"Where would you go?"

 

 

We've just come back from our walk around the village. A chap whose dog we've been admiring told us last week that he's selling up to be with his ailing father. This morning we met him again. "Are you still selling? I haven't seen your house on the internet", I said. "It's sold already", he replied.

He had bought it in 2020 for $460,000, and listed it for sale last week for $950,000. Before they could even put up the FOR SALE-sign and the advertisement onto the internet, someone walked in and paid full price.
(It had sold in 2000 for $107,000 and in 2006 again for only $320,000)

Which makes my friends' question even more pertinent: "Where would you go if Riverbend suddenly sold?" I don't think the word 'suddenly' comes into it as cashed-up buyers in my price range aren't all that plentiful.

As long as the sale will be a pre-Deceased Estate Sale and I can still drive out in my own car before they drive me out in a hearse, I'm happy to keep looking for my next dream house wherever that may be - see floorplan.

Instead of burying your millions like a past neighbour used to do - see here - invest them in an asset-test-exempt home so you can still qualify for your age pension - click here. Every other Australian seems to do it!

 

Lord of the Fries

 

 

A recent visit to Sydney brought back literary memories as we walked down King Street and saw the fish 'n' chips shop "Lord of the Fries". Nice play on words, I thought, but does anyone still remember William Golding's book, published in 1954, or the 1963 movie of the same name?

(There was a second film adaptation in 1990 which, in my opinion, is not as good as the 1963 original. Alex Garland's book "The Beach", and the adventure drama film of the same name, starring teenage idol Leonardo DiCaprio, have much in common with the original "Lord of the Flies".)

Of course, the story of "Lord of the Flies" never happened. An English schoolmaster made it up in 1951. "Wouldn't it be a good idea", William Golding asked his wife one day, "to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave?"

 

 

Golding's book "Lord of the Flies" would ultimately sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than thirty languages and be hailed as one of the classics of the twentieth century.

In hindsight, the secret to the book's success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. "Even if we start with a clean slate", he wrote in his first letter to his publisher, "our nature compels us to make a muck of it." Or as he later put it, "Man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

Unlike English-speaking children who read "Lord of the Flies" at school, my schooling - as limited as it was - in post-war Germany required no special reading about the evil that human nature was capable of, as the legacy of it could still be seen all around. It was only in the late sixties here in Australia, while still reduced to linguistic toddlerhood in my newly-adopted language English, that I first tried to read this book.

 

Fast-forward to 7:40 to start the documentary

 

Perhaps "Lord of the Flies" is not the most apropriate reading in these troubled times as it may easily get you trapped into hopelessness. Because if you believe most people are rotten, you no longer need to get worked up about injustice. The world is going to hell either way.

If you are tempted by such cynical thoughts, please do NOT click on these links to read the book or watch the 1990 movie adaptation.

 

"I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet."

 

 

It was reported that a movie theatre displayed a short film which began with a snapshot of a room ceiling. No details, no colours. Just a ceiling fan on a white ceiling. The same scene remained displayed for six long minutes when the moviegoers started to get frustrated. Some complained about the film wasting their time.

Suddenly, the camera lens slowly started to move until it reached down towards the floor. A small child who appeared handicapped was lying on a bed, suffering from a spinal cord inquiry. The camera then pans back up to the ceiling with the following words: "We showed you only six minutes of this child's daily activity, only six minutes from the scene that this handicapped child watches all hours of his life, and you complained and weren't patient for even six minutes, you couldn't bear to watch it ..."

Sometimes we need to put ourselves in another person's situation in order to realise just how lucky we are and to be thankful for all our blessings.

