Lessons from down under - Australia - editorial

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1991 by Harvey C. Bunke

I had always known I would come back. Indeed, even as I stepped from the gangplank to the ship that would take us halfway around the world to Seattle, I knew full well that, when the war was over and things returned to normal, it would not be long before I returned. Not just for a visit, but to make a new life in this land of friendly, robust people, where everything seemed simple and uncomplicated, and where opportunities cried out for attention.

Now after almost half a century I was here-here on the Flinders Street area, where I spent many an evening enjoying the ambience, sharing an order of fish and chips, luistening to the strains of "Waltzing Matilda," sipping a beer and winning--or, more likely, losing--a game of darts, or buying flowers for the dark-haired beauty I always met at the USO dance. it was here that I had bid my last farewell to friends with whom I shared so many rich experiences-experiences that, back home under ordinary circumstances, we in our youth and innocence could never have invoked, even in our wildest imagination.

Things certainly were different from that day in 1944. Dramatic marks of change were everywhere: new bridges, high rises, wide streets, here and there an air-conditioned shop or restaurant, and of course, structures reflecting both the creativity and sterility of post-war architecture. And the town was bigger. In 1940 the population of Townsville was some 25,000 plus; in 1990 it reported some 120,000.

Nevertheless I felt quite at home on this historic street with its old hotels that, like dowagers sporting shining necklaces, were graced with elaborate grillwork. Flinders Street, with its picturesque hotels and their crowded public bars-where years earlier, after tasting the local brew, I was altogether and forever convinced that not everything American was the best-generated a flood of memories. The people, unhurried and in good humor, moving to and fro; the warm, heavy, moist air, and the profuse surrounding of tropical vegetation--all inspired a pervasive sense of nostalgia, a sweet-sad touching mixture of melancholy and exhilaration. As I stood reminiscing and remembering the things I had done and not done, I briefly recalled an epigram attributed to George Bernard Shaw: "Youth is a wonderful thing; what a crime it is to waste on the young"--only to have it replaced by Wordsworth's lines, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" Perhaps, I speculated, only in the twilight of life can one fully appreciate the depth of Wordsworth's sentiment. And then the inevitable question,

Would I do it differently?"

It was only fitting that sentiments flowed strong here. As a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps, I had come to know many of the towns and cities of this vast, uncrowded land. But it was only here in Townsville that I had been based. It was here that I came to know the ordinary people who shared with me their everyday existence--at their beaches, in their homes, restaurants, movie theaters, public bars, churches, at their celebrations. It was only here that I came to know their hopes and their fears.

Although less intense, my sentiments were similar upon returning to Sydney, Mackay, and Cairn--places where I felt very much at home during my tour of duty in the Southwest Pacific. Although succeeding generations had modernized" Australia, there remained a simplicity and an optimism that Americans might envy.

My recent visit to Sydney was particularly instructive. The beaches were as beautiful as ever, the houses seemed much the same. Because there had been such dramatic deterioration in U.S. places I had once frequented but now no longer visited because they had become seamy or unsafe or both, I was tempted to observe how time had treated King's Cross. During the war it was a rather naughty place, not unlike New Orleans' Bourbon Street in the 1950s and 1960s--like a good Christian, never without sin, but always in search of atonement. Back then the streets of King's Cross were safe and clean, the shops respectable, the food good, and the social atmosphere free and easy. That, we were told by two elderly Australian ladies en route to Sydney, had all changed. Unlike when I was there in the 1940s, King's Cross had degenerated into a place unsafe and abhorrent to respectable, upstanding citizens.

In Sydney we stayed at the Nikko Hotel, where our room commanded a sweeping view of the magnificent harbor, the Opera House, and the famous old Sydney bridge that anyone who has seen can never forget. The hotel, unbeknownst to us, was located at the edge of King's Cross, a place that attracted many World War 11 GIs-as it did American troops decades later on R&R leave from Viet Nam.

Once in our room, enchanted with the view from our window, I decided that after the cramped flight, a walk would be pleasant before turning in for the night. As I left the hotel lobby I detected what I thought were bright lights on the street to my right. After little more than a block I was, on this Saturday night, in the middle of a scene that reminded me very much of San Francisco's North Beach when it was at its best. It was 9:00 p.m. and the streets were awash with people. Fruit stands bulged with pineapples, papayas, bananas, mangoes, and other tropical products, while through the windows of seafood shops could be seen a wide array of fish, many unknown to me, as well as great mounds of shrimp, clams, giant prawns, immense pacific lobsters, and, according to some, the best the sea has to offer--barrier reef bugs. Restaurants were doing a brisk business; barkers outside the bars, promising erotic ambience on the inside, buttonholed males; and everywhere people stood in pairs or groups talking. As I strolled along, stopping at one window and now another, my immediate reaction to all the vital sights, sounds, and smells of the street was one of exhilaration.