I had never heard of, let alone met, Gösta Brand when in 1977 I lived and worked on Thursday Island, commonly known as TI, although at that time he was still very much alive and living on Packe Island.
I came across his story many years later and had it confirmed by my late TI-friend David Richardson, after he had retired in Babinda. Balfour Ross, a long-time TI resident and regular visitor during his last years in Malaysia, also confirmed it.
Extract from "Den överkörda kängurun" published 1975 Author: Tore Zetterlund (1915-2001) Photo and photo texts: Eino Hanski (1928-2000)
Every boy's
dream comes true
I was sceptical until the last moment.
It was Eino who had heard about him and had contacted the man's brother in Sweden who confirmed that the story was true.
He had read the story in a book by a Danish travel writer. It was about a modern-day Swedish Robinson Crusoe who was said to live alone on a tropical island to the north of Australia. A real Jack London figure who had left Sweden more than 50 years ago and had lived a life of adventure as a sailor, pearl fisherman, crocodile hunter and hermit.
"It sounds like a piece of fiction" I said. "That sort of things doesn't happen anymore. It's as dead as the brontosaurus. It's just the boy inside all of us that still dreams of such adventures."
But Eino could produce evidence that this modern-day Swedish Robinson Crusoe existed. He had contacted the man's brother, a Viktor Brand, a farmer who had lived all his life on a farm in Simlångsdalen in Sweden. Viktor confirmed that he had a brother named Gösta who had left Sweden fifty-one years ago.
He had received the occasional short letter and card from his adventurous brother. The last one had been postmarked "Thursday Island", but that was more than a year ago. He thought he had been sick. Maybe he wasn't even alive any more.
Just in case we ever got as far as Thursday Island and found our modern-day Swedish Robinson Crusoe, we recorded a greeting from Viktor on Eino's tape recorder.
Thursday Island was almost as far away from Sweden as one could get. Our first stop after a long international flight was Sydney in Australia, then a domestic flight to Horn Island in the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. Then a short ferry ride across to Thursday Island. (There was also a Friday Island nearby which made me think of Robinson Crusoe again) We had brought with us the cassette recording of Viktor's greetings and a bunch of family photos.
The community on Thursday Island was as large as a Swedish fishing village. It reminded me somewhat of Byxelkrok on the island of Öland. The population consisted mainly of coloured people, not Australian aborigines but South Sea islanders from Melanesia. There were no racial barriers as there seemed to be on the Australian mainland.
On our very first evening on the island we freely mixed with snooker-playing and beer-drinking blacks and whites alike in the hotel bar and were able to ask questions about Gösta. Nobody knew a Gösta Brand but they had heard of an old Swede called Ron Brand who lived on Packe Island, an hour away from Thursday Island by fast boat. But he was supposed to be seriously ill, and nobody knew if he was still alive.
Next day the postmaster confirmed that Ron was identical with Gösta - Gösta had simply been too difficult to pronounce for the local people. Two hours later we were on our way to Packe Island in a small boat owned by a South Sea Islander. About twenty minutes into our bumpy ride he yelled, "There is his boat! I am sure he is on it!"
At the risk of capsizing our little dinghy and turning us into shark-food, Eino took out his camera and started filming. The boat, an average-sized sailing boat with an auxiliary motor and a dinghy tied to her stern, lay at anchor a few hundred metres off Horn Island. We spotted the bare torso of a man inside the cockpit who disappeared into the cabin as we approached.
"I think he is sick," mumbled our boatman. However, as we got closer, he re-appeared from the cabin and we saw an emaciated, wiry, brownish man wearing a slouch-hat as protection against the sun.
I called out in Swedish, "Are you Gösta Brand? We have come from Sweden to bring you greetings from your brother Viktor."
He answered in a mixture of Swedish and "Sailor's English." Yes, he was Gösta Brand. He lived on Packe Island but had anchored his boat here because he was ill and had wanted to come a bit closer to civilisation. He thought it was his lungs, but he wasn't interested to go to a hospital. And he definitely didn't want our help to return to Sweden!
" I would die on the spot," he laughed. "I have lived far too long in the tropics. If I should die, it has to be on my island or on the boat here."
He was friendly and happy and not at all unsociable as we had anticipated. We suggested that he should follow us out to his island, so that we could film him there. He didn't seem unwilling but was probably too sick to be in front of a camera and also afraid of leaving his boat. With the help of a bottle of whisky he finally agreed to wait for us until the next day when we would come back in a larger boat to tow him back to his island.
Next day we managed to hire a twin-engined speedboat that bounced along at more than 30 knots. I helped Ron lift the anchor and sat next to him in his boat while we were towed out to sea, with Eino filming from the speedboat. It turned out to be a more dramatic film than we had anticipated as the waves became bigger and wilder until they completely drenched us and filled the dinghy with water. Close to capsizing, we desperately waved our arms to tell the speedboat to turn back.
We were wet, depressed and angry as we dropped Ron and his boat back in the same spot where we had found him. So much for our efforts to film this modern-day Robinson Crusoe's existence on his tiny island!
I don't know whether it was the influence of the whisky or the prospect of appearing on Swedish television but suddenly Ron did agree to leave his boat and come with us to his island in our speadboat. "As long as you bring me back here afterwards," he said.
An hour later, after having passed other deserted islands, we stepped ashore on a South Sea island straight out of a "Boy's Own" setting. The calm waters of the bay in front of Packe Island were absolutely clear and blue, and the sand was soft all the way up to the palm trees. Palm trees that Ron had planted himself while he had built his hut and the bamboo fence surrounding it. The hut was painted white and had a roof of corrugated metal. For almost twenty years he had lived here totally alone after having cleared a piece of land and the beach in front of it. For all this he paid a peppercorn rent of ten dollars a year to the Australian government.
