Taking another dive into past memories

Hubert Hofer on left (and on top of Pandora's anchor in the photo), Ben Cropp on right

 

Pandora's box (which was really a large jar) is part of Greek mythology. Today it is an idiom meaning "Any source of great and unexpected troubles", or, alternatively, "A present which seems valuable but which in reality is a curse". "To open a can of worms" would be an even more colloquial equivalent.

Ben Cropp had certainly gone to great and fully expected troubles to locate the wreck of HMS Pandora which on the 28th of August 1791 hit a reef, keeled over and sank on what is now known as Pandora Reef, 120 km east of Cape York. Of course, as we all know, HMS Pandora has since become synonymous with the latter-day Pandora's Box which held fourteen of the Bounty prisoners. For the full story, click here.

For the full story of how in 1977 Ben Cropp discovered HMS Pandora, and the many subsequent dives on the wreck by him and Hubert Hofer, you may have to travel to Cooktown where Hubert lives now and were both recently met up to take another dive into their past memories.

Of course, Ben Cropp is the Australian documentary filmmaker who is already famous enough to warrant his own Wikipedia page. As for his many documentaries, simply do a search on Youtube - click here.

Hubert Hofer has been working on his 15 minutes of fame ever since he became part of the "Merauke Five". What makes them both interesting to me is that Hubert spent half a lifetime working on Thursday Island where I worked for a very "character-forming" year in 1977, and that Ben was born on Buka Island in New Guinea which I never visited but for whose Mr Meyer on Kessa Plantation I did the books when working for a firm of chartered accountants in Rabaul. It's a small world indeed!

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Another inside job

 

Living on an acreage is a work-in-progress. Yesterday I started on a wooden arbor with inbuilt benches above the top of the staircase leading down to the pond. I used the old 3-4-5 rule - thanks, Pythagoras! - to peg out the square and set the footings in concrete, but today it rains and it's too wet to continue, so I did an inside job.

There's never enough shelf space in a workshop to store in an accessible and visible manner the many things that are needed and that may come in handy one day, and there's never any ready-made shelving that fits into any given space, so I made my own. Four hours later it was done!

I'm sure, all that new and still empty shelf space will fill up in no time!

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The Silent Traveller

 

Chiang Yee, a Chinese born in Jiujiang in 1903, wrote and illustrated a beautiful series of books under the nom de plume "The Silent Traveller". The first of these was "The Silent Traveller in London" (actually, it was preceded by "The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland", but the London book set the benchmark for the series).

Yee's appeal was based on his unusual way of looking at the world. He interpreted the everyday with a 'positive curiosity': he was acutely aware that even the most mundane of activities - from washing clothes to walking dogs - could become a subject of bewildering fascination when observed through the eyes of a stranger.

Apart from London, he wrote books about the Yorkshire Dales, Oxford, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, Japan, and New York.

 

Des, to illuminate the strangeness of your new surroundings, you want to read this book on www.archive.org (SIGN UP - it's free! - then LOG IN and BORROW)

 

Chiang Yee died in 1977 and thus left it to me to engage in some quiet observations to illuminate the strangeness of my own new surroundings and write the final book in his series, "The Silent Traveller in Nelligen".

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The road almost travelled

 

The nice people at the GRASS ROOTS Magazine have helped to track down for me a "grassified" advertisement which almost changed my life all those many years ago in 1985 when I had just come back from my last overseas assignment in Greece.

There I was, tucked away in a tiny flat in McMahons Point, working twice as hard (which I didn't mind!) but earning only half as much (which I did mind!) of what I used to earn in Greece when looking after a fleet of ships carrying commodities to Saudi Arabia. Living almost next to the Sydney Harbour Bridge made it even more tempting to want to jump off it! But what was the alternative? An alternative lifestyle?

Then I picked up a GRASS ROOTS Magazine at the local newsagency and in it found a "grassified" advertisement by Two Waters Farm. It pressed all the buttons: get away from it all, live a simpler life, new friends ...

Unlike the advertisement above which appeared (again) some months later, the one I read (and which GRASS ROOTS' friendly Emma Jameison may still locate) sounded even more evocative and was signed off by a Uta Langer to whom I wrote and who replied and who shortly afterwards stood on my doorstep, having hitchhiked from Tabulam to Lismore from where she had taken the train to Sydney to renew her passport at the German Consulate. Between one (former) German and another, we hit it off well and the thought grew stronger to move to Two Waters Farm.

A "mud map" of the eleven allotments of Two Waters Farm

Interestingly, it had not yet been registered as a co-operative when I answered their advertisement

 

Of course, those were the days before the internet and so the only way to check it out was to go there. What delayed my reconnaissance long enough was her warning that this was serious 4-wheel-drive country and I would not be able to drive all the way to it in my then NISSAN Stanza.

As I wrote, it delayed me long enough for something else to turn up - see here - because, as the saying goes, "Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans". Perhaps, more to the point, I should've remembered the first rule of holes, "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!", because more recent "diggings" revealed an even deeper hole than I would have been able to get myself out of later.

 

Driving towards Two Waters Farm

Driving away from Two Waters Farm
A Derek Crawford uploaded these clips on YouTube
The (then?) owner of the property lives (lived?) here and here
which at one time - before or after this video? - was advertised for sale here

Driving out of Two Waters Farm for the last time
The narrator and videomaker is - I think - this guy

 

Never mind the prefix "funny"; what about the offending apostrophe in "Water's"? Another road almost travelled! I stopped digging just in time.

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P.S. In recent years, more shares in the Two Waters Farm co-operative have come up for sale here and here and here and here and here (which is Lot 10, I think, which is the property in the above videos, I think), and Lot 3 here and here and here and here and here and Lot 8 here and Lot 9 here and here and here and Lot 11 here and here and here. Many dreams have been dreamed and many dreams have been shattered.

 

I've just caught it!

 

Trying to keep warm, I was standing with my bum against the fireplace when I saw in the distance a white delivery van outside the gate. "My mousetraps are here!!!" I rushed out before it would drive off again, leaving me with no more than a notice to pick them up from the post office.

I had bought two mousetraps in April - see here - but was left with just one after a neighbour had asked me to let him have the second one as he had a mouse plague at his house and BUNNINGS had totally sold out.

This newfangled trap works so well that we've had no mice for a month until one night, as we were watching VERA, we saw out of the corner of our eyes the tiniest mouse we had ever seen flit across the kitchen floor and straight into the mousetrap - WITHOUT THE TRAPDOOR SHUTTING!

It nibbled on the peanut butter inside, then came back out again, disappeared behind the fridge, then came back for a second helping and a third. It simply was too tiny and too light to trigger the trapdoor!

There'll be no VERA tonight but I hope the mouse will be back because my new mousetrap is a tinier version, tailormade for this tiny mouse. I've already caught the van; all I have to do now is catch the mouse!

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