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This 'Bedouin Western', set in the land of Lawrence of Arabia, is about a boy who, in order to survice, must become a man and live up to the name - "Theeb"/"Wolf" - his father gave him.
The film takes place during the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War, in the wake of the Great Arab Revolt against the ruling Ottoman Empire, and is a coming-of-age story about a Bedouin boy, Theeb, who must survive in the wide-open Wadi Rum desert.
It was filmed in the same area where "Lawrence of Arabia" was shot in the early 1960s, but it is an inversion of that film in that it is told from the perspective of Arab bedouins rather than a colonial adventurer.
It includes some beautiful scenery and wonderful performances by non-professional actors from a Bedouin community in southern Jordan. The only professional actor is Jack Fox who plays the British officer with a faint whiff of Lawrence of Arabia. I loved this movie as it brought back many memories of my own time in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
And here's the soundtrack of Lawrence of Arabia which, more than the money, made me go to Saudi Arabia. "What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?""It's clean." Turn up the volume!
Irshad Manji calls herself a Muslim Refusenik. 'That doesn't mean I refuse to be a Muslim,' she writes. 'It simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah.' These automatons, Manji argues, include many so-called moderate Muslims in the West. In blunt, provacative, and deeply personal terms, she unearths the troubling cornerstones of Islam as it is widely practiced - tribal insularity, deep-seated anti-Semitism, and an uncritical acceptance of the Koran as the final, and therefore superior, manifesto of God.
In her book - subtitled 'A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith - is an open letter to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Manji breaks the conspicuous silence that surrounds mainstream Islam with a series of pointed questions: "Why are we all being held hostage by what's happening between the Palestinians and the Israelis? Who is the real coloniser of Muslims - America or Arabia? How can we read the Koran literally when it's so contradictory and ambiguous? Why are we squandering the talents of women, fully half of God's creation?"
Not one to be satisfied with merely criticising, Manji offers a practical vision of how Islam can undergo a reformation that empowers women, promotes respect for religious minorities and fosters a competition of ideas. Her vision revives Islam's lost tradition of independent thought. This book should inspire Muslims worldwide to revisit the foundations of their faith. It might also compel non-Muslims to start posing the questions we all have about Islam today. In that spirit, "The Trouble with Islam" is a clarion call for a fatwa-free future.
On this Halloween in 1938, CBS Radio Network broadcast "The War of the Worlds", beginning with a paraphrased beginning of the novel by H.G. Wells, updated to contemporary times and introduced by Orson Welles:
"We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the 39th year of the 20th century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crossley service estimated that 32 million people were listening in on radios..."
This broadcast became infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was actually taking place, but it's not the only novel by H.G. Wells that had enormous consequences. His novel "The World Set Free", which described "atomic bombs", influenced Leo Szilard's vital role in the Manhattan Project.
Perhaps without this book "Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Freebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live ..." (quoted from Richard Flanagan's "Question 7")
Anyway, here in Australia we don't really celebrate Halloween. Why, even Donald Trump hates Halloween. When you’re a deranged monster who scares shit out of people, you don’t want competition, do you?
Any movie starring Sam Neill is a good one, and so I bought "Hunt for the Wilderpeople" several years ago at full cover price; today I found it in my favourite op-shop for two dollars. I picked it up - together with an armful of books - as a small gift for a neighbour who hasn't seen this entertaining New Zealand movie yet.
Ricky is quite a handful and unlikely to make use of what's on offer in his room. The 1947 children's book "Bart: The Story of a Dog" by Ormond Edward Burton seems to be appropriate reading for someone of his age, but Erroll Flynn's "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" could give him some wrong ideas, while he would have no idea at all that "Animal Farm", if it is the book by George Orwell, is meant to be a satire of the Soviet Union.
Which brings me to that aforementioned "armful of books": Manning Clark's "The Quest for Grace", Hugh Mackay's "Ways of Escape", and David Marr's "Panic". Let's hope the coming weekend is as cold and grey as has been most of this week. It would make for great reading weather!
