Saturday 11th September

It’s one of those dates isn’t it? Where were you when ……….?

I was at the start of what turned into a week of long hours, minimum sleep and a huge amount of work repairing No 1 Paper Mill at Kinleith following a rather bad fire. 7 days later we finished, roof replaced, beams and girders repaired replaced or buttressed up, and some incredibly insane moments involved at times during the week. Harry Lau asking me at some stage on Saturday when I thought we’d be finished, looking around at the people working everywhere, the steel waiting to be lifted into place and welded, the twisted roof trusses, wiring hanging everywhere, and saying “2.35 am Monday Harry, trust me” and then watching as we all packed up at walked out at 2.45 am Monday morning. And the Mill restarting at 6am Monday with no hesitation. In amongst all of that, watching on the screens the management had in the work stations throughout the mill all the turmoil in New York.

9 years later 3 countries destroyed and others threatened, and the world is in no better or safer condition than it was before, and I know a lot of people who feel we are worse off with the loss of personal freedoms. I know there are a few airports I refuse to fly through if at all possible, Los Angeles and Heathrow at the top of the list, closely followed by Sydney.

1959 Fidel Castro taking control of Cuba from the US backed Batista Government. I was 10 years old, and I still remember the newspaper headlines, the US especially being most aggrieved at losing one of the Mafia playgrounds.

Followed later by the US initiated Bay of Pigs Invasion that turned into a fiasco.

November 1963, 14 years old with a group of the neighbourhood kids on our bikes, when someone came racing along and announced President Kennedy has been shot!

1968 and Che Guevara shot in Bolivia after spending a wasted life trying to forment a communist uprising. Apart from his record as one of Fidel Castros execution men, there was never anything he did to help anyone. Just another failed and sad revolutionary believer that couldn’t see past the rhetoric. Reading Evergreen Magazine and having a lot of mixed emotions about how Che was portrayed. Actually, reading Evergreen, and while agreeing with a lot of the writers, Nat Hentoff, Jerry Rubin, Malcolm X, this was the 60’s, there was also a lot of nihilistic stuff that has resurfaced now. Plus the foundations for Ehrlquist and his population explosion bomb, the doomsday apocalypse crowd and the Earth Mother Gaia believers which morphed into the “the world is going to fry crowd” as exemplified by Al Gore, a true snake oil salesman if ever there was one.

1975, watching the mad scramble to get out of Saigon, the helicopters lifting off the Embassy roof, people clinging to the skids, as the North Vietnamese were coming through the gates. Helicopters being pushed off the carriers into the sea, the total waste of lives to gain nothing.

Add in Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Mama Cass, Keith Relf, Marc Bolan, Tony Hancock.

Oh well, life goes on, it’ll all be the same in 500 years. As Stupid Bloody Johnson always said about his landscaping.

All I’m hoping for is to have a nursery and training school established here sometime within my lifetime. I know, shortsighted goal, but I’m over the 1,000 year Reich stuff, I’ll settle for something I think might be possible.

Friday turned into a sudden spurt of activity for some reason, apart from finally stripping the drive pulley on the Rover mulcher, utterly munched the keyway, shaft and pulley. New pulley wheel, shaft, bearings needed now, which could be a while getting them from Brisbane. It’s had a lot of use, we put through 15 cu metres of compost in the last week, I think we are really pushing the limits with it.

So instead of mulching compost we marked out and dug post holes for the propagation house, and ended the week only a day or so behind my fantasy schedule. I’m learning to be really basic again in what I do with the crew, Andrew is good, but a lot of the others especially the older ones, with no schooling at all, when you start to talk about 3-4-5 triangles, hypotenuse, square on this equals the square on the other 2 sides, it results in a lot of smiles, blank looks and what the hell is the mad palangi talking about now look in the eyes. It gets down to using bits of twigs, drawing in the dirt, adding fingers and toes, making little model houses out of twigs to show the difference between square and not so square.

Saturday afternoon

Neighbours are having another gambling and general afternoon party, a lot of people, alcohol, cards and money changing hands. It’s threatening to rain, so it may be an early night for them, even with the extension they built this week out from the sleepout hut. I’ve already had one of the guys walk into the stays under my house, to much laughter from everyone there. I heard the TWANGGGGG THUMP as he walked into it, the house shook, followed by all the laughter from next door as he had to be carried out from under my house.

Tiff and I looked at another little landscape job at one of the World Bank houses this morning. Nice little job, a bit of clearing out, replanting, nothing major, apart from the problem of getting down the hill to the house. Then trying to turn the truck around in a rather small space.