A Life Built Step by Step
— The Life of Gil Kommer —
Recorded and edited by Robin Kommer
to be completed
Dad once said; “Isn’t the memory phenomenal, you close your eyes and you see yourself, in the past, there you are.”
For me as his daughter I wondered what would happen for our future generations, when all the fabulous stories are shared and enjoyed by our family today, are long gone memories for the great grandchildren and the many generations of family still to be born. They are not going to miss out on the amazing tales of their Opa Kommer, because we will document and record dads amazing journey through life.
One of dad’s memorable sayings is: “I’ve got no problems with that”
I had no problems secretly recording dad for around two years and typing up his tales. Then one day I sent dad a brief copy of around ten thousand words. He read it and quietly looked at me remarking on my extraordinary memory to recall his stories so well. That’s a laugh. I said: “dad when was the last time you heard me tell a story in such perfect detail?” he looked at me questioningly. I then produced the recordings and he heard his voice for the first time telling me stories. Dad sat in his chair, crossed his arms across his chest, and was silent. Finally, he looked at me sideways and said: “Well I’d better be careful what I say to you in the future!” It took nearly one year before dad came to the recording party, and then became an active participant in sharing his life stories knowing that I will be recording his every word.
“I’ve had so many adventures in my life and have certainly achieved a lot. Also built a lot of buildings. It’s been, and still is, a very full life, with tragedies along the way. Whether it’s losing Helen, or Uncle Dick, I feel that as long as you keep living the life you're living, you can put them in your heart. You think of them, your loved ones, but don’t allow your life to be totally different because they’re gone.
When Helen passed away, it was the saddest moment in my life, but we still had young Peter, Robbie, Bram, Annelies and of course my beloved wife, Elizabeth. I had a family. Sure, we were sad, it was a tragedy. I still look at the photograph of Helen, and the funny thing is that I’m looking at a young girl’s photograph. I’m not looking at a lady who would be fifty-two now, with a couple of kids and all.
There’s one thing that I think would be silly, and that would be to have regrets and to say that I would have done things differently. Regret is a very negative feeling. If I regretted marrying the mother of my children, Ruth, none of my children would be here, not Bram or Robbie. I wouldn’t have adopted Jennifer and I wouldn’t have had Helen.
I can’t say that I regret. These were the decisions I made at the time. What happens when you start regretting things? Those regrets stay with you. They keep coming into your mind. Regrets can’t be talking points to people because you’d be bloody boring if you spoke about your regrets. The fact remains, if you had of made one single different decision in your life, then your whole life would have been different and would have changed.
Back in New Zealand, Uncle Piet and I had to decide which one of us would go back to Holland to celebrate Oma and Opas’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
At the time, Uncle Piet said: “You should go because you’ve been here first and you’re the oldest.”
“Piet, let’s toss for it,” I replied.
We tossed the coin and Uncle Piet went back to Holland, and his whole life changed. My whole life would have changed if I had of returned to Holland. Look at what would have happened to my life if I had of won the toss. I would have gone back to Holland and the army would have grabbed me. I would have stayed there and I wouldn’t have met Ruth, your mum. A thousand and one things could have happened. My whole life could have changed at the simple toss of a coin.
At one point, we considered moving our business to South Africa. When I looked at the way South Africa was heading after the Shapka massacre, I decided no, South Africa was not for me. Maybe it could have worked for me personally, but it certainly wouldn’t work for my children or grandchildren. So that was another decision that changed my life. The decision to leave New Zealand, to sell up, to move back to Holland instead of moving to South Africa. Another major decision that changed my life.
When you regret a decision, then you would not be in the position you are in today, because you would have had a totally different life if you had of taken the other decision. So, there is no use regretting anything. You can’t all of a sudden say: “I would have liked things to have been different,” because if at that point you say; “…if it only had been different,” your life would have changed.
“Granddad had two brothers and two sisters. Om Jouk (two children, Geder and Matti who live in America), Om Derek (has one daughter left called Matti, who’s married and has children), Opa, Tante Nel (two children, Om Ven and Klaus) and Tante Mattie (three left, Ewout, Marilel and Els). So I’ve still got eight cousins. They had another boy before Opa and he passed away when he was just an infant. He was called Piet as well.
They had a grave for that little infant at the cemetery and Om Jan and Opa had vouched to their mother, my grandmother, that they would look after the grave until they passed away. One of the family got a notice at the time to say: “What are we going to do with the grave?” because in Holland you need to pay the yearly fee to keep the grave maintence going.
This is what we do in Holland. That doesn’t happen here in Australia. We decided not to carry on with it as it was a promise made by Om Jan and my dad for his little brother.
Mum also had a similar situation with her father’s father, Mum’s grandfather, Parke Jouke. Nobody liked him. Om Jouke got a phone call in Holland asking him who was going to maintain the grave? Om Jouke then rang Mum one night, and he said: “Are you going to pay for the grave?” and Mum said: “Not me, I never liked him.”
He said: “Good on you, I didn’t like him either”.
What happens next is that they just turn the grave over, they dig them up and burn them and the name is gone forever. There is a heritage grave in a very old part of town, of Mum’s grandmother and she was 103 when she died and she is on the church ground and her husband was there to. That’s not council ground.
Who was Urich Cusiner married to…? And then she became Urich Kommer Cusiner, because the maiden name stays attached to the married name.
Our Kommer family in Holland would be Berichhoudt, that would be our family. Alkmaar was Om Jan Gerer and Matti, we were born on the Hoffplan, Bordercusmar was Om Derek, in Haystaner was Tante Nel and Tante Matt for a while.
Born Gijesbetus Kommer on the 28 March 1931, to my parents, Joanne Helen Kommer and Peter Kommer. I was one of four sons. Eldest Bram Kommer, Peter Kommer, myself and Derek Kommer.
It’s always very interesting talking about the history of a town or a country and how times change so much within the local villages. Towns had many tradespeople, basket and cane weavers were very popular back in the day. We had the baker, the cobblers. They didn’t have the steel back then for everyday use, the cobbler and blacksmiths worked on all the equipment for horses and horse carts. There was a fellow who would not only sell the knifes and scissors, but he would also sharpen knifes and scissors. He had a speciality shop for sharpening the shears, for shearing sheep. Another speciality job was the wool comber at the shearing sheds. The Kassboer (cheese maker), who would make a sort of Kraft cheese, lived only a few houses down from us in Alkmaar, opposite the Waghorner church.
One tradition that has lasted the tides of time is the brass band. I think every villiage has its own brass band. Alkmaar actually has four brass bands, the city brass band, the catholics have their own brass band. Bolsward where Mum lived is a small city of around ten thousand people and it has three bass bands.
Dutch lollies are an absolute favourite in our family and we really enjoyed, as a kid, a magic ball called a Tofa balle, that we bought for one cent. They changed colours all the time and that’s why they were called a magic ball. The dow drop was a very soft liquorice which you pressed with your thumb, and then you had this lump of liquorice on your thumb, so you would be walking around sucking your thumb with the Dow-drop, we used to walk around sucking our thumbs…stupid isn’t it.”
Waking up with ice on our blankets was a regular thing for us in our beds. The vapour from our breath would create the ice on top of the blankets. It would have been ten to fifteen degrees frost outside and we were sleeping on the first floor. Absolutely no heating. Our bedrooms would eventually have around eighteen degrees frost in them. We were still warm in the bed. We had thick woollen blankets. There was no central heating in those days. The water in the sink would have ice on it, it was cold in those winters.
We would have a small pot underneath our bed for our pee. That way we didn’t have to go downstairs in the middle of the night in the freezing cold. We were on sewage, we had a big tank in the backyard similar to a bio cycle system and once every two years a special truck would come along and suck it all away.
The farmers had the outhouses with just a simple hole that you would just poop into. Not like the outhouses in Australia where there would be big thirty-foot drops.
Oma knitted underwear for all the kids and the knitted high socks we used to wear, walking and riding bikes to school in the snow.
Father was born in 1906 and he left school when he was 12 years old. It was 1918, straight after the First World War. My father was a hard worker. He left home at the age of thirteen to live on a local dairy farm. Basically you left primary school to find work, that was fairly normal in those days. Dairy farming is hard work, seven days a week and you have to get up very early to milk the cows. It was much better to stay with the farmer and his family. My Opa and Oma, Dad’s parents, lived in a small house in the town of Ber…. and Piet P the farmer lived only about half a kilometre up the road on his farming property. They were basically still living in the same village as his parents.
Piet P actually became a lifelong friend with Dad. Piet had a daughter called Nel. When Piet passed, Nel, who had married a doctor called Hank K and were living in Bereka near Alkmaar, continued with the friendship with Mum and Dad. That’s how long the friendship lasted.
Dad became very interested in cattle. He had been working with cattle most of his life. Dad had developed a friendship with the local vet when he was younger and the vet trained him to become a veterinary midwife. Dad was able to help cows in trouble with calving. If a calf had died inside the mother Dad had to help save the cow. He had special equipment to saw the calf in pieces inside the cow and pull bits and pieces out. Cattle were livelihood. If you had thirty or forty cows in those days you were a rich farmer. You not only had the cows in the stable, you had your horse, a couple of pigs and the calves for the next year. You had to stable them all. The winters now are not as severe as they used to be. Totally different now.
Mum was born in 1906. Mum had studied at college and was a school teacher in a small town north of Bravaand, called Peel.
That’s how Mum and Dad got to know each other. Their romance started in Peel, and they were married there on the 6th of June 1929.
When Dad was travelling to many farms in the area to help the cattle (we were living in the Scaraphen at the time), he realised that there was a massive lack of very simple medicines, ointments and so on for the animals. In those days, you couldn’t simply register medicines unless it was developed by at least a pharmacist assistant, I think that was the law. So the only college to teach pharmacy was in the city of Horan, twenty-three kilometres outside of Alkmaar. Mum enrolled in that college and would ride her push bike five days per week, through all sorts of weather to study pharmacy. Mum was still push biking to her college whilst pregnant with her fourth son, Oom Derek. You get a strong headwind, you’d be lucky to ride five kilometres per hour. They were simple push bikes with no gears.
Dad was also travelling a lot on his push bike to develop his business with the farmers as a veterinary midwife.
We were looked after by a housemaid. She was a local girl, Cret, about seventeen years old. To us she was just old. That was normal for farmers’ daughters to try and secure employment in local homes to become a live-in housemaid. That way they had a wage, employment and a place to live. They were tough times and many parents couldn’t afford to keep their children at home. Cret actually stayed with us at our home until she got married. We got to know Cret’s father very well. He was a jolly man, massive head of white curly hair and he had one lazy eye. He used to make flutes or whistles out of long reeds for us.
Oma’s business, a chemist in Alkmaar, developed many medicines especially for farm animals like the black drawing ointment. Eventually, by the time the Second World War started, Dad and Mum had developed the pharmacy business and they had agents in England, Berlin and Copenhagen. They had developed a small factory, which they called Komico (Kommer and Company), and were making the medicines for livestock. Our small bathroom became a laboratory by which Mum created the medicines. They were all her own formulas. They were all professionally packaged and sold to the agents. At the time Mum didn’t think to patent her formulas for the medicines she was inventing. Mum gave me a book with all her recipes in it for the medicines, each page had the formulas, all of Mum’s discoveries. I never lost it, just don’t know where it is at the moment.
Dad was a daring businessman, despite the fact that he had left school at the age of twelve and had very little education. At one stage there was a very bad chicken disease that was spreading across the farms and killing thousands of chickens. There was a research laboratory owned by Jacquar in Belgium in the city of Genblux. They had developed a vaccine to prevent the illness from spreading further amongst the chicken farms. There were three companies in Holland interested in marketing the vaccine. Dad’s business was the smallest of the three companies. He was only just starting out in those days. Jacquar gave them a couple of months to see who was the best and the quickest in developing a market for the vaccination. Whoever did that got the contract for the chicken vaccine. Nowadays it would be like having a contract to market the vaccine for Ebola. It was a completely new vaccine and Jacquar had the patent for it. Dad went all out. The amount of advertising he did was tremendous, from ads in the paper to posters, he was brilliant. He won the contract hands down from the bigger companies.
They had by now developed a health screening method for the animals. They would put an illness into the horse and the horse would then develop the antibodies to the illness. All the farmers eventually had to do for the chickens was to scratch the leg slightly and apply the vaccine. It was very easy to apply, not an injection, similar to what they do for smallpox.
That was a massive expansion in Dad’s business. He had branches in Copenhagen, London and Holland.
At one point there was something wrong with Dad’s agency in London and the money wasn’t coming back into Holland from all the products that were being sent across. Dad said to our accountant Klaus De F, “Go over to London and see what the hell is going on over there, because I’m not getting any money out of these fellas, there’s something crook going on.” Klaus went to London around the 8th of May 1940 and on the 10th of May 1940 the Germans invaded Holland and he didn’t return to Holland for five years. The office in London that the agency was in was eventually bombed to pieces, I don’t think Dad ever found out what exactly happened to his money.
By the end of the war, it had all gone, all the branches from his business had collapsed and he had to start all over again. Dad had a lot of energy and was a true entrepreneur. Even in his retirement in Australia his mind was still active to develop business ideas, from the Van Diemens Gifts outlet we had at the factory to planting garlic.
The company of Komico still exists in Holland today, making some of the ointments that Mum had developed.
On Dad’s side, both his parents were orphans. Both my grandfathers from Dad and Mum’s side were house painters. When the advent of insurance came about, and people could insure their farms, homes, livestock and all that, my grandfather, Opa Kommer, took over an insurance agency in the local town and he became a well-known agent for a big insurance company. By this stage my father’s parents had now moved to Alkmaar. I visited them a lot as a child. They only lived about two hundred metres from our home.
My mother’s parents lived in Varaswen. Opa and Oma Van Der Zwaard. That was at least eighty kilometres from our home in Alkmaar.
You were not allowed to use the cane when I was growing up; it was already gone in most parts of Holland. I did see one boy hit with a ruler; he had to open his hand. It was more of a token discipline. However, your mum, who lived in Friesland, saw boys being hit at school by a big wooden stick, at least a metre long and quite thick. They got hit on their bum; they had to bend over. Some of them were big boys, sixteen or eighteen years old.
I’m naturally left-handed, but I had to write with my right hand. Your mum’s father was the same. Whenever I picked up the pen with my left hand, the teacher would just quietly move the pen to the right hand. In the early days being left-handed was seen as being not good, or a little evil.
I left school when I was seventeen or eighteen. I was very good at arithmetic. We had to do complex sums, no calculators back then. My weakness was the French language.
My teacher was Ms Prada. My mum wanted us to socialise more as we were four boys with no sisters, so she organised with Tante Janny B, who was a seamstress, for us to go to dance classes. There was the four of us, Bram and Janny B, and I danced with Neil DV. She was Janny’s friend and the daughter of a butcher. I could never dance the waltz and was always getting my feet mixed up when I tried to turn around. Bloody awful dance for me. That was the first dance we were taught. I still can’t do the waltz.
“When I was young, a big part of my life was living opposite the Alkmaar Kaasmarkt (cheese market) and the big church, the Waagtoren, on the Waagplein. I lived there from the age of about four to fifteen or sixteen and left the area straight after the war.
I was about four or five years old when I fell into the canal near my home in Alkmaar. People told me afterwards that they saw my clogs floating. I was just a child riding my scooter around. I wanted to make a big right-hand turn towards my house and so, as I turned, I rode straight into the canal and that’s how I got there. They told me that the clogs came up first because they’re timber. I remember sinking under the water, and when I opened my eyes I saw all this green water, so obviously I held my breath, and then I sort of floated to the top of the green water. Luckily, I came to the surface behind one of the boats and not under the boat. I floated to the surface and hung onto the rudder of the boat. When I looked up I saw all these stupid faces looking at me; they were all the faces of the farmers.
At the time a Dutchman called Jan Vas Spadol was studying for the priesthood and lived in the house across the street from the canal. He was studying at his desk and happened to look out of his second-floor window at the same time I fell into the canal, so he saw me falling into the canal. Apparently, he rushed down the stairs, across the road, climbed onto the boat and pulled me up out of the canal by my arm. I didn’t like that move because it hurt. He heaved me up and out of the water, just like that. I went into our house and Mum, your grandma, was shocked to pieces. She dried me out as I was standing in the kitchen.
