We've been Trumped again!

 

 

The guy who's filed for bankruptcy six times and is lecturing us on economics; the guy who suggested drinking bleach to cure a virus; the guy who demonstrated his mental acuity by memorising the words 'person', 'woman', 'man', 'camera', 'TV'; the guy who buried his wife in a grave on his golf course in order to get a tax concession - click here; the guy who is so bad at losing that he tried to overthrow an entire democracy to try and save face.; that guy now runs the world’s most powerful nation again.

We've been Trumped again! How can so many million people be so stupid? But don't let me get too frivolous; read this article: "How Trump Will Change the World". And these are the economic implications for Australia and the rest of the world - click here.

 

 

A quick update on Climate Change

 

 

When it comes to climate change, never let the facts get in the way of the money or the need for constant adulation from fellow cult followers. Here is an extract from a report written by a highly regarded scientist:

'... a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the circumpolar regions by which the severity of the cold, that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice, has been, during the last two years, greatly abated. Mr. Scoresby, a very intelligent young man, who commands a whaling-vessel from Whitby, observed last year that 2000 square leagues of ice, with which the Greenland seas between the latitudes of 74 degrees and 80 degrees N[orth] have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared.'

That’s alarming ... until you find out when the report was written:

20 November 1817.

The author of and reason for the report? The world-renowned botanist Sir Joseph Banks was informing his Lordship Robert Saunders Dundas, the 1st Lord of the Admiralty, of his findings from a recent expedition.

If only Sir Joseph had known about the dire consequences that awaited the world from 'a considerable change of climate', he could have been the Al Gore of his time. But in all likelihood, no one would have cared. Why? Because the climate was, is, and will continue to change ... so what’s the big deal?

I may be scraping the bottom of the politically incorrect barrel but I'm sticking with Stuart Ballantyne. I especially like his advice to Greta.

 

Fast-forward to 1:22:38

 

 

President Trump has not exactly been reassuring to traditional US allies and the Alliance system. It was a great source of concern for both General McMaster, his former national security adviser, and General Mattis, his former defense secretary.

They've gone, and I think one has to worry a little bit about how firm the resolve of the United States would be towards any of its allies in the face of a conflict, so when you put those two things together Australia can hardly be complacent about its security.

Look, let's just do some basic history here: history is mostly the history of empires; it's not actually the history of nation-states and it's mostly the history of conflict, not the history of peace. You get peaceful periods, no question; we've been in a relatively peaceful time since the end of the Cold War, but to assume that this will continue indefinitely would be to ignore the lessons of history.

Another obvious lesson of history which has been true throughout the centuries is that if you want peace prepare for war and vice versa. If you want war, act like it'll never come, allow your defense capability to atrophy.

For an enormous island that is thinly populated in relative terms compared with Asia and that has a vast store of natural resources, for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular historical folly, in particular, when it is in relatively close proximity to a one-party state with obviously imperial ambitions.

It's quite a long way away from its principal ally. That China has imperial ambitions is obvious. The more Chinese leaders in their speeches say, 'Oh, China never does conquest', the more I like to say, 'Seriously? You are really going to make that argument?' I mean the Ching Empire was taking great chunks of Russia just over a century ago, so let's get real here. This is not a good situation.

It was okay during the Chimerica era when the Chinese were like, 'Okay, it's no problem. We'll just sell you stuff cheaply and underpay our workers and lend you money, it's cool. We'll buy Australian stuff, not a problem, at market price, how much do you want?'

That was all fine but anybody who thought that that was gonna last indefinitely was dreaming because the whole point of Chimerica was that it was a temporary illusory relationship and that at some point China wouldn't need it anymore, and the Chinese are kind of getting to the point where they don't need us anymore and the bets that we placed from the Clinton-era that they would liberalize or that the internet would somehow turn them into a democracy, all that's gone.

China's actually gone in the opposite direction. Politically, Xi Jinping has increased the central control of the party and is reimposing doctrinal orthodoxy. He's cutting out such free speech as had developed in China's public square. I mean, how many more flashing red lights do you need?

So I think this is kind of getting to the point of urgent and what I see in Australian politics is a debate that if it was going on in a regional council in Scotland would seem parochial. The parochialism is stunning.

True, a considerable efforts has been made by the intelligence and national security community in this country to awaken people to the potential threat Australia faces but is Australia in any way prepared from a naval point of view for Chinese acts of aggression? No way! So I think this is a moment of truth, actually.

I said yesterday that we were entering a new Cold War and we should stop pretending otherwise. And this cold war will be very different from the last cold war. It will be fought in different ways. It will be an arms race for everything from artificial intelligence to quantum computing more than for nuclear weapons or rockets to the moon, and the battlefields will be different. When you consider what China's Belt and Road initiative has become, it is nothing less than 'Welt policy, a global policy.

It's far extended beyond the original concept that was essentially a Central Asian Indian Ocean concept and has become global, and the search for commodities is not a trivial part of what is involved. Empires at some level are about acquiring commodities at below market prices. That's kind of what empires are or at least not trusting to the market to deliver you the commodities. So it's better to own the real estate, to own the mines, to control the supply chain, and not be at the mercy of the market or the mercy of a navy which China currently is, to the US Navy, so we need to clearly understand the historical logic of China's expansion.

To have security, China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices. When you think about what that implies for Australia, it's really quite scary because Australia is a prize. Australia's a hugely attractive place from a Chinese vantage point and not just as a vacation destination or a place to study and learn English and I'm stunned by the lack of awareness of the strategic vulnerability of Australia when everything should be screaming to you - PREPARE!"

 

As Niall Ferguson puts it, "What I see in Australian politics is a debate that if it was going on in a regional council in Scotland would seem parochial. The parochialism is stunning." What he says is an uncomfortable truth, but I'd rather listen to him than to any of our self-serving politicians who are only in their jobs just long enough to claim their lifelong pensions - and then take up their cushy jobs in industry or in the diplomatic service.

 

Before they all fade away

 

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! As is Barton House itself which was demolished in 1981.

 

It was 1965. The Menzies era was coming to an end. The conflict in Vietnam was escalating. And I had just come out to Australia as a young migrant from Germany. I spent those early years, from 1965 to 1967, and then again a brief period in 1969 after I had come back from South Africa, in Canberra in a place called "Barton House" in Brisbane Avenue, one of the many boarding houses then in existence.

 

 

Those were the days of parties, of evenings in front of the telly in the TV Room watching "Z-Car" or "M*A*S*H", laughing at the antics of Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart" ("Good thinking, 99" was a favourite saying in those days); or being bored to death by Barry Jones's insufferable show-off act on Bob and Dolly's BP Pick-a-Box.

