I walked back into town and entered the Grand Hotel again, where I listened to two guitar players of such astonishing inability that they made Jimi Hendrix sound like Brahms. Perchance, I met the New Zealander Gary Duff, and Tony, on T.I. since 1959 but originally from Lausanne in Switzerland, and Henry the Dane, a mackerel fisherman. Tony was retired and only drank double gins with just a hint of tonic. The "indescribable intoxication" the famous island-lover Lawrence Durrell had experienced at finding himself in "a little world surrounded by the sea" was clearly not enough for Tony. He seemed coy about the sort of work he used to do on T.I. but it could be rightly assumed that the only job he ever had done really well and with total dedication was drinking. I knew Gary, the cray fisherman, from my time on T.I. in 1977 when he had been married then to Dang, a Thai girl, who now lived in Cairns. Gary, now 60, was remarried, again to a Thai girl who was just then back in Thailand, and was still diving for crays and drinking. He is said to keep his crew awake nights when he rolls over in bed, the $100 notes in the mattress make such a noise. Not much of a life by his own admission and he seemed to envy me my thirty freewheeling years through over a dozen countries while he had done little more than enrich the local publicans. Isn't the world pretty much like an à la carte restaurant where everybody thinks the food the next table has ordered is so much more inviting and delicious than his own? Well, my own working-life (I hesitate to call it a career) has been far from planned. I don't suggest I have been an out-and-out drifter but circumstance has played a larger role than choice in what I have done with my life - or perhaps I should say what life has done with me - but that probably applies to most people.

Leo Umundum (aka Leo the Hun), an Austrian, and Reg soon joined us. Leo had come to T.I. in 1960. He lived in some style on Friday Island in a shack which he had built himself on land with ocean views which he had never bought. He lived there with a bunch of others who had taken the parable in the Bible about the multitude that loafs and fishes all too literally. Some of the latter-day beachcombers in the Torres Strait have been on the dole for so long, they've forgotten what kind of work they're out of. They all had succumbed to the siren song of this remote and soporific island which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life will count for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered. Did homesickness ever strike them? Did they ever want to return? Unrefined and unread as they were, they echoed closely Louis Becke's sentiments - of whom they knew nothing - who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?" T.I. has always had more than its fair share of interesting characters, such as George and Patrick, two eccentric Irish beachcombers who slept under an upturned dinghy in front of the Federal Hotel, and 'Baked Beans', a Danish seaman who jumped ship at T.I.  And more recently Karl, the German, who's alleged to have been a member of the Waffen-SS. He slept in the cemetery and Bernie Bolger, the publican, would give him a free beer every time he performed his goose-step in the ROYAL HOTEL's public bar. Another real character was Ron whose last name remained a mystery as he used at least three pseudonyms regularly and haphazardly as fishermen commonly did for taxation purposes. Usually referred to as Ronny Crayfish, some fool once wagered him that he couldn't skol a bottle of vodka. Of course, Ron tried, and woke up three days later in intensive care at Cairns Base Hospital, a thousand kilometres away. He had collapsed with alcohol poisoning and been flown out on the aerial ambulance. These days, with a regular and guaranteed $450 in dole-money coming in every fortnight, beachcombers in the Torres Strait carried mobile phones in their faded and frayed jeans, surfed the internet, and subscribed to SkyTV. Thanks to all you hard-working taxpayers of Australia! Not that those bludgers would even think of acknowledging their debt; to them the dole was their God-given right and more or less the whole Torres Strait lived on it. If it wasn't the dole then it was the "work-for-the-dole", one of the more inventive euphemisms of our times. As one observant chap put it, "There's more TSI than A in ATSIC for the very good reason that most of the money goes to the Torres Strait Islanders." This is how Alan Lucas described the situation on the island as early as 1980 in his "Cruising the Coral Coast": "Thursday Island has degenerated over the years from one of the world's most romantic pearling ports to something of a 'dole office' for Torres Strait Islanders and nearby mainland Aborigines. Littering, drunkenness and a total lack of self-respect appear to be the main sports and the administration does not give the impression of conquering the island's ills. As one who has known TI since the early 1960's and who has watched it go steadily downhill I can only lament its demise and admit that there is little there to interest the visitor." True but he could have said the same of many of the 'whiteys' inhabiting the Torres Strait. With nothing between us but our unfinished drinks, I soon said my "Good-byes!" to Gary, Tony, Henry and Reg and walked back to the Federal Hotel. <=== previous page           next page ===>