My "Cabooltier" Past

 

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).

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.

 

Stopping at the same co-operative on a roadtrip to Queensland in December 1990.
I am standing in front of the 'Dickensian' office beside my recently purchased TOYOTA Camry; the Camry no longer exists today nor does the co-operative.

 

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!)

 

Noel's "shack" along Beachmere Road which was still there when I visited the place again in September 2003. By then it was already surrounded by suburbia on all sides.

 

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 liked to have hung 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.

 

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Snorkelling off Loloho Beach

 

 

This is a recent clip of Loloho Beach but it's timeless and could've been taken back in the 70s when we all lived in Camp 6 and had all that glorious beach right on our doorstep.

 

 

Did we appreciate it as much as we should have? Perhaps not, as many of us spent what little time there was left after a long ten-hour working day inside the "boozer" which, thankfully, was also on the beach.

 

 

Still, I am grateful for the memories - as is my dermatologist who earns a good living cutting out the countless melanomas on my back which I acquired while snorkelling for hours off the beach at Loloho.

(While watching the video clip, please keep your eyes open for a left rubber sandal which I lost among the coral back in 1970 ☺ )

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Hotel zum Letzten Kliff

 

 

Iwant to tell you about the failed attempt to introduce a German version of Fawlty Towers to the Germans. A pilot episode of the show, called 'Zum Letzten Kliff' ('To the Last Cliff'), was broadcast in December 2001.

In it, Basil and Sybil became Victor and Helga, an unhappily-married couple who presided over a chaotically awful hotel called 'Zum letzten Kliff' which was relocated to a North Sea island called Sylt (pronounced 'Zoolt'). The hotel also featured a young waitress called Polly, while the Manuel character was reinvented as a waiter named Igor from the Republic of Kazakhstan.

It never caught on in Germany, perhaps because it didn't include the phrase which anyone who has seen the original now uses to sum up the terrible anxiety we all have about trying, and failing, to not say the wrong thing: 'Don't mention the war!' It was so tasteless, it was hilarious.

 

 

I don't care if you don't care for it. Who won the bloody war, anyway?

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Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)

 

 

Uncertainty is a universal human predicament: 'the future’s not ours to see', as this song, popular in the 1950s, put it. In Germany, a whole generation grew up with the refrain in their ears - in German, of course: ""Was kann schöner sein / Viel schöner als Ruhm und Geld? / Für mich gibt's auf dieser Welt / Doch nur dich allein! / Was kann schöner sein?"

 

 

And what could've been more uncertain than growing up in post-war Germany? Perhaps that's why this song was so popular: it reflected resignation, acceptance, sometimes even optimism about the future; in any case, its fatalism made light of the dark situation we all were in.

Even after the more existential worries have been taking care of - food, a roof over our head, a job, etc. - we still worry. I certainly did as no period of my life was ever totally free of dread-filled apprehensions.

What we seldom ever get around to doing – once the dreaded event is past – is to pause and compare the scale of the worry with what actually happened in the end. We are too taken up with the next topic of alarm ever to return for a "worry audit". If we did, a strange realisation would dawn on us: that our worries are nearly always completely – and deeply – out of line with reality. Extended out across a year, such a "worry audit" would, I am sure, yield similar conclusions. Perhaps the world is not – for all its dangers – as awful as we presume. Perhaps most of the drama is ultimately unfolding only in our own minds.

Looking back over a lifetime of worrying about the future, it helps to remember Mark Twain’s famous dictum: ‘I have lived through many disasters; only a few of which actually happened’. "Que Sera, Sera."

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The poem of my life

 

 

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past.

Images of the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realise the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveller. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold — for it's a commercial we've been watching — the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" - routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled" - by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognise the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognise any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognise a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken", and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture — and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem.

A poem which almost everyone gets wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken" — not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less travelled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." The road he will later call less travelled is actually the road equally travelled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

With so many forks in my path, with so many opportunities gained and lost, with some fifty job relocations across fifteen countries, "The Road Not Taken" became my favourite poem ever since I discovered it ages and ages ago. During all this time it served me as a means of my self-deception before becoming the source of all my regrets as well as my comfort in old age. It's the poem of my life. Thank you, Robert Frost.

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