A trip back in time for fifty cents

 

6th Edition, February 1998

 

Most people buy their Lonely Planet Guide at full retail price to plan their next trip; I bought this old 1998 edition for a mere fifty cents at the local op-shop to take a trip down memory lane. And I discovered so much!

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 But this information is likely to be out of date since Bougainville has been off-limits for eight years and there's been considerable damage to the towns in the south."

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

With the help of the old town map on page 315 I was able to walk, in my mind, from my office in Park Street to Casuarina Avenue, across Court Street, Namanula Road and Tavur Street, before turning left into Vulcan Street to arrive at the company-supplied accommodation, a converted Chinese trade store which I shared with two other accountants, one of whom stayed for another twenty-four years until the aforesaid volcanic eruption wiped out his business. There but for the grace of God go I.

Then there is the Port Moresby City map on page 112 which also shows Cuthbertson Street where I used to sit in my parked car in the sweltering heat on a Sunday morning, waiting for the newspapers from "down south" to arrive at the news agency. You had to be quick to grab one of the few copies of the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review which always advertised the best job vacancies. Then a quick check of my mailbox at the post office on the opposite side of the street for letters from "down south" (they used to sort incoming mail on a Sunday back then), but especially for any job offer in response to any of my applications.

Page 131 reminded me of trips to Yule Island where "the missionaries who arrived at Yule Island in 1885 were some of the first European visitors to the Papuan coast of New Guinea." On the way there I would stop over at a small trade store at Hisiu, then run by an Australian and his local wife.

Then there were those many trips out to Idler's Bay to the west, Bootless Inlet to the east, and north to Brown River, or up to Rouna Falls. One time, sailing my CORSAIR dinghy from the Royal Papuan Yacht Club all the way out of Fairfax Harbour far out to sea to Gemo Island and Lolorua Island, I had to tack. My inexperienced crew, Brian Herde, failed to respond to my command of "Lee ho!" to shift his body to the other side of the dinghy, and we promptly capsized. He redeemed himself by diving under the boat and pushing the centreboard back through the slot so that I could grap it as I sat astride the upturned hull to pull the waterlogged boat and mast and sail upright again. I would never have been able to do this on my own and may well have ended up as shark food - but then again, I probably also would have never capsized on my own. Did we have life jackets or emergency flares? Are you kidding me? We were in our twenties and indestructible. Besides, sharks are not deterred by life jackets and we were too far out to sea for anyone to have seen our flares. I lost my precious wristwatch and we lost all our beer but only very nearly our lives.

The map of Lae on page 176 shows the corner of 7th Street and Huon Road where I lived and spent my last Christmas in the country in 1974 before flying out to my next assignment in Burma. My old friend Noel had flown across from Wewak to spend that Christmas with me, only to help me stencil my shipping box with "M.P. GOERMAN / RANGOON / BURMA".

I still remember talking with him about another job I had been offered eighteen months earlier as manager of a thriving co-operative at Angoram on the banks of the mighty Sepik River. Angoram was no more than a couple of hours' drive away from Wewak and I had been tempted to accept to be near my friend but how different things may have turned out because only a few months later, again at Christmas time, I developed accute appendicitis which was quickly and successfully dealt with through a hurried operation at the newly-built hospital at Arawa but which would've been impossible to handle in the remote wilds of the Sepik District. And, of course, no access to the Australian Financial Review, one of whose advertisements had just then secured me my next assignment in Burma. We are so often the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in.

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

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

 

Keep this book by your bedside forever

 

Read this essential and beautiful book at archive.org

 

Abook must be the axe for the frozen sea within us", wrote Kafka. This book by David Whyte, an Anglo-Irish poet, which I discovered totally by accident in an op-shop, is such a book.

And, being a book, no matter how complex or difficult to understand it may seem to be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life that little bit better.

I understand life just that little bit better after having read David Whyte's exploration of the underlying meaning of such words as "Friendship" ...

"A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them ... Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way ..."

... and "Regret" ...

"To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past."

... and "Run Away" ...

"It is the flight part of the fight or flight deeply in our bodies and our past ... To want to run away is an essence of being human ... To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance ... Rarely is it good to run, but we are wiser, more present, more mature, more understanding when we realise we can never flee from the need to run away."

... and there are forty-nine more! Sometimes a book you had never heard of resonates so profoundly that it leaves you wondering how you hadn't come across it before. This is such an essential and beautiful book.

 

 

Was I one of the boys or one of the young men?

 

Retrieved from CANBERRA TIMES November 1965 via trove.nla.gov.au

 

Both advertisements appeared in the Canberra Times in the last few months of 1965 which is when I applied to one of them - but which one? - and was accepted by the ANZ Bank to start a new career as Bank Officer in a new country in December 1965.

Four months earlier I had stepped ashore from a migrant ship which had landed me and several hundred other migrants at Melbourne, from where we had been taken up to the Bonegilla Migrant Centre. On the very next day, before they had even had time to "process" me, another German who had come off the ship with me, told me about a "German Lady", a Mrs Haermeyer, at the camp's reception centre who was offering to take three or four recently arrived German migrants back to Melbourne to board at her house. In minutes I had my few things packed, and was sitting, with three other former ship-mates, in a VW Beetle enroute back to Melbourne.

