Nice people are like sugar cane; when they're put under pressure all that comes out is sweetness.
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I"t was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen ..." Actually, it was a bright cool morning in May when I felt like Winston Smith because facebook had just told me "Your post goes against our Community Standards" and took down this real photograph taken on a real Singapore Airlines flight.
I wanted to share it with others in the PNG Expatriates facebook group but Mr "Sugar Mountain" Zuckerberg's Thought Police thought otherwise, and not only took it down but also banned me from posting anything else. What a relief! I've finally got my previous facebook-free life back!
With a name like Zuckerberg, this may be a regrettable throwback to Mr Zuckerberg's humourless Teutonic past, but it still doesn't explain why members of the facebook groups NGI Historical Society and TAIM BIPO, PHOTO HISTORY, PNG, PAPUA & NEW GUINEA with a decidedly learned anthropological leaning are not allowed to publish authentic photos of barebreasted native women or, indeed, native men with penic gourds.
I've just returned from my early-morning walk and found an enormous face gazing down at me from the wall of my house. It's one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it runs.
Our creaking tax system needs fixing, and the most equitable and quickest fix would be to raise the GST from the 10% it's been since inception, to at least 15%. Have the politicians on either side of Parliament the guts to do it? Of course not! Instead, they prefer to play off one group of constituents against another.
The easiest to play are the ones who trusted the tax system and locked their money away until retirement. If they were lucky - or, more to the point, productive enough - they may now be sittting on a multi-million-dollar nest egg which they are not allowed to touch - but the tax man can and will under Labour's proposed 30% super tax on unrealised gains!
This 30% super tax will apply from 1 July 2025 on all unrealised gains over $3 million; in fact, if the Greens, who hold a lot of votes in the Senate post-election, get their way, that threshold will be screwed down to $2 million. Taxing unrealised gains is not only unreasonable and unfair but may be impossible to pay if based on "paper profits" from real estate which doesn't generate enough income to cover the 30% tax.
Not that the authors of this unreasonable and unfair tax hadn't already thought of this by giving those whose superannuation income doesn't cover the tax the option to pay it out of their personal funds. Should we be grateful? I don't think so. Instead, we should all be mounting the barricades against such an oppressive tax. But will we? Of course not.
Because of their convict past, Australians are supposed to have their own particular brand of individualism and dislike having rules imposed on them "for we are young and free". Remember when they made seat belts compulsory? We all buckled up the next day! Remember when they brought in bicycle helmets? We all looked ridiculous the very day after.
And those of us who entrusted their long-term retirement plans to a fair and long-term tax system will be a whole lot poorer after 1 July 2025.
Having made the effort of washing up and dressing up to drive into town, I don't just rush back after whatever it was I needed to do there. Oh no, I stand back - or, more often, just sit back - and watch the passing parade of humanity.
There are the young kids who, looking still bright-eyed and hopeful, work behind the SUBWAY counter, doing what perhaps took them no more than a day or two to learn; and then there is the elderly man, looking broken and apathetic in his hi-vis vest with TROLLEY SERVICE stencilled on its back, who collects empty trolleys in the carpark.
What will happen to those young kids if they get stuck in their mundane job for too long? What did happen to that elderly man who, almost at the end of his working life, still collects empty shopping trolleys? They all had drawn the winning ticket in life's lottery by having been born in this lucky country. How and why had they wasted that opportunity?
I can relate to the small Nepalese man who, always smiling, constantly sweeps the long concourse of the shopping mall, and the other migrant, a Pakistani perhaps, who wears a SECURITY jacket and patrols from one end to the other. They're both still at the start of a new life in a new country, and cheerfully accept their first steps towards a better life as I did sixty years ago when I drove a delivery truck for three short months.
I am sure they know, as I did then, that this will not last, and that they can work their way up and look forward to better things to come, but what about those native-borns who already speak English, who already had years in which they could have got themselves set up and learned the skills and gained the experience necessary for a much better job?
I feel like apologising for them by saying "There but for the grace of God ...", but then I remember the German saying that I grew up with, which all my life has reminded me that "Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied".