While we had lunch at the Bay's only Thai restaurant, BHP shares hit a twelve-month high of $44.55. Perhaps I should have offloaded some, because they are down to $43.85 at the time of writing. Still, I had placed an order to sell 20,000 Pilbara Minerals at $3.33 before we left home this morning. They got sold this afternoon after I had bought them only two days ago at $3.14. That's a $3,800 profit before brokerage (and tax-free as I bought and sold them inside my SMSF which is in pension phase). Enough to cover this month's grocery bill four times over!
A quick tour of Thursday Island in Torres Strait" is what Propane Pete calls this short video clip. It is certainly the most recent record - it's less than a year old - of an island I lived and worked on before it had bitumen, zebra crossings and median strips and BUNNINGS.
The way I remember it is best described by Charmian Clift, who lived on the island of Hydra long before I lived in Greece and fell under the spell of Hydra myself. In her collection of essays, "The World of Charmian Clift", I found this evocatively-written time-capsule of what Thursday Island was like in the 1960s, ten years before I lived and worked there:
"The one certain thing about going north in Australia is that the further north you get the further north you want to go. And so I have fared north until I have fared right off the tip of the northward-pointing finger of Cape York and find myself, intrigued at the very least, on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, a place which has been of some public interest lately because of certain medical revelations concerning the incidence of what is nicely called 'social disease'. It is a place, also, of which Somerset Maugham wrote a long time ago that there was nothing there but goats, and that the wind blew for six months of the year from one direction and then turned round and blew for six months from the opposite.
There are no goats any more, but the wind still blows. Presently from the south-east, a buffeting bouncing lively wind that clashes around in the coconut palms and tosses a waxy storm of cream and pink around the frangipani-trees, stirs even the dark heavy mangoes and figs to turbulence, and raises such a storm of dust in the unpaved streets that you are nearly blinded. Your hair streams backwards, your clothes belly out like sails, your skin is coated with a layer of fine dust and your mouth is permanently gritty, but at night it is blessedly cool under the billowing mosquito net and the palm shadows dance on your flimsy walls and the crepitant coconut fronds make a soft scraping rhythm to counterpoint the monotonous thrum thrum thrum of the power plant, which, with typical official cunning, has been built slap bang on the waterfront immediately in front of the main hotel. Obviously there is a scheme afoot to develop this as a tourist island. But you sleep well here and dream strange dreams.
It is not a lovely island. It is barren, dusty, the stony soil is completely uncultivated, the streets are, for the most part, unpaved, the beaches are scungy with oozy weed, rusting tin, and a million broken bottles, the habitations are ugly and utilitarian - even wood and roofing tin have to be brought up from the south. Everything has to be brought up from the south - meat and eggs and fresh fruit and vegetables and milk - what you eat and what you wear and what you drink and the very roof over your head. The only pastures are in the sea, and it is only the sea that is really beautiful, the sea and the near distances filled with the sensuous undulations of islands - Horn and Prince of Wales - which have an illusory enchantment. I say illusory because Horn is where you land on the airstrip, and at close quarters it is just as stony and barren and uninviting as Thursday Island itself.
But the flavour of Thursday Island is authentically tropical. If you have read enough Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene you will recognize it instantly - the heat, the dust, the rusting tin, the decaying jetties, the verandahed hotels, the rhetorical customs house, the mangy dogs, the anchored luggers, the visual impact of black flesh. The old hands stamped with the tired inescapable stamp of too many years and too much tropical knowledge, the bums washed up by freakish currents and beached here, the merchants - Chinese and Sinhalese and Philippine and European and every possible combination of race as well - officialdom pink and superior and aloof, twisting decorously with the hospital sisters at the three consecutive 'cabaret' nights, Thursday at the Grand, Friday at the Torres, Saturday at the Federal. At the Royal every night is cabaret, and every day too if it comes to that, black jellying joyful spontaneous cabaret to a joke-box blasting full-belt under flyblown posters of Esther Williams and Gene Kelly. The Royal is a gold-rush pub from Cooktown, freighted up here holus-bolus long ago and re-erected. Now it has reached the last stages of decay: the stairs have collapsed entirely, the top floor is reduced to a few gappy slats which reveal old intimacies of wardrobes and chests of drawers, and Heaven knows whether the bar and the couple of decrepit rooms which are all that is left of the ground floor can hold out under the exuberance of nightly gaiety until December, when the new Royal, presently only girders on the lot next door, is scheduled for completion.
