The only death we experience is other people's

 

 

It's exactly thirty years to the day when my best friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, sent me this funny "Childers by Night" card and wrote, "Dear Pete, Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this. Mine is but that's inevitable."

 

 

I had no idea how prescient and indeed deadly serious his message was until a couple of months later I received a phone call from a woman. She introduced herself as Noel's sister and told me that Noel had just passed away!

It may seem that Noel had never achieved much in his life except get through it. And after his life had come to an end, he left no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But the way of life that he had chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and self-reliance of his character left a great influence on me so that, long after his death, I still remember him as a very remarkable man.

Noel and I first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea 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, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. 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.

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 lasted until his death almost thirty years later!

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent 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 out to my next assignment in Burma.

Our paths crossed more frequently after 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".

Perhaps this struggle is something else that we shared. I, too, still think almost every day about those many faraway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.

"Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein."   
                                                                         Hermann Hesse

 

"Here goes another one!"

 

Source
Click on image to enlarge

Brian Herde died an untimely early death in March 1999, aged only 68.
His brother Bob, who was one grade below at Jamestown Primary School,
and thus presumably one year younger, also died early in 1998, aged only 66.
Their father died after a long illness in 1950, aged 48. Bad luck or bad genes?

 

We worked together on the Bougainville Copper Project. Then we met again in mid-1974 in Port Moresby where I worked as internal auditor with AIR NIUGINI and he as accountant for Tutt Bryants. Then he visited me in Lae just before I flew out to Burma, and we spent Christmas 1975 together at my friend's place in Wewak. Coming back from Iran and taking another job in Moresby in 1976, I spent many weekends with him, and when I left for another job on Thursday Island, he visited me there in 1977. Later that year I relocated to Honiara and he came to visit me there for Christmas. The following year, 1978, I took a posting in Penang in Malaysia and he invited himself there, too, for what was from memory a four-week-long holiday. Then I took a break from being his constant host, during which time I briefly met up with him again in Adelaide on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia, until my transfer to Piraeus in Greece in 1983, when he wrote to asked if I had a job for him there. I flew him out and put him up in a hotel in Piraeus and he worked for me for three months. That was it, I hoped, as I'd grown tired of all the drop-ins.

Until 1991 (or was it 1992?), when he wrote from New Guinea where he had taken a job as accountant on a coffee plantation in the Highlands, inquiring if he was still welcome in Canberra where I had started my own practice in early 1986. I relented and he moved into my granny flat for a week or two by which time he had sorely tested my hospitality. After a long "Vienna Night" at the Austrian Club, again entirely funded out of my own pocket, he had so embarrassed me in front of my then girlfriend with his almost pathological stinginess that, encouraged by the alcohol, I gave him a piece of my mind before wishing him a good night outside the granny flat. Next day was a Sunday and I let him sleep it off but when by mid-morning there was still no sign of life, I knocked on the door. No response! I drew open the sliding door, and there was his empty bed all straightened out and the key to the granny flat but no message left on the coffee table. He had done a runner!

Despite having been an incorrigible bludger, he had been a good friend from 1970 until 1991 (or was it 1992?), and I had sometimes wondered what had become of this likeable couldn't-care-less-what-other-people-think-of-me happy-go-lucky unconventional accountant. An old airport arrival card from July 1972 told me that he was born in 1931 and now 94 years old and, at least statistically speaking, unlikely to be still around.

 

Brian returning to Australia in July 1972 after one year in New Guinea, with a detour via Hong Kong. His base was with his stepfather in South Australia, so this address in the Northern Territory must've been another one of his many "drop-ins"

 

Then I found this webpage on wikitree.com mentioning a "HERDE Brian John, born abt 1932, died 26-Mar-1999, age 67, in Townsville Hospital". It also mentioned a brother, Robert Henry, an opal cutter, which neatly tied in with Brian selling cut opals as a sideline on Bougainville Island and in Port Moresby. His name wasn't too common either, right down to the two given names - although the "born abt 1932" was out by a year - and "Townsville Hospital" made sense because during his time in Greece he had told me that he had bought a property at Airlie Beach which was just three hours south of Townsville whose hospital would have been the nearest he would've been taken to in case of a medical emergency. I emailed Towsnville Hospital and asked them for more information but I don't expect any reply, not with privacy laws being the way they are.

 

Searching the Ryerson Index shows that the official death notice was published
in the Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, which is where Brian grew up.

 

I in turn hope not to have broken any privacy laws after having pieced together this puzzle which, if correct, tells me "Here goes another one!" and puts me on notice that I, too, have been living on borrowed time.

And to think that I should've made this "lightning-bolt" discovery almost twenty-six years to the day on which he had passed away. Coincidence? Rest in Peace, Brian! I hope they made you welcome where you are now!