He regretted that a group of cultured-pearl farmers had moved in at the other end of the bay. We thought he would have welcomed having some other people nearby but he regarded them as trespassers on his island.
He told us about the many adventures he had had and showed us some nasty scars on his legs from crocodile bites. He had become an Australian citizen and for the last few years had been getting a government pension which took care of all his material needs. But he still went crocodile-hunting on occasions or fished for barramundi, always accompanied by a native from one of the other islands. "They are my best mates," he said.
On the beach sat his canoe, named "Minnehaha"", meaning "Laughing Water" in some Red Indian language. Yes, he had lived amongst Red Indians, too. That was in Canada, before he came to Australia.
"Why did you choose this life?" we asked.
"Because I love my liberty!" he answered quickly and without hesitation. He had obviously considered this question many times.
"Didn't you ever miss a woman?"
"Yes, of course, but then I also have to get hold of a woman. I have never lived with a woman. I love my liberty!"
It sounded self-assured but by the time we had finished our filming and were to leave, we thought we knew the price he had paid for his freedom - what he called his "liberty" - and his carefree existence. He had seemed strangely touched by our visit as we recorded his message to his brother in Sweden.
"You are both welcome to come back and stay on my island," he said as we were about to depart. "Bring your wife and kids with you."
We could tell that he meant what he said although he knew quite well how unlikely another visit would be. Not many people ever come this far.
I had one last look into the cabin of his boat before I climbed down the rail. There were three guns, two with telescopic sight, a cracked mirror, an old radio, some cans and a pair of old-fashioned spectacles. The sum total of his life, plus loneliness, hardship, and the occasional sickness.
As we left, the outline of where he sat in the boat waving goodbye was getting smaller and smaller. Very soon it would be hard to believe he existed at all.
But both Eino and I had the tooth of a crocodile he had given us to prove that he was real!
The story reminds me of Somerset Maugham's short story German Harry although that particular character is said to have been a Danish fellow by the name of Henry Evolt who lived on Deliverance Island and died there in January 1928, aged 79.
Why did I leave Burma after only one year? I mean, I had it all: I was chief accountant for the French national oil company TOTAL before I had even turned 30, earned a big salary, lived in one of those big ex-British colonial houses with a circular driveway and servants' quarters, and was chauffeured around in a big car - and they had begged me to sign on again for another year! Too much hubris and the promise of another job in my favourite town in my former stamping grounds of Papua New Guinea had something to do with it.
The job had been advertised by the consulting firm W.D.Scott in all the Australian newspapers which I regularly read at the Australian embassy in Rangoon. I applied and was hired sight unseen! Maybe that should've set off alarm bells but in those days I felt indestructible and the job of "adviser" to John Kaputin, one of the 'Young Turks' in the new nation of Papua New Guinea, seemed like a challenge too good to miss.
All I knew about John Kaputin was that his had been the first marriage between a New Guinean and a white woman and that he was regarded as a troublemaker by certain people. As soon as I had arrived in Rabaul in early 1976, I found that, while he was involved in many commercial activities, he hadn't complied with statutory requirements and was chased by the Registrar of Companies for outstanding annual reports and by the Chief Collector of Taxes for outstanding tax returns. With an almost total lack of record-keeping, how was I to create something out of nothing?
Today the area sports the Kabaira Beach Hideaway which was then a stopover for local plantation owners when they transported their cocoa and copra produce to Rabaul
Then he took me some 50km along the North Coast Road (a dirt track at the best of times) to show me my accommodation, a very beautiful bungalow in a picturesque oceanfront location, but without telephone connection and on remote Kabaira Plantation, the exact spot where in 1971 District Commissioner Jack Emanuel had been speared to death.
Pacific Islands Monthly, September 1971 Click on image to read in larger print
Not that I was concerned for myself - I mentioned that in those days I felt indestructible, didn't I? - but I had to think of my wife who was to come out from Burma to join me. And so John and I parted company.
Forty years later, what I know about John Kaputin is still no more than what I read in old issues of the Pacific Islands Monthly - click here - including his jailing in 1979 for failing to produce an annual report for New Guinea Development Corporation, of which he was the chairman.
Pacific Islands Monthly, November 1979, page 11
Seems like no one picked up the slack after I had left!
Leaving the family home at the age of fourteen, and leaving the "Fatherland" at the age of nineteen to come to Australia, prepared me to pay week by week for the space I took up in the world, and to finally close my eyes in a rented house.
I was happy to wander the earth, to have only portable possessions, and to live in temporary dwellings. No family ties, no entry in the parish register, no attic full of grandmother's furniture, no family vault for me.
So what imp of perversity made me buy "Riverbend", this seemingly commonplace decision which shaped my life for the last thirty years and seems to have determined my fate for the next dozen-or-so?
For what I had not realised at the time I bought this place was that it would begin owning me. I was lured into a sort of perpetual treasure hunt for this and that and something else to fill all the rooms, forever accumulating, and increasingly tied to, more and more possessions.
And then there is probably the greatest drawback of living in a small community - the lack of anonymity. Here you recognise everyone and everyone recognises you. We all meet again, and yet again. Endlessly meeting, the same people over and over again; endlessly meeting, the same conversations, yesterday, today, tomorrow; endlessly meeting, the same shafts of malice and spite, the same behind-the-hand sniggers.
