Why Germans don't play Scrabble

 

 

If you think that "Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih" is huge, try "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" with not a hyphen in sight, except if the word is split across two lines. And we can't even compound the word 'meat pie'!

Perhaps there's a good reason why we don't write 'meatpie' or 'polopony', the latter looking like a misspelt 'polyphony' but simply meaning 'polo pony'. Like the ancient Romans who wrote without spaces between words in a style called scriptio continua (continuous script) to save expensive writing materials, Germans to this day write compound words without spaces or hyphens, even though today writing materials are considerably cheaper than they were in ancient Roman times.

The hyphen leads a double life: it is used not just to break words into syllables but to tie two or more words together, in the formation of compounds. Here are three compounds: school bus, bus driver, school-bus driver. This is one of the simpler uses of the hyphen turning compound nouns into adjectives. Ice cream is two words as a noun but hyphenated as an adjective in ice-cream cone. Ice cream itself remains non-hyphenated - this last word, ironically, being hyphenated.

As for word breaks, consider the word 'cashier': 'cash-ier', as a noun, seems obvious, as it means 'one that has charge of money', but 'ca-shier' is a transitive verb, meaning 'to dismiss from service'. It happens again with the word 'bumper': who doesn't know that it breaks after the 'bump'? But divided into 'bum-per', it becomes an adjective meaning 'unusually large', as in ' bumber crop'.

 

You're so lucky! There's one online at www.archive.org

 

By way of this long weekend's entertainment, I have just read Edward N. Teall's "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in his Place). It may be the only full-length work on hyphens ever published in the English language.

As an enthusiastic reader of all of W. Somerset Maugham's novels and short stories, I keep coming across his spelling of 'to-day' with a hyphen. His writing was of a different time, and language changes as do its rules, and I am comforted by Teal's final, reassuring paragraph:

 

 

There should be a German book on the use of hyphens as well. I mean, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz would be so much easier to read with at least three hyphens judiciously inserted, even for someone like me who served his articles with the much hyphenated Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft.

 

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Dumb and Dumber

 

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand-children's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

So wrote Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark" in 1995, twenty-seven years ago. How prescient was that!

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org
or listen to the audiobook here

 

And he continued: "The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one video cassette rental in America is the movie 'Dumb and Dumber'

 

 

To which I can add only four words: Not only in America!

 

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Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein ...

 

 

ERIKA is a German marching song, mainly associated with Nazi Germany. The marching song is from the perspective of a soldier who is longing for his sweetheart back home. The theme of the song is based on Erika being both a common German female name and the Latin name (Erica) of the heather plant that grows on the heath.

 

 

The above postcard features only the first stanza of the song. The full song is written below:

 

Erika On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Eagerly a hundred thousand little bees, swarm around … Erika. For her heart is full of sweetness, a tender scent escapes her blossom-gown. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Back home, there lives a blonde little maiden and she’s called … Erika. That girl is my faithful little darling and my joy, Erika! When the heather blooms in a reddish violet, I sing her this song in greeting. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. In my room, there also blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. Already In the grey of dawn, as it does at dusk, It looks at me, Erika! And then it’s to me as if it’s saying aloud: “Are you thinking of your fiancée/bride?” Back at home, a maiden weeps for you and she’s called … Erika.

 

Before I could become a teenaged "Halbstarker", I had already joined the "Fahrenden Gesellen", who, on hikes and in camps, taught me my self-reliance, which has kept me in good stead throughout all my life.

 

'Yours truly' on the left

 

And, yes, we marched as we sang, and we sang as we marched, which included such old favourites as "Erika", because those were the 1950s and 1960s, a time well before the zenith of German self-flagellation.

 

 

Remember Oskar Matzerath? In Günter Grass's "Blechtrommel", on his third birthday, Oskar Matzerath, disgusted by the mundane and hypocritical adult world around him, throws himself down the cellar stairs to halt his physical development, remaining the size of a three-year-old child while his mind matures. He uses his glass-shattering vocal shrieks against anyone who tries to take away his red-and-white toy tin drum, which he constantly beats in protest against society.

