Warum kommt da keiner?

Click on image to open separate window in which to enlarge the details

This aerial photo shows LESS THAN HALF the property. The remaining five acres-plus continue along the bottom of the photo.

A = Main Building, B = Self-contained Guest Cottage,
C = Workshop/Outside Bathroom/Carport, D = Gazebo,
E = Equipment Shed, F = Pondhouse, G = Library/Home Entertainment Centre

The property marked 1 directly above "Riverbend" sold for $950,000 in 2011.
The property marked 2 is a vacant block which sold for $750,000 in 2011.
The property marked 3 is an older house and on sale for $875,000.
The property marked 4 is a modern house with pool and on sale for $1,825,000.

All waterfront properties along Sproxton Lane are on blocks of approx. 1,500 - 1,700 square metres. The some 20 times larger "Riverbend" (over 7 acres) is for sale at around $2 million.

 

Warum kommt da keiner? Ich meine, warum kommt da kein Käufer? Billiger kann ich es den Leuten doch gar nicht anbieten!

Das letzte unbebaute Grundstück in Sproxton Lane wurde vor fünf Jahren für $750.000 verkauft. Und das waren bloß 1.500 Quadratmeter Land gewesen.

Beim "Riverbend" läufst Du vom Einfahrtstor über 5.000 Quadratmeter ehe Du erst zum Haus kommst. Und dann sind da einen halben Kilometer am Fluss entlang noch über 25.000 Quadratmeter hinterm Haus.

"Riverbend" ist in gelb markiert; das Grundstück markiert in rot
wurde für insgesamt $1.700.000 verkauft

Und das ganze, mit Haus, Gästehaus, Werkstatt, Schuppen, Klubhaus am Teich, voller Einrichtung und allem Drum und Dran, kann man für $2.000.000 kaufen. Oder $1.975.000. Oder sogar noch weniger.

So, warum kommt da kein Käufer?

 

P.S. Hier und hier gibt es noch viel mehr zu sehen.

Münzstraße 2

 

"Warum in die Ferne schweifen? Sieh, das Gute liegt auf der Internet", denn dort fand ich gerade diese alte Aufnahme von der Münzstraße in Braunschweig wo ich in den frühen 60er Jahren hinter den Fenstern im obersten Stockwerk des Gebäudes vor dem der alte Mercedes geparkt ist meine Lehre absolvierte.

 

 

A Nightingale emailed from Londonderry

Merv Nightingale, my boss on the Bougainville Island contract with the Camp Catering Services Group almost forty years ago, sent me this message:

"Oh I thought that I better let you know that I have been working my way through your various blogs and am both amazed and impressed by your ability to produce such items. I must admit to also being very impressed with your obvious computer skills and your excellent command of the English language. If all else fails you would have no trouble in switching to journalism such is your ability ... I was fascinated by the blog on the Islands, but still have not come accross the old camp office. Brings back a lot of memories, but looking at the areas and the people, I am glad that things turned out the way that they did as I think that it would have proven to be a disaster had we all stayed. Hope all are well down there, and while I think of it, you look well in your photos and obviously the area agrees with you. Best wishes, Merv Nightingale"

Thank you, Merv, but of course you were always most flattering of my abilities, as testified by the glowing reference you gave me when I left Bougainville to take up the position of Financial Controller in Camp Catering Services' head office in Sydney. This reference, together with some fifty other similarly glowing ones, is now slowly yellowing around the edges and fading away just as I am.

Click on image to enlarge
And here's a photo of the old office, Merv:

Flashback

NCR computer at Morgan Equipment, Bougainville Island 1980

 

Thanks to our cottage guests, we needn't go anywhere as the world comes to us. We constantly meet interesting people and I met my 'alter ego' in our recent guest Bernard whose experience in computing parallels my own.

We both started programming with the help of punchcards in the mid-70s, he in New Zealand and I on the Waigani Campus of the University of Papua New Guinea where the English lecturer Ian Grant opened my eyes to the beauty of FORTRAN IV.

Then came the first harddisks which, when first created in the 1950s and 1960s, were the size of a refrigerator with a capacity of just a few megabytes. The removable harddisk I am holding in the photo above in the offices of Morgan Equipment on Bougainville Island in 1980, held what is now a laughable but was then a whopping big ten megabytes.

Now we have tiny memory sticks with the capacity of a terabyte (TB) which is 1000 gigabytes (GB) or one trillion bytes! For the tetrapods amongst you who still walk on all fours, please note that it is terabyte which is derived from the Greek word 'teras', meaning “monster”, and not tetrabyte which is ancient Greek for "four".

Both Bernard and I had programmed in COBOL ("common business oriented language") which was invented in 1959 by a committee established by the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the oldest computer programming language. Banks, financial markets, governments and the military-industrial complex all programmed their computer mainframes with COBOL. Only a few had bothered to spend the vast sums necessary to retool or update when more advanced languages came along with the result that fewer and fewer cutting-edge programmers and IT experts in the West were versed in COBOL.

Which led us to talk about India and Y2K. You remember Y2K or the millenium bug, don't you? All computers have internals calendars which employ six digits - YYMMDD - to display the date. The first two numbers in the sequence signified the year; consequently, "991231" was scheduled to become "000101" at midnight, on January 1, 2000, at which point all old computers using this illogical calendar and programmed mainly in COBOL would go into meltdown. Planes would plummeted from the sky, trillions of dollars would be wiped from banking systems, and governments would stop functioning. It was even suggested that confused computers in Washington and Moscow would launch nuclear weapons on each other.

So what happened? In a word, nothing. But India benefited hugely from this non-existent problem because, having only reluctantly entered the computer age in the 1980s and a decade on still teaching and using COBOL, it suddenly had a huge competitive edge when Western multinational were caught up in the Y2K hysteria. The Indian government promptly advertised the nation's debugging expertise in COBOL and earned more than US$2 billion in export revenue. In addition to this immediate revenue from the 'fixing' of the Y2K bug, it also launched Indian IT on the path of becoming the world's leading supplier of outsourced computer programming skills.

