"Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen ..."

 

 

Well, it took quite a "Weilchen", a whole seventy years in fact, for me to realise that this little ditty which we quite often sang when I was still knee-high to a grasshopper was actually connected to the Fritz-Lang movie "M".

 

 

Long before "Psycho", "The Silence of the Lamb" or "Se7en", this far-ahead-of-its-time German film struck fear into viewers' hearts with its tale of a child-killer at loose in the city, and it has remained the blueprint for all serial killer movies ever since. Many of its images, such as a missing child’s balloon stuck in telephone lines or Beckert discovering an M (for ‘murderer’) chalked on his shoulder, remain genuinely iconic.

 

 

Fritz Lang was an extraordinary filmmaker and his CV is littered with classics – the "Mabuse" films (1922, 1932, 1960), "Metropolis" (1927), "Fury" (1936), "The Woman in the Window" (1944), "Scarlet Street" (1945), "The Big Heat" (1953) and "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and "While the City Sleeps" (both 1956) are merely the best known, with "M" perhaps best-known of all.

After leaving Germany for France when the Nazis came to power and settling in the USA in 1935 (where he died in 1976, aged 85), Lang buoyed his anti-Nazi credentials with the Hitler-assassination thriller "Manhunt" (1941) and the Bertolt Brecht collaboration "Hangmen Also Die" (1943) which depicts Gestapo agents hunting Reinhardt Heydrich's killer in occupied Prague.

It's a grey and overcast morning. It's not really cold but I've lit the fire anyway just for company as Padma has gone into the Bay for a bit of shopping. I'm about to watch "M" again, if only to remind myself of what I used to be singing all those years ago in another life in another country.

 

Where do they get all those books from?

 

 

After an hour in the warm-water pool and my first visit to the local skin clinic - after having travelled for many years to a far-away dermatologist who became more and more interested in the colour of my money than the colour of my skin - we looked at each other and simultaneously said, "Let's go for a drive to Ulladulla."

Which is code for "Let's visit the Uniting Church Outreach Centre" which is always full of wool for Padma's crocheting and lots of books for my reading pleasure, and this time was no exception. I know that Padma was pretty happy with her bagful of wool and I was absolutely amazed at the books I found: not just one but TWO of the latest books by Australia's leading social psychologist, Hugh Mackay, "The Way We Are" and "The Kindness Revolution"; a hardcover copy of "The Price of Everything - Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do"; another hardcopy cover of Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat"; and "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That" about selected journalism and other stuff; "Word Watching - Field Notes from an Amateur Philologist"; "Why Broome?", a story of why twenty-six of the many expatriates from all over the world have come to live in Broome which I want to read as I've been obsessed with Broome lately; and for the first time I found a Charles Bukowski book, this one being "Ham on Rye". I hope I live long enough to read them all!

 

 

Of course, as they say in the commercial, "But wait, there's more!" but I don't want to bore you with all the others, except for one, "Make the Most of Your Time on Earth", an absolute treasure for armchair-travellers like me whose travelling is now limited to the fifty kilometres to Ulladulla and the few steps up to the Milton-Ulladulla Bowling Club where we sat down for a sumptuous lunch of some Thai chicken salad for Padma and a lashing of curried prawns for me, all washed down with a glass of chardy and topped off with what was probably the best baked cheese cake I have ever tasted. Or was it just the exuberance of watching BHP climb back up the stairs after its nine-month-long drop from over $50 to just around $38?

 

 

When we got home, I found in my mailbox a quarterly PAYG instalment notice from the Australian Taxation Office, and by the time I had lit the fire and settled down by it to start reading Hugh Mackay's latest offering, BHP had closed at $$43.36, one offsetting the other. As I write this the morning after, I notice that BHP's overnight New York price at four o'clock their time is US$60.91 for the American Depositary Receipt (ADR) which is their equivalent of two shares. At the current exchange rate of 69 US cents to one Australian dollar it would suggest an opening price in Sydney this morning of $44.13, enough to buy me many more books in Ulladulla.

