"Here goes another one!"

 

Source
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Brian Herde died an untimely early death in March 1999, aged only 68.
His brother Bob, who was one grade below at Jamestown Primary School,
and thus presumably one year younger, also died early in 1998, aged only 66.
Their father died after a long illness in 1950, aged 48. Bad luck or bad genes?

 

We worked together on the Bougainville Copper Project. Then we met again in mid-1974 in Port Moresby where I worked as internal auditor with AIR NIUGINI and he as accountant for Tutt Bryants. Then he visited me in Lae just before I flew out to Burma, and we spent Christmas 1975 together at my friend's place in Wewak. Coming back from Iran and taking another job in Moresby in 1976, I spent many weekends with him, and when I left for another job on Thursday Island, he visited me there in 1977. Later that year I relocated to Honiara and he came to visit me there for Christmas. The following year, 1978, I took a posting in Penang in Malaysia and he invited himself there, too, for what was from memory a four-week-long holiday. Then I took a break from being his constant host, during which time I briefly met up with him again in Adelaide on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia, until my transfer to Piraeus in Greece in 1983, when he wrote to asked if I had a job for him there. I flew him out and put him up in a hotel in Piraeus and he worked for me for three months. That was it, I hoped, as I'd grown tired of all the drop-ins.

 

Brian at Marina Zea in Piraeus during one of our regular weekend meets. And here comes the kicker: about a week-and-a-half before the three months for which I had flown him out all the way from Australia at company expense and paid him $3,000-a-month had finished, he stuck his head into my office to inform me that he had booked his return flight for the following day. As he put it, "I'm leaving early to compensate for the extra time I worked with you on weekends". A few months later I received a phone call from a prospective employer to whom he had applied for a new job with a glowing reference he had written himself on a letterhead purloined from my office. Friends and employees I have known.

 

Until 1991 (or was it 1992?), when he wrote from New Guinea where he had taken a job as accountant on a coffee plantation in the Highlands, inquiring if he was still welcome in Canberra where I had started my own practice in early 1986. I relented and he moved into my granny flat for a week or two by which time he had sorely tested my hospitality. After a long "Vienna Night" at the Austrian Club, again entirely funded out of my own pocket, he had so embarrassed me in front of my then girlfriend with his almost pathological stinginess that, encouraged by the alcohol, I gave him a piece of my mind before wishing him a good night outside the granny flat. Next day was a Sunday and I let him sleep it off but when by mid-morning there was still no sign of life, I knocked on the door. No response! I drew open the sliding door, and there was his empty bed all straightened out and the key to the granny flat but no message left on the coffee table. He had done a runner!

Despite having been an incorrigible bludger, he had been a good friend from 1970 until 1991 (or was it 1992?), and I had sometimes wondered what had become of this likeable couldn't-care-less-what-other-people-think-of-me happy-go-lucky unconventional accountant. An old airport arrival card from July 1972 told me that he was born in 1931 and now 94 years old and, at least statistically speaking, unlikely to be still around.

 

Brian returning to Australia in July 1972 after one year in New Guinea, with a detour via Hong Kong. His base was with his stepfather in South Australia, so this address in the Northern Territory must've been another one of his many "drop-ins"

 

Then I found this webpage on wikitree.com mentioning a "HERDE Brian John, born abt 1932, died 26-Mar-1999, age 67, in Townsville Hospital". It also mentioned a brother, Robert Henry, an opal cutter, which neatly tied in with Brian selling cut opals as a sideline on Bougainville Island and in Port Moresby. His name wasn't too common either, right down to the two given names - although the "born abt 1932" was out by a year - and "Townsville Hospital" made sense because during his time in Greece he had told me that he had bought a property at Airlie Beach which was just three hours south of Townsville whose hospital would have been the nearest he would've been taken to in case of a medical emergency. I emailed Towsnville Hospital and asked them for more information but I don't expect any reply, not with privacy laws being the way they are.

 

Searching the Ryerson Index shows that the official death notice was published
in the Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, which is where Brian grew up.

 

I in turn hope not to have broken any privacy laws after having pieced together this puzzle which, if correct, tells me "Here goes another one!" and puts me on notice that I, too, have been living on borrowed time.

And to think that I should've made this "lightning-bolt" discovery almost twenty-six years to the day on which he had passed away. Coincidence? Rest in Peace, Brian! I hope they made you welcome where you are now!