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.