I can certainly remember crying and asking Mum: “Will I die now?”
That’s when Mum decided: “That’s it, you are all taking swimming lessons,” so the whole three of us, Peter, Bram and I attended swimming lessons.
I was around seven years old when we had to do our swimming test. The water was very clear, and they had this wooden body at the bottom of the water. You had to dive into the deep end and bring the wooden body up from the bottom to the top. Then you had to swim with one arm, holding its chin with the other arm, and then get the wooden body to the side of the pool. There were two swimming lessons; one of them was to swim, the other was to rescue.
“We did some dangerous things in our youth. The winters were very severe in my youth, a lot more severe than they are now. Ice breakers would go through the canals, breaking up the ice for the ships to go through. What they left behind were all these big floating blocks of ice. We used to ‘scotch a lopper’, like hopscotch, jumping from one block of ice to another. Scotch-a-lopen translated means a ‘scotch’ being a block of ice, and a ‘lopen’ means walking.
When you’d stand on the smaller one it went down under your feet and you had to quickly jump to the next ice block. We did stupid things. We did daft things. If you fell into the icy cold water you were in trouble because you couldn’t lift yourself up onto the ice. People, including kids, had fallen into the water and had to be rescued. When an ice breaker went through the canal and cracked all the ice up so that other boats could go through, you had a lot of fun walking from one piece of ice to another. Some of the ice blocks were so small they sank as soon as you stepped on them, so you had to jump quickly to the next ice block; otherwise you fell, your weight was heavier than what the ice could carry. You were aiming for the big blocks first, so you’d go bop-bop-bop and then you’d be cheering.
We were doing it in part of the canal, I think it was in 1944. There were about four of us and all of a sudden this yell came from the side of the bank—oh mate, unbelievable—one of the fathers of the four had seen his son Scotch-a-Lopen. The boy was standing on this big block of ice, like the three of us; he was scared to go back because he knew he was going to get a hiding.
His father was shouting: “Come back here you, how dare you do that!”
Half the time parents didn’t even know what their kids were up to.
The most dangerous thing I’ve ever done on skates, I can see it now, was on the mead. We had very simple ice skates. You had to make certain that the steel of the skate was ground in a certain way for a left and a right foot. It’s not just a bit of steel. What happens when you’re ice skating is that you are turning, using your ankles, and you push yourself off the ice to propel forward. It had to be slightly cut at an angle to create that cutting edge that made contact with the ice. I was never a good ice skater because I had problems with my ankles; they were weak ankles and got tired. I really liked ice skating and felt jealous of the people who could skate around for hours and hours. I would have liked to have skated until the sun went down.
There was a big bridge; it had arches that the water would flow through, with two small openings like rounded curves, one on either side. It was probably xx…long. In the winter the mead hardly ever froze over, but in the very severe winter of 1944–1945, the ice in the centre of that bridge over the mead had actually frozen.
The dare was, we used to dare each other, the dare was to skate fast and have enough speed to get on your hunches, because you couldn’t stand, and carry through in this tunnel through to the other side. Whilst you were going through under the bridge, you could hear the ice move around you. It wasn’t quite cracking, but that was one of the silliest things I’d ever done. Luckily, a lot of us got through it. The bridge had arches underneath it and the water would flow through these arches. It was thin ice, not thick ice, and you could hear the ice move; it was not cracking. We had to get a hell of a speed up, then sit on our hunches to try to get to the other side because you couldn’t stand under the bridge, it was only about …this ..high. You would be on your hunches, then you’d hear this high-pitched sound like “eeeeeee” and you kept your eyes fixed on the opening at the other side. I never went back through from where I started.
The Elfstedentocht ice competition happened nearly every year when I was young. That was the big ice skating competition with eleven cities competing, and they would skate for almost 200 kilometres from Friesland in the north of Holland and past eleven cities. The ice had to be at least fifteen centimetres thick throughout the entire course for the race to occur and it hasn’t happened now for many years.
I think that climate change is a furphy because climate change is being observed on all the planets in our solar system, and they are having climate change at this very moment. Every 280 years in history the sun goes into hibernation. The sun is now starting its hibernation cycle. What they’ve found out with the so-called climate change or global warming is that there’s been climate change observed in all our planets. In Venus, in Mars, in Jupiter, all the planets in our solar system are having climate change. It’s nothing to do with Earth; it’s about sunspots and that sort of thing. They don’t tell you about that, it doesn’t suit them to tell you about that. This is when we get a mini ice age; we’re at the start of this mini ice age, which is coming now.
In London the smog was huge; there was the famous London smog where you couldn’t see your own hand, so they banned all the coal fires in London. In Holland coal was used to heat the homes. Anthracite was a good-quality coal from Maastricht; it is a very fine coal and it has the highest carbon content with very few impurities. Anthracite would keep the stove going day and night; that would keep the house warm. A lot of the farmhouses had cooking utensils where you’d put the pot on, with kerosene and a wick. You’d walk into the house and smell cooking and kerosene.”
When we were younger our family lived opposite the cheese market in Alkmaar. When all the farmers, with their own speciality cheese, had set themselves up in a spot at the market, the buyers would core the cheese for tasting. When they weren’t looking, my brothers and I, or my friends, would sneak in, pull out the core piece of cheese and then put the little waxed corked top back. We had fun.
All the buyers, of course, would have this cheese core, which they used to taste the quality of the cheese. It was a genuine market at the time. The farmers would come to town every second or third month on their horse and cart. A farmer who was well known for his premium-quality farmers cheese, or ‘Boarers kaas’, might have saved up, for example, thirty cheeses. He would have a little spot at the market. His clientele would then go and sample his cheese by coring through the protective wax, taste a sample, and then place the core back into the cheese so it didn’t look like it was full of holes on the outside.
By the 1920s and 1930s, big milk and cheese factories had commenced business in Holland. These factories became bigger and bigger. The individual farmers co-op of, say, ten farmers—small family businesses in the district—would combine to get enough milk to produce their specific quality of cheese. This quality of cheese and specific flavour were well-kept family secrets, as it was their livelihood and reputation. It wasn’t long before the smaller family businesses started to disappear because of the competition with the big cheese factories.
Today these cheese factories are enormous. Holland is the largest cheese exporter in the world. If you go to the big cheese stalls in a local market in Holland, maybe there are 150 different types of cheeses; you can still ask for a specialised Boarer kaas. Chad actually found a speciality cheese shop in Sydney and bought me some cheese.
Chad said: “Have a taste of this, Opa.”
I said: “Well, that’s one of the best cheeses I’ve tasted.” Chad just loved that cheese.
The regional archives of Holland show so much of the Dutch history. It was ‘looking into the past’, and one photo in particular was the Vantesiebad, Carbatong, an outdoor pool. It’s an area not unlike a swimming pool but it’s in nature, so it’s called ‘a nature bath’, and this one was made in 1917. It is so far gone in my memories, looking back like this into the past. It’s far more sophisticated now than when I was there. There were all these little buildings that people got dressed in. There was a little point warmed by the sun between the shallow and the deep end. It was a wonderful nature bath Berkervekv, opening on the 1st of May for the summer. We used to swim in very cold water. I was born in ’31 so it’s all gone now; it’s just a park with a pond that has ducks swimming in it. It became no longer suitable for swimming because of the regulations for quality water.
Your mum would agree that back in those days the canals would go through all our villages and we all just swam in the canals. Even today when we go to Holland and hire the boat for our holidays, kids are still swimming in the canals. The water in the canals is very hygienic. They’ve cleaned it up so much, you can just swim in the water. They’ve put restrictions on the farms with what fertilisers they can put in the ground.
During the days of the war our way of life was surrounded by rumours. The liveliest part of every conversation was the rumours.
We managed to procure a radio. This was an illegal item during the war. It was a new radio back in 1938–1939. A German ‘Blau bukked.’ As a matter of fact I think Uncle Bram still has that radio. That was an excellent radio to receive the short wave broadcast from England. So right throughout the war we were able to listen to the secret BBC radio. If we were discovered there would have been a massive penalty. Not even our neighbours or friends knew we owned the radio.
The Germans were passing on the news through a cable network system. Everybody that had an ordinary radio that could pick up short wave had to hand the radios in to be destroyed. The Germans could then control the news. The average workers in Holland could not afford radios and they used the cable system. It had only three stations. That was how the Germans could control the news and the information.
I remember listening to the secret BBC station on our radio and hearing about the first real defeat of the Germans. The American troops had joined the Australians, English and Polish and led by General Montgomery we defeated Germany at Elarlamaine.
I remember mum being so incredibly happy.
She said: “Those so and so’s have been defeated!”
During the second world war Opa provided food and dairy for our family, breeding rabbits and cows. There was a small piece of land (Poldar) just outside of Alkmaar called the ‘Huisvader Paldar’. Opa had got friendly with the farmers in that area. One of them was Piet H. and his German wife, who we called Muider Malansha, like Marlene Deitrich. Dad rented a small piece of land from Piet H. He had a couple of cows there. When dad had a factory in Alkmaar he then employed Piet H, and he worked for dad until he retired. Dad was very loyal to people who were loyal to him.
We had a fairly hard task master with Father Kommer. He was not brutal or cruel, but he made us work. He made us understand that it was our responsibility to work. It had nothing to do with child labour, we all had to pull our weight for the family.
We lived in a house that was probably built around the 1570’s, around the time that the Wagtoren (the weighing tower) had been completed, which was in 1574. Back then the cities were designed around the church, with all the little streets. It was an old home, and it had been rebuilt and altered over hundreds of years. There were a few areas within the house that had been blocked up during the countless renovations. We found a fairly solid space with a little trap door in a cupboard on top of some shelves. You could crouch up on the top shelf and lift up the manhole which opened up into a decent-sized space. There was also another space on the second floor. That was big enough to hide a few people.
We didn’t actually put anyone in the hiding places until we knew for sure about the raids because the spaces were slightly claustrophobic. We were often warned by someone or another that a German raid was occurring. We would get a knock on our door, and someone would say that there was a raid in our district. One of our local blacksmiths, his son was in the Hitler Youth and actually fighting on the war front, he was a good informant of when the raids were going to happen.
Dad made a lot of his own salamis and sausages, and when he went into the space to hide, sometimes he would quietly make food. At one point dad had procured a bottle of booze, a bottle of gin. On one particular raid, he was sitting there, hiding and having some fun, making sausages, drinking some gin. Once he started singing and mum was a bit worried, telling him to be quiet.
Mum and dad hid a few boys during the war to protect them from the Germans. It’s a bit like the story of Anna Frank. We hid Piet V and another young Dutchman. In order to keep them busy, dad had them do odd jobs. One of the jobs was to chop the roots from some of the massive trees into kindling for fires. That was incredibly difficult to do. The boys had to split the roots with big wedges and hammers. At least they were kept busy.
We didn’t have that many German raids. The raids were called Razzia. It was during the last two years of the war that the underground really got going. That’s when the Germans picked up a lot of young men, even shooting some of those that worked in the underground.
The Germans had big factories to operate and were having less and less people to work for them. A lot of the young men in Holland between the ages of eighteen to thirty-three were taken as slave labour in Germany. They weren’t really political prisoners of war. In 1944 the German war industry was at its peak. Eighty-five per cent of the workers in Germany were foreign workers from the occupied countries.
My friend ……… he was picked up and told he had to go to Germany. My friend worked in Germany for a month or two and then the factory he was working in got bombed to pieces. He escaped with his uncle, who ended up dying in one of the bombing raids. He experienced something like twenty bombing raids on Germany whilst he was hiding with his uncle. When he was freed, there was no such thing as buses or trains, and it took him three months to walk back home to Holland. His family had no idea where he was, or if he was alive or not.
I remember once there was a knock at our door one day. At the time we were listening to the radio, and there was a policeman standing there. I was around twelve years old and we just panicked. Mum was working in our pharmacy shop, and we could see through the glass of our door, a man standing in a uniform. I think Piet K picked up the radio and quickly ran to the place he would hide in. There was an ashtray on top of the radio and it fell and clambered down the stairs making a lot of noise. We were not supposed to make noise.
Anyway, it was just a Dutch policeman telling us that he could see some light through some of our windows. As soon as the sun went down, we had the blackout police walking our streets to see if any light could be seen through the windows at night time. You couldn’t have any light showing or the boys in the aeroplanes would see us. It was a total blackout every night.
Towards the end of the war we had no electricity and relied on candles and kerosene lamps. We never had any problems with water.
With the ‘One Bridge Too Far’ landing, the rumour had been that ‘Operation Market Garden’ was going to be the Rhine in the … and the big bridges were to be destroyed to prevent the Germans from moving forward. In Arnham, in the central area of Holland, the Germans had a massive big Tiger tank division. They were on R and R (rest and recreation) at the time from the Battle of the Bulge. England had been informed from the Dutch underground about the Germans’ presence and a massive para-troop operation, where thousands of mainly English and Polish men were dropping into Arnham to try to prevent the Germans from moving. The Americans were coming down from the southern part of Holland and pushing through.
Some of our roads are very small and at one point they could not move forward, a huge army with their thousands of men and tanks. There was a roadblock.
The problem with Hitler was when he had his first defeat in Moscow, Russia, and the defeat in Stalingrat, he knew the war was lost but couldn’t give up. The Americans entered the war after Pearl Harbour, this is when the Americans started to bring in their troops. Hitler then declared war on the United States of America.
Hitler was trying to control the Suez Canal and was defeated in North Africa by the Allies and the Americans who were under the command of General Montgomery. We managed to hold off the Germans in Tubruk, the Australians were already there and then along with the Americans there was the standoff at a place called Elarlamaine. A lot of American war equipment was now getting involved. The famous battle at Elarlamaine was the first real defeat of the Germans in the war.
Hitler knew at that time that the war was over, but his desperation and fanatism was so extreme that he still managed to kill over six million Jews. He destroyed Germany by allowing the continued bombing of the country.
When the Allied forces were fast approaching one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Paris in France, Hitler actually gave the order to the German high command who was in charge of Paris to destroy the city. How can a madman want to destroy such a beautiful city like Paris. The commander of course did not fire a shot, he let the Allied forces come in and take over.
The German General Powers had 350,000 men in Stalingrad at the time, and he knew he could not win. A very severe winter was coming and he requested to withdraw the troops and return to Germany. At the time a section was not surrounded so there was still a corridor to get out. Hitler said: “No. You are to fight to the death”. He had no compassion, no concern for his own people.
The Russions in Stalingrad took 130,000 German soldiers prisoner. They started with 350,000 and ended up with around 130,000 prisoners. So many died. Only about 6,000 survived and ever came out of Siberia. Russia lost over 24 million people in that war. The whole of Australia’s population.
Dad and his brothers going on the canals as youth to do jobs.
I was always a bit of an entrepreneur. At one stage, I was around thirteen years old, I started selling tobacco.
My brothers and I all had savings accounts at the ‘Nut spar Bank.’ Opa used to do a bit of cash dealings and he started dividing his money into our savings accounts to divvy up his cash and avoid taxes. At one stage I had around seven or eight thousand guildings in my account. There was a gentleman called Lefsting, our first treasurer in Holland after the war. Lefting decided to tax people to the hilt to get rid of the black money on the market. Finally, Opa had to take his money out of our savings accounts. Then I was back to my few guildings.
“The actual point of liberation after the war was when the Americans came into Paris. The absolute jubilation that those people had, to know that they were free, that the tyranny was gone. Those people had an explosion of joy. It was like a massive spring that had been standing on high tensile all that time during the war, and then all of a sudden they had now been released. When the Canadians came rumbling through our city, Alkmaar in Holland, you knew you were free. The joy and the dancing lasted for a full three days, it never stopped, and there was no liquor to drink, it was just pure unadulterated joy of being free. No more soldiers on the streets with guns, the tyranny was gone. When the Americans went into Rome, they saw Italy surrender. All of a sudden, the Italians became the enemies of the Germans, whereas before the surrender they used to be friends with the Germans.