The native population is now free to drink what and where and when it chooses, and mostly it chooses the wreck of the Royal and draught beer in great jugs and an absence of inhibition.
An old-timer who was good enough to give me a couple of hours of reminiscence regretted bitterly the passing of the protectorate, segregation, European supremacy, and the no-drinks-for-natives rule. What he was mourning, I think, was paternalism. He said that the native population was happier in the old days, and that their present freedom was only debauching them, and debauching the European population with them. He quoted rates of illegitimacy and venereal disease, mixed alliances, cross-breeding, and the somewhat forward behaviour of certain young women.
It is terribly difficult for a stranger to assess the complexities of the social structure of Thursday Island. I suppose it is presumptuous of me even to try.
To begin with Thursday Islanders aren't necessarily born on Thursday Island. They come, most of them, from other islands in the Strait - Murray, Darnley, Mabuiag, Badu, Saibai, Boigu, Dauan - to this trading post, administrative centre, and clearing house for labour. Here there is a hospital, schools for the children, hotels and shops and taxis, work in the town or on the pearling luggers, which still - in spite of all one has heard about the bottom having dropped out of the market - go out for commercial shell, although these days the main and profitable catch is live shell to feed the cultured-pearl farms on Friday Island and Horn and Possession and Good's, on Albany and Darnley and Boigu, at Poid on Moa, and the Escape River. Out of a native population of between 1,500 and 1,700, about 600 men are engaged directly in pearling.
From here too the enterprising or adventurous or ambitious islander can move south to swell the labour force on the mainland. The Torres Strait islanders are a big race, tall, and physically strong: they can earn good money labouring on roads and rails, in quarries and canefields. Education here is improving; there are schools up to the seventh grade on Darnley, Murray, York, Mabuiag, and Badu, and on Thursday Island itself a high school up to junior standard where children from the outer islands are brought in and housed in a hostel if their potential warrants it (only boys yet, which is a bit sad: the Australian attitude towards women carries through even in this fresh and exciting field of social experiment).
What is evident is that here the educated young have no avenues open to them in which they might profitably use their education. A few can be absorbed into the Department of Native Affairs, which still administers the Strait's islands, but the majority have to move south, often through Bamaga on the Cape, a settlement which has training facilities and operates as a launching pad to the south, economic and spiritual independence, and - one desperately hopes - eventual integration. It is a tribal movement: Thursday Island drains the outer islands of the young, the clever, the hopeful, the ambitious, and the south drains Thursday Island. One could, I suppose, foresee a time when the outer islands will become Twilight Homes for the aged, and, when the aged die, revert to nature and silence, which is a fairly spooky thing to contemplate.
In this movement of population inevitably - and I suppose unfortunately - much of custom and tradition is left behind as unnecessary baggage. On the outer islands there is still feasting and singing and dancing, but here on Thursday there is little evidence of any indigenous culture. No crafts are practised, except for the crafts of the sea, feasts of turtle meat and turtle eggs are not usual, and apart from All Souls' Cathedral ('... erected to the glory of God and in memory of those lost in the wreck of the B.I. s.s. Quetta 3,484 tons, which about 9.14 p.m. on Friday 28th February 1890, struck an uncharted rock in the Adolphus Channel, whilst outward bound from Brisbane to London, and although in calm water & bright moonlight sank within three minutes with the loss of 133 lives out of a total of 293 on board'), where services are very High Church and hymns are sung in the native language to the accompaniment of a drum (and this is a breathtaking experience for a stranger), songs are likely to be pop, and dancing European.
And yet. And yet. This place tastes exotic, like strange warm fruit. The trades blow, the palms stream, the dust swirls in clouds and coats ugly houses, tropical trees, rolling children, and hurtling taxis filled with grinning black faces. The days of Assemblies, China boats, shell traders, pearl buyers, and the reign of Burns Philp, might be gone, but something lingers, a smell and a taste and an essence, half squalid and half romantic, something indolent, excessive, irresponsible, shameless and happy. One responds instinctively, and I suppose primitively.