Where, in today's brow-beaten Germany, are the people who are prepared to halt their personal and professional development to "beat the drum" in protest against what is happening in their country?

 

 

I am no longer a German and I no longer live there to have to witness the Untergang des Abendlandes, and no-one can stop me from singing "Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein, und das heißt: Erika ..."

 

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A permanent solution to a temporary problem

 

 

I was phoning a neighbour across the river to check how much rain their gauge had registered after last night's downpour, when she asked me, "Have you heard?" "Heard what?" I said. "Yesterday the postman found our neighbour dead. He had hanged himself!"

If this keeps going, little Nelligen will soon need its very own suicide help-line because this has been the fourth suicide since I've lived here.

The first one was a young bloke in Nelligen Place who shot himself after his girlfriend had left him. The second one was a neighbour up the lane whose wife left for Sydney to visit her daughter. Before she left, she'd told him, "When I come back, I want you gone!" So he put one end of a hose onto the exhaust pipe, started the engine, and put the other end of the hose and himself into the car. He was gone alright. The third one was a gunsmith who was professional to the end: he shot himself. And now this Indian rope trick by someone who hadn't even been an Indian!

I have never liked the word 'suicide'. Nor have those who committed it "passed on" or "gone to a better place". They killed themselves and are dead! FULL STOP! Germans used to call it "Selbstmord", literally "self-murder", but they, too, seem to have gone soft and now call it "Suizid".

Why not call it even more euphemistically 'a permanent solution to a temporary problem'? If you have a temporary problem, don't call the suicide help-line, call me! I will come over with a couple of beers and talk and talk and talk so much that you'll kill me instead of yourself!

 

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P.S. As for that offending hyphen in "Help-Line", I am right now reading "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)", a book written entirely about the hyphen. More about that tomorrow. I know you can't wait!

 

To say nothing of the cockroaches and the diarrhoea

 

 

In 1987 I answered an advert for a six-month electrical position at OK Tedi. I guess they must have been desperate as they took me. I flew to Cairns to catch the twice-weekly charter flight to Tabubil, the township for the mine. The landing was a bit frightening, with high mountains on either side and in front, as the plane entered thick clouds, which only cleared just before the wheels touched down.

Dongas, identical to those I had lived in on Bougainville Island, had second, peaked aluminum roofs over them because of the heavy rains during most afternoons. The rainfall was approx. 8000 mm a year, and when it rained it was deafening on the aluminum roof. Offices were a selection of sheds, and any communication with the outside world was mainly by fax from the main office which was just another, bigger shed.

But the food was absolutely woeful – unbelievable! Very little came in by air. Most was shipped from Australia and was still in perfect condition when it was dropped onto barges at the mouth of the Fly River. But the tug-and-barge trip, which took several days for the 800 kilometres from the mouth of the river to the small town of Kiunga (the riverport for the OK Tedi mine), usually ended in disaster. The crews were Nationals, and either the diesel generators connected to the refrigerated containers broke down or, more often, the diesel for the generator was stolen when the barge guards were asleep. In the tropical temperatures, the frozen food had defrosted long before the barges reached Kiunga, and long before being trucked up the mountain to the township of Tabubil.

The cooks did what they could, but the meat and fish were black. I never touched them. I lived on baked beans and locally baked bread for breakfast and, on alternate days, tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Lunch was tea and plain cake (the milk was powdered, so that was OK); dinner was tinned peaches or apricots and anything else that looked edible. Of course, there were plenty of cockroaches running around. Local vegetables caused so many cases of diarrhea that the cooks had to wash them in a weak solution of Dettol.

