A friend just emailed me this receipt for a Hawaiian pizza at the Basic Goodness Pizzeria in Tofino in British Columbia in Canada.
Twenty dollars for two pale ales seems expensive but what would make me choke is the extra one percent on top of it to support Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation's vision to conserve and revitalise Tribal parks and culture.
Am I hearing VOICEs in my head or is this what's going to happen here?
My first landfall in Australia and for some 229 other "Auswanderer" aboard the ship FLAVIA was Sydney. Together with another young German I ventured just far enough from the ship to explore the Rocks and to sit on the steps leading up to the Harbour Bridge.
We still had some distance to go before we would finally disembark in Melbourne and be processed through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, but we had already decided there and then to come back to Sydney and to that very spot to wait there every Sunday for the other one to turn up.
That was in August 1965, and I never did return to Sydney until a year later the ANZ Bank, for whom I had begun to work in Canberra, sent me on a two-week training course at their Haymarket staff training centre.
The next time I was in Sydney was in 1972 when Camp Catering Services, whom I had helped to set up their catering operations on Bougainville Island in New Guinea, transferred me to their Crows Nest head office as their Group Financial Controller, during which time I lived in a ramshackle boarding-house at Blues Point with views of the bridge at which I had promised to meet up again with the other young German.
My final - and longest - stay in Australia's famous "Harbour City" was in 1985 after I had come back from my last overseas assignment in Saudi Arabia and Greece, and thought that Sydney would be the answer to all my prayers. It wasn't! Contrary to what former prime minister Paul Keating once said, I preferred to camp out and left after six months.
Reading about Sydney in Louis Nowra's book "Sydney - A Biography" was far more interesting and a lot easier than actually living there, and I learned a great deal about some of the buildings and places that I quite thoughtlessly and indeed ignorantly walk past back in 1972 and 1985.
What I still don't know is how many Sundays the other young German may have sat on those Harbour Bridge stairs waiting for me to turn up.
Wheelbarrows are said to have been invented by the Chinese - along with gunpowder, paper, seismoscopes, paper currency, magnetic compasses, crossbows, and many other things - which may explain Padma's enthusiasm to shift the twelve tonnes of dirt I bought last week.
While I was otherwise engaged - all right, you guessed it, I was reading! - Padma single-handedly spread a good portion of those twelve tonnes along the edge of what is euphemistically known as "our tennis-court".
Anyone for tennis?
Inside a book are arranged these twenty-six little marks in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand. It's truly astonishing to see what these twenty-six little marks can do.
In Shakespeare's hands they became "Hamlet". Mark Twain wound them into "Huckleberry Finn". James Joyce twisted them into "Ulysses". Gibbon pounded them into "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". John Milton shaped them into "Paradise Lost".
The alphabet is arguably mankind's greatest invention but because we use it ourselves on a daily basis, we somehow take it for granted. Just think how much information you have acquired and dispensed through the writing of words made up of letters. Imagine if you had been restricted to communicating only with those who were in the same place at the same time as you? That was the reality for the human race until only about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, a tiny percentage of our time on earth. It is perhaps no coincidence that the evolution of the human race from just another band of hunter-gatherers competing with many other species for survival to the dominant one on the planet has occurred during the period in which we have developed the ability to communicate complex concepts over the limitations of space and time.
My favourite quote is from Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos": "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
The one thing that bothers me is that I’m going to die with so many books still unread that I have always wanted to read.
Another week, another Monday! We'll spend our usual two hours in God's wading pool before Padma goes shopping at ALDI and I rehome some books from VINNIES and the Salvos.
It was a sunny but cold Sunday - still no rain with our tanks are running low! - and I stayed close to the fireplace and binge-watched a couple of DVDs while Padma had coffee with friends at Nelligen's River Cafe.
I watched "A Merry War" which is a movie adaptation of George Orwell's much lesser-known book "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and Oliver Stone's film "JFK" about the assassination of John F. Kennedy which prompted me to follow it up with this excellent documentary on YouTube:
My last job in town for the day will be to queue up at Centrelink with the rest of the unwashed to have my pulse taken so as to certify on the annual "Lebensbescheinigung" that I'm still alive and entitled to receive my German pension which was recently increased to €113.83 a month.
Living the life of Riley!
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.
For a translation, click here.
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.
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.