After the aborted visit to the warm-water pool, I had just paid for my car registration and a few insurance premiums and was wondering what sort of lunch we could afford with the money we had left, when we saw a friendly labrador behind the steering wheel of a parked car. Walking across to ask him if he had a driver's licence, we were joined by a young couple who also loved dogs.
The young couple (well, youngish! you have to be under 35 to get an Australian holiday working visa) turned out to be from France and on a twelve-month working holiday in Australia. He had been working in a metal factory in Cowra; she had been pet-sitting in Sydney; now they were off to see the nation's capital before driving to Falls Creek in Victoria where they will be working in the snow fields for the season.
Thankfully, the NRMA had given me enough loyalty and no-claim bonuses on my insurance premiums to allow us to have lunch for four at the Catalina Country Club, and so we spent the next few hours chewing the fat and on a beautifully cooked barramundi with chips and salad, and the drinks and the conversation just flowed. Padma talked what's called 'women's talk' with her, and I talked politics, books and movies with him.
"Being French, of course, you would have seen 'The Day of the Jackal'?" I asked. Blank look! "But you've seen 'Casablanca' with Humphrey Bogart, surely?" Blank look! "What books have you read?" None of the books he had read I had ever heard of, nor had he ever heard of any of the books I had read. And on and on it went, both of us seemingly living in parallel universes when it came to books and movies. Am I really that old?
When we began to bemoan the unaffordability of housing in both our countries, we seemed to have struck a common cord. I mentioned 'le viager' which he countered with a hesitant "Le viager - qu’est-ce que c’est ?" but then he remembered "Le viager consiste à vendre un logement à une personne qui verse en échange une rente viagère au vendeur jusqu'à son décès imprévisible". Always on the look-out to recommend another movie, I suggested he watch "My Old Lady".
Of course, they followed us out to "Riverbend" where we spent a few more hours over tea and biscuits and, of course, they will visit us again before they fly back to France from Sydney in nine months' time.
It's warm outside. The verandah is flooded in sunlight. I think I lie down on the old sofa and listen to the audiobook of "The Day of the Jackal".
It's (almost) winter now and you won't get me down to the pool any earlier than eight o'clock in he morning. This morning we got there around 8.30. Kerrie-Lee and the other lifeguards were already in attendance, walking round and round the beautiful 35-degree warm-water pool in their upmarket brandnew sneakers which, as they told me, cost them several hundred dollars a pair - and they had several pairs of them!
"Why don't you buy an ordinary pair of plimsolls?" I asked. "A pair of what?" came the reply. Not one of them had ever heard of plimsolls or what some of us commonly called "sandshoes" which had a canvas upper and a flat rubber sole. Am I the only one who is old enough to remember plimsolls?
I still remember a friend from our days on Bougainville Island in the early 1970s who visited me in Canberra in 1992 (or was it 1993?), still wearing the same pair of plimsolls he had worn on the island, except that by then both of his big toes were poking through their canvas top. He'd always been known as a man who had got his money's worth!
I had no time left to ponder this before a butch-looking female gym instructor of uncertain age turned on the loudspeakers, and over the blast of upbeat zumba music ordered everyone not belonging to her 9.15 water aerobics class to get out of the water before at least half of the Bay's geriatric ladies invaded the pool. The only thing to be said in their favour was that probably all of them still remembered plimsolls!
Who derived their name, should you wish to know, from the coloured horizontal band joining the upper to the sole which resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull, because, just like the line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.
If you want to read more about the Plimsoll Line, click here
The so-called Plimsoll Line, which indicates the legal limit to which a ship may be loaded for specific water types and temperatures in order to safely maintain buoyancy, came about when the British MP Samuel Plimsoll back in the 1860s blew the whistle on the common practice of overloading ships, and he thus saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
What would have saved us from paying fifteen dollars for a mere thirty minutes in the warm-water pool was the above notice which we only saw on the inside of the door after we had paid for our two tickets.
If you were a smoker, you'll remember Salem for having been the first filter-tipped menthol cigarette. If you were (like me) in mari-time transport (on and off four times), you'll remember Salem for having been the biggest maritime fraud ever perpetrated.