Because of a mix-up I found that I was assigned to the instrument section, while another new guy a couple of weeks later, who was an instrument bloke, was allocated to electrical. We suggested that we swap positions but that was too difficult, so in instrument I remained. Actually, it worked out well as the two of us in the small instrument section had to travel down to the port of Kiunga regularly. The distance from Tabubil to Kiunga was about 120 kilometres, mainly up and down hills, except for some 20 kilometres of flat before the port. The road was metalled and reasonably wide, so there was no trouble when meeting another 4WD Toyota travelling in the opposite direction.

Trucks were another story: the company’s fleet were "Pacific" trucks made in Canada , which were very rugged prime movers. These were based in Kiunga and a convoy of some eight to a dozen, all driven by locals, would leave early each morning for Tabubil or on to the mine itself, and return in the afternoon. They would drive like maniacs on the downhill sections, as knew every bump in the road, and cut every corner. Early in the morning before driving down to Kiunga, I would ring the dispatcher who would give me the number of trucks in the convoy. Driving down the mountain range, I had a rough idea where I would meet the convoy, so some distance ahead I would stop and switch off the engine, and, if I heard nothing, would continue for a bit and listen again. In the quiet mountain air, once the truck engines were heard, I would quickly get off the road by driving into a drainage ditch. If it was an uphill section, the trucks were slow, but if it was flat or downhill, they were anything but slow. First, an Isuzu truck, acting as a lead vehicle, would rush past. Then I would count the following trucks. The Isuzu maintenance truck with spare tires would make up the end of the convoy. More than once, a missing truck and no maintenance truck meant there had been a breakdown, and so I would carefully drive on and keep listening for the missing truck, which eventually would drive past me just as crazy as if it had still been part of the convoy.

After finishing my work at Kiunga, I would head back up the mountain which was just as interesting, as trucks generally returned empty and going downhill fast, so that there was still a lot more stopping and listening, and, invariably, there were also heavy afternoon rains.

When I finished my contract, even though I was offered more work on higher pay, I'd had enough. I did not go back to Australia but went to Port Moresby and then to Indonesia and on to Singapore to work there. I have never been back to PNG, and it's not on my bucket list."

 

After more than forty years, and now living in Malaysia and nearing his dotage, an old workmate from my years on the Bougainville Copper Project, Roy Goldsworthy, put pen to paper to write the above article. It describes his six months in 1987 at the Ok Tedi mine when it was still under construction and didn't look like anything in this corporate video:

 

 

I had come to Port Moresby in 1982 to assist in the setting-up of the tug-and-barge operation that would supply the Ok Tedi Mine - see here - just after Bechtel Corporation, who would built the mine, had arrived.

I had worked for Bechtel Corporation during the construction phase of the Bougainville Copper Project ten years before, and when it turned out that my boss from those early days, Sid Lhotka, was again in charge of the accounting side of the Ok Tedi Project, I was keen to join him.

He and I and my then wife had dinner at the Papuan Hotel in Port Moresby, where he told me that the Ok Tedi Project was so rough that they only hired single staff. For a short moment I regretted being married, but having read Roy Goldsworthy's article, I know now that it saved me from eating lots of baked beans and tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, to say nothing of the cockroaches and the diarrhea (although I prefer "diarrhea" spelt the English way which is "diarrhoea" because it really looks like I've completely lost control of my vowels).

 

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What time is it?

 

 

Don't forget that Daylight Saving Time in New South Wales begins this Sunday, 4 October 2026, at 2:00 am, when clocks move forward one hour to 3:00 am.

First popularised during World War I and World War II to conserve fuel and lighting energy, Daylight Saving Time was meant to shift an hour of sunlight from the morning into the evening. Of course, only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom and have a longer blanket.

I had better write it down on a piece of paper so I won't forget it!

 

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I talk to the trees ... that's why they put me away

 

 

As someone who almost grew up to the sounds of The Goon Show on the steam-driven wireless, I must confess that I've been a lifelong fan of the participants in the show.

