Is it already seven years ago?

 

Little Rover born November 2002 passed away 30 August 2017

 

Lat night, at around ten past seven, the life force that had bounced little Rover - Mr Onederful! - through life for almost fifteen years, left him. We were both with him, talked to him, stroked him, and comforted him, and his big beautiful eyes were still looking up at us, as he took his last laboured breath.

We had one last day in the sunshine together, as he watched me prepare the vegetable garden, and he still enjoyed a large bowl of his favourite food, and we had come to accept that his seizures, sometimes just two a day (or night) but often more, would continue, but that he would always recover and be his beautiful, loving, wonderful self again.

This time it was not to be. Death is never pretty but his was as short and painless as any of us can ever hope for. From the time he lost consciousness until his eyes became unseeing, it was little more than a few short minutes. It was so quick, in fact, that the reality that the house will be so much emptier without him hasn't quite sunk in yet.

We placed him in his little sleeping box, covered him in his favourite jumper, and gave him a tearful burial minutes before midnight.

 

 

Good-bye, my friend, and rest in peace. We will never ever forget you.

 

The Rainbow Bridge ℬy the edge of the woods, at the foot of the hill, Is a lush green meadow where time stands still. Where the friends of man and woman do run, When their time on earth is over and done. For here, between this world and the next, Is a place where each beloved creature finds rest. On this golden land, they wait and they play, Till the Rainbow Bridge they cross over one day. No more do they suffer in pain or in sadness, For here they are whole, their lives filled with gladness. Their limbs are restored, their health renewed, Their bodies have healed with strength imbued. They romp through the grass, and sniff at the air, All ears prick forward, eyes dart front and back, Then all of a sudden, one breaks from the pack, For just at that instant, their eyes have met: Together again, both person and pet. So they run to each other, these friends from long past, The time of their parting is over at last. The sadness they felt while they were apart, Has turned into joy once more in each heart. They embrace with a love that will last forever, And then side by side, they cross over ... together.

 

Tributes

 

From Margaret and John in Sydney:

"Dear Peter It is with much sadness I read of your loss. Our pets give so much joy. Be comforted in knowing that you gave little Rover the best life possible and that you were both blessed to have your time together. I hope you can find some sunshine and reflect that he has no suffering now. Condolences to you and Padma."

❤

From Helene and Othmar in the Bay:

"Sad to hear that Little Rover has left you, but one day, you will meet him again and together you will be be happy again."

❤

From Reg in Wollongong:

"So sorry Peter, It is astounding just how close we become to our pets, particularly an all forgiving totally tolerant dog who is always loyal and always a friend despite the occasional vagaries of their master. Our irreplaceable pet has pride of place in our backyard under the bird bath, he too lasted a little over 15 years and was a wonderful animal."

❤

From Andrew in Mackay:

"A great companion gone to the other side. May he rest in peace."

❤

From Frank in Sydney:

"Sorry to hear about Rover. It’s always a tough time and one we have been through many times so can relate to how you must be feeling at the moment."

❤

From Jeff up the lane:

"Sorry to hear the sad news of Rover. I'm sure Suki will welcome him to Doggie Heaven."

❤

From John on Lombok Island:

"So sad Peter. I hope you get another puppy. I have two in Lombok; one rescued from a crazy monkey which had already killed two puppies; the other abandoned on the beach to die, both having a better life now."

❤

From Chris in Canada:

"You have the good memories which are few in life. Cherish them, my friend."

❤

From Colleen in Sydney:

"So sorry to hear about little Rover, but peace is now with him. Poor little puppy – sounds like he did a lot of suffering recently and while we don’t want to let go, we don’t want them to suffer. Think of the wonderful years and love he gave you, and really, could Rover have asked for a better life? He will be smiling in doggie Heaven!"

❤

From Ian in Mackay:

"You have indeed been fortunate to have had such loving pets come into your life. The joy, happiness and pleasure cannot be measured - it is a treasure forever embedded in your divinity."

❤

From Bozenna in Greece:

"Dear Peter and Padma, it's difficult to witness and enjoy the entire life span of a beautiful creature only to see it all end. I am sorry for your loss."

