The only death we experience is other people's

 

 

It's exactly thirty years to the day when my best friend from my New Guinea days, Noel Butler, sent me this funny "Childers by Night" card and wrote, "Dear Pete, Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this. Mine is but that's inevitable."

 

 

I had no idea how prescient and indeed deadly serious his message was until a couple of months later I received a phone call from a woman. She introduced herself as Noel's sister and told me that Noel had just passed away!

It may seem that Noel had never achieved much in his life except get through it. And after his life had come to an end, he left no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But the way of life that he had chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and self-reliance of his character left a great influence on me so that, long after his death, I still remember him as a very remarkable man.

Noel and I first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea 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, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. 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.

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 lasted until his death almost thirty years later!

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent 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 out to my next assignment in Burma.

Our paths crossed more frequently after 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".

Perhaps this struggle is something else that we shared. I, too, still think almost every day about those many faraway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.

"Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein."   
                                                                         Hermann Hesse

 

Why Nelligen? Why not?

 

 

Some people ask me why I retired at Nelligen, to which I reply, "Why not?" (I sometimes ask myself why I retired, full-stop, but that's a different story altogether.)

It all started in Canberra while I was still running my small computer consultancy Canberra Computer Accounting Systems and dabbling in tax and accounting work on the side. After I had solved a tax problem for a German friend, Tony Finsterer, for which I refused payment, he insisted that I stay at his weekend cottage at Nelligen.

For several months, I didn't find the time to drive to the coast. When I eventually did I had almost forgotten Tony's offer. Luckily, I didn't blink as I drove across the Nelligen bridge on the way to Batemans Bay and so spotted this tiny village nestled alongside the Clyde River.

I asked for directions to Tony's cottage at the General Store and was shown to # 21 Sproxton Lane across the river. (Tony has since died and his cottage has changed hands twice and is again for sale.)

The cottage was locked and Tony in Canberra. I phoned him and was told to look for the keys under the watertank and to make myself at home. Which I did and which set me on my own quest to find a little place in Nelligen.

At the time, Nelligen was a place forgotten even by real estate agents and nothing was for sale except a few empty building blocks. One such block overlooked the Clyde River from its location in Nelligen Place. I could imagine sitting there on the verandah and taking in the views. Which is exactly what a chap was doing just two blocks away. I walked up and asked if I could join him.

Soon we were not only sharing the same views but also memories of people and places we both had known as "Sandy" Sandilands and his wife Betty had also lived and worked on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait and in Rabaul in New Guinea. I felt at home at once! A few weeks later I was the proud owner of a block of land in Nelligen Place!

I wanted to build a beautiful little Classic Country Cottage. However, a retired public servant who occupied a small log cabin next to me did what public servants do: be a pain in the coccyx ! He objected to my building plans - TWICE! - on some obscure grounds. This delayed me long enough to find a much better place across the river. And that's how I came to buy "Riverbend"!

"Riverbend" had been auctioned in August 1992. I went to the auction as a spectator knowing that the reserve price was outside my range. It must have been outside everybody else's as well because it didn't sell. More than a year later, in November 1993, the owners accepted my much-reduced offer. The rest, as they say, is history!

(Oh, and I did go back to thank the public servant for objecting to my plans so that I could buy this much better and bigger and waterfront property. Last time I looked his mouth was still open!)

 

 

"Riverbend" has been my home now for over 17 years. As they say, there's no place like home and, as evidenced by the tee-shirt, Nelligen is right up there with every other great metropolis.

 

 

"Here goes another one!"

 

Source
Click on image to enlarge

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?
Their mother died in 1987, aged 80.
Their stepfather, Murray Gladstone Coleman, died in 1993, aged 85.

 

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!