In Alkmaar we had the Whit Kruis (White Cross), the Red Cross and the Green Cross. The White Cross was mainly a disinfectant point because a lot of people before the war had problems with lice and all those sorts of things, you know, the gypsies and all. The White Cross station used to disinfect clothes as well as people. They had big steamers to disinfect all the clothes and blankets. There was a massive number of Italians coming in at that time. Some of the Italians wore these funny hats, they were the Alpine people. They all went to the White Cross stations. I had a friend whose father was a manager of the White Cross, and he was telling me that to some extent, the Italians were all prisoners of war, and the Germans first had to get all of them through the disinfectant section before the Germans could do something with them, that’s how much lice they had. All their clothes were taken off, they were given other clothing and their old clothes were all put into the steamers.”
“After the war in 1948, I went to England for a couple of weeks. I was only a youngster, seventeen years old. It was during our summer holidays in June or July. I took a boat from Amanda to Harwich. I’ve never been so freezing in all my life. It was an old passenger boat and I managed to find a spot underneath a staircase. I can still remember it, there was a coil of rope under the stairs, I got myself onto the rope, like it was a seat, and just sat there feeling bloody miserable. I didn’t want to get up until we got to Harwich. I just sat on this coiled rope, underneath the staircase and said to myself: “Well I’ll just sit here until we bloody arrive.”
It was a four-to-five-hour journey across to Harwich. From there I went to Bath. During the war, Holland had five years of German occupation. England had also been fighting. I stayed at Clifford W’s place. The houses that I visited in England were, I thought, primitive. I thought; “these people really live primitively, compared to how we lived in Holland”.
Holland was a very civilised and well organised country, with advanced architecture. The weighing tower in Alkmaar was built in 1554, 200 years before Captain Cook came to Australia. England had very rich people, with barons and earls, and then they had very poor people, living in extreme poverty. Holland never had that division of wealth, where there were really down-and-out people with nowhere to live and such poverty. Of course there was poverty in Holland, but not to the extent that I saw in places in England, in London. The other big difference was in the education system. Children were still being caned in England and hit by teachers. That had been outlawed in Holland for a long time.
I never saw Clifford’s father, except maybe on the weekend. He worked, went to the pub with his mates, came home to sleep and then went back to work again in the morning. Hardly ever saw him. Pub life was the best life for him. The blankets I had were just those knitted things with little squares together, and I was damned cold there too. I went to a few places like that with Clifford W and a couple of friends, they all lived the same way, very plain. There were cloths like towels on the floor in the kitchen and hardly any heating, nothing like the Dutch homes. Actually, the homes were similar here in Australia when I arrived.
I remember talking to your mum and she said: “Nobody has coffee tables here in Australia. There’s only a TV, a bar or a table with nothing in the middle except liquor and a lamp with just a bulb.”
Yeah, it was normal where we went in Australia. I couldn’t believe my eyes. You know we came from a well organised country. In Holland we were one of the few families with a telephone because Oma had the chemist shop in Alkmaar. Our home was right on the same canal that I’d fallen into as a boy riding my pushbike. After I returned home from my holiday in England, I could see that Holland was a lot more advanced than England. In 1948 Holland had no more war rations, but England still had rations. Holland got back on its feet a lot quicker and better than England, despite the fact that we had German occupation and some of the infrastructure, like the railroads, had all their tracks taken away for the war effort and all that.
The same as Germany. The way that Germany was devastated, completely bombed to pieces, and the speed that Germany recovered was unbelievable. It’s really a total miracle the way that the Germans revived the whole of their country so quickly. I was surprised how England still had rations in 1948 and Holland didn’t. In 1949, when I was still in England, I met a lady called June L, she came back to Holland with us and stayed with us for a fortnight.
The next year, in February 1950, when I was eighteen, I went to Bastilles in the north-east of France, then to New Zealand. I caught a boat called ‘Sudan’, chartered by a French company called the Leslesingsardating. They were dropping off soldiers to the various French colonies, so it was a troop carrier. It had some space left which they filled up with migrants who were going to Australia. I then flew from Sydney by a big Southerland water plane, a massive big plane, to New Zealand and it took all night to fly there. I think they did about one hundred and ten kilometres per hour. It took a long while. It was a war plane, which they converted into a passenger plane. Massive big thing. The company was called Teal, later on becoming Air New Zealand. A teal was a water bird who lived in New Zealand.”
“When I decided to go overseas, my father gave me a 1942 shilling, a two bob piece. I’ve still got it today. I had started corresponding with a lady from New Zealand, Patricia W. She had sent some nice gifts to me in Holland. Originally my dad wanted me to go to Brazil. He said it was a big country. I had agreed for a little while, as Dad knew someone from Amsterdam who had been very successful in Brazil. I started to seriously learn Portuguese for a couple of months, so I could live in Brazil and communicate. After a while though, it just didn’t feel right to me. I had all this stuff from New Zealand, and when push came to shove I said to my father, I’m going to New Zealand. Just like the flip of a coin. My whole life changed by that one decision.”
I was on my way to New Zealand via Australia in January 1950. There I was at Mar Sei port, standing on the ship that was going to take me to the other side of the world. Cold and miserable. I hung overboard the ship to see all the people coming on board and saw my big crate still on the wharf. I could see in big letters on the crate the words “G. Kommer.” Granddad organised the crate. He put jigs for wire baskets in it and he even put a small anvil in it. I rushed onto the gangway and said: “Hey, that’s my crate.” They said: “Sorry sir, it’s overweight.” I had around one hundred pounds of money from Opa and Oma, which was a lot of money in those days, and it cost me nearly sixty pounds to get that crate on board. I carried that small anvil around New Zealand with me. I hardly ever used it. I got rid of it when I started my own business. I really don’t know why Opa gave me an anvil. He must have thought New Zealand was very primitive. Anyway, I had jigs for agricultural baskets, and God knows what else Opa had put in the crate. I had to get the crate onto the ship. Luckily I saw it still standing on the wharf. I can still visualise it. Then I had to get it from Sydney to Auckland by sea, because I was travelling by Tiel airlines, which is a Southerland flying boat from Rush cutters bay to Auckland.
I actually had a big anvil sitting in the factory for a long time. A fellow business Rotarian came to visit and they had just started the Man Shed. Peter, an ex-constable in the police force, big fellow, hands like coal shovels, he was also a blacksmith and also from our wine club Lack-of-Nucky club. Peter saw the anvil sitting in the corner, which I had bought for around five hundred dollars at an auction, and he noticed it.
He said: “That’s a big anvil you have sitting in the corner. Does it sing?”
I said: “What do you mean?” Apparently when you hit an anvil it should sing, and make a ping sound. I said: “Well I don’t know if it sings or not, but could you use it in the man shed?” So that’s where the second anvil went. They use it all the time there, and no, it doesn’t sing.
I worked for Mr Robertson at Avondale, to George V, on the farm, to Alas V. in the timber mills, then back to Auckland when Mum and Dad left to go back to Holland. I worked as a maintenance engineer, then to Christchurch where I worked as a truck driver, then I worked for Scotts Engineering refurbishing army trucks, then I worked for Firestone and then I worked for myself.
“I had been living in New Zealand for around three years when my Oma Kommer died of breast cancer, and around seven years in New Zealand when my Opa Van der Zwad, also known as Gijs Van Der Zwad, died of bowel cancer.
I arrived in New Zealand at the end of February 1950. I was actually eighteen when I arrived in February and in March turned nineteen. It’s a different world today. It was really like going to Mars. Uncle Piet came out in December 1950. Opa, my dad, decided to come and say hello to us both and arrived in June 1951. Then nearly one year later, Oma (Mum) came out to New Zealand. They both went back to Holland in 1952. Opa and I worked together for about six months in a town called Manawatu (Whanganui) in the Kang country, on the North Island. We had two bachelor pads, and we turned one of them into our living quarters and the other one into a sleeping quarter for us both. We met some good friends there, Jimmy and Noel. Noel’s family took me in; they lived in Tiowamutu Tongariro. Taranaki. I can’t trace Noel’s or Jimmy’s family in New Zealand. Uncle Piet and I did the flip of the coin to see who would go back to Holland for our parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Uncle Piet said: “You’re the eldest, you go.” I said to him: “Let’s flip the coin.”
Uncle Piet did go back to Holland and was then called up into the army. I was called up for the ……….which is a little like the officers’ academy. I was called up to go to the officers’ quarters when I was in New Zealand. I then applied to the ambassador for temporary leave so that I didn’t have to join the army, and fortunately temporary leave was granted.
That was another life-changing flip-of-the-coin moment.
I think I was quite an arrogant, snotty little fellow when I was younger in Holland. New Zealand brought me down to earth big time.”
“The most dangerous job I ever did was at the Firestone factory in Christchurch. We used to block the automatic safety switches because they were so annoying. The US opened the Firestone factory in 1948 and it was still very new; by 1955 it had actually produced around one million tyres. There was no occupational health and safety in those days.
What happened was the rubber had to be cured and made soft by friction. You had these massive big mills with five hundred horsepower motors to keep making the rubber softer. As the rubber was being made softer it used to stretch out on these big rollers and then ‘ping ping’, it would sometimes snap and come up, hitting the safety cord, and of course when the rubber hit the safety cord the mill would stop. We used to block that safety switch so that the motors in the mill wouldn’t stop and that way you could keep on working. The supervisor would walk past you, he saw the safety switch bloody blocked, and he never said anything about it. It was unbelievable how we worked in such a dangerous place, that was stupid, I would never do that again.
Rubber stretches, you see, and before it really started warming up, it would come through the mill and we used to have to constantly pick it up and bring it back onto the mill to move around. It was a hell of a job; it was practically all manual. If it got a little bit warm it would stretch and break and then go ‘ping’, hitting the cord that would then stop the motor. We would then have to reverse the thing, because we couldn’t restart the motors without first reversing and then we could start again. It was a hell of a job. So, to release the safety switch, you would pull this cord with a bit of a handle, and it would restart the safety switch and then you could start the motors again. Now it was that cord that we used to tie around somewhere so that it wouldn’t automatically switch off, that was bloody dangerous. So when the rubber snapped, it would stay within the mill, it would hit the safety cord but it wouldn’t stop the motor. Rubber becomes very sticky and if you were not careful you could have been dragged into the mill.
After a while when the rubber became very sticky, we had to cut it out and sometimes if your cut was wrong… oh boy, looking back at my time at Firestone, that was one of the most dangerous jobs I’ve ever had. One of the young fellas actually got his hand mangled in the old rubber mixing mill. It was the three-roll Calendrer machine. His hand went straight through the calendrer mill. The calendrer machine was a specialised rubber mill that used to make a very fine rubber. I used to roll the rubber up into big rolls and carry them to the extruders, that was bloody heavy. You see a tyre is made out of many layers of rubber. We had to feed the extruder, the extruder made inner tubes, yeah… we did some silly things.”
We had to throw the big bales of hay around on the farms when I did farm work. I remember the older men all had bad backs. I met a lot of youngsters like myself who also did farm work. They were rugby union players, very solid, strong as an ox.
I used to work as a truck driver in Christchurch. We used to pick up the empty kegs from the pubs and big heavy crates of empty bottles.
We had no power steering in those big trucks and buses. In those days females could not even turn the steering wheels to drive them around corners, so we had no female truck or bus drivers back then. Now we have collapsible backs and the pallet jack or forklifts just go straight onto the back of the truck.
“I had a magic motor bike in New Zealand, a brand new Matchless twin. I’ve got this emblem patch here in the office that Peter gave to me. He bought it off eBay. I was twenty-four in that photo, and that gun was my pea shooter, a .22, and it doesn’t shoot peas, proper bullets. It was a small rifle, a Browning .22 semi-auto, an FN, Fabrique Nationale. It was made in an armament factory in Herstal, Belgium, a national factory of the war. The FN rifles were not common here in Australia. That particular one had a lock where you could actually untwist the barrel out of the unit, then you had it in two pieces, and you could put both ends, each around twenty-four inches long, into your side saddle. I also had a Lee-Enfield .303, but I only used that for deer shooting. At that time around 1960 we didn’t have to have a licence at all for any of our guns in New Zealand.
The FN was good for rabbits and hares. I was not a bad shot, because those hares would run fast. We used to skin them, dissect them, and that was our dinner. Hares were running animals so they were a bit tough to eat, so we’d soak them in a few spoons of malt vinegar for twenty-four hours. If I was to fry it until it was brown, and the flesh was all cooked inside, it would have been dry. In order to keep it succulent, after I soaked them, I would boil the meat just a little until it was slightly cooked and then fry it in butter until it got nicely brown on the outside, then it was very succulent and nice.”
“I think my business first began with the desire to do something for myself, or to do something different. I think the desire to do something for yourself has to be there in the first place.
I made a few nice frames for my motorbike tanks. I didn’t make much money out of it, because it was all done out of brass wire and they were chrome plated. When I rode to work I had my lunch or whatever in it, just a little tiny thing (Diagram), and you had little legs under it with four suction cups. How my business really got started was when my bike went in for a service.
The fella at the mechanic shop said: “That’s nice, where did you get it?”
“Well,” I replied, “I made that.”
He then asked me how much it would cost if I was to make some for him. I made some and he sold them. I made such a good quality product for myself that when I started making them for these people in the motorcycle shop, well I then had to look at the price that I’d have to charge them. He did sell a few, but really it was not a cheap thing, because you see, I made a Rolls Royce for myself. When you do something that you don’t think you’ll do again, you make a good job out of it.
After a while I wanted to do some motorcycle touring so I made a couple of frames and had some beautiful saddlebags made by a friend who was a leather worker in Christchurch. So to make a frame to hold the saddlebags I had to find all the bolts on the bike that would hold the frame. I made the frames just for my bike. They were beautiful.
Of course, every bike would have different bolts to the Matchless, and so the next time I went to the mechanic for a service on the motorcycle he says: “Where did you get that?”
I said: “I made it.”
Then he said: “Could you make some for us?”
And that’s what really encouraged me to start working for myself.”
I did some silly things, like pretending to be very strong and carrying bloody gas bottles around on my shoulders, for the business. They would have weighed around fifty to two hundred kilos. You would heave the gas bottles up onto your shoulders, and then carry them.
“Uncle Peter went back to Holland and I started mucking about in a big workshop, making things by myself. I sold my motorcycle and bought my oxy-acetylene bottle, a vice and a cutting shear and that was it. So, Gil had started to work for himself.
I rented a little place and a flat, and I thought: “What the hell can I make?”
Father Kommer (Opa), who was still living in Alkmaar, was making foot scrapers. He was making plenty of them for Dutch homes and also for caravans. You had a step that you pulled out to get into the caravan. Back in 1950 the caravans were really a bit primitive, not like the sophisticated caravans of today. I thought the first thing I would do was to make foot scrapers.
I didn’t know what else to do. I bought a lot of inch by one eighth flat bar steel. I probably made one hundred and fifty of these frames. I’d make some frames, about eighteen by eight inches, then put a lot of wires on top and they became foot scrapers. When they were finished, I had them galvanised, so they were quality stuff. I worked day and night on it, and they didn’t sell. People preferred the foot scrapers made out of the rubber tyres, and they were the foot scrapers that I had to compete against. What they did to make them was to cut the side walls from old rubber tyres into strips and you could buy them everywhere at the time. Rubber mats that could go into the house. My foot scrapers were made to scrape the shit off Dutch clogs.
Anyway, they just didn’t sell. I realised a very important thing: never make something by hand that somebody else can make by machine. That doesn’t work. Always make something by hand that nobody else can make by machine. That was the critical thinking that got me to make scrolls, because nobody else can make that. That’s when I started to make fancy stuff.
So from then on I carried on and on. I bought a place, a workshop with a little flat unit opposite Lancaster Park, outside of Christchurch, and I had a good workshop there, I did well.
I sold my old 24’ Buick for an old Ford ’46 van. I could not believe the amount of petrol the old Buick chewed up. It would take at least four litres for every four kilometres. The most expensive petrol thing that I’ve ever had in my life. I was short of money so I used to go to Lancaster Park petrol station, which was an all-night petrol station, put three gallons in the Buick, drive back to Stevens Street where the workshop was and then back to Linwood Ave. The distance was probably only about three kilometres. The very next morning I would have to put another two or three gallons in the Buick, that’s around four litres in a gallon. I hardly drove at all, just to keep the bloody thing going I’d have to put around ten litres in it. So I bought a little Ford van after the Buick, with a tiny little four-cylinder motor. That was a lot better for the deliveries.”
