The blessedness of being little

 

 

The childhood years are the best years of your life ..." Whoever said that didn't grow up in post-war Germany where the war had humpty-dumptied all our childhoods, never to be put back together again.

I never had a childhood. For me it was nothing more than a starting point from which I have never stopped running. Of course, I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper, but despite having had what would now be called a deprived childhood, I stopped well short of becoming a full-blown sociopath as I never felt the urge to smash windows or bash up old ladies to steal their hand-bags. Simply growing up fast seemed to be the best revenge.

Mind you, I wonder if any childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one seeking to recapture the unobtainable. To my mind, people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

Good or bad, we can't leave the past in the past because the past is who we are. Anyway, what else is there to talk about while standing in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems the natural choice since it’s the reason why most of us stand in line there to begin with.

Until we have nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with our whole life laid out in front of us, and our whole life left behind.

 

An einen guten Freund von meiner Jugendzeit

 

 

Lass nun ruhig los das Ruder Dein Schiff kennt den Kurs allein Du bist sicher Schlafes Bruder Wird ein guter Lotse sein Lass nun Zirkel, Log und Lot Getrost aus den müden Händen Aller Kummer, alle Not Alle Schmerzen enden Es ist tröstlich einzusehen Dass nach der bemessenen Frist Abschiednehmen und Vergehen Auch ein Teil des Lebens ist Und der Wind wird weiter wehen Und es dreht der Kreis des Lebens Und das Gras wird neu entstehen Und nichts ist vergebens Es kommt nicht der grimme Schnitter Es kommt nicht ein Feind Es kommt, scheint sein Kelch auch bitter Ein Freund der's gut mit uns meint Heimkehren in den guten Hafen Über spiegelglattes Meer Nicht mehr kämpfen, ruhig schlafen Nun ist Frieden ringsumher Und das Dunkel weicht dem Licht Mag es noch so finster scheinen Nein, hadern dürfen wir nicht Doch wir dürfen weinen

 

 

 

 

The Lotus Eater

 

Robert Duncanson's 'Land of the Lotus Eaters' (1861)

 

After having spent so many years in remote and exotic parts of the world, it seems quite prosaic and counter-intuitive (I've been trying to use this word for some time ☺), and a whole lot of other adjectives besides, to finish up living the last few of them in as pedestrian a place as "Riverbend".

On my drives home along Rangoon's U Wizara Road I used to encounter a tall, European-looking Buddhist monk. He was said to be an Italian who'd come to Burma as a tourist, converted to Buddhism, and never left. I never stopped to talk to him but now wished I had. In what was a sleepy Port Dickson in Malaysia I met a retired British civil servant in a deserted very 'pukka sahib' club. He had come out as a young man and never left.

And there were a dozen more places and a dozen more encounters but it never crossed my mind that perhaps one day I, too, would be old and would need to decide where to retire. In the end, that steamroller they call life simply made the decision for me and here I am at "Riverbend".

And yet I would probably have felt just as much at home in any of the other places I worked and lived in. Well, perhaps not any of them, not in Saudi Arabia or Iran or what's now Namibia, but in some small water-front town in the Maluku Islands or in some small place in Upper Burma.

And so I'm intrigued whenever I read about people, fictitious or not, who have boldly taken the course of their lives into their own hands as did a learned gentleman in Australia in the 1930s who clearly foresaw that a great war was about to break over the world. He had no desire to participate in this foolish war, but he had to conclude from his studies that Europe was going to explode and that the resulting fires would involve Africa and much of Asia. With extraordinary clairvoyance he deduced that Australia, left unprotected because the military men were preoccupied with Europe, would surely become a temptation to Asia and would probably be overrun.

Wishing to avoid such a debacle, he spent considerable time in determining what course a sensible man should follow if he wanted to escape the onrushing cataclysm. He considered flight into the dead heart of Australia, but concluded that although he could probably hide out in that forbidden region, life without adequate water would be intolerable. Next he contemplated removal to America, but dismissed this as impractical in view of the certainty that America would also be involved in the war.

Finally, by a process of the most careful logic, he decided that his only secure refuge from the world's insanity lay on some tropical island. He reasoned, "There I will find adequate water from the rains, food from the breadfruit and coconut trees, and fish from the lagoons. There will be safety from the airplanes which will be bombing important cities. And thanks to the missionaries, the natives will probably not eat me."

Fortified with such conclusions, he studied the Pacific and narrowed his choice of islands to the one that offered every advantage: remoteness, security, a good life, and a storm cellar until the universal hurricane had subsided.

Thereupon, in the late summer of 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, this wise Australian fled to his particular South Pacific refuge. He went to the almost unknown island of Guadalcanal --- which, as we now know, saw some of the bloodiest fighting in WWII.

And, if you're a Somerset Maugham reader, you would know of Thomas Wilson, of whom he writes in his short story "The Lotus Eater":

"Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."

Go on then, have a good look; read the full story here.

 

The height of creature comforts

 

 

Whenever I see a red plastic chair, I immediately think back to my character-forming years spent on the Bougainville Copper Project. For us, that red plastic chair was the height of creature comforts; indeed, the only comfort.

I was still single then and very young. To me, Bougainville was home which came in the shape of a 9x9ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, where one's wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and one's needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.

Life was so simple then; we were still so innocent!

