PNG's Independence Day 16 September 1975

 

It was in the dying days of 1974 when I received an urgent telegram from TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles to fly to what was then called Burma to take up a new position as chief accountant in their exploration office in Rangoon.

I was at the time working in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea, putting the finishing touches to Air Niugini's internal audit department, as the country was hurdling towards independence the following year. When the then Chief Minister Michael Somare - soon to be Sir Michael and Prime Minister of the independent country of Papua New Guinea - heard of my impending departure, he expressed his regrets that I wouldn't be there for this momentous occasion. "The least we can do is make our Independence Day the same as your birthday", he said.

And so it came to pass that my birthday and Papua New Guinea's Independence Day are celebrated on the same day each year.

 

 

P.S. Of course, if you believe this, you'll probably spend the rest of your life doing a convincing impression of a cabbage! ☺

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund

 

 

Early morning at "Riverbend". I've just come back from "Melbourne" where I sat in the early-morning sun lost in thoughts but not lost because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I experienced the feeling of belonging somewhere.

These days I no longer venture far from "Riverbend". People ask me, "But what do you do all day?" Here's a quick and incomplete summary:

The kookaburras' mad cackling wakes me in the morning. I roll out of bed and go to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I then sit in the sun and enjoy my first cup of tea of the day, after which I go back inside to get a banana or apple to feed to the possum in his possum penthouse.

By this time scores of wild ducks have assembled by the horseshed demanding their breakfast of several scoops of "Lucky Layer" pellets. The almost-tame kookaburra has been watching me constantly and it's now his turn to be fed. All that effort calls for a second cup of tea!

Second cup of tea in hand, I wander down to "Melbourne" where I can look far downriver and possibly spot some early-morning fishermen. The place is full of life. I surprise three dilatory rabbits breakfasting in the long grass. A wallaby watches me from a safe distance. A butterfly procession is in full swing. I sit down on my homebuilt green bench and, sipping my cup, ponder: 'Does a butterfly know that it used to be a caterpillar and does a caterpillar know when it goes to sleep that it will be a butterfly when it wakes up?' Life flows. Life ebbs. Knowledge has not solved its mystery. We have learned how to blow up the world and walk on the moon, but we still do not know why we are here.

If it is a weekday, I go back inside at around 10 o'clock to switch on the computer to watch the gyrations of the stock-market. As my old mate Noel Butler used to say when I questioned him once why he bought and sold some of those "penny-dreadful" shares, "What else is there?" Some days the market is good to me, on others it isn't, and on some it turns downright ugly but, as Noel put it so succinctly, what else IS there? In between watching stock quotations and listening to the news on the radio, I answer some emails and walk up to the gate to await the mail. And so, almost without realising it, lunchtime has come around.

"Happy Hour" is when I take my afternoon nap on the very old but oh-so-very-comfortable sofa on the veranda. Waking up refreshed, I pick up a book and read for a while, sitting in the sun. Again, almost without noticing it, dinner rolls around, after which it is only a couple of hours before I head off to bed to listen to Philip Adams' "Late Night Live" at 10 past 10 on ABC Radio. And that's about it! Multiply this by 365 and you have a fair summary of the year. May there be many more years like it!

 

Worin liegt das Glück des Älterwerdens?

 

Bitte höre ihr zu; Du wirst es ganz bestimmt nicht bereuen

 

Vor einiger Zeit "entdeckte" ich die Bücher der Elke Heidenreich, und insbesondere ihre gesammelten Kolumnen die sie seit 1983 regelmäßig in der größten deutschen Frauen-Zeitschrift "Brigitte" veröffentlicht hatte.

Ihr Ton erinnert mich da ein bißchen an die 'essays' der australischen Autorin Charmian Clift die in den späten sechziger Jahren im "Sydney Morning Herald" erschienen und dann in Buchform in "Trouble in Lotus Land" und "Being Alone With Oneself" wieder veröffentlicht wurden.

 

 

Anscheinend gibt es da acht Bände; drei davon - den 1988 und 1992 und 1999 Band - kann man ganz kostenlos beim www.archive.org lesen.