Mind you, we are lucky, as we can pull up the drawbridge and drop the portcullis. We live on the edge of it all and on rambling seven acres, far enough from the ontological baggage of others so as not to burden us.
Our neighbour is the river. As the Rat said in "The Wind in the Willows", "[I live] by it and with it and on it and in it. It's my world, and I don't want any other."
Indeed I don't! It's beautiful here; beautiful one day, perfect the next!
Perhaps it is the result of having read Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke and Joseph Conrad at an impressionable age, but the South Pacific islands have always evoked a powerfully romantic image with me. Mention the South Seas and I conjure up a vision of waving coconut palms and a dusky maiden strumming her ukelele. Silhouetted against the setting sun, Trader Pete (that's me!) sits in a deck-chair in front of his hut sipping a long gin and tonic while a steamboat chugs into the lagoon, bringing mail from home.
Rabaul circa 1970
In truth, I came to the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea as an audit clerk with a firm of Chartered Accountants in Rabaul (and thereby hangs another tale). When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for audit personnel on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in October 1970. In those early days, all incoming traffic stopped at the transit camp at Kobuan where one had to wait for transport to Panguna where Bechtel's "top brass" had their offices.
Transit Camp at Kobuan
The road to Panguna was still something of an adventure and it was some time before I could present myself to Sid Lhotka, Bechtel's Manager of Administrative Services.
He hired me on the spot and I returned to Rabaul to give notice and get my things and within a few weeks I was back "up top" only to be told that
I would be working at Loloho, senior auditor in charge of several large contracts such as the construction of the harbour facilities (built by Hornibrook),
the Power House construction (built by World Services), the Arawa Township (built by Morobe-ANG), and the haulage services (provided by Brambles-Kennellys.) Des Hudson and a string of time-keepers, amongst them Neil Jackson ("Jacko"), Bob Green, and
"Beau" Players, joined the team later.
Camp 6 at Loloho
We all lived in Camp Six which was idyllically situated on Loloho Beach. Every day (and often even before going to work), we would go for a swim in the beautifully warm and clear waters of Loloho Bay. Except for one, Bill Avery, our telephone operator who was ex-Navy. He claimed he had a pact with the sharks: they wouldn't come onto his land, and he wouldn't go into their water. I'll never forget the day when we had a prolonged power failure and no running water in camp, and the whole camp population washed and shaved in the surf! Ever since I've been keeping a cake of soap which lathers in seawater. The camp had a certain hierarchy with "oldtimers" occupying the front row of dongas facing the beach, also known as "Millionaires' Row." Twice a week was film night to which viewers brought their own plastic chairs and victuals and liquid supplies and watched whatever was being offered
(the Natives were crazy about Cowboy movies), against a backdrop of stars twinkling through swaying palm fronds and with the surf as background music.
Payday was the big night in Camp Six with gambling tables such as Snakes & Ladders doing a roaring trade. Flick shows (with little to be seen across the tops of a dozen boisterous guys, all drinking and smoking, crammed into a 6-by-10ft donga) were also highly sought-after.
The "boozer" (or Wet Canteen in the official language), set right on the beach of Loloho, was a great place for an evening out! Offshore, across the dark waters, several small islets marked the outer limits of the reef. We named them "Number One Island", "Number Two Island", and so on. On some night, after a sufficiently large intake of SP (also known as 'Swamp Piss'), heated debates would develop as to whether they were ships coming into port!
Sometime in 1971 I transferred to Panguna where I was put in charge of the General Accounts Department with Brian Herde doing the Accounts Payable and John Gaskill keeping the General Ledger. Neil Jackson somehow found his way "up top" as well and became offsider to Brian Herde, imitating one of the Three Musketeers by attacking all passers-by with a long wooden ruler until the day the booze got the better of him and he didn't turn up for work at all. Sid Lhotka visited him in his donga at Camp 3 and rumour has it that "Jacko" told him to f%@# off! He was on the next plane out!
Panguna mine site shrouded in clouds
Another auditor wasn't quite so outspoken to get off the island but did so even more quickly: Frank Joslin was given the monthly "perk" of hand-carrying a batch of punch cards to Bechtel's Melbourne office where he presented himself, never to be seen again thereafter. His neat little trick became known as "doing a Joslin" and was much talked about but never imitated. Some of the new recruits to the audit team were less than delighted with their posting to muddy and rain-soaked
Panguna and started counting the days to the end of their twelve-month contract - literally! They ran up an adding-machine strip list from 365 days
down to zero and pasted it to the office wall, ticking off one day at a time. Needless to say, not many survived that kind of mental torture.
There were some others who never left Aropa airstrip: they had seen the mountain range shrouded in clouds from the aircraft and, refusing to leave
the small airline building and spending a fretful night on a hard wooden bench, reboarded the same aircraft for its morning flight back to Port Moresby.
Others took to
the wild camp life with gusto, spending what little time was left after a 10-hour working day, in the "boozer" and even investing in their
own 'fridges outside their dongas. The nights were punctuated by the squeaking of 'fridge door hinges and the squishing sound of rings pulled off beer
cans. A common "status symbol" amongst serious drinkers were door-frame curtains constructed from the hundreds of pull-top rings collected from empty
beer cans. Les Feeney was put in charge of the audit group but more often than not was in charge of the carousing going on in the
"boozer" and endlessly stuffing his pipe but never succeeding in lighting it. He and Peter the "Eskimo", a lumbering polar
bear of a man hailing from Iceland, ran a constant "throat-to-throat" race as to who was the biggest drinker.