❤

From Chris in Switzerland:

"Sincere condolences for your loss."

❤

From Urs in Brisbane:

"I am sorry to hear of your loss my friend, it is always hard to lose a companion like Rover, dogs give us so much and do not ask for much in return, I guess this is why we miss them so much when they are gone, my thoughts are with you and Padma at this difficult time."

❤

From Renate and Jürgen in Germany:

"Mein lieber Freund am anderen Ende der Welt, Dein lieber kleiner Wegbegleiter ist nun auf dem Weg in den Hundehimmel. Glaube mir, ich kann Deine Empfindungen nachempfinden, wir haben das hinter uns gebracht, einige Male."

❤

From Margaret and Clayton in Canada:

"We were so sorry to hear Rover had passed away, and extend our most heartfelt condolences to you both. Our furry friends are beloved family members and bring us so much joy. Rover will certainly leave a void in your lives; may the cherished memories of all the wonderful times you spent together bring you solace. Our thoughts are with you both during this difficult time."

❤

From Des in the USA:

"I concur your feelings which we also had for our Benji when he passed on at the age of 17. We also said no to another until Leo came into our lives. They are truly man's best friend"

 

Another afternoon well spent

 

 

Excuse my feet but I just couldn't be bothered to take them down to take this picture of another afternoon well spent listening to the audiobook of Yuval Noah Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". Both very cerebral and yet entertaining.

 

Read a preview here

 

How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war or ecological catastrophe? What do we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? How should we prepare our children for the future?

"21 Lessons for the 21st Century" is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarised than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.

In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari untangles political, technological, social, and existential issues and offers advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? Why is liberal democracy in crisis?

Harari's unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" is essential reading.

 

 

And all these densely fact-packed 400-plus pages on a memory stick no bigger than your thumb's fingernail holding more than 320MB! Those are indeed technological advances well beyond understanding for someone like me who started his computing career while writing his first program on Hollerith punch cards and then on 256Kb floppy disks in A and B drives.

But back to Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century": even my trusted www.archive.org hasn't got an online copy of the book (unless you're able to read it in Portuguese here), but there are several audiobooks on YouTube, all by AI Voice Recorder, such as this one, which also highlights the text as it reads along. However, I bought myself a beautiful audiobook read by the British narrator Derek Perkins which I have uploaded to the net. I'm happy to email you the URL if you can keep it under your hat!

To whet your appetit, here's the Introduction.

 

Pushing s**t uphill

 

Nelligen's new sewerage pumping station at the top of Bridge View Road

 

Remember the famous death scene in which Harry Lime's fingers grasp through a grate in the sewers below the streets of post-WWII Vienna? "When a zither starts to play, you'll remember yesterday; in its haunting strain Vienna lives again; a song that's always new; in your heart a part of you; oh, shines so brightly when you hear the 'Third Man' theme" - click here.

Unlike Vienna's sewerage system - and countless others since Roman times and well before - which all run on gravity, Nelligen's yet-to-be-connected sewerage system is a push-and-pull (or blow-and-suck, if you like) vacuum system operating through pipes of such small diameter that it would be incumbent on all of us never to indulge in a full-blown vindaloo.

It'll be a long time between meals should the pumps in that new building shown above ever fail. Here's hoping we won't all be pushing s**t uphill!

Now stop holding your nose and watch Harry Lime in "The Third Man":

 

 

Beautiful one day, perfect the next!

 

Click on image for a full panorama shot

 

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 what remains of my days?

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!

 

Heart of Darkness

 

 

Padma gave me a thermos full of lemongrass & ginger tea and a playlunch - well, a packet of chocolate-coated diet biscuits, to be precise - and I took my memories and a memory stick to spend a peaceful day down by the river in far-away "Melbourne".

I suffer from what Immanuel Kant - always spoken of with his first name to avoid any ambiguity - called 'unsociable sociability' (ungesellige Geselligkeit) and I need my regular dose of solitude like others need their food and drink. Spending time away in far-away "Melbourne" in silent monologue with myself and my thoughts feeds my 'unsociable sociability', and I will spend more time there more often as the weather warms up.