 

It's a jungle out there

 

 

Adrian Monk is afraid of 312 things, including germs, milk, ladybugs, harmonicas, heights, asymmetry, enclosed spaces, foods touching on his plate, messes, frogs, snakes, risk, and many more. The OCD and phobias cause problems for him and anyone around him.

Apart from acrophobia (that's an extreme or irrational fear of heights, Des!), I have none of Monk's problems: despite being a (former) German, I have no problems with germs. I also drink milk by the gallon (well, by the litre, really) and I believe there are far too few ladybugs around.

Instead, I suffer from GPS, or grammar pedantry syndrome. Hearing someone say "someone put their head around the door" sounds to me as if there were two bodies and one head, like in some frightful Russian scientific experiment. After all, someone, everyone and no-one are singular pronouns to be followed by a singular possessive pronoun.

There are some 125 episodes of "Monk", of which I have season 1 and 2, or twenty-nine episodes, on DVD. Having watched all of them, and with nothing else to do, I decided to look up my plastic surgeon's website.

There, just above the ©-footing, I read the warning "The website is restricted to individuals under 18 years of age." Shouldn't that be "restricted to individuals OVER 18 years of age"? And should I tell her?

If I do, will she bar me from further consultations or give me a free one?

 

Don't do things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing things you don’t like doing

 

British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (1915–1973), author of the cult-classic The Way of Zen, asks the seemingly simple question of what you would do if money were no object. Listen to other Alan Watts lectures on YouTube

 

This could well become a worthwhile New Year's Eve resolution in six weeks' time: ask yourself the seemingly simple question of what you would do if money were no object because if you think that money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time.

Of course, most people never make enough money to be able to relax about it. They have families to support and their own lives. So they never have the option of cutting out and whatever they're doing becomes a habit.

Anyway, don't expect me to have the answer. Although I was lucky enough to enjoy what I was doing - "choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life" - I still wasted most of my life making money so that I can now contemplate such questions.

Instead, subscribe to www.brainpickings.org's newsletter which is full of meaningful, often timeless pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more.

It is compiled by a far-too-young-for-such-erudite-stuff Maria Popova who, as a one-woman-Reader's-Digest, reads hundreds of pieces of content a day and anywhere between 12-15 books per week.

I've been a subscriber for years, and my life has been richer for it. Meet you there!

 

Good news for all my readers

 

 

Retirement is such a busy time: in between taking out the garbage and my afternoon nap, there are hardly enough hours left for a bite to eat if I also want to keep my blog readers informed of all that's not happening in my life.

So I bought this adjustable neck-mounted, mouth-ready device which allows me to keep typing while eating my cheese-and-onion sandwich.

Mind you, timing has never been my strong suit: I rushed from job to job and place to place, always in a hurry and always afraid of missing out on something. I even rushed into retirement without knowing what it would be like. That was twenty-three years ago; long enough to find out.

Now that I have, I wonder why I was in such a hurry. Instead of sitting here, I could've spent another year in Greece, or Papua New Guinea, or Burma. Even another year in Saudi would've been more stimulating.

Life has no REWIND button, only a PAUSE button, and mine is stuck.

 

Sell up, pack up & take off

 

Read it online at archive.org

 

I bought this book at Vinnies in Nowra before the operation when I could still walk; I ought to have bought it decades ago when I could still walk away. As the cover suggests, it's the perfect book to discover the pros and cons of living for the quarter of the cost of Australia in places such as Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, and Spain.

The big eye-opener comes on page 158: "The great news about Australian superannuation is that the pension you draw from it can be received in Bali or Thailand or Malaysia, just as it can be received in Australia ... but the real danger zone is restricted to those with a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF)."

And it goes on: "There is one key phrase to remember in respect of your self-managed super fund and that is: 'complying super fund.' A self-managed super fund becomes a non-complying fund if it loses its Australian nature - that is, if it is no longer considered to be an Australian superannuation fund by the Australian Taxation Office."

"You do not want that to happen. Let us give you a taste of the consequences. Should your self-managed super fund become non-complying at any point, the ATO can send you a tax bill that is equivalent to almost half the total assets in your fund ... And that is not all. The ATO will also tax any earnings of the fund at the highest marginal tax rate for every year that the fund is non-complying.

And if the fund does regain its residency status and becomes an Australian superannuation fund once more, then there is another one-off penalty. This time, just to welcome you home, an amount (asset values less contributions) will be included in the fund's assessable income in the year the fund regains its Australian residency status. This amount will be taxed at 15 per cent if the fund regains its complying status or 45 per cent if the fund remains non-complying for other reasons."

Phew! Non-compliance occurs when the self-managed super fund does not meet any one of these three tests:

1. The fund was establshed in Australia or or any assets of the fund is situated in Australia;
2. The central management and control of the fund is ordinarily situated in Australia;
3. The fund has no active members or, if it does have active members, then at least 50 per cent of:
   • the total market value of the fund's assets attributable to superannuation interests is held by active memebres; or
   • the sum of the amounts that would be payable to active members if they ceased to be members is attributable to superannuation interests held by active members who are Australian tax residents.

If that sounds complicated, just go back to "2. The central management and control of the fund is ordinarily situated in Australia": if you are managing and controlling your self-managed super fund while permanently relaxing on a Bali beach at Nusa Dua, you're automatically non-complying.

Funny that, because if your Australian superannuation is with an industry fund, a public service fund or one of the big retail fund managers then you have nothing to worry about; neither have you anything to worry about when you receive the Australian age pension which can be paid overseas indefinitely.