 

Hotel Wellington

 

And then there were the evenings spent at the Burns Club or in the Newsroom of the "Wello" Pub (Wellington Hotel) across the road, drinking 'schooners' and talking about 'sheilas', followed by a last-minute dash back to Barton House before the dining room closed! And Sunday morning, sitting on the frontsteps with the boys, recovering from the night before, while waiting for the week's washing to run through its cycle in the communal laundry in the backyard.

Many were the Monday mornings when, on my way to work at the ANZ Bank across from the Monaro Mall, I would rush into David Jones to buy one of their light-blue-labelled "David Jones' For Service" white shirts to put on before going to work, as I had once again failed to do my weekend laundry at Barton House which was always full of social acitivities with no time left for household chores. I would then serve the bank's customers in a brandnew shirt still full of fold-marks and pin holes from its original wrappings. (Of course, later we had those terrible drip-dry shirts which I could wash in the handwash basin inside my room, and which then turned a slight grey as they aged and the armpits were always stained.)

 

Recognise me?

 

It was at Barton House that I was introduced to the culinary delights of Australia in the 60s: mixed grill, corned silverside, Yorkshire pudding, spaghetti-meatballs, lamp chops, and, as a filla-uppa, loads and loads of steam-pudding drowned in thick creamy custard. And who can forget those dreadful brown-paperbag luncheon packs of baked-beans sandwiches, chutney sandwiches, and spaghetti sandwiches? Is there anything more revolting than a soggy spaghetti-sandwich dripping through the bottom of a brown paperbag? The people who ate that stuff must've been a weird mob indeed!

There were never any seconds - except for steam-pudding!!! - and for a growing lad that meant going next door to the "Greasy Spoon" at Lachlan Court to stock up on Iced Vovos, Arnott's Spicy Fruit Rolls (my favourites!), and spring and Chiko rolls.

I always occupied a share-room because a share-room was cheaper. And some of the room mates I had to share with! There was the ANZ "Bank Johnny" from the Kingston branch who regularly came back drunk, night after night, and who was a master of the Australian expletive - which he used constantly, stand-alone, in between words, even inserted into words! Watching him at the Bank stringing together sentences without profanity was like watching someone trying to swim across a river without using his arms or his legs. And the WORMALD-employee who would purposefully strut off to work only to be back inside the room five minutes later, screaming his head off. "They repossessed my car again, the bastards!!!" He regularly fell behind with his repayments, and regularly had his car repossessed.

 

 

And then there was the postie who seemed to lead a charmed life as he was usually back from work by mid-morning until he was found out to have dumped his mail deliveries at the local tip! And the Kiwi with his already then wonderfully antique ROVER-car with walnut dashboard who loved classical music and played it throughout the night on his radiogram. Remember the radiogram? His was an expensive "HIS MASTER'S VOICE ". My own choice of music at the time were THE SEEKERS and PETER, PAUL AND MARY. There will never be another time like that! And could I write a book about it? You bet!!!

 

Picnic on the front lawn of Barton House;

 

There was a constant stream of new arrivals, but for a hard core of people - and that included me! - Barton House was "home" because we had no other! The home we never left, not even for Christmas, when it became a ghostly place with just a handful of us scattered along its empty corridors and we sat like lost sheep in a small 'holding pen' of the otherwise closed-off dining room. It was the sort of "home" 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. And it gave me the confidence and the skills to deal with all manner of people in future years.

 

Soaking up the sun on the front steps of Barton House: half of yours truly on the far left, keeping a safe distance from Colleen Murray, her roomie Dulcie, and Denva Boardman

 

And what variety of people I met, and what interesting friends I made! Some of the names I still remember are John Burke, my immediate boss at the Bank, Merv Quine, another "Bank Johnny" originally from Broken Hill, the other two "Bank Johnnies" Dennis Everitt and Bob Southwell, Pat Fisher from Foreign Affairs who was forever on study leave trying to learn some foreign languages but never getting past the equivalents of "Good Morning" and "How are you?". And Jerry from the Government Printers who somehow or other broke his leg and stayed on crutches for years and years, creaming off the insurance companies. The retired dotty surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who spoke to no-one and always walked about with his own cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal shower cubicles and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower beyond what he considered was a reasonable time.

 

Sunday afternoon cricket on the back lawn of Barton House (houses across the road are long gone as is Barton House itself). Colleen Murray fielding in slips, wickie was “Little John” Mathis (ex CBC Kingston?), and Merv Quine making a spectacular shot

 

For years after, and in different parts of Australia, I still kept bumping into people who had been at Barton House, who had been chased for their outstanding rent by Peter "Frenchie" Chek, the manager, who also ran an "Academy of Self-Defense" (and didn't he need it to deal with some of his more difficult boarders!) They all looked back on their time there with fond memories and a great deal of nostalgia which prompted me digitise these photos before they all fade away - and I with them.

 

 

Yes, those were the days. We thought they'd never end but they did as the busy years went rushing by us and we lost our starry notions on the way.

 

 

Mirage

 

 

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, once again, W. Somerset Maugham's "Volume Four - Collected Short Stories", which I had bought for 625 drachmas in Athens when I myself was still a footloose expatriate and living in Greece.

 

 

What again attracted me was the short story "Mirage" which tells of another expatriate character from England called Grosely who has spent most of his working life in China but finally decides to return home.

What happens when he eventually arrives, however, is perhaps not all that surprising. London has changed, nothing is where it should be, manners and tastes are apparently more sophisticated. Grosely hates it.

What he does next is really quite interesting. He decides to leave England again and return to Shanghai. En route, he visits places like Singapore and Colombo. But at the last stopping place before China proper - Haiphong - he remains. He’s only supposed to go ashore for forty-eight hours but, undecided where home actually is, he stays.

 

---

 

Mirage

I had been wandering about the East for months and at last reached Haiphong. It is a commercial town and a dull one, but I knew that from there I could find a ship of sorts to take me to Hong-Kong. I had some days to wait and nothing to do. It is true that from Haiphong you can visit the Bay of Along, which is one of the Sehenswurdigkeiten of Indo-China, but I was tired of sights. I contented myself with sitting in the cafés, for here it was none too warm and I was glad to get out of tropical clothes, and reading back numbers of L'Illustration, or for the sake of exercise taking a brisk walk along straight, wide streets. Haiphong is traversed by canals and sometimes I got a glimpse of a scene which in its varied life, with all the native craft on the water, was multicoloured and charming There was one canal, with tall Chinese houses on each side of it, that had a pleasant curve. The houses were whitewashed, but the whitewash was discoloured and stained; with their grey roofs they made an agreeable composition against the pale sky. The picture had the faded elegance of an old water-colour. There was nowhere an emphatic note. It was soft and a little weary and inspired one with a faint melancholy. I was reminded I scarcely know why of an old maid I knew in my youth, a relic of the Victorian age, who wore black silk mittens and made crochet shawls for the poor, black for widows and white for married women. She had suffered in her youth, but whether from ill-health or unrequited love, no one exactly knew.