 

The internet is for people who can't sleep

 

Volksschule Braunschweig Heinrichstraße Ostern 1960

Back Row (left-to-right)

Volker Kluge / Wolfgang Ihlemann / Joachim Schumacher / Helmut Ullrich / Ulrich Schäfer / Andreas Morgenroth / Helmut Bolle / Volker Wisse / Hendrik Heinemann / Jürgen Kreul Middle Row (left-to-right) Klaus Kratzenstein / Herbert Becker / Dagmar Kroll / Jutta Veste / Heidi Werner / Christa Funke / Wenzel Tappe / moi / Joachim Stut Front Row (left-to-right) Gudrun Otto / Heidi Nabert / Petra Küster / Sigrid Röseling / Herr Sapper, teacher / Barbara Ziegert / Margret Brandenburg / Ingrid Behrens / Waltraud Häupler / Karin Käsehage
(No prize guessing where I am in the photo!!!)

 

And I was still wide awake when late one night some years go this email arrived: "Ich hoffe Du bist etwas überrascht eine E-Mail zu bekommen, aber wir sind in die selbe Klasse in der Heinrichschule gegangen, auf dem Klassenfoto bin ich unter dem Namen DAGMAR KROLL. Würde mich freuen etwas von Dir zu hören! "

Let me translate before you rush out and enrol in a Berlitz German Language Course: "I hope you're surprised to receive this email because we attended the same class at primary school. My name is Dagmar Kroll and I'm the third from the left in the middle row in this photo taken on the last day at school. Would love to hear from you!"

What a surprise indeed! Dagmar found the photos another schoolfriend had sent to me previously and which I had put up on my German blog - here and here - and she's busy scanning some more to send to me. This seems to be a case of "good things come to those who wait" - for over sixty years! - because we were refugees from East Germany and had little money, and none at all for such frivolities as school photos.

Of course, she also asked the obvious question, "Why did you leave Germany?" Well, no one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.

Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of 14.

Being the youngest solo-migrant on board the migrant ship FLAVIA, a television crew had asked me the same question before it left Bremerhaven in 1965. I had no answer in front of the whirring newsreel camera and still have no answer today. I mean, how do I explain the sense of dissatisfaction and frustration that affected me at the time?

We can't choose our parents and are born into the prison of our race, religion and nationality. I had no problem with my race which, being blond and blue-eyed, helped me to slip into Australia under its "White Australia" policy, but I'd already renounced my Lutheran upbringing and joined the German Freethinkers, and many years later also changed my nationality by becoming an Australian. Two out of three isn't bad, is it?

True to her word, Dagmar sent me three photos of a class reunion in 1983 which, come to think of it, I could've attended as I was at the time working in Jeddah and Athens. Another missed opportunity? Perhaps not, as my life had moved in a completely different direction from those stay-at-homes with whom I had little in common during my school days and would have had even less in common twenty-three years later.

 

Class Reunion 1983 - for names see last photo

Class reunion 1983 Get-together at Teacher's house after the reunion
from left to right: Joachim Stut - Dagmar Kroll - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) -
Barbara Zieger - Gudrun Otto - Volker Kluge

Class Reunion 1983
from left to right; back row: Volker Kluge - Herbert Becker - Wolfgang Ihlemann - Wenzel Tappe - Helmut Ullrich - Ulrich Schäfer; middle row: Heidi Werner - Ingrid Behrens - Jutta Veste - Dagmar Kroll - Christa Funke; front row: Gudrun Otto - Petra Küster - Sigrid Röseling - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) - Barbara Zieger - Waltraud Häuptler

 

However, I would've liked to have met "Herr Sapper" again before he passed away sometime in 1987. He was a great teacher who helped me overcome my lack of a tertiary education by giving me this personal letter which helped me into my first job after completing my articles.

My favourite author, Somerset W. Maugham, wrote a story entitled "The Verger" about a man without formal education who ended up more successful than he might've been with the right kind of schooling.

I count my blessings every time I watch the movie as I count my blessings to have had such a wonderful teacher, a real "Mr. Chips".

Rest in Peace, "Herr Sapper"!

 

Nothing to be frightened of

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Late last year an old friend of mine in Greece sent me an email: "January 1 is the first page of a new book and I wonder what will happen in this book. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but I needed to tell you about my fear of what is inevitable soon. You are such a good friend."