What memories my solitude will throw up is always unpredictable but the memory stick I took along held a 90-minute BBC Radio dramatisation of "Heart of Darkness" - click here - which I had heard several times before.

It made the perfect background sound as I reclined on the daybed and, watching the thousands of flecks of dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight coming through the window, I drifted off to a long and satisfying nap.

May there be many, many, many more sunkissed days like this!

 

Sitting outside "Melbourne" at the end of the day and reflecting
on "The horror! The horror!" of old age and gum boots and all that.

 

 

Horst Berger in Tonga

 

 

Lieber Peter, auch Du erhältst gerne Post, wenn ich Dich richtig verstanden habe. Also hier ein 'TAPA-Glücksschwein.' Freude am Leben und freue mich auf ein Wiedersehen, Horst". So schrieb er mir im März 2007, ein Jahr nach meinem Besuch in Tonga, und für mehrere Jahre hielt diese Verbindung noch an.

Nach dem großen Zyklon Ian in 2014 schickte ich ihm ein paar tausend Dollar um ihm mit seinem Wiederaufbau zu helfen. Vielleicht war das nicht genug gewesen, denn seitdem habe ich gar nichts mehr von ihm gehört.

 

 

Glück braucht der Mensch, Horst, und ein paar Freunde die Dir helfen!

 

Become a subscriber to "Confidential Daily"

 

 

A friend who knows my tastes but also my distastes for all that false wokeness that's all around us now, sent me this article about what "Confidential Daily" calls the pathetic, ill-founded, vomit-inducing "Welcome to Country" message - click here. Don’t forget to boo loudly next time you hear it.

So who is behind "Confidential Daily"? None other than Cory Bernardi, former Senator for South Australia from 2006 to 2020 and leader of the Australian Conservatives, a minor political party he founded in 2017 but disbanded in 2019. He ends the article ends with this plea: "I need every Australian, yes, even you miserable greens, to write, email, and text to their local, state and federal politicians to stop wasting our money with this unnecessary grievance industry. It makes our country look weak. It dispirits, disheartens, and depresses our young people against starting or retaining a small business, knowing that any bedwetting malcontent can trigger expensive litigation via a team of well-funded, weak bureaucrats who could never survive on their own skills in private enterprise."

Registering with "Confidential Daily" is free. All subscribers receive the famous "Weekly Dose of Common Sense" email every Wednesday. To register, click here, enter your name and email address, and choose your type of membership. You will be sent an email to confirm your details with a secure link. When you click on the link within that email you will be registered and automatically signed in.

 

Mein Patenonkel Heinz Rühmann

 

 

Als ich vor Jahren vesuchte die Geschichte unserer vom Krieg zerstörten Familie wieder zusammen zubasteln, schrieb mir mein älterer Bruder aus Kiel: "Der Heinz Rühmann soll ja Dein Patenonkel in Stendal gewesen sein. Ob sich daran allerdings jemals Heinz Rühmann erinnert haben könnte, das weiß man nicht. Man darf ja nicht die damalige, unruhige Zeit vergessen - gleich nach dem Krieg!"

Davon wußte ich gar nichts denn meine allererste Kindheitserinnerung ist der Moment als wir während der Berliner Blockade in einem DAKOTA-Kohlenflugzeug der Engländer nach Hannover flogen und gegenüber von uns im Flugzeug eine Frau saß die einen Dackel in ihrer Handtasche hatte. Das ist meine allererste Erinnerung die ich nie wieder vergessen habe.

 

Peter in Berlin in 1948

 

Vor unserer Flucht in den Westen in 1948 wohnten wir damals in Stendal in einem für damalige Verhältnisse recht komfortablem Einzelhaus in der Weberstraße 4, das vorher wohl zur Stadtgärtnerei gehört haben mußte. Ich war im September 1945 in der Parkstraße 15 geboren.