But there was a local paper at Haiphong, a small dingy sheet with stubby type the ink of which came off on your fingers, and it gave you a political article, the wireless news, advertisements, and local intelligence. The editor, doubtless hard pressed for matter, printed the names of the persons, Europeans, natives of the country, and Chinese, who had arrived at Haiphong or left it, and mine was put in with the rest. On the morning of the day before that on which the Old tub I was taking was to sail for Hong-Kong I was sitting in the café of the hotel drinking a Dubonnet before luncheon when the boy came in and said that a gentleman wished to see me. I did not know a soul in Haiphong and asked who it was. The boy said he was an Englishman and lived there, but he could not tell me his name. The boy spoke very little French and it was hard for me to understand what he said. I was mystified, but told him to show the visitor in. A moment later he came back followed by a white man and pointed me out to him. The man gave me a look and walked towards me. He was a very tall fellow, well over six feet high, rather fat and bloated, with a red, clean-shaven face and extremely pale blue eyes. He wore very shabby khaki shorts and a stengah-shifter unbuttoned at the neck, and a battered helmet. I concluded at once that he was a stranded beachcomber who was going to touch me for a loan and wondered how little I could hope to get off for.

He came up to me and held out a large red hand with broken, dirty nails.

"I don't suppose you remember me," he said. "My name's Grosely. I was at St Thomas's Hospital with you. I recognized your name as soon as I saw it in the paper and I thought I'd look you up."

I had not the smallest recollection of him, but I asked him to sit down and offered him a drink. By his appearance I had first thought he would ask me for ten piastres and I might have given him five, but now it looked more likely that he would ask for a hundred and I should have to think myself lucky if I could content him with fifty. The habitual borrower always asks twice what he expects to get and it only dissatisfies him to give him what he has asked since then he is vexed with himself for not having asked more. He feels you have cheated him.

"Are you a doctor?" I asked.

"No, I was only at the bloody place a year."

He took off his sun-helmet and showed me a mop of grey hair, which much needed a brush. His face was curiously mottled and he did not look healthy. His teeth were badly decayed and at the corners of his mouth were empty spaces. When the boy came to take the orders he asked for brandy.

"Bring the bottle," he said. "La bouteille. Savvy?" He turned to me. "I've been living here for the last five years, but I can't get along with the French somehow. I talk Tonkinese." He leaned his chair back and looked at me. "I remember you, you know. You used to go about with those twins. What was their name? I expect I've changed more than you have. I've spent the best part of my life in China. Rotten climate, you know. It plays hell with a man."

I still had not the smallest recollection of him. I thought it best to say so. "Were you the same year as I was?" I asked.

"Yes. '92."

"It's a devil of a long time ago."

About sixty boys and young men entered the hospital every year; they were most of them shy and confused by the new life they were entering upon; many had never been in London before; and to me at least they were shadows that passed without any particular rhyme or reason across a white sheet. During the first year a certain number for one reason or another dropped out, and in the second year those that remained gained by degrees the beginnings of a personality. They were not only themselves, but the lectures one had attended with them, the scone and coffee one had eaten at the same table for luncheon, the dissection one had done at the same board in the same dissecting room, and The Belle of New York one had seen together from the pit of the Shaftesbury Theatre.

The boy brought the bottle of brandy, and Grosely, if that was really his name, pouring himself out a generous helping drank it down at a gulp without water or soda.

"I couldn't stand doctoring," he said. "I chucked it. My people got fed up with me and I went out to China. They gave me a hundred pounds and told me to shift for myself. I was damned glad to get out, I can tell you. I guess I was just about as much fed up with them as they were with me. I haven't troubled them much since."

Then from somewhere in the depths of my memory a faint hint crept into the rim, as it were, of consciousness, as on a rising tide the water slides up the sand and then withdraws to advance with the next wave in a fuller volume. I had first an inkling of some shabby little scandal that had got into the papers. Then I saw a boy's face, and so gradually the facts recurred to me; I remembered him now. I didn't believe he was called Grosely then, I think he had a one-syllabled name, but that I was uncertain of. He was a very tall lad (I began to see him quite well), thin, with a slight stoop, he was only eighteen and had grown too fast for his strength, he had curly, shining brown hair, rather large features (they did not look so large now, perhaps because his face was fat and puffy) and a peculiarly fresh complexion, very pink and white, like a girl's. I imagine people, women especially, would have thought him a very handsome boy, but to us he was only a clumsy, shuffling lout. Then I remembered that he did not often come to lectures, no, it wasn't that I remembered, there were too many students in the theatre to recollect who was there and who wasn't. I remembered the dissecting room. He had a leg at the next table to the one I was working at and he hardly ever touched it; I forget why the men who had other parts of the body complained of his neglecting the work, I suppose somehow it interfered with them. In those days a good deal of gossip went on over the dissection of a "part" and out of the distance of thirty years some of it came back to me. Someone started the story that Grosely was a very gay dog. He drank like a fish and was an awful womanizer. Most of those boys were very simple, and they had brought to the hospital the notions they had acquired at home and at school. Some were prudish and they were shocked; others, those who worked hard, sneered at him and asked how he could hope to pass his exams; but a good many were excited and impressed, he was doing what they would have liked to do if they had had the courage. Grosely had his admirers and you could often see him surrounded by a little band listening open-mouthed to stories of his adventures. Recollections now were crowding upon me. In a very little while he lost his shyness and assumed the airs of a man of the world. They must have looked absurd on this smooth-cheeked boy with his pink and white skin. Men (so they called themselves) used to tell one another of his escapades. He became quite a hero. He would make caustic remarks as he passed the museum and saw a pair of earnest students going over their anatomy together. He was at home in the public-houses of the neighbourhood and was on familiar terms with the barmaids. Looking back, I imagine that, newly arrived from the country and the tutelage of parents and schoolmasters, he was captivated by his freedom and the thrill of London. His dissipations were harmless enough. They were due only to the urge of youth. He lost his head.

But we were all very poor and we did not know how Grosely managed to pay for his garish amusements. We knew his father was a country doctor and I think we knew exactly how much he gave his son a month. It was not enough to pay for the harlots he picked up on the promenade at the Pavilion and for the drinks he stood his friends in the Criterion Bar. We told one another in awestruck tones that he must be getting fearfully into debt. Of course he could pawn things, but we knew by experience that you could not get more than three pounds for a microscope and thirty shillings for a skeleton. We said he must be spending at least ten pounds a week. Our ideas were not very grand and this seemed to us the wildest pitch of extravagance. At last one of his friends disclosed the mystery: Grosely had discovered a wonderful system for making money. It amused and impressed us. None of us would have thought of anything so ingenious or have had the nerve to attempt it if he had. Grosely went to auctions, not Christie's, of course, but auctions in the Strand and Oxford Street, and in private houses, and bought anything portable that was going cheap. Then he took his purchase to a pawnbroker's and pawned it for ten shillings or a pound more than he had paid. He was making money, four or five pounds a week, and he said he was going to give up medicine and make a regular business of it. Not one of us had ever made a penny in his life and we regarded Grosely with admiration.

