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Donald Horne originally wanted to publish his 1964 book, "The Lucky Country" with a question mark: "The Lucky Country?" I have felt the same about the title of this post: "Bullish BHP?"
After steadily climbing over several months to a new 52-week high of $65.98 on 17 June 2026, BHP's shares started dropping and dropping and dropping. Instead of selling at or near their 52-week high, I hung on, hoping each fall would be the last, all the way to Thursday's $56.87.
On Friday they began to recover, with two more small lifts to today's $58.71. Now, CommSec's daily market report suggests that "the stock price may rise from the close of 58.71 to the range of 67.00 - 69.00".
"Bullish BHP" or "Bullish BHP?" If CommSec is right and BHP shares get back to their former 52-week high of $65.98, I won't make the same mistake and hang on for a few more cents or dollars. I will sell out!
Der wohl bekannteste Schrankenwärter in ganz Deutschland und der Welt, Alfred Laumann, starb am 1.9.2023. Er war 81 Jahre alt.
Er wurde berühmt durch diesen YouTube 'clip' aus dem Jahre 2006. Damals war er schon für viele Jahre Schrankenwärter in Groß Düngen gewesen, denn laut seiner facebook-Seite schrieb er von dort im Jahre 1997, "Hallo,
mein Name ist Alfred Laumann ich bin 55 Jahre alt und komme aus Bad Harzburg. Seit 37 Jahren arbeite ich für die Bahn als Schrankenwärter". Also wurde er Schrankenwärter im Alter von achtzehn Jahren als andere noch von Abenteuern in fremden Ländern träumten!
Sein Schrankenwärterhaus ist jetzt als Sehenswürdigkeit auf GOOGLE Maps markiert (siehe hier) wo man ihm das obige Denkmal aufstellte.
Jetzt bewacht er wohl einen Bahnübergang irgendwo oben im Himmel. Ruhe in Frieden, Schrankenwärter Laumann.
For more about Schrankenwärter Laumann, click here.
I confess that there are days when I feel like Schrankenwärter Laumann and I need to remind myself of what one of my ex-colleagues from my New Guinea days keeps telling me, "Peter, you've done enough for at least two lifetimes."
Schrankenwärter Laumann's weekly highlight is Tuesdays when he checks the readiness of his signalling horn (2:32); mine is on Thursdays when I wheel out the garbage bin for next morning's collection, which takes care of two days of the week as I wheel it back in again on Fridays.
As for the rest of the week, I read books on Sundays, and also on Wednesdays and Saturdays and Tuesdays and Mondays. Ocassionally, I break my schedule and ponder what the hell made me retire so early instead of working on challenging overseas contracts for another ten, fifteen, even twenty years - enough years for at least a third lifetime!
No more navel-gazing! Today is Thursday when I wheel out the garbage bin for Friday morning's collection, after which I wheel it back in again.
Australia in the 1960s was a country of teedrinkers. If you wanted coffee, you had two choices: International Roast or none. International Roast came in a huge tin which, in Barton Hosue where I was living, was so rarely opened it outlasted the two years I lived in that boarding-house.
On the rare occasion when I feel like a cup of coffee, I still look for the old International Roast, which usually comes in a user-friendly 100g-tin for six dollars. Today I found a big 500g-tin for fifteen dollars. That's five times the contents for only two-and-a-half times the price! Given that the value of my share portfolio has been dropping like a stone ever since BHP's 52-week high of $65.98 on the 17th of June — they are trading at $57.25 as I type while enjoying my first cup of International Roast — I couldn't afford to pass up this money-saving bargain, and so I took the big 500g-tin, even though it'll probably outlast me once again!
On that happy note I shall fill a thermos with some more International Roast and go to "Melbourne" for a quiet afternoon among the gum trees.
I have called my little cabin "Melbourne", so that, if someone asks for me, Padma won't have to tell a lie when she tells them "He's gone to Melbourne" to make them go away.
It's important to have a place to shut out the world and all its demands. A place to collect your thoughts, a place where you can think, relax, be honest with yourself; feel tranquil when needed, and stimulated when not. Somewhere, however small, that gives you a sense of solitude and is a sanctuary for your private thoughts, and where visitors need not be welcomed.
