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And thereby hangs another tale:
As a boy in Germany I used to dream of visiting three places in
the world: Borneo, the Amazon Basin, and New Guinea. (As it turned
out, I eventually lived and worked in Borneo and in New Guinea
- two out of three is not bad, is it?)
This is the story of how I got to New Guinea:
After my 'compulsory' two years in Australia from 1965 to 1967 as an 'assisted migrant',
I was free to leave again - and leave I did as it seemed impossible
to live on what was initially a youth wage and later became the salary
of a junior bank officer with the ANZ Bank.
I had booked a passage back to Europe aboard the Greek ship
'PATRIS'
So the 'Patris' never got to Port Moresby but sailed through the Great Australian
Bight and around the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town) instead. However,
a good number of 'Territorians' from the then Territory of Papua &
New Guinea had already booked a passage and the shipping line at great expense
flew them down to Sydney to join the ship. And so it came that I spent
some four weeks aboard the 'Patris' in the company of a whole bunch
of hard-drinking and boisterous 'Territorians'.
Having barely scraped together the fare, I had no money to spend
on drinks but I did mix with the
'Territorians' night after night in the ship's Midnight Club to listen
to Graham Bell and his Allstars. I was
spellbound by the stories those 'larger-than-life' 'Territorians' told
about the Territory and my mind was made up that I would go there one day.
One of the 'Territorians' whom I befriended was Noel Butler who then lived in
Wewak in the Sepik District. If New Guinea seemed remote and exotic,
then the mystical Sepik District was even more remote and more exotic!
It sounded all very Conrad-esque and straight out of "Heart of Darkness"!
Noel had been sent up to the Territory as
a soldier during the war and had never left it! After leaving the army,
he had tried his hand at coffee and tea in the Highlands and had held
numerous positions of one kind or another ever since. He
epitomised the typical 'Territorian' with his Devil-may-care attitude
and his unconcern about the future, about money, and about a career.
Somehow, for those people, the Territory provided everything they wanted
from life and the rest of the world was the place that was visited once
every other year during their three-month leave.
Our love of chess made Noel and me shipboard mates and we spent many
hours hunched over the chess board as the ship ploughed its way towards
Europe.
Eventually the ship docked at Piraeus in Greece where Noel saw me off
at the railway station as I was bound for Hamburg in Germany. I had
been promised a job there and my thin wallet was in urgent need of
some fattening-up! There was no time or money left for sightseeing
as I boarded the train on a wintry Athens morning to spent several
days transiting through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Austria before
reaching Germany.
I spent the next few miserable winter months in Hamburg and then in
Frankfurt before finding a way out again: I got a job in southern
Africa which, as I saw it, was almost halfway back to where I eventually
wanted to go: New Guinea. That is not to say that my career was a planned
one. Although I have not been an out-and-out drifter, circumstance
usually played a larger role than choice in what I did with my life -
or perhaps I should say what life did to me (but that's probably
true of most people's lives).
With no money in my pocket, I had to rely
on employers to get me back to the other side of the world.
My destination was
South West Africa, or Namibia as it is called now,
which stretches north from
South Africa's Orange River along 1280 kilometres of the loneliest,
yet in parts most hauntingly beautiful coastlines touched by the
Atlantic Ocean.
But the die was cast and I knew I would find a way to get to the
Territory. From Noel, with whom I had stayed in contact during all
this time, I had heard about PIM, the Pacific Island Monthly which
was read by one and all in the Territory. I bought a copy and decided
to place in it a tiny classified ad which from memory ran
something like this: "Young Accountant (still studying) seeks position
in the Islands." The response was hardly overwhelming but the two
letters I did receive were enough. One was from a Tom Hepworth of
Pigeon Island Traders in the Outer Reef Islands in the then British
Solomon Islands Protectorate who described to me in glowing terms the
leisurely life on a small atoll in one of the remotest part of the
South Pacific. It all sounded terribly tempting but his closing
remarks that "of course, we couldn't pay you much at all..."
stopped that particular day-dream as I had to think of my
future and what future was there after several years spent on a tiny
island away from anywhere and with no money in my pocket? (As it happened, I made contact with the
Hepworths again almost 35 years later
(but thereby hangs yet another tale.)
The other letter was from a Mr. Barry Weir, resident manager of the firm
of chartered accountants Hancock, Woodward & Neill
Rabaul was everything I had expected of the Territory: it was a small
community settled around picturesque Simpson Harbour. The climate
was tropical with blazing sunshine and regular tropical downpours, the
vegetation strange and exotic, and the social life a complete change
from anything I had ever experienced before!