Perhaps I should have read this book decades ago when I could still walk away; and perhaps I shouldn't have bothered setting up my own self-managed super fund either!

 

Pain is the proof that I'm still alive

 

 

I like pain; it assures me I'm still alive. After leaving Nowra Private Hospital and anticipating more pain to come, while sitting in the backseat of the car with my leg bandaged and elevated, I sent Padma into Atli's Country Pharmacy for a packet of paracetamols.

She came back with one hundred tablets in a bottle labelled, "Do not cut or chew tablets". With my swallowing capabilities severely compromised since my previous encounter with a head and neck surgeon, I cracked the seal to check the size of those tablets. They were too long and too big!

Not expecting the chemist to take back a bottle with its seal broken, I sent Padma back with another tenner and instructions to buy paracetamols of a smaller size or at least some that could be cut up into smaller pieces.

Moments later she came back with another brand of paracetamols and the tenner still intact. "They'll take back the other one, even with a broken seal", she said, and took it back to the pharmacy. Try that at a pharmacy in Batemans Bay where the colour of your money is all that matters!

Of course, Padma bought a few more things to compensate them and thank them. Atli's Country Pharmacy, with the emphasis on Country.

 

Walk, don't run

 

 

A very dear person who was the most important person in my life gave me for a birthday present this bottle opener. I used it for nothing else, until the subtle message finally revealed itself to me - too late, as so much else in my life.

For years I moved from one place to another, and dreamt continually of stopping. And because my desire to stop haunted me, I didn't stop. I continued to wander without the slightest hope of ever going anywhere.

I gave myself up to the drift, veering, detouring, and circling back, always one step ahead of nowhere, inventing the road I had taken as I went along. And for all I had left behind, it still anchored me to my starting place and made me regret ever having taken the first step.

And yet I went on. For even though I lingered at times, I was incapable of taking roots, for what I wanted is what I didn't want.

In the end it was the sheer distance between myself and what I had left behind that allowed me to see what I am not but might have been.

 

When I was a boy

In Berlin in 1948

 

When I was a boy, my mother would send me down to the corner store with a few coins and I'd come back with 5 bags of potatoes, 2 loaves of bread, 3 bottles of milk, a hunk of cheese, a box of tea, and half-a-dozen eggs.

Of course, you can't do that now. Too many friggin' security cameras!

I was reminded of this when helping Padma with her shopping today.

 

Regrettable regrets

 

 

Remember the scene at the end of the film Casablanca in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergmann are standing on the tarmac as she tries to decide whether to stay in Casablanca with the man she loves or board the plane and leave with her husband?

Bogey turns to Bergmann and says: "Inside we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life."

Regret is an emotion we feel when we blame ourselves for unfortunate outcomes that might have been prevented had we only acted differently in the past, and yet studies show that people regret inactions more than actions. Why is this so?

Well, one reason is that our psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions. When our past action caused an unfortunate outcome, we can console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience. But with inaction we can't console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience because ... well, there wasn't one. The irony is all too clear: because our psychological immune system can rationalise an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we ought to just blunder ahead.

Which is exactly what I have always done. And, yes, I have plenty of regrets but they are all regrets of actions, not inactions. So perhaps I am ahead of all those who hedged their bets, who never left their hometowns, who never left their safe jobs, and who never took any chances.

 

Mein Leben im Lied

 

Hannes Wader, "Heute hier morgen dort"

 

Heute hier, morgen dort, bin kaum da, muss ich fort Hab mich niemals deswegen beklagt Hab es selbst so gewählt, nie die Jahre gezählt Nie nach Gestern und Morgen gefragt Manchmal träume ich schwer und dann denk ich es wär Zeit zu bleiben und nun was ganz andres zu tun So vergeht Jahr um Jahr und es ist mir längst klar Dass nichts bleibt, dass nichts bleibt, wie es war Dass man mich kaum vermisst, schon nach Tagen vergisst Wenn ich längst wieder anderswo bin Stört und kümmert mich nicht, vielleicht bleibt mein Gesicht Doch dem Ein' oder Andern im Sinn Manchmal träume ich schwer, und dann denk ich es wär Zeit zu bleiben und nun was ganz andres zu tun So vergeht Jahr um Jahr und es ist mir längst klar Dass nichts bleibt, dass nichts bleibt, wie es war Fragt mich einer, warum ich so bin, bleib ich stumm Denn die Antwort darauf fällt mir schwer Denn was neu ist, wird alt, und was gestern noch galt Stimmt schon heut oder morgen nicht mehr Manchmal träume ich schwer und dann denk ich es wär Zeit zu bleiben und nun was ganz andres zu tun So vergeht Jahr um Jahr und es ist mir längst klar Dass nichts bleibt, dass nichts bleibt, wie es war

 

 

A change is as good as a holiday

 

 

In my chronically peripatetic life in the past, I used to plot my escape almost as soon as I had arrived somewhere. A growing familiarity with a place led to boredom and restlessness, and leaving it was usually the easier option than staying put.

After an employer had put me up in some fancy hotel, be it the Mendana Hotel in Honiara or the Tusitala Hotel in Samoa or the Inya Lake Hotel in Rangoon or the E & O Hotel in Penang or the four-months-long stay at the Gateway Hotel in Port Moresby, not to mention my longest-ever stays of over a year at the Al-Harithy in Jeddah and the Savoy in Piraeus and the Athenium Intercontinental in Athens, I'd get restless after several months in the same room and, on the spur of the moment, ring Reception to send up the bellboy and move me to another room with another view.