The Salem was a supertanker which was scuttled off the coast of Guinea on 17 January 1980, after secretly unloading 192,000 tons of crude oil in Durban in defiance of the South African oil embargo. The ship's owners then presented Lloyd's of London with an insurance claim of US$56.3 million, the largest single claim received up to that time. Go and read Klinghoffer's book or look at the unadorned facts
here and here.
Although the tanker was supposed to have sunk so quickly that not even the ship's log could be saved, the shipwrecked crew had taken all their personal belongings as well as duty-free goods and wrapped sandwiches.
"Fraud of the century: the case of the mysterious supertanker Salem" by A.J. Klinghoffer
One apocryphal story even suggested that they had booked in advance hotel rooms in Dakar where they eventually came ashore. Methinks it was the sandwiches that gave them away, be they plain or toasted.
As for the mastermind behind this audacious fraud, he escaped:
ARCHITECT OF HUGE TANKER FRAUD CAPS HIS CAREER WITH A JAILBREAK
JAMES NOLAN | May 30, 1988
When Frederick Soudan, the mastermind of the world's largest maritime fraud, decided it was time to leave federal prison he called his wife from a phone booth.
She drove up. They drove away.They have phones there that aren't monitored, said one lawyer involved in the case. I suspect he just called and said, 'Hello dear. It's time to come get me' and she did.
Outside the minimum security prison near Fort Worth, Texas, the pickup was so unobtrusive that federal prison guards barely remember Mr. Soudan leaving. And in Washington, the Justice Department believes it has bigger fish to fry. The matter is settled so far as we're concerned, said a spokesman. He was caught, convicted, sentenced and escaped.
But on an international scale, insurance investigators and anti-fraud detectives are outraged that the perpetrator of the notorious Salem supertanker scam is free.
After years of international legal wrangling and complex criminal investigations, Mr. Soudan now is not only free but probably still wealthy - with an estimated $2 million cachedin Swiss and Bahamian banks.
We're very disappointed, said Eric Ellen, the director of the International Maritime Bureau. If you can't hold him in prison the whole deterrent effect goes immediately.
The escape, simple compared to his other crimes, was only the latest chapter in Mr. Soudan's book of world-class tricks. His crimes have given him a perverse air of Homeric greatness. The Salem caper now holds the Guiness Book of World Records' title as World's Largest Maritime Fraud.
Guiness claims the Salem fraud eventually cost Shell Oil Co. $305 million. Court testimony showed that the crime began when the audacious Mr. Soudan talked sophisticated London merchant bankers into lending him some $15 million to buy the supertanker Salem. Then he hired Greek officers and a crew of Tunisians.
The plot turned on South Africa's unquenchable thirst for oil. The racially troubled nation is not deemed a legitimate customer by the Middle East oil kingdoms.
The Soudan ring got a contract to deliver oil worth $45 million to Durban, South Africa, in 1980. The ship loaded in Kuwait and, while it was at sea, Mr. Soudan succeeded in selling the cargo again to Shell.
The oil was delivered to Durban. Then the Salem loaded its tanks with seawater and headed up the coast of Africa, faking a course for Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to make delivery to Shell.
A hundred miles off the coast of Senegal, the crew opened valves in the ship's bottom to let in the sea water and took to lifeboats. Down the giant ship sank, in mile-deep waters.
The first suspicion of a scam came when it was reported that the crew wore shore-going clothes and carried well-stocked suitcases into the lifeboats.
Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a Rutgers University professor, has written a book about Mr. Soudan called Fraud of the Century: the Case of the Mysterious Supertanker Salem. It's due out later this month.
Mr. Klinghoffer says trial testimony taken in Rotterdam; Athens, Greece; Houston; and Liberia shows that Mr. Soudan got a tidy sum of loot.
Fred Soudan got $4.25 million. But he had expenses and paid off debts so we estimate he's got $2 million now. It's in Swiss banks and the Bahamas, said the professor of political science.
In 1985, Mr. Soudan was sentenced to 35 years in a minimum security prison in Fort Worth. And last December, he escaped.