Particularly of Eccles when he sang I talk to the trees .. that's why they put me away. My immediate boss in the ANZ Bank, John Burke, would occasionally sing it under his breath when things got a bit mad at work and just before reaching for another BEX Powder. I thought it funny then, not knowing it was a parody of the Paint Your Wagon tune.

I no longer think it's funny because every morning, cup of tea in hand, I wander among the trees of "Riverbend" and do my own impersonation of Eccles (I tried to do a 'Squint' Eastwood impression but didn't quite manage the spaghetti-western look).

♫  I talk to the trees ..♪. that's why they put me away  ♫ 

 

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And Their Ghosts May Be Heard ...

 

Between 1629 and 1727 at least six Dutch ships were marooned or lost sailors on the west coat of Western Australia. What was the fate of those shipwrecked survivors? Did they die in misery soon after being marooned? Or did they intermarry with local Aborigines and leave traces - their ghosts - in an entirely new cultural group? Stimulating and thought provoking, 'And Their Ghosts May Be Heard ...' is a fascinating account of the fortunes of Australia's first white settlers.

 

That sounds very interesting. Haven’t heard of it before!" wrote an old friend from my days on Thursday Island who now lives in Cooktown and has been into searching for and diving on old shipwrecks for half his life, mostly in the Torres Strait.

Sorry, mate, but by the time that I have packed and posted to you my own copy of "And Their Ghosts May Be Heard ...", it will have cost me about as much as the same book now selling on ebay, so go for it.

However, I can share a review by Edward Duyker in the August 1994 edition of the Sutherland Shire Historical Society's quarterly bulletin:

 

"In 1616 the Dutch East India Company adopted a faster southern sailing route to the Indies in order to take advantage of the westerlies. Without accurate chronometers to determine longitude, it is surprising that there were not more ships such as the Batavia, Vergulde Draeck, Zuytdorp and Zeewijk which simply crashed into the coast of Western Australia between 1629 and 1727. In recent years these wrecks have been discovered and a rich trove of artefacts brought to the surface. The story does not end here. There is evidence that some seventy-five shipwrecked Dutch sailors and passengers made it to shore. Unfortunately they left few remnants of their presence beyond the immediate vicinity of the wrecks. There has long been speculation that these Dutch castaways did not perish of thirst and starvation, but melted into the local Aboriginal population. Respected observers such as the explorer A. C. Gregory and the anthropologist Daisy Bates fuelled this speculation with reports that the skin colour of the western Aborigines was suggestive of mixed racial origins. Rupert Gerritsen has taken up the challenge of this mystery and sought to prove that the Dutch castaways not only survived but engendered a unique local culture. In support of his case he has meticulously reviewed the available archaeological, anthropological, historical and linguistic evidence. The result is an impressive scholarly work, but one which remains unconvincing. The Nanda people may be different from their neighbours, but there are many sharp cultural and linguistic contrasts among neighbours in this world. The continent of Australia is no exception. Gerritsen makes much of the presence and use of the yam Dioscorea hastifolia, suggesting it may have been introduced and cultivated by the Dutch. The portrait of semi-sedentary Nanda hunter gatherers feasting on vast fields of yam reminded me of the riverine seed-collecting economy of the Bagundji along the Darling river (NSW). Early explorers commented on the harvesting, threshing and milling of native millet by the Bagundji almost as if these people were primitive cultivators. None suggested that these proto-agricultural techniques, in sharp contrast with the arid-land economy of the Bagundji's near neighbours the Wangaaybuwan, were a result of instruction by European castaways! Similarly the low stone-walled Aboriginal huts by Lake Condah in Victoria are a far cry from the popular image of the sparse material culture of the Australian nomads. Skin colour also varied greatly in Australia. In 1772 Marion Dufresne's officers were somewhat surprised to discover that the Tasmanian Aborigines were really reddish-brown and that it was only smoke and dirt that made them look so dark. Gerritsen is clearly a sensitive and sincere researcher who seeks to avoid ethnocentrism, but I couldn't help thinking (perhaps uncharitably) of the arguments of Erich von Daniken, who, in 'Chariots of the Gods', sought to explain the cultural achievements of Ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian America as a result of extraterrestrial intervention! In primary school most of us were taught how the words 'beef' and 'mutton' entered the English language from the Norman French words boeuf and mouton. The argument is compellingly obvious. Gerritsen also focuses on individual words, but it is stretching a point, even a coincidence, to suggest that the Nanda word for wooden bowl battje is the same as the Dutch word for a small bath badje or that a digging stick wippa is the same as a Dutch word for a small plank wipje . Far more appropriate Dutch words for these two objects are respectively kom or beker and stok or staf. They barely need translation for an English reader to realise the tenuous nature of Gerritsen's case. Despite the author's lack of firm archaeological and documentary evidence, 'And Their Ghosts May Be Heard' is a stimulating and thought-provoking work. I was reminded of my first reading of Kenneth McIntyre's equally passionate book 'The Secret Discovery of Australia' which sought to prove that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach this continent. I was not convinced, but I learned a great deal from the attempted proof. And archaeology may yet give both Gerritsen and McIntyre the last laugh."