Nowadays there are no more bellboys and no more fancy hotels but the need for change is still there and so, again on the spur of the moment, I moved my 'electronic nerve centre' into the hallway where I can see the river on one side and the pond on the other as I browse the web or listen to the radio. As they say, a change is as good as a holiday.

 

Tupela - a time in an untamed Paradise

 

 

In Australia I sickened of the urban life, the crowded rush to work in the mornings, the tiresome after-work booze-ups at the pub and the predictability of my future ... As I observed the careers of my fellow workers grinding relentlessly toward retirement, I felt a dark cloud descending and as it thickened around me I struggled to find a way to escape."

I wished I had written this but it's taken from Andrew Leslie Phillips' blog who, like me, went to Papua New Guinea at a young age. His first posting was to Kieta whereas I started off in Rabaul but eleven months later also ended up if not in Kieta, then at least on the same island of Bougainville.

His description of Kieta brings back lots of memories:

"Kieta was perched on a narrow ribbon of land skirting the harbour. Pok Pok Island loomed offshore, protecting the harbour from the squalls and storms that sometimes tore in from the east with great ferocity. Pok Pok means crocodile in Pidgin English and the island had the shape of a huge crocodile laying flat on its belly on top of the sea, its huge head jutting out to the south, its tail tapering to the north. It was inhabited by local natives who paddled their small canoes loaded with copra, fish and vegetables for sale in Kieta.

Jimmy Wong’s Chinese trade store was at one end and of the settlement and Kieta’s hospital, a series of grass huts with tin roofs, was at the other. Between were administrative buildings huddled under the ubiquitous coconut trees that curved and swayed against the cloudless sky providing dappled shade from the tropical sun. Houses with enclosed verandahs protecting the inhabitants from the teeming malarial anopheles mosquitoes, crept back from the shoreline and climbed steeply up the mountains offering a fine view of the picturesque harbour. A thick green blanket of jungle, a carpet of dense undergrowth and a profusion of tropical forest trees swathed in creepers and vines and screeching wildlife, accelerated rapidly into the clouds toward the inland spine of the island."

Inspired writing; pity he never wrote a book. However, his ex-wife did, under her new name Libby Bowen. She named it "Tupela" which is Tok Pisin for “Two People”. It is described as being "set against the luscious, colourful backdrop of Papua and New Guinea prior to independence, 'Tupela' is a memoir and love story of Libby, a young bride, and Andrew, the most junior patrol officer, who begin their marriage at Kieta, a tiny town on the island of Bougainville. Postings to other districts in PNG follow, including Rabaul, where they survive the murder of District Commissioner Jack Emanuel, a giant earthquake and tsunami, and a visit to a Tolai village with swirling Dukduks. What they can't survive are changes to their relationship. Their life together is unravelling just as the colonial power in Papua and New Guinea is. They try to hide the truth as they enjoy the excesses of life in a country they both love."

 

 

I'll order a copy as soon as I've found out from where and for how much.

 

It's still there!

Click on image to enlarge

 

I was up with the lark again - although all I could hear was the paradoxical laughter of the kookaburras - to grab that extra hour or two by myself during which I cook my own porridge and follow my own thoughts and decide what to do for the rest of the day: very little or nothing! I call it my very-early-morning dreaming!

Someone else who's also still dreaming is whoever is on that motor cruiser moored across the river. It's Day Three now and he's still there. I can just make out the wide hull appearing through the thick mist like a mirage (the above photo was taken a couple of hours later). That's how I like all my neighbours: well out of earshot and almost out of sight!

It's time for the morning news, and I've just heard that so far this year 178,323 people were married. Shouldn’t that be an even number? I mean, it's only logical, isn't it? "Logic?" I hear you ask, "what's logic?"

The best way to explain it is by telling you about two Queenslanders, Jim and Bob, who were sitting in their local pub up in Townsville where I once used to live, having a few XXXXs (they couldn't spell 'beer' either).

Jim turns to Bob and says, "You know what, I'm tired of going through life without a good education. Tomorrow I think I'll go down to that community college and sign up for some classes."

Next day, Jim goes to the college and meets with the Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes: Maths, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Jim asks the Dean. "What's that?"

The Dean says, "I'll give you an example. Do you own a whipper snipper?"

"Yeah!"

"Then, logically speaking, because you own a whipper snipper, I think that you would also have a yard."

"That's true, I do have a yard."

"I'm not done yet", the Dean says. "Because you have a yard, I think, logically, that you would also have a house."

"Yes, I do have a house."

"And, because you have a house, I think you might logically have a family."

"Yes, I have a family."

"I'm not done yet", the Dean says. "Because you have a family, then logically you would also have a wife. And, because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual."

"I am a heterosexual", says Jim. "That's amazing how you were able to find out all that about me just because I have a whipper snipper!"

Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to meet Bob at the pub again. Over a couple of XXXXs (they still can't spell 'beer'), he tells Bob about his classes, how he is signed up for Maths, English, History and Logic.

"Logic?" Bob says, "What's that?"

Jim says, "I'll give you an example. Do you have a whipper snipper?"

"No."

"Then you're a poofter."

