There were many a tropical night when I and the young, bespectacled Swiss chef who was in charge of all in-flight catering (as well as our own meals at the Pilots' Mess) sat on that top verandah and, with the help of quite a few 'Greenies" and punctuated by the roar of landing and departing aircraft , bemoaned the state of the world and our rather insignificant place in it.
I had just taken on the new position of Internal Auditor with Papua New Guinea's newly-formed national airline AIR NIUGINI, which meant I was busy setting up procedures and writing manuals that would assist auditors who'd come after me to follow established auditing standards.
My office was in Port Moresby's imposing ANG House but I was seldom there, with my work taking me all over Port Moresby and the country.
It was an interesting and challenging job but there are always more interesting and more challenging jobs ahead, and so, just after Christmas 1974 (which I spent on a beach in Lae, blissfully unaware that Cyclone Tracy had just wiped out Darwin) I flew out to Rangoon in Burma to take up the position of Chief Accountant with the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles who had begun drilling for oil in the Arakan Sea.
My Air Niugini T-shirt, Port Moresby, 1974 still with laundry mark "15" for my room in the Pilots' Mess at Six-Mile
On the way, I stopped over in Hong Kong where the company had booked me into the swank PENINSULA Hotel who met me at the airport with a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. I had not expected this nor had they expected to meet a young chap straight out of New Guinea, in shorts and wearing an AIR NIUGINI T-shirt still with the laundry mark "15" for my room in the Pilots' Mess, and carrying a swag over his shoulder.
As for my neighbour and confidant during those long tropical nights, the young, bespectacled Swiss chef, I am ashamed to say that I forgot his name but if somebody knows him or he himself reads this blog, please email me at riverbendnelligen[AT]mail.com . The internet is a small world and I have seen longer odds than finding an old friend this way!
P.S. The odds are shortening: just received a facebook message from a Raymond James Hammett: "I took up head chef position at PX in 1975 from Swiss/German Frank Gertz". That must've been him - Frank Gertz.
Vor achtzehn Jahren starb meine älteste Schwester Bärbel, gerade 65 Jahre alt. In ihrem letzten Brief, geschrieben für sie bei ihrem Pfleger Marc Dörner, ermahnte sie mich "Ich denke an dich, vergiss mich nicht." Hab' ich auch nicht!
Ihr Pfleger schickte mir diesen Brief zusammen mit seiner eigenen Erkärung: "Sehr geehrter Herr Goermann, ihre Schwester bat mich den Brief den wir zusammen verfasst haben, erst nach ihrem Tod abzuschicken. In den letzten Wochen die sie bei uns war konnte sie sich leider nicht mehr adäquad ausdrücken. Ich habe viel mit ihrer Schwester über ihr Leben und auch über den Tod gesprochen, und ich hoffe das ich ihr ein wenig ihre große Angst vor dem Tod nehmen konnte. Ich habe ihr unzählige Male ihren Brief den sie etwa in November bekam vorgelesen, und wir haben die Augen geschlossen und uns vorgestellt nach Australien zu Reisen und bei ihnen zu sein, das hat ihrer Schwester sehr gefallen. Auch kurz vor ihrem Tod betreute ich ihre Schwester. Sie konnte nicht mehr sprechen dennoch hörte sie mit Aufmerksamkeit zu und drückte meine Hand, was mir die Gewissheit gab das sie genau versteht. Ich mochte ihre Schwester sehr, ihre Offenheit und direkte Art und auch oft ihre heitere Laune. Ich wünsche Ihnen und Ihrer Frau alles Gute und grüße Sie ganz herzlichst aus Berlin. Marc Dörner"
Meine Schwester war fünf Jahre älter als ich, und hatte vielleicht noch mehr an der Scheidung unserer Eltern gelitten als ich. Vielleicht war es deshalb daß sie schrieb "Rückblickend hatte ich kein gutes Leben, im Grunde genommen war es eigentlich Scheiße!" Man gab ihr Medikamente die sie in einen Schlaf versetzte aus dem sie nicht mehr erwachte.
Sie und meine andere ältere Schwester und mein älterer Bruder blieben alle in Deutschland hängen, während ich das Glück hatte mir weit weg vom Elend des Elternhauses in Australien ein neues Leben aufzubauen.