 

 

The book begins in 1629 with the story of the BATAVIA. Many books have been written about her. The above video gives a short summary; many more are available on YouTube. Just type 'Batavia ship wreck' and click.

 

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Between You & Me

 

Waiting for my lunch at the Moruya Bowling Club. "No rush! I have plenty to read!"

 

My fondest hope is that just from looking at the title you will learn to say fearlessly "between you and me" (not "I"), whether or not you actually read this book and penetrated to the innards of the objective case.

I had been meaning to buy it for some time, and there it was, almost staring at me from the bookshelf at Vinnies, priced at just two dollars, which allowed me to also buy "The Naked Heart - The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud", "Under the Volcano - The Story of Bali", Adam Spencer's "World of Numbers" (of course; I am an accountant, after all), and "And Their Ghosts May Be Heard ..." which is about castaways that arrived on Australia's shores before the First Fleet.

And while I was stocking up on Australiana, I also picked up the DVDs "Kakadu - Where Man Meets Wild and Nature Calls the Shots" ...

 

 

... and "Kokoda", where you can smell the blood, sweat and terror, and feel the wet, oppressive heat and empathise with the bone-deep exhaustion. I had half-walked and half-stumbled it but that was in peacetime in 1974 when I worked as internal auditor for AIR NIUGINI in Port Moresby in New guinea. I was fifty years younger then than I am today, and still stupid enough to push my body beyond its limits.

 

 

These days, an armchair and a quiet weekend is all I want to watch the DVDs and read the newly-acquired books. I think I start with "Between You & Me". And, between you and me, so can you by clicking here.

 

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I'm a dawn watcher

 

 

There was a time when I stayed up to watch the sun rise; these days I get up for it: often as early as four, or five, but never later than six o'clock. I am addicted to sunrise, that mysterious still time before reality is revealed, before shapes emerge, when everything floats nebulously in that queer light that makes you think of the beginning of time.

Long before the huge garbage truck comes hissing down the lane on a Friday morning, long before the efficiency of the plumbing in the house is put noisily to the test, I sit on the verandah with a big thick mug of tea and watch the world reveal itself to be pretty much what it was yesterday.

I am lucky to have watched the sun rise from atop the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, from tropical islands in the South Seas and bobbing fishing boats in the Aegean Sea, and I shall never forget watching the sun rise from the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion.

I don't know whether it is true that dawn is the time when the majority of people choose to enter the world or to leave it, but it does seem to be a suitable hour. I should count myself lucky to push the   Publish   button on my last blog as I watch the sun turn the Clyde into a river of gold.