Dear reader, I'm glad I could answer your question "What's logic?" May I now ask you a question? Do you have a whipper snipper? I thought so!!!

 

On the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month

 

This story is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.
Erich Maria Remarque

[Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde, — auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam.]

 

On the 11th hour of this day, the 11th day of the 11th month, a minute's silence is observed and dedicated to those soldiers who died fighting to protect their nation. The Armistice, an agreement to end the fighting of the First World War as a prelude to peace negotiations, began at 11am on 11 November 1918. (Armistice is Latin for to stand (still) arms.)

Published as a novel in 1929, "All Quiet on the Western Front" (German: "Im Westen nichts Neues"), is the greatest anti-war novel ever written. It is set in 1917 at the height of World War I and revolves around an enlisted Imperial German Army soldier, Paul Bäumer, and his hometown best friends as they come to terms with the harsh realities of war and loss.

Under the Nazis it was a crime for anyone to own a copy of the book. Once they assumed complete power over Germany in 1933, they confiscated copies from homes and libraries, burned them, and banned its publication. When they accused the author of being “unpatriotic,” he escaped to Switzerland, then to the U.S., where he lived the rest of his life. Undeterred, the regime arrested his sister. At her trial, the judge declared, “We have sentenced you to death because we cannot apprehend your brother.” Hours later, they beheaded her.

Unlike most war stories, "All Quiet on the Western Front" makes no effort to justify or sentimentalise either side of the conflict. When Erich Maria Remarque started writing the novel in 1927, he aimed to capture his experience of the war with journalistic clarity. Paul and his comrades hold no animus towards the French. They fight because they are told to fight and do not want to die. In one of the most famous scenes from the book, Paul falls into a shell-hole and buries his knife into the chest of a French solider. For hours he lay next to the slowly dying Frenchman and finally, wracked with guilt, confesses, "If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother."

 

Read the book online here
Read the original German edition online here

 

There are three film adaptation of this German epic anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque: the original 1930 version in black-and-white, the above 1979 version starring Ernest Borgnine, and the latest released in 2022.

The book and three film adaptations all end with the same final scene:

 

"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

[Er fiel im Oktober 1918, an einem Tage, der so ruhig und still war an der ganzen Front, daß der Heeresbericht sich nur auf den Satz beschränkte, im Westen sei nichts Neues zu melden.]

Er war vornübergesunken und lag wie schlafend an der Erde. Als man ihn umdrehte, sah man, daß er sich nicht lange gequält haben konnte; – sein Gesicht hatte einen so gefaßten Ausdruck, als wäre er beinahe zufrieden damit, daß es so gekommen war.]

 

The trenches. The lies. The subversion. The abandonment of democracy. It would be easy to view these events as calamities of a bygone era, the material of any war movie. The world has progressed, we tell ourselves.

And yet, nationalist movements are once again on the rise. Italy has elected a neofascist prime minister who flies the flag of Mussolini. Hungary silences its press and calls for "ethnic homogeneity." From France to Poland, far-right politicians undermine the European Union. Brazil teeters on the brink. Russia has invaded Ukraine. And in the U.S., the oldest democracy in the world, armed "patriots" violently attacked the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election at the behest of the president. A new fascism cloaked in stars and stripes.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" and the history that surrounds it, reminds us of what we risk if we allow democracy to weaken under the pressure of fanatical nationalism. Lest we forget!

 

Their only job is to grow up

 

As eighteen-year-old paymaster in 1963 or 1964 somewhere between Walsrode and Verden where we built the autobahn from Hannover to Bremen. In the background is my double-bunk and an oil heater on which I cooked meals and heated up water for my morning ablution.

 

I don't know if it's an age thing but these days as I walk around town I keep noticing those adolescents - young adults really - whose only job seems to be to grow up as they ride their skate-boards and do silly stuff our generation had either never done or already stopped doing by the time we entered high school.

Not that I ever entered high school. High school was for the kids of rich parents; it certainly wasn't for our family of five kids who tried to exist on the meagre pension my father got for getting shot up in the war.

Don't get me wrong: I am not feeling sorry for myself. My education was never ruined by any school system and I successfully completed my professional articled years earlier than other articled clerks had even begun theirs.

And I hadn't even started to shave yet when I left home to become perhaps the youngest-ever paymaster for a construction firm that built the autobahn from Hannover to Bremen. My "office" (which was also my "home") was a kind of gypsy caravan which relocated every few months to catch up with the 200-strong construction crew who demanded their pays every weekend on time and accurate to the last 'Pfennig'.

 

As a young bank clerk in front of the ANZ Bank's Kingston A.C.T. branch

 

Those beginnings equipped me well for my first few years in Australia where I built myself a new career faster than those adolescents learn how to ride their skateboards.

Do I envy them their freedom? Hell no! On the contrary, I feel kind of sorry for them because they, too, need to grow up, and I've yet to see a fifty-year-old skateboarder!

 

Is this the world's most expensive light switch?

 

 

My little hole-in-the-wall unit in Sydney is a good little renter, so when the property manager emailed me, "We recently performed a routine inspection and found the entrance light switch broken", I told her to get things fixed promptly; after all, it was just a simple light switch and how much could that cost?

A week later I knew how much: $347.80 - and it wasn't even gold-plated!