Those days are gone now and so is Bernard and I am waiting for our next guests to bring back other long forgotten memories.

Unreliable memories

Robyn's email prompted me to jot down the events that led to my going to Honiara in February 1973 and my subsequent departure at the end of the same year:

Having assisted in the successful start-up of Camp Catering Services' operations on Bougainville, the company lured me to Sydney to become the group's Financial Controller. I hired a friend and fellow-accountant to take over from me and headed for Sydney - and disaster! Sydney was the pits! And it was agony to watch the financial and reputational benefits of the company's 'Jewel in the Crown', the Bougainville Copper Project, being frittered away in endless head office waste and infighting.

I quit after only five months. The managing director, Nelson Hardy, immediately offered me my old position back on Bougainville, but how could I do my friend out of a job? Instead, I found my own way back to the islands by successfully applying for the position of 'Secretary' (Commercial Manager) with the British Solomon Islands Electricity Authority (BSIEA) in Honiara, the capital of the then British Solomon Islands Protectorate.

I took over from another expat who for years had collected sizeable allowances for a non-existent wife and several children in Australia. When it seemed he was going to be found out, they all suddenly died in a car crash! Not that he shed a tear as such was the shortage of expat manpower that he was immediately re-employed by another business in town.

My new boss, the meek-and-mild General Manager of the Authority, a British civil servant 'Yes, Minister' type, wanted to get through his contract with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of benefits for himself and his cohorts of expat time-servers whereas I was young and ambitious and wanted change. I hadn't read about Kipling's six honest serving-men yet but already couldn't help myself questioning the what and where and when and how and why and by whom when looking at some of the hide-bound Authority's procedures.

The warehouse at the old Honiara powerhouse (next to Blums' Hotel) documented the issue of every single bolt and nut and washer, worth no more than a few cents each, on triplicate requisitions. These were then priced, multiplied, totalled and entered on ledger cards TWICE, first on the respective stock card and then on the job card. As this work was deemed to be beyond the mental capacity of a 'Native', a highly-paid expat woman had made a career out of it. When I suggested that such minor material issues should be left unrecorded and instead a small lumpsum added to every capital job to account for such incidental issues, I was in her opinion hastening the decline of the British Empire! That she was the wife of a British police officer who had faithfully served the dying Empire, from one independence-gaining African colony to another, and now hung on to his last posting for dear life, was of course sheer coincidence. It was all jobs for the boys - and their wives!

The Authority employed a dozen Gilbert Islander meter-readers who lolled about the office for most of the time waiting for the end of the month when they were let loose like a swarm of angry bees to race through the streets and up and down the hills of Honiara to read the whole town's electricity meters all at once. They would then return to head office with their readings and, with the help of a calculator, deduct last month's reading from this month's, multiply the result by the kilowatt unit rate, and transcribe it all onto invoices which were then folded, put into envelopes, and mailed out.

After having watched this in utter amazement for the first month, I suggested that the town area should be broken up in sectors and that meters should be read throughout the month, each sector at the same time each month. I also suggested that, with each kilowatt hour costing just a few cents, consumption should be charged in multiples of TEN kilowatts so that meter-readers could drop the last digit on their readings to make the recording of this month's and the deducting of the previous month's reading easier. Finally, I drew up a simple ready reckoner of charges in multiples of ten kilowatts for the meter-readers' use. They would take it with them on their rounds together with each householder's invoice on which the previous month's reading (without the last digit) had already been carried forward. As they read the meter, they would enter the new reading (without the last digit), deduct the previous month's reading, look up the charge on the ready reckoner, and enter the dollar amount on the invoice. The original invoice would then be left in the householder's mailbox and the carbon copy (yes, they had already progressed to NCR-type precarbonised invoice paper) returned to the office.

All hell broke loose! This would never do! Surely, those 'black savages' couldn't do a white man's job? I had rocked the British expats' lifeboat, HMS Sinecure, and it was all hands on deck to repel the usurper from the Colonies!

Well, it took me longer to convince the Protectorate's Auditor-General, who had been roped in to stop me from committing these follies, than to train the meter-readers who welcomed the changes with full throttles as they zoomed all over town, proud of their new importance. To paraphrase Lawrence of Arabia, "It is better that they do a thing imperfectly than for you to do it perfectly: for it is their country, their work, and your time is limited".

Mendana Hotel
Guadalcanal Club
My house on Lengakiki Ridge overlooking Honiara and the sea

I lived a gracious life in a big house on Lengakiki Ridge overlooking Honiara and the ocean beyond, all the way to Savo Island and Tulagi. I was member of the Point Cruz Yacht Club and every day by 4.30 sharp the offshore breeze would fill the sails of my CORSAIR dinghy. Wednesday nights was Chess Night on the terrace of the Mendana Hotel and there was always a big do on of a Saturday night at the Guadalcanal Club (commonly referred to as G-Club).

Entrance to Governor's Residence
New arrivals in the Protectorate were supposed to leave their card with the aide-de-camp to His Excellency the British Governor. In due course, a gold-embossed invitation would be hand-delivered to summon them to morning tea on the lawns of the Governor's Residence.

Some of those 'Empire-builders' actually did walk with their noses in the air. They may have suffered from a rare medical condition that necessitated keeping their nostrils uplifted - if so I'm sorry for them - but the impression they gave me was that of the snooty Englishman abroad.

I was bored by the ease and comfort and meaninglessness of it all. Those were my restless years and I still had places to go - more than thirty, as it turned out - so, unable to tuck another cucumber sandwich under the cummerbund, this subject left Her Brittanic Majesty's Protectorate to return to reality (spelled PNG).