 

Read a preview here

 

Now let me get back to my Hugh Mackay and "The Way We Are".

 

 

Youth, you son of a bitch, where did you go?

 

 

I didn't write this but WOW does it speak to me!!!

 

Barely the day started and it's already six in the evening. Barely Monday has arrived and it's already Friday again ... and the month is almost over ... and the year is almost over. ... and already 40, 50, 60 or 70 years of our lives have passed .. .and we realise that we lost our parents, our friends ... and we realise it's too late to go back.

So, let's try, despite everything, to enjoy the remaining time. Let's keep looking for activities that we like. Let's put some colour into our grey. Let's smile at the little things in life that put balm in our hearts. And despite everything, we must continue to enjoy with serenity this time we have left.

Let's try to eliminate the 'afters': I'll do it after; I'll say it after; I'll think about it after. Don't leave everything until 'after'.

Because what we don't understand is that:

Afterwards, the coffee gets cold.

Afterwards, priorities change.

Afterwards, the charm is broken.

Afterwards, health passes.

Afterwards, the kids grow up.

Afterwards, parents get old.

Afterwards, promises are forgotten.

Afterwards, the day becomes the night.

Afterwards, life ends.

And then it's too late.

So, let's leave nothing until 'after'. Because if we wait until 'after', we might lose the best moments, the best experiences, the best friends, the best family. The day is today. The moment is now. We are no longer at the age where we can afford to postpone what needs to be done right away.

 

It looks like an eternity, but it's a short trip. Enjoy life and always be kind.

 

 

PNG's Independence Day 16 September 1975

 

It was in the dying days of 1974 when I received an urgent telegram from TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles to fly to what was then called Burma to take up a new position as chief accountant in their exploration office in Rangoon.

I was at the time working in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea, putting the finishing touches to Air Niugini's internal audit department, as the country was hurdling towards independence the following year. When the then Chief Minister Michael Somare - soon to be Sir Michael and Prime Minister of the independent country of Papua New Guinea - heard of my impending departure, he expressed his regrets that I wouldn't be there for this momentous occasion. "The least we can do is make our Independence Day the same as your birthday", he said.

And so it came to pass that my birthday and Papua New Guinea's Independence Day are celebrated on the same day each year.

 

 

P.S. Of course, if you believe this, you'll probably spend the rest of your life doing a convincing impression of a cabbage! ☺

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund

 

 

Early morning at "Riverbend". I've just come back from "Melbourne" where I sat in the early-morning sun lost in thoughts but not lost because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I experienced the feeling of belonging somewhere.

These days I no longer venture far from "Riverbend". People ask me, "But what do you do all day?" Here's a quick and incomplete summary:

The kookaburras' mad cackling wakes me in the morning. I roll out of bed and go to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I then sit in the sun and enjoy my first cup of tea of the day, after which I go back inside to get a banana or apple to feed to the possum in his possum penthouse.

By this time scores of wild ducks have assembled by the horseshed demanding their breakfast of several scoops of "Lucky Layer" pellets. The almost-tame kookaburra has been watching me constantly and it's now his turn to be fed. All that effort calls for a second cup of tea!

Second cup of tea in hand, I wander down to "Melbourne" where I can look far downriver and possibly spot some early-morning fishermen. The place is full of life. I surprise three dilatory rabbits breakfasting in the long grass. A wallaby watches me from a safe distance. A butterfly procession is in full swing. I sit down on my homebuilt green bench and, sipping my cup, ponder: 'Does a butterfly know that it used to be a caterpillar and does a caterpillar know when it goes to sleep that it will be a butterfly when it wakes up?' Life flows. Life ebbs. Knowledge has not solved its mystery. We have learned how to blow up the world and walk on the moon, but we still do not know why we are here.