Ich weiß jetzt schon was am Ende meine letzten Worte sein werden: "Rückblickend, abgesehen von den sehr schweren Anfängen und den sehr vielen Problemen und der Ehescheidung von meiner wunderbaren birmesischen Frau die ich noch bis heute vermisse, im Grunde genommen war mein Leben eigentlich toll!" --- in English, of course!
I started our GOERMAN FAMILY SUPER FUND in the 2004/2005 tax year - and I've never looked back! The secret is to find the right accountants and administrations. I first went with what seemed to be then a bunch of rookies, Superannution [sic] Accounting Services, whose spelling mistakes were the least of my worries.
In the very first year they overcalculated the superfund's contribution tax by several thousand dollars, and it took me, a former but then very frustrated tax agent, three weeks to teach them their job - click here.
It makes for very dry reading, so just scroll down to their last email:
4 October 2005
Dear Peter,
Thanks for that. I have read the legislation. I think you are right. Deepest apologies, my interpretation of the law was incorrect s274 which says that 15% but then there is this 82AAT which excludes it from being tax (only the deductible amount will be taxed) – the 82 AAT notice thing. Really appreciate that, now I have to go fix up a couple of returns. Really, thank you for this. Really appreciate it. Owe you one. I will forward you an amended return for your signature today.
Regards
Allan Ong
I accepted their apologies and their offer of waiving their fees which in my opinion was a small price to pay for perhaps also having saved their business because, as he confessed in a later telephone conversation, he then had to go back and correct a whole lot of other clients' tax returns.
Of course, the next year I took my business elsewhere which became very much an "out of the frying pan into the fire" situation. The local branch of a Canberra outfit, having quoted me a fixed fee, got greedy when they saw the balance of the fund and thought they wanted a slice of the action by tripling their fee on completion of the work. I had to take the matter to the local magistrate for arbitration before they accepted my payment of six hundred dollars to be shot of them.
"All good things come to those who wait" they say, and it came true for me when I went into pension phase and to SUPER-efficient SuperHelp.
That was in 2007, and I have been with them ever since! SUPER-fast, SUPER-efficient, SUPER-friendly! Don't take my word for it, try them!
Many years ago, one night when I couldn't sleep, I idly listened to RADIO NATIONAL and a segment called VERBATIM, in which the interviewer talked with a then 92-year-old chap called Bill who has had an obsession with wheels all his long life. Listen to the interview here.
The power of the engine didn't matter; whether it was trucks, bicycles or battered old 2CV Citroens, Bill had travelled Australia from end to end on all of them. Most of his travelling had been done in pursuit of work (and girlfriends) and his was the story of a labouring man with a taste for adventure and no desire to settle down.
For Bill, there had always been another river to ford or a python to wrestle or a murderer to evade ... and suddenly I realised that I knew that chap: he was the Bill Skinner whom I had befriended back in 1977 when I lived on Thursday Island. Bill had driven an old truck up to Cape York and, daunted by the prospect of driving down that same rough road again, had come across to Thursday Island to book himself, his three dogs, and his truck onto the barge returning to Cairns in a few days' time. He had missed the boat going back to Bamaga and wandered the main street of TI aimlessly when we ran into each other. I invited him to stay at my house for the night and we talked and talked (and drank and drank!) well into the night.
We met again in 1979 when I overnighted at the Great Northern Hotel in Cairns on my way to a job interview on Mornington Island. Bill lived in Cairns at the time and I went to his house in Severin Street. His backyard was a junkyard! It was full of old things which Bill had kept or collected under some "it-may-come-in-handy-one-day" compulsion. To make even more room for all the junk, Bill had moved the clothes hoist to the top of the roof! Laundry-day at Bill's must've been quite a thing to behold!
It was almost dark when I got there. He said he was about to get some soil for his garden and told me to jump into his old, unregistered jeep. I was wondering where he would get soil at such late hour when he pulled in at a nearby cemetery and ask me to keep a sharp look-out while he was shovelling soil from a freshly-dug grave into the back of his jeep. He'd forgotten to tell me that we were going to be a couple of grave-robbers just as he hadn't told me that he'd "tarred" his old, unregistered jeep in black paint only a couple of days before. Those black paint spots stayed on my trousers for a long time!