“Opa’s company in Holland was called ‘Komeco’ (Kommer in Company), so I made the company in New Zealand ‘Komaco’ (Kommer and Company), exactly the same really. I’ve still got some photographs of an exhibition that me and Herman, my partner, did.
Definitely my bread-and-butter products were with wrought iron. We made thousands of little tiny things for the walls. Little detailed ironwork pieces, all completed by hand, simple things, and we used white metal too.
I had a neighbour in Linwood Ave with such a messy yard, it was a shocking sight. He saw me one day after work as I was walking up the stairs to my home and he came over to me.
He says: “Gil, I’ve fixed all the problems mate, there’s no problem, it’s all good now.”
I said: “What have you done?”
He replied: “Have a look at it.”
All he did was put a bit of a fence around the property, it was still messy.”
“It was around 1957 or 1958 in New Zealand that my partner Hermon S joined me. I couldn’t quite do it all by myself. I awarded Hermon, who did not have a single cent of income to put into the business, 50% of the company. Hermon was a nice man, he was an honest man. I said to him, “Why don’t you come in as a partner in my factory, my business? I’ll give you half.”
We both worked very hard.
I wanted to make top quality stuff so decided to get a treatment section going opposite Lancaster Park. I set up a painting section and we had to degrease things, chemically treat and phosphate coat them, and then I’d paint it. We’d do all that in the one shop, so we went to Walter Street to extend.
I needed two tanks to put stuff in, one with a mild acetylene to descale and one with degreaser to get rid of any fats on the product. I sketched out where the two tanks would be and also made a space in between them so I could stand. The two tanks were made of steel and were pretty high up so I made a couple of steps. This way I could put the products into these tanks without bending down too much.
Anyway, we needed a lot of concrete, and that meant a lot of reinforcement.
I thought: “What the hell do I do with the hundred or so frames that I’d made for the foot scrapers?”
The foot scrapers were getting rusty, they would have been about a year old by then, so I had a good idea: “I’ll put them in that concrete.” We banged them all up to make them flatter and we put all these frames into the concrete for reinforcement. It was quite a massive structure, and it served us well.
Mum and I went back to New Zealand in 1983, and I showed Mum where I had the shop. I was so surprised to see that the workshop was still behind the shop, it was the exact same workshop. There was a mechanic there now. I knocked at the door, Mum was with me, and I introduced myself to these fellas.
I said: “I used to own all that and I had a workshop here.”
I actually owned the whole block.
One of them said: “Can I ask you something? Did you make that stuff outside, you know with the tanks on it?”
I said: “Yeah.”
This fella just looked at me and said: “We had to demolish it, what the hell did you put in the concrete? It took us forever, we had to jackhammer every single square piece of concrete out of that, what did you use for reinforcement?”
I said: “All these bloody foot scrapers, I used them to get the reinforcement in it.”
They had an enormous amount of trouble trying to get rid of it. That was really a ‘piece de resistance’. At the time, I never realised that somebody else would take it and try to pull it apart, that was really funny.”
“I employed a young fella around seventeen years old, I think he got seven pounds a week at that time, he stayed with me for quite a while. Then Herman started to help me, he came from Amsterdam. I then employed two other men, one was a welder, and we also employed an Englishman, Tommy, a Pom. Tommy also worked with me for quite a while. He was sick one time and he stayed away from work for two days, so I thought I’d go and visit him in his home. I’ve never ever seen such an untidy, dirty, grubby place in my life. They were living there quite happily.”
“Once, I felt like making a beautiful mahogany table for myself. It was very expensive to buy the wood and the material. I just had that idea, wouldn’t it look nice. I didn’t have the equipment but I had the ideas, so I bought the slats, glued them together, then had to go back and put the planer over it to make it really flat. There was a special setting that the boys had to do for the planer, and trim the sides off, and then I had to sand them, lay the frame and really put some quality polish on it all. By the time it was finished it was not a cheap thing. More or less it was an artistic thing, to satisfy a feeling I had to make it.”
“I not only fell into a canal when I was a child, I also saved a boys’ life in New Zealand, on the Avon River which flows through the centre of Christchurch. I was around twenty four or twenty five because I’d just started my own business, and was living in Christchurch. I had a very old Buick truck, 1924, and was driving down along the Avon River, going back to my flat, or my room, at Linwood Ave. It’s a winding road, when I just happened to look to my left, and that’s where fate comes in, or providence comes in. Whoever saw the skiff within a minute after the boy had fallen out, wouldn’t have known where to look for him because the skiff would have been at least twenty metres further down the river.
I looked towards the river and there was a skiff, you know a single skiff like a rowing boat. A lot of people used to do boating on the Avon River, anyway I saw this single skiff, and at the very moment of seeing the skiff, I saw two white tennis shoes disappearing into the water. I didn’t see him fall out of the skiff.
That’s all I saw, the top of two white tennis shoes about six inches above the water just disappearing on the side of the skiff, it must have happened in a split second, just at the exact moment that I looked across at the river as I was driving. Obviously, I was made to look.
I looked at the skiff and I thought: “There’s no-one in it, shit, there’s somebody drowning, somebody fell in the water there.”
Yeah, the boat was drifting, and I knew exactly where somebody had fallen, I didn’t worry about where the skiff was floating down the river, I was only interested in where I saw the shoes disappear in the water. The Avon River flows very fast, it’s the service water, flowing to an estuary then to the Pacific Ocean. The skiff, being so light, had already drifted rapidly way down the river.
I jammed on the brakes of my car, in the middle of the road and ran out of the car, managing to kick my shoes off in the bargain. I ran to where I thought the pozzy was, dived into the river and kept my eye, my mind, on where I saw those shoes. I dived under the water. When you get down below the water to where the reeds were, the water was barely moving and there was the body of a young fella floating in amongst the weeds.
The funny thing is, that section of the Avon River was not very deep. I could swim a lot better back then than I can swim today; I swim like a log now. Anyway, I swam to the spot because at the time I didn’t know that it wasn’t a very deep river, it was probably only up to my chest. As soon as I saw his body, I got him and managed to pick him up. That’s when I realized that I could actually stand up in the water and I managed to heave his body onto my shoulders. He was bloody heavy too, and he started jerking as I was carrying him. I walked slowly towards the shore. A lot of people had by now stopped. I remember somebody else getting into the water and helping me out of the river with this young fella. Somebody had also called the ambulance which arrived not soon after that, and the boy was alright.
Then I thought: “Oh shit I lost my glasses”, so I went back in the water and found my glasses in the weeds. I got out of the water, picked up my shoes, which were on the side of the road and started walking to my truck.
The ambulance drivers saw me and asked for my name and address so I said: “Yeah okay, I live on Linwood Ave.”
I was as wet as a duck and just wanted to get back home, so I got back into my truck and I drove home, like yeah, everybody does it every day, rescues a drowning boy, like so what.
About six weeks later I got a knock on the door, at Linwood Ave. I opened the door and two people were standing there, I said: “What can I do for you?”
You see in Christchurch there were a lot of elite schools, and they’re the ones that have the skiffs in the water for training, anyway there was this gentleman standing there with a very stout young fella, a solid boy, no wonder he was heavy, about sixteen or seventeen years old. His father, a well-spoken and well-dressed man had come to my home to thank me.
He said: “I wish to thank you for saving my sons life.”
So that was the father and the son coming back to thank me, which I thought was decent. The boy could have had a black out or a fainting spell and fell over the edge, because you’re sitting quite high in those skiffs, and the seat moves, you go backward and forwards as you’re rowing. I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t interested, I was too young to be interested.
The funny thing is that I didn’t normally drive that way home. Not at all. I must have done some deliveries, because I normally go straight from my workshop toward Linwood Ave in a different way. On that day I turned off Kilmore Street to Colombo Street and crossed over the river on my way to Linwood Ave, right off Victoria Square, a big park land, and that’s when I saw it.
I have stopped thinking the word ‘by chance’. I think it’s fate. How come I was driving then? How come, all of a sudden, I looked to the left? It was as if I was forced to look to the left, because it was a winding road around the river, and at that moment I saw two half shoes disappear into the water, and it just happened and it was meant to. Looking back, it didn’t dawn on me that I just saved a life, I saw it, and I did it.”
“I spent a great deal of my youth camping and hunting. One particular hunting trip turned into an escape from the bush. I was with my friend Herman and we were out in the bush to go deer hunting. We stayed in a deer hut, high up in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, in the middle of the forest, surrounded by dirt roads.
We arrived at the hut around about six or seven o’clock in the evening, made a bit of a fire for ourselves and had a good meal. We knew if it rained we couldn’t stay because we wouldn’t be able to get out of the forest. We were going hunting early the next morning, to do a bit of deer shooting, so we had an early night. I woke up in the middle of the night about two o’clock and it was pelting with rain, it had been raining for a while. I thought, oh God we will never get out of here. It was absolutely pouring down with rain and I thought those roads are going to get inundated. There were hardly roads actually, they were just dirt tracks.
I woke up Herman and said to him: “Those tracks are going to get flooded and boggy, we could be stuck here for possibly weeks, especially if it gets too boggy.”
So, at two am in the morning Herman and I were driving out of the forest using torches.
The first thing we did was get some old rope that we had with us and tie it around the wheel cup of the Fordson E83W van. Luckily, we had some rope to try and get more grip on the tyre it was a nice bit of rope, so we roped all the back wheels to try and make more traction. The wheel hub was solid with a lot of holes in it, so we wove the rope in and around them.
When you’re driving into the Southern Alps you drive on dirt tracks and you just climb higher and higher. Sometimes you drive across a little bit of a plateau in the track that’s not quite level, it might have a slight dip and then you go back up onto another section of the track, another level. These dips in the tracks used to get full of water.
We left in the middle of the night, Herman drove some of the way and then I drove.
I would be sloshing through the water trying to find the solid ground so the van can drive safely. I would put the torch somewhere on the track to show Herman where to turn left or right. He’d turn left, then right and then he’d go and gun ’em up because there was a little dry area, and he’d slither across in the van. Yeah, he’d slither across until he got to the area where another dry patch was. We stood there on this little bit of high ground with the torch and then we would start off on the next little run, with one of us sloshing through the track looking again for dry ground to navigate the car through the forest tracks.
This was how we found another posy to get out of the boggy dirt tracks. I would wave the torch in the air, or he would wave the torch, and then we would gun the bloody thing through the water and the van would slide across the muddy dirt track and that’s how we got out of there, in the middle of the night. It took us a couple of hours.
I tell you what, that was a night to remember. We never shot anything.
The funny thing is you had to really rev the engine, in first gear and then slither around to make certain… and then e-e-e-e-e-e, turn right where the torch was and then e-e-e-e-e-e and then we stopped and said, okay now we go for the next bit.”
“I had a dog called ‘Tippy’ who was with me in those early days. Tippy was a bull pointer, and he used to sleep underneath the work bench. I really had nothing to do for this dog. One day some friends of mine who knew some boys who went pig hunting asked if I’d like to go pig hunting with them, so I took Tippy with me. He wasn’t a pig dog at that point, however he would learn to be. He had the greatest time with the other dogs, and blue pointers are good seeking dogs for finding out where the pigs are. They don’t grab hold of the pig, they start barking you know, he didn’t really know what to do he just went with the other dogs.
These fellows were absolutely smitten by Tippy because he was such a beautiful dog and I thought to myself, sleeping underneath my bench all the time and then just going home, what would his life be otherwise, even if he gets torn up by a pig, he loved that life at the time. Really, these fellas were tough.
I said to them: “What happens if a boar gets a dog?”
“Oh’” one of the fella’s said, and he pulls out a needle and a thread from his pocket saying: “We’ll sow him up.”
He had it with him, the sewing kit, if the dogs got hurt.
The fella continued, saying: “No, we never miss a dog, they don’t get killed. They might get torn a bit, but we’ll sow him up.”
These fellas were tough all right. Some of the kiwis in the country side are really tough blokes, they’re rugby players mate, they’re the ‘All Blacks’.
I said to this fellow: “Would you like Tippy?”
He said: “We would love him; he’d be a seeker and start barking.”
They had a couple of those big dogs with massive jaws, and they were holders. As soon as the two or three seeker dogs barked, the fellows knew that a pig had been bailed up, and they’d let the other dogs go and they used to go voooom, two or three of the holders would leave you, and you’d just stand still. This was at night time, very scary stuff. You stand still and don’t move at all, just wait. Then as soon as the holders got hold of the pig you’d hear the squeal of the pig, ‘eee-eee-eee’ then you went in there and either shot them or stick them, well these boys used to stick them with a knife.
Pigs were a massive menace in New Zealand. A lot of New Zealand Maori went to the second world war and the pig population got rampant, because, in some areas there are a lot of hills in New Zealand, and the pigs use their snout to pick out the succulent roots of plants. Whole sides of hills were dying off because of this and then when the next big rain arrived, huge gullies would form on the side of the hills. You’d know exactly where pigs had been because you’d see these dead spots. The government was actually paying money for them, so much for a pair of ears, something like that. I knew that Tippy was happy there, so that’s how I got rid of Tippy, he was a lovely dog.
I’ve still got a photograph somewhere of the 1925 Buick that I used to take hunting. The Buick had a frame on the back with a couple of bars across that you pulled out which you could put suitcases on, a luggage carrier, all the old cars had it. On the outside of the Buick I had this crate, which I made for Tippy so he could come with me.
I bought an old crate, a big one and made a kennel out of it for Tippy. I cut it and made a wire door in it so he could stay in there when we went hunting or fishing. Funny thing is I never thought of putting him inside the car. I thought a dog didn’t belong inside a car. Dogs should be out in a kennel somewhere. He was alright, he was a good dog. It was such a different life back then, completely different. All the different lives that I’ve had.”
“At the time I had a good friend, Charlie Sang, a second-generation Chinese man, born in New Zealand. He spoke fairly good English. He owned a flower shop in Madresse. He had these little tiny pots made by a pottery group somewhere in Christchurch. He wanted me to make a scroll with a little ring on it so he could put the little pottery pots in this scroll and then people could put some flowers in the pot and hang them off a wall. He was advertising this product and I made quite a bit of stuff for his business. I got fairly friendly with him and his wife. They bought a nice new home somewhere outside Christchurch.
He said something once to me, which was quite peculiar. He said: “Gil, you’re a migrant from Holland and you’re lucky.”
I said: “Why, what do you mean by that?”
He replied: “Well I’m born here in New Zealand, but I’ll always be Chinese. People will always look at me and my children as being Chinese, not being New Zealanders. Whereas as far as you’re concerned your children will be seen as New Zealanders, they will blend into this society.”
It wouldn’t matter today because of the migration, but at that time, there were a few Chinese restaurants in Christchurch and here was a Chinese businessman who owned a fairly successful big flower shop, but in his mind he felt he was still Chinese. I can still remember him, he was a good payer too, paid everything in cash.”
“There’s one thing I really remember about New Zealand back in those days, and that is, New Zealand had shit coffee. They only sold the coffee extract, they couldn’t even make real coffee. It was not even like instant coffee, it was really rubbish stuff, coffee extract. They poured it out of a bottle and you put hot milk in it, shocking. It tasted a little bit like coffee.
There was a Dutchman who opened a coffee shop in Christchurch. I’ve still got the article that Phillip Monger sent to me, because when this Dutchman died, his name and some of the history was in the Christchurch newspapers. This Dutchman wanted to open a coffee shop so he opened a restaurant called ‘Milando’, towards the end of Colombo Street (that area had the cheaper rent) and he pulled out real coffee and made cinnamon bread. That was all he had when he started. He was the first person to open a decent coffee shop in Christchurch. Of course, the first clients he attracted were all the bloody Dutchmen in Christchurch that just wanted a cup of coffee at night time. His shop was chock-a-block full with young Dutch migrants, smoking, drinking coffee and having a lot of fun. It was a haven for Dutch people who wanted a nice cup of coffee, and they were talking their language again.
He walked with a slight limp, I still remember that, he had one leg shorter than the other. He was injured in the war. I believe he was in the Resistance, and worked in the underground, he was older than me. I don’t remember what part of Holland he came from. Don’t forget, when you get a lot of migrants in New Zealand they come from all over Holland. He asked me to make his tables, so I made all his coffee tables. I made all the frames, simple frames nothing complex, and he got all the timber. I can still remember the design of it, believe it or not. It was just a piece of square frame which was angle iron, and my legs were very simple (diagram A). I made all of the tables very quickly for him, that was my contribution to the Milando.”
