In memory of the late Noel Butler of Wewak, a remarkably unremarkable man

 

Childers, Queensland, by night

 

It's almost thirty years ago when my best friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, sent me this funny "Childers by Night" card and wrote,

 

"Dear Pete, Hope your outlook on the future is not
as black as this. Mine is but that's inevitable."

 

I had no idea how prescient and indeed deadly serious his message was until a couple of months later I received a phone call from a woman. She introduced herself as Noel's sister and told me that Noel had just passed away! The only death we experience is other people's.

It may seem that Noel had never achieved much in his life except get through it. And after his life had come to an end, he left no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But the way of life that he had chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and self-reliance of his character left a great influence on me so that, long after his death, I still remember him as a very remarkable man.

 

Noel's airport arrival card on 13 November 1967,
one day before boarding the PATRIS

 

Noel and I first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea but, following the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal closed and the ship was re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the many New Guinea expats who had already booked, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. And so for the next four weeks I would sit in the ship's Midnight Club and listen to the many yarns of high adventure told by those larger-than-life New Guinea expats while Graeme Bell's All Stars played their ragtime music.

During the day, Noel and I would sit on deck for hours, hunched over a chessboard. Our mutual love of chess and my interest in New Guinea started a friendship which lasted until his death almost thirty years later!

 

Christmas 1975 on the Wewak golf course

 

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma.

 

Christmas 1975 on the beach in Wewak outside the Windjammer Hotel

 

Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea".

Perhaps this struggle is something else that we shared. I, too, still think almost every day about those many farway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.

"Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein."   
                                                                         Hermann Hesse

 

Of Christmases past

 

In Camp 6 at Loloho on the Bougainville Copper Project
left-to-right: Neil "Jacko" Jackson, yours truly, Bob Green

 

It's that time of year again when thoughts turn to Christmases past. We didn't use the word 'Christmas' then. Christmas came with too much emotional baggage. It reminded us of families and homes which we were far away from or didn't even have.

Of course, I'm talking of those many years - decades, in fact - spent in boarding houses, construction camps, hotels, and company housing. Come Christmastime, those who had families and homes had gone; those who didn't hadn't.

 

Yours truly in the chequered shirt in the middle

 

There was Barton House in Canberra, usually throbbing with life from its 300-odd - and some very odd - inmates, which turned into a morgue by Christmastime. The dining room was roped off except for one table next to the kitchen. That one table was large enough for those left behind.

It's hard not to be reminded of something when you're surrounded by half a dozen gloomy faces. So for my last Christmas in Canberra in 1969, just before I flew to my next job in New Guinea, I hitched and hiked to Angle Crossing where I spent a solitary weekend writing letters which is the only device that combines solitude with good company.

 

Canberra's then Youth Hostel at Angle Crossing, over the hill from the Murrumbidgee River

 

Years later, and just one day before Christmas, I booked myself into hospital on Bougainville Island with acute appendicitis . "You'd better get on the next plane out and into a hospital at home", the doctor told me. He was already deep into his medicinal alcohol and had trouble remembering which side my appendix was on. "This is my home", I said. He made one long incision just to make sure he wouldn't miss it.

What I had missed was that my best friend Noel Butler was coming over from Wewak to spend - ahem! - Christmas with me. He must have got there while I was still under the anaesthetic, because there he was standing at the foot of my bed. He'd gone to my donga and waited and finally asked the hous boi where I was. "Masta bagarap long haus sik".

 

Yours truly and Noel hunched over a chess board in New Guinea

 

We tried again the following year by which time I had moved to Lae on the north coast of the New Guinea mainland. By the time Christmas and Noel had come, there was just enough time left for a drink at the club and a game of chess before I flew out to my next job in Burma.

And so it went on, year after year, either coming or going or laid up with something, deftly avoiding Christmas. It's not so easy anymore!

 

So schrieb ich vor zwei Jahren

 

 

So schrieb ich vor zwei Jahren:

Ich kam gerade von "Melbourne" zurück wo ich eine sehr ruhige Nacht verbrachte. Auf dem Wege zurück zum Haus tauchte ein Angler aus dem Nebel auf dem Fluss auf. Der hatte wohl auch eine ruhige Nacht in seinem Boot verbracht. Manchmal brauchen wir solch ruhige Momente um mit unserem Leben klarzukommen.

