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."