In another twist of fate, while on assignment with FLUOR Engineering in Melbourne in 1981 and staying at the old Majestic Hotel on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, I bumped into his daughter Roslyn, who was then living in nearby Elsternwick, and her husband, whom he'd described in the radio interview as "that useless man who just sits around the house and won't get a job", and again in 1985 in Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island after I had just come back from overseas.
After hearing him on the radio, I wrote a short note to his then current address in Longwarry in Victoria. He replied that his memory was no longer what it used to be but that he did remember his trip to TI and our meeting and, as he put it, "if I can find Nelligen on the map, I'll drop in some day" and "I could easily drive up there, but thieves are everywhere here now and very cunny [sic]" and "I camp in a caravan every night hoping to catch the thieves - with a 3-inch piece of pipe!!!" It sounded just like the old Bill Skinner!
He either couldn't find Nelligen on the map or was too busy hoping to catch up with those thieves because he never made it to Nelligen, and, unless he lived well past the hundred-mark (which he celebrated in 2012 with his daughter Roslyn on Magnetic Island where she then lived), he's now finally settled on his own 6-foot plot.
It's been good knowing you, Bill, you old bastard!
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.
P.S. So much has changed at Mt Perry since Noel left in 1986: the old gold mine reopened, the old cinema was restored to a motel and restaurant, and that bit of a cow paddock across the dirt road from Noel's old place is now a fully-fledged golf club. Why, they now even have their own Mount Perry Visitors Guide! Noel would have loved it!
Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn's rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.
The 6th of August is an important day for me.
It was on this day in 1965, fifty-seven years ago, when I arrived in Australia. My decision to leave the "Fatherland" was made as hastily and as much on the spur of the moment as every other decision I have made before and since. Avoiding eighteen months of military service had something to do with it. Escaping what was shaping up to become a fairly mundane and ordinary life was another.
Two years earlier I had successfully completed my articles with an insurance company and made my first escape of sorts: I had joined the large highway construction company Sager & Woerner (SAWOE) as their payroll clerk. There were three of us in the office: the two "Schwaben" Dietl and Spoerl (always properly addressed as "Herren") and myself, not yet eighteen years old but learning fast. Our mobile office followed every few months the "Autobahn" under construction from Walsrode to Verden-an-der-Aller to Bremen. Already, although not yet articulated, "Have pen, will travel" had become the motto of my life.
It was the 30th of June 1965 when I boarded the Italian passenger ship FLAVIA in Bremerhaven. The Australian immigration department had offered me an airline ticket to get to the other side of the world, but as I had had to sell my beloved stamp collection to raise the required £50 for the assisted passage out, I thought it only fair that I ought to get my money's worth and take the six-week sea voyage via Tilbury, Curaçao, the Panama Canal, Papeete, and Auckland, to Australia.
I was told, "If you want a pleasant voyage don't travel from Europe on a migrant ship." I am glad I did not follow the advice. The boat was crowded but it was good to be among people who were good to each other because they were sharing a common adventure, the greatest they had known. We were all looking forward to living in a country where there was space, and room to grow, and where hard work was rewarded. There were no streamers at Bremerhaven, and no band was playing: people stood quietly on the rain-moist deck as the last visitors were ordered ashore. Then the slow, sonorous, terrible blast on the ship's siren; suddenly a gap had opened between ship and land: we were on our way; there was no going back!
In the bowels of the ship order emerged from disorder. We were accommodated in 6-berth cabins on the lowest deck, Trinidad Deck, with no portholes and only shared facilities. As we headed south and out into the Atlantic. the warming sun spread animation among the passengers now settled into a daily routine, punctured by ample meals.
English classes got under way properly where we were asked to form a credible "th" sound and to differentiate the "v" from the "w". Learning English was no game for us: our whole future depended on it. And it was made easier by an ingenious but now all-but-forgotten method called Basic English, invented by the English linguist Charles Kay Ogden, who had distilled the English language to a system of 850 words that covered everything necessary for day-to-day purposes.
The shipboard cinema showed Australian documentary films which we watched with intense concentration. There were the usual shipboard diversions: deck games and the pool (always too crowded and always too low on water) during the day and music and dances and fancy dress balls and bingo in the evenings but overarching all these activities was the one question that was on all our minds: what would await us in Australia? We used to sit up in our six-berth cabin long into the night worrying and wondering about it.