Mr. Soudan was born in Tyre, a Lebanese port in the eastern Mediterranean. But the 45-year-old Mr. Soudan made his business in the United States. He had moved to Houston in the glory days of the oil patch, won U.S. citizenship and grew rich as an oil broker.
And it was in the international oil business that Mr. Soudan learned the gift of persuasiveness that would serve him so well - and international commerce so poorly.
U.S. District Judge Carl O. Bue, a former admiralty lawyer, tried the case in Houston. Now retired, the judge recalled Mr. Soudan.
Many people in life are gifted with a glib vocabulary and charming personality. Mr. Soudan was one of these, Judge Bue said.
David Berg, a trial lawyer who defended Mr. Soudan, said the judge rejected a plea bargain. The terms of the proposal called for Mr. Soudan to plead guilty to some counts and serve three years.
The trial, Judge Bue said, was no back-alley scrap. This was a very sophisticated case. You had people come over from Lloyd's of London; detectives from Scotland Yard; South African police; people from Greece.
The Justice Department sent down two of their top prosecutors from Washington. Very able lawyers to deal with issues that were novel. Nothing like it ever before.
I am sure the maritime industry would like the case to go away and its like never be seen again, Judge Bue concluded.
Mr. Berg laughed as he reminisced about Mr. Soudan.
Down here, we think that he had his mind fixed on the three-year term in the plea bargain. That time came, and he just looked around and said: 'Well, I have done my time. That's it. Time to go.' Then he just walked out, Mr. Berg said.
Clint Peoples, a U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Texas in Dallas, has issued a warrant for Mr. Soudan. Paris-based Interpol is looking for him.
Mr. Peoples said that Mr. Soudan's Spanish-born wife, a very pretty young lady, bought airline tickets to Madrid, her home. Some feel he has returned to Lebanon, where the long arm of the law catches few these days.
Others, at Lloyd's of London, feared briefly that he would seek revenge against those who testified against him, according to some sources.
Still other investigators say he may be in Spain. In the Whitehall Club in New York City, maritime officials speculate that Mr. Soudan may have met with foul play from some colleague in crime. Whatever the case, Mr. Soudan has simply disappeared.
He was in the Federal Correctional Institute for the morning head count and at night he was just gone, Mr. Peoples said.
One of the last few postcards I received from my friend Hans Moehrke
On this day in 2015, my friend Hans Moehrke passed away at his home in Cape Town. He and I had met when he stayed at the SAVOY HOTEL in Piraeus where I was a permanent resident during my "Greek days". We breasted the bar on many nights and, over many drinks, bemoaned the state of the world and our place in it, in three languages: Afrikaans, English and German. We were both in commodity trading: I mainly in grains, in lots of 20,000, 30,000, even 50,000 tonnes at a time, whereas Hans was more into pork bellies for which there wasn't much demand from my Saudi masters.
We stayed in touch after my return to Australia in 1985, sometimes through an occasional phone call but more often through letters and postcards. "I was delighted to speak to you on the phone today. Although some ten years or more must have passed since we last spoke with one another, hearing your voice was just as if we had been together only yesterday", he wrote, and repeatedly invited me to visit him and his family in Cape Town. (His daughter Astrid and her husband and their son later emigrated to Adelaide, and I like to think that my supporting letter to the Department of Immigration was of some help.)
Knowing I was again single by choice - just not my choice - he tried to matchmake me by sending me several of these enticing postcards:
On the back he wrote, "I will gladly assist you in trying to source the right partner for you. However my hands are tied until I receive detailed specifications from you. South Africa has many fair maidens to offer, although they may not always be fair in colour as revealed on these postcards. To acquire any one of the wholesome women for the purpose of marriage, you have to negotiate with the parents of the bride to agree on the level of the 'Labola' payment. The price is determined by the status of the family - chief, headman or commoner - whether the bride is a vergin [sic] or not, whether she has illegitimate children, etc. In practice this means you will have to pay plus/minus 200 cows or 40,000 rand for a daughter of a chief, if she is still a vergin [sic]. If on the other hand, if she has had premarital experience, one should be able to negotiate a 25% discount. Should the above proposition arouse your interest and since I am reasonably familiar with local customs, I could of course assist you with negotiations and any physical examination that may be required (here, too, I am qualified) to make sure that you receive value for money."