"There, but for the grace of God, go I"

In 1968/69 I lived and worked in Lüderitz in South-West Africa, or what is now Namibia. I shared the company accommodation with another young German, Karl-Heinz - more about it here.

I left again, and only after another 30 years and another 40 jobs in more than a dozen different countries did I finally come to rest here on the South Coast of New South Wales in Australia.

Not so Karl-Heinz: he got married in South-West Africa and stayed put. Today, forty years later, he's still in the same place, living with his wife Dorle on a farm in the semi-arid interior of the country.

We're still - or rather, again - in contact with each other and I hear that life in the now independent Namibia is far from ideal. Not politically and not at all in agricultural terms. There are some years when they just get by with the help of the cactus-jelly they originally started as a sideline. Here are more pictures.

(Correction: the website has gone blank which may suggest that Karl-Heinz no longer makes and sells cactus-jelly)

Well, it could have happened to me too because at the time I was still a German and South-West Africa was a real piece of Germany in the middle of Africa. The then Volkskas offered me a job but I wanted to get back to Australia.

"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

I lived and worked here

www.bwana.de

 

For a whole six months, from late September 1968 until late March 1969, I lived and worked in this tiny town at the end of the world, squeezed in between two deserts, one watery, the other sand.

For me South-West Africa, now Namibia, was merely a staging post to earn enough money to get me back to Australia, and I never had the time to visit the nearby ghost town of Kollmannkuppe.

 

www.bwana.de

 

However, for another young German, whom I befriended there, it became "home" - see here.

"There, but for the grace of God, go I!"

 

Why I am not rich!

The address says it all: PO Box 187, Rabaul, New Guinea

Remember the Poseidon boom in Australia in the late 1960s when some nickel stocks experienced spectacular increases in price? The best-known, Poseidon, rose from $1.85 on 26 September 1969 to its high of $280 on 10 January 1970. Some years later it went off the board. Its shares were worthless.

In 1969 I'd just come back from South West Africa, rejoined the ANZ Bank in Canberra and then gone to Papua New Guinea to escape the hand-to-mouth existence of a banking career. I was totally ignorant of the Poseidon boom but my new colleagues in the chartered accounting firm of Hancock, Woodward & Neill in Rabaul talked of nothing else - when they weren't drinking which was most of the time!

PO Box 12, Kieta, Bougainville, New Guinea

First out of sympathy and then as a convert, I spent what little money I earned on VAM and Kambalda shares which, after I had bought them at several dollars each, went down to just a few cents and then to nothing.

Are those early years called the formative years because during that time one forms one's financial base? Well, my shiny VAM and Kambalda share certificates weren't even pliable and absorbent enough for the most obvious use, which is perhaps why I still have a few of them today. As the saying goes: I started out with nothing and I still got most of it left.

Taim bilong Rabaul

Graham Ward and Peter Logan at the Royal Papuan Yacht Club in Port Moresby

 

Peter Logan, a friend from my days in Rabaul in 1970 where he worked at Rabaul Garage selling cars for John Dowling, recently travelled back to Papua New Guinea to meet up with another friend of ours, Graham Ward.

Rabaul had been my jumping-off spot in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea when I arrived there in early January 1970. It was everything I had expected of the Territory: it was a small community settled around picturesque Simpson Harbour. The climate was tropical with blazing sunshine and regular tropical downpours, the vegetation strange and exotic, and the social life a complete change from anything I had ever experienced before! And to top it all, I loved the work which offered challenges only available in a small setting such as Rabaul where expatriate labour was at a premium.

I worked for Hancock, Woodward & Neill, a small firm of chartered accountants: the resident manager, Barry Weir, his wife Muriel as secretary, and two accountants, Peter Langley and Graham Ward, plus myself. Graham was a real character who was destined never to leave the Territory. For him the old aphorism came true that "if you spend more than five years in New Guinea you were done for, you'd never be able to get out, your energy would be gone, and you'd rot there like an aged palm."

Mango Avenue

He and an accountant from another chartered firm and myself shared a company house (which was really an old Chinese tradestore) in Vulcan Street and a 'hausboi' who answered to the name of Getup. "Getup!!!" "Yes, masta!" Each of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping. I always dreaded when it was their turn as they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest of the kitty to stock up on beer! We spent Saturday nights at the Palm Theatre sprawled in our banana chairs with an esky full of stubbies beside us. The others rarely spent a night at home; their nocturnal activities ranged from the Ambonese Club to the Ralum Club to the RSL. When they were well into their beers, mosquitoes would bite them and then fly straight into the wall! Then, next morning, they were like snails on Valium. How they managed to stay awake during office hours has always been a mystery to me!

Palm Theatre

When the tradestore lease terminated, Graham and I moved into adjoining flats above New Britain Bakery in Mango Avenue until the stale smell of bread and the noise of the nightly baking drove us away. We next took up quarters at the mess hall of the Public Works Department along Malaguna Road where Graham Ward, Peter Logan, an alcoholic spray-painter by the name of Brian Davies who worked for Rabaul Garage, and I shared a 'donga', each of us occupying a separate room connected by a long verandah, with the ablution block at one end.

On that verandah, right next to my door, stood an old beer fridge beside an old wicker chair. This chair was always occupied by Brian who never wore anything other than the same pair of paint-splattered overalls (I think he even wore them when taking a shower which he did every Sunday, whether he needed one or not ☺). After a hot working-day during which he had quenched his thirst with paint thinner, Brian would sit all night on the verandah and work his way through the contents of the beer fridge (as we all know, alcohol doesn't solve any problem, but then neither does milk). I will always associate the sound of a creaking fridge door and the soft popping of bottle tops with those tropical nights in Rabaul!