 

 

Und mein Bruder schrieb: "Rühmann und sein Ensemble tingelten damals praktisch fürs 'tägliche Brot' durch die Provinz und gaben damals in Stendal ein Gastspiel. Rühmann und seine Frau, Herta Feiler, kampierten bei uns ja mit seinem ganzen Tournee-Stab (Werner Fütterer, Alexa von Poremski, Bruni Löbel) und waren sicher froh irgendwo einen Unterschlupf gefunden zu haben. Uns ging es ja damals den Umständen entsprechend recht gut und wir hatten trotz der schlechten Zeiten keinen Mangel. Bei uns war damals ein 'ziemliches Leben in der Bude', denn die waren praktisch bei uns zuhause. Das Theater in Stendal lag ja fast um die Ecke."

 

 

Wie schon geschrieben, ob sich der Heinz Rühmann an uns erinnerte ist zweifelhaft, aber seine Schlager "Ein Freund, ein guter Freund", "Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern" und "La Le Lu nur der Mann im Mond schaut zu" wurden oft in unserer Küche und, als wir dann in späterern Jahren endlich eins hatten, auch im Badezimmer gesungen.

 

 

Und sein berühmtes Lied "Wozu ist die Straße da" zeigte mir den Weg in die weite Welt und diese Lieder gingen mit mir um die Welt - siehe hier.

 

 

Sein berühmtester Film, "Die Feuerzangenbowle", wurde in den späteren Nachkriegsjahren zu einem Kult-Film. Es handelt sich dabei um die amüsante Geschichte eines erfolgreichen Schriftstellers, der sich auf ein ungewöhnliches Experiment begibt: er kehrt zurück zur Schulbank, um das zu erleben, was er als Jugendlicher verpasst hat – das normale Schulleben.

 

 

Heinrich Spoerls Buch kann man 'online' bei archive.org lesen - siehe hier.

 

 

Und mit diesem Lied setzte sich Heinz Rühmann sein eigenes Denkmal:

 

 

A short commercial break

 

 

In the beloved Australian film "The Castle", Darryl Kerrigan famously acknowledges the serenity while staying at the family holiday house in Bonnie Doon: "Ah, the serenity. So much serenity."

One look at "Riverbend", and you'll be thinking the exact same thing. This one-of-a-kind absolute waterfront freehold property offers serenity and tranquility by the bucketload. Located on the edge of the picturesque village of Nelligen, "Riverbend" is a private paradise only ten minutes away from the bustling resort town of Batemans Bay with all its amenities.

This truly unique property with a massive two-storey brick residence set in parkland totalling some seven acres stretches for over 400 metres along the Clyde River. The land is mostly level and takes in an entire bend of the river.

After owning this incredible property for over thirty years, the present owners are ready to say their final goodbyes in the hope that it will attract a buyer who will also treasure this slice of paradise. "It's a place of true beauty and discovery, and for making new magical memories, and we will absolutely miss it for many reasons", they say, but old age is forcing them to downsize. "We now wish to pass this slice of paradise onto someone else to enjoy this incredible lifestyle."

As for the price (which is negotiable and the owners will even toss in a copy of "The Castle"), most residential properties sell at a price ratio of 75% for the house and 25% for the land; "Riverbend" has an inverse ratio of 25% for the house and 75% for the land (already two years ago, the Valuer-General's Land Valuation of the LAND ALONE was $2,637,000) because, as you know what they say about land, "They don't make any more!"

Land valuation and price aside, what the property is all about is location, location, location! The tranquillity, the absolute privacy and beauty of the river draw you to it. If you are looking for an idyllic lifestyle where the only alarm clock in the morning is a bunch of kookaburras, where you can sit on a huge verandah overlooking the river and watch amazing sunsets, and where you are serenaded to sleep at night by the sound of frogs, you will love it here. If you thought that it was no longer possible to find paradise on earth, think again!

For some photos, click here.

 

Read me a story

 

 

For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for “to read” literally meant "to cry out" or "to listen". Only occasionally, a different technique was mentioned: to "see" a tablet – to read it silently.

Today, silent reading is the norm. Most adults retreat into a personal, quiet world inside their heads when they are reading, but we may be missing out on some vital benefits when we do this. The majority of us bottle the words in our heads as if sitting in the hushed confines of a library.