After he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and his hand-writing had become almost illegible, we phoned each other instead.
Then, after I had heard nothing from him for a while, I don't know what made me do it but I googled "Hans Moehrke Cape Town" and found this:
www.remembered.co.za
Hans Horst Moehrke was born on 30 July 1934
and passed away on 27 May 2015 in Cape Town.
Posted by Remembered Admin, 10 Jun 2015
That was ten years ago, and I still miss his postcards and letters and occasional phone calls, his great sense of humour, and even more our long talks breasting the bar of the SAVOY HOTEL. Rest in Peace, Hans!
People die only when we forget them.
I shan't forget you, Hans!
Vor fast siebzig Jahren erschien in Deutschland eines der liebenswertesten Bücher der fünfziger Jahre, das seinen Autor mit einem Schlag berühmt machte, und auch heute noch gern gelesen und in hohen Auflagen verbreitet ist.
"Ich denke oft an Piroschka" ist die Geschichte des deutschen Austauschstudenten Andreas der in den zwanziger Jahren nach Südungarn fährt, um dort seine Ferien zu verbringen. Die romantische Puszta-Landschaft, die überwältigende Gastfreundschaft der Menschen dort, und vor allem aber Piroschka, die deutschsprechende Tochter des Stationsvorstehers von Hódmezővásárhelykutasipuszta bezaubern ihn.
In 1955 erschien dann der Film und wurde zum Filmklassiker. Das Buch des Horst Hartungs habe ich leider nicht da die Portokosten nach Australien zu hoch sind, aber obwohl der Film auch auf YouTube zu haben ist, habe ich mir den DVD gekauft denn es ist ein Stück Heimat zum Sammeln. Ausserdem habe ich auch noch das Hörspiel. Höre es dir hier an:
It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.
There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.
If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!
Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
So wrote Umberto Eco, of "The Name of the Rose"-fame, who owned 50,000 books, about home libraries. I think he would have approved of my library (see above) and the more modest one in "Canberra" which only houses books on travel and linguistics, and the even more modest one inside "Melbourne" which comprises all my books currently "on the go", to say nothing of the five very large bookshelves in the living-room which are more of a static display of the many books I have read and loved but haven't returned to for almost as long as I have lived here.
Ever since people asked me why I settled in Nelligen - if "settled" is the right word! - I have been asking people who came after me the same question. Their answers have been as varied as the people themselves but often there was a personal twist to it, just as there was to mine, as I explained in "Why Nelligen? Why not?".
Two people I asked were a couple from Victoria who bought a house here for no better reason than that their best friends had also bought a house here. When their friendship broke up, first their friends and then they moved away again. Which made my own plan in 2003 to relocate to the little town of Childers a safer proposition since the person who had attracted me to it in the first place, Noel Butler, my best friend for the best part of thirty years, had already been dead for eight years by then and was not likely to leave as he already lived in my memory forever.
After a lifetime spent in New Guinea, Noel had struggled - a struggle we shared - to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea". He had either succeeded in finding his home in Childers, or his sudden death in 1995 had prevented him from trying his luck somewhere else again. I like to think that, for the last eight years of his life, he had found his home in Childers, so that when potential buyers knocked on the door of "Riverbend" just after I had begun to advertise it more than twenty years ago, I thought I check it out. What I am suggesting here is that, unless it is for work reasons, we usually have a personal reason for choosing the place we want to live in, and that the memory of Noel had been mine for driving to Childers.