"Bulldog", a likeable Pom, tried hard to catch up with them! On one occasion he also tried to learn how to play the
electric organ. He never did but the speakers and amplifier which came with it, were put to good (and all-too-frequent) use when he played his
favourite Neil Diamond record, "Hot August Night." The whole camp rocked when "Bulldog" plugged in that organ! I shall
always associate "Hot August Night" with nights at Camp One!
During my time on the island
I became a Justice of the Peace and also obtained my registration as a tax agent (Registration No. TTA322, dated 26th April 1971) and assisted many in the camps with their tax returns. I even made successful representation to the New Zealand Inland Revenue to have the then 18-months "world income rule" set aside for the Kiwis working on Bougainville. Had I not obtained this particular ruling, they would have been liable to pay New Zealand income tax on their Bougainville earnings. I became something of a scribe for many in the camp who wanted to apply for a passport or needed documents authenticated or who - surprisingly - couldn't read or write and asked me to handle their correspondence - including some pretty red-hot love letters!!! I always toned down their replies which must have kept quite a few guys out of troubles!
After the Bechtel contract had come to an end, I hung around Sydney for a few weeks suffering from 'Bougainvillitis' for which there was only one cure: I went back to the island a second time on an even bigger and more challenging job when I helped Camp Caterimg Services set up their new operations - click here.
After Bougainville came stints in the Solomons, back to PNG (setting up the Internal Audit Department for AIR NIUGINI in Port Moresby where I run into Brian Herde again who'd taken a job with Tutt Bryants),
Rangoon in Burma, Samoa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, PNG once again (setting up the tug-and-barge operations for Ok Tedi; Bechtel was back in town to manage this project and with it came Sid Lhotka with whom I had dinner at the Papuan Hotel in Port Moresby to talk about "old times"), Saudi Arabia (where I met up with Des Hudson again), Greece - but none of those assignments came ever close to the comraderie and esprit de corps of the years on Bougainville!
Over the years I repeatedly ran into "ex-Bougainvilleans" and "ex-Territorians" in Australia and elsewhere. We would swap yarns which always ended in a great deal of nostalgia and a hankering for a way of life that would never come again. Like myself, many had found it difficult to settle back into an "ordinary" life and, like myself, had moved from place to place in an attempt to recapture some of the old life style.
The 1979 film adaptation of "The Riddle of the Sands" starring Michael York
Resting on the bed in "Melbourne" and reading the 350 pages of "The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow", I could think of no time when I had felt more contented - or perhaps there had been a time but I just couldn't think of it. To prolong the bliss, I switched to another nautical book, Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands".
P.S. ... and anyone who loves "The Riddle of the Sands" will love Sam Llewellyn's sequel, "The Shadow in the Sands" - click here. A more than decent sequel to the original - 'Carruthers' and 'Davies' feature under their 'real' names (and here Childers is Carruthers, though I've seen elsewhere that he is Davies) - but the action is a year later and focuses on Captain Charlie Webb, chartered to crew for former Lancers Captain Dacre on the yacht Gloria. The two books are best read back-to-back, even if 'The Riddle of the Sands' has been read previously. Re-reading that before launching into 'The Shadow in the Sands' gives the proper background for the follow-up tale, and adds to the enjoyment.
Er lebt seit dreißig Jahren allein in den Weiten Kanadas, ernährt sich von dem, was er selbst erntet oder erlegt und genießt die Einsamkeit in vollen Zügen – Jo Bentfeld ist ein Freidenker, ein Zyniker und vor allem ein kleiner Anarchist.
Menschen wie Jo Bentfeld gibt es nur selten – er ist ein Aussteiger, ein Eigenbrötler und ist ein echtes Original. Nicht alles was er sagt, ist für Jedermann sofort nachvollziehbar und doch klingt jeder Satz, als hätte er treffender nicht sein können. Nicht immer ernst gemeint, aber immer sympathisch. Er ist ein Mann, dem die Zivilisation zu viel, oder je nachdem, wie man es betrachtet, zu wenig ist.
Im Sommer 1932 wurde Jo Bentfeld, der laut der regionalen Tageszeitung „Neue Westfälische“ eigentlich Hans-Joachim Blankenburg heißt, in Ostrach, Baden-Württemberg geboren. Erst als Schreiner und später als Polizeikommissar tätig, sehnte er sich zurück an seinen Ursprung: Unberührte Natur, das einfache Leben und vor allem: Freiheit. Das Leben, das er einst als Kind lebte.
Das erste Mal abseits der Zivilisation lebte Bentfeld in Skandinavien: In seinem Wohnmobil suchte er vor ungefähr 40 Jahren die Einsamkeit des Nordens. Doch während für die meisten die Leere Skandinaviens schon zu viel ist, konnte es Bentfeld nicht abgelegen genug sein. Die Touristen, die sich vor allem im Sommer in den nordischen Ländern tummeln, störten den Mann, der die Einsamkeit so sehr liebt, und so zog es ihn an einen Ort, der noch weiter von Zuhause weg und noch abgelegener war als Europas Norden. Den Ort, der seinen Wunsch nach Einsamkeit erfüllte, fand der Aussteiger in Kanada, nahe der Grenze zu Alaska: Er folgte einer Straße, die nur wenige Monate im Jahr geöffnet war. Am Ende angekommen schlug er sich noch drei Tage durch die Wildnis Yukons und fand den Ort, der zu seinem Zuhause werden sollte.