Each of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping. I always dreaded
when it was their turn as they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent
the rest of the kitty to stock up on beer! We spent Saturday nights
at the Palm Theatre sprawled in our banana chairs with an esky full of
stubbies beside us. The others rarely spent a night at home; their nocturnal
activities ranged from the Ambonese Club to the Ralum Club to the RSL.
When they were well into their beers, mosquitoes would bite them and then fly
straight into the wall! Then, next morning, they were like
snails on Valium. How they managed to stay awake during office hours has
always been a mystery to me!
Rest in Peace, Noel. I know you would have wanted me
to read this poem at your funeral:
During my time in Rabaul, advertisements began to appear in the
local POST-COURIER for the Bougainville Copper Project. I applied to
the project's construction managers Bechtel Corporation for the advertised
position of Senior Contract Auditor and was invited by the Project
Administration Manager Sid Lhotka to attend an interview at Panguna. It was a
case of vini,vidi,vici and within a month I was flying
back to Bougainville to start work with Bechtel
(but thereby hangs yet another tale.)
I loved contract auditing! It was so much more exciting than
verifying some figures on a balance sheet. It was pitting one's
brains against the contractor's who was hell-bent on squeezing
the last dollar out of each contractual clause and interpreting it
to his best advantage. Nothing was ever quite the way it seemed;
everything was open to interpretation! I had read Rudyard Kipling's
story "The Elephant's Child" in "Just So Stories"
and one of his poems had become an axiom in my work
(many years later I asked a calligrapher to put it on a piece of
vellum and the frame has hung above my desk in many offices
around the world):
After an interlude in Honiara, the capital of the then Protectorate of the British
Solomon Islands, where, under the curious title of "Secretary",
I worked as accountant and administration manager for the British Solomon Islands
Electricity Authority, I returned to Bougainville and then moved on to Port Moresby.
There, on November 1, 1973,
AIR NIUGINI
commenced operations as the national
airline of Papua New Guinea, taking over the internal services of
Ansett Airlines of Papua New Guinea and TAA, and AIR NIUGINI's first
general manager, Ralph Conley, hired me
in 1974 to set up the airline's internal audit department, located at ANG House
on a hill overlooking the city of Port Moresby and its harbour.
Papua New Guinea in those pre-Independence days was full of expatriates
who under the immigration law had to be in possession of
an open return air ticket at all times.
Those tickets had been bought from AIR NIUGINI and in most cases would
not be used for several years. AIR NIUGINI, being a member of IATA,
also sold tickets to any destination in the world without flying
to any overseas port other than Cairns and Honiara. They collected
the money and only had to part with it after the overseas
airlines had presented them with the used ticket coupon through what is
known as the Interline Billing System which in those pre-computer days
could take months. In the meantime, AIR NIUGINI "sat" on all
that money from open return tickets and uncollected overseas
fares and earned good interest on it! A very good business indeed!
But imagine my surprise when during an audit I discovered that
AIR NIUGINI's accountants at Six-Mile were also routinely including all that
unearned money as INCOME in their current Profit & Loss Statement!
My report caused quite a flurry (and a few red faces) in the accounts
department!
AIR NIUGINI had absorbed many of the previous staff from Ansett and TAA
and there were many internal conflicts. One day, for example, an ex-Ansett
flight attendant was assigned to an ex-TAA F27 and obstinately refused to
open the door after a landing at Wewak. According to the regulations of
her previous company, this was the responsibility of the traffic officer on
board. The traffic officer, an ex-TAA man, had been trained differently and,
in any case, had other things to do. He refused to open the door. The argument
pretty well covered the subject of responsibility and competence. Fortunately,
it remained at the verbal level, but it is reported to have lasted more than
15 minutes while the passengers roasted in the cabin under the sizzling sun.
The 'politics' and 'jockeying' for positions permeated most departments,
including finance and administration, and internal auditing under those
circumstances was not a pleasant task. I left before I could explore the
deepest depths of the human character and just after Christmas 1974
(which I spent on a beach in Lae, blissfully unaware that
Cyclone Tracy
had just wiped out Darwin) flew out to Rangoon in Burma to take
up the position of Chief Accountant with the French oil company TOTAL who
had begun drilling for oil in the Arakan Sea. I stopped over in Hong Kong
where the company had booked me into the swank
PENINSULA Hotel who met me
at the airport with a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. I hadn't expected this nor
had they expected to meet a young chap straight out of New Guinea, in shorts
and tee-shirt, carrying a swag over his shoulder.
to be continued ... SOON!