Unfortunately, I have no photos of that period in my life as I didn't own a camera then. Maybe I ought to have bought one instead of the worthless mining shares which my fellow-accountants had talked me into "investing" in - read more here.

The address says it all: Box 187 P.O., Rabaul, New Guinea, T.P.N.G.

During my time in Rabaul, advertisements began to appear in the local POST-COURIER for the Bougainville Copper Project. I applied to the project's construction managers Bechtel Corporation for the advertised position of Senior Contract Auditor and was invited by the Project Administration Manager Sid Lhotka to attend an interview at Panguna. It was a case of vini,vidi,vici and within a month I was flying back to Bougainville to start work with Bechtel (but thereby hangs yet another tale.)

I've sometimes wondered what would have become of Graham had he come across to Bougainville. I had a job lined up for him in my contract audit group at Loloho looking after the construction of the Arawa Township, Loloho Port, and Loloho Powerhouse. He actually flew over for the interview and said he would return within the month but never did.

I guess when Graham returned from the interview on Bougainville, Mark Henderson, who by that time had taken over from Barry Weir as partner, offered him a few extra dollars (which, in Graham's currency of the day, may have been the equivalent of several cartons of SP) and Graham was happy to stay. It is also possible that he may not been cut out for the pace on Bougainville where we worked a minimum of 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Graham Ward was never to leave Rabaul - well, not until September 1994 when the town was totally wiped out by a volcanic eruption. By that time Graham had already got married to a PNG citizen and had become a PNG citizen himself and moved to Port Moresby. He remains there to this day, little changed in looks (further proof that alcohol is a great preservative ☺) and still just on the verge of making a lot of money with some newly dreamed-up scheme.

I wished I could've been a fly on the wall and listen in as he and Peter Logan talked about the good ol' days.

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear ...

The Errol-Flynn look-alike on the far right is yours truly ☺

 

This photo is thirty-eight years old! I discovered it on the Pacific Forum Line's website and took it as recognition of my contribution to the formation of that shipping line in Samoa in 1978 when I set up their financial recording and reporting systems.

 

 

Yes, it's long, long ago; too long ago to even feel real. It was in another life when I was young and full of energy and adventure - not to mention full of myself ☺

Sing me the songs I delighted to hear; long, long ago; long ago.

Debbie Does Dallas

 

It all started in 1985, my very own annus horribilis: I had returned from my last assignment overseas and, in anticipation of continuing the work for my former Saudi boss, settled in tropical Townsville.

The work never came - well, not until two years later when he offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by that time I had grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.

With few other job prospects in Townsville, I had hastily relocated to Sydney where I eventually took up the impressive-sounding job of "Internal Consultant" with Wormald International which required me to be 'on the road' - or rather 'in the air' as Wormald's operations were spread all over the world - for nine months of the year. After the first rush of adrenalin had passed, I remembered that I had just given up an even more highly-paid overseas job with even greater perks in order to live a 'normal', domesticated life.

But not in Sydney! So when I saw a job advertised for a PICK computer programmer in Canberra, I remembered having studied PICK with Ranger Uranium almost a decade earlier, and applied. A few days later the company's directors flew down from Canberra to give me the once-over and then the job.

I had found it puzzling during the interview when the directors asked me if I had any objections to working in the 'adult video industry' which, as they repeatedly pointed out, was involved in the duplication and distribution of X-rated videos. I had never heard of an 'adult video industry' nor did I know what X-rated was or who rated it. As for videos, the first and last time I had seen a video was at a friend's place in Saudi Arabia during the screening of 'Bambi' to his young kids.

However, I wasn't going to let this lack of knowledge get between me and a lucrative job in Canberra. And so, one early morning before the crack of dawn in late November 1985, I drove out of Sydney, against an endless stream of headlights coming into the city. I still remember thinking to myself, 'You can keep it, you suckers! I'm out of here!'

Arriving in Canberra, I acquainted myself with my new 'boss', a brand-new AWA Sabre mainframe, its empty bowels hungrily awaiting its very first line of computer code. But before I could start 'cutting code', I had to learn about the business. And what a business it was! Quite simply, it was Australia's biggest - by far! - distributor of pornographic movies with a client list as thick as a metropolitan telephone directory and a turnover running into the millions. The problem was that it was all done, slowly and expensively, by hand.

After having accepted the fact that pornographic movies were just like any other movies except with the boring bits removed, the professional challenge was simply too good to be missed and I was itching to introduce some methods into the madness.

Which began each morning with Australia Post delivering several large bags of letters containing orders and cash. Lots of cash because many customers didn't want to use their real names which were needed to pay by Bankcard. I had never seen so many Donald Ducks and Mickey Mouses buying pornographic movies! ☺

The girls - it was an all-girl crew! - would write up the bank deposits and Bankcard slips and then pass the orders to the 'production department' with its banks of fifty-or-more duplicating machines. The 'production manager', when drunk (which was often), delighted in turning up the sound. I don't know how many heavy grunts and groans got embedded in my computer code. ☺

Creating a database of tens of thousands of customers, adding their 'profiles' of likes and preferences (I won't bore you with the details ☺) and their purchase histories, and then linking their orders to produce daily picking slips for the production department, bank deposits, and Bankcard submissions seems to have been, in retrospect, quite a simple task but was in fact colossal. There were many nights I couldn't sleep; not because I had watched too many of their movies - as it happened, I didn't watch my first X-rated movie until several months into the job! - but because of the many programming problems.

One particular problem was the 'lending' side of the business. With the price of a movie around fifty dollars (when fifty dollars was still real money), many customers preferred to borrow which sounds a bit like your local library and in many ways it was: a customer would buy his first video and, after viewing it, exchange it for another.

This was a very profitable side of the business and, to keep it going, customers were given one free 'exchange' after six (six, not sex! ☺) To keep tabs on their exchanges, a bunch of girls kept 'library cards' for all customers which presented a problem as harddisk space was still at a premium in those days and a decision had to be made on how many and for how long such records should be kept.