The day after, the "German Lady" took me to the local Labour Exchange and in seemingly no time had secured me a job as 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company which had foodstores all over Melbourne. There I was, refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their Austin cars.

Sometime during the voyage out from Germany and under circumstances which I have long forgotten, I had made friends with a young German who had come out to Australia many years before with his parents as a child. He had been on his way back from a trip to Europe with his wife, baby, and mother-in-law with whom he had revisited his own hometown and that of his Yugoslav wife. Before long he was on the 'phone to me suggesting that I should come to Canberra where he worked as storeman for a plumbing supplier who needed a truck driver. I didn't need much persuading!

 

 

I had absolutely no knowledge of the Canberra/Queanbeyan area nor did I possess a C-class driver's licence or had ever driven a truck before, but Hans, my German friend, simply took me down to the local Police Station where everybody seemed very impressed with my elaborate German "Führerschein", and I was promptly issued with a C-class truck licence.

I kept at this job for a few weeks but after I had almost burnt out the truck's diff while bogged down in the mud with a full load on the back, and after a slight but still embarrassing collision with the rear-end of another vehicle, I thought it best to cash in my chips while I was still ahead.

I had earlier answered to one of the advertisements shown above and, to my own surprise, was accepted. And the rest, as they say, is history.

To me writing of these past experiences is a way of finding the meaning in all those happenings in life whose significance I couldn't even fully grasp at the time. As it turned out, those two serendipitous events, having been invited by my shipboard friend to come up to Canberra and then being accepted by the ANZ Bank, laid the foundation for all my later successes.

 

 

Erich Kästner fand die richtigen Worte dafür

 

 

Dreimal kam ich nach Braunschweig zurück: Ende 1967 als ich noch Deutscher war und die Möglichkeit hatte mich vielleicht noch einmal einzubürgern; und als Australier in kurzer Folge Mitte 1983 und Januar 1984 von meinen Arbeitsplätzen in Saudi-Arabien und Griechenland um Abschied zu sagen vom Vater, erst am Krankenbett und dann am Sarg.

Mir fehlten damals die Worte. Heute fand ich sie beim Erich Kästner:

 

Kleine Führung durch die Jugend Und plötzlich steht man wieder in der Stadt, in der die Eltern wohnen und die Lehrer und andre, die man ganz vergessen hat. Mit jedem Schritte fällt das Gehen schwerer. Man sieht die Kirche, wo man sonntags sang. (Man hat seitdem fast gar nicht mehr gesungen.) Dort sind die Stufen, über die man sprang. Man blickt hinüber. Es sind andre Jungen. Der Fleischer Kurzhals lehnt an seinem Haus. Nun ist er alt. Man winkt ihm wie vor Jahren. Er blickt zurück. Und sieht verwundert aus. Man kennt ihn noch. Er ist sich nicht im klaren. Dann fährt man Straßenbahn und hat viel Zeit. Der Schaffner ruft die kommenden Stationen. Es sind Stationen der Vergangenheit! Man dachte, sie sei tot. Sie blieb hier wohnen. Dann steigt man aus. Und zögert. Und erschrickt. Der Wind steht still, und alle Wolken warten. Man biegt um eine Ecke. Und erblickt ein schwarzes Haus in einem kahlen Garten. Das ist die Schule. Hier hat man gewohnt. Im Schlafsaal brennen immer noch die Lichter. Im Amselpark schwimmt immer noch der Mond. Und an die Fenster pressen sich Gesichter. Das Gitter blieb. Und nun steht man davor. Und sieht dahinter neue Kinderherden. Man fürchtet sich. Und legt den Kopf ans Tor. (Es ist, als ob die Hosen kürzer werden.) Hier floh man einst. Und wird jetzt wieder fliehn. Was nützt der Mut? Hier wagt man nicht zu retten. Man geht, denkt an die kleinen Eisenbetten und fährt am besten wieder nach Berlin.

 

 

 

Bastards I've met

 

 

Many years ago, one night when I couldn't sleep (which is most nights), I idly listened to RADIO NATIONAL and a segment called VERBATIM, in which the interviewer talked with a then 92-year-old chap called Bill who has had an obsession with wheels all his long life. Listen to the interview here.

The power of the engine didn't matter; whether it was trucks, bicycles or battered old 2CV Citroens, Bill had travelled Australia from end to end on all of them. Most of his travelling had been done in pursuit of work or girlfriends, and his was the story of a labouring man with a taste for adventure and no desire to settle down.

 

 

For Bill, there had always been another river to ford or a python to wrestle or a murderer to evade ... and suddenly I realised that I knew that chap: he was the Bill Skinner whom I had befriended back in 1977 when I lived on Thursday Island. Bill had driven an old truck up to Cape York and, daunted by the prospect of driving down that same rough road again, had come across to Thursday Island to book himself, his three dogs, and his truck onto the barge returning to Cairns in a few days' time. He had missed the boat going back to Bamaga and wandered the main street of Thursday Island aimlessly when we ran into each other. I invited him to stay at my house for the night and we talked and talked (and drank and drank!) well into the night.