“There was also a beautiful restaurant that had just opened up on the corner of Amar Street, on the first floor, and this fellow wanted it to be decorated in the Victorian style. I made all these beautiful curly chairs for the whole restaurant.
That was a very big job. I made all the jigs. The chairs were complex and all the curls were made by hand. The chair was full of curls, the back had all these curls around it, even the legs were straight with a couple of beautiful curls on the side of the legs (diagram B).
I made some stuff over there in New Zealand.”
A part of my normal range of products were these sets of three tables, a nest of tables (diagram C). The table set was very simple. They had scrolls on the two sides, and then a frame around the top with little corners so the polished edge glass could fit into the centre. One had to fit into the other, so eventually when you saw them, they had to be parallel. Now, that’s fine, but because it’s all hand done, you had to make certain they were all steady and not wobbly, so you’d pull out one leg, then the other one to make certain that the table was steady, but sometimes it still didn’t look straight. Then you’d put the three tables into each other, and you had to make certain they were all running parallel. I was forever adjusting things to make it look parallel so that they were all exactly the same. You could then pull out a small table or a larger one when needed and they packed away nicely, storing the two smaller tables under the larger framed table. I made hundreds of these sets of tables, they were so popular, I should have asked for more money for them.
Some of my beautiful products were a whole range of fireside utensils. We had a spade, a brush and a poker. The poker was 3/8ths material. They had little hook things that came together with the hook on the top and that’s how they hung. The top had red, yellow and green balls attached to a nice wooden handle on the top. They were phenomenal, they were so good. I made log containers with the fireside utensils. I made my log containers really nice. I had very fine expanded mesh metal and you had the basket and the front, and it had all sorts of scrolls around it, and on the top ring I had a large round handle that was loose. It looked like a medieval wood log holder, really heavy duty. It was around 36 inches by 18 inches wide.
I’d start work about six or half past six in the morning and I went sometimes until ten or eleven o’clock at night to really get on my feet.”
“One night, we were working back and it was getting late. We had been selling a lot of the fireside sets and needed to make more pokers. The fireside poker had to be hammered out, like blacksmith work to make it into a poker. At the time, we had the two workshops. One in Walter Street and one opposite Lancaster Park which I had recently bought, a nice workshop. We needed to make at least one hundred of these pokers. There was a welding flame, at least one inch thick that created a blue glow to the room, and a little light. The welding table was very big and when heated it made a noise like a church bell. We had the epoxy acetylene torch on, one was heating up the end of the rods, as soon as it was cherry red, the other fella would then go flat out, bang-bang, like blacksmiths on this fairly big two metre by one metre welding table. Then reheating the metal we would continue banging it and hitting it until we produced the poker. We didn’t realise how loud we were. It was like church bells going off. We had a small bulb for light, it wasn’t big and the big welding flame gave us a little bit more light. All of a sudden, I was at the time hitting up the metal for the poker, I sensed behind me something, and I looked behind me and it was dark. Then I saw these two coppers standing there. The policemen had these bobby hats on, and they were standing there quietly looking at us, laughing their heads off. I turned off the welding torch and looked at them. One of the older ones, he looked like he was probably in his forties, he just shook his head and he says: “Fellas, listen, do you realise the noise that you’re making? We’ve had about five calls from the people around here.”
He just gave us a warning; he knew we were flat out working. He said “Do you really realise the noise? It’s like church bells going off for miles around!”
So, we stopped what we were working on. We just didn’t think about the echo of sound in the stillness of the night. It was funny. Somebody had put in a complaint about the noise.
Life is like a big lollipop, everybody has a lick on it sometimes.”
Hermon my partner had married Minchaka, one of your mum’s (Ruth’s) friends. He ended up dying from lung cancer. It’s about uncanny really about Hermon’s death. I had read an article in the Reader’s Digest about the relationship between smoking and lung cancer and I showed Hermon the article.
“Hermon,” I said: “Read this!”
I hadn’t even considered the fact that I had smoked from my fourteenth year onwards. I was twenty-five at the time and I said to Hermon; “I’ll be fifty, and if I smoke like this I’ll die and you will be fifty-one.” He was one year older than me.
Herman said; “Well Gil, you can cross the road and die, my grandfather smoked cigars until he was around eighty-five.”
“Well, it’s up to you.” That’s when I stopped smoking.
I got the death notice from the paper that one of my friends had sent me. I wrote to Minchka, his wife, with my condolences. I asked her what had happened and she told me he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Hermon was a little like Vincent Van Gough, a highly emotional man. Minchka told me that when the doctors had sent him home because there was no hope, he slumped in the chair and she said; “If he said it once, he said it a thousand times, if only I’d listened to Gil”.
The sad part was that Herman actually died when he was fifty-one. He was a good man. He was my mate, my business partner.”
Ruth (your mum) was working at the post office at the time. Her close friend was Minchka Z, a lovely Dutch lady who was married to Hermon.
Hermon was very upset when I decided to leave New Zealand and go to Holland to follow up on my dad’s idea to do something in business together. Basically though, it was because I was fairly unhappy with Ruth at the time and I thought maybe if I showed her my upbringing, my hometown, my family, she would see things a bit differently. It actually got worse; a lot worse. Ruth would drag every old little memory out of the cesspit, practically every bloody night. That woman was a menace. Really focused on herself.
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Chelsie Place. We had our German Shepherd dog Ricky. That home had an outhouse. We didn’t have an inside toilet there. We had the dunny man come along to empty our loo. He was scared of Ricky, so I had to make a kennel for Ricky. I noticed the bloody thing was overflowing because the dunny man hadn’t emptied our loo because of Ricky. It was a very clay area, so I quickly emptied it in the back yard up against the fence, that’s where my passionfruit vine grew.
“I worked as a second-hand car dealer on Parramatta Road, no ethics at all there. I sold a Ford coupe which they returned the next week with a whining dif. The car dealer had put sawdust in, or whatever they did, so that on the test run, it wouldn’t make any noise, or whine. One of these things was ‘buyer beware’. You buy one of these things, so beware. Today you have consumer protection, but not back then. They’d turn back the speedometer, the car had about eighty thousand miles on it and they’d turn the clock back to thirty-five thousand miles, yeah bulldust, it had eighty thousand miles on it and it was a worn-out car. At that time motors didn’t last as long as they do today. Every twenty thousand miles, you’d have to have the engines re-bored, new rings or a valve grind. They had all sorts of tricks to make the motors run well for around two weeks. There was always something going wrong with the motors, they were not as accurately manufactured as they are today. Today you can drive at least three hundred thousand kilometres, that was impossible in the early days. You see what happened were the oil filters. You’ve got carbon going into the motors, and that became like a grinding mechanism, with all the dirt in the oil grinding down the motors. The oil filters changed all that.”
Eventually my whole family moved to Australia from Holland and became a part of my business
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Bram born Holland, ship back to Australia and Robin was born in 1962 followed by Helen in 1965
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On my way home from the factory, Ruth was heavily pregnant with Robbie. A young man died in that accident
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The time you tried to help a person and then they all ganged up on you
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Building My Boat the Alkmaar
I didn’t know what to do with myself after I divorced Ruth. So I decided to build a boat at the back of the factory.
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Getting the boat from the factory at St Marys to Silver Water
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We survived well off the factory in those days. Consider this, we had orders at the time for three thousand pounds each. You could buy a house in St Marys for two and a half thousand pounds. That’s equivalent to getting an order today for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s the value today of a house in St Marys.
I did some good business in the early days. Even when we employed something like twelve people, my wage bill for the employees only got to around two hundred to four hundred pounds per week. This was right up to the early-mid eighties, even early nineties we made good money. We could support four directors and their wives. Tante Attie and Mum were on the books and at one stage we had all the cars on the books.
I remember once, I was at the Wileamena club and one of the directors said to me: “Can you have a look outside at the car park, Gil.”
I think I was the president of the club at that time. Our family had all arrived at the club for a function and we came in separate cars. Funny enough all our cars were almost parked next to each other. Uncle Bram had a Saab, Tante Attie had a Volvo, Mum was driving a Volvo and Opa and Oma were driving the Mercedes.
He said: “The Kommer clan are here.”
Five expensive imported cars. We looked like the millionaire’s club.
It was a lot more affordable then, and we could afford a lot more things. Mind you, I did well by organising a good superannuation fund for Uncle Bram and myself. We managed our own fund, Van Diemens Gifts Retirement Fund. After a while we couldn’t manage it ourselves so we employed John and Victor H, and they created the South Australian Investment Corporation Trust fund for us. We built the lease buildings through the trust fund, then China came on strong.
“How can we in this country help to maintain that freedom that our brave soldiers fought and died for? I once had an argument with a big union official in the late 60’s. The union organiser, or rep, was Mr Hogan, also known as Brother Hogan, and the top executive of the AWU union at the time was Mr McDonnel. Hogan was lying through his teeth to the workers at our factory and I knew this from Ruby R, a lady who used to work for me at the time.
She came to me saying that the union official was standing in the canteen and telling all the workers a lot of stuff. He was outright lying, just trying to put shit on the boss so the people would hate me. The idea was to sign up the workers automatically into the union, like what Woolworths were doing at the time. Woolworths capitulated and if you worked for Woolworths, you automatically joined the union. The bosses had arranged that and would then take the union fees out of their wages.
So, when he came around again, as he was entitled to come around every fortnight, to try and coax the workers to automatically sign up, I refused to let this happen.
I said: “No way, people are free to do what they want to do. They can join the union if they want to, but I’ve got other people who don’t want to join and they are free not to do it.”
Mr Hogan then came back to the factory, say on a Wednesday because he came every fortnight, and I caught him going up into the factory. I knew where our boundary was, so I stood on our boundary.
I said: “Mr Hogan, this is our boundary line, you’re not coming across anymore, that’s it.”
He said: “I have rights, I have every right to come across.”
I said: “No you don’t. You’ve lied to my workers. One of the things you said to them was that the ALC company had been on strike because they were going to change to nickel and the sheet welders said there was more skill involved in that type of welding and they wanted more money. They went on strike, week after week after week and they got nothing. You’ve been telling my workers that they got a victory, that’s bullshit.”
You see I heard it from Graham G. Graham G came to work for us because he was one of the welders who went on strike at AS Engineering. He found out that in all that time that he was striking, he didn’t get any money and he needed money to live on.
I told him: “You lied, piss off.” I literally said: “Piss off.”
So then I got a call from Mr McDonnel, his boss. He was the secretary of the union who later became a commissioner for the arbitration court, pretty high up in the industry.
“Hi Mr Kommer, how are you? blah blah blah, I believe Brother Hogan came to visit you and you’ve refused Brother Hogan access to your yard?”
I said: “Is he your brother? And yes, I did.”
“You know we have the law on our side on that,” he said.
I said: “You might have the law on your side but you don’t have the law on your side if he lies to people, and I will refuse to allow him in if he can’t be truthful.”
“I think he was Mr Kommer, Mr Hogan is not a liar, blah blah, and why don’t you want your workers to come and join up with the union?”
I said: “Because they have free choice. I don’t want to make them do it.”
He said: “Mr Kommer, are you a member of an organisation?”
I said: “Yes I am.”
“Can I ask you what organisation?”
“MTIE.”
“Metal trade industrial employers,” he said, “well, that’s a union for bosses.”
“Yes, you’re correct,” I replied.
“Well why don’t you want your workers to come with us?”
I said: “I did it voluntarily, nobody compelled me to. If they want to join up with your union, I won’t stop them, but I won’t make them.”
So then he got nasty, slowly but surely.
He said: “Well, we know you’re getting all your stuff from Blackwoods.”
I said: “So.”
“We can make it a little difficult for you, you know.”
I said: “Mr McDonald, are you threatening me?”
“No, I wouldn’t do that Mr Kommer, but after all, you never know, the drivers might misplace your address or something like that.”
I said: “You are threatening me. Look let me tell you one thing, I went to Canberra not so long ago, and I looked at the whole of the memorial, sixty-three thousand letters in gold lettering written in black marble. There were not many Italian names or Dutch names or French names, they were all Australian names, on one side. Sixty-five thousand names were engraved on the other side from the First World War. That was a devastating war for Australia, sixty-five thousand dead from a population of only six million, that’s a lot of people who died.
Tell me Mr McDonald, they fought for freedom and they died for freedom. What you don’t know, what you must realise, is that I lived in Holland under occupied Germany. If it wasn’t for the sacrifice of those Australians, I wouldn’t be here today. They gave their lives for me to be a free man in this country. Can they carry on with this fight? No they can’t, because they’re not here anymore. Can I carry on this fight for freedom? Yes I can and I will, until my last breath.
I will fight for the freedom that these people died for. Mr McDonald, neither you, the prime minister nor the Queen of England are going to tell me what to do with my workers. That’s all I want to say.”
After that talk he said nothing and I never had any further involvement with the union ever again. We did have a couple of people join the union. The two or three that joined up with the union could never strike in the factory because the others didn’t want to strike. So we never had a strike. They were being agitated by the union to have their wages garnished. I never heard from them again.”
It was a Friday afternoon, and the people had all gone. I was talking to Mrs Holmes in the office. I had my gumboots on and had been shovelling sand. We had this call at the door and there were four blokes standing there. One tall fellow, another two, and a deaf and dumb bloke.
I said: “What do you want?”
The tall fellow said: “We want the money that you owe for the two days.”
I said: “He left the workplace. As far as the law is concerned he forfeited his money, so get off my property.”
Mrs Holmes looked like she was about to cry. “Mr Gil,” she said, “watch out Mr Gil, be careful.”
“Get off this property,” I said, and with my gumboots on I walked through the factory, leaving a trail of loose sand behind me, and kicked them off the property.
Then they started to warn me. “Ah ha,” they said, “you have to go home for the weekend, and we know where your factory is, and you better watch it.” That’s how they started to threaten me.
Meanwhile Mrs Holmes was so frightened that she rang up one of her old school friends who was now a sergeant of the St Marys Police force, Sergeant Ian L.
So I’ve now kicked them off the site, and they went away. After I returned to the office, in comes Sergeant Ian and another very big police officer. In those days you had to be a certain height to be in the police force.
So Sergeant Ian L looks at me and asks: “What’s going on?”
I told them all about it, and described the lads to them. They knew exactly where they were. There used to be a pool room on Station Street in St Marys, opposite the railway station, and that’s where they were hanging out. Both the officers knew these boys by the description I’d given them. The tall one was quite well known in St Marys at the time, and the deaf and dumb one.
I was actually a good mate to Ian L at the time, and he said: “Don’t worry about it, we’ll fix it up.”
So, both the police officers went up to the pool room, and you couldn’t do this today, they cornered these fellas and they said: “If ever you come near the Uniwire factory you’ll be in jail, we’ll pinch something on you, don’t worry about it.”
Poor Mrs Holmes was so upset. I virtually kicked four louts off the property, in my gumboots: “Get out!”
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I wish I could get the factory back to how it was 15 years ago. As soon as we went from wire into tube and sheet metal, and more and more into sheet metal, we started to get into trouble. For that you need skilled people, different people. With wire we could do it with school kids, and we made the best wire products with that.
We drifted into the sheet metal company, and there were ten times more sheet metal workers in Sydney than wire workers. The competition and also the machinery was expensive, this included the turrets and the lasers to keep up in this level of competition.
We couldn’t survive with just wire, we would have disappeared as it was coming from overseas. We wouldn’t have survived the industry if we just remained wire manufacturers. The times were changing and so we had to change.
The sheet metal demanded a lot more overheads. You need a programmer, an estimator. I could estimate wire work products with my thumb, and make money out of it.
There is so much purchasing, you need a purchasing officer because of the complexities of the jobs that you are doing.
All I did with wire was ring up BHP or Australian Wire and order another five tonnes of wire, that was all the purchasing we had to do.
Just had to order the size, like six millimetres thick, and then order a few tonnes of wire.
Wire of course is beautiful, it’s like polystyrene.
You know you’ve got a little pod of polystyrene and you blow a little air into it; it can become a whole room full.