And I wasn't disappointed. As I wrote in my travel diary then, "Childers, some fifty kilometres from Bundaberg, is a National Trust town and has a real community spirit. People know each other without living in each other's pockets as they can satisfy their curiosity from the constant stream of visitors who stop over for a day or two or, in the case of a whole bunch of overseas backpackers, work in the area as fruit pickers. The town is surrounded by rolling hills which are covered in sugarcane and avocado plantations. Everything seems to grow in the deep red soil! Most of the town's population live in highset 'Queenslanders' which are ideal for the subtropical climate. The footpaths are shaded by huge Brazilian leopard trees where locals and visitors sit at small tables taking their refreshments. This continues well into the night when the four pubs open their doors to the warm breeze. Before we had finished our first drink at the Childers Hotel, we had met people from as far away as Perth and Tasmania and struck up a long conversation with the licensee who happened to have lived just about everywhere, including my own 'stamping grounds' New Guinea, Burma and Saudi Arabia! It's a small world and it all comes together in Childers!"
Next day was much of the same. My diary again, "Beautiful morning at Childers! My old mate Noel Butler used to live here and at Mt Perry after he had come down from New Guinea in the late 70's. We had met aboard the PATRIS on the way to Europe in 1967 and kept in touch all those years until he passed away in 1995. We drove out to Mt Perry, which experienced renewed mining activities, to look at Noel's old house. Stopped at the not-so-grand Mt Perry Grand Hotel for a beer and a chat with the locals and some of the newly-arrived mine workers who were a colourful bunch. It left me to ponder what I might be doing today had I taken up Noel's invitation in 1985 to join him at Mt Perry which, as he put it, would have given him a new lease of life. His last place on the outskirts of Childers was now shaded by well-established trees and groves of banana and paw-paw trees, thanks to his hard work. What a difference from Christmas 1990 when I last visited him here!"
At the back of my mind had been to look at some houses. If I could find something suitable, I would sign on the dotted line. One that attracted my attention was the little split-level shown above, which was located at the edge of town at 5 Ginns Road. For me it "ticked all the boxes", but it was priced at $290,000 at a time when most houses in Childers sold for under $200,000. Had the price been lower, I might have signed on the dotted line. Someone else did shortly afterwards at $275,000. In the end, all I finished up buying on that trip was a new pair of shoes.
Over twenty years later, we are still at "Riverbend" and the same house is again for sale - this time for $785,000 - after it had been resold in 2007 for $371,000 and again in 2013 for $410,000, which should tell you something about the real estate market over the past twenty years as well as about the difficulties of selling at the high end of the market (it does also debunk the myth that house prices double every seven years).
I also still have those shoes I bought in Childers in 2003, although I have not worn them for quite a while. Perhaps it's time I tried them on again.
On this day next month Padma is off to Indonesia - again! Although, I must admit, it's been a few years since her last trip to Bali on JETSTAR, and I simply haven't had the heart yet to tell her of JETSTAR's latest economy-class upgrade.
Anyway, after her arrival late at night in Denpasar, she'll be whisked away by the airport shuttle bus to the luxury of the nearby HARRIS Hotel at Tuban. And all this for Rp 573,750 which is just a touch over AUS$50.
Next day she'll be off to the "Land below the Wind" Borneo - or, as the Indonesians call it, Kalimantan - to Samarinda where she was born; then to her older brother in Jakarta; then she's booked into some sort of Buddhist meditation class at Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world which, with Pagan in Burma and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, ranks as one of the great archeological sites of Southeast Asia.
Sometime before or after or in between, she'll also visit her sister and the old family home in Surabaya, while I am left sitting close to the fireplace in Nelligen, just watching the charges pile up on the VISA-card. She gets her trip; I get my peace and quiet. It's a fair trade-off!
With all things Hydra on my mind on this coolish autumn day, I found an online copy of George Johnston's "Closer to the Sun" at archive.org (create a free account, then log in and "borrow" the book) - a rare find indeed!
These semi-autobiographical stories of George Johnston and Charmian Clift's life on the island of Hydra (called Silenos in the book) make for interesting reading to those who've been to Hydra or want to know more about the Johnston's six years spent in the Greek islands.
Pollution, then as now, has been a problem. This is how "Closer to the Sun" begins: "The most important man on the island of Silenos was Dionysios, the public garbage collector."