Im Haus zurück, fing ich an meine Haferflocken zu kochen und den Komputer anzukurbeln wo ich eine E-mail von einem Armin Müller fand:

"Hallo Peter, hier ist der jüngere Sohn von Bärbel. Ich habe die traurige Pflicht auch Dich zu informieren. Bärbel ist am 23.11.22 verstorben. Die Beisetzung fand in Braunschweig-Mascherode statt. Ich hatte deine Nummer in Ihrem iPhone gefunden, konnte Dich als den Auswanderer zuordnen und eine kurze Suche brachte mich auf eure Website."

Bärbel und ich trafen uns als Lehrlinge in 1962 als ich schon im dritten Jahr meiner Lehre war und sie gerade ihre Lehre angefangen hatte. Wir saßen uns gegenüber in der Feuerversicherungsabteilung und daraus wurde dann eine Freundschaft die noch mehrere Jahre nach meiner Auswanderung anhielt. Wir erneuerten sie als ich im Februar 1984 zur Beerdiging meines Vaters wieder nach Braunschweig kam und wurde dann eine Brieffreundschaft als ich in 1985 Griechenland wieder verlies.

Oder besser gesagt, wieder eine Brieffreundschaft denn dass war es schon einmal für einige Jahre nach meiner Auswanderung in 1965 gewesen. All diese Brief schickte sie mir in 2011 um mich daran zu erinnern mit den Worten: "Doppelt so viel habe ich hier noch fallst Du sie haben möchtest."

 

 

In späteren Jahren schickte sie mir noch Fotos von einem Betriebsausflug den ich schon lange vergessen hatte - siehe hier - und nahm auch Fotos auf von meinen Elternhäusern am Altewiekring und Cyriaksring - siehe hier und hier. Und hier ist meine Antwort an ihren Sohn Armin:

"Lieber Armin, das ist doch völlig unmöglich und gar nicht zu glauben!!! Bärbel und ich kannten uns von unserer Lehre in der Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherung in der Münzstrasse, und wir trafen uns zum letzten Mal in 1984 als ich nach Braunschweig kam zur Beerdigung meines Vaters. Unsere Verbindung war in den letzten Jahren wieder abgebrochen, wohl deshalb weil ich hier unten am Ende der Welt in einem ganz anderen Millieu lebe und überhaupt keine Verbindung mit der (k)alten Heimat mehr habe. Wie ich mich erinnere war ihr letztes Lebenszeichen von der Ostsee mit einem Foto mit ihr und Deinem Vater am Strand. Danke für Deine Email und die Mühe die Du Dir machtest Dich mit mir in Verbindung zu setzen. In meinem Alter ist man daran gewöhnt solche Nachrichten zu erhalten, denn mehr und mehr alte Freunde und Freundinnen versterben nach und nach. Dennoch hat mich diese Nachricht besonders gepackt denn sie bringt mich ganz zurück an den Anfang meiner beruflichen Karriere und bevor ich überhaupt Gedanken hatte je einmal nach Australien auszuwandern. Meinen herzlichen Beileid an Dich und Deinen Bruder und Vater."

 

 

Meine alten Erinnerungen sterben langsam aus.

 

 

The "Marie Celeste" of the Clyde River

 

 

The story of the "Mary Celeste" might have drifted into history if Conan Doyle hadn't published it in his "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" in 1884. His sensationalistic account set off waves of theorising about the ship's fate; it also immortalised the vessel's misspelt name as "Marie Celeste" which I have used for the houseboat pictured above.

It is usually moored further up the river but still visible from "Riverbend", with no-one visibly aboard, and then, at the start of yet another weekend, it has miraculously shifted downriver to a mooring just off "Riverbend", again with no-one visibly aboard. Another case of "Marie Celeste" indeed!

 

 

I've had my breakfast, watched the documentary again, and also had another look outside - yep, she's still there, as quiet and mysterious and seemingly abandoned as ever, the "Marie Celeste" of the Clyde River!

 

 

 

Opportunity shop knocks!