We met again in 1979 when I overnighted at the Great Northern Hotel in Cairns on my way to a job interview on Mornington Island. Bill lived in Cairns at the time and I went to his house in Severin Street. His backyard was a junkyard! It was full of old things which Bill had kept or collected under some "it-may-come-in-handy-one-day" compulsion. To make room for even more junk, Bill had moved the clothes hoist onto the top of the roof! Laundry-day at Bill's must've been quite a thing to behold!

It was almost dark when I got there. He said he was about to get some soil for his garden and told me to jump into his old, unregistered jeep. I was wondering where he would get soil at such late hour when he pulled in at a nearby cemetery and ask me to keep a sharp look-out while he was shovelling soil from a freshly-dug grave into the back of his jeep. He'd forgotten to tell me that we were going to be a couple of grave-robbers just as he hadn't told me that he'd "tarred" his old, unregistered jeep in black paint only a couple of days before. Those black paint spots stayed on my trousers for a very long time!

In another twist of fate, while on assignment with FLUOR Engineering in Melbourne in 1981 and staying at the old Majestic Hotel on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, I bumped into his daughter Roslyn, who was then living in nearby Elsternwick, and her husband, whom he'd described in the radio interview as "that useless man who just sits around the house and won't get a job". I bumped into her again in Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island where she had moved after Melbourne and where I had tried to settle after I'd come back from overseas in 1985 - but that's a story for another day.

After hearing him on the radio, I wrote a short note to his then current address in Longwarry in Victoria. He replied that his memory was no longer what it used to be but that he did remember his trip to Thursday Island and our meeting and, as he put it, "if I can find Nelligen on the map, I'll drop in some day" and "I could easily drive up there, but thieves are everywhere here now and very cunny [sic]" and "I camp in a caravan every night hoping to catch the thieves - with a 3-inch piece of pipe!!!" It sounded just like the old Bill Skinner!

He either couldn't find Nelligen on the map or was too busy hoping to catch up with those thieves because he never made it to Nelligen despite living well past his hundred-mark (which he celebrated in 2012 with his daughter Roslyn on Magnetic Island where she still lives).

 

 

He's finally settled on his own plot in the Belgian Gardens Cemetery. If I ever get back to Townsville, I pop by and look you up, you old bastard!

 

 

Some of my best friends were acquaintances

 

The only New Year's Resolution I made - other than the one resolution not to make any - was to invest in a new address book, and I have been occupied with the somewhat saddening task of copying out names and adresses from the old.

It's a very old book indeed, since it accompanied me in all my travels around and around and around the world for more than thirty years. Who were all those people crammed into the pages of this battered old book? Every page is absolutely jam-packed with names and numbers, sometimes underlined or with marginal notations 'See page so-and-so'.

There are names that belong to boat voyages, or train travels, or hotel encounters; people who seemed so charming that one promised to 'keep in touch'. I never offered them to 'look in and see me if you are passing through' as I usually was, as they say, of no fixed abode which spared me a lot of trouble as they were absolute strangers with whom I had nothing in common except a shared voyage or some talk in a bar or dining room.

Of course, there are some names and addresses that I am transcribing into my new book that belong to people who were once just passers-by or brief encounters somewhere, but who have come to justify the word 'friend' and have gone on meaning that through many years of absence.

 

 

With email and the internet, it's now much easier to keep in touch, and also to know when no longer to keep in touch, such as when one's email is returned with the mail delivery message 'mailbox for user is full'. It probably means that an old friend has gone 'off-line', metaphorically or, more likely, physically, and no amount of emailing will reach him again.

Perhaps future death certificates should include an instruction to shut down the email account so as to remove any doubt in a sender's mind.

I couldn't have said it better myself

Senator Alex Antic, the lone voice in the wilderness

 

Peter Lacey does a wonderful job in publishing "Recollections", an online magazine about the history of our local area. In his latest issue he has added the first of what I hope will be many articles on 'hot' topics.

The first 'hot' topic is about the "Welcome to Country" message which now precedes every event and even radio and television broadcasts. As he prudently adds, "These views do not necessarily reflect the views of the South Coast History Society"; however, they closely reflect mine.

 

Click on images to enlarge

 

If you wish to receive "Recollections", send an email containing the message 'Send Recollections' to southcoasthistory@yahoo.com. It’s free!

Gescheit gedacht und dumm gehandelt, so bin ich mein' Tage durchs Leben gewandelt

 

 

Der erste Morgen im neuen Jahr: gibt es da etwas besseres als Elke Heidenreich zu lesen? Leider gibt es ihre Bücher in Australien nicht und die Angebote auf ebay von Deutschland sind einfach zu teuer wenn man die Lieferkosten dazurechnet.

 

Drück drauf um es zu vergrössern oder hier

 

Da muß ich mich dann mit diesen zwei Seiten begnügen. Ja, also dann: "Alle Jahre wieder. Es wär so schön gewesen, es hat nicht sein sollen."