When dream meets reality

Someone - not me! - sitting on Pallarenda Beach looking towards Magnetic Island

 

Perhaps it was a mental image such as this that made me buy a block of land in Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island in 1979 and a couple of years later an old beachshack on Pallarenda Beach.

We all need a dream, and the dream of one day living there gave me a sense of hope and home as I continued my peripatetic, some might say pathetic lifestyle, moving from place to place and country to country.

I once met an Englishman in Honiara in the then British Solomon Islands Protectorate who spent his evenings drinking gin & tonics in front of a fake fireplace with a huge painting of London's Tower Bridge above it.

In Maugham's "On a Chinese Screen" collection of 1922, there's a short story called "Mirage", which tells of a character from England called Grosely who has spent most of his working life in China. We're given in the first pages much background detail concerning his early days as a medical student, and what brought him to the Orient in the first place.

But the story really only picks up when, after years of very difficult saving and hard work, Grosely is able to travel back to the England he has adored, with the money he has accumulated. What happens when he eventually arrives, however, is perhaps not all that surprising.

"It was different from how he remembered it, there was much more traffic and he felt confused and a little at sea. He went to the Criterion and found there was no longer a bar where he had been used to lounge and drink. There was a restaurant in Leicester Square where he had been in the habit of dining when he was in funds, but he could not find it; he supposed it had been torn down."

What he does next is really quite interesting. He leaves England, his memories and perhaps part of his Self, for China. En route, he visits places like Singapore and Colombo. But at the last stopping place before China proper - Haiphong - he remains. He’s only supposed to go ashore for forty-eight hours, but he stays, because for this character at least a sense of self - partial and fluid though it may be - is so immediately tied to place: "I’ve never been so happy in my life. I often think I'll go on to Shanghai some day, but I don't suppose I ever shall. And God knows, I never want to see England again", he remarks to the narrator.

Looking at life through the wreaths of opium smoke that he exhales several times a day, Grosely represents the partially disorientated traveller who has settled for flux rather than fixity. Positioned between east and west, undecided where home actually is, Grosely seems to find the in-between existence not only agreeable, but a sort of solution.

"I knew that on the threshold of China his courage had failed him. England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too. If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it."

When dream meets reality it sometimes becomes a nightmare, and so it was with my premature homecoming in 1985. I felt like one of those expat characters in a W. Somerset Maugham story who, when finally washed up on their home shores, can often be found peering into an empty glass while wishing to be somewhere else. Maybe I, too, should have stayed forever abroad and dreamt of home from a safe distance.

I sold the block of land on the island and that beachshack in the late '90s for little more than what I had paid for them which didn't matter as by then they'd served their purpose as my London Tower Bridge painting.

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 

Alexander Solzhenit͡syn's novel describes a single prisoner's day in a remote Siberian labour camp in the Stalin era of 1951, of which he had first-hand experience, having been imprisoned from 1945 to 1953 for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a fellow officer about the conduct of the war.

The book's publication in 1962 was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history, since never before had an account of Stalinist repressions been openly distributed. Filming the unfilmable, the movie about tedium and hopelessness becomes tedious itself, however, it seemed a fitting movie to watch on a cold and crisp winter morning.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org
or listen to the BBC drama here

 

"The day had gone by without a single cloud - almost a happy day. There were three thousand and fifty-three days in his sentence, from reveille to lights-out. The three extra days were because of the leap years ..."

 

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Before the VOICE vote, let’s get the facts in order

Senator Lidia Thorpe has become the Poster Girl the No vote needed. That Prime Minister Alabanese proposes that we vote Yes in principle and then let the likes of Senator Thorpe decide the details of the powers she would like to give to herself is preposterous.

 

Can the Uluru Statement from the Heart be described as militant? Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey says it can, adding that it's a "vulnerable document".

Professor Blainey says the statement is sometimes silent when Aboriginal failures are visible, but vocal in condemning the Australian people for misdeeds that he says "never happened".

I've just listened to Professor Blainey - remember his now famous book, "The Tyranny of Distance"? - being interviewed by Tom Switzer on ABC Radio National's BETWEEN THE LINES, in which he gives a thoughful and balanced response to the claims by the YES and NO proponents.

To listen to the podcast, click here and pick it up from 3:00.

 

 

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VOICEs in my head

And now the prime minister's biggest argument is, "If you don't marry my child, you're a bad person" and, in reply to the football codes barracking for the YES vote, "If I'm going to take political insights from people who can chase a ball around a paddock, then I start listening to my dog." Barnaby Joyce in full flight. Love it!

"If you don't know how the VOICE is going to work, vote NO."
"We are one together, not two divided."

 

 

If you don't know
what you're voting for,
vote NO.

 

 

As time goes by

 

Sometimes I walk into Vinnies only for the music which often is straight from the sixties. This morning, still with water in my ears from the two hours in the pool, I listened to Marianne Faithfull's plaintive, quavering "As Tears Go By" which took me right back to 1968 when I lived in Lüderitz, wedged in between the cold Atlantic Ocean and the hot and dry Namib Desert of South-West Africa.

There I shared a company flat with another young German, Karl-Heinz Herzberg, who in the room right next to mine played night after night "As Tears Go By" while outside the desert wind never stopped howling.

 

 

Karl-Heinz had come to that quaint little German town in Africa some time before me and seemed to have found his niche there, whereas to me it was little more than a stepping stone on my way back to Australia after a disasteriously disappointing nine months in the (c)old country.

Robert Frost wrote "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in", but neither my father and stepmother nor my mother and stepfather rolled out the welcome mat when I totally unannounced reappeared after my first two years in Australia.

They must've thought it would be better to be cruel to be kind, and so I kept moving instead of slipping under the old eiderdown and enjoying the old homecooking again. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Decades later, and thanks to the internet, I was in contact with Karl-Heinz Herzberg again. He had stayed on in South-West Africa, had married and raised children, and watched as the erstwhile German colony which during my time there had been a South African dependency, had become the independent nation of Namibia.

 

 

These memories flooded through my mind as I listened to Marianne Faithfull singing "As Tears Go By" while riffling through Vinnies' book-shelves. By the time their retrospective Muzak had launched into "I Am Australian", "Georgy Girl" and "Waltzing Matilda", I was at the cash register and paying them a couple of gold coins for Natasha Solomons' feel-good novel "Mr Rosenblum's List" and the inspirational "First You Have to Row a Little Boat - Reflections on Life and Living" by R. Bode.

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