 

 

Writing up the invoice must have taken longer than installing the switch:

Attended site to investigate entrance light switch Carried out investigation and testing Isolation of power Disconnection and removal of faulty switch and switch plate Supply and installation of new switch and switch plate Reenergised circuit Test and commissioning ensuring all systems are operational Labour and necessary materials included Correct disposal of trade waste from site in line with waste management plan

I think "reenergised circuit" means they switched the power back on afterwards (really? I'm so glad they did!) and "correct disposal of trade waste from site in line with waste management plan" suggests they threw away the broken light switch.

There was a time when the description would have been, "Supplied and installed new light switch", but that wouldn't have warranted $347.80.

 

Don't leave home without it

I show you mine ...

 

Leave home without your iqama in Saudi Arabia and you are in serious shit. Not quite a beheading but you're getting closer. I'll never forget the day a friend and I drove out of Jeddah for a day on the beach along the Red Sea.

Halfway there, he almost lost his head when he tapped his shirt pocket. "Oh shit, I forgot my iqama!" he yelled and drove straight back home to retrieve it (actually, he didn't yell Oh shit! because in over fifty years I've never heard him swear; put it down to bad parenting). Here he is:

 

... if you show me yours (click on image)

 

The iqama, of course, is a Saudi Arabian residency permit and you take it everywhere - to work, to the beach, to the shops, even to the toilet - because if you're caught without it, you're taken away first and released later - MUCH LATER!

I still have mine, and occasionally still tap my shirt pocket. Occasionally, I also still tap my forehead and wonder why I ever decided to go there.

 

Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East!

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In June 1988, Noel Barber´s “Tanamera” was filmed at the Raffles

 

Somerset Maugham once remarked, "Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East!", and ever since this saying can be found wherever the logo of Singapore's Raffles Hotel appears.

Maugham fell in love with the Grand Old Lady when he arrived for the first time in March 1921. He used to sit under the frangipani tree in the Palm Court. There he worked every morning until lunch. There and in what is today the spacious Somerset Maugham Suite, he corrected the galleys of his short story collection "The Trembling of a Leaf" and worked on a play called "East of Suez". When he returned to the hotel in 1925, he was writing some stories for "The Casuarina Tree", a rare compilation of indiscretions which helped multiply the anger against him that already escalated in the colonies.

I stayed at the Raffles on a number of occasions - and on two occasions in the Hermann Hesse and the Somerset Maugham Suite - but, unlike Maugham, I never worked before lunch because it took me all morning to recover from the night before. However, once I had gorged myself on Raffles' famous tiffin, it was back and forth between Beach Road and the port of Sembawang to keep an eye on my employer's trans-shipment of tens of thousands of tons of sorghum and barley which came into Singapore in bulk to be bagged into 50kg-bags and reloaded onto one of our ships returning to the Middle East - click here.

With the value of our cargoes running into the millions, flying into Singapore in the pointy end of the plane and putting up in the town's best hostelry was little more than a rounding error. Those were the days, my friends; I thought they'd never end - but they did because in a fit of misdiagnosed homesickness I resigned, leaving me with no more than one last look at the legendary Raffles on YouTube:

 

 

Some days I feel like Storm Boy

 

A squadron of pelicans roosting in Riverbend's lagoon

 

Storm Boy is a touching and highly believable story in which the reader lives as much with Mr Percival as with Storm Boy. With great delicacy and tact, the author, Colin Thiele, conveys his message that to live in balance with nature, man must learn to live with and understand her creatures.

This is a children's story that has been very successfully made into a film - two films, in fact: one made in 1976 which is my favourite - click here -, and a more recent one with Geoffrey Rush - click here -, of which I could find only a full-length version in French but you're a linguist, aren't you?

The setting is, "The long, long snout of sand hill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murrany Mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach."

 

To read the book online, click here. To listen to the audiobook, click here

 

I thought of Colin Thiele's book as I walked along the lagoon and spotted this squadron of pelicans. Luckily, I had my camera with me to take a picture. What an incredible place "Riverbend" is. And I'm calling it home!

Some days I feel like Storm Boy.

 

A true story except for the parts that are not

 

"Declared open on 19th April 1987 by Mr Jack Myers
an employee engine driver & fireman of the Co.
from January 1937 to December 1973."

 

I discovered this little gem during another drive to Ulladulla when we strolled along the picturesque harbour to walk off some of the lunch we had overindulged in at the bowling club: pumpkin soup followed by a large Fisherman's Basket followed by a slice of cheesecake.

Who was Jack Myers? Did he have any dreams and ambitions beyond being an engine-driver and fireman at Mitchell's Mill for thirty-seven years from January 1937 until December 1973?

Perhaps the point of this cumulative tale is Jack Myers' pointless life? Perhaps Jack Myers would've been engine-driver and fireman at that Mill much longer had it not been for the Mill's closure in 1974? Perhaps the highlight of Jack Myers' life is this plaque to his extraordinary ordinariness?

I don't know! And please, don't get me wrong: I am not knocking Jack! Jack and millions like him are the red blood cells that hold our society together. All I know is that nobody is going to put my name on a plaque for having lived the same year thirty-seven times over.

Which reminds me of a couple I used to know in Townsville - let's call them John and Elizabeth, because those were their names.

John had come here in 1957 as a young man, leaving his small country Austria to see the world. He took a job in Sydney and, on his first holiday, bought an old motorbike and drove north to explore Australia.