And yet, there’s something about the comfort of hearing a human voice, especially if that voice is a pleasing one. I am old enough to remember the renditions in a resonant baritone voice of "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow" by Leonard Teale (not to be mistaken with Colin Thiele whom I equally admire for his novel "Storm Boy"; incidentally, Leonard Teale's birth surname was also Thiele but he adopted the Teale homophone when he acted in "Homicide"; remember "Homicide"?)

But back to reading aloud, and my growing collection of audiobooks which I usually buy on CDs and then copy onto a more convenient USB (which stands for "Universal Serial Bus", in case you want to know) flash drive, or copy directly onto a USB stick from the huge audio library at archive.org (if you find archive.org usful, make a donation here for doing a great job).

 

 

I've "ebay-ed" Bill Bryson's "At Home", "The World as Stage", and "A Short History of Nearly Everything", and Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". Many happy hours of listening await me.

 

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

 

 

The handwritten dedication on the flyleaf reads, "To my darling Lee, Happy Birthday, Love Sue 8/95", and to ensure that darling Lee would fully appreciate the gift, loving Sue had left the Chatswood ABC Bookshop's sales docket dated 27/08/95 for $75 as a handy bookmark inside the book.

It stayed there for almost exactly twenty-nine years until I picked up the same book yesterday at Vinnies in Moruya for a mere two dollars. Wayne the Bookwhisperer, who prices all of Vinnies' books and thinks nothing of slapping a $10 price on a second-hand copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey", knows his fellow-Moruyans well enough to realise that an encyclopedia of the English language wouldn't exactly fly off the shelf, hence the cheap price for what is still an almost pristine copy which even darling Lee didn't seem to have looked at much in all those twenty-nine years. Look, I don't mean to denigrate those who prefer "Fifty Shades of Grey" to this beautifully produced encyclopedia of the English language - and for those people who do, let me explain that denigrate means "put down" - but for me this was the find of the week.

I love reading about words; I love writing with words; I love listening to words; in fact, words are all we have, you and I, as you sit in front of your computer and I sit and tap at my keyboard, but words failed me as I listened to the news on the car radio on the drive home. According to one piece of news, an estimated 5.5 million, or close on 20% - TWENTY PERCENT!!! - of the entire Australian population has a disability and many are on the payroll with the euphemistically called and much abused National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS. Even the word "insurance" is an abuse because, according to the Oxford dictionary, "insurance" is "an arrangement with a company in which you pay them regular amounts of money and they agree to pay the costs, for example, if you die or are sick, or if you lose or damage something such as your health, your life, your possessions, etc." No-one pays any amount of money, regular or otherwise, into the NDIS, other than the other 80% of Australia's long-suffering taxpayers who are currently being hit with some $45 BILLION - a figure which is estimated to DOUBLE by 2031-2032 - so that little old ladies can fritter away their time playing bingo at the Returned and Services League Club while NDIS-provided personal carers dust their venetian blinds and clean their bathrooms and kitchens and mow their front lawns, and revoltingly obese men with tattoos all over them can come to the swimming pool attended by their NDIS-provided personal carers in a futile attempt to lose the excess weight they accumulated through an alcohol-induced lifestyle. I am not exaggerating - I have met several of both kinds! The NDIS has become the new #MeToo movement: where once they prided themselves on the number of pills they took, they now take pride that their NDIS-package is bigger than yours!

The NDIS was one of those Labor government ideas which, as well-meaning as it might have been, has completely gone off the rails, and is now almost impossible to rein back in. A recent case in point was an unsuccessful attempt to stop paying for sex workers attending to the "personal needs" of disabled people which resulted in a major outcry and the repeated mention of "human rights". I am all for looking after the nation's truly disabled but free sex workers? What next? Free P&O cruises? This is unaffordable and corrupting welfare on steroids!

