What a great idea!

Testing the springs in the worn-out old armchairs at the Treehouse Cafe

 

Regular readers of this blog will be happy to know that after that not only mind-blowing event last Thursday - click here - I'm also regular again, and my final scatological comments on it are that I've never been so happy to see shit again!

We're off to Mollymook tomorrow and will drop in at the The Treehouse Cafe Ulladulla. We had walked past it many times already until, several years ago, we actually walked inside - and were so pleased we did!

It was like something out of the Mad Hatter's Party with all the furnishings, decorations, even the crockery and cutlery, straight out of the nearest op-shop. The chairs were comfortable and deep, mainly because the springs were so worn out, the cutlery holder a left-over from last night's dinner, and the table number as vinyl as the table cloth.

 

 

While others may spend half a million dollars on a Coffee Club franchise and another hundred thousand for an all-chrome-and-glass fit-out which takes them years to recover, the Treehouse Cafe has created a unique ambience for less than the first day's takings. What a great idea!

If you want to study a good business idea, come to the Treehouse Cafe!

I was holding back on this, but ...

 

Last Wednesday I had planned to check out the Batemans Bay Chess Club which meets every Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Catalina Country Club. Luckily, I didn't go because, come five o'clock, I had acute stomach pains which stopped me from breathing and gave me black-outs.

I hung on for several more hours but by nine o'clock in the evening things had got so bad that we drove to the EMERGENCY department.

By the time I had gone through all the formalities called "triage", I might already have been gone as indeed most of those terrible stomach pains had, but the doctor - a Doctor Klaus Bauer; just my luck to pick a doctor with a German name! - decided to keep me overnight to take some x-rays in the morning when the radiologic technologist was back on duty.

I spent a most uncomfortable night on a most uncomfortable bed among the usual hullabaloo that goes on in an emergency department during the night, with drunks showing up, and the occasional bad and offensive language aimed at the two very efficient but totally overworked nurses.

By nine o'clock in morning, bleary-eyed and trailing a saline drip, I was led out to the x-ray room. An hour later I was told what Padma had been telling me for the past twenty-odd years, namely, that I was full of shit.

At first they gave me a big cup of some bowel-movement-improving fluid. When that didn't have the desired effect, they brought in the big gun: a device for administering an injection known as an enema. After this nasty experience I won't join a Gay Pride parade any time soon!

As I wrote, I was holding back on this, but I can't any longer ...

Last seen twenty years ago, on 13 March 2003

 

The only sign you can find today of Hugo Julcher is his picture on the Queensland Police missing persons file: a smiling fellow in singlet and underpants, a fresh-caught barramundi dangling from his fishing line.

 

Recently, I was messaging David Clarke who's spent nearly twenty years at Lockhart River where he works for the Aboriginal Shire Council. As he puts it, "I've done my share of wandering but my bones urge to ultimately rest here. It's strange where life carries you."

He also knows David Glasheen of Restoration Island and went diving with Hubert Hofer when he was still at Bamaga. And if that wasn't enough, he also spent time in Rabaul, Kavieng and Kieta. It's a small world indeed!

Then he told me about another mad Austrian. Not that Schicklgruber chap, but Hugo Julcher who for many years lived at the mouth of the Olive River before he went missing in 2003. I pricked up my ears, and what transpired was a very strange story about a very strange man. "I doubt if anyone has written up Hugo's story", he added. Well, here it is:

For about ten months of the year, Hugo Julcher and his then companion Heather Schlaegl used to share their remote shack some forty-seven nautical miles north of the Lockhart River with about a dozen resident crocodiles and who knows how many local snakes and cruising sharks.

 

 

It was built from flotsam and jetsam found on the wide, white beaches within easy walking distance of that lonely shack. An old sail made up one wall and an old tarp provided half the roof, and all sorts of odds and ends had been turned into just about every stick of furniture.

 

 

Hugo came to Australia from post-war Austria in the early 1950s. He was promised work in his trade as a cabinet maker but none was available when he arrived, and so he worked in just about every other job you care to name in every state, including buffalo shooting in the Territory.

 

The mouth of the Olive River

 

How he ended up at the mouth of the Olive River seems to be lost in the mist of time. Eventually, he married Heather from Cairns, and brought her seven hundred kilometres north. They lived mostly on fish and bush tucker and, according to the occasional visitor, didn't waste any time worrying about the crocodiles that lived within a few steps of their hut.

Heather died back in Cairns sometime in the late '90s, and Hugo was again living alone in his remote piece of paradise. Then, in March 2003, he failed to meet a boat that was to get him supplies from Cairns.

 

Hugo Julcher and Heather Schlaegl sometime in 1997; Hugo would've been 65 then.

 

The Missing Person Notice reads, "Last seen on Oliver River Camp 47 Nautical Miles North of Lockhart River by friend Graeme ROBERTS, Hicks Island. JULCHER failed to meet a ship scheduled to transport him to Cairns on the 13/3/2003, has not been located since this date", but people think the crocodiles finally got Hugo, the hermit of Olive River.

 

 

I've since lodged an application with the National Archives for access to his early immigration papers. It's the least I can do for one of the last of a vanishing breed who came in their thousands from all over Europe after World War II, seeking work but also looking for lots of adventure.

 

A blast from the past

Roy, Sheryl, moi

 

On this day eight years ago, the phone rang and a stranger's voice said, "This is Sheryl from Brisbane. We're across the river at Nelligen and would like to come and visit you."

"I don't know a Sheryl from Brisbane", I replied. "Yes, you do", the voice said. "I'm Sheryl. We worked together in the ANZ Bank in Canberra in 1967." OF COURSE! And so we met again after 48 years.

Back then Sheryl and I not only worked in the same bank but also lived in the same boarding-house about which I had written here. She had found my story on the internet some years ago and contacted me then by email but I had promptly forgotten. She and her husband Roy were campervanning up and down the East Coast and calling in on friends.

Sheryl had been more of a teenage crush than a friend to me as she was by far the best-looking sheila in the bank. I had been in Australia for just over a year and owned nothing more than the clothes I stood up in at a time when possessing a car was 95% of a young man's personality.

With 5% personality and a thick German accent I never stood a chance.

 

 

P.S. ... and to think that fifty-six years ago, I would've willingly given up on the idea of seeing so much more of the world, would've willingly stuck with my dull 9-to-5 job in the bank, would've had kids and a big mortgage on a small house with a white picket fence around it - as they say, "the full catastrophe ..." - IF SHE HAD ONLY SO MUCH AS SMILED AT ME!!! Are these just the faintest echoes of Somerset Maugham's "Red"?