Early morning at "Riverbend"

 

 

Early morning at "Riverbend" and I'm considering which of the fifty shades of Earl Grey I'm going to have for my tea this morning. Just a short while ago, the weekly garbage truck came down the lane with its headlights blazing which is always a sign that autumn and the end of day-light saving are not far away.

It's been raining which does nothing to improve my mood even though the ducks on the ever-increasing pond don't mind. Which is the keyword in this highly destabilised world we live in. Don't mind about the war in Ukraine; the trade wars between America and China; don't mind about turf wars between bikie gangs in Sydney; don't mind about drive-by shootings and knife-stabbings, don't mind about lying politicians and corrupt public officials; and don't mind about people complaining about banks lending them too much money (they used to complain about not lending them enough money).

It was so much easier to keep calm when I lived in New Guinea before the internet when there was no television or even a decent radio reception from Australia, and the only news was from a local station called 'Maus Bilong San Kam-ap' in Tok Pisin, New Guinea's lingua franca, where a helicopter is a 'Mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ' which made the latest news about helicopter gunship action in Vietnam sound almost hilarious.

Then there was Burma which was under a 6-to-6 curfew and sealed off behind the "Teak Curtain", and where one couldn't even buy Western toothpaste, let alone hear Western news. The only 'television' to watch were those blue-light electric mosquito zappers which were on the wall of every restaurant and which we called "Burmese television".

And then there was the world's largest sandbox, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where everything was totally censored and a Western newspaper was as stiff as cardboard after all its 'offending' articles had been doused in black ink by censors armed with thick felt-tipped pens.

Of course, we could achieve the same now by simply turning off the radio, the television, the internet, but somehow we are all addicted to the news, especially bad news. Maybe I make today a totally news-free day and just concentrate on my Earl Grey tea.

 

Armchair-travelling on a cool and rainy morning

 

Marina Zeas in Piraeus in Greece

 

As the mornings get cooler, it's good to stay indoors with one hand firmly clasped around a hot cup of tea while the other does some armchair travelling on the keyboard with the help of GOOGLE Maps. I GOOGLEd for Boudouri # 2 where I used to live in Piraeus and found this:

 

Click on image to go to GOOGLE Maps

 

My apartment was at the end of the street in the building with views of Marina Zeas which is now obscured by trees.

 

The view from my balcony of Marina Zea

 

The photo below, 'stolen' from the Greek real estate site www.rems-hellas, advertises the old brownstone building, which is directly opposite the apartment I used to live in, up for sale and redevelopment. My favourite taverna, where I used to dine almost every night and where I had my permanent table and chair, was on the corner where the BERLONI-sign is displayed now. Whatever BERLONI is, it's no longer my old taverna!

 

 

And while I was at it, I also GOOGLEd for my old office building at # 3 Agiou Nicolaou in Piraeus:

 

Click on image to go to GOOGLE Maps

 

My office was on the top floor (not visible) in the brownish building towards the centre of the picture from where I had a 180-degree view of the harbour of Piraeus with its many tavernas in which I spent many hours, especially on a rainy day. The opening scene in the movie ZORBA THE GREEK takes me right back there - click here.

 

 

The work was challenging, not least because I was constantly second-guessing what my boss in Jeddah was doing. He told me nothing but expected me to somehow piece together from a bank's advising the establishment of a Letter of Credit, the payment of a charter fee to some ship owners, the receipt of a laytime calculation for demurrage or despatch from a consignor or consignee, and the eventual proceeds from a sale, what commodities he'd bought or sold, and to ensure that we hadn't been shortchanged. And there could be dozens of million-dollar deals up in the air - or rather, on board ocean-going vessels - at any one time!

It was one giant jigsaw puzzle and detective work pure and simple but I enjoyed it, so much so that I even audited deals done before my time, when TREFISCO, a 'Treuhandgesellschaft' in Switzerland, had been engaged to do the same work. They'd typically been more interested in collection their commissions and fees than ensuring that we had been paid out in full, and I discovered one deal with RICHCO in Amsterdam going back several years on which we were still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars which I was able to claw back plus interest.

When I reported this "windfall", my boss's laconic response was, "What took you so long?" What took me so long? I wasn't even supposed to have gone back that far as I was busy enough just keeping current deals under control. Cutting off my nose to spite my face, I resigned on the spot!