Of course one should deplore drunkenness and promiscuity, illegitimate babies of uncertain fatherhood, and disease apparently spreading like the plague. But the drink and the disease are a white gift, and the illegitimate babies are beautiful and happy and adored. People laugh here, and wear flowers in their hair, and go fishing and get drunk and make babies and grow fat without concern or regret.
I cannot see that law or even incentive will alter this pattern in this generation, which, consciously or unconsciously, still pulses to old rhythms. Freedom is only a word until its meaning is deciphered; it needs time and the right key and constant usage.
But the children of this generation will understand it. Or some of them will. Their children's children will consider freedom, equality, independence to be a birthright. As it should be. Legally the Torres Strait islanders are now Australian citizens, with all the privileges and all the responsibilities that devolve upon that state. Most other Australians don't even know they exist, and of course one wonders how long they will exist in their present state.
Civilization will take up, and responsibility, and material ambitions, taxes and plastic flowers and shoes on the feet and respectable alliances and temperate behaviour. The drum in All Souls' will be silent, the Department of Native Affairs a memory, and the new Royal will hold cabaret with due decorum and a four-piece orchestra.
I am glad I have tasted Thursday Island while the taste is still rank and wild. It will turn bland soon enough."
I am also glad I lived and worked on Thursday Island in 1977 when it was still rank and wild. I returned to a much 'tamer' Thursday Island in 2005 - read more here - but by then much of the magic had already gone.
A colleague from the good ol' days on Bougainville, who eventually put down roots in the USA, some time ago emailed me the scanned image of a postcard I had mailed him from Mackay in 1980. On the back I had written:
"Journey's End! We've settled in Mackay. A comfortable small town, beautiful beaches, National Parks, a booming sugar and tourist industry to supply the necessary dollar, who wants to go anywhere else, especially overseas?"
Famous last words! Two years later, I was also working in Saudi Arabia, but not before I had also worked in Brisbane, (again) on Bougainville Island, in Melbourne, in Townsville, and then (again) in Port Moresby.
I don't know if I sent him a postcard from Townsville, but if I had it may well have read the same as the Mackay postcard because I really liked that small house on the beach which I had bought and in which I felt as comfortable as in an old pair of worn-out slippers. Then, eight months later, came the fatal phone call: did I want to be part of the big Ok Tedi mining job in New Guinea? Once more, the fatal call of the wild!
So it was back to New Guinea and then on to Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Three years later I was back in Townsville but the magic of just walking in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me.
I have since reflected many times on the many places I have lived and worked in, and wondered what life might be like if I had stayed on. What if I had stayed in New Guinea - no, not in today's New Guinea! - or in Burma or Samoa or Malaysia, or in Greece, or even on tiny Thursday Island? Plenty of what-ifs with absolutely no time left to act on them.
"Sitzfleisch" is a German word for being able to endure a lengthy or boring task. Some people are natural sitters. I am not. I have always needed that rush of adrenalin that comes with the excitement of a challenging job. Once completed, I would hand it over to a natural sitter and move on again. Not anymore. Forty years later, I've finally grown enough "Sitzfleisch" to do the same thing in the same place.
The high-stakes poker game between America and China continues: China wants access to America's chips and America wants access to China's rare earth minerals. And while they are pulling back from the brink of an all-out trade war, both are buying time to fortify their positions.
Whether a trade deal materialises or it's back to the same high-friction trade environment, I see Australia's big iron ore miners, which are diversifying into energy minerals, as relatively safe bets for now. In fact, the commodity cycle is growing stronger by the day.
To cut to the chase, go to 31:20 and listen to what Alain has to say about accountants 😀
It was a cool and wet afternoon, and I spent it sleeping, and drinking, and eating, and reading. I read Alain de Botton's lastest book, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work", which is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people get up to all day – and night – to make the frenzied contemporary world function.