Solitude means being alone without feeling lonely. We all need periods of solitude. Periods of time to think. Thinking really means talking to your self. It involves both the speaker (I) and the listener (me).
Descartes, the 17th-century rationalist and father of modern philosophy, famously said cogito ergo sum, which means I think therefore I am. He believed thinking starts with the eye and came up with his immortal line when he was alone in bed. He must have really liked his own company.
To explore this famous thought experiment further, go the to wikipedia page
I did a lot of talking to my self last night in my own special place, "Melbourne", far away from the rest of the world. I thought I might spend the rest of the night there, but then there was a knock on the door, and 'she-who-must-be-obeyed' said that dinner was ready.
A day in town is never complete with a visit to Vinnies, and so, after a lunch of Chinese food at the Soldiers' Club, I checked through Vinnies' book section for any hidden treasures.
I found a nice copy of Albert Camus' "The Plague" and an interesting history of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, titled "The Same Man".
On the lighter side, I picked up Jonas Jonasson's "The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared" - which was also made into a charming movie - click here - and Paul Hogan's "Australia According to Hoges". I wasn't sure about "Philosophy Made Simple" by Robert Hellenga and "This Book Made Me Think Of You" by Libby Page, but at two dollars each, I can't go much wrong, can I?
All I need now is plenty of time to read them all.
Sometimes life moves in circles: before I bought "Riverbend" at the end of 1993, I had bought a small riverside unit in the Bay as my pied-à-terre when I came down to the coast from Canberra.
An almost forgotten photo of my Unit 4 after I had rescued it from some terrible tenants and tried to rent it out as a furnished holiday-rental, but that was a mug's game too, with the income barely covering the body corporate levies and council rates. I sold it in 2003 for $365,000 at what was then the height of the market. The next owner sold it again in 2008 for $310,000, and it was last sold in 2018 for $430,000. Barely a raving financial success.
Then, after a sudden rush of blood to the head, I found myself to be the owner of "Riverbend", and I no longer needed the little riverside unit. I kept it as a rental but that was a mug's game, which I gave away in 2003 by selling it for $365,000. Even though the capital gains had barely kept up with inflation, I was presented with a tax bill of $55,640. Not much of an investment, but, of course, it had always been a lifestyle choice.
My previously owned Unit 4 is two doors to the right of the BLACKSHAW pointer
That was Unit 4 at 33 Clyde Street - click here - so when Unit 2 recently came up for sale, I was interested to have a look. Its current owners had bought it in 2021 for $531,000, and it is now for sale at between $650,000 - $665,000 (Why do agents advertise a price RANGE; do they really expect someone to pay more than the advertised bottom price?)
When I inspected it today, I was impressed with the improvements to both the inside of the unit and the maintenance of the whole 15-unit complex, and said that I would be interested in buying it for $600,000.
Something may come of it, or nothing may come of it. If I can buy it for $600,000, I'm back to where I started in 1992 when I bought the same unit two doors down as my coastal pied-à-terre. I'll keep you posted.
In the meantime, if you're interested in some riverside living in the heart of the Bay, you should contact Jessica Fisher at BLACKSHAW.
P.S. It's early Monday morning, just after 9 o'clock, and BLACKSHAW phoned: no, the owners won't accept $600,000! I'm sort of relieved as I always tend to get a bit carried away on the day (and I won't even tell you about my wedding day!) Anyway, I'm not quite ready yet to swap 10,000 of my BHP shares for yet another excursion into real estate. In trying to solve the unaffordable housing problem by removing tax-breaks on those that provide the housing, the Labor government's changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax have put a cloud over real estate as a form of investment. The downward correction in the real estate market could run for another six to twelve months, after which house prices will eventually stop falling and slower rises will resume. The owners of Unit 2 may well rue the day they rejected my offer.
To watch the whole movie, click here (There's something weird about 'wierd'; 'I before E, except after C' doesn't always work)
Remember that scene in "They're a Weird Mob", in which Nino for his first job as a builder's labourer wears his Sunday best? It's not in the book, but in the movie Pat's last words to his departing boss are, "Why didn't you bring me Prince Philip?"