 

 

Even during my restless years, I belonged to several book clubs, including Reader's Digest and TIME-LIFE, whose publications cost the usual $29.95 (plus postage & handling) which then was a week's housekeeping money (or the cost of a lavish dinner-for-two to which I never treated myself). When it was time to relocate, I would put the books into boxes (which cost money) and the boxes into storage (which cost more money).

Then, twenty years later, when all my travelling was done, I got the boxes out of storage, only to discover that many of those books I had so carefully boxed and stored, could be bought at an op-shop for a dollar or two. (And ditto for all those vinyls, those fragile black things handled with kid gloves lest they got scratched. They are on sale now, unscratched, for just ten cents!)

If I had my time over again, I would buy nothing new as I can hardly image a world without op-shops. Generally staffed by kindly older ladies, they're little rays of sunshine amidst the primarily drab and boring shopping experiences of the twenty-first century. Apart from large, wildly expensive department stores like David Jones and Myers, where else can you go that sells such a wide variety of goods? If you're lucky the ladies might even offer you a cuppa and a biscuit.

Throughout history people have always worn second hand clothes and treasured pre-loved things. In most families (and in my family in particular), younger siblings (and I was the youngest) have long been the recipients of their older sisters' and brothers' hand-me-down clothes, while donating unwanted garments and household paraphernalia to the needy has been practiced by those who are more privileged. While once upon a time such benevolence was generally practiced informally, over the last several decades shops dedicated to selling pre-loved wares have sprung up in cities and towns, large and small, all around Australia.

I can't remember when I discovered my first op-shop. I remember once seeing a funny shop with funny-looking people going in and out but it was quite some time later, when op-shops had gone mainstream and into main street, that I entered a store which had that peculiar odour created by used clothing and household items within.

In days gone by, if I needed a new belt to accommodate that expanding waistline, I would have gone into a men's wear store and happily paid $20. These days, I go into an op-shop and choose from a range of real leather belts with real brass buckles, and never pay more than a dollar. As for books, I have found books I never knew existed and never paid more than a couple of dollars for them.

Once such treasures are discovered, it boosts one’s endorphin levels, thus creating euphoria which can last for hours or days, depending on the perceived value of the find (and relative purchase price). A word of warning though: repeated discoveries of this nature will lead to the addiction of op-shopping!

 

In praise of the quiet life at "Riverbend"

 

 

A quiet life sounds like an option that only the defeated would ever be inclined to praise. Our age is overwhelmingly alive to the benefits of active, dynamic, ‘noisy’ ways of living.

If someone offered us a bigger salary for a job elsewhere, we’d move. If someone showed us a route to fame, we’d take it. If someone invited us to a party, we’d go. These seem like pure, unambiguous gains. Lauding a quiet life has some of the eccentricity of praising rain.

It’s hard for most of us to contemplate any potential in the idea because the defenders of quiet lives have tended to come from the most implausible sections of the community: slackers, hippies, the work-shy, the fired…; people who seem like they have never had a choice about how to arrange their affairs. A quiet life seems like something imposed upon them by their own ineptitude. It is a pitiable consolation prize.

At "Riverbend", the quiet life is no pitiable consolation prize. It is the very raison d'être for living here.

 

'Mal was zum Nachdenken!

 

 

Elke Heidenreich writes in a personal way about a topic that affects everyone: everyone wants to grow old, but nobody wants to be old. In her new book, she deals with growing old and creates a work that only she can write - personal, honest, and wise. As she writes, "In old age, you bear the consequences for everything you have done. But with it comes serenity, and you understand: Most is completely unimportant. You should just breathe and be grateful."

 

 

Here's a preview of the first few pages - in German, of course: click here.

 

Hotel zum Letzten Kliff

 

 

The axiom in joking is, a person's favourite joke is the key to that person's character; and so it is for a culture (however, you won't trick me into discussing with you Australian culture which is mainly agriculture and horticulture).

Instead, I want to tell you about the failed attempt to introduce a German version of Fawlty Towers to the Germans. A pilot episode of the show, called 'Zum Letzten Kliff' ('To the Last Cliff'), was broadcast in December 2001. In it, Basil and Sybil became Victor and Helga, an unhappily-married couple who presided over a chaotically awful hotel called 'Zum letzten Kliff' which was relocated to a North Sea island called Sylt (pronounced 'Zoolt'). The hotel also featured a young waitress called Polly, while the Manuel character was reinvented as a waiter named Igor from the Republic of Kazakhstan.