Until that happens, I shall continue to be a dawn watcher. It's why I'm so hopeless in the afternoon.

 

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The Jennings Germans

 

Klaus Scharrer, at 98 years of age, the last of the Jennings Germans in Canberra

 

The fingerprints of the ‘Jennings Germans’ are all over Canberra. They were some one hundred and fifty German carpenters who came to Canberra in the early 1950s to build 1850 homes for construction company AV Jennings.

After travelling halfway around the world, these young men began to build not only houses, but also a life for themselves. Brick by brick and friendship by friendship, they altered the physical and cultural landscape of Australia's then still quite small capital city and left a legacy that has lasted generations.

During my short time as secretary of the Harmonie German Club in the early 1990s, I still met several of these Jennings Germans, including Hugo Klug whose business I computerised - see here - and Tony Finsterer whom I can blame for now living out my life at "Riverbend". But that's a story for another day after I have translated this blog post into German.

 

Rosa (94) and Klaus Scharrer (98)

 

Today's story is not about Hugo Klug or Tony Finsterer but Klaus Scharrer who, at 98, is the last of the Jennings German carpenters in Canberra.

He will turn 99 in December and until only a few years ago he still made things from timber. One of the last things he made was a display cabinet for the German Club’s 70th anniversary five years ago.

It is a fitting end to a working life that began on the other side of the world and brought him to Canberra at the age of 25, with the skills of a German carpenter and little idea of what would happen next. That was in 1951. Canberra needed houses. Klaus was one of 150 young German tradesmen AV Jennings recruited to help build them.

He can still tell you exactly when he arrived: 10 December. He remembers the five-week voyage, the room at Ainslie Hostel and houses arriving in pieces, their walls ready to be stood up. He didn’t have any grand plan to make Australia home. “I had no plans”, he says.

Almost 75 years later, Klaus is still in Canberra — the last surviving Jennings German living in Canberra. Beside him is Rosa, aged 94, the woman who followed him from Munich in 1957 and began married life with him in a timber garage in Queanbeyan. Between them, they remember a Canberra that sounds almost unimaginable now.

 

Canberra advertising poster, c.1940s

 

"There was nothing here", Rosa said. There was Government House and Old Parliament House. Civic was tiny, with a cinema and little else. On Sundays, almost everything closed. In summer, they could head to the Cotter River for a swim and barely see another person.

Rosa could hardly speak English. Klaus owned a block of land but couldn’t afford to build a house on it. Yet neither talks about those years as particularly hard. Rosa remembers open spaces, warm weather and strangers who said hello. Their story is, in many ways, about how a place becomes home without anyone deciding that it will.

For Klaus, it began with a £125 block of dirt. By 1953, he had left Jennings for a better-paying job at a Queanbeyan joinery when a Russian colleague who spoke German pointed to the vacant land next to his own. The block cost £125. Klaus didn’t have the money, but he could pay it off gradually — whatever he could manage each month. So he bought it. It was a small decision that changed the course of his life. He had arrived in Australia unsure whether he would stay. Now he owned a piece of it.

With help from fellow German carpenters, he built a timber garage on the block. In the next few years he saved enough to travel back to Europe. But Australia was no longer a place he could simply leave behind. “I had a block of land here,” he said. “I had a garage.”

Upon returning to Germany, Klaus stopped in Munich to visit an old friend from Jennings. His friend’s sister, Rosa, was also there. It was carnival time, and Klaus and Rosa went to a dance. About three months later, they were married. Rosa had long been curious about the country that had taken her brother halfway around the world.

“I just wanted to go and see the world,” she said. “That was my dream when my brother left.” When she arrived in Australia in 1957, her husband didn’t have a conventional home waiting for her. He had the garage. There was a bed-sitting area, kitchen bench, table and stove. There was no sewer connection and the toilet was outside. But they had land, and they knew how to build. Their house came together gradually.