If it is a weekday, I go back inside at around 10 o'clock to switch on the computer to watch the gyrations of the stock-market. As my old mate Noel Butler used to say when I questioned him once why he bought and sold some of those "penny-dreadful" shares, "What else is there?" Some days the market is good to me, on others it isn't, and on some it turns downright ugly but, as Noel put it so succinctly, what else IS there? In between watching stock quotations and listening to the news on the radio, I answer some emails and walk up to the gate to await the mail. And so, almost without realising it, lunchtime has come around.

"Happy Hour" is when I take my afternoon nap on the very old but oh-so-very-comfortable sofa on the veranda. Waking up refreshed, I pick up a book and read for a while, sitting in the sun. Again, almost without noticing it, dinner rolls around, after which it is only a couple of hours before I head off to bed to listen to Philip Adams' "Late Night Live" at 10 past 10 on ABC Radio. And that's about it! Multiply this by 365 and you have a fair summary of the year. May there be many more years like it!

 

Worin liegt das Glück des Älterwerdens?

 

Bitte höre ihr zu; Du wirst es ganz bestimmt nicht bereuen

 

Vor einiger Zeit "entdeckte" ich die Bücher der Elke Heidenreich, und insbesondere ihre gesammelten Kolumnen die sie seit 1983 regelmäßig in der größten deutschen Frauen-Zeitschrift "Brigitte" veröffentlicht hatte.

Ihr Ton erinnert mich da ein bißchen an die 'essays' der australischen Autorin Charmian Clift die in den späten sechziger Jahren im "Sydney Morning Herald" erschienen und dann in Buchform in "Trouble in Lotus Land" und "Being Alone With Oneself" wieder veröffentlicht wurden.

 

 

Anscheinend gibt es da acht Bände; drei davon - den 1988 und 1992 und 1999 Band - kann man ganz kostenlos beim www.archive.org lesen.

In der Zwischenzeit fand ich zufällig diese YouTube-Unterhaltung über das Älterwerden. Dieser Frau könnte ich stundenlang zuhören! Und es kommnt gerade zur richtigen Zeit denn in zwei Tagen werde ich 79. Bei meinem Alter wäre eine Unterhaltung übers ALTwerden eigentlich mehr angebracht.

 

 

P.S. Und hier ist ihr Buch zu diesem Thema, zusammen mit Leseprobe:

 

 

Eine Reise in die 50er Jahre

 

 

Das Deutschland in den 50er Jahren - und den frühen 60er - ist das einzige Deutschland das ich kenne denn in 1965 ging es schon ab nach Australien. Vom Wirtschaftswunder erfuhr ich gar nichts denn in unserem Zuhause lebten - existierten - wir, die Eltern und fünf Kinder, nur von der Kriegsrente unseres Vaters und jeder Pfennig wurde dreimal umgedreht.

Dennoch gaben wir dem heiß erwarteten Geldbriefträger, der monatlich Vatis kleine Rente ins Haus brachte, immer sein 50-Pfennig Trinkgeld. Der Rest ging dann gleich zum Lebensmittelgeschäft an der Ecke bei dem wir den ganzen Monat angeschrieben hatten.

Ich fing mit 14 Jahren an zu arbeiten denn selbst mein Lehrgeld, so klein wie es auch war, half mit uns über die Runden zu bringen. Da war vom Wirtschaftswunder keine Spur. Schreckliche Kindheit? Wieso? Wir waren so an kaputte Städte und Trümmergrundstücke und fehlende Badezimmer und Klos auf der Unteretage gewöhnt daß es uns gar nicht armseelig und schrecklich erschien. Wir kannten nichts anderes.

Als wir mit der Berliner Luftbrücke aus dem Osten kamen, wohnten wir zuerst in einer Gartenlaube ohne Licht und fließendem Wasser. Dann in einer Zwei-Zimmer Wohnung die wir uns mit einem anderen Ehepaar teilen mussten das uns vom Wohnamt zugewiesen war. Schlange stehen vor dem Klo war da nichts außergewöhnliches. Man musste sich dann immer beeilen obwohl es genug Lesestoff gab denn das "Klopapier" waren alte Zeitungen die ich in kleine Viertel verschneiden musste. Dadurch habe ich das Lesen früh gelernt und wurde eine Leseratte.