My idea was to do away with library cards altogether. "But what about the free exchange?", asked the 'library girls'. "Give them a coupon with each exchange; when they've collected six, they can return them in lieu of money for a free one", was my reply. "But what if they lose them?", shot back the girls who seemed more concerned about losing their jobs than the customers losing their coupons. "Tough!" I told them, on both counts. But they still had one shot left in the locker, "Without a library card, we won't know what they ordered before. What if they borrow the same video twice?" "Girls", I said, "if they want to do Debbie twice, they're welcome to her!"

And so it came to pass that, in just under a year, the business was fully computerised. The order backlogs vanished, turnaround times were reduced from more than a week to just one day, and I like to think that those 'library girls' found work elsewhere - maybe even in your local library in which case say 'hello' from me next time you borrow a book.

As for all those people who tut-tuttingly told me, "How could you?" (they were probably the same who signed their orders with "Donald Duck" ☺) and asked what it was like working for an X-rated adult movie distributor, I tell them it was hard. In fact, it was constantly hard. The drunken production manager saw to that.

Canberra Computer Accounting Systems

What was once at the forefront of my life, is now at the back of the workshop door: Canberra Computer Accounting Systems' car door signage with which I drove through Canberra's streets for ten years.

It all started in 1985, my very own annus horribilis: I had returned from my last assignment overseas and, in anticipation of continuing the work for my former Saudi boss, settled in tropical Townsville.

The work never came - well, not until two years later when he offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by that time I had grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.

With few other job prospects in Townsville, I hastily relocated to Sydney where I eventually took up the impressive-sounding job of "Internal Consultant" with Wormald International which required me to be 'on the road' - or rather 'in the air' as Wormald's operations were spread all over the world - for nine months of the year. After the first rush of adrenalin had passed, I remembered that I had just given up an even more highly-paid overseas job with even greater perks in order to live a 'normal', domesticated life.

I promptly resigned and moved to Canberra where I had taken my first tentative steps as a young migrant twenty years earlier. There I wrote computer software in the PICK language for a large mailorder business for the first twelve months - read more here. Personal computers were slowly making their presence felt, and I began to specialise in PC-based computerised accounting systems, selling and installing off-the-shelf ATTACHÉ, SYBIZ, NewViews, and other packages, and also writing custom-built solutions in TAS, under my business name Canberra Computer Accounting Systems.

It was strictly a one-man business, just me and a telephone answering service. Those invisible girls at the answering service did a wonderful job for me as their ever-changing voices made my clients think they were dealing with a large computer software house. Only a few knew that I was working out of the spare bedroom in my house (later TWO spare bedrooms, with the wall knocked out between them).

Those were the days when an IBM computer with just 20MB of harddisk space retailed for around $8,000, when a monochrome monitor (you had a choice of green or amber display) cost some $700, and individual accounting software modules such as General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, or Inventory Control sold for close to a thousand dollars - EACH! Dot-matrix printers (remember dot-matrix printers?) sold for almost a thousand dollars and connecting several computers together with the help of LANtastic or NOVELL (those were the days before MS WINDOWS!) took hours and hours, if not days, and meant thousands of dollars in profit!

And there was very little competition as my combined expertise in accounting software, computer hardware, and networking plus a degree in accountancy wasn't matched by anybody. It took several years before accounting firms realised that there was a buck to be made by setting up their own PC consultancies.

Of course, all good things must come to an end: hardware and software prices kept dropping and with it my margins. I mean, who was going to stump up hundreds of dollars for installation and training after having bought a small-business accounting package such as 'Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)' for just $95 ?

And then came WINDOWS! Suddenly everybody was a computer expert and Canberra Computer Accounting Systems was no more! But it was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the memories!

Why Nelligen? Why not?

 

Some people ask me why I retired at Nelligen, to which I reply, "Why not?" (I sometimes ask myself why I retired, full-stop, but that's a different story altogether.)

It all started in Canberra while I was still running my small computer consultancy Canberra Computer Accounting Systems and dabbling in tax and accounting work on the side. After I had solved a tax problem for a German friend, Tony Finsterer, for which I refused payment, he insisted that I stay at his weekend cottage at Nelligen.

For several months, I didn't find the time to drive to the coast. When I eventually did I had almost forgotten Tony's offer. Luckily, I didn't blink as I drove across the Nelligen bridge on the way to Batemans Bay and so spotted this tiny village nestled alongside the Clyde River.

I asked for directions to Tony's cottage at the General Store and was shown to # 21 Sproxton Lane across the river. (Tony has since died and his cottage has changed hands twice and is again for sale.)

The cottage was locked and Tony in Canberra. I phoned him and was told to look for the keys under the watertank and to make myself at home. Which I did and which set me on my own quest to find a little place in Nelligen.

At the time, Nelligen was a place forgotten even by real estate agents and nothing was for sale except a few empty building blocks. One such block overlooked the Clyde River from its location in Nelligen Place. I could imagine sitting there on the verandah and taking in the views. Which is exactly what a chap was doing just two blocks away. I walked up and asked if I could join him.

Soon we were not only sharing the same views but also memories of people and places we both had known as "Sandy" Sandilands and his wife Betty had also lived and worked on Thursday Island and in Rabaul in New Guinea. I felt at home at once! A few weeks later I was the proud owner of a block of land in Nelligen Place!

I wanted to build a beautiful little Classic Country Cottage. However, a retired public servant who occupied a small log cabin next to me did what public servants do: be a pain in the coccyx ! He objected to my building plans - TWICE! - on some obscure grounds. This delayed me long enough to find a much better place across the river. And that's how I came to buy "Riverbend"!

