two other managers, Ernest Wayland and Lloyd McChesney, but I met Sid Lhotka again ten years later for dinner at the Papuan Hotel. He was back again in PNG as Administration Manager for the Ok Tedi Project in the Star Mountains, and I was billing him for the Steamships-Brambles Joint Venture.
I lived at Camp 6 and worked at Loloho with a whole bunch of guys, including Des Hudson (we both finished up in Saudi Arabia later) ...
... and always-drunk-and-never-working Neil "Jacko" Jackson who was fired not long afterwards for telling Sid in a drunken state to "f... off".
According to other incoming passenger cards, he had worked in New Guinea in various guises - clerk in Treasury Department and salesman - since the early sixties which would have explained his alcoholic state.
Thus in late 1970 he returned to his auntie's posh Toorak house which in due course he inherited and inhabited with scores of stray cats and an ever-growing mountain of empties. When last I phoned him in the early 2000s, he complained that his neighbours were trying to have him evicted. Either the neighbours succeeded in having him evicted or he died of cirrhosis of the liver because later calls always rang out.
Together with "Jacko" Jackson, Bob Green, Tom Black, Owen Dwyer (whose Passenger Arrival Cards I could not find), and Geoff Roberts, I spent many nights in the Camp 6 "boozer" gazing down a bottle of South Pacific Lager or out to sea. If you are still alive - even if, like me, only just - and happen to read this, email riverbendnelligen[AT]mail.com
Tony Bailey spent some time with us in the audit office ticking off trip sheets submitted by the haulage contractors Brambles-Kennelly. Our illustrious presence must have rubbed off on him because on his passenger arrival card he stated as his usual occupation "Accountant". (I've since been able to make contact with Tony - click here)
Not to be outdone, "Beau" Player, a likable little Pom with a talent for sucking up to people but nothing much else going for him, had suddenly become an accountant when arriving in Australia via Fiji in June 1972.
showing a chubby face flanked by two suited gentlemen looks very much like him
He didn't stay in Australia for long because on his next Passenger Arrival Card in September 1972, still calling himself an accountant, he stated to have just come back from Bangkok. Interestingly enough, he stated as his next address Hornibrook Constructions, one of our contractors on Bougainville, with whom he must have scored a job in Port Moresby.
That job didn't last very long because in December 1972 he was back in Australia, having just returned from Port Moresby and giving his usual occupation as "Cost Analysist" (???) Is a "cost analysist" better than an accountant, "Beau", or were you just enjoying a spelling challenge?
Bougainville produced lots of new accountants. Here's another one:
And then there was Leon Ortega who served time as accountant for Hornibrook Constructions at Loloho for whom he submitted to us his often hugely inflated progress payment claims. He later hugely inflated the tax deductions on his own group tax certificate by salami-slicing small amounts off each of Hornibrook's hundred-or-so other employees' tax deductions and adding them to his own. He seemed to have missed out on his huge tax refund because next thing we heard he was serving time among murderers, rapists, thieves and gang members (sometimes with one person qualifying as all four) at Bomana Jail in Port Moresby. The memories a simple Passenger Arrival Card can bring back!
(I also tried to find the Incoming Passenger card for Roy Goldsworthy who lived across from me in Camp 1 at Panguna. He has been in and out of Australia but there is no record of it, unless he travelled in a monk's cowl and under an assumed name. The only card in his name was that of a British Maintenance Engineer - close! - who travelled from Southampton to Melbourne. However, his birthdate was 10/12/1920 which doesn't quite fit the Roy Goldsworthy who visited me at "Riverbend" only a couple of years ago, slightly aged and totally bald but otherwise still fighting fit and full of good advice.)
Sometime later I requested a transfer "up top" to Panguna, mainly because at Loloho they had teamed me up with a useful Yank, Cliff Hawley, who spent all his days chewing gum with both legs sprawled over his desk, and from whom I tried to get away as far as possible.
After I had transferred to Panguna I crossed paths with the late arrival, hard-drinking and always pipe-stuffing-but-never-smoking Les Feeney.
Brian Herde and I became friends at Panguna where he worked as a lowly Accounts Payable clerk but didn't care as long as he had his free board and lodgings because he was making more on his share-trading, especially in SANTOS, than any of us ever earned working for BECHTEL.
We kept in touch for years until we met again in Port Moresby where I was setting up the internal audit department for AIR NIUGINI in 1974 and Brian had taken the job of accountant with Tutt Bryants. Always assured of free accommodation and a meal wherever I might be in the world, he then visited me in Lae, in Honiara, on Thursday Island, in Penang in Malaysia, and in 1983 I gave him a three-month paid job in my office in Piraeus in Greece. He never failed to pay for his shameless bludging by being a very likable chap and most agreeable company. Already in his 60s, he was again working on some tea plantation in the New Guinea Highlands when he came to visit me in Canberra in 1991.
And then there was George Loucaides. His Incoming Passenger card now tells me he was born in Egypt but he certainly wasn't a practising Muslim because he drunk as much and as often as all the rest of us.
It was in early 1972 that I got itchy feet again and left New Guinea, having been promised an exciting job with TUBEMAKERS in Australia.
On arrival at TUBEMAKERS, some smug Pommie bastard of an accountant told me that the job was no longer available. I hung out with my friends in Canberra, the Dahls - see Part I - , wondering where my next meal was going to come from, when Camp Catering, who had just won the Bougainville catering contract from B.F. Browns, sent me a telegram to come in for an interview for the position of office manager/accountant.
It was a case of veni, vidi, vici, and in days I was back on Bougainville - but that's another story for another day with another set of cards.