With his characteristic philosophical eye and combination of wit and wisdom, Alain leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from accountancy to art, rocket science to biscuit manufacture, in search of what make jobs fulfilling or soul-destroying.
It's a beautiful book which I've been dipping into several times before, usually when I missed my work which used to give my life purpose and meaning. Unlike most of my other books, I bought this one in mint condition on ebay, and so can you because, unfortunately, the only free online edition is in Korean - click
here. So the choice is yours: a crash course in Korean or pay anything up to $20 (postage included) on ebay.
Do you live your life only to get to the end of it? Most people answer this question with a "no", but not everyone lives like they mean it. In the manic society that most of us experience, people exhibit a neurotic behaviour Robert Holden calls "Destination Addiction".
People who suffer from Destination Addiction believe that success is a destination. They are addicted to the idea that the future is where success is, where happiness is, and where heaven is. Each passing moment is merely a ticket to get to the future. Destination Addiction is a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is somewhere else.
We are always on the run, on the move, and on the go. Our goal is not to enjoy the day, it is to get through the day. We have always to get to somewhere else first before we can relax and before we can savour the moment. But we never get there. There is no point of arrival. We are like runaway trains bound for a station called NEXT.
What a pity that I hadn't listened to Robert Holden forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, but, of course, there had been no internet then where I could have listened to such insightful gems, and anyway, Robert Holden was only born in 1965, the same year in which I came to Australia when I had already embarked on a life of "striving without ever arriving".
What makes Caboolture real fruit yoghurt so much tastier?
Well out here the birds are chirpier, the air is cleanier
The grass is greenier, the cows are happier
They make it much creamier, with fruit that’s fruitier
In bits much chunkier, the breeze blows gentlier
The whole world’s friendlier, and things are less hastier
That’s why it’s tastier. Caboolture real fruit yoghurt.
There’s nothing artificial about Caboolture.
Before the internet, vacant positions were advertised in newspapers, and for financial positions none were better than the big display ads in the Australian Financial Review.
They were the only ones I responded to. The bigger the better! I mean, why reply to a small classified? If that's all they could afford, they couldn't afford me! ☺
Indeed, the only classified that ever got me a job was the one I placed myself in an issue of PIM, the Pacific Islands Monthly, in 1969. From memory, it ran something like this: "Young Accountant (still studying) seeks position in the Islands." (decades later I visited the National Library in Canberra and had all twelve 1969-issues of PIM sent up from their archives, but I couldn't find the ad again; of course, they're now on the internet as well - see here - and still I couldn't find the elusive ad).
That tiny classified got me my first job in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea. The rest, as they say, is history because from then on it was display ads all the way through until 1979 when, having returned to Canberra from my last overseas assignment in Malaysia and finding life in suburbia wanting, I started a working holiday caravanning up and down the Australian east coast.
I travelled as far south as Melbourne, as far west as Mt Isa, and as far north as Cairns, and found myself in Brisbane by mid-June 1980. An old friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, had just bought himself a small acreage near Caboolture north of Brisbane, so when I saw an accounting job advertised with the Caboolture Co-operative, I applied even though the ad was not 'display' nor was the job.
Noel (on right) visiting me at my 'mobile home' in the Northern Star Caravan Park in Brisbane
This dairy co-operative, owned and operated by the cow cockies in the district, had started its life as the Caboolture butter factory in 1907 which was also the age of its Dickensian office to which I was invited for an interview at the crack of dawn.
The interviewing panel was a bunch of cow cockies still wearing their cow-something-splattered wellies from the morning's milking. This was the real deal; there's nothing artificial about Caboolture!
They must've been wondering why this bright spark who'd just done a consulting job in Malaysia and been senior-this and chief-that in the past, wanted to be the accountant for an outfit whose only claim to fame, apart from their rightly famous yoghurt, was the production of a cheddar cheese speckled with peanuts and aptly named "Bjelke Blue". (Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the longest-serving and longest-lived as well as most controversial Premier of Queensland and also a peanut farmer - or, some might say, just a peanut!)
Mercifully, the cow cockies turned me down which, for a fleeting moment, made the birds sound a little less 'chirpier' and me feeling a little more ‘saddier’ as I would've had liked to hang around for a little bit 'longier' with Noel who'd been my best friend since our first chance meeting on a Europe-bound ship in late 1967.