It never caught on in Germany, perhaps because it didn't include the phrase which anyone who has seen the original now uses to sum up the terrible anxiety we all have about trying, and failing, to not say the wrong thing: 'Don't mention the war!' It was so tasteless, it was hilarious.

 

 

I don't care if you don't care for it. Who won the bloody war, anyway?

 

Nelligen - where did the name come from?

 

 

Nobody seems to know, not even my wife who usually knows everything! ☺

As Stuart Magee explains in his beautiful little volume of local history, The Rivers and the Sea, "the need for the place arose in the 1850s when Braidwood and its satellites such as Majors Creek, Araluen and Mongarlowe were up to their ears in the explosion of people and commerce surrounding the discovery of gold.

The movement of goods, people and information between Braidwood and Sydney was chancy and oh so slow. Depending on the weather, bullock trains might take three weeks or three months. Horse-drawn carriage or dray was usually quicker but limited in capacity and expensive. Down the mountain lay the very navigable Clyde and thence a 24-hour run by steamship to Sydney. There was, as I understand the historian Reynolds, some competition between Currowan and Nelligen as to which would receive Braidwood's blessing, and Nelligen won out.

So, in the 1850s, the town was laid out and the road from Braidwood was opened. And a tough road it was too. There is a number of old photos showing the grim results of teams of horses and bullocks going over the side of the Clyde Mountain road.

Nelligen boomed! Over the next 20 years there arose four pubs, two stores, a blacksmith, a bakery, a police station, a court-house, schools, churches and a post office, Above all was the terminal building of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company. If today you were to set up your picnic in that nice little park between the general store and the wharf, you would be smack in the middle of the 126 x 45 feet ISNC's jetty and store (oh, very well then, 38 x 14 metres). Twice a week the steamers plied between Nelligen and Sydney, stopping at the far less consequential village of Batemans Bay on the way. The size of some of the paddle-steamers, and later screw-steamers, is astonishing. The Kembla, a paddle-steamer in use on the Clyde from 1861, was 183 feet long. The S.S. Moruya was 150 feet and 530 tons. The S.S. Allowrie was 180 feet. It ran aground on a mudflat in the river on one occasion and had to await the high tide to float it off. The last steamer to call at the Port of Nelligen was in 1952 - 99 years after the first."

But the goldfields centering on Braidwood started to run down, then the timber industry went into decline, and, Stuart continues in his little book, "after such a pivotal role in the development of the southern parts of the state, Nelligen has been deserted even by the highway and left to fend for itself.

All up and down the coast the faces of small towns are being tarted up and titivated by tourist-boards and enthusiastic councils. But Nelligen remains untouched and unimpressed by such progress. Not even the modern marvels of reticulated water and sewerage have imposed themselves upon it." Not yet, Stuart, but work is underway and by Christmas both will have been imposed on us.

"If I lived there I would hope not to see it change. But you sense it may just be resting after its great exertions and sooner or later some bright spark will again see it as the right place to do heroic things." (reproduced with Stuart's permission)

There is so much more in this delightful book but I won't spoil your anticipation as I am sure your local Angus & Robertson has a copy of this enjoyable read!

As for the name of Nelligen, I've had it explained to me that a certain Nelligen butcher had a wife by the name of Nell. Apparently, he did away with her and threw the body in the river. Unlucky for him, the Clyde is a tidal river and on every rising tide her body would float back up again, prompting locals to exclaim, “Here comes Nell again”. (This is NOT the official version of how it got its name but it's as good as all the others.)

 

Commas are important people!

 

 

Did you know that Australian author Peter Carey won the 2001 Booker Prize for "True History of the Kelly Gang" – a work that contained not a single comma? Amazing, huh? Of course, one might wonder why he bothered, but still.