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operated by Chandris Line (or, as we came to call it, Chunder Line -
but that is yet another story!)
which had been scheduled to leave Sydney and call at Port Moresby on
its way through the Suez Canal. But history and the Eqypt-Israeli war
of 1967 [the so-called 6-Day War which began on June 5, 1967]
intervened and the Suez Canal was closed to all shipping.
And as we played game after game, I learnt about the
Territory and listened to stories of some the Territory's
'old-timers', including one 
The Namib desert, whose desolate sands have trapped
and killed thousands of men and women of every race as they sought to
unlock its secrets or merely to survive, runs right to the sea.
The local Ovambo people call Namibia "the land
God made in anger" and as the sun mercilessly bakes deserts,
plains and mountains alike, it is a close cousin to hell. I spent
some time in
in Rabaul on the
island of New Britain in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea
who, subject to a satisfactory interview with their representative
in Australia, offered me the position of audit clerk. That was it!!!
I passed muster at the interview and in the dying days of the year
1969 I left Australia for New Guinea. I was on my way!!!
And to top it all, I
loved the work which offered challenges only available in a small
setting such as Rabaul where expatriate labour was at a premium. The
firm was small: the resident manager, his wife as secretary, and two
accountants (both still studying) plus myself. One of the accountants
was a real character who was destined never to leave the
Territory. For him the old aphorism came true that "if you spend
more than five years in New Guinea you were done for, you'd never
be able to get out, your energy would be gone, and you'd rot there
like an aged palm." He and an accountant from another chartered firm
and myself shared a company house (which
was really an old Chinese tradestore) in Vulcan Street
and a 'hausboi' who answered to the name of Getup. "Getup!!!" "Yes,
masta!"
Easter 1970 gave me the chance to visit my old mate Noel Butler when
the Rabaul tennis club chartered a DC3 to fly to Wewak for some
sort of tournament. I got a seat aboard and visited Noel who lived
on his own little estate along the Hawain River some ten miles outside Wewak.
It was a wonderful place! Tilly lamps at night and a shower gravity-fed
from a rooftop holding tank which was refilled by the 'haus boi'
with a handpump. A native village was just down the road and far into
the night small bands of villagers would pass the house strumming
their ukeleles. An alcoholic beachcomber by the name of McKenzie
(who was said to be an excellent carpenter on the few occasions when
he was off the grog) lived even farther out than Noel. He had no transport
which however did not stop him from walking all the way into Wewak to quench his
ever-present thirst at the Sepik Club. On his return late at night he would stagger
in to Noel's for a few more noggins to propel him on his way. In later years
some friendly people in town fixed him up with a donkey which used to carry
him home safely. The Territory was full of characters like McKenzie.
Noel returned to Australia in the late 70s
but 'homesickness' for his spiritual home New Guinea meant that he never
settled successfully anywhere else. He moved from Bundaberg to Caboolture (1980)
to Innisfail to Mt Perry (1985) to Childers (1990) where he passed away in 1995. During
all those years we remained good friends and exchanged a constant stream of
letters and visited each other on several occasions. His passing-away
not only broke my last link with New Guinea but also meant the loss of a
very dear friend who belonged to that generation of Australians who took pride
in their self-reliance and fortitude in the face of hardship. Whenever our talks
turned to a problem one of us had experienced in the course of our
quarter-of-a-century-long friendship, he simply remarked, "A philosopher
I ain't" and got on with the nearest job to hand.
I met Noel again when
I returned to Australia in 1985 and went up to Mt Perry on my way from
Townsville to Sydney. Noel had just finished building himself a small but
comfortable house on a 5-acre block on the edge of the township. I stayed over
for a few days; later, when my settling into the hurly-burly of Sydney left me wondering
if I had done the right thing, Noel invited me to join him at Mt Perry which,
as he put it, would give him a "new lease of life". I didn't
recognise it for the cri de cœr it was and it wasn't
until 1990 that I visited Noel again just after he had moved to
Childers where he had again built a small house on the edge of town. His passing-away
in 1995 came as quite a shock to me: until we get old ourselves we tend to
regard death as something that happens to other people. The most persuasive
reminder that none of us is exempt comes when it happens to a coeval.