 

In my office in Piraeus

 

Of course, I should have stayed longer but hindsight comes too late ("Too late!" - an apt title for my autobiography? ☺)

Anyway, that's the difference between youth and age: when you're young, you invent a different future for yourself; when you're old, you invent a different past.

 

 

P.S. See also
the Mofarrij fleet
TARE weight
my Jeddah office
Bozenna and Ted
Thamer Mofarrij
Saudi calling

 

 

The New Rulers of the World

 

 

"When American Vice-President Dick Cheney said that the 'war on terrorism' could last for fifty years or more, his words evoked George Orwell's great prophetic work, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. We are to live with the threat and illusion of endless war, it seems, in order to justify increased social control and state repression, while great power pursues its goal of global supremacy. Washington is transformed into 'chief city of Airstrip One' and every problem is blamed on the 'enemy', the evil Goldstein, as Orwell called him. He could be Osama bin Laden, or his successors, the 'axis of evil'."

 

 

So begins the Introduction to John Pilger's book "The New Rulers of the World", a must-read for anyone interested in debunking the myth of globalisation.

 

 

Saudi calling

 

 

My phone screen displayed country code 966 - Saudi Arabia! I pressed the button and said, "Marhaba!" I could almost feel the oven heat and the sand blowing in from the desert when a voice said, "Al-salamu alaykum"

Yes, it was Sheikh Abdulhameed, my ex-boss's brother. After I had wa-alaikum-salaam-ed him back and added a few more niceties, it was down to business. Or rather, it wasn't because, as he put it, he just wanted to stay in touch with an old habibi - after more than thirty years? -, inquire about my wellbeing and what I was doing, and was I thinking of visiting the Kingdom again?

Visiting Saudi Arabia again? Nothing could be further from my mind, habibi or not habibi. I'm 73 years old, go to the bathroom half a dozen times a day, and couldn't be bothered flying to Bali, let alone halfway around the world to Saudi Arabia. In any case, we've been there before, haven't we? Almost a year after I'd come back to Australia, Abdulhameed contacted me and, knowing I would not want to live in Saudi Arabia again, asked me if I'd go and work from the office of their Paris bankers on Avenue Kléber.

When that failed to rekindle my old 'wanderlust', he asked me to come to Saudi Arabia on a flying visit to pick up the paperwork for a full audit in Australia. This I did but I should've known better because, unlike his brother Abdulghani who'd always flown me first-class and accommodated me in five-star hotels, this time my ticket was 'cattle-class' and I was the only European in the sort of hotel in Jeddah he put me up in. I did get back to Australia and got down to work but stopped about a month later after he had failed to pay my first interim bill.

 

 

This time we exchanged a few more pleasantries; talked about his business dealings past and present; the reforms taking place in the Kingdom; what was happening across the border in the Yemen; he assured me he would call again; then a final telephonic embrace - both sides of the keypad -, and I was none the wiser why - if there was a why - he had called me.

It's the way of doing business in Saudi Arabia, and this strange phone call happened almost four years ago to the day. There was no sequel, and niether should there be because my globetrotting days are over. I mean, I hardly even bother driving the eight kilometres into the Bay these days.

 

Do You Want Fries With That?

 

 

My Canberra real estate spy with a religious bend - he calls himself FRIAR but that's probably part of his spycraft - made another dead letter drop, this time to tell me about what is probably the most stunning property on the Clyde River, built sometime in the 90s and owned by the couple who used to own the Batemans Bay and other Golden Arches franchises.

It went online only three days ago, with the agents Ray White keeping its location secret but suggesting that "Address available on request" but every local knows where it is and anyone coming up the river can see it on the starboard side. If you don't have a boat, you can simply click here.

The online advertisement mentions no price and invites "Expressions of Interest" but the clipping from the Canberra Times suggests a price guide of $5 million which would smash the current sale record for Batemans Bay.

 

P.S. Tong, are you reading this???

 

I've just discovered Daniel Kehlmann

 

 

Born in 1975 in Munich, Daniel Kehlmann found his way all the way to Batemans Bay where I found the eight-hour audio recording of his book "Measuring the World" in my favourite op-shop. What a find!

"Measuring the World" recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world.

Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground.

Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to know that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula.

 

 

And while I'm still listening to the audio book, I've already ordered the paperback (it's also available at archive.org) and the movie in German.

 

 

What a find!

 

The Third World War

 

 

Who are better qualified than the Germans to make a documentary about a fictional Third World War?