In die Ferne gehen - Reisen - war damals ein Luxus für reiche Leute und selbst Fernsehen kam nur viel, viel später. Damals wurde auf der Straße ferngesehen vor dem Schaufenster eines Fernsehgeschäftes - siehe hier. Abends saßen wir in der warmen Küche und starrten auf das magische grüne Auge in unserem Blaupunkt-Radio aus dem ein Hörspiel kam oder wir spielten nächtelang "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht!" - siehe hier.

Und von dem meisten was sie auf diesen Dokumentarfilmen zeigen wusste ich auch nichts, denn für solche Dinge war kein Geld und keine Zeit da. Ich denke auch nicht daß ich viel verpasst habe. Ob die 50er Jahre besser waren - besser als was? - weiß ich nicht denn ich lebe seit 1965 in Übersee wo es zumindest anders ist.

"Es lebe die Nachkriegszeit, die ist fast so schön wie die Vorkriegszeit." ["Wir Wunderkinder"]

 

The Haj

Read the book onlone at www.archive.org

 

Some books I've read in the past are seared into my memory, not because of the books themselves but because of the settings and the circumstances in which I've read them. "The Haj" by Leon Uris, better known for "Exodus", is such a book.

There I was, after yet another sleepless night, sitting in the early morning sun on the upstairs porch of my newly-acquired house at 43 Wackett Street at Cape Pallarenda just north of Townsville, holding "The Haj", slowly reading out each sentence to kill time, while over the top of my glasses I jealously watched my neighbours driving off to work.

 

Somewhere I still have a photo of me sitting on that porch.
If and when I find it again, I shall add it to the blog.

 

It was a nice neighbourhood and they were nice neighbours who waved as they drove past, probably wondering what I was doing all by myself in that big four-bedroom-two-bathroom house, seemingly with not a care in the world. They possibly even envied me for not having to go to work.

Little did they know that, having gone like the clappers for years, I felt like a fish out of water. Work had always been my hobby, my social life, my whole reason for being, and, having returned from my last big job overseas, suddenly being without it, it did strange things to my mind.

Despite all the fancy work overseas, I had always been ready to work at home for just a fraction of my previous salary in some small mum-and-dad business, or, at best, in a small suburban accounting practice, but to find nothing on offer at all had unnerved me. It was not even a question of money - of which I had enough - but to have a purpose in life, because to me to have a purpose in life meant to go out to work.

The days simply crawled by. A nice couple living across the street at 42 Wackett Street invited me a couple of times for dinner during which they showed me photos of their daughter and expressed their regrets that she lived in far-away Tasmania. They encouraged me to enjoy my 'sabbatical', as they called it, and to 'hang in', presumably until their daughter returned. They were very nice people but checking up with all-knowing realestate.com.au, they, too, sold up in 1989 - click here.

 

My then neighbours across the street. Thanks to GOOGLE Map
now your fingers can do the walking - click here

 

The neighbours to my left at Number 41 had also tried to befriend me, even if only to get my permission to crane their new swimming pool into position from my backyard. We had a few beers together but I didn't stay long enough to try out their new pool. They, in turn, sold up again in 1988 - click here. I hate to think I had been an unsettling influence!

 

The pointer is above Number 41; my house was to the right of it

 

I left after only a few months but kept 43 Wackett Street as a renter for several years but, as always, trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants got the better of me, and I sold it in 1992 for little more than I had paid for it, but I still have the "The Haj". No need to read it again as I still remember it, line by line, as I do those few months in Pallarenda.

 

45 Hale Street, Townsville

The new owners did not change much of its outside appearance apart from giving it a 'cool' blue-and-white paint job.

 

The year was 1985. I had come back from my last posting in Greece. My Saudi boss, who was reluctant to see me go, had promised to let me continue my audit work from Australia, and so I bought this property on the edge of Townsville's CBD to be both office and home to me.