“Every so often we bought a bag of cement,” Klaus said. He did the brickwork and stonework himself and, naturally, the carpentry. That was how many young German tradesmen established themselves. After spending their working days building for others, they helped each other put up homes, doing everything from window frames and interiors to painting and brickwork.

Rosa had arrived with almost no English, and one of her first teachers was the greengrocer across the road. She pointed at what she wanted, and he gave her the word. “One lettuce.” The next time, she knew how to ask for lettuce. Then came cucumber, apples and the everyday vocabulary of her new country. She read newspapers, listened to people and learnt from neighbours and their children. Today, the shift is complete: Rosa and Klaus speak mostly in English, even at home and with their family.

Soon Rosa was travelling from Queanbeyan to Manuka to work as a tailor. She made men’s suits, and Canberra’s diplomatic community became part of her clientele. “I made suits for all the embassies,” she said. She remembers one diplomat ordering suit after suit – about ten during his posting.

Australia also felt less formal than the Germany she knew. There, Rosa remembers, people generally waited to be introduced before greeting one another. Here, strangers said hello. “Everybody talks to you. Wherever you go, you say hello, I say hello.” The space struck her too.

In Munich, she remembers a life largely lived in flats. Here, a young carpenter without much money could buy a block and build a house bit by bit. Soon they built the house that welcomed their daughter in 1961.

Their son followed in 1963. For Klaus, work rarely ended at knock-off time. Rosa remembers him and his mates coming home about 5 pm, eating, then heading out again around 6 for contract jobs that could keep them working until 10.

In 1978, after securing a major ABC contract, he established K&R Scharrer Joinery. The business began in a workshop of about 100 sqm and eventually grew into a 600 sqm factory employing five people. He retired in 1994.

Canberra, meanwhile, refused to stand still. The open spaces filled with suburbs. Civic grew. Roads became busier. Rosa sometimes misses the old one. “You could go out to the Cotter River, and you didn’t see a soul,” she said. “I liked it better then than what I do now when I go to Canberra. There’s traffic everywhere.”

 

Mother and daughter returning from a three-month visit to Germany in 1969

 

Germany remained as part of their lives. They went back many times to see family, and the Scharrer family crest still has a place in their home. But they never moved back. Rosa didn’t miss six-month-long German winters. She liked Canberra’s weather, its space and the easy friendliness she had noticed from the beginning.

For Klaus, the answer was similarly uncomplicated. “Life is easier here,” he said. Over the years, Klaus kept track of families of his friends and fellow carpenters who had made the same unlikely journey. But time gradually thinned their numbers. Klaus is now the last surviving Jennings German still living in Canberra. He believes another survivor may be living elsewhere in Australia.

 

The two years passed quickly and before the men knew it their contract was completed. Most had originally planned to return to Germany, but only 25 did so. The rest stayed.

 

On 10 December 2026, 75 years to the day since his group arrived, he plans to gather with descendants of the men who made that journey with him. And Klaus, almost 99, will be the living link to the young carpenters who arrived with their tools and two-year contracts, not knowing how much of their lives would ultimately be built here.

 

 

I checked the website of the National Archives of Australia and found that Klaus hasn't 'claimed' his immigration papers from 1951 yet. For a small handling fee, the archives will digitise and make them available for downloading from their website. Perhaps I should arrange it and give him a big surprise on his 99th birthday on the 24th of December.

 

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The world's most expensive tap washer

 

 

The new tenant moved in and returned the ingoing report just now. She also reported that the kitchen water tap is leaking. I have attached the video for your review", my friendly rental manager emailed me. "Our plumber is working in this area today; we have just requested him to attend ASAP. Trust you are okay with this."

And just to make sure that I fully understood the urgency of the matter, she had also enclosed the above video clip. Of course, I immediately told her to go ahead; after all, how much would it cost to replace the valve in a leaking tap? BUNNINGS sell them at $6.43 for a four-pack.