Wire is the same. You start off with a coil and the first thing you do is make it smaller. From the coil you straighten the wire, from that moment onwards it’s like polystyrene, it expands exponentially. If you look at the end result of a display stand from wire, there’s a lot of air.
It was so easy.
I’ve had many general managers who couldn’t hack it, who couldn’t manage the complexities of the business. They make all the promises in the world. At one point I had a sales marketing manager who half took over the general manager position and all of a sudden he was rude to my customers, my clients. I started getting phone calls complaining about his rudeness. One of my best clients, Vivil Accessories, they didn’t want to tell me.
I spoke to one of my sales personnel, and all I could say was: “You’re kidding!”
That same week I put a notice on his desk saying: “…Piss off.”
It’s only after he was gone that I started hearing more and more stories. So many of my clients didn’t want to tell me. He was just bloody rude to people.
Some people can get promoted to the level of their incompetence, and they stay there. At a certain level in business, some people just can’t cope. They are not likely to get promoted again and unlikely to get demoted. They were competent until their promotion and at the level of their promotion they can’t quite cope and get frustrated.
They were looking for promotion, for extra prestige. They find themselves staying at that level under stress, under duress, and they are just barely coping. If they had stayed at the lower level, they would be highly efficient because it was at that level that they were competent.
So, what you get: people get promoted to the level of their incompetence. Big companies, government — so what you’re getting is incompetent governance.
Helping to start Harold the Giraffe thing for children, the big meeting at Colyton High School
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“The book ‘Plato’s Republic’ was my sleeping tablet. I don’t think I’ve ever ploughed through to the end of it. Interesting, very interesting. It was extremely complex attempting to understand what Plato was actually trying to say, but I enjoyed it. I found after two pages or three pages of intensive reading that I just woke up the next morning. I took the book always as a sleeping tablet. I think the concentration of trying to understand the exact meaning of what he wanted to say was so intense that it tied up the ol’ brain. I often read Plato when I was on our boat, the Alkmaar.”
“Ruby R lived with her mother and also worked at our factory. Her mother went into hospital a few times, and one day she said to me at work: “Oh Mr Gil, Mum’s back in hospital.”
I quietly asked Ruby: “What’s wrong with your mum?”
“She’s got a lot of pain in her back because she’s got arthritis in her spine,” Ruby would tell me. The first thing I said to Ruby was: “Does your mum drink milk?” She said her mum loves milk.
I said: “That’s one of the other things, stop drinking milk, because we drink milk when we’re old, but cows never drink milk when they’re old, and some people can drink milk all their life and other people can’t. A massive amount of calcium will just build up. Ruby, I’m going to ask you to do something with your mother that I haven’t asked anybody else.”
The last thing you want to do is be like a Bible basher or be like a food basher, telling people how good everything is. I told Ruby my recipe and said that I would tell her this because I know that you will ask your mother to do it.
This is my remedy to back aches and pains. You get an orange and a lemon and squeeze them. You put a tablespoon of cod liver oil in the juice to emulsify that mixture and drink it on an empty stomach. You don’t have anything to drink or eat for at least half an hour after you take the mixture.
She said: “What will it do?”
I said: “It will do the following; the citric acid that’s in the system has the ability to dissolve built-up particles on your bones that create the pain through being arthritic, the built-up particles on the joints, and that’s one important thing. The cod liver oil will swish through your blood and cleans your arteries and keeps all your arteries supply. You don’t get the hardening of the arteries and it will increase your blood flow, and the best thing is that the pain, which is from the built-up calcium on your vertebrae, will disappear.”
Ruby’s mum did drink the concoction and about six to eight months later Ruby gave me a present from her mum, an opal ring. It was silver with a nice triplet opal on it. It was a lovely thought, and she must have spent a bit of money on that ring. She also sent a letter to say that she feels one hundred per cent better and it said: “Thank you for that, good old-fashioned remedy.”
I was only in my thirties, living on Cliff Road, when my spine became really painful. I had X-rays taken and the doctor said to me: “You’ve got a spine of a man in his sixties, full of calcium build-up.” The X-ray showed everything; my vertebrae had calcium build-up and the doctor didn’t know what to do.
At one point we were living in a flat in St Marys and I was doing some research on back pain. I stumbled across a book from Dan Alexander; ‘Arthritis and Common Sense’. Now he said in his book to drink more milk, which I did. One morning I just couldn’t get out of bed. I actually fell out of bed and was laying on the floor calling out for help. I used to take the mixture of cod liver oil, but every morning I drank coffee milk, which the Dutch milkman at the time gave me.
I asked myself: “What the hell is going on?” This voice came in: ‘it’s the milk.’ As clear as daylight, so I said: “Alright, I’ll stop it.”
Honestly, day by day by day I felt better and within a week I walked straighter. I couldn’t believe the difference, and any subsequent photo taken from Dr J P afterwards showed no calcium build-up.
I used to say hello to another fella, Peter from Eric Anderson. He was a sales manager at the time of Lance Motors on Queens Street. I noticed that he walked exactly like I did, because you walk against the pain. Well, I also gave him the recipe. I don’t know whether he used it, but I know he did stop drinking milk.
He said: “I can’t believe it, Gil; I can’t believe the difference.”
He was a milk drinker like the mother from Ruby R.
I said: “The milk doesn’t agree with you, mate. It builds up the particles of calcium. A calf is born with bones that are practically all cartridge, they’ve all got to become solid strong bones.”
He eventually became the general manager for Lance Motors for years and years and walked straight as a dye.
Every time he saw me, he’d say: “I must thank you.”
I’d say: “That’s alright.”
He said: “Why don’t you want to tell it to other people?”
I said: “Peter, they would look at me a bit stupid, like I’m telling them how to become a religious person. The cow milk is designed to give the weak bones of a calf strong bones as soon as possible, and that can only be done by calcium.”
“There was a big reason why I decided on having my back operation. Lies (your mum) came out to Australia in June ’76 and said hello to us all. I liked her. She was quite funny, younger and much more energetic. I knew I had a bad back, and I was not going to ask a lady to marry me if I was going to be a cripple. After Lies went back to Holland, I didn’t correspond much with her because we wrote nice letters to each other, and I thought that if the operation was a failure then I would stop corresponding altogether. Mum was wondering what the hell was going on. I wanted my operation first. I wanted to see how it would turn out.
After I realised it was a success, then I asked your mum to come out here and we would get married. I could live with the back pain and cope with it, but I could not, for the love of me, ask a woman to marry me as a cripple, someone who was not one hundred per cent. That’s why I decided to have the back operation. I had to get myself organised first.
Mum was here in 1975, Uncle Derek passed away in 1976, and I had my operation around that time. After the operation and the success, I then corresponded with her again. I sent Mum the money to come here with Annelies and to live with us in Australia.
The back operation was performed by Dr Gunsky and Dr Matherson, and it was magic. Back in those days in Australia, you could smoke in the hospital beds. Unbelievable. I had a private room. It was not much of a room; however, it was private, and I couldn’t believe that people were smoking in hospital. I saw people walking around that I thought were operated on long after me; however, many had been operated on before me. I was ready to be discharged within the fortnight. I attended a lot of physiotherapy, water therapy and all that. I got discharged and said hello to the boys who were there before me.
A fortnight later Dr Gunsky asked me to come to his surgery. He was a very reputable neurosurgeon, an elderly man at the time. I was in the waiting room to see Dr Gunsky and a lady and man were sitting next to me. She was called into the surgery and boy did she make some noise, hanging onto her husband’s hand as she was trying to walk into Dr Gunsky’s office.
My thoughts were: “That poor lady, she’s going to have the operation.”
She hobbled out of his office and went to the reception desk and then I was called in. There was one Asian man and a Caucasian man in the surgery office.
“Mr Kommer,” Dr Gunsky asked, “Do you mind if these two students look in on the examination as it is part of their curriculum to observe?”
I said: “Not at all.”
We did the exercises to see what was wasted before and what was coming through with a bit more strength and all those things. I did my knees exercise, up and down. I did everything he asked me to do in the examination.
He turned to the boys and said: “Now Mr Kommer has healed very well. He had the operation about three weeks ago. He stayed about twelve days in hospital and what you see now — the lady who came in beforehand had the exact same operation a fortnight earlier. You see something now that you will have to see more often in your practice. Mr Kommer wanted to get better from the time of the operation. The lady whom you saw earlier, she never wanted to get a lot better because she didn’t want to lose that sympathy she had. Both of them had the same operation. The lady had invested a lot of time receiving sympathy from her husband and that sort of thing.”
The doctor continued to say: “Mr Kommer is divorced, and he had a positive outlook from the time he got into hospital, from the time I met him. Have a look at how he has healed.”
He told them one of the aspects of medicine that is a bit unexplainable is that a person with a positive mind can get better a lot quicker than a person with a negative mind. A pessimist is a difficult healer. That’s the last time I saw them. Dr Gunsky said there was no need to see me — no more check-ups.”
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Your mum wasn’t happy about how we were travelling. We had the car pulling the old family caravan, and the caravan was full of ladderax furniture. Every night we had to take it out, and then in the morning we had to put it all back in again. We had a few quarrels on our honeymoon, disputes they call it. I remember we had to unpack in Goulburn and it was freezing cold. You mum said that it’s a wonder she is still here. Mum did not like showering in the caravan park showers and using their toilets.
The feral cats in Australia are huge. We stopped on the road a couple of times and they were getting bigger and bigger, they’re like lynx, wild cats are very big. On our way to Bourke, as we were driving, we noticed a person standing next to his parked car, a Mustang, with three nice girls sitting in the car. We were in the middle of nowhere, so of course we stopped to see if they were okay.
I said: “Can I help you?”
“Yes ya’ can mate,” came the reply, “about five kilometres up the road they’re doin a bit of road work and the foreman knows me. Ask for George the foreman and tell him that I’m stuck here.”
We drove up the road, we had to go off the road a little bit, and we asked where George the foreman was. It wasn’t summer, so it wasn’t that hot. So George comes walking over to us, they don’t say much, these country people, and I said: “Are you George the foreman?”
“Yep,” he says, whilst blowing air onto his upper lip, pft.
It wasn’t the heat of summer and there weren’t any flies around, he just had this habit, whilst speaking, to blow air onto his upper lip, pft, then continue his sentence.
“Have you got a friend who has a red Mustang?”
Pft, “Yep,” pft.
“Well, he’s stuck on the side of the road between here and Ningum and asked if you could go and help him.”
Pft, “Yep,” pft, George replied.
About halfway between Ningum and Bourke, we decided to stop and stay in a hotel pub at a place called Nulow for the night, near the opal fields near Kulamurra.
We got our suitcases out, so behind the pub there was a horse standing and a shed. The room had one of those old-fashioned beds with the wire mattress. In the corner of the room was like a concrete section with a slight edge, that was the shower. If you wanted to go to the toilet you had to go outside, bypass the horse to go to the toilet. I had this big Milo tin that we had filled with little bits and pieces of opal in the caravan. I emptied it out and mum ended up using that for her toilet so she didn’t have to walk past the horses in the middle of the night.
These are the stories that stayed with us. If we had stayed in a normal hotel room with all the conveniences, we wouldn’t be talking about it or having a laugh.
When Peter was born, mum was still a little dopey from the anaesthetic and she said: “I want Gil, I want Gil.”
The nurses thought your mum was saying: “I want a girl; I want a girl.”
The nurses were looking at mum saying: “You’ve got a beautiful boy.”
The nurses were admiring Peter when he was born and smiling, saying he was so beautiful, such a lovely pink colour. I remember asking them: “Why are you talking so much about his beautiful colour?”
They said that the number of women who smoke during their pregnancies and have ‘blue’ babies is terrible. Not the healthy pink skin, which is what should be normal. I can’t understand why youngsters are not being taught at high school the damage that is done to the foetus if the mother smokes or drinks. Why not a more comprehensive class on parenting. After all, most of the children are going to be parents.
“Once I was driving my Valiant home at night from Dick Bernards’ place near Penrith. I saw somebody walking on the road and all of a sudden, I heard this loud bang. I thought shit, I’ve hit somebody. I quickly stopped the car and just froze. I then opened the door to get out and to see what the hell’s going on. This fella comes around with a ruddy face, he was a bit of a drunk.
He said to me: “Are you alright mate?”
I said: “It’s not me I’m worried about you, are you alright?”
He must have hit the car with his hand or something. He had a bottle in one of his hands. All I felt was this bloody bang.
I remember another hitchhiker once, a long time ago. He had the strongest body odour, he was a hobo. Lucky mum was not in the car. I didn’t know that human beings could smell so foul, I had no idea. I was driving down from Palomino road onto Forresters road, going into the factory area in St Marys. This fella was sitting on the side of the road. I thought shit, maybe he’s been hurt or something. I stopped the car and went over to see him.
I asked: “Are you alright mate?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m alright.”
I said: “What happened?”
“Ah,” he said, “I’m just having a rest.”
He had a sort of a coat on that was a bit like tarpaulin material, that sort of thing.
I said: “Where are you going?”
“Ah,” he said, “to the station.”
I said: “Well hop in the car and I’ll take you there.”
“Oh thanks mate.”
After I started the car I thought, “what the hell is that smell?” I couldn’t make it out, and it was this fella who was just smelling so bad, vile actually, it was almost like I was in Hades.
You know if it was a court sentence the judge would say: “You will be fined to spend one week with this gentleman in the cell.”
I would have said: “Please give me five months solitary.”
Anyway, I opened both the windows. By the time I got to the station, I was thinking that even Hades couldn’t smell so putrid. Honestly the smell was still in the car the next day. I was driving a four-wheel drive. I couldn’t believe it, I honestly could not believe that a human being could smell so foul, it was absolutely nauseating. Anyway, I dropped him off at the station.
I said: “Off you go mate.”
I don’t know if he was going to catch a train but he would have been sitting in an empty carriage. Everyone would have quietly disappeared. Very unusual, I’ve never smelt a human being who hasn’t washed for years, it was horrible, you could actually shovel the body odour out of the window.
I once saw a gentleman walking along St Marys road. It was a bit of a lonely road, and I’d seen him there before. He had this funny looking garment on, all black with a hat, like some type of Greek Orthodox minister.
So, I stopped and said: “Can I help you?”
He said: “No it’s alright.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To the station.”
I said: “That’s a long way away, at least eight kilometres, do you want me to give you a lift?”
He said: “If you don’t mind.”
He was from some type of Arminian or Coptic Church. He wore this official garment like he was a minister, so I took him to the station, he was not a bad chap. He was a good passenger, not a smelly passenger.”
Lies and I did trace one family in New Zealand. I had some time off when we were in New Zealand on a trip and mum said: “Why don’t we have a look at the place where you used to work?”
We took a taxi from Rotorua and went all the way to the farm property not far from Waikatu. The taxi driver was looking at his map, working out where he was to go to, when all of a sudden I remembered the roads and how to get there.
He wanted to turn left and I said: “No, you turn right here.”
I knew exactly where to find the farm, after all those years. The house was still on the hill, that used to belong to the owner. They had two share farms. One of his properties had almost two hundred acres and the property next door was two hundred and fifty acres. It was all his property, and he had two share milkers. He used to live well on that. As we drove to the farmhouse we saw Mr Crawford’s name still on the letterbox.
I said to your mum: “That must be his son.”
As it worked out, Mr Crawford’s son, Roger, is now a manager of the South Waikato Cluster. The house that I used to live in, with George Balina, had gone and been replaced by another house. George Balina, he’d also long gone, bought his own farm. I did see this young fella, the share milker, and said hello to him, talked to him for a while, whilst mum and the driver sat in the taxi. That was a funny thing, to remember where to go, after all this time.”
“I had a Valiant. I got caught for speeding, and that was the end of all my points. I remember I drove religiously within the speed limit for 12 months. It was the late 1960’s, early 1970. The amount of people tooting their horns. What would have been a good idea was to put a big sign on my back window that said: ‘I’ve lost all my points, I’m on probation for 12 months, so shut up’. The only safety belts were in the front seat, not in the back seat. You kids used to play in the back of the car. The Volvo I once owned was a very heavy-duty car, a ’72 model I think, that’s when the factory was doing fairly well. At one stage I had a grey BMW, a seven series, probably one of my favourite cars. Mum had a Volvo.
There was no power steering back then.