In der Zwischenzeit fand ich zufällig diese YouTube-Unterhaltung über das Älterwerden. Dieser Frau könnte ich stundenlang zuhören! Und es kommnt gerade zur richtigen Zeit denn in zwei Tagen werde ich 79. Bei meinem Alter wäre eine Unterhaltung übers ALTwerden eigentlich mehr angebracht.

 

 

P.S. Und hier ist ihr Buch zu diesem Thema, zusammen mit Leseprobe:

 

 

Eine Reise in die 50er Jahre

 

 

Das Deutschland in den 50er Jahren - und den frühen 60er - ist das einzige Deutschland das ich kenne denn in 1965 ging es schon ab nach Australien. Vom Wirtschaftswunder erfuhr ich gar nichts denn in unserem Zuhause lebten - existierten - wir, die Eltern und fünf Kinder, nur von der Kriegsrente unseres Vaters und jeder Pfennig wurde dreimal umgedreht.

Dennoch gaben wir dem heiß erwarteten Geldbriefträger, der monatlich Vatis kleine Rente ins Haus brachte, immer sein 50-Pfennig Trinkgeld. Der Rest ging dann gleich zum Lebensmittelgeschäft an der Ecke bei dem wir den ganzen Monat angeschrieben hatten.

Ich fing mit 14 Jahren an zu arbeiten denn selbst mein Lehrgeld, so klein wie es auch war, half mit uns über die Runden zu bringen. Da war vom Wirtschaftswunder keine Spur. Schreckliche Kindheit? Wieso? Wir waren so an kaputte Städte und Trümmergrundstücke und fehlende Badezimmer und Klos auf der Unteretage gewöhnt daß es uns gar nicht armseelig und schrecklich erschien. Wir kannten nichts anderes.

Als wir mit der Berliner Luftbrücke aus dem Osten kamen, wohnten wir zuerst in einer Gartenlaube ohne Licht und fließendem Wasser. Dann in einer Zwei-Zimmer Wohnung die wir uns mit einem anderen Ehepaar teilen mussten das uns vom Wohnamt zugewiesen war. Schlange stehen vor dem Klo war da nichts außergewöhnliches. Man musste sich dann immer beeilen obwohl es genug Lesestoff gab denn das "Klopapier" waren alte Zeitungen die ich in kleine Viertel verschneiden musste. Dadurch habe ich das Lesen früh gelernt und wurde eine Leseratte.

In die Ferne gehen - Reisen - war damals ein Luxus für reiche Leute und selbst Fernsehen kam nur viel, viel später. Damals wurde auf der Straße ferngesehen vor dem Schaufenster eines Fernsehgeschäftes - siehe hier. Abends saßen wir in der warmen Küche und starrten auf das magische grüne Auge in unserem Blaupunkt-Radio aus dem ein Hörspiel kam oder wir spielten nächtelang "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht!" - siehe hier.

Und von dem meisten was sie auf diesen Dokumentarfilmen zeigen wusste ich auch nichts, denn für solche Dinge war kein Geld und keine Zeit da. Ich denke auch nicht daß ich viel verpasst habe. Ob die 50er Jahre besser waren - besser als was? - weiß ich nicht denn ich lebe seit 1965 in Übersee wo es zumindest anders ist.

"Es lebe die Nachkriegszeit, die ist fast so schön wie die Vorkriegszeit." ["Wir Wunderkinder"]

 

Appointment in Samarra

 

 

Appointment in Samarra" is 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. The speaker is Death.

 

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

 

 

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 them.

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 damaged 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!

 

Frühlingsanfang

 

 

Offiziell ist heute der erste Frühlingstag. Was rauschet, was rieselt, was rinnet so schnell? Was blitzt in der Sonne? Was schimmert so hell? Und als ich so fragte, da murmelt der Bach: "Der Frühling, der Frühling, der Frühling ist wach!"

Ich liebe den Frühling, ich liebe den Sonnenschein. Nun wird es endlich wieder wärmer sein, und ich werde mehr Zeit im Garten verbringen. Eine neue Klingel habe ich schon angehängt. Bitte immer feste klingeln!