"By Jove, he's clever," we said.

"He's just about as sharp as they make them."

"That's the sort that ends up as a millionaire."

We were all very worldly-wise and what we didn't know about life at eighteen we were pretty sure wasn't worth knowing. It was a pity that when an examiner asked us a question we were so nervous that the answer often flew straight out of our head and when a nurse asked us to post a letter we blushed scarlet. It became known that the Dean had sent for Grosely and hauled him over the coals. He had threatened him with sundry penalties if he continued systematically to neglect his work. Grosely was indignant. He'd had enough of that sort of thing at school, he said, he wasn't going to let a horse-faced eunuch treat him like a boy. Damn it all, he was getting on for nineteen and there wasn't much you could teach him. The Dean had said he heard he was drinking more than was good for him. Damned cheek. He could carry his liquor as well as any man of his age, he'd been blind last Saturday and he meant to get blind next Saturday, and if anyone didn't like it he could do the other thing. Grosely's friends quite agreed with him that a man couldn't let himself be insulted like that.

But the blow fell at last and now I remembered quite well the shock it gave us all. I suppose we had not seen Grosely for two or three days, but he had been in the habit of coming to the hospital more and more irregularly, so if we thought anything about it, I imagine we merely said that he was off on one of his bats. He would turn up again in a day or so, rather pale, but with a wonderful story of some girl he had picked up and the time he had had with her. The anatomy lecture was at nine in the morning and it was a rush to get there in time. On this particular day little attention was paid to the lecturer, who, with a visible pleasure in his limpid English and admirable elocution, was describing I know not what part of the human skeleton, for there was much excited whispering along the benches and a newspaper was surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Suddenly the lecturer stopped. He had a pedagogic sarcasm. He affected not to know the names of his students.

"I am afraid I am disturbing the gentleman who is reading the paper. Anatomy is a very tedious science and I regret that the regulations of the Royal College of Surgeons oblige me to ask you to give it enough of your attention to pass an examination in it. Any gentleman, however, who finds this impossible is at liberty to continue his perusal of the paper outside."

The wretched boy to whom this reproof was addressed reddened to the roots of his hair and in his embarrassment tried to stuff the newspaper in his pocket. The professor of anatomy observed him coldly.

"I am afraid, sir, that the paper is a little too large to go into your pocket," he remarked. "Perhaps you would be good enough to hand it down to me?"

The newspaper was passed from row to row to the well of the theatre, and, not content with the confusion to which he had put the poor lad, the eminent surgeon, taking it, asked:

"May I inquire what it is in the paper that the gentleman in question found of such absorbing interest?"

The student who gave it to him without a word pointed out the paragraph that we had all been reading. The professor read it and we watched him in silence. He put the paper down and went on with his lecture. The headline ran Arrest of a Medical Student. Grosely had been brought before the police-court magistrate for getting goods on credit and pawning them. It appears that this is an indictable offence and the magistrate had remanded him for a week. Bail was refused. It looked as though his method of making money by buying things at auctions and pawning them had not in the long run proved as steady a source of income as he expected and he had found it more profitable to pawn things that he was not at the expense of paying for. We talked the matter over excitedly as soon as the lecture was over and I am bound to say that, having no property ourselves, so deficient was our sense of its sanctity we could none of us look upon his crime as a very serious one; but with the natural love of the young for the terrible there were few who did not think he would get anything from two years' hard labour to seven years' penal servitude.

I do not know why, but I did not seem to have any recollection of what happened to Grosely. I think he may have been arrested towards the end of a session and his case may have come on again when we had all separated for holidays. I did not know if it was disposed of by the police-court magistrate or whether it went up for trial. I had a sort of feeling that he was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, six weeks perhaps, for his operations had been pretty extensive; but I knew that he had vanished from our midst and in a little while was thought of no more. It was strange to me that after all these years I should recollect so much of the incident so clearly. It was as though, turning over an album of old snapshots, I saw all at once the photograph of a scene I had quite forgotten.

But of course in that gross elderly man with grey hair and mottled red face I should never have recognized the lanky pink-cheeked boy. He looked sixty, but I knew he must be much less than that. I wondered what he had done with himself in the intervening time. It did not look as though he had excessively prospered.

"What were you doing in China?" I asked him.

"I was a tide-waiter."

"Oh, were you?"

It is not a position of great importance and I took care to keep out of my tone any note of surprise. The tide-waiters are employees of the Chinese Customs whose duty it is to board the ships and junks at the various treaty ports and I think their chief business is to prevent opium-smuggling. They are mostly retired A.B.s from the Royal Navy and non-commissioned officers who have finished their time. I have seen them come on board at various places up the Yangtse. They hobnob with the pilot and the engineer, but the skipper is a trifle curt with them. They learn to speak Chinese more fluently than most Europeans and often marry Chinese women.

"When I left England I swore I wouldn't go back till I'd made my pile. And I never did. They were glad enough to get anyone to be a tide-waiter in those days, any white man I mean, and they didn't ask questions. They didn't care who you were. I was damned glad to get the job, I can tell you, I was about broke to the wide when they took me on. I only took it till I could get something better, but I stayed on, it suited me, I wanted to make money and I found out that a tide-waiter could make a packet if he knew the right way to go about it. I was with the Chinese Customs for the best part of twenty-five years and when I came away I wouldn't mind betting that lots of commissioners would have been glad to have the money I had."

He gave me a sly, mean look. I had an inkling of what he meant. But there was a point on which I was willing to be reassured; if he was going to ask me for a hundred piastres (I was resigned to that sum now) I thought I might just as well take the blow at once.

"I hope you kept it," I said.

"You bet I did. I invested all my money in Shanghai and when I left China I put it all in American railway bonds. Safety first is my motto. I know too much about crooks to take any risks myself."

I liked that remark, so I asked him if he wouldn't stay and have luncheon with me.

"No, I don't think I will. I don't eat much tiffin and anyway my chow's waiting for me at home. I think I'll be getting along.' He got up and he towered over me. "But look here, why don't you come along this evening and see my place? I've married a Haiphong girl. Got a baby too. It's not often I get a chance of talking to anyone about London. You'd better not come to dinner. We only eat native food and I don't suppose you'd care for that. Come along about nine, will you?"

"All right," I said.

I had already told him that I was leaving Haiphong next day. He asked the boy to bring him a piece of paper so that he might write down his address. He wrote laboriously in the hand of a boy of fourteen.

"Tell the porter to explain to your rickshaw boy where it is. I'm on the second floor. There's no bell. Just knock. Well, see you later."

He walked out and I went in to luncheon.