This is a fake historical documentary which imagines a worst-case scenario of how the Cold War might have ended had history taken a different course. Employing a massive amount of archival imagery from military training films from both East and West, fake news reports, fake interviews, public statements by real historical figures (Bush, Thatcher, Kohl, etc.) and a wide variety of other original and archival material, it is a film unlike any other, both in its making and in its use of true pictures to illustrate an alternative vision of the past. Presented as if it where actually true and involving the actual political leaders of the time, World War Three makes real the ultimate horror of the Cold War, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Two-and-a-half years in the making, this international co-production was developed in consultation with military advisors from both NATO and the former Soviet Union. It is a realistic exploration of what might have been as it was imagined by those who were trained to fight World War Three.

A 1998 TV movie which has suddenly become very real again.

 

What to do if Labor gets in

 

Back in 1981 during my first attempt at domesticity in Townsville, I had a retired neighbour who confided in me that, after a lifetime of earning lots of money in mining, he had buried it all in kerosene tins in his garden - I kid you not! - so that he would qualify for the government pension. I pointed out to him that he missed out on more interest than he got in welfare but he was not persuaded because, as he said, "I paid my taxes for it!"

I have been searching for kerosene tins on ebay today because, if Labor gets in this year and starts fiddling with my self-managed super fund, I'll pull all the money out, stick it in kerosene tins, bury it in the garden, and leave a map in my will with a cross on it that says, "Dig here!"

Then I'll go, cap in hand, to Centrelink and apply for the government's age pension plus a whole bunch of other freebies: free medical treatment, free pharmaceuticals, free trains and buses, concessional postage stamps; why, even free housing, if I fill in the right forms.

If enough of us self-funded retirees follow my example, the whole thing may finally be seen for what it is: a totally rorted and unsustainable system funded by those of us who didn't piss it all up against the wall while we were still working, plus generations yet unborn, and we may once again be allowed to provide for our own retirement without being robbed at every step of the way.

Incidentally, when I visited Townsville again in 1985, I heard that the retired neighbour had died and the house been sold. I was tempted to tell the new owners to start digging but they looked like Labor voters who were already drawing enough in benefits!

 

In eigener Sache

 

 

Mein Name ist Peter Goerman und ich lebe im Ruhestand an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales in Australien.

Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 von Deutschland aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mir nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n - von Görmann auf Goerman.

Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen[AT]mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.

In der Zwischenzeit, falls Du mein Blog in der englischen Sprache lesen willst, besuche mich At Home at Riverbend.

 

Full steam ahead!

 

The old Steampacket Hotel, a derelict old building left to rot ever since the new Steampacket Hotel opened on the Kings Highway, has just now been sold for $1,601,000 - click here. It last changed hands in July 2012 for a mere $240,000. The owners couldn't have made that much profit selling beer.

 

 

Don't GOOGLE me, I GOOGLE you!

Helmut and I raise our glasses in June 2011 at the Lake Eacham Hotel,
the one and only Husbands' Daycare Centre in Yungaburra

 

I always visit bookshops, so when I toured the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland in mid-2011, I called in at the Spencer & Murphy Booksellers in Yungaburra which was minded for a few days by Helmut Brix, a fellow-German who'd come to Australia and also passed through Bonegilla in 1961, four years before me.

 

Helmut's Bonegilla registration card indicating he stayed there for just over a month, after which he was hired by KODAK Australia in Abbotsford and lived at the Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel in Melbourne

 

Helmut 'holding the fort' at Tony's bookshop

 

Entry in National Archives of Australia: "BRIX Helmut Franz born 9 December 1938 - German - travelled per MIKLM departing in 1961 under Australian German Migration Agreement" Perhaps I ought to request a full copy of his immigration papers in celebration of our short and accidental meeting and ensuing friendship which lasted for several years. And I did - click here.

Being almost seven years older than me, Helmut immediately settled in Melbourne and finished up with a wife, children, mortgage, the lot - or, as Zorba the Greek called it so fittingly, "the full catastrophe".

 

A young Helmut Brix in his camerashop in St Kilda

The new shop was at 177 East Boundary Road, Bentleigh East

Helmut in his former career as Camera repairman

 

Fifty years later, he said goodbye to his grown-up kids, told his wife he needed time to himself, and travelled north. In Yungaburra he found friends and a free flat in exchange for looking after several more, and I admired (and envied) him for the ease with which he had escaped from half a century of domesticity. Lotus-eating in Bali or Bora Bora next?