I agree that commas are not condiments and you shouldn't pepper your sentences with them unnecessarily. Even so, a well-placed comma is the difference between “what is this thing called love?” and “what is this thing called, love?” And between “let’s eat, Grandma!” and ... well, you know the rest. (My favourite book on this subject is "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"; I believe an earlier Australian edition was called "Eats, Roots and Leaves".)

 

 

A misplaced comma might even be damaging to your health. Compare "Do not administer any liquids which are diuretic" (some liquids are permissible) and "Do not administer any liquids, which are diuretic" (all liquids are forbidden). And don't even get me started on the Oxford comma: "I love my parents, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel." Donald Trump and Angela Merkel are not my parents; a comma after Donald Trump would've made this clear - and, for the record, I don't love either.

What I do love are early mornings on the jetty! Shingles or no shingles, the sun is out and so am I! And I've chosen to reread "The Old Man and the Sea". It's a short book, written in Hemingway's typical sharp and muscular style, which was eventually named the "Iceberg Theory", as it used simple language on the surface with a wealth of meaning hidden below. And it has short sentences with very little need for punctuation.

Still, commas are important people! (please insert a comma as you see fit)

 

A tale with a sting in the tail

 

 

Burg Thurston works at Batemans Bay's Innes Boatshed which has been a local landmark since 1955. There he made friends with a giant black stingray called "Nobby".

“Over time, the stingray got more confident”, Burg says. “Now I jump in, he shoos the other stingrays off and comes in and glides up my belly.”

"I loved to surf in the mornings and when I started working the morning shift I was often a bit anxious when I knew I was missing the waves. Then I realised, if my mind was always in the surf while I was working, I was going to miss what is right in front of me, which was the stingrays and how beautiful the boatshed was, and how good my job actually was.”

Did you yell 'Encore'? Well then, here it is:

 

 

Wherever you are and whatever you do, this film may inspire you to take your focus off what you haven't got and turn it to what's right in front of you.

 

Arabian Sands

 

I recently found a beautiful hardback copy still in mint condition of Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands", the book about Arabia to end all books about Arabia. I've only just now found a beautifully made doco-movie by the same name which follows Wilfred Thesiger's crossing of the Rub Al-Khali, Arabia's "Empty Quarter".

Sprawling over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the Empty Quarter—or Rub' al Khali—is the world's largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. It is one of the most arid regions on the planet, and stretches over twelve hundred kilometers from west to east, and is up to six hundred kilometers wide.

 

 

It had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward and, although Wilfred Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As Sam. He crossed it with Bedu companions twice, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

 

Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands" in his own voice with subtitles

 

It all began when, in 1945, an entomologist, O.B. Lean, acting on behalf of the Middle East Anti Locust Unit (MEALU), hired Thesiger to search for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia. Feeling least at home in his own culture and with his own kind, Thesiger resented the juggernaut of western "civilisation" and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth's peoples.

His sympathies were with the indigenes, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys. Few other explorers of recent times have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these foreign peoples.

 

 

His best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of south Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, now a greybeard in his 60s, remembers him. "He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with," he said. Thesiger could have asked for no better epitaph. He died in 2003.

 

 

It's been almost four decades since I walked the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. I'm left with my memories as I read "Arabian Sands" while sitting close to a burning fireplace with a painting above it of a "modern" Saudi camel being driven across the burning sands in a TOYOTA pick-up truck.

 

---

 

P.S. Are you drawn in by the desert as I was all those many years ago? Don't let the spell go to waste; come and watch "Lawrence of Arabia".

 

The internet is for people who can't sleep

 

Back Row (left-to-right) Volker Kluge / Wolfgang Ihlemann / Joachim Schumacher / Helmut Ullrich / Ulrich Schäfer / Andreas Morgenroth / Helmut Bolle / Volker Wisse / Hendrik Heinemann / Jürgen Kreul Middle Row (left-to-right) Klaus Kratzenstein / Herbert Becker / Dagmar Kroll / Jutta Veste / Heidi Werner / Christa Funke / Wenzel Tappe / moi / Joachim Stut Front Row (left-to-right) Gudrun Otto / Heidi Nabert / Petra Küster / Sigrid Röseling / Herr Sapper, teacher / Barbara Ziegert / Margret Brandenburg / Ingrid Behrens / Waltraud Häupler / Karin Käsehage
(No prize guessing where I am in the photo!!!)