Bozenna is an old friend of mine - in both senses of the world - and she was a dedicated employee when she worked for me in Greece. Perhaps I should send her a copy of Julian Barnes' book "Nothing to be frightened of" or its more bluntly titled twin "Death", a disarmingly witty book in which Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all.

The book may not get there in time, but in the meantime there's always "Appointment in Samarra" to console her. It's a Mesopotamian tale about the deadly inescapability of coincidence and fate and death, all bound in a parable designed to both frighten and make sense of life's madness.

 

 

At a time when we're fighting illness as if it were an invader, we're really just fighting ourselves, the bits of us that want to kill the rest of us. Towards the end - if we live long enough - we are left with the competition between the declining and decaying parts of us as to which will get top billing on our death certificate. As Flaubert put it, "No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start dropping off."

Which is perhaps not a bad thought on which to end this post. We've already had more than our three score and ten, so let's not get greedy.

 

The Shiralee

 

 

I'm amazed at how many Australians have not heard of - or perhaps forgotten - some of the most quintessential Australian movies - or have I become more Australian than the quintessential Australian?

"The Shiralee", based on D'Arcy Niland's book by the same name, is one such movie. It's the story of the itinerant rural worker Macauley - sometimes described as a 'swagman' or 'swaggie' - who suddenly finds himself taking responsibility for his child. Having returned from 'walkabout', he finds his wife entwined in the arms of another, and so he takes his four-year-old daughter, Buster, with him. The child is the 'shiralee', an Aboriginal word meaning 'burden'. In their time together, father and daughter explore new depths of understanding and bonding. The barren landscapes of the outback are central to the swagman's love for his country and provide a backdrop to the richness of his developing relationship with Buster.

Of course, there's nothing like curling up with D'Arcy Niland's book ...

 

To read the book online, click here

 

... but if you're more visually than cerebrally inclined, you'll find both the 1957 movie version with Peter Finch and the 1987 remake with Bryan Brown faithful screen adaptations of this wonderful book.

 

The original black-and-white movie from 1957 starring Peter Finch

 

D'Arcy Niland wrote another masterpiece, "Dead Men Running", which was made into a TV mini series in 1971. I wasn't in Australia then and so I missed it. If you can find it on YouTube or on DVD, please let me know.

 

How I long for those innocent 60s!

 

Fast-forward movie to scene at 11:06

 

I absolutely enjoyed watching "The Efficiency Expert", set in the Australia of the 1960s, the one I fell in love with when I arrived here in 1965. It all came back in a sudden rush: the way people dressed and spoke back then; the way people worked (or not!); and all those walnut-coloured furnishings that surrounded us.

But what really got my attention was the noticeboard on the wall that had diagonally-placed straps across to hold in place whatever was on it.

 

Front of BARTON HOUSE facing Brisbane Avenue in Canberra

 

One such now old-fashioned noticeboard was in the entrance hall of Barton House (I nearly wrote 'foyer' but it wasn't that kind of place). The manager would place all incoming letters on that board, roughly in alphabetical order, with the A's in the top left-hand corner and the Z's at the bottom right, and each evening on coming "home" from work, we would check the noticeboard for mail before heading to our rooms.

 

I might as well admit it because it's far too late to sack me now:
I sometimes used the Bank's aerogrammes to write to family and friends
(yes, that's how I used to write my capital-A's; I was a lot squarer then)

 

For some of us, including 'yours truly', "mail" was often nothing more than a plain-looking envelope containing a note from the manager that we had (once again!) fallen behind paying our boarding-house fees.

I never forget the day a fat envelope was waiting for me which, like an hour-glass, leaked a slow trickle of sand from a torn corner. I had just returned to Australia after six months in the Namib Desert in South-West Africa, and my former colleagues had sent me a "souvenir" from "Sandhausen"; "in case you're missing all that sand", they'd written.

That's how it was in those days: there were no postal secrets and yet an unspoken "untouchability" of one's mail, even if it stayed on the board for days and weeks on end, even months if the recipient was on holiday. I knew of boarders who had cash money sent to them through the mail!