I will always remember one of my cabin-mates, a young butcher from Berlin, who was constantly dressed in a fishnet-shirt (to solve his laundry problem, as he put it, and which left an interesting tanning pattern on his upper torso). Nothing seemed to bother him much; not our uncertain future nor the English lessons which he had dispensed with in favour of the bar. As far as he was concerned, if things didn't work out he could always commit suicide! An interesting outlook on life, to say the least, and the solving of one's problems. I have sometimes wondered how he ended up?
Both then and now, the whole voyage has been a bit of a blurr: we passed through the Panama Canal, and made a brief refuelling stop at Papeete, after which we headed towards Auckland, New Zealand. With no money in my pockets and so much at stake, this was no pleasure trip! Sometime during the voyage and under circumstances which I have long forgotten, I had made friends with a young German who had come out to Australia many years before with his parents as a child. He was now married and on his way back from a trip to Europe with his wife, baby, and mother-in-law with whom he had revisited his own hometown and that of his Yugoslav wife. This friendship was going to have a major impact on my future life in Australia (of which I shall tell more momentarily), and to this day Hans and I have remained good friends.
Soon, but to us not soon enough, after more than five weeks at sea, the outline of the Australian coast and of the city of Sydney hove into sight. There they were, those famous golden beaches of which had spoken the brochures that the immigration department had given us. Here many passengers left us, as did Hans who was heading for his hometown Canberra, but for us, the migrants, the "New Australians" as we were henceforth to be known, the voyage continued for another two days to the port of Melbourne.
We disembarked in some sort of organised chaos at Port Melbourne and soon afterwards boarded a train for the inland town of Albury from where we were taken to the Migrant Centre at Bonegilla. Remember the movie "The Great Escape"? Well, Bonegilla was a camp along the lines of what you saw in that movie - except that Bonegilla was a darn sight worse. We were put into corrugated-iron huts in what had been an old Army Camp - and I believe the old Spartans enjoyed more comforts than did the inmates of the "Bonegilla Migrant Centre". Although we were in the depth of the Australian winter (which can be pretty cold in the Australian inland), there was no heating, and only a threadbare ex-Army blanket to ward off the cold at night. For somebody who had just avoided conscription into the German "Bundeswehr", it seemed a poor exchange.
Deep blue skies and brilliant sunshine during the day made up for the freezing nights. It was two days after I had arrived in camp and while I was "thawing" out in the midday sun when another German who had come off the ship with me, told me about a "German Lady", a Mrs Haermeyer, at the camp's reception centre who was offering to take three or four recently arrived German migrants back to Melbourne to board at her house. I had been "processed" by the camp's administration on the first day and knew that in all likelihood I was destined to be sent to Sydney to work as labourer for the Sydney Water Board. So what did I have to lose? In record time I had myself signed out by the "Camp Commandant", my few things packed, and was sitting, with three other former ship-mates, in a VW Beetle enroute back to Melbourne.
The "German Lady" had turned out to be a very enterprising roly-poly German housewife who with her German husband, a bricklayer, operated something of a boarding-house from their quaint little place at 456 Brunswick Road in West Brunswick in Melbourne. The place seemed already full to overflowing with young Germans from a previous intake, with bodies occupying the lounge-room sofa, a make-shift annex, and an egg-shaped plywood caravan in the backyard. My ship-mates joined that happy crowd but I was "farmed out" to a nice English lady across the road who had a spare room. The very next day the "German Lady" took me to the local Labour Exchange and in seemingly no time had secured me a job as 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company which had foodstores all over Melbourne. There I was, refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their Austin cars. I still joined the others for breakfast and dinner in the "German house"and also had my laundry looked after by the "German Lady" but I was already making my own way in Australia. Looking back, my life seems to have been full of such serendipitous encounters because more good luck was to follow!