I was reminded of this scene when I walked into my favourite op-shop, Vinnies in Moruya, and met Paul, the book whisperer, who tends to the second-hand book section. "Why don't you wear a tie?" I wanted to ask.
As he told me, he's a retired high-school teacher in maths and history, and never lost his habit of being dressed like a high-school teacher. I, too, seemed to have been born with a collar and tie on, and for most of my working life I have worn both, and, if the climate allowed it, also a proper suit. It left me with a wardrobe full of business suits and dinner suits and even a tuxedo, and I have often wondered if I should wear them out while I'm driving my ride-on mower up and down "Riverbend". It'd finally give the neighbours something they could really talk about!
When I grew up in Germany, brown shoes with blue suit were definitely démodé
A German reader, getting well ahead of me, tried to image what I would look like sitting on my ride-on, dressed up to the nines, and so created this image — with the help of "KI", he told me. The same people who gave us Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Kant (sorry, I didn't mean to swear!) and such beautiful words as "Schadenfreude", "Lebensschmerz", "Sehnsucht", "Blitzkrieg", "Wiener Schnitzel", and "Heimweh", replaced scores of them with English ones (and then, even more strangely, gave them German der, die, das articles, German plural endings, and even conjugated them - if they're verbs - and declined them - if they're a nouns or adjectives - as if they were German words. And yet, they insist on using the initialism "KI" (künstliche Intelligenz) instead of the proper English one, which is "AI". (And if you think that this was a rather convoluted explanation, that's still the German in me trying to get out.)
To read the book, click here (Yes, I could've read it online, but I bought it for its beautiful slipcover)
The things Paul and I talked about were books and movies. Of course, as an ex-teacher, he had seen the movie "Wake in Fright", based on the novel by Kenneth Cook, after which we briefly touched on "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, "The Shiralee", and "Doctor Zhivago" with Omar Sharif — whom Paul resembled, or so Padma insisted. I left with a beautifully produced slipcover copy of Okakura Kakuzo's "The Book of Tea", which is all about tea and Taoism and Zen, and Hermann Koch's "The Dinner", after which we had our usual lunch at the Moruya Bowling Club.
I like to keep the taxman at arm's length, not because I have anything to hide but simply because I hate the aggravation he causes me with his silly questions, as he did several times in the late 1970s when I was still working overseas and he kept asking me what my "gross income from all world sources" was.
There had always been the ‘183-day’ test, which I easily passed every time, but the taxman kept asking away, as he had first done in 1978, when he asked me, "1. Were you born in Australia?" and "7. State your reasons why you consider yourself to be a resident or non-resident of Australia", and, of course, "14. Details of all income earned by you from sources within and outside Australia in the year ended 30 June 1978".
All this was done in those pre-computer days by typewriter, and so I would pull out my portable OLYMPIA typewriter, which I had bought many years earlier in New Guinea, and type, "Please explain your definition of 'resident' and 'non-resident' which presumably is quite different for tax purposes from the casual sense of the word" (which was long before "Please explain!" had become an iconic catchphrase).
Deafening silence for another year, until, like a dog with a bone, he trotted out the same questions the next year, and all the other years while I lived and worked in Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, Burma, Indonesia, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, on and on and on. Perhaps he thought I lived inside that PO Box 42 in Duffy in the A.C.T.
I've been back in Australia for decades now, but my distaste for the taxman is as strong as ever. To keep keeping him at arm's length, I still prepare my own tax return, but then let H&R Block lodge it for me.
Better them than me to "Block" the taxman's silly questions. This has been my first year with H&R Block, and I can highly recommend them.
I've just had one very long and very hot shower in an attempt to warm myself up on this cold and wintry morning. The soap I lathered myself with was the same rich pink which will always remind me of CAMAY soap and my time on Bougainville Island.
During the construction phase of Bougainville Copper in the early 70s when I lived in Camp 6 at Loloho, we received with our weekly towel change a new piece of CAMAY soap, whether we had used up the old one or not. Usually we hadn't and there was CAMAY soap all over the camp.