Perhaps by the time the Chinese arrive on our shores to freshen up our sadly depleted gene pool, our nation will be girth by wheelchairs occupied by one half - many of whom would be better off if they tried to keep fit by walking - while the other half serves them caffé lattes and cleans their venetian blinds, if indeed they are not also attending to their more "personal needs". And there are supposed to be people who complain that we waste too much of taxpayers' money on the AUKUS submarine deal!

As for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language which has already entertained me for hours and re-activated brain cells I had almost forgotten I had, if you know someone called Lee whose birthday is in August, please give him my thanks for having left it in such pristine condition by hardly ever using it. I'm making up for all that lost time!

 

The Summing Up

 

Start reading here

 

George Orwell called W. Somerset Maugham "the modern writer who has influenced me the most". "The Summing Up" (1938) is Maugham's introspective attempt at bringing together his thoughts on subjects that had primarily interested him through the course of his life - ideas on literature, art, religion, ethics, and philosophy - in a conclusive, coherent manner.

I read this book every few years, and I enjoy it more each time. In his early sixties and not knowing how much longer he might live, W. Somerset Maugham decided to set down in "The Summing Up" not so much an autobiography as his observations about life. He then went on to live another thirty years (born in 1874, he died in 1965 at the age of 91).

 

 

Today's literary treat - for me as well as for you, if you care to join me - is to listen to part of this audiobook while at the same time reading along.

 

Chapter 6 starts here

 

 

Chapter 13 starts here

 

The audiobook stops at "never having felt some oi the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give."

Now turn the page and keep on reading. Perhaps you are too busy right now; perhaps you have an important court case ahead of you, in which case turn to page 38 just before the beginning of chapter 17: "When I have heard judges on the bench moralizing with unction I have asked myself whether it was possible for them to have forgeotten their humanity so completely as their words suggested. I have wished that beside his bunch of flowers at the Old Bailey, his lordship had a packet of toilet paper. It would remind him that he was a man like any other."

As you can see, there's something for everyone in this wonderful book.

 

Memories of Bay Street

 

Toasting my new overseas job with my then neighbour before leaving for the airport.
He was the Tin Man I wrote about in "Dig here!".

 

It was early 1981. After more than ten years overseas and the last eighteen months on the road in Australia, I'd taken up a permanent accounting position with the construction company AV Jennings in Townsville. The work was easy and the pay adequate.

We had bought this small house on the beach at Pallarenda just ten minutes out of town. It was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers with holes in them, and I had begun to turn domestic with gusto.

 

The house is just to the left of the swimming enclosure and marked with a red dot

 

The house was just one block away from the beach and the shark-proof swimming enclosure. From the corner window we could see the ocean and Magnetic Island on the horizon. The sound of the surf was always in our ears, and brolgas and curlews walked the streets at night. So many happy memories! If it is true that we remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them, then happy memories are the worst. That is the trouble with real life: the happiness is so rarely saved for the end.

 

Sales history: I bought it in 1981 for $35,000 and sold it again in 2000 for $115,000; it was rented out for $300 a week until 2016 when it was sold for $313,000. Its current estimated resale value is $500,000 to $550,000

 

One day we met a chubby Labrador walking down the road. We liked him and he liked us, and from then on he spent more time with us than with his owners. We called him "Labby" and he listed to it.

 

I named it KARAWEIK in remembrance of a dinner at a restaurant of the same name in Rangoon where I had decided to ask a certain person to share the ups and downs of this unpredictable life with me. I loved her without knowing how, blindly living married life as if I were still a single man. "Never say you know the last word about any human heart!"

 

Money was still tight and our furnishings were sparse and second-hand but we lived in the tropics and spent as much time outside as inside.

 

Even the washing machine was an old twintub with the lid missing (on far left)
which we bought for fifty dollars and for which I cut a wooden replacement lid

 

I had a water diviner sink a bore and instal a pump which was connected to a timer which started each morning at 5 o'clock to wake us up to another glorious morning in the tropics. I grew vegetables under the elderberry tree along the side of the house with amazing results.

 

 

It was an old house - even the toilet was downstairs - but it was solid and had survived several cyclones and, above all, it was comfortable.

 

 

I tried to be a handyman, with mixed results, and "Lubby" for company.