In New Zealand I remember changing the old 24’ model Buick for an old Ford 46’. I couldn’t believe how some motors were so much more efficient than others. The old Buick probably did at least four litres for every four kilometres.
I remember when Opa bought a Volkswagan from one of the representatives.”
Dads cars 4 wheel drive army looking thing
Fishing trip with Craig, we stayed in the lake all night and didn’t catch much at all. At one point we were just drifting to the beach and I was having a snooze, Craig was saying: “Gil, Gil, wake up!”
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Outings with the grandchildren on the boat, being pulled behind on the rubber thing
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Family Easters
Renting the other apartments when we started to become a big family
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“I remember our tree expedition in the middle of the night up at Boomerang. Craig, Peter and myself. We stopped off at Robbie’s home on the way to Boomerang and again on the way back for a cuppa and to talk and laugh about what Peter called: “Our ninja mission.”
We got pulled over by the cops after leaving Robbie’s place on the way up north. Later I found out that the police officer could not have fined us even if he wanted to because we didn’t do the U-turn. He talked a long time to his bloody superior.
What happened was after we left Robbie’s place, we started driving in the wrong direction and were heading back towards Wyong instead of towards Newcastle. It was dark and it was one o’clock in the morning. There was nothing or no-one on the road apart from two little lights that were coming towards us further down the road. As it worked out, those two little lights were the police car.
I needed to turn around and said to the boys, “I’ll turn here and do a U-y.”
I thought however that I’d better wait for the car to pass and it was the cops’ car. He stopped, turned around and came up to us.
He said: “Do you realise you’re not allowed to do a U-y here?”
“Yes I do,” I said to him.
He then went off and talked to his superior for a long while.
His superior must have said: “Well they didn’t actually do a U turn.”
He came back to our car and said to me: “I’ll give you a warning,”
His superior must have said: “Did they actually do the U turn?”
He would have had to say: “No, they stopped and then went back.”
On our return trip Craig said “Gil, we came, we saw, we conquered.”
I waited for a reasonably full moon so we could do it at night with some light. What I would have liked to have seen was so and so’s eyes the next morning when he looked out in his back yard and there was nothing there. We however had left as soon as the job was done and were back home here in Kenthurst by nine o’clock in the morning.
We were cutting the scraggly She-oaks down at two o’clock in the morning, shoving them all in the back bush. Our so and so neighbour must have called the ranger out the next day when he realised the trees were gone.
I remember telling Craig about the rangers being called whenever I took a couple of bloody branches off those trees and Craig said: “Well Gil, this time we gave them a good haircut.”
We had round up with us and we just soaked the stumps in round up and said: “You’re not going to live anymore.”
The whole time we were cutting the trees down we were going ‘ssh-ssh-ssh’ because it was so early in the morning, we didn’t want to wake up anyone, yet we were cutting down trees. Every time we heard the snap, crunch, crack of falling branches we all started saying: “Ssh-ssh-ssh.” The beauty about that area at Boomerang Beach is that there is constant crashing of the waves so there is always noise in the air.
Funny thing though that with all the wind on that point of the cliff, trees did naturally fall down. Just on that particular night they just naturally feel down in a straight line, and the only ones to fall were those bloody She-oaks.”
“You know that movie with Captain Phillips, when his ship gets pirated. That movie is based off the coast of Oman. The pirates were operating out of Salalah. Well, that’s where I got stranded, at the Salalah airport in Oman.
I like adventures. Your mum and I were on our world cruise and I wanted to surprise Uncle Peter for his 80th birthday party. You lot were already in Holland, Bram, Peter and Robbie. The night before I was leaving, mum and I were having a cup of coffee on the boat with some people. Mum was telling these people the story that I was going to get off the boat at Salalah and catch a plane to surprise my brother in Holland for his birthday. The main city is Muscat in Oman, and I had booked it all. I then mentioned to these people on the boat that I could take a taxi to Muscat.
The next thing this fella said: “Do you realise that Somalia is one thousand kilometres away from the airport at Muscat? It’s not just a taxi ride, mister, it’s one thousand kilometres away.”
I just thought I’d catch a taxi from Somalia to Muscat and away I'd go — that’s when I first started to panic.
I had no idea that I had to take a domestic flight. Mum and I went back to our cabin on the ship and I started googling the domestic flights and looked into booking another ticket. I found a flight from Somalia to Muscat, which was going to leave Somalia at around one pm. That flight would get me to the airport just in time to catch my next flight from Muscat to Dubai. Then I would pick up a KLM flight from Dubai to Holland. I paid one hundred and sixty pounds for that domestic flight ticket.
Saying goodbye to mum, I disembarked from the ship when we docked at the port. Grabbed a taxi and headed off to the local airport terminal at Somalia.
At the airport at Somalia, I walked up to the glass case and, pointing to the plane which had landed at the airport and was already on the tarmac, I said to the attendant: “I’ve got a booking on this plane over there.”
He said to me: “No name, you not there.”
“Well, I booked last night,” was my firm reply, to which he said: “Plane full anyway, and the gates are closed.”
So I thought: ‘the plane was already full and the gates were closed?’
“What do you mean, gates are closed?”
He just looked at me blankly and said: “Well, all passengers are on board, the plane is full.”
I had in my hand this one-hundred-and-sixty-pound flight ticket, which I showed him, and he just shrugged his shoulders. I quickly went outside of the airport and thought this is gonna’ be a disaster. I was thinking to myself: ‘I’d better go back on that boat,’ so I quickly got a taxi and we rushed off, driving around ten kilometres back to the harbour.
There was a policeman and an army man standing at the port facility with the big boom gate. The taxi driver who drove me there said: “I can’t go onto the wharf, I’m not allowed on the wharf.”
We then went to the boom gate and luckily this army officer, or security guard, could speak a couple of words in English. Fortunately for me, another car was also coming, so this army officer stopped the car.
He said a few words to the driver and then looked at me, saying: “You’re alright, you can go in this car and he will take you to the boat.”
I couldn’t see the boat because there were a lot of buildings around it, so I got into the car and as he turned the corner, I heard this noise — a very familiar noise — the blast of a horn as a ship leaves the harbour.
“Oh God,” I thought.
This man who was driving the car was so kind. He took me back to the dock.
“Well,” I said to him, “now I’ve got to get some money.”
It was a Saturday afternoon and the banks were closed. I went to an ATM. I never use ATMs, but I had three numbers written on the back of my credit card, and I knew there was one missing. I knew that there should be four numbers. I couldn’t remember if it was 4869 or 4689. I placed my card into the ATM and thought: “Here it goes.” The ATM accepted the card and the password. What a feeling of relief, because I had no money at all on me. I felt so relieved that at least now I could get money. I pressed up $250, the question came on the screen ‘would you like 250?’, which was the top amount I could withdraw at the time. It turned out to be $1126.
I said to this fella: “Could you take me back to the airport please?”
Which he did. I wanted to give him a fifty-dollar note for all that he had done for me.
“Sorry sir,” he said, “it’s too much.”
So I gave him a 20, and he said: “Thank you.”
I thought now that’s the true Islamic spirit of not being too greedy, or whatever, and the second fella who helped me at the airport was exactly the same.”
To book the KLM flight to Amsterdam, all I had to do was give Peter my credit card number and all the details and he could book everything for me. That’s the magic of credit cards...
When I arrived in Amsterdam, I rented a car and drove into the car park of the seaside restaurant where Oom Piet was celebrating his eightieth birthday party...
I said (in Dutch): “Have you got a cup of coffee for a traveller?”
He looked around and he couldn’t believe it, he had tears in his eyes, he cried. He didn’t expect it, when I arrived at his party, it was a huge surprise.
Peter later told me his part of the story, he said: “I’d walked back up the stairs after dad and sat down where I was sitting before... I tell you what, it was a big surprise to everybody there.”
The Wagon Wheel in St Marys
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Car Trips and Checkpoints.
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We had a visitor at the Rotary Club, around 1968–69, Rabbi Brash, who gave a good talk. He wrote two books about “What’s the origin,” mainly about sayings. He spoke about what’s the origin of the handshake and this and that.
He said, “So, what’s the origin of the veil that brides wear?”
He wrote about the fact that villages in medieval times sometimes stole each other’s maidens to put new blood into the village. The idea was to put a sack over her head, marry her off, then take the sack off, so she couldn’t go back to the village and was then stuck with her husband.
“Anzac Day: It was 2015 and we had a big Anzac Day event here at Kenthurst. Paul Rapp was doing all the organising. He knew there was going to be a flyover by three F18s, on their way to the Sydney Anzac Day Parade. He gets hold of the air force and gives them a ring. As they’re coming in from Richmond, he requests that the air force fly over Kenthurst on their way to Sydney. Paul involved the local member of parliament and before we knew it, the flyover for a small town on the outskirts of Sydney had been confirmed. Nathan was marching and so was Big Jim, it was a big event.
It all started with Paul saying: “Look, how about we create a small march from the Caltex station at Kenturst, march a little bit on the road and back into the park? Nothing to do with a street march, I think it would barely take 120 metres.”
The amount of people that came to Kenturst to look at that little march was amazing. They had many divisions represented, Vietnam section and all that. Big Jim goes and stands next to Peter on the Vietnam section. They look at each other and couldn’t believe that they were in the exact same unit together and hadn’t seen each other since Vietnam. Here they both were meeting again, here, in Kenthurst at our little Anzac Celebration march.
Last year (2016) we did the march again, not quite as big, however somebody came up with a (model) Jeep and a Ford motorcycle that had both been restored. Then this year (2017) we had the Furphy in the parade. I borrowed the car trailer from Sam C and we put the Furphy on the car trailer, then brought it around to Kenthurst. Our horse Nikko then came around on the horse float. It was a huge success.”
Vanuatu: building a school or medical centreWhen you thought you were fit, and you were helping build a school or hospital, then all the younger blokes went out for drinks and you went to bed.
We had a huge project where we converted the electric sewing machines to paddle sewing machines, which we gave to the ladies on Vanuatu and some of the neighbouring islands. They could then sew dresses and sell them at some of the markets. Back then they didn’t have easy access to electricity. Now there is electricity everywhere.
Fund Raising Events: We borrowed a cow from a local farmer, then we’d walk the cow around an enclosed off area that had numbers randomly placed in it. The aim was that wherever she did a poop, and it landed on that particular square, the person who put their bet on that number would get five thousand dollars. John H eventually won the five thousand dollars and then he donated it back to the Variety Bash. That particular activity raised us ten grand. I’ve still got all the numbers of the “cow pad raffle” somewhere in the shed.
The only problem was the bloody cow didn’t want to poop!
The farmer was so frustrated he said: “I’ll go and get a second cow.”
When he was on his way to get the second cow, the first cow was walking around and then—poop, poop, poop—and they all landed onto three of the squares. We looked at the biggest poop, and that was the square that won it.
On one of our other charity events, was raising money for the Variety Club Bash.
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“There’s not many people that I know who have had knee replacements that can bend their knee as well as I can. It’s as if I’ve had no knee replacement at all. I’ve got such good movement in my knee. I believe it’s because I continued with my physiotherapy. I did an extra four weeks of physiotherapy after the operation at Mt Wilson.
Somebody told me to make certain that I strengthen my thighs, and do thigh exercises, but once again, whether it’s my back or whether it is my knee you can also be bloody lucky as well.”
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Ricky the German Shepherd
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Keishunds
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All the Magnificient Fresian Horses
Heiska, the Stallion, Wiska, Nikko; Gelding
We had just watched our dads Friesian horses receive ribbons in a judging thing and all were excited. Dad paid for our motel room and a feast of a dinner so we were being very spoil.
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Ricky the Maltese Terrier
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Helens Galah
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“I remember the time that we asked the tree loppers to come over to Kenthurst to cut some of our trees. Sonny has done many jobs around the place, his hands are like huge slabs when he shakes your hand and if he stands on the concrete path and I stand at the front door, three steps up from the path, he would be nearly my height.
It was on a Sunday, three blokes, big fellas, including Sonny, turned up with their chain saws and started cutting down the Lily Pily trees from around the pool area. Council would not give permission and the trees were causing us a lot of problems around the pool area. Then about an hour after they started cutting the trees, the next thing you know, their two wives arrive with about six kids and started having a picnic in our garden. They actually sat in a circle, lit a fire and started cooking. It was amazing. They dug a little hole in the grass on the lawn and made a little fire. Then there was a knock on the door, Mum answers and one of the tree loppers’ wives asks your mum if we had any juice for them to drink.
Mum said: “No I don’t have any juice.”
“I’ll tell you what, it was a bit bloody scary driving the tractor down through the old fire trails that come out of Kenthurst Park in the middle of the night to get it back home. The tractor lights were working at that time, I had to get the tractor home and it wasn’t road registered, so I couldn’t go on the road. The gentleman that sold me the tractor suggested that there was an easy track going along the back through the fire trail. It went well, I had no problems with it, you sit in the chair and you just hold on. Driving down a fire trail at night with poor tractor lights, it was a bit scary.
For the first few years I had the David Brown tractor, which I sold to John De. I must have had this tractor since ’87. It came with the grader, I bought the slasher and the rotary hoe, which eventually rusted to pieces.”
There is a Jesuit monastery here in Kenthurst and the Pope came and stayed there for a few days. Mum (Lies) rang her family and said: “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”
There were banners out to welcome Pope Pias. the German pope. He was one of the only popes who ever resigned. In my honest opinion he was the king of darkness. I think he resigned because he had a pact with the devil. The official version was ill health.
I was heading north towards Towoomba on a business trip once. All of a sudden I looked at the petrol gauge of the old Volvo and thought: “Shit, I’m using a lot of fuel.” There was something like another two hundred kilometres to drive, which is normal in some of those outback towns. I thought: “Bugger me dead, I’m using so much petrol.” I stopped the car and looked underneath and there it was in the petrol tank, a tiny wee hole that fuel was leaking from. So then I worked out how many more kilometres I still needed to drive to Quilpie and I thought: “All right, if I drive fast enough, I’ll just make it!”
They were all gravel roads back then. As I drove into Quilpie there was a big bed and breakfast place, and the gutters are fairly high, so I drove the car with two wheels on the gutter and two wheels on the road so I could get underneath it in the morning. That was also the exact time I ran out of fuel. I found out where the leak was, just a tiny wee hole, so I shaped a bit of hard wood and bunged it into the hole. That repair job got us back to town and eventually I traded the car in with that piece of hard wood still in the petrol tank. It’s probably still in there.
I met up with an opal miner in Quilpie, Bob G. he was off the booze, but a lot of people in the town were alcoholics. There was a fellow on the Gold Coast, Dennis, who dealt in opals, had a massive big shop and he used to help the ex-alcoholic get mining leases, provide some equipment and he would buy the opals from them. Anyway, I was sitting with Bob after a meal and I was about to go to bed, when Bob said: “You can’t go to bed yet, I’m waiting for a Klee trap tractor/bulldozer that I bought to arrive and the bloke is delivering it tonight.”
We waited and waited. Eventually it got to around twelve thirty when this fella pulled up with the big low loader carrying a big bulldozer on top. The fella was Snow B. with his daughter Gail. He called Gail ‘Fang’ because she liked to look at the TV show The Addams Family.
I asked Snow: “What made you so late?”
He said: “We ran over a bullock on the road from Tarum.”
The bullock had rolled right underneath the big low loader and had ripped all the oil lines. He said it took a bit of repair work. Eventually he put his six year old daughter Gail on a mud guard to hold some type of thing in place so that the low loader vehicle could get into Quilpie.
The next morning we had a look underneath the low loader to see how we could fix it all up. You should have seen the bits of flesh and hair, bits of bullock skin under the low loader.
That’s how I met Snow B.
The whole family went to Andre Rieu, live in Sydney in 2009. Incredible music, costumes, and my son and daughter also took two of their friends.
I danced with your mum at the concert. “I had to dance, I wouldn’t want to not go to Andre and not dance.”
Many concerts at the Opera House.
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Les Miserables (seen 3 times), Phantom of the Opera, Lion King, Karen Carpenter Story, Aladin.
Shen Yun Performing Arts
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2016: The Amsterdam Buddapist trek, we went through 62 locks in the boat we went on with the river cruise.