 

And I was still wide awake when this email came in late one night: "Ich hoffe Du bist etwas überrascht eine E-Mail zu bekommen, aber wir sind in die selbe Klasse in der Heinrichschule gegangen, auf dem Klassenfoto bin ich unter dem Namen DAGMAR KROLL. Würde mich freuen etwas von Dir zu hören! "

Let me translate before you rush out and enrol in a Berlitz German Language Course: "I hope you're surprised to receive this email because we attended the same class at primary school. My name is Dagmar Kroll and I'm the third from the left in the middle row in this photo taken on the last day at school. Would love to hear from you!"

What a surprise indeed! Dagmar found the photos another schoolfriend had sent to me previously and which I had put up on my German blog - here and here - and she's busy scanning some more to send to me. This seems to be a case of "good things come to those who wait" - for over fifty years! - because we were refugees from East Germany and had little money, and none at all for such frivolities as school photos.

Of course, she also asked the obvious question, "Why did you leave Germany?" Well, no one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.

Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of 14.

Being the youngest solo-migrant on board the migrant ship FLAVIA, a television crew had asked me the same question before it left Bremer-haven. I had no answer in front of the whirring newsreel camera and still have no answer today. I mean, how do I explain the sense of dissatisfaction and frustration that affected me at the time?

We can't choose our parents and are born into the prison of our race, religion and nationality. I had no problem with my race which, being blond and blue-eyed, helped me to slip into Australia under its "White Australia" policy, but I'd already renounced my Lutheran upbringing and joined the German Freethinkers, and many years later also changed my nationality by becoming an Australian. Two out of three isn't bad, is it?

True to her word, Dagmar sent me three photos of a class reunion in 1983 which, come to think of it, I could've attended as I was at the time working in Jeddah and Athens. Another missed opportunity? Perhaps not, as my life had moved in a completely different direction from those stay-at-homes with whom I had little in common during my school days and would have had even less in common twenty-three years later.

 

Class Reunion 1983 - for names see last photo

Class reunion 1983 Get-together at Teacher's house after the reunion
from left to right: Joachim Stut - Dagmar Kroll - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) -
Barbara Zieger - Gudrun Otto - Volker Kluge

Class Reunion 1983
from left to right; back row: Volker Kluge - Herbert Becker - Wolfgang Ihlemann - Wenzel Tappe - Helmut Ullrich - Ulrich Schäfer; middle row: Heidi Werner - Ingrid Behrens - Jutta Veste - Dagmar Kroll - Christa Funke; front row: Gudrun Otto - Petra Küster - Sigrid Röseling - Franz Sapper (retired teacher) - Barbara Zieger - Waltraud Häuptler

 

However, I would've liked to have met "Herr Sapper" again before he passed away sometime in 1987. He was a great teacher who helped me overcome my lack of a tertiary education by giving me this personal letter which helped me into my first job after completing my articles.

My favourite author, Somerset W. Maugham, wrote a story entitled "The Verger" about a man without formal education who ended up more successful than he might've been with the right kind of schooling.

I count my blessings every time I watch the movie as I count my blessings to have had such a wonderful teacher, a real "Mr. Chips". Rest in Peace, "Herr Sapper"!

 

Leading you down the Radio Garden path?

 

From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders and connected people and places. Radio Garden allows you to listen to thousands of live radio stations worldwide by simply rotating the globe. Every green dot represents a city or town. Tap on it to tune into the radio stations in that city.

This is what the internet should be about, an amazing free resource from a group in the Netherlands. You can search directly on the names and descriptions or simply browse through an interactive world map.

If you're looking for alternative sources of news and information in these troubled times, radio is a good place to start looking. There are no blocks, filters or paywalls, just radio stations from all over the planet.

I've just listened to CMC FM in Padma's hometown Surabaya, then swivelled the globe and tuned into Radio Okerwell in my old hometown in Braunschweig in Germany before crossing over to Ellinadiko in my last overseas posting for a bit of Greek music. Where would you like to go?

Start here!

