Friday, 29 April 2005
Ricky loved making money, and T.I. was just the place for him. "You can buy; cheap - $500,000!" he exhorts me, pointing to an empty block of land across the road on the corner of Douglas & Blackall Street.
I remembered it well as the site of T.I.'s open-air picture theatre with its primitive wooden seating. All gone! "Come back to Ricky," he admonished me as I left the shop empty-handed.
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Although now fewer in numbers than in 1977, T.I. still had a good many quaint shops
which, like their owners, seemed like prehistoric fossils. They offered all sorts of
strange items which at first glance seemed as useful as mittens to a concert pianist.
Did anybody ever buy them? One such shop, "Green Horizon"
(more like "Lost Horizon"), was presided
over by Quasimodo-like Anthony Seekee who, with few gray hairs and fewer teeth, proclaimed,
"Asiatics grow old very slowly." Don't you sell mirrors in your shop,
Anthony? He told me all about the various pieces of real estate he had amassed in
Cairns at a time when a block of land was still selling for $5,000 while in the
same breath bemoaning the fact that because of all those riches he no longer qualified
for the age-pension. "I should have gone to Vietnam as some of my mates had
done so that I could now claim the veterans' pension which isn't means-tested,"
he complained.
Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.
A little farther up the road was Thursday Island's only empire of kitsch,
"Ricky's T.I. Discount Store", presided over by T.I.'s sole Singaporean.
Ricky Cheong, about 50, bespectacled, black stovepipe pants and patterned shirt,
sold everything useless from stuffed lobsters to ceramic dragons.