 

A trip back in time for fifty cents

 

6th Edition, February 1998

 

Most people buy their Lonely Planet Guide at full retail price to plan their next trip; I bought this old 1998 edition for a mere fifty cents at the local op-shop to take a trip down memory lane. And I discovered so much!

Only the very back of the guidebook, the last three pages 359-361, is dedicated to the place where I had spent most of my time in New Guinea. It begins with the explanation, "The following information is included in case the situation in Bougainville dramatically improves and travel onto the island is once again allowed. But this information is likely to be out of date since Bougainville has been off-limits for eight years and there's been considerable damage to the towns in the south."

And equally so about the first place I had lived and worked in: "Rabaul is a weird wasteland, buried in deep black volcanic ash. The broken frames of its buildings poke out of the mud like the wings of a dead bird. Almost the entire old town is buried and barren and looks like a movie set for an apocalyse film. Streets and streets of rubble and ruined buildings recede in every direction. The scale of what happened to Rabaul cannot be appreciated until you see it. If you were fortunate enough to walk its busy, noisy and colourful streets before September 1994, be prepared for a shock."

With the help of the old town map on page 315 I was able to walk, in my mind, from my office in Park Street to Casuarina Avenue, across Court Street, Namanula Road and Tavur Street, before turning left into Vulcan Street to arrive at the company-supplied accommodation, a converted Chinese trade store which I shared with two other accountants, one of whom stayed for another twenty-four years until the aforesaid volcanic eruption wiped out his business. There but for the grace of God go I.

Then there is the Port Moresby City map on page 112 which also shows Cuthbertson Street where I used to sit in my parked car in the sweltering heat on a Sunday morning, waiting for the newspapers from "down south" to arrive at the news agency. You had to be quick to grab one of the few copies of the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review which always advertised the best job vacancies. Then a quick check of my mailbox at the post office on the opposite side of the street for letters from "down south" (they used to sort incoming mail on a Sunday back then), but especially for any job offer in response to any of my applications.

Page 131 reminded me of trips to Yule Island where "the missionaries who arrived at Yule Island in 1885 were some of the first European visitors to the Papuan coast of New Guinea." On the way there I would stop over at a small trade store at Hisiu, then run by an Australian and his local wife.

Then there were those many trips out to Idler's Bay to the west, Bootless Inlet to the east, and north to Brown River, or up to Rouna Falls. One time, sailing my CORSAIR dinghy from the Royal Papuan Yacht Club all the way out of Fairfax Harbour far out to sea to Gemo Island and Lolorua Island, I had to tack. My inexperienced crew, Brian Herde, failed to respond to my command of "Lee ho!" to shift his body to the other side of the dinghy, and we promptly capsized. He redeemed himself by diving under the boat and pushing the centreboard back through the slot so that I could grap it as I sat astride the upturned hull to pull the waterlogged boat and mast and sail upright again. I would never have been able to do this on my own and may well have ended up as shark food - but then again, I probably also would have never capsized on my own. Did we have life jackets or emergency flares? Are you kidding me? We were in our twenties and indestructible. Besides, sharks are not deterred by life jackets and we were too far out to sea for anyone to have seen our flares. I lost my precious wristwatch and we lost all our beer but only very nearly our lives.

The map of Lae on page 176 shows the corner of 7th Street and Huon Road where I lived and spent my last Christmas in the country in 1974 before flying out to my next assignment in Burma. My old friend Noel had flown across from Wewak to spend that Christmas with me, only to help me stencil my shipping box with "M.P. GOERMAN / RANGOON / BURMA".

I still remember talking with him about another job I had been offered eighteen months earlier as manager of a thriving co-operative at Angoram on the banks of the mighty Sepik River. Angoram was no more than a couple of hours' drive away from Wewak and I had been tempted to accept to be near my friend but how different things may have turned out because only a few months later, again at Christmas time, I developed accute appendicitis which was quickly and successfully dealt with through a hurried operation at the newly-built hospital at Arawa but which would've been impossible to handle in the remote wilds of the Sepik District. And, of course, no access to the Australian Financial Review, one of whose advertisements had just then secured me my next assignment in Burma. We are so often the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in.

And then there is Wewak itself, described on the guidebook's page 254 as "an attractive town where you can happily spend a day or two in transit to the Sepik or Irian Jaya." Well, that was then: today Weak is a very unsafe and run-down place and the border to Irian Jaya is also closed. The town map on page 256 still mentions the Windjammer Hotel which burnt down many years ago. The larger district map on the facing pages 250 and 251 shows the road to Cape Wom and the Hawain River where my friend Noel used to live before Independence and the unruly natives forced him out.

A great trip back in time for a mere fifty cents!