After dinner I called a rickshaw and with the porter's help made the boy understand where I wanted to go. I found presently that he was taking me along the curved canal the houses of which had looked to me so like a faded Victorian water-colour; he stopped at one of them and pointed to the door. It looked so shabby and the neighbourhood was so squalid that I hesitated, thinking he had made a mistake. It seemed unlikely that Grosely could live so far in the native quarter and in a house so bedraggled. I told the rickshaw boy to wait and pushing open the door saw a dark staircase in front of me. There was no one about and the street was empty. It might have been the small hours of the morning. I struck a match and fumbled my way upstairs; on the second floor I struck another match and saw a large brown door in front of me. I knocked and in a moment it was opened by a little Tonkinese woman holding a candle. She was dressed in the earth-brown of the poorer classes, with a tight little black turban on her head; her lips and the skin round them were stained red with betel and when she opened her mouth to speak I saw that she had the black teeth and black gums that so disfigure these people. She said something in her native language and then I heard Grosely's voice:

"Come along in. I was beginning to think you weren't going to turn up."

I passed through a little dark ante-chamber and entered a large room that evidently looked on the canal. Grosely was lying on a long chair and he raised his length from it as I came in. He was reading the Hong-Kong papers by the light of a paraffin-lamp that stood on a table by his side.

"Sit down," he said, "and put your feet up."

"There's no reason I should take your chair."

"Go on. I'll sit on this."

He took a kitchen chair and sitting on it put his feet on the end of mine.

"That's my wife," he said pointing with his thumb at the Tonkinese woman who had followed me into the room. "And over there in the corner's the kid."

I followed his eyes and against the wall, lying on bamboo mats and covered with a blanket, I saw a child sleeping.

"Lively little beggar when he's awake. I wish you could have seen him. She's going to have another soon."

I glanced at her and the truth of what he said was apparent. She was very small, with tiny hands and feet, but her face was flat and the skin muddy. She looked sullen, but may only have been shy. She went out of the room and presently came back with a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and a syphon. I looked round. There was a partition at the back of dark unpainted wood, which I suppose shut off another room, and pinned against the middle of this was a portrait cut out of an illustrated paper of John Galsworthy. He looked austere, mild, and gentlemanly, and I wondered what he did there. The other walls were whitewashed, but the whitewash was dingy and stained. Pinned on to them were pages of pictures from The Graphic or The Illustrated London News.

"I put them up," said Grosely, "I thought they made the place look homelike."

"What made you put up Galsworthy? Do you read his books?"

"No, I didn't know he wrote books. I liked his face."

There were one or two torn and shabby rattan mats on the floor and in a corner a great pile of The Hong-Kong Times. The only furniture consisted of a wash-hand stand, two or three kitchen chairs, a table or two, and a large teak native bed. It was cheerless and sordid.

"Not a bad little place, is it?" said Grosely. "Suits me all right. Sometimes I've thought of moving, but I don't suppose I ever shall now." He gave a little chuckle. "I came to Haiphong for forty-eight hours and I've been here five years. I was on my way to Shanghai really."

He was silent. Having nothing to say I said nothing. Then the little Tonkinese woman made a remark to him, which I could not of course understand, and he answered her. He was silent again for a minute or two, but I thought he looked at me as though he wanted to ask me something. I did not know why he hesitated.

"Have you ever tried smoking opium on your travels in the East?" he inquired at last, casually.

"Yes, I did once, at Singapore. I thought I'd like to see what it was like."

"What happened?"

"Nothing very thrilling, to tell you the truth. I thought I was going to have the most exquisite emotions. I expected visions, like de Quincey's, you know. The only thing I felt was a kind of physical well-being, the same sort of feeling that you get when you've had a Turkish bath and are lying in the cooling room, and then a peculiar activity of mind so that everything I thought of seemed extremely clear."

"I know."

"I really felt that two and two are four and there could not be the smallest doubt about it. But next morning–oh God! My head reeled. I was as sick as a dog, I was sick all day, I vomited my soul out, and as I vomited I said to myself miserably: And there are people who call this fun."

Grosely leaned back in his chair and gave a low mirthless laugh.

"I expect it was bad stuff. Or you went at it too hard. They saw you were a mug and gave you dregs that had been smoked already. They're enough to turn anybody up. Would you like to have another try now? I've got some stuff here that I know's good."

"No, I think once was enough for me."

"D'you mind if I have a pipe or two? You want it in a climate like this. It keeps you from getting dysentery. And I generally have a bit of a smoke about this time."

"Go ahead," I said.

He spoke again to the woman and she, raising her voice, called out something in a raucous tone. An answer came from the room behind the wooden partition and after a minute or two an old woman came out carrying a little round tray. She was shrivelled and old and when she entered gave me an ingratiating smile of her stained mouth. Grosely got up and crossed over to the bed and lay on it. The old woman set the tray down on the bed; on it was a spirit-lamp, a pipe, a long needle, and a little round box of opium. She squatted on the bed and Grosely's wife got on it too and sat, her feet tucked up under her, with her back against the wall. Grosely watched the old woman while she put a little pellet of the drug on the needle, held it over the flame till it sizzled, and then plugged it into the pipe. She handed it to him and with a great breath he inhaled it, he held the smoke for a little while and then blew it out in a thick grey cloud. He handed her back the pipe and she started to make another. Nobody spoke. He smoked three pipes in succession and then sank back.

"By George, I feel better now. I was feeling all in. She makes a wonderful pipe, this old hag. Are you sure you won't have one?"

"Quite."

"Please yourself. Have some tea then."

He spoke to his wife, who scrambled off the bed and went out of the room. Presently she came back with a little china pot of tea and a couple of Chinese bowls.

"A lot of people smoke here, you know. It does you no harm if you don't do it to excess. I never smoke more than twenty to twenty-five pipes a day. You can go on for years if you limit yourself to that. Some of the Frenchmen smoke as many as forty or fifty a day. That's too much. I never do that, except now and then when I feel I want a binge. I'm bound to say it's never done me any harm."

We drank our tea, pale and vaguely scented and clean on the palate. Then the old woman made him another pipe and then another. His wife has got back on to the bed and soon curling herself up at his feet went to sleep. Grosely smoked two or three pipes at a time, and while he was smoking seemed intent upon nothing else, but in the intervals he was loquacious. Several times I suggested going, but he would not let me. The hours wore on. Once or twice while he smoked I dozed. He told me all about himself. He went on and on. I spoke only to give him a cue. I cannot relate what he told me in his own words. He repeated himself. He was very long-winded and he told me his story confusedly, first a late bit, then an early bit, so that I had to arrange the sequence for myself; sometimes I saw that, afraid he had said too much, he held something back; sometimes he lied and I had to make a guess at the truth from the smile he gave me or the look in his eyes. He had not the words to describe what he had felt, and I had to conjecture his meaning from slangy metaphors and hackneyed, vulgar phrases. I kept on asking myself what his real name was, it was on the tip of my tongue and it irritated me not to be able to recall it, though why it should in the least matter to me I did not know. He was somewhat suspicious of me at first and I saw that this escapade of his in London and his imprisonment had been all these years a tormenting secret. He had always been haunted by the fear that sooner or later someone would find out.