 

 

It was beautiful one day and perfect the next, and I couldn't wait to get back to our little house by the beach after a day's work in the city ...

 

 

... until eight months later the fatal phone call came in: did I want to work overseas again? The call of the wild again and a new challenge! So it was back to New Guinea and then Saudi Arabia, and finally Greece. Shades of Hermann Hesse: "But there is no centre in my life, my life hovers between poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there."

We left Pallarenda for New Guinea in January 1982. These oh-so-long-forgotten photos had been taken barely three months earlier. Then I found two more photographs with a strange car parked in the driveway.

 

 

I flipped them over, and on the back was my best friend's handwriting:

 

 

"Taken Dec. 1982" and printed in March 1983. By the time my old mate Noel had visited Townsville to see where I used to live I was already working in Saudi Arabia, and by the time these photographs reached me, my domestic bliss was over. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Happiness is like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

A little over three years later I was back in Townsville but the old magic of just walking back in and picking up from where I had left off had deserted me. You can't step into the same river twice! --- to which a good friend added, "... but you can sure step into the same pile of shit more than once!" Je suis vraiment très très désolé, Daw Khin San Myint!

As Hermann Hesse wrote: "Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning."

Reluctantly, I sold the little house on the beach in December 1999 ...

 

 

... and here's a current street view of 3 Bay Street, courtesy of GOOGLE Map. They've cut down the frangipani and elderberry tree that used to shade my vegetable garden, and they've also removed the small palms I had planted on the nature strip. But it still looks very homely. If only ...

 

 

 

SeaChange

 

 

I did my seachange at about the same time the Australian television program ran on the ABC - in fact, I had bought "Riverbend" a few years before in 1993. Like Laura Gibosn, I had also suffered from professional burn-out but unlike her no job was waiting for me at the Bay and I took up grass-cutting and reading and grass-cutting and reading and grass-cutting and reading and more reading.

 

 

While I was looking for more books at Vinnies to feed my reading habit, I also discovered the full boxset of the first three series containing thirty-nine episodes. Some thirty-three hours of uninterrupted comedy bliss!

 

It's a small world

 

 

Some months ago, I picked up this coffee table book of "Aung San Suu Kyi - A Portrait in Words and Pictures" at Vinnies. The check-out lady was surprised, "Why are you interested in Burma?" to which I answered, "Because I used to live and work there."

When she continued, "I am Burmese and I am from Rangoon," I began to take notice of her typical soft Burmese voice and took another look at her typical gentle Burmese demeanour. "It's been almost fifty years since I left Rangoon but I'm still in love with Burma and its people," I told her as she gave me that typical doe-eyed Burmese look and wished me good-bye.

I am a regular Vinnies customer, and it was a few weeks later that we met again at the check-out. "Oh, it's you again! Have you read the Aung San Suu Kyi book yet?" she wanted to know. "Not yet," I replied, and then told her where I used to live and work in Rangoon. When I mentioned that for a few months I had also lived at the Inya Lake Hotel, she told me that her father had been its manager, although not at my time. What a small world!

Weeks went by during which I stocked up on more books and DVDs, until one day it was another "Oh, it's you again!" and we struck up another conversation during which I confessed that my love of Burma and the Burmese people had been more than just platonic. Perhaps I must've also confessed that "ငါ့ရဲ့ ပထမဆုံးနဲ့ တစ်ဦးတည်းသော အချစ်" had been a certain Daw Khin San Myint whose memory I still carried to this day, because when I visited Vinnies again today, she asked me, "Is her family name Thaw?"

Quite taken aback, I asked, "Yes, how did you know?", after which she told me that her father, U Pye Aye, who now also lives in Batemans Bay, took over as manager of the Thamada Hotel from Daw Khin San Myint's father when he passed away after suffering a heart attack in 1977, and that U Pye Aye was somehow related to the Thaw family. Small world indeed!

Would I like to visit Burma again, she then wanted to know. "With all that emotional baggage I now carry, I'd never get past the check-in counter," I told her and left before my emotions could completely overwhelm me.