 

ABC Late Night Live is also good for a replay in the afternoon

 

 

It's too cool outside to listen to the radio on the verandah, and so I retired to the bedroom with a cup of tea to listen to Geoff Raby "Why was the US Afghanistan withdrawal a history-changing moment for China?" Interesting stuff. Make yourself a cuppa and listen to it here.

Geoff Raby's book "Great Game" is the story of the remaking of the world order. Historically, China has sought its security by building dominant relationships with pliant states that accept its pre-eminence. Its expanding role and influence in Central Asia has been as incremental and piecemeal as it has been deliberate. Without firing a shot, China could potentially end the United States' international primacy to become the most consequential global power. With its emergence as the leading power in Eurasia based on its inexorable economic rise and Putin's folly in Ukraine, China has been released from its past existential anxieties about land-based threats from Eurasia. It now has the chance to project its power globally, as the US did from the early twentieth century when it became the dominant power in the western hemisphere. What threats and risks must China address? And what happens when China becomes the established, stable, dominant power in Eurasia? Australia's former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, takes the reader on a journey across Eurasia to understand the forces shaping its geopolitics. Raby enriches this analysis by weaving his own travel stories, experiences and adventures into the fabric of his narrative.

This book is geopolitics on a grand canvas, written from the ground up. Published only two days ago, on 12 November 2024, it's not likely to be on the shelves at Vinnies. With my BHP shares having closed the day as low as $40.01 today, I may have to save up to afford the price of $34.99.

 

 

my.gov.au

 

 

Our Medicare system is being milked for all it's worth by some unscrupulous medical practitioners. I've made it a habit to always look up my my.gov.au account to see how much is charged even though I pay for each consultation out of my own pocket except for the ones by telephone.

I wished everyone would check their my.gov.au account regularly because the system is wide open to abuse. So imagine my surprise when I received the above email just after I had spoken to my GP by phone to request a repeat prescription. "Finally," I thought, "the government is keeping the doctors honest by telling us whenever they charge our Medicare account."

The sender's email address was a very convincing "no-reply@my.gov.au"; however, instead of clicking on the link shown in the email, I went straight to my my.gov.au account to find - nothing! NOTHING? What's going on?

Going back to the email, I placed the cursor over the sender's email address, and lo and behold, the REAL sender of this email was hamra-rent-cars.tn, suggesting some scumbag in Tunesia was up to no good.

You really can't be too careful these days! If you do get an email which you are not sure about, DON'T CLICK ON ANY LINK but place your cursor over the sender's email address and all shall be revealed. And should you happen to be on holidays in Tunesia, don't hire a car at Hamra Rent Cars!!!

 

P.S. Hamra is Arabic and means "the red one" (hence the Alhambra in Granada in Spain), but in this context might as well mean "plenty of RED flags" because the ownership of the domain name is equally obscure:

 

Qantas Makes Emergency Landing

 

Courtesy of THE SHOVEL

 

AQantas flight from Brisbane was forced to make an emergency landing in Sydney today after crews suddenly realised Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie was sitting in the economy cabin, at least fourteen rows back from her customary seat in Business.

Shaken crew members said they first realised something was wrong when they heard a loud whining noise coming from seat 16B. “At first we thought it was an engine failure, but then we realised that it was much worse than that. It was Bridget McKenzie screaming ‘Do you know who I am?’ and ‘Where’s my complimentary Champagne?' We immediately alerted the pilot and we made an emergency landing soon after,” one crew member explained.

Upon landing McKenzie was taken off the plane and rushed to the Chairman’s Lounge, where she is expected to make a full recovery. The National Senator, who is used to getting free upgrades, said she was traumatised by the ordeal. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. I looked to my left and there was a person sitting in a seat next to me! And then I looked to my right and there was another person in another seat there too! Two people, right next to me! It was hideous!”

Qantas has apologised for the incident, saying it was a technical issue that should never have occurred.

 

The Mozart Effect

 

 

Remember this clarinet concerto? Of course, you do! You remember it from the scene in Out of Africa when Denys Finch-Hatton takes Karen Blixen on safari and picnicks with her high up on the Masai Mara plain with a gramophone beside them playing Mozart. [after placing a gramophone in a field near wild baboons who sat around listening, Denys said, 'Think of it: never a man-made sound... and then Mozart!']

If Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A major, K. 622, needed any popularising, this movie did it. It is one of the most magical pieces of music ever composed. A shiver runs down my spine every time I hear it. Don Campbell calls it the “Mozart Effect” in his book of the same name: the ability of music to heal the body, strengthen the mind and unlock the creative spirit (some doctors have claimed that half an hour of classical music produces the same effect as ten milligrams of Valium).

[voiceover in movie]   "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold."

All right, let's hear it one more time, adagio, together with some unforgettable scenes from the movie:

 

 

[excerpt from book]   "To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa. There, where there are few or no roads and where you can land on the plains, flying becomes a thing of real and vital importance in your life, it opens up a world. Denys had brought out his Moth machine; it could land on my plain on the farm only a few minutes from the house, and we were up nearly every day.

You have trememdous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild black storms, all swing around you in a race and a dance. The lashing hard showers of rain whiten the air askance. The language is short of words for the experiences of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.

But it is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flyer is the flight itself. It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in all their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. "I see,' I have thought. 'This was the idea. And now I understand everything.'"

If you want to understand more about Karen Blizen, watch this doco:

 

 

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P.S. What is the K. 622 in Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A major, I hear you ask. Well, maybe you didn't ask but I'll tell you anyway: Mozart was such a prolific composer in his short life - he died at age 35 - that his work was catalogued by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, hence the K, which stands for Köchel-Verzeichnis, in K. 622 , to provide a shorthand reference to all his compositions. Trust the Germans and their German "Gründlichkeit"!

 

No worm left behind

 

 

During the summer's warm afternoon rains, worms emerge from the wet soil. They push their small pink heads up toward the surface of the earth and draw their bodies onto wet grass, where they can breathe fresh air and glide across the ground. But when the rain stops and the sun comes out, those worms that travelled too far onto the road become stuck.

I find them during my morning walks, writhing in the heat as the sun bakes them alive. Their little bodies twist and turn as they desperately try to return to the safety of the soil beneath the grass. Watching them struggle so violently, one might wonder why they can't just save themselves by using that energy to wriggle off the road. The worm corpses left behind after the rain suggest that their journey is more difficult than it seems – on the surface, far from their underground burrows, worms can get stranded. Their task is Sisyphean, their dilemma at once futile and inescapable. For that reason, I like to think that I understand them a little. They’re just like us, trying to get where they’re going.

My worm-rescue protocol is simple and, as far as I can tell, effective. I lift the worms off the road with a stick or leaf and gently place them in the grass nearby. Taking my cue from our politicians, my motto is simple: "No worm left behind."

 

Digging holes and filling them again

 

 

The digging-holes-and-filling-them-again in Sproxton Lane is coming to an end, with "Riverbend" last in line in this cul-de-sac. They dug a trench to the "blind" corner by the bottom gate, and then bored below the road to surface at the top gate.

 

Looking towards Riverbend's bottom gate (marked with a blue sign)

 

The sewerage and the town water connections are now inside our gate.

 

Water connection inside our gate

Sewerage connection inside our gate

 

We've been told that we'll get their town water and they'll get our s**t before Christmas! I wonder who's getting the more desirable present?

 

More about the Seven Little Sisters

 

 

There are people who visit op-shops because they have to, and then there are people who visit them because they like to. The reasons for visiting may vary, but in the op-shop, we’re all searching for something. We’re all rummaging side by side.

I am a dedicated op-shopper for books; firstly, because there are no more bookshops around, and secondly, if there were any, they would only stock mainly trashy pulp fiction which turns over quickly, and none of the books that I am interested in, such as that rare book, "The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters" - click here - which, with the instinct of a truffle-hunting dog, I unearthed at the local Vinnies shop a few days ago.

Having devoured it in one short afternoon, I am now on a quest to find out more about its author, William Willis, a German-born American who, at the age of fifteen, left his home in Hamburg to sail around Cape Horn.

He wrote four more books, some of which are available on the internet but, given their rarity, at prices which make me hesitate to press the BUY-button (the killer is usually the postage cost but I shall keep searching).

 

 

As for all the other books I have purchased from op-shops, I fully intend to read them all and am on schedule to have done so by my 235th birthday!