"It's funny that even now you shouldn't remember me at the hospital," he said, looking at me shrewdly. "You must have a rotten memory."

"Hang it all, it's nearly thirty years ago. Think of the thousands of people I've met since then. There's no reason why I should remember you any more than you remember me."

"That's right. I don't suppose there is."

It seemed to reassure him. At last he had smoked enough and the old woman made herself a pipe and smoked it. Then she went over to the mat on which the child was lying and huddled down beside it. She lay so still that I supposed she had fallen directly asleep. When at last I went I found my boy curled up on the footboard of the rickshaw in so deep a slumber that I had to shake him. I knew where I was and I wanted air and exercise, so I gave him a couple of piastres and told him I would walk.

It was a strange story I carried away with me.

It was with a sort of horror that I had listened to Grosely, telling me of those twenty years he had spent in China. He had made money, I do not know how much, but from the way he talked I should think something between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds, and for a tide-waiter it was a fortune. He could not have come by it honestly, and little as I knew of the details of his trade, by his sudden reticences, by his leers and hints I guessed that there was no base transaction that, if it was made worth his while, he jibbed at. I suppose that nothing paid him better than smuggling opium, and his position gave him the opportunity to do this with safety and profit. I understood that his superior officers had often had their suspicions of him, but had never been able to get such proof of his malpractices as to justify them in taking any steps. They contented themselves with moving him from one port to another, but that did not disturb him; they watched him, but he was too clever for them. I saw that he was divided between the fear of telling me too much to his discredit and the desire to boast of his own astuteness. He prided himself on the confidence the Chinese had placed in him.

"They knew they could trust me," he said, "and it gave me a pull. I never double-crossed a Chinaman once."

The thought filled him with the complacency of the honest man. The Chinese discovered that he was keen on curios and they got in the habit of giving him bits or bringing him things to buy; he never made inquiries how they had come by them and he bought them cheap. When he had got a good lot he sent them to Peking and sold them at a handsome profit. I remembered how he had started his commercial career by buying things at auctions and pawning them. For twenty years by shabby shift and petty dishonesty he added pound to pound, and everything he made he invested in Shanghai. He lived penuriously, saving half his pay; he never went on leave because he did not want to waste his money, he would not have anything to do with the Chinese women, he wanted to keep himself free from any entanglement; he did not drink. He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy. That was the only thing he wanted. He lived in China as though in a dream; he paid no attention to the life around him; its colour and strangeness, its possibilities of pleasure, meant nothing to him. There was always before him the mirage of London, the Criterion Bar, himself standing with his foot on the rail, the promenade at the Empire and the Pavilion, the picked-up harlot, the serio-comic at the music-hall, and the musical comedy at the Gaiety. This was life and love and adventure. This was romance. This was what he yearned for with all his heart. There was surely something impressive in the way in which during all those years he had lived like an anchorite with that one end in view of leading again a life that was so vulgar. It showed character.

"You see," he said to me, "even if I'd been able to get back to England on leave I wouldn't have gone. I didn't want to go till I could go for good. And then I wanted to do the thing in style."

He saw himself putting on evening clothes every night and going out with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and he saw himself going to the Derby in a long coat and a brown hat and a pair of opera glasses slung over his shoulder. He saw himself giving the girls a look over and picking out the one he fancied. He made up his mind that on the night he arrived in London he would get blind, he hadn't been drunk for twenty years; he couldn't afford to in his job, you had to keep your wits about you. He'd take care not to get drunk on the ship on the way home. He'd wait till he got to London. What a night he'd have! He thought of it for twenty years.

I do not know why Grosely left the Chinese Customs, whether the place was getting too hot for him, whether he had reached the end of his service, or whether he had amassed the sum he had fixed. But at last he sailed. He went second class; he did not intend to start spending money till he reached London. He took rooms in Jermyn Street, he had always wanted to live there, and he went straight to a tailor's and ordered himself an outfit. Slap up. Then he had a look round the town. It was different from how he remembered it, there was much more traffic and he felt confused and a little at sea. He went to the Criterion and found there was no longer a bar where he had been used to lounge and drink. There was a restaurant in Leicester Square where he had been in the habit of dining when he was in funds, but he could not find it; he supposed it had been torn down. He went to the Pavilion, but there were no women there; he was rather disgusted and went on to the Empire, he found they had done away with the Promenade. It was rather a blow. He could not quite make it out. Well, anyhow, he must be prepared for changes in twenty years, and if he couldn't do anything else he could get drunk. He had had fever several times in China and the change of climate had brought it on again, he wasn't feeling any too well, and after four or five drinks he was glad to go to bed.

That first day was only a sample of many that followed it. Everything went wrong. Grosely's voice grew peevish and bitter as he told me how one thing and another had failed him. The old places were gone, the people were different, he found it hard to make friends, he was strangely lonely; he had never expected that in a great city like London. That's what was wrong with it, London had become too big, it wasn't the jolly, intimate place it had been in the early nineties. It had gone to pieces. He picked up a few girls, but they weren't as nice as the girls he had known before, they weren't the fun they used to be, and he grew dimly conscious that they thought him a rum sort of cove. He was only just over forty and they looked upon him as an old man. When he tried to cotton on to a lot of young fellows standing round a bar they gave him the cold shoulder. Anyway, these young fellows didn't know how to drink. He'd show them. He got soused every night, it was the only thing to do in that damned place, but, by Jove, it made him feel rotten next day. He supposed it was the climate of China. When he was a medical student he could drink a bottle of whisky every night and be as fresh as a daisy in the morning. He began to think more about China. All sorts of things that he never knew he had noticed came back to him. It wasn't a bad life he'd led there. Perhaps he'd been a fool to keep away from those Chinese girls, they were pretty little things some of them, and they didn't put on the airs these English girls did. One could have a damned good time in China if one had the money he had. One could keep a Chinese girl and get into the club, and there'd be a lot of nice fellows to drink with and play bridge with and billiards. He remembered the Chinese shops and all the row in the streets and the coolies carrying loads and the ports with the junks in them and the rivers with pagodas on the banks. It was funny, he never thought much of China while he was there and now–well, he couldn't get it out of his mind. It obsessed him. He began to think that London was no place for a white man. It had just gone to the dogs, that was the long and short of it, and one day the thought came to him that perhaps it would be a good thing if he went back to China. Of course it was silly, he'd worked like a slave for twenty years to be able to have a good time in London, and it was absurd to go and live in China. With his money he ought to be able to have a good time anywhere. But somehow he couldn't think of anything else but China. One day he went to the pictures and saw a scene at Shanghai. That settled it. He was fed up with London. He hated it. He was going to get out and this time he'd get out for good. He had been home a year and a half, and it seemed longer to him than all his twenty years in the East. He took a passage on a French boat sailing from Marseilles, and when he saw the coast of Europe sink into the sea he heaved a great sigh of relief. When they got to Suez and he felt the first touch of the East he knew he had done the right thing. Europe was finished. The East was the only place.

