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; of course, they're now on the internet as well - see here - and still I couldn't find the elusive ad).

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.

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!)

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 had liked to hang 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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I walked this walk ...

 

At 1:27 she just walked past my window without giving me a wave!   😀

 

Forty years ago, I walked this walk every morning, all the way up Blues Point Road, but instead of turning right to the train station, I turned left all the way up to Crows Nest to my new job as "Internal Consultant" with Wormald International.

 

 

It was the year 1985, my very own annus horribilis: I had returned from my last assignment overseas and, in anticipation of continuing the work for my former Saudi boss from home, settled in tropical Townsville. The work never came - well, not until two years later when his brothers Ali and Abdulhameed offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by that time I had grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.

With few other job prospects in Townsville, I hastily relocated to Sydney where I eventually took up this impressive-sounding job which required me to be 'on the road' - or rather 'in the air' as Wormald's operations were spread all over the world - for nine months of the year. After the first rush of adrenalin had passed, I remembered that I had just given up a far more highly-paid overseas job with far greater perks in order to live a 'normal' domesticated life. I promptly resigned and moved to Canberra, where I had taken my first tentative steps as a young migrant twenty years earlier, but not before I had bought this "hole-in-the-wall".

 

Behind that upstairs window was my room with no view

 

Since then, at the end of each month when I receive the rent statement from the agent, I am reminded of those terrible - what? - six or seven months during which everything I did seemed to have gone wrong, including the purchase of this apartment. There had been two on sale, one at the rear overlooking Lavender Bay and offering a glimpse of Sydney Harbour Bridge, and this one facing the street. I chose the one facing the street because I felt lonely and wanted to watch the people walk by on the footpath and the cars driving up the road, the same cars whose noise drove me mad and stole my sleep after I had moved in.

 

In this photo the building is marked with "Blues Point Real Estate"

 

I have just noticed that Unit 1 in this eight-unit complex has come up for sale again - click here. It last sold twenty years ago for $290,000 and is now "price-guided" at $725,000. Being at the bottom of the building, even though it faces the rear, all it faces is a weathered old fence. Two floors up, it would be worth another $250,000. As would've been mine!

 

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Wadjda

 

Click on 'cc' for English subtitles

 

Wadjda goin' to watch?" Padma asked me last night, just after I'd eaten my bangers and mash and washed them down with a glass of Chateau Cardboard. I replied, "Yes!"

"Wadjda" is the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and was made by that nation’s first female director, Haifaa Al Mansour. It's a winning and wonderfully moving tale of a 10-year-old girl, living in a suburb of Riyadh, making her voice heard in that patriarchal society.

The girl wants a bicycle so she can race against a boy called Abdullah – except, of course, in Saudi Arabia girls aren’t allowed to ride bicycles any more than they are allowed to drive cars. Wadjda’s mother won’t let her daughter have a bicycle and the girl decides to raise the money to buy one herself.

Haifaa al Mansour admits that she got death threats for her work and says that she had to spend much of the location shoot directing from inside a van. Nothing new here, although the scenery is new to me as I had never been to Riyadh except through it on my way from Bahrain to Jeddah.

 

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"What would Noel have done?"

 

Rest in Peace, Noel! Your memory lives on at "Riverbend"

 

Almost no day goes by when I haven't pondered something or faced some decision and asked myself, "What would Noel have made of this?" or "What would Noel have done?"

Marcel Proust believed that spending an hour with a friend was "to sacrifice a reality for something that does not exist; our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive" and that friendship in the end is no more than "a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

My friendship with Noel was more akin to Proust's comparison to reading --- "In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original parity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to" --- because, while we first met aboard the liner PATRIS in late 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany, much of the next twenty-seven years until his untimely death in 1995 was spent in writing letters, he from his home in Wewak in what was then the Territory of Papua New Guinea, and I from my countless abodes around the world.

My friendship with Noel played no small part in my resolve in 1969 to leave a promising and secure career with the Australia & New Zealand Bank for the wilds of New Guinea. I worked there for several years, during which time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland. Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea", which was the closest he ever came to reflect on his life which had been full of hardship.