 

 

Well, I did find out today just much it cost. $246 ! How much I wished I had pursued a lifelong career in plumbing instead of in accounting!

 

 

Of course, I should have remembered the world's most expensive light switch, but I'm getting old and gradually my memory begins to fade.

But not my sarcasm. As I emailed her: "Amanda, I was gobsmacked by the $246 charged for fixing that dripping tap. Could you please at least supply me with a copy of the invoice so that I can frame and hang it on the wall with the inscription 'The world's most expensive tap washer'?"

 

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Eleven square metres per person

 

German Real Estate Advertisement by W&W (RESERVIERT is the equivalent of UNDER OFFER)   3-room unit, 77 square metres, in a much sought-after location in Braunschweig, Cyriaksring 47, for sale at €147,000 This beautiful home unit in the "Luisenhof" complex has been fully renovated and is now much sought-after ... (for the full advertisement - in German - click here)

 

These days you can find anything on the internet. I have just found an advertisement for the sale of the exact same rental unit at # 47 Cyriaksring in my hometown Braunschweig where my parents lived and where I grew up in in the 1950s.

This three-roomed unit (not just bedrooms; in Germany they count all rooms) was home to my father, my stepmother, my stepsister Karin, my stepbrother Borkhardt, myself, and two sub-tenants who were billetted with us by the authorities because of the acute housing shortage in those bombed-out post-war years. Seventy-seven square metres for seven people, eleven square metres per person.

Acute housing shortage, unemployment, no money, and little to eat sum up those dreadful post-war years. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads, even though we had to share that luck with two total strangers.

The advertisement includes a number of photos showing how beautiful everything looks today. The view across the yard is still as it was then, although the metal bars which were used to give carpets a good hiding (vacuum cleaners were unknown) have been replace by kids swings.

 

 

The front door opened onto a small entry hall, next was the kitchen ...

 

The small door on the left opened up to the "Besenkammer" or broom closet

 

... and straight across the one bedroom in which slept my father, my stepmother, Karin, Borkhardt, and I. My oldest brother and sister had already left but where were my two other sisters, Bärbel and Monika?

 

One bedroom for five. How did we all fit in???

 

The bathroom housed the only loo which, with seven people (or was it nine?), was always engaged. The gas-fired hotwater system has gone. It had to be lit with a match - and always ignited with a loud bang - to get any hot water, but nothing else has changed - well, except for the toilet roll on the wall. In my days we cut up the local newspaper and hung it on a hook. I learnt how to read and became a reader sitting on that loo.

 

 

The kitchen has been renovated and now also has a balcony, but the tiny coolroom is still in the left-hand corner as we didn't have fridges then. Nor washing machines; instead, we had a communal laundry in the basement with a huge wood-fired copper kettle which I had to stoke.

We all lived in the warm kitchen where we did our homework, made our own toys out of bits of cardboard and with 'im Falle eines Falles' UHU, and where we spent the long winter nights playing "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht" or chess or cards or Mikado. We were poor but we didn't know it!

 

 

 

The "large" lounge room belonged to our sub-tenants. I still remember two Bavarian zither-players who could play the Harry Lime theme but, fortunately, there was no third man or it would've been really crowded!

 

 

The smaller lounge room was our "gute Stube", the parlour, which was reserved for visitors and our parents' attempt at being bourgeoisie.

Our own furnishings were far more modest, although my father's pride was an ornate 'Schreibtisch', on which stood a large eagle carved out of marble. As a little boy, I had always been fascinated by it. So, decades later, after my father had passed away and I had settled in Australia, I asked my stepsister to ship it to me. I would've loved it to stand on my own 'Schreibtisch' as a reminder of my father and what used to be my modest home but, unfortunately, they already had turned it into cash.

 

 

Thank you, W&W, for this wonderful trip down memory lane - and, by the way, you just took a couple of thousands off QANTAS's bottom-line.

 

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