He went ashore at Djibouti and again at Colombo and Singapore, but though the ship stopped for two days at Saigon he remained on board there. He'd been drinking a good deal and he was feeling a bit under the weather. But when they reached Haiphong, where they were staying for forty-eight hours, he thought he might just as well have a look at it. That was the last stopping-place before they got to China. He was bound for Shanghai. When he got there he meant to go to a hotel and look around a bit and then get hold of a girl and a place of his own. He would buy a pony or two and race. He'd soon make friends. In the East they weren't so stiff and stand-offish as they were in London. Going ashore, he dined at the hotel and after dinner got into a rickshaw and told the boy he wanted a woman. The boy took him to the shabby tenement in which I had sat for so many hours and there were the old woman and the girl who was now the mother of his child. After a while the old woman asked him if he wouldn't like a smoke. He had never tried opium, he had always been frightened of it, but now he didn't see why he shouldn't have a go. He was feeling good that night and the girl was a jolly cuddlesome little thing; she was rather like a Chinese girl, small and pretty, like an idol. Well, he had a pipe or two, and he began to feel very happy and comfortable. He stayed all night. He didn't sleep. He just lay, feeling very restful, and thought about things.

"I stopped there till my ship went on to Hong-Kong," he said. "And when she left I just stopped on."

"How about your luggage?" I asked.

For I am perhaps unworthily interested in the manner people combine practical details with the ideal aspects of life. When in a novel penniless lovers drive in a long, swift racing car over the distant hills I have always a desire to know how they managed to pay for it; and I have often asked myself how the characters of Henry James in the intervals of subtly examining their situation coped with the physiological necessities of their bodies.

"I only had a trunk full of clothes, I was never one to want much more than I stood up in, and I went down with the girl in a rickshaw to fetch it. I only meant to stay on till the next boat came through. You see, I was so near China here I thought I'd wait a bit and get used to things, if you understand what I mean, before I went on."

I did. Those last words of his revealed him to me. I knew that on the threshold of China his courage had failed him. England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too. If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it.

"Somehow I stayed on. You know, you'd be surprised how quickly the days pass. I don't seem to have time to do half the things I want to. After all I'm comfortable here. The old woman makes a damned good pipe, and she's a jolly little girl, my girl, and then there's the kid. A lively young beggar. If you're happy somewhere what's the good of going somewhere else?"

"And are you happy here?" I asked him.

I looked round that large bare sordid room. There was no comfort in it and not one of the little personal things that one would have thought might have given him the feeling of home. Grosely had taken on this equivocal little apartment, which served as a house of assignation and as a place for Europeans to smoke opium in, with the old woman who kept it, just as it was, and he camped, rather than lived, there still as though next day he would pack his traps and go. After a little while he answered my question.

"I've never been so happy in my life. I often think I'll go on to Shanghai some day, but I don't suppose I ever shall. And God knows, I never want to see England again."

"Aren't you awfully lonely sometimes for people to talk to?"

"No. Sometimes a Chinese tramp comes in with an English skipper or a Scotch engineer, and then I go on board and we have a talk about old times. There's an old fellow here, a Frenchman who was in the Customs, and he speaks English; I go and see him sometimes. But the fact is I don't want anybody very much. I think a lot. It gets on my nerves when people come between me and my thoughts. I'm not a big smoker, you know, I just have a pipe or two in the morning to settle my stomach, but I don't really smoke till night. Then I think."

"What d'you think about?"

"Oh, all sorts of things. Sometimes about London and what it was like when I was a boy. But mostly about China. I think of the good times I had and the way I made my money, and I remember the fellows I used to know, and the Chinese. I had some narrow squeaks now and then, but I always came through all right. And I wonder what the girls would have been like that I might have had. Pretty little things. I'm sorry now I didn't keep one or two. It's a great country, China; I love those shops, with an old fellow sitting on his heels smoking a water-pipe, and all the shop-signs. And the temples. By George, that's the place for a man to live in. There's life."

The mirage shone before his eyes. The illusion held him. He was happy. I wondered what would be his end. Well, that was not yet. For the first time in his life perhaps he held the present in his hand.

 

---

 

As a former expatriate, who has spent close on twenty years in far-off places, I can relate to Maugham's stories which are taken from real life and which Maugham disguised so little that the rubber-planters of Malaya threatened violence if he ever returned to the peninsula.

To this day I still correspond - these days by email - with some of the expatriates I have known. For some, this became their permanent life and they remain, even in retirement, far from home; others returned home too late and buried their loneliness and their misery in drink.

I don't know what Maugham would've made of me. Perhaps "Riverbend" is my Haiphong, and as long as I never see home again I shall keep it.

 

"Irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein."
          Hermann Hesse

 

Who reads Paul Auster in Moruya?

 

Read a preview here

 

After visiting op-shops over many years and in many different locations, they have become reliable barometers of a town's wealth, both financial and intellectual. The volumes of near-new apparel, for which Padma has developed an uncanny eye, attest to a town's prosperity, while the range of second-hand books on sale is a good indicator of the intellectual depth and breadth of its inhabitants.

I never set my hopes too high when visiting Vinnies in Moruya whose bookshelves are in the main stocked with popular pulp fiction ranging from crime, detective, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure, mainly for the male readers, to an absolute deluge of lurid romance for women only.

Only occasionally do I discover some little gem - non-fiction or high-class fiction - which Vinnies' 'Wayne the Bookwhisperer' has already learnt will be of little interest to the hoi polloi and won't exactly fly off the shelf.

With this in mind, he marks them down to a mere dollar which is exactly what I paid today for a copy of Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies". Who reads Paul Auster in Moruya? Whoever it is, thank you and if you have any more, please, bring them in because I can't read enough Paul Auster. Of the many books he's written and I haven't read yet, I'm still looking for his two non-fiction titles "The Invention of Solitude" and "The Art of Hunger".

 

 

In the meantime, I shall spend the weekend reading "The Brooklyn Follies" which is set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, and tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once promising academic career, and life in general. Having accidentally ended up in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with life and passion.

 

 

You can't be too careful these days!

 

Source

 

To be born in Australia is to win the lottery of life", a former prime minister once said. To which I might add, "... which is also won by those who are lucky enough to be allowed to immigrate to this wonderful country ...", but, of course, there are always those who don't know when they are well off.

