Leo Umundum (aka Leo the Hun), born 1/7/1940, died 2019
Alan Lucas, in his "Cruising the Coral Coast", described the situation on Thursday Island in 1980 in these words:
"Thursday Island has degenerated over the years from one of the world's most romantic pearling ports to something of a 'dole office' for Torres Strait Islanders and nearby mainland Aborigines. Littering, drunkenness and a total lack of self-respect appear to be the main sports and the administration does not give the impression of conquering the island's ills. As one who has known T.I. since the early 1960s and who has watched it go steadily downhill I can only lament its demise and admit that there is little there to interest the visitor."
True but he could have said the same of many of the 'whiteys' inhabiting the Torres Strait. I had my once-in-a-career chance to join them and succumb to the lure of this remote and soporific island when I worked as accountant for Thursday Island's Island Industries Board in 1977.
However, I wasn't ready yet to become either an alcoholic or a philosopher in search for the meaninglessness of the human existence and so moved on to bigger and better things. Nonetheless, the island kept me under its spell and I returned in April 2005 - see my travelogue - to find out what I might've missed out on.
Not much, I realised, when I entered the Grand Hotel and met the New Zealander Gary Duff, and Tony, on T.I. since 1959 but originally from Lausanne in Switzerland, and Henry the Dane, a mackerel fisherman. Tony was retired and only drank double gins with just a hint of tonic. The "indescribable intoxication" the famous island-lover Lawrence Durrell had experienced at finding himself in "a little world surrounded by the sea" was clearly not enough for Tony. He seemed coy about the sort of work he'd done on T.I. but it could be assumed that the only job he ever had done really well and with total dedication was drinking.
I knew Gary, the cray fisherman, from my time on T.I. in 1977 when he had been married to Dang, a Thai girl, who now lived in Cairns. Gary, now 60, was remarried, again to a Thai girl, and was still diving for crays and drinking. He was said to keep his crew awake at night when he rolled over in bed, such was the noise the $100-notes made that he had stashed away under his mattress. Not much of a life by his own admission and he seemed to envy me my thirty freewheeling years through over a dozen countries while he had done little more than enrich the local publicans on the island.
Leo Umundum (aka Leo the Hun), an often out-of-luck and always out-of-work Austrian, soon joined us. Leo had come to T.I. in 1960 to join a bunch of other latter-day white beachcombers who'd been on the dole for so long, they'd forgotten what kind of work they were out of.
When I came to Thursday Island, Leo already lived in some style on neighbouring Friday Island in a shack with ocean views which he had built himself on land which he had never bought. He had sired some children with local women, and came across to Thursday Island once a fortnight to collect his dole cheque and convert it into urine.
Even never-working Leo the Hun got his one minute's worth in these Minutes.
I had always thought that Leo would one day be knighted for his services to the Australian brewing industry and live out his days as Sir Osis of the Liver, until years later I received this email from another T.I. identity:
"Went to the Cooktown RSL earlier on where an old mate told me that 'Friday Island Leo' had topped himself some time ago. I rang another friend to verify the story and she said that Leo had been diagnosed with advanced cancer, so he grabbed his gun and the rest is history!"
And this is the way the story ends - to paraphrase T.S. Eliot - "Not with a whimper but a bang."