 

Helmut's new-found domesticity at Yungaburra.
A romantic at heart, this one must've got him in:
"Liebes Laube" means "Love Shack"

 

However, we all seem to be creatures of habit because a few months on he told me he had bought a house at 17 Currawong Avenue, Yungaburra and turned domestic again! (he bought it in July 2011 for $430,000; after his death it was sold in March 2019 for $355,000; the new owners carried out some renovations and advertised it for sale in March 2023 for $675,000)

Which is where the story should end, except when I GOOGLEd him, I found he had escaped again, this time for good:

 

born 9 December 1938 - died 18 March 2018

 

Rest in Peace, my friend, and I'm glad we had those beers together. I'll stay off GOOGLE for a bit as this has been enough bad news for one day.

 

In bed with Phillip

 

Nothing is very much alive at "Riverbend" after 10 p.m. except ABC Radio National's 'Late Night Live'. Tucked up in bed, with the radio dial softly glowing, I am tuned into Phillip Adams' Late Night Live.

I've been a regular listener of LNL for more than twenty years, going back to its previous presenter, the redoubtable Richard Ackland, and as soon as I hear its theme music, the first movement of Brescianello's violin concerto no. 4 in e-minor, I know I'm in for an intellectual treat.

There's no other radio program anywhere on Earth that casts a wider net, so go ahead and spend a night in bed with Phillip.

 

So weit die Füße tragen

 

As prisoner of war, Clemens Forell, a German soldier during WW II, was sentenced to 25 years in a labour camp in far east Siberia. After four years working in the mines he escapes from the camp (in 1949) and tries to get home to his wife and children.

For three years he journeys through Siberia. An odyssey of 14,000 kilometers, set against a backdrop of desolate and inhospitable landscape, beset by danger (from both animals and humans). Constantly battling the worst nature can throw at him, Forell makes his way, step by step, towards Persia and the longed-for freedom. Sometimes riding on trains, sometimes by boat, mostly on foot, he never knows if his next step won't be his last. His prosecutor Kamenev is always right behind him, and more than once it seems that Forell is captured again ...

 

You can read the book online by clicking here
(SIGN UP - it's free! - LOG IN, then BORROW)

 

This film, first made as a TV-series in black-and-white in six parts of altogether 400 minutes in 1959, and remade in 2001 as a feature film in colour in both the German and Russian language, is based on the book by Josef Martin Bauer which has been translated into fifteen languages.

It is the true story of the German officer Cornelius Rost (1922-1983) who in 1949 escaped from the Siberian Gulag and for three years travelled 14,000 km, mainly on foot, to present-day Iran. After his return to Germany, Rost lived for the next 30 years in constant fear of being re-arrested by the KGB and died a broken man.

And yet, he was lucky to have come back at all! Of the 3.5 million German prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union, the vast majority perished in the forced labour camps.

 

It's a STIHL

$369 skin only, $549 for whole kit; female operator optional

 

I've had a troubled relationship with the infernal combustion engine ever since my first car, a tiny, second-hand FIAT 500, which I kept paying off well after it had broken down after only six months. It taught me a lesson and I never had another car until I got my first company car at the age of twenty-four, a huge 4x4 TOYOTA Landcruiser painted in safety-yellow and bearing the insignia of the Bechtel-WKE construction project on Bougainville in Papua New Guinea.

After that came a succession of other company cars in New Guinea, in Burma, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece, to the point that I never had to bother about repairs, oil and grease changes, flat tyres, or even filling up with petrol - they were all part of my remuneration.

Fast forward to retirement and I found myself surrounded by a diesel engine in my tractor, a 4-stroke (whatever that means) in my ride-on mower, and several two-stroke lawnmowers which would only start after I had almost dislocated my shoulder and which are gathering dust now, thanks to the German company STIHL and its battery-powered tools.

Many months ago, I bought a battery-powered lawnmover which is a joy to use as it never fails to start, to which I recently added a battery-powered hedge-trimmer which I have already used to great effect on every hedge at "Riverbend", and I'm about to also buy the above battery-powered grass-trimmer which at $369 is an absolute STIHL.

 

30 Days in Sydney

 

Which is about the longest I would ever want to stay in Sydney although I have stayed longer: once, in early 1972, after having come down from New Guinea in search of a so-called 'career job', for two months; then again in late 1972, having been sent down from New Guinea to take up a so-called 'career job', for six months; and more recently in 1985 after my return from overseas and a pretzel-shaped 'career' chasing big jobs and big money, for another six months; altogether just over a year.

