Have just returned from Cooktown ...

... and other points north!

Have just returned from Tonga ...

... and there's much to tell!

Isn't the world-wide web wonderful?

A view from Balfour Ross's balcony

 

It allows us to meet up with all sorts of people! My travelogue of my trip to Thursday Island attracted many readers: American and Australian servicemen who were stationed there during the war, fellow-travellers, and some former residents of the island.

One such former resident is Balfour Ross who had gone to Thursday Island in 1964 as a young man of 27 and, apart from a four-year stint in equally remote Normanton and another four years in New Zealand, had spent all his life on Thursday Island. What's even more remarkable, however, is the fact that Balfour and his wife June, after a lifetime on T.I., have recently retired to Malaysia under the Malaysia My Second Home Programme. Amazing what you can do when you start to think outside the square!

Balfour Ross in Terengganu

Balfour now lives in Terengganu on Malaysia's beautiful east coast on the fourteenth floor of a modern apartment building with sweeping views of the town, its river and beaches, and out to the sea. Malaysia is a country of startling beauty and great ethnic and cultural variety with a lovely tropical climate and what's more, it offers a very affordable lifestyle for someone on an Australian pension. Smart move, Balfour!

I have fond memories of Malaysia from my own time there when I worked as a consultant to the Penang Port Commission in 1978. It seems that Penang is a particularly popular place for those who make Malaysia their second home. Among them are friends of Balfour's, Alan and Pat Jones of Perth, who bought and renovated an old Chinese shophouse which they now run as a café. Balfour also put me in touch again with David Richardson

whom I had known on T.I. and whose holiday shack on Price of Wales Island I had sometimes visited. David now lives in Babinda south of Cairns. By a strange twist of fate, Balfour and David are now related through Balfour's wife who is the daughter of David's wife.

Balfour also put me in touch with Stan Pedler on Thursday Island, a large, effusive fellow with a colossal colonial-style moustache, who runs the Christian bookshop on the island and I remember having gone into his shop to look for something by C.S Lewis and Stan and I striking up a conversation about all sorts of things.

Stan Pedler in his shop on Thursday Island

The sign above his shop reads 'Sower Christian Bookstore, Agent for All Pest and Weed Control'. It obviously pays to diversify on T.I. where the newsagency sells kitchen utensils and the supermarket sells fridges, and Stan, apart from being an insecticidal Bible-thumper, also handles airfreight for TNT and sells plane tickets for Aero-Tropics ('If you want to get to the outer islands and you want God on your side, then I'm your man.')

He is a modern-day missionary with two life stories to tell: his own and Jesus's. A failed cotton farmer, he flew north in his little Cessna as far as he could, to Mer, in the eastern Torres Strait, where he felt the warmth of God's presence and cottoned on to Christianity. A year later he returned to Mer in his yacht "Temehani" laden with picture Bibles and Jesus videos. Calling himself New Light Ministries, he moved all around the Strait before setting up shop on T.I.

Stan Pedler aboard TEMEHANI

Don't we live in a small world? And it is full of unconventional characters, many of whom you can meet on Thursday Island.

Googlemap Riverbend

 

I'm back in Sydney!

 

Wolfgang, the tenant from hell

 

I'm back from Sydney! I had to go and have a look at my little unit at McMahons Point which was supposed to have been vandalised by its last tenant who had to be evicted.

I first first ran into him in 1985 when I lived for a few months at McMahons Point and occasionally frequented the Blue's Point Hotel. He had been a permanent fixture at the hotel already then. Twenty years later, the hotel has a new owner and a new interior but he still sits there, like an anachronism from another age, quaffing his drinks.

However, he did change position: he is now strategically placed next to the Men's Room so as not to waste too much time between drinks! Other patrons simply walk around him as though he was just another piece of furniture. What a sorry sight! What a wasted life! And what a waste of taxpayers' money as that is what he lives on: Government benefits!

 

 

I endured the five hours aboard the bus from Batemans Bay to Sydney and the train journey from Central Station to North Sydney. Passing a Thai restaurant named THAI-TANIC as I walked down Blues Point Road towards the unit, I thought what a fitting description it was of my own feelings, having lost many weeks of rent and facing huge repair bills.

 

 

I let myself into the unit which had been recarpeted and repainted only two years earlier. It now had cigarette burns and stains from numerous spillages in the carpets, nicotine-stained walls, and everywhere, on the windows, the venetian blinds, the benchtops and bathroom fittings, was the accumulated grime of two years' dirty living. The stove and oven were relatively unmarked which perhaps proves that there's a steak in every bottle as this hard-drinking alcoholic hadn't wasted any time with cooking.

The unit was not habitally and I took a room for two nights at the Blue's Point Hotel down the road. The room was simple but comfortable and, of course, who should I see in the Public Bar downstairs? The tenant from hell, of course - who else? Living testimony to what the human liver can endure!

 

 

Garage conversion

 

With a neighbour's help, I have embarked on a major renovation: as the house is overflowing with my 5,000-plus book collection and the double garage serves no better purpose than to store a whole pile of junk, I decided to get rid of much of the junk and to turn the garage into a "Bibliothèque".

We will replace the roll-a-door with a sliding glass door to let plenty of daylight in, and line the peaked ceiling with tongue-in-groove timber panelling and, most important of all, make the eaves "possum-proof" as the garage has been the home for several possums over many years. One of the possums lived very contentedly inside my kayak hanging from the ceiling; when I removed the kayak, it quickly moved to the INSIDE of the rolled-up green roll-a-door and still was inside it when these pictures were taken. Despite all the noise we were making with our power tools, it refused to vacate its new home!

We'll be busy with the woodwork for another two or three days, including the wooden frame for the sliding glass door, during which time an electrician will instal some ceiling lights and powerpoints. Then I need to decide what I want to do about the floor which is rough concrete at the moment and whether I should clad the walls or leave the brickwork 'au naturel'. Come back to this page soon for my next progress report!