By all the rules of sages and psychologists Bob should have been dejected and unhappy having lived a life that they would have considered futile and worthless.

   To claim that Bob experienced no deep night of the soul would only confound our moralists and theologians but perhaps truth does lie at the bottom of a well. Bob himself would have agreed that at least it lay at the bottom of a bottle.

   To say that Bob had come a long way since his 6^th Division days in Greece during the war would be the understatement of the age. The highlight of this campaign for Bob was making love – if that is not a too elaborate a word to describe what went on – with a Greek girl within sight of the Acropolis.

   Whatever Bob’s faults many agreed with his friend, Dave, the malaria control officer in Angoram, that Bob’s attraction lay in the way he squandered the treasure of life with a seemingly disregard for the future.

   At the end of the war Bob took his discharge from ANGAU in Port Moresby. He had some idea of returning to Australia to see what happened to his wife, who he had married just before the war, to discover on returning from the Middle East to Adelaide that she had decided to end the marriage because she had taken up with someone else, or as Bob so delicately put it, he found another bull in the paddock.

   Bob did in fact arrange to go to Australia shortly after taking his discharge but he made the mistake of contemplating this move in the bottom pub at the Snake Pit bar. Needless to say, Bob never made the plane.

   His deferred pay was coming to an end so he concluded that a man with a drinking habit needed a livelihood. He decided to try his luck in the Sepik and so he went to Wewak. Over a beer there with an acquaintance it was suggested that recruiting labour for the plantations was all the go and the best thing to get into.

   With this in mind, Bob moved inland and settled in a place just outside Nuku, a patrol post. From here he set out on recruiting patrols over most of the inland Sepik, including journeys on the Ramu and Sepik Rivers.

   Over the next few years Bob became a legend in his own time with hundreds of natives being taken by him to Angoram and Wewak to be signed on for work on plantations around Kavieng, Madang, Rabaul and elsewhere.

   Most other recruiters didn’t have a chance in getting recruits as Bob became so popular in the various villages that the natives would wait for him to come. Or as they used to say : Mi laik wetim Masta Bob.

   On his own account thousands of pounds passed through his hands. One can imagine with him getting 10 to 20 pounds per recruit. With a doctor friend of his he bought a plane which unfortunately crash off the coast killing the doctor.

   Perhaps this was a turning point in Bob’s life, as John, the doctor, was a great friend of his and felt his loss greatly. Recruiting ceased to give him the financial stability it had in the past. He just didn’t seem to care much about going out to get recruits only making the occasional trips to keep body and soul together.

   He eventually ended up in Angoram in a houseboat that he referred to as his “outfit”. In Angoram he did manage to keep himself constantly inebriated keeping the locals and expatriates entertained with stories of drinking sprees and sexual exploits. His faithful house boy, Yum stayed with him looking after him as best he could, even when he was on the “whitelady” – methylated spirits.

   Perhaps Bob’s life was a journey that was involved more in traveling than in reaching any destination. If he had been a botanist he would have spent his life in searching for the famed orchid – the Sepik Blue – but Bob was involved in the art of living, at least from his point of view, and the Sepik Blue had little interest for him. He was more concerned with satisfying the “blue throbber”, the term he used to describe his genitalia and even this search, one suspects, was more in the imagination than in actual fact.

   One supposes that in the final count Bob’s end of life was as he would have liked it in the bar of the Madang Club with a glass in his hand.