Two in one week is two too many

 

Heimo's passport photo from the time of his immigration to Australia in 1963

 

The phone rang. "Have you heard?" At "Riverbend" we live on the edge of Nelligen and hear nothing of what's going on in our small village. "No, I haven't!" "Heimo passed away last Wednesday!" Suddenly I felt cold. Time to light the fire.

It's now more than six years ago when Padma came back from the weekly craft meeting and announced, "You may be interested to know there's a new lady in our craft group whose husband is from Austria. They bought a house on Old Bolaro Mountain Road and moved here."

Of course, Austria is not Germany. Instead, it's that little country next to it where they speak German with a funny accent, but there were other similarities: Heimo had also arrived as a young migrant, although two years before me, and he had also been "processed" through the dreaded Bonegilla Migrant Centre, and so over several visits to their house and ours and quite a few glasses of wine slowly our friendship developed.

 

Heimo's Bonegilla registration card

 

It was only a few weeks ago that we had lunch together at the Moruya Bowling Club and afterwards he had helped me to empty another bottle of red at home, and we had planned another get-together on the jetty as soon as the weather turned warm again. Padma hadn't gone to Wednesday's craft meeting but Heimo's wife Loraine had. When she returned home, Heimo was in bed having already breathed his last.

 

 

They say we should live every day as if it were our last; perhaps we should also treat every meeting as if it were our last which suggests we shouldn't be obsessed about trivial inconveniences or ruminate about small affronts to our ego. We should focus on what matters, and what matters is that we are in this together trying to find meaning in our life.

 

 

This has been a bad week because two in one week is two too many.

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

 

Who could ever forget this famous line in the movie "Casablanca"? If I had already heard of it when, just returned from two years in Australia, I was standing on the railway platform in wintry Piraeus in December 1967 and saying my good-byes, I might have said to my shipboard mate for the past four weeks, "Noel, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

 

RMHS Patris

 

We had both just disembarked from the liner PATRIS, Noel turning right to Istanbul and I am heading left to (c)old Germany. The PATRIS had originally been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea on the way 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 to board the ship at Port Moresby, Noel amongst them, where flown down to Sydney at the shipping line's expense. 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.

 

Noel's Sydney Airport arrival card on 13 November 1967,
one day before the departure of RMHS Patris

 

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 we kept going by regular correspondence and, after I had come up to PNG in late 1969, mutual visits, I to his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel spending 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 to my next assignment in Burma. After Burma I spent Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

Our paths crossed more frequently after PNG's Independence in 1975 and the onset of old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland and 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".

 

 

Our friendship lasted for almost thirty years until his untimely death on this day in 1995. To paraphrase Rick's famous last words in "Casablanca", "Noel, I think we've had a beautiful friendship."

Another Greek morning

 

 

There's only one thing better than a night spent in front of the blazing fireplace, and that's a sunny morning spent beside the river for a quiet Frühschoppen with a glass (or two) of retsina and a tub of tzatziki, both of which are an acquired taste.

I acquired my taste for them during the two years I lived and worked in Greece, and as much as I still miss Greece, I never miss out on my white bread dipped in tzatziki and washed down with a glass (or two) of retsina. After all, as the poet Percy Shelley proclaimed in the preface to his iconic verse drama "Hellas", "We are all Greeks", and he went on to explain how Greece is the birthplace of European civilisation: "Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece".

 

Read Shelley's "Hellas" here

 

Something to reflect on on another Greek morning. Στην υγειά σας.