"Riverbend" had been auctioned in August 1992. I went to the auction as a spectator knowing that the reserve price was outside my range. It must have been outside everybody else's as well because it didn't sell. More than a year later, in November 1993, the owners accepted my much-reduced offer. The rest, as they say, is history!

(Oh, and I did go back to thank the public servant for objecting to my plans so that I could buy this much better and bigger and waterfront property. Last time I looked his mouth was still open!)

"Riverbend" has been my home now for over 17 years. As they say, there's no place like home and, as evidenced by the tee-shirt, Nelligen is right up there with every other great metropolis.

In memory of Noel Butler

Noel (left) and I at Wewak in New Guinea sometime in the early 70s

 

Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.

If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.

Noel Butler was such a friend. Some friends are more or less replaceable with other friends. Noel was not. I last heard from him on this day exactly twenty-one years ago. He'd sent me a "Greetings from Childers by Night" postcard which was all black except for those words. On the back he had written, "Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this; mine is but that's inevitable." I was then far too young and far too busy and far too full of myself to think that this was more than a funny card. Four months later, Noel was dead.

Rest in Peace, Noel! Your memory lives on at "Riverbend" and so does your card which, beautifully framed, sits on top of the mantelpiece.

As long as we live, they too will live,
for they are now a part of us,
as long as we remember them.

The Little House in the Prairie Country

This old black-and-white picture - probably taken in the late 50s - of the "Landheim" (home in the country) of the "Wandervogel" group I belonged to as a youngster in Germany brings back many memories.

This "Landheim" was just 28 kilometres outside my hometown Braunschweig and I walked, hitchhiked, and cycled to it a hundred times, alone and with "Kameraden", and the weeks and weekends spent there are forever part of my memories.

They, the "Fahrenden Gesellen", recently celebrated their 100th anniversary which they commemorated with the publication of a "Festschrift" of old photos, stories, and documents which I promptly ordered.

"Es lebe der Bund!"

From the book "100 Jahre Fahrende Gesellen - 1909-2009", page 49:

"In den 1950er Jahren entdeckte Heinz Radtke 30 km nördlich von Braunschweig eine alte Spargelbude, umgeben von kleinen Wäldchen, Heidefeldern und Äckern, die nun leer stand und verfiel. Für 40 DM im Jahr wurde sie gepachtet und von den Jungen über zwei Jahre lang an jedem Wochenende ausgebaut, denn aus den Wänden des Fachwerkbaus war viel herausgefallen, ebenso schaute durch das Dach der Mond. Es wurde gesägt, gemauert, gehämmert, gebastelt, neu verputzt und das Dach gedeckt.

Endlich konnte die Einweihung gefeiert werden. Neben Gaugrafen und Bundesleiter hatte sogar die Stadt ein Ratsmitglied geschickt. Es wurde ein schönes Fest, ohne Alkohol! Man trank Kaffee, lachte, sang Lieder und kratzte sich, denn die Mücken eines nahen Sumpfes waren uneingeladen auch gekommen. Den Gästen konnte ein Raum mit drei Fenstern gezeigt werden, 5 x 3 m groß, mit Tisch, Stühlen, Schrank, alles umgebaut nach unserem Geschmack. Ein Kochherd und sogar eine Pumpe waren da. Über dem Tagesraum war der Dachboden mit Matratzen zum Schlafen eingerichtet.

Viele Jahre diente dieses Landheim den Jungen und auch manchem Altgesellen zur Erholung vom Großstadtlärm. Hier wurden auch Gau-, Mannschaftstreffen und Osterlager veranstaltet. Nach zehn Jahren lief der Pachtvertrag ab, und ab Anfang der 1970er Jahre gab es auch keine Jungengruppe mehr in Braunschweig."

Welcome to Barton House

Sunday morning after the night before: chilling out on the front steps; "yours truly" in dead centre, wearing sunnies and checkered shirt. Notice the chap on the far right having a "hair of the dog" from a McWilliams flagon left over from the night before. If that didn't do it, there was always BEX powder and a good lie down!Or take Vincent's with confidence for quick three-way relief. All things of the past now!

 

It was 1965. The Menzies era was coming to an end. The conflict in Vietnam was escalating. And I had just come out to Australia as a young migrant from Germany. I spent those early years, from 1965 to 1967, and then again a brief period in 1969 after I had come back from South Africa, in Canberra in a place called "Barton House" in Brisbane Avenue, one of the many boarding houses then in existence.

Those were the days of parties, of evenings in front of the telly in the TV Room watching "Z-Car" or "M*A*S*H", laughing at the antics of Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart" ("Good thinking, 99" was a favourite saying in those days); or being bored to death by Barry Jones's insufferable show-off act on Bob and Dolly's BP Pick-a-Box. And then there were the evenings spent at the Burns Club or in the Newsroom of the "Kingo" Pub across the road, drinking 'schooners' and talking about 'sheilas', followed by a last-minute dash back to Barton House before the dining room closed! And Sunday morning, sitting on the frontsteps with the boys, recovering from the night before, while waiting for the week's washing to run through its cycle in the laundry in the backyard.

It was at Barton House that I was introduced to the culinary delights of Australia in the 60s:    mixed grill, corned silverside, Yorkshire pudding, spaghetti-meatballs, lamp chops, and, as a filla-uppa, loads and loads of steam-pudding drowned in thick creamy custard. And who can forget those dreadful brown-paperbag luncheon packs of baked-beans sandwiches, chutney sandwiches, and spaghetti sandwiches? Is there anything more revolting than a soggy spaghetti-sandwich dripping through the bottom of a brown paperbag? The people who ate that stuff must've been a weird mob indeed!

There were never any seconds - except for steam-pudding!!! - and for a growing lad that meant going next door to the "Greasy Spoon" at Lachlan Court to stock up on Iced Vovos, Arnott's Spicy Fruit Rolls (my favourites!), and spring and Chiko rolls.