He got as far as Home Hill which, just a hundred kilometres south of Townsville and with a population of no more than a thousand at the time, was a backwater of a backwater.

John put up at the local pub where he met a young buxom barmaid who fell for his Viennese charm and accent, and they eventually settled in Townsville where John became the papercutter at the local newspaper.

He was still the papercutter at the local newspaper when I met them almost three decades later. By then, they had swapped their dreams of seeing the world for six kids and a small house in the suburbs. As Elizabeth wistfully remarked, "I married John in the hope of leaving Home Hill to see the world and I got as far as Townsville."

That was in 1985. Today the only plaque with John's name on it is in Townsville's cemetery. "Für immer in unseren Herzen."

 

 

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

 

 

Apocryphal (that means being of doubtful authenticity, Des) or not, it is said that one day an excited young man came to Alexander Dumas ('The Three Musketeers', remember?) with the most superb idea for a novel.

"You have a good plot?" Dumas asked.

"A plot that is full of excitement; characters that breathe; settings that bedazzle the eye; and a suspense that is truly unbearable", the young man said.

Dumas grabbed him by the shoulders and cried, "Good! Now all you need to make it a novel is 200,000 words."

Well, I've put the following story through an online word counter and it comes to barely six hundred words, so you may want to embroider it a bit in your own mind to turn it into anything 'novel'. Anyway, here it goes:

My old mate Noel Butler was a bit of an Errol Flynn-type, helped along by the fact that he'd spent most of his adult life in New Guinea. In 1967, when I first met him aboard the PATRIS as I returned to Europe after a ho-hum first two years in Australia, I'd just turned 22 while he was already of an age that made him popular with a certain type of dowager who was on her way to Europe to spend her late husband's fortune.

Lack of social, but primarily dancing, skills, and an even greater lack of money prevented me from partaking in the nightly shipboard delights, but Noel and I spent almost every daylight hour of every day hunched over a chessboard, and our mutual love of chess and my fascination with his adopted home, the mythical island of New Guinea, spawned a friendship that was to last almost thirty years until his death in 1995.

Born in 1920 in Bundaberg, Noel enlisted in the Army and was sent to New Guinea (where he took part in the Bougainville Campaign) and after his discharge in late 1945 went back there. He never chose the orthodox road, behaved like a good little squirrel, and turned domestic, but instead freewheeled through life with both hands off the handlebar.

If New Guinea was a backwater, then Wewak in the far-flung Sepik District was a backwater of a backwater, and it was there that Noel had found his niche, venturing out every couple of years to go on an African safari or take a bumboat ride through the Indonesian archipelago.

I visited him on his little 'hacienda' just outside Wewak several times, and he visited me on Bougainville and in Lae and elsewhere, but mostly we stayed in contact through correspondence which sometime in the early 70s took a colourful turn when he began using writing-paper embellished with pretty butterflies in the corners and along the edges.

I picked him up on this, and he told me that a lady-friend in Brisbane had sent him several pads of this writing-paper. By the time I visited him again, I had become quite a lepidopterist (that's someone who collects and studies butterflies, Des) but thought no more of it until one night at the Sepik Club he introduced me to a matronly barmaid. Sitting down at our table, he said, pointing back at her, "She's the one who sent me those writing-pads", and over a few beers the story began to unravel.

Apparently, she'd taken a shine to Noel and come up to Wewak to stay with him. There's little entertainment in the islands and visitors are always welcome but Noel also liked his privacy, so after a few weeks he asked her when she was going back to Brisbane. "Oh, I'm not!" she cried, "I've packed up everything in Brisbane and I'm staying here with you."

I don't know when Noel had decided that domestic life was not for him, but it was long before this particular lady-friend tried to get her man. As he confided in me, "If I'd wanted to get hitched, I would've done so while I could still have commanded a premium", or words to that effect.

Anyway, in the most tactful way possible in such a delicate situation, he showed her the flyscreened door. "So how come she's still here?" I asked. She'd found herself a new lover - the local plumber; shit happens! - and, to cover her tracks, had spread the rumour that Noel was a homosexual.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (which, by the way, sounds very Shakespearean but you can thank William Congreve for this paraphrase).

 

Whinging in the rain

 

 

It's a rained-out 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. The rain keeps the boats away and the tourists. And it's the perfect excuse to just sit here by the window and look out on the rain and let the mind go totally blank and think of nothing.

It's been raining all night which is good but it does nothing to improve my mood even though the ducks on the pond don't mind. Which is the keyword in this highly destabilised world we live in. Don't mind about trade wars between America and China; don't mind about the war in Ukraine; don't mind about the war in the Middle East; 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 the government not giving them enough and yet suing banks for giving them too much.

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-tip pens.

Of course, we could achieve the same 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.

 

In A Savage Land

 

Many years go, I bought this DVD at great expense from the USA.
Now the full-length movie is freely avaialble on the internet

 

Still travelling - mentally, of course - I watched last night once again "In A Savage Land" and enjoyed every one of the 106 minutes of it. It's a stunning and visually breathtaking movie filmed on location in New Guinea's Trobriand Islands.

Watching this movie was like opening the cover of an adventure book and being immediately transported to another world. Although there were shades of Malinowski and "Sex and Repression in Savage Society", the story line, a kind of English Patient in the South Pacific, didn't really engage me; it's the superb cinematography that at times feels as though I was watching a candid documentary on a wild and exotic remote island where the mud and the heat and the smells are as real as the leaves that cover my lawn down here in not-so-tropical New South Wales.

