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Another relaxing morning in the warm-water pool until our "Waschfrauenhände" told us it was time to leave. Then picked up a small book parcel from the post office containing two recently ordered books, and a bit of light reading in the shape of "The Little Paris Bookshop" and the DVD "The Killing Season" about Labor's Rudd/Gillard years, from Vinnies.
We had lunch at the New Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant, where I almost choked on my stubbie of Victoria Bitter as I looked out the window and discovered that I was imbibing in an alcohol-free zone.
If the rain, the mud, the dust, the heat, and the sheer boredom didn't get you down, it was the unrelenting routine of working ten hours a day six days a week, building the largest copper mine in the world on the tropical island of Bougainville. [for more, click here]
Was it any wonder we dreamt of escaping to Kieta for a scent of the big wide world beyond?
Once we had, by hook or by crook, hitched a ride, our first stop was the waterfront shop of Greens, a veritable Aladdin's cave of desirable merchandise, from t-shirts to bilum bags to postcards depicting Highland 'meris' suckling their babies on one side and a pig on the other. Then it was time for liquid refreshments at the Kieta Hotel, or in the unpretentious yacht club, and, much later, on Arovo Island.
Kieta Yacht Club
Then, Kieta had a population of just over a thousand. There were thirteen trade stores, a supermarket, cinema shows at the Kieta Club and the nearby high school, two hotels (including the newly opened Davara at Toniva), a deepwater harbour, three banks and enough traffic to cause city-style congestion.
Kieta today
What's left of it today? Nothing! Except for the memories which will stay alive for as long as we stay alive! You know, I'd rather look back on life and say, "I can't believe I did all that" instead of "If only I had".
While on a sailing holiday off the coast of Germany, a young English yachtsman has a run-in with a local German captain. His suspicions aroused, he calls in his old friend from the Foreign Office and the two set sail again, only to find that the Germans are planning an invasion of Britain and they are the only two who can stop them.
Watch it while it's still on Youtube. If you're too late, you can always read the book here. [SIGN UP - it's free! - LOG IN and BORROW]
I was searching on YouTube for a copy of Liz Thompson's video "Breaking Bows and Arrows" - click here - when I came across this equally fascinating 45-minute clip of an 84-day voyage in an open dinghy from Sydney to Port Moresby via Thursday Island in 1978.
What makes this video so special for me is that it shows both Thursday Island and Port Moresby's Royal Papuan Yacht Club just the way they were when I used to live and work there in the 'seventies.
This is for you, Hubert in Cooktown, and all those who shared my time in Port Moresby in the days when we were still young and full of hope.
I've just been watching "Never on Sunday" again to remind me of a time when not every day was the same as every other day, and when I still believed I was actually 'going somewhere' (like a bus), and when I still thought my life would eventually 'add up to something' (as if anyone were counting).
Actually, it was a toss-up between "Never on Sunday" and "Lawrence of Arabia", because both are re-enactments of sorts of my time with the same employer - perhaps the longest I have ever been with the same employer outside my articled years - and "Never on Sunday" won out.
Until that fateful year when I finally returned from my last overseas assignment in Greece after a misdiagnosed case of acute homesickness, life had been like scenes from a movie, no beginnings, no real endings, just fade-outs, as I had always feared the danger of returning to a life of constant sameness, and preferred to linger in the climate of memory.
After a couple of false starts, first in Townsville and then in Sydney, I settled in my old house in Canberra and took up computer programming and lawnmowing which seemed to suit my always restless disposition (the first part, not the lawnmowing!) as each week brought a new client and a new challenge, even though the location remained the same.
For years I had thought that there must be something wrong with me, since all the other people around me seemed to live contented lives in their assigned slots, or, as Somerset W. Maugham so well described it at the beginning of his short story "The Lotuseater":
Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. [read the rest of the story here]
That was until I tried to trace on realestate.com.au the whereabouts of some of my former neighbours who at the time seemed like the epitome of "settledness": like that nice couple across the street from me at 42 Wackett Street in Pallarenda who I waved to each morning from my balcony as they drove off to work while I was stuck at home with no work prospects, trying to lose myself by reading Leon Uris's "The Haj" from cover to cover. I still have a photo of me reading it on the balcony, and when I recently saw a copy of it at Vinnies, it all came back to me.
They invited me several times to dinner during which they expressed their regrets that their daughter lived in far-away Tasmania (which the implied conclusion left unspoken) and that I should enjoy my newfound sabbatical since I would soon enough be back in work (which I was but I couldn't see it then). I left for Sydney only a couple of months later in mid-1985. Did they stay in their "settledness"? NO! They sold in 1989!
The neighbours to the left of me at 41 Wackett Street owned a chicken place in town and repeatedly invited me over to the pool they had only recently added to their backyard. As he put it, "We put every dollar we can spare back into our house", suggesting to me that they meant to stay put. Did they stay in their "settledness"? NO! They sold in 1988!
I repeated the same exercise with my neighbours at McMahons Point in Sydney and at Kambah in Canberra with similar results. None stayed in their apparent "settledness" for all that much longer than I did which makes me feel that there wasn't all that much wrong with me after all.
In fact, I am starting to feel that there's something wrong with me now that I have been at "Riverbend" for twenty-nine going on thirty years. Never in a month of Sundays would I have thought this would happen.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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