It's unthinkable in today's Australia, just as unthinkable as those same boarding-houses which have all disappeared. As for the slowly-leaking envelope, it would today be confiscated by Customs on suspicion of containing a prohibited substance. How I long for those innocent 60s!

 

The Millionaire Castaway

 

David Glasheen on facebook

 

This book is really quite disappointing. I had bought it because I know (of) David Glasheen and because I had expected a little more from a chap who has spent over twenty years all by himself on a desert island. You know, insights into why we are here and what life it all about.

Instead, as Somerset W. Maugham put it in his story, "German Harry", "If what they tell us in books were true his long communion with nature and the sea should have taught him many subtle secrets. It hadn't."

 

The Millionaire Castaway: The Incredible Story of How I Lost
My Fortune but Found New Riches Living on a Deserted Island
The book is dedicated to David's daughter Erika Ruby (10/2/78 - 20/3/13) who died an untimely death on the mainland at Lockhart River just across from the island
-o-
Click here for a preview

 

Actually, the prologue about social distancing and the COVID pandemic, dated 7 April 2020, and added to the 2020 reprint after I had already bought it, is perhaps the best and most thoughtful part of the book.

In fairness to good ol' Dave, he may have done a better job and bared it all, had he written the book himself. Which he didn't; someone called Neil Bramwell wrote it for him, and in the retelling all that got lost.

Like Maugham's story, David's may end similarly: "I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water's edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognisable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man."

David (or is it Neil?) closed the prologue like this: "Here's hoping this pandemic will bring out a little of the castaway in all of us." Not in me!

 

A Town Like Alice

 

 

A lot is being made about the nightly unrests in Alice Springs but Canberra residents say an Alice-Springs-style curfew is also required to curb anti-social behaviour in their entirely invented city, designed for public servants to bring up their children in safety and comfort, by an American architect.

“You can’t walk past a flower bed or into a Senate Committee Hearing these days without being subjected to some drunk person babbling on incoherently,” one Canberra resident said.

 

 

While the Alice Springs curfew applies to residents under the age of 18, the Canberra version would apply to those over 50. “That’s where the majority of the problem appears to be,” another resident said.

To fix the problem in Canberra, experts say there would need to be a curfew in place between 8pm and 8am, as there is in Alice Springs. And another curfew between 8am to 8pm.

 

 

Go straight to page 105

 

For the full-length movie, click here

 

Julian Barnes' book "The Sense of an Ending" was made into an equally gripping and mesmerising movie; however, as always, for me the book, which is very British and very literary, wins out.

 

 

You can read it at www.archive.org, or you can go straight to page 105.

 

 

"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be"

I couldn't have said it better myself.

 

 

They're A Weird Mob

 

To read the book, click here (SIGN UP (it's free!), LOG IN and BORROW

 

Regarded as a classic, this film, based on the book by the same name, takes a kind-hearted look at Sydney in the mid-60s. It's an Australia that no longer exists, making the film something of a social document worth watching.

The premise of the film is a reverse Crocdile Dundee, a fish-out-of-water comedy about a goofy, good-natured Italian who comes to Australia (rather than leaves it) and entertains the locals as he bumbles through day-to-day life, excusing his many faux pas with a nervous smile and a glassy-eyed look.

While it shows an Australia that no longer exists, it is the Australia which I came to love, warts and all, when I arrived here in 1965. Now almost sixty years old, the film is an entertaining time capsule and a compilation of the many things that haven't changed - from small gestures like returning shouts of beer at a bar to the ongoing city rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney (highlighted in a scene featuring a cameo from Graham Kennedy) and the generous and welcoming spirit of the Australian people.

"They're A Weird Mob" is a warming and optimistic story which takes me back to a less cynical time and culture which is light years away from today's competitive, money-chasing reality. As John O'Grady writes in his entertaining book (which was published as early as 1957), "Anyone who thinks he recognises himself in these pages, probably does." I do!