 

The inside has been quite stunningly renovated. The humble verandah has become an extension of the living-space.

 

I bought the place for something like $50,000-plus but the promised work never materialised and so I left, first for Sydney and sometime later back to Canberra from where I had started out twenty years ago.

I hung onto the place for some years as a rental property but the trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants was just too much bother and so I sold it again in April 1998 for a mere $87,000 - hardly the sort of rags-to-riches story so often touted by real estate agents.

 

The front room, once meant to have been my office, is now a beautifully appointed lounge.

Behind the lounge is another sitting-room. Its feature is the silky-oak room divider, repainted a gleaming white.

The garden has the city skyline as its backdrop, illustrating how close this ideal 'city pad' is to Townsville's mall and CBD.

 

The property resold four more times since I sold it in 1998, the last time in 2021 for $495,000. It's listed as a $500-a-week rental in January 2024.

 

 

The improvements continued. For all the latest photos, click here.

 

Townsville's Castle Hill in the background

 

Another example of my mad life and the equally mad property market!

 

Appointment in Samarra

 

 

Appointment in Samarra" is a Mesopotamian tale about the deadly inescapability of coincidence and fate and death, all bound in a parable designed to both frighten and make sense of life's madness. The speaker is Death.

 

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

 

 

How I long for those innocent 60s!

Fast-forward movie to scene at 11:06

 

 

I absolutely enjoyed watching "The Efficiency Expert", set in the Australia of the 1960s, the one I fell in love with when I arrived here in 1965. It all came back in a sudden rush: the way people dressed and spoke back then; the way people worked (or not!); and all those walnut-coloured furnishings that surrounded them.

But what really got my attention was the noticeboard on the wall that had diagonally-placed straps across to hold in place whatever was on it.

 

Front of BARTON HOUSE facing Brisbane Avenue in Canberra

 

One such now old-fashioned noticeboard was in the entrance hall of Barton House (I nearly wrote 'foyer' but it wasn't that kind of place). The manager would place all incoming letters on that board, roughly in alphabetical order, with the A's in the top left-hand corner and the Z's at the bottom right, and each evening on coming "home" from work, we would check the noticeboard for mail before heading to our rooms.

 

I might as well admit it because it's far too late to sack me now:
I sometimes used the Bank's aerogrammes to write to family and friends
(yes, that's how I used to write my capital-A's; I was a lot squarer then)

 

For some of us, including 'yours truly', "mail" was often nothing more than a plain-looking envelope containing a note from the manager that we had (once again!) fallen behind paying our boarding-house fees.

I never forget the day a fat envelope was waiting for me which, like an hour-glass, leaked a slow trickle of sand from a damaged corner. I had just returned to Australia after six months in the Namib Desert in South-West Africa, and my former colleagues had sent me a "souvenir" from "Sandhausen"; "in case you're missing all that sand", they'd written.

That's how it was in those days: there were no postal secrets and yet an unspoken "untouchability" of one's mail, even if it stayed on the board for days and weeks on end, even months if the recipient was on holiday. I knew of boarders who had cash money sent to them through the mail!

It's unthinkable in today's Australia, just as unthinkable as those same boarding-houses which have all disappeared. As for the slowly-leaking envelope, it would today be confiscated by Customs on suspicion of containing a prohibited substance. How I long for those innocent 60s!

 

Frühlingsanfang

 

 

Offiziell ist heute der erste Frühlingstag. Was rauschet, was rieselt, was rinnet so schnell? Was blitzt in der Sonne? Was schimmert so hell? Und als ich so fragte, da murmelt der Bach: "Der Frühling, der Frühling, der Frühling ist wach!"

Ich liebe den Frühling, ich liebe den Sonnenschein. Nun wird es endlich wieder wärmer sein, und ich werde mehr Zeit im Garten verbringen. Eine neue Klingel habe ich schon angehängt. Bitte immer feste klingeln!