During the first days in Melbourne I had written to Hans in Canberra to let him know where I was, and before long he was on the 'phone to me suggesting that I might want to come up to Canberra. I didn't need much persuading! Hans got me a job as storeman/driver in the hardware & plumbing supplies company of Ingram & Sons in Canberra's industrial suburb of Fyshwick. I drove an INTERNATIONAL truck and delivered anything from ceramic floor tiles to bathtubs and roofing iron to building sites all over Canberra. Not that I had a driver's license for a truck or had ever driven a truck before in my life but this was Australia, a young and vigorous country still largely devoid of formalities, and an even younger city, Canberra, still in the making: Hans simply took me down to the local Police Station where everybody seemed very impressed with my elaborate German "Führerschein" and where I was promptly issued with a much simpler but oh so much more useful Australian driving license. I kept at this job for a few months but after I had almost burnt out the truck's diff at Deakin High School while bogged down in the mud with a full load on the back, and a slight but still embarrassing collision with the rear-end of another vehicle just outside the British High Commission, I thought it best to cash in my chips while I was still ahead.
I had earlier on answered an advertisement by the Australia & New Zealand Bank for school-leavers to join their ranks and, to my own surprise and joy, was accepted. I joined the ANZ Bank and, in keeping with my new "status" as a "Bank Johnny", moved from the migrant hostel on Capital Hill (now the site of the new Parliament House) into Barton House, one of Canberra's many boarding houses in those early years.
Those were the days of portion-controlled boarding-house food of mixed grill, topped off with unlimited supplies of steamed pudding drowned in thick custard to fill an ever-hungry stomach, of soggy spaghetti-sandwiches dripping through brown-paper luncheon bags as I walked to work from Barton to Civic across Commonwealth Bridge to save a bob or two on bus fares. And those were the weekends of parties, of nights spent in the Newsroom of the "Kingo" Pub or at the Burns Club across the road, of evenings in front of the telly in the TV Room watching "M*A*S*H", "Get Smart" or Bob and Dolly's BP Pick-a-Box!
I did a lot of growing-up in those short two years, and gained a lot of experiences that were to shape me for the rest of my life. The people I met, the friends I made! 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 outstanding rents by Peter "Frenchie", the manager, and who looked back on their time there with fond memories and a great deal of nostalgia.
Another boarding house I remember was the ORIENTAL PRIVATE HOTEL at 11 Milsons Road at Cremorne Point. In that esteemed establishment I occupied the dark, windowless end of a corridor which had been walled off and grandly called a "room". No window, no ventilation, just a bed and a wardrobe but it was all I could afford at the time. And there were many more boarding houses and many more privations before I had reached even a modicum of personal comfort and financial security.
Well, as the saying goes, " ... and the rest is history." (and what a history it has been!). Today, fifty-seven years later, the big WHAT IF questions in life --- (what if Lord Jim had remained on watch? I hope you have been reading your Joseph Conrad) ---, have been replaced by "What's for dinner and what's on the telly tonight?" Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip all the same.
Not that all those years merely passed me by and can be ignored nor the mistakes undone or the stupidities uncommitted again. And neither can I forget the shames and humiliations, the treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and brief moments of happiness which I now call experience and which are supposed to be my recompense for the youth and the health and the energy left behind as I bounced through life, spending more time on planning my next weekend than on how I might spend the rest of my life.
Perhaps I have lived two lives, the one I actually live, and a parallel life that walks around with me like a cast shadow and lies down with me as I go to sleep. It is the life I might have lived had I made different choices in that time when time and choices were still plentiful. I hope I can all sum it up as Edith Piaf did with her song, 'Non, je ne regrette rien. Non, rien de rien. Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait. Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égale. Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.'
P.S. Some six years after my arrival, on the 9th of December 1971, I appeared before Reserve Magistrate David Bruce Moorhouse at Arawa on Bougainville Island in the then Territory of Papua New Guinea, to swear allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, and to observe faithfully the laws of Australia and fulfil my duties as an Australian citizen.
And today, fifty-seven years later, after having paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars in income tax to the Australian Government, having incurred no more than a few speeding fines and parking infringement notices against my name, and never having asked for a single cent in Government assistance and even now in retirement living off my own investments and savings, I like to think that I have kept my end of the bargain and that the Australian Government got themselves a good deal in 1965 when they paid my fare out to this wonderful country.
I am proud to call myself an Australian and to call Australia my home, and to do so not through some accident of birth but because of my own deliberate decision and years of hard work!
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien 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 mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
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.
My Air Niugini T-shirt, Port Moresby, 1974