And what about those haunting closing lines? "You look back on a life. What do you hold? What do you take with you into death? .... The thing I'll remember on the day I die is the smell of a pearl shell, freshly opened. Yes, that's what I'll take with me into the dark."

 

 

P.S. Read Malinowski's "Argonauts Of The Western Pacific" here.

P.P.S. Watch "Tales from the Jungle", which examines his work, here.

 

Tomorrow belongs to me!

 

 

In the entire history of musical theatre, there is no scene more beautiful and at the same time more terrifying than this one. The song is beautiful and could almost pass as a children's song, but when you know its time and setting, it gives you a terrible chill.

This is how it all started: a few innocent songs, a few demonstrations, a mistaken sense of patriotism ... and millions and millions dead!

 

The sun on the meadow is summery warm. The stag in the forest runs free. But gather together to greet the storm. Tomorrow belongs to me! The branch of the linden is leafy and green. The Rhine gives its gold to the sea. But somewhere a glory awaits unseen. Tomorrow belongs to me! The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes. The blossom embraces the bee. But soon, says a whisper: "Arise! Arise!" Tomorrow belongs to me! Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (again) Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (hailing) Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (fading) Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me!

 

 

The clip is part of the musical "Cabaret" which is set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis are ascending to power.

The boy actor in the film was a fifteen-year-old German called Oliver Collignon. However, his voice was dubbed over with the voice of an American youth, Mark Lambert. Neither of these two young men were included in the film's credits.

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was written by John Kander and Fred Ebb in the style of a traditional German song that stirs up patriotism for the "Vaterland". It has been mistaken for a genuine "Nazi anthem" and led to the songwriters being accused of anti-Semitism even though the lyrics are neither racist nor anti-Semitic, and both writers are Jewish.

German nationalism explained in three minutes flat! Chilling stuff!

 

It all began with FORTRAN IV

 

 

The year was 1976 and I was in this really dead-end job in Port Moresby. Normally, I'd rather be dead than be seen in a dead-end job, and I wouldn't have given it more than a month or two but personal circumstances had forced me to stick it out.

To make me feel I was actually getting somewhere, I enrolled in a programming course at the nearby University of Papua New Guinea, which is how FORTRAN IV became my pathway to computing.

Personal computers weren't around yet, and computing was still a closed shop with men in white coats doing mysterious things behind closed doors. It wasn't until 1980 that I could try out my new knowledge with Morgan Equipment in my old stamping ground on Bougainville Island.

Inside MORGAN EQUIPMENT's office on Bougainville Island

I flew back to Bougainville in late November 1980 for the first time since 1974 and it was almost like coming home! I revisited all the old places, Kieta, Arovo Island, Camp 6, and Loloho Beach; however, time did not permit me to see Panguna and the minesite again. MORGAN EQUIPMENT was a good company and their boss, Roger Brandt, a very pleasant man to work for. Having sorted out a great many of the accumulated problems in the first week or so of my being there, he promptly made me an offer of a permanent position which I said I would seriously consider. An attractive salary, house and company car and future opportunities with MORGAN EQUIPMENT on any of their other world-wide projects. Shortly after New Year I flew back to Brisbane where a job offer from Ranger Uranium was already waiting for me. So what did I do? I took the Ranger job. Was it a mistake? Yes, I think so because a couple more years on Bougainville would have been most beneficial. (Funnily enough, when I returned from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in early 1985, MORGAN EQUIPMENT once again offered me the job and once again I let the opportunity slip)

 

Morgan Equipment's computer was the size of a large fridge and ran on software written in COBOL (more than sixty years later - it was first used in 1959 - the COBOL programming language is still alive today)

The large white disk I'm holding is a 5MB removable harddisk - imagine, A WHOLE FIVE MEGABYTES! WOW! We thought it would last us for ever!

 

After Morgan Equipment, I learned the PICK language for Ranger Uranium but never used it much until I met Debbie - click here.

With my appetite sufficiently whetted, I started my own computer consultancy, Canberra Computer Accounting Systems, and offered the lot: hardware, software (bespoke and off-the-shelf), and networking (that was before WINDOWS, and networks were either LANTASTIC or NOVELL).

Personal computers had just come on the market, and they weren't the sort of thing that you just plugged in and pressed the button. Countless hours were needed to "burn them in"; to perform low-level formatting during which one set the interleaf and partitioned the harddisk, followed by high-level formatting during which one transferred the system files that contained the hardware configurations; and finally one wrote the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to fire up the computer.

Then came the biggest part of the job: drawing up a chart of accounts tailored to the particular business one was doing it for, which required accounting knowledge; then, using these accounts, each of the various modules - Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Inventory, Invoicing, Job Costing, Payroll, etc. - was linked to the General Ledger module from which the then also tailor-made financial reports - Trading and Profit & Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, etc. - could be generated.

For several years I had the market almost completely to myself, until the big accounting firms realised that there was money to be made in computer consultancies, and began to set up their own PC departments.

And then came WINDOWS and cheap accounting software like MYOB! Suddenly we were all computer experts and ready-made accountants, and Peter Goerman, Dip.Ac., FAAI, AFAIM, MIMCA, of Canberra Computer Accounting Systems, Canberra's only accounting software specialists, went into retirement on the beautiful South Coast of New South Wales!

It was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the memories!