Who could ever forget this famous line in the movie "Casablanca"? If I had already heard of it when, just returned from two years in Australia, I was standing on the railway platform in wintry Piraeus in December 1967 and saying my good-byes, I might have said to my shipboard mate for the past four weeks, "Noel, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
We had both just disembarked from the liner PATRIS, Noel turning right to Istanbul and I am heading left to (c)old Germany. The PATRIS had originally been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea on the way but, following the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal closed and the ship was re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope.
However, the many New Guinea expats who had already booked to board the ship at Port Moresby, Noel amongst them, where flown down to Sydney at the shipping line's expense. And so for the next four weeks I would sit in the ship's Midnight Club and listen to the many yarns of high adventure told by those larger-than-life New Guinea expats while Graeme Bell's All Stars played their ragtime music.
one day before the departure of RMHS Patris
During the day, Noel and I would sit on deck for hours, hunched over a chessboard. Our mutual love of chess and my interest in New Guinea started a friendship which we kept going by regular correspondence and, after I had come up to PNG in late 1969, mutual visits, I to his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel spending 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 to my next assignment in Burma. After Burma I spent 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.
Our paths crossed more frequently after PNG's Independence in 1975 and the onset of old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland and 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".
Our friendship lasted for almost thirty years until his untimely death on this day in 1995. To paraphrase Rick's famous last words in "Casablanca", "Noel, I think we've had a beautiful friendship."