Überwindung, sein Leben in Deutschland gegen das Leben eines Einsiedlers einzutauschen, brauchte es nicht, sagt Bentfeld. Vielmehr war es eine „Rückkehr in die Erlebniswelt meiner Jugend. Ich bin im vorläufig letzten Weltkrieg in einem kleinen Dorf in bäuerlicher Selbstverwirklichung aufgewachsen. Wir lebten von der Natur: Säen, Ernten, Sammeln, Schlachten – und was man so nicht gewinnen konnte, gab es halt nicht.“ Und genau danach sehnte er sich: Abgeschiedenheit, Einfachheit, das Leben fernab von Technik, Stadttrubel und oberflächlichen Konversationen. Ein Leben in der „wirklich unberührten Natur“, wie Bentfeld es beschreibt.
Dabei lebte er nicht immer allein: Für einige Jahre leistete ihm seine damalige Frau Sabine Gesellschaft in den Tiefen Kanadas. Er lernte sie auf einer seiner Lesungen, die den Autor hin und wieder nach Deutschland verschlagen, kennen und nahm sie kurzerhand mit in sein kleines selbstgebautes Paradies. Inzwischen ist das Paar geschieden und Bentfeld lebt wieder allein in den Wäldern. Neben seiner Frau blieben Besucher aber eine Seltenheit. In seinen 30 Jahren, die er inzwischen in seiner Hütte an Jo’s Lake lebt, bekam er nur ungefähr 30 Mal Besuch. Darunter seine beiden Söhne und ihre Familien, Reporter und ein kleines Filmteam, welches dieses Video über Bendtfelds Leben drehte.
Wie der Alltag zwischen Bären und Bäumen aussieht? „Bei mir im Urwald bin ich meine Hausfrau, ich muss also den halben Tag an meinem Wohlergehen arbeiten: Kochen, Waschen, Flicken und so weiter. Die 2. Hälfte für Jagd, Fischfang und Wanderungen“, beschreibt Bentfeld sein Leben. Wenn all das erledigt ist, richtet er sich frei nach Kurt Tucholsky und „lässt die Seele baumeln“. Ein Leben, das natürlicher nicht sein könnte und doch für die meisten Menschen kaum noch vorstellbar zu sein scheint.
Was er braucht, jagt, sammelt oder baut er selbst, ein Umstand, der seine Lebenskosten äußerst gering hält: Nur ungefähr 300 Euro benötigt er pro Jahr. Für Mehl, Kaffee, ein paar Gewürze und natürlich Munition. „Den Rest entnehme ich der Wildnis: Jagd, Fischfang, Beeren, Pilze und Naturgemüse sammeln“, erklärt der Aussteiger.
Das Bentfelds Lebensstil auch gewisse Gefahren mit sich bringt liegt auf der Hand: Unberechenbare Krankheiten, unvorhersehbare Wetterumschwünge und wilde Tiere könnten dem Einsiedler zum Verhängnis werden. Doch den Szenarien, die viele Menschen vielleicht abschrecken, steht Bentfeld entspannt gegenüber. Auf die Frage, wie er mit Krankheiten umgeht, antwortete er nur knapp: „Ich bin unheilbar gesund und habe 30 arztfreie Jahre im Blockhaus in der weglosen Wildnis verbracht. Das nächste Indianerdorf ist sieben Tage Fußmarsch durch den weglosen Urwald entfernt.“ Kein Anflug von Angst klingt in den Worten des 85-Jährigen mit, eher eine optimistische Sicht auf die Dinge. Und die Vergangenheit spricht für ihn: Trotz zunehmenden Alters ist er fit genug, um allein zu überleben. Die frische Luft und das tägliche Arbeiten in der Natur scheint ein gutes Mittel gegen das Älterwerden und seine Begleiterscheinungen zu sein.
Auch die wilden Tiere, wie Wölfe und Bären, die durch die Wälder Kanadas streifen, bereiten ihm keine Sorge. „Es gibt keine gefährlichen Tiere im Norden – nur unvorsichtige dumme Menschen“, antwortet er TRAVELBOOK. Ein entspannter Umgang mit der Natur und das Vertrauen auf seine eigenen Instinkte und sein Urteilsvermögen geben Bentfeld die Sicherheit, die man sicherlich benötigt, wenn man ein Leben wie das seine führt.
So ganz ohne Gefahren ist der Norden dennoch auch für Bentfeld nicht: Wind und Wetter können gegen den Menschen arbeiten und auch die weglose Natur hat ihre Tücken. Sein gefährlichstes Erlebnis war, als er sich auf dem siebentägigen Rückweg seines jährlichen Einkaufs in einem Schneesturm verirrte. Ein Vorfall, welcher im kanadischen Winter durchaus tödlich enden kann.
Eine gewisse Sehnsucht nach Freiheit ist wohl in jedem Menschen vorhanden. Bei einigen mehr, bei anderen weniger und bei Menschen wie Bentfeld in einem ausgesprochen hohen Maße. Dabei hat er geschafft, die so ersehnte Freiheit auch zu leben: Außerhalb der Zivilisation hat Bentfeld die größtmögliche Freiheit, sich selbst zu verwirklichen und lebt nach seinem Motto „Bedürfnislosigkeit ist die Mutter jeder Freiheit!“ Fernab der nach immer mehr Konsum strebenden Welt hat er sich sein eigenes Paradies aufgebaut und lebt sein Leben nach seinen Bedürfnissen und nicht nach denen großer Konzerne. Wie es sich anfühlt in dieser vollkommenen Freiheit allein in Kanada zu leben? Bentfeld findet eine Antwort, die schöner nicht sein könnte: „Euphorisch, nur auf rosa Wölkchen schwebend.“ Eigentlich fast so, wie man es sich immer vorgestellt hat.