"Happiness is just an illusion, filled with sadness and confusion. What becomes of the broken-hearted who had love that's now departed?

 

A trip back in time for fifty cents

 

6th Edition, February 1998

 

Most people buy their Lonely Planet Guide to plan a trip; I bought this old 1998 edition for a mere fifty cents at the local op-shop to take a trip back in time. And I discovered much!

Only the very back of the guidebook, the last three pages 359-361, is dedicated to the place where I had spent most of my time in New Guinea. It begins with the explanation, "The following information is included in case the situation in Bougainville dramatically improves and travel onto the island is once again allowed. But this information is likely to be out of date since Bougainville has been off-limits for eight years and there's been considerable damage to the towns in the south."

And equally so about the place in which I first lived and worked: "Rabaul is a weird wasteland, buried in deep black volcanic ash. The broken frames of its buildings poke out of the mud like the wings of a dead bird. Almost the entire old town is buried and barren and looks like a movie set for an apocalyse film. Streets and streets of rubble and ruined buildings recede in every direction. The scale of what happened to Rabaul cannot be appreciated until you see it. If you were fortunate enough to walk its busy, noisy and colourful streets before September 1994, be prepared for a shock."

 

 

With the help of the old town map on page 315 I was able to walk, in my mind, from my office in Park Street to Casuarina Avenue, across Court Street, Namanula Road and Tavur Street, before turning left into Vulcan Street to arrive at the company-supplied accommodation, a converted Chinese trade store which I shared with two other accountants.

 

 

Then there is the Port Moresby City map on page 112 which also shows Cuthbertson Street where I used to sit in my parked car in the sweltering heat on a Sunday morning, waiting for the newspapers from "down south" to arrive at the newsagency to grap one of the few copies of the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review which always advertised the best job vacancies, and to check my mailbox at the post office on the opposite side of the street for letters from "down south" but especially for any job offer in response to some application I had sent off in previous weeks.

 

 

Page 130 reminded me of trips to Yule Island where "the missionaries who arrived at Yule Island in 1885 were some of the first European visitors to the Papuan coast of New Guinea." On the way there I would stop over at a small trade store at Hisiu, then run by an Australian and his local wife.

Then there were those many trips out to Idler's Bay to the west, Bootless Inlet to the east, and north to Brown River. Sailing my CORSAIR dinghy from the Royal Papuan Yacht Club all the way out of Fairfax Harbour to Gemo Island and Lolorua Island and capsizing it far out at sea. I would have never made it back home had I not been with my mate Brian Herde who dived under the boat and pushed the centreboard back through the slot so that I could grap it and pull the boat upright again. I lost my precious wristwatch and we lost all our beer but only nearly our lives.

 

 

The map of Lae on page 176 shows the corner of 7th Street and Huon Road where I lived and spent my last Christmas in the country in 1974 before flying out to my next assignment in Burma. My old friend Noel had flown across from Wewak to spend that Christmas with me, and I still remember talking about another job I had been offered eighteen months earlier as manager of a thriving co-operative at Angoram on the banks of the mighty Sepik River. Angoram was no more than a couple of hours' drive away from Wewak and I had been tempted to accept to be near my friend but how different things may have turned out because only a few months later, again at Christmas time, I developed accute appendicitis which was quickly and successfully dealt with through a hurried operation at the newly-built hospital at Arawa but which could've been far more complicated in the remote wilds of the Sepik District. And, of course, no access to the Australian Financial Review with all its interesting job ads! We are so often the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in.

 

The Sepik is to New Guinea what the Congo is to Africa

 

And then there is Wewak itself, described on the guidebook's page 254 as "an attractive town where you can happily spend a day or two in transit to the Sepik or Irian Jaya." Well, that was then: today Weak is a very unsafe and run-down place and the border to Irian Jaya is also closed. The town map on page 256 still mentions the Windjammer Hotel which burnt down many years ago. The larger district map on the facing pages 250 and 251 shows the road to Cape Wom and the Hawain River where my friend Noel used to live before Independence and the unruly natives forced him out.

A great trip back in time for a mere fifty cents!