Still, before long I was once again responding to display ads and roaming the world, and Noel remained my very best friend until his untimely death in 1995.
At 1:27 she just walked past my window without giving me a wave! 😀
Forty years ago, I walked this walk every morning, all the way up Blues Point Road, but instead of turning right to the train station, I turned left all the way up to Crows Nest to my new job as "Internal Consultant" with Wormald International.
It was the year 1985, my very own annus horribilis: I had returned from my last assignment overseas and, in anticipation of continuing the work for my former Saudi boss from home, settled in tropical Townsville. The work never came - well, not until two years later when his brothers Ali and Abdulhameed offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by that time I had grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.
With few other job prospects in Townsville, I hastily relocated to Sydney where I eventually took up this impressive-sounding job which required me to be 'on the road' - or rather 'in the air' as Wormald's operations were spread all over the world - for nine months of the year. After the first rush of adrenalin had passed, I remembered that I had just given up a far more highly-paid overseas job with far greater perks in order to live a 'normal' domesticated life. I promptly resigned and moved to Canberra, where I had taken my first tentative steps as a young migrant twenty years earlier, but not before I had bought this "hole-in-the-wall".
Behind that upstairs window was my room with no view
Since then, at the end of each month when I receive the rent statement from the agent, I am reminded of those terrible - what? - six or seven months during which everything I did seemed to have gone wrong, including the purchase of this apartment. There had been two on sale, one at the rear overlooking Lavender Bay and offering a glimpse of Sydney Harbour Bridge, and this one facing the street. I chose the one facing the street because I felt lonely and wanted to watch the people walk by on the footpath and the cars driving up the road, the same cars whose noise drove me mad and stole my sleep after I had moved in.
In this photo the building is marked with "Blues Point Real Estate"
I have just noticed that Unit 1 in this eight-unit complex has come up for sale again - click here. It last sold twenty years ago for $290,000 and is now "price-guided" at $725,000. Being at the bottom of the building, even though it faces the rear, all it faces is a weathered old fence. Two floors up, it would be worth another $250,000. As would've been mine!
Wadjda goin' to watch?" Padma asked me last night, just after I'd eaten my bangers and mash and washed them down with a glass of Chateau Cardboard. I replied, "Yes!"
"Wadjda" is the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and was made by that nation’s first female director, Haifaa Al Mansour. It's a winning and wonderfully moving tale of a 10-year-old girl, living in a suburb of Riyadh, making her voice heard in that patriarchal society.
The girl wants a bicycle so she can race against a boy called Abdullah – except, of course, in Saudi Arabia girls aren’t allowed to ride bicycles any more than they are allowed to drive cars. Wadjda’s mother won’t let her daughter have a bicycle and the girl decides to raise the money to buy one herself.
Haifaa al Mansour admits that she got death threats for her work and says that she had to spend much of the location shoot directing from inside a van. Nothing new here, although the scenery is new to me as I had never been to Riyadh except through it on my way from Bahrain to Jeddah.
Rest in Peace, Noel! Your memory lives on at "Riverbend"
Almost no day goes by when I haven't pondered something or faced some decision and asked myself, "What would Noel have made of this?" or "What would Noel have done?"
Marcel Proust believed that spending an hour with a friend was "to sacrifice a reality for something that does not exist; our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive" and that friendship in the end is no more than "a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
My friendship with Noel was more akin to Proust's comparison to reading --- "In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original parity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to" --- because, while we first met aboard the liner PATRIS in late 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany, much of the next twenty-seven years until his untimely death in 1995 was spent in writing letters, he from his home in Wewak in what was then the Territory of Papua New Guinea, and I from my countless abodes around the world.
My friendship with Noel played no small part in my resolve in 1969 to leave a promising and secure career with the Australia & New Zealand Bank for the wilds of New Guinea. I worked there for several years, during which time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.
We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland. Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle 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", which was the closest he ever came to reflect on his life which had been full of hardship.