Auch auf die Frage nach seinen schönsten Momenten in Kanadas Natur findet der Zyniker genau die richtigen Worte: „Jeder Tag ohne Menschen allein mit der Wildnis.“ Dennoch vermisst er etwas, was nur die Zivilisation bietet: „Nur mein tägliches ‚Viertele‘ vom roten Trollinger, das Gott einem jeden Schwaben zugestanden hat.“ Denn Weinanbau gestaltet sich im Norden Kanadas tatsächlich etwas schwieriger.
Ich hatte nie etwas über den Jo Bentfeld gehört bis ein Schweizer namens Fabio Principato eine Email schickte in der er sich über German Harry und Tom Neale erkundigte nachdem ich über sie so viel geschrieben hatte. Am Ende schrieb er: "Bis jetzt konnte ich nur ein Buch über einen Mann lesen, der in Kanada gereist ist und dort in den Wäldern einen Blockhaus alleine gebaut und dort für lange Jahre gelebt hat.
Irgendwo online konnte ich sein Buch finden (den einzigen findbaren) und noch sogar mit seiner Unterschrift aus dem 2000.
Etwa einmal im Jahr reiste er zu seinem Heimatort zurück um Vorträge über sein Leben zu geben.
Sein Name war Jo Bentfeld."
The most fundamental delight which literature can offer has something to do with the perception or discovery of truth, not necessarily a profound or complex or earthshaking truth, but a particular truth of some order. This "epiphany" comes at the moment of recognition when the reader's experience is reflected back at him.
This is what happened to me when idly, and to pass the time on a grey day, I picked up "Wandering: Notes and Sketches" (German title: "Wanderung: Aufzeichnungen") by Hermann Hesse and suddenly found myself totally absorbed in what the backcover had described as 'a fine antidote to the anxiety-provoking pressures of today.'
Let the following excerpts speak for themselves:
There is so much more in this serene little book. "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us", wrote Kafka. This book fits this description. And, being a book, no matter how complex or difficult to understand it may seem to be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life that little bit better.
Here's to the joy of reading! And to more of Hermann Hesse's writing!
Es war einmal eine Buchdame in Berlin bei der ich ein paar deutsche Bücher bestellte und dann wurde daraus eine Freundschaft. Erinnerst du dich noch an Helene Hanffs "84 Charing Cross Road"? Es war nicht ganz so aber ähnlich.
Das war vor vielen Jahren und ich habe schon lange keine Bücher mehr bestellt und nicht nur weil die Buchdame ihren Laden zumachte und keine Bücher mehr verkauft. Anstelle dessen schreibt sie jetzt ihre eigenen. Ihr letztes magnum opus ist ihre Autobiografie "Ich - Mein Leben - bis jetzt".
Ich habe es gleich verschlungen, denn immerhin werde ja auch ich in diesem magnum opus erwähnt: "Als die Umsätze im kleinen Laden nicht mehr so gut waren, habe ich mit Internet angefangen bei ZVAB. Das Internet-Geschäft lief gut, ZVAB war ja weltweit. Ich bekam eine Bestellung aus Australien. Fritz Delfgen [sic - es war Heinz Helfgen] 'Ich radle um die Welt'. Daraus hat sich eine lange Freundschaft entwickelt bis zum heutigen Tag. Durch ihn lernte ich auch seinen Bruder aus Kiel kennen, bis heute in Kontakt." Ich werde es wohl noch ein- oder zwei- oder vielleicht sogar dreimal langsam und gemütlich über Ostern lesen.
In der Zwischenzeit werde ich über ihre abschliessenden Worte im Buch nachdenken: "Meine Jahre sind gezählt, ich blicke noch einmal zurück auf meine Kindheit, auf 41 Jahre Ehe und sehe die noch verbleibende Zeit. Ich werde auch in die letzten Monate oder Jahren wieder meine Mitmenschen enttäuschen, das schaffe ich noch, bestimmt."
Das hast Du bei mir nicht geschafft, Renate, denn Dein Buch liest sich sehr spannend und hat mich überhaupt nicht enttäuscht. Vielen Dank dafür! Und träume weiterhin und auch ohne Hund von der Freiheit und der Ferne bis zum Horizont und warte nicht schon am Morgen auf den Abend.
Apart from telling sick jokes, Roman numerals really don't have much going for them. Adding CLXXVII to XXIII may be relatively straightforward, but try multiplying CLXXVII by XXIII or dividing CLXXVII by XXIII.
These days you see Roman numerals only in descriptions and references, such as
sequels to films (e.g. Rocky III), dates on statues and public buildings, names of monarchs and popes (e.g. Elizabeth II), and also on coinage, general suffixes, sporting events (e.g. Superbowl XLIX), and copyright dates on movie credits and TV shows. And the odd sick joke!
So that you can work out for yourself the copyright date of that old movie you thought was rather corny, here are the very simple rules:
(which I was taught before I left German primary school in MCMLX)
There are just seven Roman numerals:
I (1), V (5), X (10), L (50), C (100), D (500), and M (1000).
And there are just three simple rules:
If a smaller numeral comes after a larger numeral, add the smaller number to the larger number
If a smaller numeral comes before a larger numeral, subtract the smaller number from the larger number
Do not use the same symbol more than three times in a row
The rule of not using the same symbol more than three times in a row means that the highest number in pure Roman numeral form is 3,999 - which is written as MMMCMXCIX - because the number 4,000 would have to be written as MMMM which would make for an even sicker joke.