Which means I know almost nothing about Sydney and very little about my own little bailiwick, McMahons Point, which I only left to walk up the Pacific Highway to my office in Chatswood. As Peter Carey writes in his book, "If you can confidently say you know a city, you are probably talking about a town. A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived."

And yet it was the first place I set foot in when I came off the boat in 1965. A fellow-migrant, another young German, and I ventured just far enough from the FLAVIA, tied up at Pyrmont, to explore the Rocks and to sit on the steps leading up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We still had some distance to go before we would finally disembark in Melbourne and be processed through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, but we had already decided to come back to this spot every Sunday and wait for the other one to turn up. I never did, as I moved from Bonegilla to Melbourne and from Melbourne to Canberra, and I've often wondered how many Sundays my mate sat on those stairs waiting for me to turn up.

In my opinion, the only reason for living in Sydney is work, and since I no longer work, I no longer need to go to Sydney. Anyway, having made a career out of turning my back on painful memories, I'm not about to relive them. Peter Carey's wildly distorted account is as close as it gets.

 

"Your coming here would give me a new lease on life"

The main street of Mount Perry, circa 1956, when it was still in its heydays

 

It is possible, I suppose, to construct hypothetical circumstances in which you would be pleased to find yourself, at the end of a long day, in Mount Perry, Queensland - perhaps something to do with rising sea levels that left it as the only place on earth not under water, or maybe some disfiguring universal contagion from which it alone remained unscathed. In the normal course of events, however, it is unlikely that you would find yourself standing on its lonely main street at six thirty on a warm summer's evening gazing about you in an appreciative manner and thinking: 'Well, thank goodness I'm here!'"

So wrote Bill Bryson in his book "Bill Bryson Down Under" in chapter 12 about Macksville, New South Wales. I took the liberty of quoting from it, only substituting Mount Perry for Macksville, both of which I know, Macksville because an old accountant-friend from my days in New Guinea had opened an office there, doing little more than helping cow cockies fill out unemployment claim forms, and Mount Perry because my best friend, also from my New Guinea days, had settled there sometime in the early 1980s when I was still working in Athens in Greece and started receiving letters from him postmarked "Mount Perry Qld 4671".

That was years before the internet, and I had no way of knowing where Mount Perry was or what it looked like. That eye-opening revelation was left until mid-1985 after I had returned to Australia and, unable to find work in Townsville in Far North Queensland, I moved down to Sydney and visited Mount Perry on my way south. By that time the last traces of some former mining boom had disappeared, the picture show had been closed for years, the local mechanic had just moved to Gin Gin, the only shop in town hardly ever saw a customer, and the post office which had postmarked all those letters seemed on the verge of closing. In fact, my friend who waited for me in town to guide me to his lonely plot of land, had parked in front of it, and his was the only car in the main street.

He'd sent me this photo while I was still working in Greece and after he'd just bought himself this small prefab on a five-acre plot. It was the sort of place where you went when you had little money and life hadn't been too good to you and you needed time to lick your wounds.

 

Noel's prefab on his five-acre plot. As he wrote on the back,
"It's as isolated as it looks, but plenty of crows and wallabies for company"

 

Following my return to Australia due to a misdiagnosed case of home-sickness, life hadn't been too good to me either, and I was also licking my wounds in Sydney when my best friend invited me to join him at Mt Perry. "Your coming here would give me a new lease on life" he wrote - words from a quiet, lonely man who had sought a refuge and become stranded. He had stayed away too long, and everyone had forgotten him. It was the nearest he'd ever come to admitting that his own home-coming after a lifetime in New Guinea hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped, and he was feeling lonely and in need of like-minded company.

My friend's cri de coeur - for that is what it was - never quite registered because, while I'd experienced my own bouts of loneliness which had always been cut short by the excitement of forever chasing work around the world, I still had another twenty-five years of work ahead of me.

As so often happens, the story had a happy ending for both of us: I left Sydney for Canberra where I was able to establish my own practice, and Noel could sell his isolated plot with "plenty of crows and wallabies for company" and resettle on the edge of Childers, within walking distance of shops and pubs and medical facilities, where I revisited him in 1990 to spend our last Christmas together before he passed away in 1995.