We never talked about the past, I because I didn't have one yet and Noel because, as he once confided, "Talking about it makes it more real", and so I knew nothing about his joining the Army when still in his late teens and being sent up to New Guinea to take part in the Bougainville Campaign, his unsuccessful attempts to grow coffee and tea in the New Guinea Highlands, and the subsequent years spent in mainly lowly-paid casual jobs with various government departments. As he once quipped, "I must be the longest-serving casual public servant in the Territory."
Cairns Post, September 14, 1943: "Word has been received that Butler, serving with the A.I.F. in New Guinea, has been wounded in action. Noel, who is a past student of the Innisfail High School, was well known in Cairns."
He epitomised the typical 'Territorian' with his Devil-may-care attitude and his unconcern about the future, about money, and about a career. Somehow, for him, the Territory provided everything he wanted from life and the rest of the world was a place that he visited once every so many years after he had saved up enough money for the fare.
His stoicism, his strength in the face of adversity, were a role model for me as I tried to make my own way through life. From afar, he observed my stumbling, my going from bust to boom and back again, which once prompted him to compare me to the proverbial cat with nine lives.
Noel was my last connection with a time in which I became what I am today, and my memories of that time are inseparable from my memories of him, and so thinking of him has become a kind of code for thinking of many other things that happened to me during those years and which I would rather forget because talking about them make them more real.
What would Noel have done? I think he would've done the same!
The following article is taken from the book "Bougainville - The Establishment of a Copper Mine" and describes B.F. Brown's catering operations on Bougainville Island. It's dear to me because "we", Camp Catering Services, against all the odds had wrenched this multi-million-dollar catering contract from them in April 1972.
I became Camp Catering Services' office manager/accountant - click here - and was one of their few management staff who had local experience as I had worked as senior auditor for the mine's construction managers W.K.E. - Bechtel Corporation since 1970.
And Camp Catering Services were desperately short of people with local knowledge as B.F. Browns very grudgingly gave up this very lucrative contract and had done everything in their power to entice their own staff to leave the island in the hope that we would fail and they could regain their role as caterers which they had held since September 1969. They were so confident we would fail that they kept their management team on the island until May 2nd when they left on a charter flight which became known as the "Champagne Flight".
With Tom Richards, Catering Manager, on far left
Left-to-right: Willie Leong, Wando Taim, Enrico Collavini, Marco Perini, Herman The German
Click on image for larger print
Love the 'Motion picture theatre management and operation' which at Camp 6 consisted of rather irregularly and often belately rocking up with a noisy clickety-clickety-clack movie projector, feeding through - sometimes back to front or with the first reel shown last - an often very dated and faded reel, with the sound track drowned out (literally!) by a sudden downpour of rain, and taking an eternity between reel changes or when the celluloid broke, to a roofed-over area on Loloho beach to which you had to bring your own plastic chair
A clean mess hall before the drunken fights started
25 million cans of beer! I know some of the people who drank most of them!
We gave it all we got, saw off the challenge, and settled into a successful operation which became the jewel in the crown of Camp Catering Services' contracts in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. I thrive on challenges but the prospect of endless routine after the first five adrenaline-filled months was quite daunting, so when everything was settled down and running smoothly, I handed over my job to a friend and accepted the new challenge of promotion to Group Financial Controller in the company's head office in Sydney.
City life didn't agree with me nor could I see much point in endlessly attending management meetings, endlessly signing cheques, and endlessly drinking cups of coffee brought into my posh office by my very own secretary and so I moved on to 'meatier' jobs in the British Solomon Islands, Burma, Iran, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece. However, I kept in touch with Camp Catering Services' Bougainville manager, Merv Nightingale, whose generous reference opened many more doors for me.
He lost his job when the Sydney head office triumvirate consisting of his half-brother Nelson Hardy, "the Hungarian Goulash Chef" Joseph Tamas, and that little Chinese guy whose hyphenated name escapes me (I think his name was Max Den-Toll), gutless and smelling big money, sold this once-in-a-lifetime contract to S.H.R.M. and wound up the company.
As they say, all good things must come to an end, even the largest civil catering contract ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
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.
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