Ian Paterson, AASA, ACIS, AAIM, grand-daddy of all accountants, used to say, "If the debits don't equal the credits - make 'em!"
The accountant of a large business had the same daily routine: on arriving at work, he would unlock the bottom drawer of his desk, peer at something inside, then close and lock the drawer. He had been doing this for thirty years.
The entire staff was intrigued but no-one was game to ask him what was in the drawer. Finally the time came for him to retire. There was a farewell party with speeches and a presentation. As soon as he had left the building, some of the staff rushed into his office, unlocked the bottom drawer and peered inside. Taped to the bottom of the drawer was a sheet of paper. It read, "Debit on the left, credit on the right". This joke isn't funny with Arabs - well, nothing is - whose debits and credits are vice versa.
I wonder if this joke made the rounds of accountants who in 1994 had gathered in the small Italian town of San Sepulcro to celebrate the publication five hundred years earlier of the first book on double-entry accounting by the Italian monk Luca Pacioli (pronounced pot-CHEE-oh-lee), who was born there circa 1445.
While Pacioli is often called the "Father of Accounting", he did not invent the system. Instead, he simply described a method used by merchants in Venice during the Italian Renaissance period. His system included most of the accounting routines as we know them today. For example, he described the use journals and ledgers, and he warned that "a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equalled the credits!" His ledger included assets (including receivables and inventories), liabilities, capital, income, and expense accounts. He demonstrated year-end closing entries and proposed that a trial balance be used to prove a balanced ledger. Also, his treatise alludes to a wide range of topics from accounting ethics to cost accounting -- see translation by J.B. Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping).
Practising Pacioli's teachings afforded me a comfortable living, and although my personal life was not always perfectly balanced, I never went to sleep at night until all the debits had equalled the credits (or, to get an early night, by posting the difference to a suspense account, as my friend Ganesh Sharma Krishna in Singapore shrewdly observed).
Noel (left) and I at Wewak in New Guinea sometime in the early 70s
Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.
If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.
Noel Butler was such a friend. Some friends are more or less replaceable with other friends. Noel was not. I last heard from him on this day exactly twenty-nine years ago. He'd sent me one of those funny "Greetings from Childers by Night" postcard which was all black except for those words. On the back he had written, "Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this; mine is but that's inevitable." I was then far too young and far too busy and far too full of myself to think that this was more than a funny card. Four months later, Noel was dead.
Rest in Peace, Noel! Your memory lives on at "Riverbend" and so does your card which, beautifully framed, sits on top of the mantelpiece.
As long as we live, they too will live, for they are now a part of us, as long as we remember them.
My default option for all insurances is to buy the cheapest policy with the highest excess, if not in fact "self-insure" as I do with flood insurance on "Riverbend" which would cost me a ridiculous $6,000-plus in premium. Instead of paying this money to an insurance company, I save it for a "rainy day", if you will pardon the intended pun.
After I'd bought that cute little MG3 (for no better reason than that Padma liked its metallic skye-silver colour), I walked into the office of my friendly NRMA insurers next door which whom I had been insured for the past 35 years, and asked for a Third Party Property Damage Motor Insurance which I've always thought to be the cheapest option. That was two weeks ago and I was right: it cost me only a very affordable $210.08.
When I had reason to be back there again today, I was attended by another equally friendly lady who, while glancing over my existing policies, asked, "Is there any reason why you took out only third party property damage on your new car and not a comprehensive third party fire and theft policy which covers your own vehicle to a maximum of $10,000?"
"Because a comprehensive policy is too expensive", said wise old me. "Not that much more expensive", said the friendly lady (whose name turned out to be Nicole). "The extra cover would only cost you an extra $60 a year!"
We cancelled the old policy and I paid the extra $60 - well, $62.56, to be precise - and now the cute little MG3 can go up in smoke or be hotwired by a roving gang of car-crazed teenagers, and I still get $10,000 back from the insurers. That's what I call great service! Thank you, Nicole!
P.S. Nicole, your head office just now emailed me a customer survey. You will be mentioned in despatches!
Sunday morning after the night before: chilling out on the front steps; "yours truly" in dead centre, wearing sunnies and checkered shirt. Notice the chap on the far right having a "hair of the dog" from a McWilliams flagon left over from the night before. If that didn't do it, there was always BEX powder and a good lie-down!
Or take Vincent's with confidence for quick three-way relief. All things of the past now!
The Council to Homeless Persons says the people who live on the streets are just the tip of the iceberg as their definition of 'homelessness' also includes people living in rooming houses (smart move to up their 'membership'! ☺)
Thank you, Council to Homeless Persons, for your research which is probably as 'quackers' as, and probably even dearer than, the 300,000-Pound taxpayer-funded U.K. study Why-Ducks-like-Water.
It's one thing to regard as homeless those who slip into a pair of cardboard pyjamas and only read newspapers they've slept under, but to include people who live in rooming houses? Really! They could've made even bigger headlines if they had included people who live in houses with fewer than four bedrooms and an ensuite!
Anyway, at least now I know that I, too, was a 'homeless' person once as was my immediate boss in the ANZ Bank and many other 'Bank Johnnies' who in the 60s and 70s lived, two to a room, in what was then Barton House, one of Canberra's many boarding houses - or rooming houses, if you will.
The 165-bedroom Barton House in the late 60s
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.
These boarding houses were the sort of "homes" that prepared me well for the house I later shared in Rabaul with two fellow-accountants and the camp accommodation I occupied when I went to Bougainville Island.