Hydra in George Johnston's days
And it continues, "The garbage man ... was important every day of the year to one section of the town or another. For without his high-wheeled cart and his string of basket-burdened donkeys, and, most important of all, his goodwill, how was the rubbish of the town to be carted away in conformity with the proclaimed and printed order of Lieutenant Fotis, the police commandant, that streets, walls, and courtyards should be kept clean and all houses in a state of reputable whitewash?"
At the end of the novel, we discover where all the garbage went ... into the sea: "The Twelve Apostles made the last turn around the buoy, and its bow was lifting and falling now in a slow, graceful dance to the run of the clear gulf seas ... the wake of the boat had come in and slapped quick waves around the base of the rock chute, where Dionysios had been emptying the garbage down from the high houses in the pannier-baskets of his donkeys."
The one redeeming feature? Not so much plastic back then in the 1960s.
The origin of tea began, it is said, when Daruma, a Buddhist saint, irresponsibly fell asleep over his devotions, and, upon awakening, was so distraught that he cut off his eyelids and threw them to the ground where they took root and grew up as a bush, the leaves of which, when dried and infused in hot water, produced a beverage that would banish sleep.
It would take a lot more than the thought of cut-off eyelids to put me off my first hot cup of tea of the day taken by the window overlooking the river when it is shrouded in early-morning mist. A Chinese ink painting in slow motion!
Winternights spent in front of the fireplace are the nicest possible thing to do. I can't image that somebody could go through life without ever having roasted chestnuts or prodded glowing coal or made dream pictures in flames or listened to the fire sounds - the crackling and the hissing and the sighing and strange whimpering of a knotted log - or just dozed off in front of a fire.
Winter at "Riverbend" is a time of hibernation, of introspection, of listening to Mozart, watching old movies, re-reading long-forgotten books, playing chess, even LUDO (if I could find three more players!) - a time for every purpose under heaven, according to Ecclesiastes.
Dreimal kam ich nach Braunschweig zurück: Ende 1967 als ich noch Deutscher war und die Möglichkeit hatte mich vielleicht noch einmal einzubürgern; und als Australier in kurzer Folge Mitte 1983 und Januar 1984 von meinen Arbeitsplätzen in Saudi-Arabien und Griechenland um Abschied zu sagen vom Vater, erst am Krankenbett und dann am Sarg.
Mir fehlten damals die Worte. Heute fand ich sie beim Erich Kästner:
Kleine Führung durch die Jugend
Und plötzlich steht man wieder in der Stadt,
in der die Eltern wohnen und die Lehrer
und andre, die man ganz vergessen hat.
Mit jedem Schritte fällt das Gehen schwerer.
Man sieht die Kirche, wo man sonntags sang.
(Man hat seitdem fast gar nicht mehr gesungen.)
Dort sind die Stufen, über die man sprang.
Man blickt hinüber. Es sind andre Jungen.
Der Fleischer Kurzhals lehnt an seinem Haus.
Nun ist er alt. Man winkt ihm wie vor Jahren.
Er blickt zurück. Und sieht verwundert aus.
Man kennt ihn noch. Er ist sich nicht im klaren.
Dann fährt man Straßenbahn und hat viel Zeit.
Der Schaffner ruft die kommenden Stationen.
Es sind Stationen der Vergangenheit!
Man dachte, sie sei tot. Sie blieb hier wohnen.
Dann steigt man aus. Und zögert. Und erschrickt.
Der Wind steht still, und alle Wolken warten.
Man biegt um eine Ecke. Und erblickt
ein schwarzes Haus in einem kahlen Garten.
Das ist die Schule. Hier hat man gewohnt.
Im Schlafsaal brennen immer noch die Lichter.
Im Amselpark schwimmt immer noch der Mond.
Und an die Fenster pressen sich Gesichter.
Das Gitter blieb. Und nun steht man davor.
Und sieht dahinter neue Kinderherden.
Man fürchtet sich. Und legt den Kopf ans Tor.
(Es ist, als ob die Hosen kürzer werden.)
Hier floh man einst. Und wird jetzt wieder fliehn.
Was nützt der Mut? Hier wagt man nicht zu retten.
Man geht, denkt an die kleinen Eisenbetten
und fährt am besten wieder nach Berlin.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