A certain surveyor working for BECHTEL would collect all the CAMAY soap he could get his hands on and also regularly empty the crib rooms of all their LIPTON tea-bags and ARNOTT'S Scotch Finger biscuits, all of which he would parcel up and regularly send back to his family in Perth.
If you have ever been to Perth and seen a family with a lovely CAMAY complexion and a strong aversion to LIPTON tea and ARNOTT'S Scotch Finger biscuits, you will immediately know whom I am talking about.
Ah, beautiful Bougainville Island! Those days will never CAMAY again!
Click on FULL SCREEN and enjoy! This is a cautionary tale. By the time this movie was made, Paul Eling Johnson had become a bit of a sad sack who still lived on his boat alone, had nobody and no-one and his boat was in a barely floating condition, and he didn't sail anymore. He had found an accepting and non-judgemental community who treated him lovingly and with respect, despite his addiction and often wandering about in an inebriated state. A story of freedom bounded by alcohol and poverty. As the filmmakers stated, "This film is a contemplation about his choices after a lifetime of freedom before he embarked on his final journey of no return."
You know, when you go to youtube.com's front page to search for something and you see a whole list of their latest "suggestions" which you normally ignore and move on from? ("This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put", I hear you whisper.)
This morning I was going to type in "Yuval Noah Harari" to see if I could find something about his latest book "Unstoppable Us - How Humans Took Over the World", when I was facing their latest "suggestion" of "The Sailor | Full Movie - What is the price of freedom? Paul Johnson sailed the world all his life. He loved, drank, and lived foolish, never truly living on land. Now he is turning eighty. What is at the end of such a journey? Is there loneliness?", uploaded as recently as Oct 18, 2022.
I hope YouTube won't delete it because, while this world-renowned sailor and builder of boats died in June 2021, aged 83, his legend lives on.
My own sailing-days are well and truly over! The nearest I ever got to casting off completely was in 1974 when I worked for AIR NIUGINI in Port Moresby and saw a wooden yacht, "Spirit of Barbary", advertised for sale at Popondetta on the north coast of New Guinea. An old mate from my Bougainville days, Brian Herde, was also interested, and we flew across to spend a couple of days sailing and living aboard it, after which our minds seemed made up. I had just enough saved up to pay for my half of the boat, but Brian was notoriously reluctant to spend money and to sell even a tiny fraction of his many SANTOS shares, and so the deal was off.
I've had a variety of small sailing boats ever since: in Port Moresby, in Lae, in Honiara, and crewed on boats at Kieta and in Rangoon and Apia and Penang - I even owned a small LASER on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra! - and until a few years ago sailed my small motor-sailer, the "Lady Anne", on the Clyde River, but now my sailing-days are over!
But I can dream, can't I? And so I keep a large library of sailing books, from Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World" and Francis Chichester's "Gipsy Moth Circles The World" to "The Long Way" by Bernard Moitessier and Robin Knox-Johnston's "A World of My Own".
However, even that library is thinning out as I pass on the books before they become my funeral pyre. One of the lifeguards at the Aquatic Centre, Sam, owns a yacht with her partner, and before they headed north again, I've been feeding them with Alan Lucas's sailing instructions and "Fitting Out Below Decks" and "Fitting Out Above Decks".
No more fitting out for me, but there's still time to watch this most poignant, beautiful film of this amazing sailor whose motto in life was "Never be afraid to be terrified."
Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday
A Monday, a Monday is very, very good
Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday
A Tuesday, a Tuesday, in fact I wish you would
Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday
A Thursday, a Friday and Saturday is best
But never, never on a Sunday
A Sunday, a Sunday, 'cause that's my day of rest
Most any day you can be my guest
Any day you say, but my day of rest
Just name the day that you like the best
Only stay away on my day of rest
Oh, you can kiss me on a cool day, a hot day
A wet day, which everyone you choose
Or try to kiss me on a gray day, a May day
A pay day, and see if I refuse
And if you make it on a bleak day
A freak day, a week day, why you can be my guest
But never, never on a Sunday
Indulge yourself and listen to the soundtracks here
... and I want to be transported back to a time when both the world and I were still young - and decidedly warmer than tonight's "Riverbend".