We never talked about the past, I because I didn't have one yet and Noel because, as he once confided, "Talking about it makes it more real", and so I knew nothing about his joining the Army when still in his late teens and being sent up to New Guinea to take part in the Bougainville Campaign, his unsuccessful attempts to grow coffee and tea in the New Guinea Highlands, and the subsequent years spent in mainly lowly-paid casual jobs with various government departments. As he once quipped, "I must be the longest-serving casual public servant in the Territory."

 

Cairns Post, September 14, 1943:
"Word has been received that Butler, serving with the A.I.F. in New Guinea,
has been wounded in action. Noel, who is a past student of the Innisfail
High School, was well known in Cairns."

 

He epitomised the typical 'Territorian' with his Devil-may-care attitude and his unconcern about the future, about money, and about a career. Somehow, for him, the Territory provided everything he wanted from life and the rest of the world was a place that he visited once every so many years after he had saved up enough money for the fare.

His stoicism, his strength in the face of adversity, were a role model for me as I tried to make my own way through life. From afar, he observed my stumbling, my going from bust to boom and back again, which once prompted him to compare me to the proverbial cat with nine lives.

Noel was my last connection with a time in which I became what I am today, and my memories of that time are inseparable from my memories of him, and so thinking of him has become a kind of code for thinking of many other things that happened to me during those years and which I would rather forget because talking about them make them more real.

What would Noel have done? I think he would've done the same!

 

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16,900,000 meals for 9,000 men in jungle camps, 1250 miles from supply port

 

 

The following article is taken from the book "Bougainville - The Establishment of a Copper Mine" and describes B.F. Brown's catering operations on Bougainville Island. It's dear to me because "we", Camp Catering Services, against all the odds had wrenched this multi-million-dollar catering contract from them in April 1972.

I became Camp Catering Services' office manager/accountant - click here - and was one of their few management staff who had local experience as I had worked as senior auditor for the mine's construction managers W.K.E. - Bechtel Corporation since 1970.

 

 

And Camp Catering Services were desperately short of people with local knowledge as B.F. Browns very grudgingly gave up this very lucrative contract and had done everything in their power to entice their own staff to leave the island in the hope that we would fail and they could regain their role as caterers which they had held since September 1969. They were so confident we would fail that they kept their management team on the island until May 2nd when they left on a charter flight which became known as the "Champagne Flight".

 

With Tom Richards, Catering Manager, on far left

Left-to-right: Willie Leong, Wando Taim, Enrico Collavini, Marco Perini, Herman The German

 

Click on image for larger print

Love the 'Motion picture theatre management and operation' which at Camp 6 consisted of rather irregularly and often belately rocking up with a noisy clickety-clickety-clack movie projector, feeding through - sometimes back to front or with the first reel shown last - an often very dated and faded reel, with the sound track drowned out (literally!) by a sudden downpour of rain, and taking an eternity between reel changes or when the celluloid broke, to a roofed-over area on Loloho beach to which you had to bring your own plastic chair

A clean mess hall before the drunken fights started

25 million cans of beer! I know some of the people who drank most of them!

 

We gave it all we got, saw off the challenge, and settled into a successful operation which became the jewel in the crown of Camp Catering Services' contracts in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. I thrive on challenges but the prospect of endless routine after the first five adrenaline-filled months was quite daunting, so when everything was settled down and running smoothly, I handed over my job to a friend and accepted the new challenge of promotion to Group Financial Controller in the company's head office in Sydney.

City life didn't agree with me nor could I see much point in endlessly attending management meetings, endlessly signing cheques, and endlessly drinking cups of coffee brought into my posh office by my very own secretary and so I moved on to 'meatier' jobs in the British Solomon Islands, Burma, Iran, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece. However, I kept in touch with Camp Catering Services' Bougainville manager, Merv Nightingale, whose generous reference opened many more doors for me.

 

 

He lost his job when the Sydney head office triumvirate consisting of his half-brother Nelson Hardy, "the Hungarian Goulash Chef" Joseph Tamas, and that little Chinese guy whose hyphenated name escapes me (I think his name was Max Den-Toll), gutless and smelling big money, sold this once-in-a-lifetime contract to S.H.R.M. and wound up the company.

 

 

 

As they say, all good things must come to an end, even the largest civil catering contract ever undertaken anywhere in the world.

 

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