Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, we want to hear from you! There are not many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience."
Which is how I began my Bougainville Copper Project website in 2003, after which I received hundrds of replies from people who had settled back in Australia or stayed on in New Guinea or were still on the move.
One email was from Roy Goldsworthy, who had lived across the hallway from me in Camp 1 in Panguna in 1972, and was still on the move. As he wrote, "Hi Pete, a bit of a surprise to see the Bougainville Copper site and even myself pictured. I have moved on from BCL – and have always liked to work elsewhere – have just come back to Oz after three years in China, then two before that in Korea. Other than a year in Oz in 1999, I have spent from 1985 totally overseas – Singapore – Qatar – Abu Dhabi – Dubai. Due to head off again this weekend to Kuala Lumpur for a job for Qatar. Other than a couple of years engineering after leaving BCL I have specialized in the design, construction, installation, and commissioning of offshore living quarters on oil platforms. My permanent email is rsgolds[AT]xxxxx.xxx Drop a line, Regards, Roy"
He has since then settled in Malaysia, and we have had plenty of time to exchange emails. One of the 'inmates' that shared with us the same end of the hallway and our regular Sunday afternoon 'tea parties' was a Swedish radio technician, and Roy thought he had recently seen his name listed on a radio club's website near Lismore on the Central Coast.
Having learned the precise spelling of the Swede's unusual name, I searched www.archive.gov.au for more information, and there it was:
He had come through the same migrant camp six months after me, and had stayed for over a month instead of my short two nights, after which he had moved to Brisbane and stayed at the Wacol Migrant Centre. Had we known, we could've talked about it during those rained-out Sunday afternoon 'tea parties', but then again, we weren't reminiscing about our past back then but instead looked ahead to what our future might hold.
This immigration arrival card confirmed that this was the Hans Helgesson we both knew from our time on Bougainville, and so I continued my search, only to be pulled up short by this website ...
... and this probate notice suggesting that he had died in the tiny town of Coraki, half an hour's drive south of Lismore. The probate had been applied for by Tor Richard Helgesson, who presumably was his son:
His wife had already died three years before him:
What a sudden shock. He was only one year older than me and just one year younger than Roy who exclaimed, "Life is a lottery!" And so it is.
I had never heard of Coraki, so this was as good a time as any to learn a little more about this small town on the confluence of the Richmond and Wilsons Rivers in northeastern New South Wales. With a population of fewer than 1,200 people, it's barely three times the size of our village of Nelligen. Good choice, Hans, to live in retirement and rest in peace.
"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."
