Australia 1965-1967 Coles, Melbourne Ingram & Sons, Canberra December 1965 to November 1967, Australia & New Zealand Bank, Canberra After my 'compulsory' two years in Australia 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' 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. 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. 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 Errol Flynn of whom I had never heard before (but whose autobiography 'My Wicked, Wicked Ways' I was to read many years later.) [Sometime later, I found in a local op-shop an old book written by Errol Flynn, "Showdown" (1946) which, although of no great literary merit, is an entertaining adventure story set in New Guinea with the main character in the story, Shamus O'Thames, being Errol Flynn's thinly disguised "alter ego". I didn't know that Flynn had written anything other than his 1960 autobiography so I looked up the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature and discovered that he had written a regular New Guinea column for the Bulletin and a travel book, "Beam Ends" (1937).] It seemed the Territory attracted three types of people: missionaries, moneymakers, and misfits. Which category would I fit? 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.