I always occupied a share-room because a share-room was cheaper. And some of the room mates I had to share with! There was the ANZ "Bank Johnny" from the Kingston branch who regularly came back drunk, night after night, and who was a master of the Australian expletive - which he used constantly, stand-alone, in between words, even inserted into words! Watching him at the Bank stringing together sentences without profanity was like watching someone trying to swim across a river without using his arms or his legs. And the WORMALD-employee who would purposefully strut off to work only to be back inside the room five minutes later, screaming his head off. "They repossessed my car again, the bastards!!!" He regularly fell behind with his repayments, and regularly had his car repossessed.

And then there was the postie who seemed to lead a charmed life as he was usually back from work by mid-morning until he was found out to have dumped his mail deliveries at the local tip! And the Kiwi with his already then wonderfully antique ROVER-car with walnut dashboard who loved classical music and played it throughout the night on his radiogram. Remember the radiogram? His was an expensive "HIS MASTER'S VOICE ". My own choice of music at the time were THE SEEKERS and PETER, PAUL AND MARY. There will never be another time like that! And could I write a book about it? You bet!!!

There was a constant stream of new arrivals, but for a hard core of people - and that included me! - Barton House was "home" because we had no other! The home we never left, not even for Christmas, when it became a ghostly place with just a handful of us scattered along its empty corridors and we sat like lost sheep in a small 'holding pen' of the otherwise closed-off dining room. It was the sort of "home" that prepared me well for the house I later shared in Rabaul with two fellow-accountants and the camp accommodation I occupied when I went to Bougainville Island. And it gave me the confidence and the skills to deal with all manner of people in future years.

And what variety of people I met, and what interesting friends I made! Some of the names I still remember are John Burke, my immediate boss at the Bank, Merv Quine, another "Bank Johnny" originally from Broken Hill, the other two "Bank Johnnies" Dennis Everitt and Bob Southwell, Pat Fisher from Foreign Affairs who was forever on study leave trying to learn some foreign languages but never getting past the equivalents of "Good Morning" and "How are you?". And Jerry from the Government Printers who somehow or other broke his leg and stayed on crutches for years and years, creaming off the insurance companies. The retired dotty surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who spoke to no-one and always walked about with his own cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal shower cubicles and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower beyond what he considered was a reasonable time.

For years after, and in different parts of Australia, I still kept bumping into people who had been at Barton House, who had been chased for their outstanding rents by Peter "Frenchie" Check, the manager, who also ran an "Academy of Self-Defense" (and didn't he need it to deal with some of his more difficult boarders!) They all looked back on their time in Barton House with fond memories and a great deal of nostalgia.

 

Der Mann, der Gott verklagte - The Man Who Sued God

 

Am Samstag, 19.3.2016, um 5.25 Uhr, gibt es einen australischen Film auf dem MDR Fernsehen - siehe hier.

Es ist ein spaßiger Film der in Bermagui, nur eine kurze Entfernung von Riverbend und Batemans Bay, gefilmt wurde.

Viel Spaß beim Zuschauen!

 

Life is good!

I am a Seenager. (Senior teenager)
I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only 60 years later.
I don’t have to go to school or work.
I get an allowance every month.
I have my own pad.
I don’t have a curfew.
I have a driver’s licence and my own car.
I have ID that gets me into bars and the liquor store.
The people I hang around with are not scared of getting pregnant.
And I don’t have acne.
Life is great.
I have more friends I should send this to, but right now I can't remember their names.

Unreliable memories

 

My employment with the ANZ Bank, despite its relative shortness, has been a hugely important milestone in my life and I will always be grateful to the late Mr Robert Reid, the then manager of the ANZ Bank in Canberra, who hired me as a youngster, fresh off the boat from Europe, and gave me the chance of a new start in a new country - click here.

 

 

And, of course, the Bank's social life and the team spirit, together with living in a boarding-house full of other "Bank Johnnies", left me with many memories which I indulged in on my Barton House blog entry.

Working for the ANZ Bank allowed me to not only learn good, almost expletive-free English and mix with people a cut above the rest but it also introduced me to Australian commercial practices which would stand me in good stead as I worked my way through a correspondence course in accountancy with the then Hemingway Robertson Institute.

 

 

"Once you withdraw, you lose all your interest!" That's what my immediate boss, John Burke, jokingly used to tell me! He was the head-ledgerkeeper at the ANZ Bank in Canberra Civic during my first two years as ledgerkeeper from 1965 to 1967. He was again my boss as accountant of the Kingston A.C.T. branch where I worked as a teller for another nine months or so after I had come back from South Africa.

 

Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969

 

Those were the days before computers, electronic calculators, or even electric adding machines! Everything was done manually and took many hours, like when it was 'all hands on deck' twice a year to 'do the decimals', i.e. calculating the interest on savings accounts. And you needed a strong pair of hands to shake a sorting tray full of coins. Rolling those coins into tightly-wrapped tubes also took some learning.

And what about pistol practice? Not that we ever fired a shot in anger! That small pistol in the teller's drawer and the red trip lever on the floor that would set off the alarm were our only defense against a hold-up that never came.

There were some machines, like that huge beast of a 'Proof Machine' which was the size of a small room on which all incoming cheques were 'batched' by the respective bank on which they were drawn. And in those days there were many more banks than there are today: who still remembers the Rural Bank of New South Wales, the English, Scottish & Australian Bank, the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, the Commercial Bank of Australia, or the Bank of Adelaide?

