Isn't the world-wide web wonderful? It allows us to meet up with all sorts of people! My travelogue of my trip to Thursday Island attracted many readers: American and Australian servicemen who were stationed there during the war, fellow-travellers, and some former residents of the island.
One such former resident is Balfour Ross who had gone to Thursday Island
in 1964 as a young man of 27 and, apart from a four-year stint in equally remote Normanton and another four years
in New Zealand, had spent all his life on Thursday Island. What's even more remarkable, however, is the fact that
Balfour and his wife June, after a lifetime on T.I., have recently retired to Malaysia under the
Malaysia My Second Home
Programme.
Amazing what you can do when you start to think outside the square!
Balfour now lives in Terengganu on Malaysia's beautiful east coast on the fourteenth floor of a modern apartment
building with sweeping views of the town, its river and beaches, and out to the sea. Malaysia is a country of
startling beauty and great ethnic and cultural variety with a lovely tropical climate and what's more, it offers a very
affordable lifestyle for someone on an Australian pension. Smart move, Balfour!
I have fond memories of Malaysia from my own time there when I
worked as a consultant to the Penang Port Commission in 1978. It seems that Penang is a particularly
popular place for those who make Malaysia their second home.
Among them
are friends of Balfour's, Alan and Pat Jones of Perth, who bought and renovated an old Chinese shophouse
which they now run as a café. Balfour also put me in touch again with David Richardson whom I had
known on T.I. and whose holiday shack on Price of Wales Island I had sometimes visited. David now lives
in Babinda south of Cairns. By a strange twist of fate, Balfour and David are now related through Balfour's
wife who is the daughter of David's wife. Don't we live in a small world?
Balfour also put me in touch with Stan Pedler on Thursday Island, a large, effusive fellow with a colossal colonial-style moustache, who runs
the Christian bookshop on the island and I remember having gone into his shop to look for something by C.S Lewis
and Stan and I striking up a conversation about all sorts of things.
The sign above his shop reads 'Sower
Christian Bookstore, Agent for All Pest and Weed Control'. It obviously pays to diversify on T.I. where the
newsagency sells kitchen utensils and the supermarket sells fridges, and Stan, apart from being an insecticidal
Bible-thumper, also handles airfreight for TNT and sells plane tickets for
Aero-Tropics ('If you want to get to the
outer islands and you want God on your side, then I'm your man.')
He is a modern-day missionary with two
life stories to tell: his own and Jesus's. A failed cotton farmer, he flew north in his
little Cessna as far as he could, to Mer, in the eastern Torres Strait, where he felt the warmth of God's presence
and cottoned on to Christianity. A year later he returned to Mer in his yacht "Temehani"
laden with picture Bibles and Jesus videos. Calling himself New Light Ministries, he moved all around the Strait before
setting up shop on T.I. The world is full of unconventional characters and you can meet many of them on T.I.
Best wishes and
from us all!
Peter & Padma & Malty
& Rover
riverbend@batemansbay.com
5 August 2006