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We were at the Vatican and there was a massive amount of people. All of a sudden, I heard this voice. People were yelling and screaming and all that sort of thing. We were standing where there was like a sandstone bench, so I asked Lies to sit, and I went into the throngs of people, like millions of them. I asked a priest what everyone was looking at and he said, “The pope, the pope,” pointing in the direction of where a bit of carpet was in front of the balcony. I came back to the ledge where Lies was sitting and I told her what I had seen. All of a sudden there were these pigeons overhead of us and then they popped on me, and I had these white streaks on my clothing.
I laughed and said to Lies, “You see, I’ve just had a message from God.”
I’ve been blessed by a pigeon in the Vatican.
We’ve hired a boat in Holland three times at this stage. The first time was a small boat, ten metres,
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We did have a Kommer cousins day, in Holland, when we hired the boat. We went to a beautiful restaurant that had a function room with accommodation. Om Piet suggested the cousins’ day and asked if Om Bram and I would help pay for it. Om Piet organised it and put it all together. We were touring the canals at the time on the boat. We moored the boat at Davidton and your mum and I rented a car to drive to Halton. That was at Gelderon.
After the war, the British and the French took the world map and basically divided Europe. The Americans were only slightly involved because they had no real interest in that. They withdrew and wanted to get back into their own country.
The British and French said: “What shall we do with all this land?”
They took a pencil and put a bit of a circle around a plot of land, saying: “That can now be Yugoslovia”, another circle and that became Iraq, then Iran. They didn’t worry about the ethnic population, who was living there. No, they just drew on the world map. What they did, the Kurds, who are in the top end of Turkey and drifting over to Iraq, Syria and Iran, they were a particular ethnic group that should have had their own country, however with the divisions, this massive ethnic group was actually divided amongst four countries. They have been fighting ever since to get their own nationality, their own land.
There were various partisan leaders at the time, who were friendly with the British and French, and they became vassal states, like the Shar from Persia, now called Iran, their family was given the leadership of Persia.
Israel at the moment has two different ways of leadership thinking. You’ve got the old Zionites, the true Jewish Zionist, they are still secretly looking at the greater Israel at the time when Israel was famous, this includes parts of Syria and the Jordon, they are still hoping to get the land that was bequeathed by God back to them. They were quite in shock when America and President Trump said he was going to withdraw the troops from Syria. These people want as much turmoil as possible in that area, so they can eventually pick up the land they want. The more problems in the Middle East, the less people worry about Israel. They worry about Iraq, Iran and all the other ones.
The Jesuits are in many ways very violent, if you are looking at their basic platform, it was almost like the Muslims, as they were prepared to kill babies to get rid of the Protestants and to return the people back into the Catholic church. At the time that was their sole function, to get rid of the Reformation. The Jesuit oath, and their basic constitution, is to eliminate the Protestants. They had special permission from the pope at the time to create the order of the Jesuits.
There used to be Christian statues in so many places around Europe, especially in Rome, and they used to have like a platform above the head of the statue to protect the statue from being fouled by the birds. This eventually ended up being the halo.
The message of Christianity was spread by Paul. Paul was on the road to Damascus, which is Syria, when he was struck blind and what came into his mind was the voice of God. His name at that time was Saul, not Paul. The voice said to him: “Saul, Saul what are you doing to me”
He was told that going through the gates of Damascus there would be a man there waiting for him and he would get his sight back. The teaching of Christianity as Christ as the Saviour amongst Jews did not go very fast or very well. This was predicted, prophesied, in the Old Testament that this would occur.
The Greeks, Romans, Babylonians all had their own religions. Paul was the first one that was instructed not to preach to the Jews and to spread the faith of the church amongst the non-Jewish people. His helper was Barnabus. The funny thing is that Paul’s name, Peter, Luke and Thomas is used a lot among the Christians, but not Barnabus and he was Paul’s biggest helper. Not many people are named after him. Massive population of Jews in Rome. It was the Christians who started to live in the catacombs in Rome because of their persecution by the Romans. They were being eaten by the lions in the colosseum. They would sing hymns as they were standing in the centre of the colosseum and that upset a lot of the Romans. Eventually that was the strength of Christianity, it was their faith. They weren’t yelling and screaming, just standing in the centre singing hymns while the lions were let loose to kill them.
In any country during that era if a group became too strong or too powerful, the dictators would get fearful that they would be overthrown. Many religions and gods existed in those days, especially all the Roman gods. Christianity was teaching a different religion altogether and it was a bit like heresy in those days. If you taught Christianity in Saudi Arabia today, you won’t last long. Same back in those days. And so that was what happened. When the Christians started to preach Christianity, the Romans were out to catch them and to then imprison them and use them as fodder, as entertainment to the masses.
When Christianity started to become very strong the Roman politicians had to make a decision: either we join them or we get defeated. It was Augustus who became the first Roman Christian Caesar. From then onwards the Roman empire became the Holy Roman Empire. That was when the church started to expand rapidly and you could only become a king by the blessings of the Lord, and kingdoms could only expand with the blessings of the bishops. It was then God’s will that you would become a king.
Christian statues started to replace the Roman and Greek statues of gods. As time went on, you had your various saints being produced. Take from year zero to the year six hundred when it was still the Dark Ages, go back six hundred years from now, you get to the year fourteen hundred, so that’s a long time for Christianity to evolve in Europe. Then after the start of the Holy Roman Empire you had monostries coming home, you had the monks travelling around Europe converting people.
The Gnostics had a belief in the creator but not necessarily the Christian creator.
We had that at school as a matter of fact in our history classes. The commencement of Christianity in the Roman era. You don’t get that in schools today. It was not considered a religious teaching it was just considered a part of history. We did Greek empire, the Greek philosophies and Greek mythology. You got no idea how today’s schools compared with what the early schools taught. In the early days sixteen and seventeen year old young men were in the position of majors and captains. University education included Latin and Greek.
“One of the strangest experiences I’ve had in my life was after I went to pick up some booze at the big bottle shop down Windsor Road near Woollies. It was around Christmas time, four or five years ago (2012). I got the booze for the Christmas party all loaded up and started to drive home towards Annangrove Road. The next thing I was aware of — you know how you come out from Riverstone onto Garfield Road — the next thing I knew, shit, this is not the turn-off to Annangrove Road. I was driving and all of a sudden I was — well — I didn’t know where I was.
I thought, ‘What the hell happened?’
I don’t know what happened. I must have been driving perfectly well, but then there was a stage from one section to that point where I realised I was on the wrong road. That part of the drive was a total blank. All I know is that I became aware of driving the car again in a totally different section. I had to go further down the road, turn around and go back — I missed my turn-off by a few kilometres.
It was exactly the same as when I found myself sitting in the chair in the garage with no recollection of how I got there. That was when I had the accident with the horses. Exactly the same sensation — waking up in the chair, with no dirt on my knees, not knowing how I got there or what had occurred. My last memory was going into the paddock.”
“I walked down to the paddocks that day to open the gate that’s between the two paddocks to move the horses from one paddock to the next. At the time we had three horses — Nikko was very young, Wiska and Kluska. Normally, before entering the paddocks and opening gates, I would give them some hard food in their troughs. However, on this particular occasion I thought, ‘Oh bugger, they all just mill around you and it gets very annoying’, so what I did was put three pads of hay in the front paddock to get them away from where I was going. That way, I could open the other gate without them milling around me.
I opened the gate to the front paddock, closed it, and the next thing, I’m sitting on a chair in the workshop with a wet paper towel in my hand that had a bit of blood on it. I had no idea how I got into the shed, what had happened, and why there was blood on the paper towel. I quietly walked up to the house and your mum was there. Mum looked at me and noticed that the back of my head was full of blood. Oma quickly got a pair of scissors to cut away the hair that had blood on it and helped clean it all up. I only had a very small cut in the area, but head wounds bleed a lot, so it looked worse than what it was.
Peter was also home at the time and I said to him, “I don’t know what happened? I just sort of woke up sitting in the chair in the garage and I’ve lost my glasses.”
Peter went down to the garage to look for the glasses and he found them in the paddock just near the gate. There was a bit of gravel in that area.
He came back up to the house and said, “Dad, I’ve found your glasses.”
It was just at that moment when he said that he had found my glasses that I saw myself falling sideways and seeing nothing else but horse legs all around me. The moment he said, “I found your glasses,” suddenly I remembered a small bit about what had occurred. Boom — I remember falling sideways and seeing all the horse legs around me. It was a complete mystery how I got back to the garage.”
I had a slight mark on the side of my head and when I told the story to Jeff H, he said, “That mark looks like a horse hoof — you’d better get an X-ray done.”
So I got an X-ray done and the result showed a crack in one of the bones inside my skull. It was a fine fracture. The specialist said, “Don’t worry about it, that fracture will heal.”
The question for me was, “How did I come to sit in that chair?”
Now because of my knees, if I’m on the ground, I actually have to get onto my knees to get myself up. If I fell in the paddock where there was gravel, then naturally there would be some gravel or rubbish on my knees — that’s if I had got up the normal way. There was no gravel on my knees at all.
The horses heard me opening the gate and they would have thought that they were going to get some hard food. All three of them came rushing at me, and I believe that they knocked me over. That’s all I can say — that’s all the theory I’ve got — because as I fell, I can remember all these bloody horses and all their legs, twelve legs all around me.
Then there’s the next question: “How did I come to sit in the chair?”
Another funny thing was that the gate to the paddock was closed.
I believe that one of the horses must have lightly touched me on my head with its hoof. They were excited because they thought they were going to get their hard food. It was more than that though — I had no gravel on my knees, no gravel on my hands. I just had a wet cloth in my hands, sitting in the garage. I must have gone to the sink and got a wet towel. The gate to the paddock was closed as well. It’s a mystery. I’ve just got no idea — all I know is that I woke up in the chair with a wet paper towel and a bit of blood on it.
One of the horses, maybe even Nikko, must have quietly touched my head — not stood on it, just touched my head with a hoof — because they left a mark of a hoof on my temple. It was Jeff H who said, “That mark looks like a horse hoof.”
Fortunately, it was just a tiny, tiny fracture. I had no headaches at all. The horses would have kept milling around me after I fell, but how the hell did I open the gate without the horses? I just don’t know. And how long did I lie there? Was it five or ten minutes? Or was it longer? Did the horses quietly go back to the grass? Somewhere along the line I either got up myself or I was lifted up and placed into the chair.
I don’t know if angels were involved, however there are a few things in life that make you wonder what the hell.”
“There’s more between heaven and earth than we know.
I would like to think that the episode with that white stallion on our property, fighting with the little white horse, was interceded by divine intervention, because if it was, that would strengthen my belief. Even the fact that your mum decided to come down to the shed and see what was going on is unusual. All the events that day just click together. The thing is, I even arrived home early on that Wednesday, which I never do.
The white stallion was literally attacking the little horse, trying to trample it. First, I grabbed a pitchfork from the shed. I thought to myself that I had to protect myself first, then I raced into the paddock, which in hindsight I would never do again because it was so dangerous.
Somehow the little horse was running towards the shelter that we had recently built — the only shelter that had a gate to it — at the same time that I was approaching them both in the paddock, with the white stallion following hot on the little horse’s heels. That little stallion then went into the enclosure and, as he was turning around, the white stallion was right behind, ready for a full-on attack — ready to trample the little guy in the enclosure. He would have certainly killed the little horse if I had not been there.
So I was right behind them both and could prong the white stallion with the pitchfork, which then allowed the little one to escape almost underneath his legs. I was standing just to the side of the enclosure to avoid the little white horse as it escaped. The white stallion didn’t want to respond to the prong because it was still trying to claw at the little horse — it was wild with aggression. I gave that white stallion a good prong too — it didn’t draw blood, but by golly the stallion shot backward towards the back of the shelter. It hurt him. And that’s what I managed to do — I managed to close the gate on the white stallion. Interestingly, that was the only shelter we had built that had a little gate on it which I could close.
As you know, Mum hardly ever walks down to the paddocks, but she knew the horses were fighting because she saw the white stallion chasing the little horse around the paddocks.
So Mum came to see me and I said, “Please come around, crawl underneath the fence, stand here and hold the pitchfork up against the stallion so I can put webbing around the shelter.”
It had been raining for a few days, so there was a lot of mud. Mum crawled underneath the fence in the mud to help me.”
“Once again, I feel the angels were with us both the day of the white stallion attacking the little horse and the day I found myself sitting in the shed without my glasses, holding a cloth with a bleeding forehead. I’ve got to listen more to the angels. Sometimes I feel that I don’t listen to them enough.
The thoughts are still there, you see, and now don’t forget this — I think if you decide not to listen to the good voice, but listen to the bad voice, then a dark voice will follow. I feel the guardian angels will stop talking to you. If you come to your senses they might come back, and you might hear them again. I think that if you haven’t listened to that dark voice, if you haven’t listened to Lucifer and the sinful voices, then the angels will keep prodding you all the time — they won’t stop prodding you.
They are there to guard you. They’ve been given instructions to guard you and look after you. Therefore, the problem is really you. You can help them do their job so much better if you listen to them. They would feel so much happier and satisfied if you respond to them. They get a bit flustered if you don’t respond to them.
You’ve got your daily life and, believe me, I do believe you’ve got a main angel but also some subsequent ones. There is one main though, because the angels can’t be around you all the time — they’ve got their own lives to live. I do feel, however, that you’ve got one main one. I’m not saying that the others are subordinate to the main angel — just in a sense they are more or less helpers and they can take over for a little while.
I mentioned to Anne C some near-death experiences that I’ve had and she gave me a book which detailed the experiences of many children up to the age of five who were able to recall their past lives. I also mentioned near-death experiences to Tina M and Tina said that her mum had experienced an out-of-body sensation before she had died.
Tina said that she would go to visit her mum and her mum would say, “I’ve just had a magnificent experience in a place full of colours and music. I felt so peaceful.”
So while she was conscious she had a few of these experiences towards the end, and then she said to Tina, “Really, I’m not afraid to die after all these experiences.” Tina comes around to visit us with four books about near-death experiences.”
Dad and Uncle Bram were in the car on Carlingford Road and a truck careered through a red light.
Dad, Bram, Mr Bernard and his wife were driving along Putty Road. A truck took over, Dad pulled over and stopped the car, just avoiding a head-on collision with another vehicle.
Story of Dad stopping his car at just the time that a child on a tricycle went straight in front of his car.
How many times does intuition happen? You think about the knife slipping — no, no, no — then it slips and you cut yourself. A few things happen in life and sometimes you think back and say, ‘Is it all chance? Is it all accidental?’
Instead of taking notice of the inner voice, we want to think that we know better. However, I believe you’ve got a guide somewhere.
“I think when we talk about the spirit world, we’re brought onto this earth and you can reincarnate to do the best you can. At one stage you might decide not to be reincarnated and you go through various stages in heaven, in the spiritual world, to become a higher and higher spirit. At some stage, as spirits and as guardian angels, you are in touch with people on earth — not as Jesus Himself, but in a form, as representatives of Jesus. Your spirit is high enough to act like Jesus and to do miracles.
That’s why so many people can simultaneously be in touch with the spiritual world, because the spirit of human beings who have been enlightened to get to that level are here to help humans to get into the system — into the spirit world — into a higher realm of the spirit world. They are here to protect you.
The Almighty Power has created this stupendous unseen world where people can actually be elevated to higher levels. Some people can reincarnate back to earth — fine, no problems — they feel that they are more or less incapable of getting to the higher levels in the spirit world, so they’ve got to do more of a stint on earth.
When you dream or when you hear God’s voice, that’s fine, but there are also these enlightened spirits that have the power to be God, in a sense, to do miracles. If the Lord is the Lord of the Universe, He’s got a heck of a big territory to cover.
Once you’re at an enlightened stage, you’re part of the Lord Himself.
That’s what Jesus said, “You’re all part of my body.”
There He is. Some stars explode, some are re-created — this, that and the other. You can’t only be the Lord of just a little tiny world. You can actually have created this world together with other gods or higher beings and say, “Right, this is it — I’ve got my foremen, my managers to look after this place.”
Really, the spirit world would probably be a world of colour and music.
As above, so below.
I would say they’re all teachers in a way. They will guide you through a path — they won’t tell you how to suck eggs.
Things change phenomenally depending on what you have learnt and who you are. We all have different abilities to absorb knowledge.”