 

Here's proof of how big a Proof Machine was

 

Once a day one of us juniors would be the Exchange Clerk and trot off to the Reserve Bank on Canberra's London Circuit to exchange cheques with the other banks. It was a much sought-after job as some of the exchange clerks from the other banks were of the female variety which gave us blokes a chance to chat them up ☺

For us ledgerkeepers - Kevin Sloan, John Julian, Jeff Bowdie, and yours truly - the race was on every morning to extract as quickly as possible our customers' overdraft balances and report them on blue O/D Cards to the Assistant Manager, Mr Bradford, who would then decide which to pass and which to do the dirty deed on. Back in those days a dishonoured cheque was a disgrace - well, to some; others were daring enough to attempt to 'fly a kite' - and a customer's cheque was 'bounced' for all sorts of other reasons first - Endorsement Required; Signature Unlike Specimen Held; Amounts in Words and Figures Differ; Post-dated - before his lack of funds was disclosed with a gentle "Present Again" or the more abrupt and final "Refer to Drawer".

Female bank staff were demurely dressed in dark-blue smocks with detachable collars and an ANZ brooch fastened to the lapel. The absence of either resulted in a severe reprimand from the manager. As did swearing: Kay Atkinson once exclaimed, "Strewth!" Within minutes the phone rang and the manager wanted to know who had uttered such profanity.

Back then banks still bothered with small-time banking: we regularly visited schools and encouraged kids to deposit their play money into savings accounts with us. And we offered a variety of Special Purpose savings accounts: for holidays, for education, and, of course, for the eventual home purchase. No bank in those days gave out home loans to customers who had not been diligent savers over several years!

The ANZ Bank also encouraged its customers to save for Christmas with their Christmas Club coupon book which held 50 coupons of either $1, $2, $5 or $10. A customer could walk into any branch, deposit the equivalent of one or more coupons, and then wait until early December before he was sent his final balance, plus interest, in a cheque.

Some customers couldn't wait that long. They were given the third degree by the manager who demanded that they put their reason for an early withdrawal in writing. Once reluctantly approved, they were given back their money but without any interest - remember John Burke's "once you withdraw, you lose all your interest"? ☺

Speaking of third degree, woe betide you if, as a teller, you were short of money at the end of the day. All that grovelling and letter-writing to the State Manager who eventually, after you had started paying off the shortage from your meagre salary of forty-quid-a-fortnight or whatever, graciously forgave you the rest.

And I will always remember that small cheque I had sent to the Bankers' Association to pay my union dues. They had taken so long to cash it that I'd totally forgotten about it. When it finally came in, the balance in my account was less than the stamp duty on the cheque. I think turning up drunk for work or being caught out in some osculating activities with a ledger girl in the bank's strongroom would have been more excusable than uttering a worthless cheque. More grovelling and more letter-writing to avoid being given the sack! (By the way, having an account with another bank was also a sackable offense!)

Do banks these days still have an Opinion Clerk? I was one for a while, which was probably the only time when the ANZ Bank gave out opinions in a heavy German accent. My favourite one was 'Possessed of assets' (which in the vernacular meant "filthy rich") which I knew I would never achieve on my paltry bank salary (my penurious situation was best captured by the bank opinion 'Financial position unknown' aka "flat broke"), so I left the bank again at the end of 1969 to seek my fortunes elsewhere - see here.

 

The tie that binds

 

But I still have my old Bank tie and many happy memories and, yes, I am now 'Possessed of assets' but rapidly running out of time to spend them all. Unless, of course, it is true what they say: that old bankers never die; they just want to be a loan!

 

 

Das gibt's ja immer noch!

Ein schweizer Freund in Brisbane schickte mir diesen Artikel und da erinnerte ich mich gleich an das Natron welches mein Vater jeden Tag trank, manche Tage mehrere Male, denn die Tüten mit dem Kaiser-Natron lagen ja immer irgendwo in der Küche.

Das war vor über fünfzig Jahren und heute gibt's das immer noch!

 

Bali's Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

 

Ich "entdeckte" dieses atemberaubend schöne Hotel im ruhigen Norden von Bali vor zehn Jahren als es gerade zum Verkauf angeboten war - siehe hier. Damals dachte ich daß ich "Riverbend" schnell verkaufen könnte und überlegte mir dieses Stückchen Paradies zu kaufen um den Rest meines Lebens in Bali zu verbringen.

Erstens kommt es anders, zweitens als man denkt: der Verkauf von "Riverbend" fiel durch und in der Zwischenzeit wurde dieses traumhafte Hotel von einer Gruppe von Australiern in Canberra erworben.

Man muss ja nicht immer gleich besitzen was einem gefällt und so über die Jahre besuchte ich dieses Hotel mehrere Male als zahlender Gast und verbrachte wunderschöne Wochen dort, meistens ganz ruhig und allein denn ein geschäftlicher Erfolg war es für die Besitzer nicht.

Als einziger Gast konnte ich immer ungestört schwimmen, lesen, im kleinen Dorf spazieren gehen - siehe hier - , mich massieren lassen ...

... die Schwefelbäder von Air Panas besuchen - siehe hier - oder von der Terrasse für Stunden in die unendliche Weite der Java-See schauen.

Ein deutsches Ehepaar besuchte das Hotel in 2014 für bloß eine Nacht und wie die meisten Besucher verliebte sich gleich in dieses traumhafte Paradies. Sie hatten nicht genug Geld es zu kaufen aber die Besitzer waren bereit es für zwei Jahre an sie zu verpachten.

Diese zwei Jahre sind vorbei und die Deutschen sind wieder weg und das Hotel ist zum Verkauf angeboten für AUS$250.000 oer circa €160.000.

Ein sehr günstiger Preis aber ich bin immer noch ans "Riverbend" gefesselt und könnte höchstens für ein paar Monate pro Jahr in Bali wohnen. Falls ich ein paar gleichgesinnte Leute finden könnte die wie ich einen neuen Lebensstil suchen und sich dieses wirklich traumhafte Grundstück mit mir teilen wollten, würde ich sehr gerne bereit sein das nötige Geld darin zu investieren. Bist DU interessiert?

Klicke hier für mehr Fotos.