Greece may still be envisioned by some as old guys in sheets wandering around the Acropolis spouting wisdom before somebody pours hemlock in their ear, but my guess is that they will change their minds after having watched Melina Mercouri do her stuff in "Never on Sunday".
The film is a mix of Pygmalion plus "hooker with a heart of gold", and tells the story of Ilya, a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist and classical scholar who is enamored of all things Greek.
Homer Thrace: She killed them. Medea herself, does she not say, “I killed my children”? Ilya: And you believe her? You don’t understand the women. Medea loves her husband, yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: Her husband is interested in another woman? Yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: So she said to her husband that she has killed her children to frighten him, to get him back. Homer Thrace: No! Ilya: Yes. She gets him back, and everybody go away and everybody is happy and they go to the seashore. And that’s all! Homer Thrace: If I show you that everything that was ever written about Medea talks of her killing her children. If you ask 10 out of 10 people who saw the play and they tell you it’s true, then by simple logic. . .You’re a Greek, you should be logical. Ilya: Why? Homer Thrace: Because the greatest Greek of them all, Aristotle, invented logic. He said – Ilya: Who? Homer Thrace: Aristotle. . . Ilya: Aristotle! The one that the Captain said thinks men are everything and women are nothing? I don’t care what he said, Aristotle.
Homer Thrace: It's extraordinary. Where do you learn all those languages? Ilya: In bed.
Both Greece’s film industry and the entire nation took centre stage when the film was released in October of 1960, and it led to massive increases in tourism and location-shooting there.
Some twenty years later, I lived and worked in Piraeus by which time Melina Mercouri was already a not-so-sprightly 64 years old. Piraeus was still as lively and, in parts, as bawdy as shown in this movie, but never on Monday when I went back to work in my office at # 3 Agiou Nikolaou to manage my Saudi boss's commodity trading and fleet of bulk carriers.
"And everybody is happy and they go to the seashore." Some memories can get you through even the darkest and stormiest night.
Anyone who recognises me in this photo gets a year's free subscription to this blog
Canberra's Barton House in the sixties was a place for young people or anyone who could not afford more than the weekly £11/10s for a shared room, shared facilties, breakfast and dinner, and a brown-paper-bag full of soggy lunchtime sandwiches. Our average age was well below thirty as you had to be young to survive the late-night drinking and partying.
Pity the retired old surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who lived alone in a room, just him and a copy of every Canberra Times ever printed. He spoke to no-one and yet, if you met him in the corridor, he would stop and stare, daring you to go past him. You could hear him before you saw him as he always carried his own set of cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal showers and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower for longer than what he considered was a reasonably long enough time.
According to the archives, "The Colonel" - who only ever made it to sergeant - came to Canberra in 1913 to work as surveyor for the Commonwealth. His real name was Ernest John Dowling and he was born in Geelong on 20 March 1891 (which would've made him 74 years old the first time he rapped his walking-stick on my shower cubicle).
Mercifully, he died on 13 August 1971, long before his "home", Barton House, was demolished in 1981. A trig station on a hill near Uriarra in the A.C.T. is named after him, which is more than any of us callous youngsters achieved who so mercilessly made fun of him in the sixties.
Padma is again considering a trip home to Indonesia and took me along for some grocery shopping so that I will know where everything is and where all the specials are while she's away. After all that mental overload, I couldn't help myself but had to take a leek - well, two, actually.
Before he could call the woman with the mob and bucket and the police, I explained to the manager that this was just one of my occasional outbursts of the oxymoronic 'German humour' which had followed me halfway around the world, but all he wanted to know was the meaning of 'oxymoronic'. I told him to ask my friend Des.
To all my old friends from the Bougainville days, this is merely a photographic confirmation that all that lovely CAMAY soap we were given in the camps did nothing for my complexion, and neither have the ravages of time passed me by, so if you run into me at Woolies, you'd probably won't recognise me - unless you see me taking a leek.
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.
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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