In the past we had the proverbial "whinging Pom" and sometimes also an "arrogant Kraut", whose complaints we then cut short with the forthright Australian interjection "If you don't like it here, why don't you piss off?" How many "whinging Poms" or "arrogant Krauts", do you think, would've stood a chance to sue you over making such a remark? Exactly! ZERO!

Times have changed and we now have the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 under which Pauline Hanson copped it sweet after replying to the above tweet that Faruqi had immigrated to take "advantage" of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.

The post was racist, nativist and anti-Muslim, the judge said, which allowed me to add a new word to my vocabulary: nativist. Look it up!

Times have changed! Only this morning I said to Padma across the breakfast table that I don't like the juice, and immediately hastened to spell it out to her: J - U - I - C - E. You can't be too careful these days!

 

 

The Ugly American

 

 

Published in 1958, the book "The Ugly American" is far too often confused with another cold-war-era novel set in Southeast Asia, Graham Greene's "The Quiet American", which appeared in 1955, was also set in SE Asia and made into an excellent movie.

"The Ugly American" has become a shorthand for Americans who wear tank tops to the Vatican or eat Big Macs in Beijing but in the book and the movie they are not drunken backpackers or seniors wearing socks and sandals but the so-called elite of the diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language and customs leads to observations in the book like this: "The simple fact is, Mr. Ambassador, that average Americans, in their natural state, if you will excuse the phrase, are the best ambassadors a country can have,” a Filipino minister tells an American official. "They are not suspicious, they are eager to share their skills, they are generous. But something happens to most Americans when they go abroad. Many of them are not average ... they are second-raters." As the authors write:

 

Written one year before Hawaii became the 50th State of the USA,
the book is still as relevant today as it was then.

 

The book caused a sensation in diplomatic circles and had major political implications. The Peace Corps was established during the Kennedy administration partly as a result of the book. The bestseller has remained continuously in print and is one of the most influential American political novels. It has been called an "iconic Cold War text". Read it here.

Plenty of good reading and viewing for the weekend.

 

 

Replays from the "Black Box" of my life

 

 

When we were young, we could remember our short life in its entirety. As we get older, our memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box that aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, you know why you did; if you don't, then the log of your journey is much less clear.

As is mine since I try to remember not the occasional crashes but the exhilarating take-offs, most of which had to do with my work since it was work that gave me my reason for being as well as sustenance in the beginning and then slowly growing prosperity and comfortable retirement.

There was my primary school teacher, "Herr Sapper", who helped me overcome my lack of a tertiary education by giving me this personal letter. It gave me my first job which normally required matriculation instead of my "poor-people education" of just eight years of basic "Volksschule".

 

 

Then came that magic moment in 1964 when the friendly interviewing officer in the Australian consulate wrote "Appears good type. Understands employment prospects. Should settle without difficulties. Questions to the point. Neatly dressed" on my "Auswanderungsantrag nach Australien mit Fahrtunterstützung" (Application for assisted passage to Australia) and, with great florish and in red ink, stamped "APPROVED" across it.

 

 

Or what about the anxious moment when, just weeks after my arrival in Australia, Mr Reid of the ANZ Bank ignored my stumbling English and gave me a start with the Bank and into a better career than I had ever dared to hope for when I first had signed that application for an assisted passage?

 

 

Then there was that moment three years later, when the partner in the Canberra firm of chartered accountants, Hancock Woodward & Neill, sent me off to their branch office in New Guinea with the words, "No need to tell me anything about yourself. I heard nothing but good things about you from my golf partner who works with the ANZ Bank. I just wanted to shake hands with you and wish you all the best in your new career."

 

 

And then the brief encounter in late 1970 with the manager of Bechtel Corporation who were building the Bougainville Copper Project. He had sent me the airfare to fly across from Rabaul for the interview, took one look at me, and sent me straight back with the words, "Pack your things and be back here on the first day of next month" (on three times my current salary plus free board and lodgings and a company vehicle).

 

 

Two years later, with the Bougainville Copper Project completed, I was walking the streets of Sydney, looking for a job! I had applied in writing for another job on the island with a company who had just won a new contract there, giving as my address the only permanent contact I had, a friend in Canberra, to whom they sent a telegram asking me to come in for an interview. All my friend knew was that I was staying in some sleezy boarding-house on the North Shore but which one? He must've tried half the numbers in the Yellow Pages before he got to the one that I was in.

If you know anything about boarding-houses you know that their only telephone is the one hanging on the wall in the empty hallway and anyone passing it may answer it - or not. The chances of that 'anyone' being someone who happened to know that I, only recently arrived, was the one my friend was looking for, and that I also just then happened to be sitting in my windowless walled-off-end-of-the-corridor "room" and was able to come to the phone, are so infinitesimally small as to almost non-existent.

The next day I attended the interview and the day after dlew back to the islands to take up my new position as accountant and office manager in what was so far the biggest job in my career. Six months later I had successfully pulled off a challenging start-up job and, with a glowing reference in my pocket, headed back to Sydney on a promotion.

 

 

And the blood-rushing-to-the-head take-offs continued when I received a telegram from France's biggest oil company to take up the position of chief accountant in Rangoon in Burma, sight unseen!!! That was after I had grabbed the very last copy of Friday's FINANCIAL REVIEW at Port Moresby's newsagency in which they had advertised it. Had someone else snatched that last copy, I would never have seen the advertisement!

 

 

Then a bunch of executive headhunters phoned me just after I had got my first taste of domestic bliss and had settled down in a small house on the beach in Far North Queensland with a wife and a neighbour's dog and an easy job that paid the bills. Would I be interested in kicking off a multi-million-dollar joint venture in New Guinea? The call of the wild again!

Four months later I was back in town with a new glowing reference in one hand and a new problem on the other: the river that Heraclitus had predicted two-and-a-half-thousand years earlier I would not be able to step back in again had totally dried up, with the small house on the beach still occupied by tenants and no job available to pay the bills. With wife and neighbour's dog also gone, I've always regretted heeding that particular call of the wild.

 

 

But still the take-offs continued with my serendipitous discovery in yet another issue of the FINANCIAL REVIEW of an half-page display advertisement for a Group Financial Controller in Saudi Arabia.

With the theme music of Peter O'Toole's "Lawrence of Arabia" in my ears, I applied and was sent the airfare to attend an interview. It must've been my mention of the Alhambra and that they'd had street-lighting in Córdoba while the rest of Europe was still dressed in bear skins that got me the job, because a week later I was on my way to the world's largest sandbox.

In between these notable ones, there were several dozens of other take-offs and landings in other countries. Thirty years ago, I made my final touch-down at "Riverbend". Occasionally, I still miss those exhilarating blood-rushing-to-the-head take-offs but not the packing up, the queues at the check-in counter, and the endless waiting at the baggage carousel.

As for the black box, it's actually orange in colour, and it was invented by Dr David Warren, an Australian who was born - wait for it! - on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory, the first white child born on the island.