I am glad I was a 'homeless' person once. I wouldn't have missed it for the world because it gave me the confidence to go out into the world and deal with all manner of people and situations in future years.
P.S. The ORIENTAL PRIVATE HOTEL has since been turned into twelve strata-titled apartments, each costing close to a million dollars. And that's the cause of the real homelessness today: the lack of boarding houses which became uneconomical to run because of ever-increasing rules and regulations, rates, property taxes and insurance costs.
It has never been shown that human emissions of the gas of life drive global warming. Large bodies of science that don't fit the narrative have been ignored by IPCC, COP and self-interested scientists paid by taxpayers.
A huge subsidised industry of intermittent unreliable wind and solar electricity has been created based on unsubstantiated science. The same hucksters now want subsidised hydrogen, costly inefficient EVs, subsidised mega-batteries and other horribly expensive tried and failed schemes to impoverish people, create unemployment, transfer wealth and enrich China. Germany, Texas, California and the UK had a glimpse of Net Zero with blackouts, astronomically high electricity costs and hundreds of deaths. We once had reliable cheap electricity and now that governments have gone green, we are heading for hard economic times.
In this book Professor Ian Plimer charges the greens with murder. They murder humans who are kept in eternal poverty without coal-fired electricity. They support slavery and early deaths of black child miners. They murder forests and their wildlife by clear-felling for mining and wind turbines. They murder forests and wildlife with their bushfire policies. They murder economies producing unemployment, hopelessness, collapse of communities, disrupted social cohesion and suicide.
They murder free speech and freedoms and their takeover of the education system has ended up in the murdering of the intellectual and economic future of young people. They terrify children into mental illness with their apocalyptic death cult lies and exaggerations. They try to divide a nation. They are hypocrites and such angry ignorant people should never touch other people's money.
The greens are guilty of murder. The sentence is life with no parole in a cave in the bush enjoying the benefits of Net Zero.
P.S. I know you want to hear more from and about the man; click here.
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!
P.P.S. And this is how Noel's place looks today: click here. How Noel would've loved to see these photos!
Sorry, Chasers, but Peter Roget - despite his 'Frenchie' surname - was a proper Englishman
If you suffer from monologophobia – the obsessive fear of using the same word twice – you reach for Roget's Thesaurus, published in 1852 by Dr Peter Roget who longed for order in his chaotic world and so, from the age of eight, began his quest to put everything in its rightful place, one word at a time.
Roget was not just a doctor. He was also a polymath whose work influenced the discovery of laughing gas as an anaesthetic, the creation of the London sewage system, the invention of the slide rule and the development of the cinema industry – as well as being a chess master and an expert on bees, Dante and the kaleidoscope. All of which showed up in the work that he christened a "thesaurus", borrowing the Greek word for "treasure house".
His Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” I've never made head nor tail of the system and always go straight to the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to use it as a book of synonyms even though Roget thought there “really was no such thing,” given the unique meaning of every word.
I've always thought that people who claim to have lots of friends probably couldn't spell the word 'acquantance' ... 'aquantence' ... 'acquaintenance' ... well, you know, 'friends'. Looking at their facebook pages, I was amazed at the number of friends some of my acquaintances have and promptly reached for Roget's Thesaurus to see if the words 'friend' and 'acquaintance' are synonymous. According to the good doctor, they are!
So go ahead, Hengky Tambayong - who is, incidentally, a real nice guy and Bali's best hotel manager! - , and enjoy your 2,354 friends! I shall keep counting the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand.
Henry David Thoreau's two years on Walden Pond are better known to posterity than the other forty-three of his brief life. His shack was smaller than a contemporary single garage but, Thoreau emphasised, it was sufficient. In it he kept three chairs: 'one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society'.
Thoreau's masterpiece, "Walden" (1854), is possibly the most popular book of philosophy ever to emerge from the United States, It is beautiful in every way. People can quote lines of it without knowing their source, such as the adage 'to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life'; or, 'a man who has at length found something to do will not need a new suit to do it in'. And, of course, his enduring 'I went to the woods because ...'
I have my own "Walden" here at "Riverbend". I call it "Melbourne" so that when I'm there and the phone rings in the house, Padma can excuse me for not answering it by saying, "Peter has gone to Melbourne".
I hadn't been to "Melbourne" for a while because of all the rain, but today I went and I spent several peaceful hours there, reading passages from the illustrated edition of "Walden" against the backdrop of the river and the sounds and smells of the nature all around me.
You know what's funny? Paintings of Adam and Eve where they both have belly-buttons. Mind you, lack of a belly-button on Adam and Eve would've been one of the biggest tourist attractions in the pre-Flood world, as the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren would've come up and said, 'Why don't you have a belly-button?'
I was still at primary school when I asked the biology teacher, 'Why do we have a belly-button?' The umbilical cord was not yet part of our school curriculum and his reply was an evasive, 'So that our tummy can breathe'.
Even at the age of fourteen I found this hard to believe, and I kept asking uncomfortable questions. Questions about the Spanish Inquisition got me a less-than-top mark in 'Religion'; not believing my biology teacher got me a less-than-top mark in 'Naturlehre' which is what Germans call biology. (I had also questioned the androgynous origin of boys' nipples but his answer was lost in the tumultous noise suddenly coming from the back of the class; I seem to have been precocious before I became promiscuous.)
I've been asking questions all my life and many have got me into trouble. I'm now reduced to just 'What's for dinner?' and 'What's on television?'
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.
Transit Camp at Kobuan
Camp 6 at Loloho
Panguna mine site shrouded in clouds
Rangoon in Burma, Samoa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, PNG once again (setting up 
