Six months ...

Joseph loved to go to Gluepot.  The crazy little reserve, 200kms from Adelaide, only 23 years old, where you mostly need a four-wheel drive vehicle to enter, where you need to be self-sufficient, and not afraid of the heat, where there are Mallee Fowl mounds and birds as well as the wildlife…and where Joseph met lots of really interesting people - from all over the world. So, in his memory, we placed a bench, with a simple plaque, and we hope lots of people will enjoy a rest and maybe some will remember him as they do.

Graeme (Malleefowl Graeme), carted the huge flat-pack, in his huge 4-wheel drive, up there last weekend and assembled it and then tested it out. 

It was supposed to be a Muskoka chair but the bench won and I guess is does have a slight “Muskoka” feel about it. It is made of re-cycled materials (Polywood) so requires no maintenance and I hope he (Joseph) would like it and appreciate the re-cycled part of it.

Graeme also reported that the La Niña rains reached Gluepot- the best rains in four years!  It had been a devastating drought and last year, almost to the day when Joseph was there, he was so sad at the lack of anything; birds, animals plants - so I hope he knows that the rains finally came and the roads did turn to glue!

I realise now, that whether he knew it or not, when Joseph took his extended trips to Canada etc. he was (sort of) preparing me for life without him. But he was never gone this long … and anyway there was always messages or phone calls … but there is none of that now.  Last night there was a “Mopoke” (Southern Boobook) calling in the tree outside the apartment. “Mopoke”, “mopoke", “mopoke” it called until I finally went out on the balcony …  but I couldn’t see it.  We often heard them but this was the closest … but I couldn’t see him.  

As we come across them, friends and family are taking things that belonged to Joseph; clothing, camping items, bike, books, journal etc. and I love it. I know he would love it as well, that people are enjoying camping or riding or reading with the same things he did.

Sadly nothing Joseph did or could do, would be enough to prepare me for the trauma of tax returns. I have managed, in my 68 years to never, ever complete a tax return. I’ve signed my name to lots, but couldn’t tell you what was on the pages.  I could say “such was my complete and utter trust in Joseph”, which is true, but the other truth is that I am very (very) lazy and I really do have Dyscalculia!  Joseph spent quite a bit of time explaining our finances to Cassia but it’s too much for her to do the taxes- for two countries, with foreign pensions, and withholding tax, and yuk yuk yuk - it’s too much for her and I fear the poor accountant here in Adelaide, who has agreed to look after me, will never be the same after I see him on Monday.  “Don’t worry if you don’t have everything” he says, “we can easily work on it as we go along”!!  Ha!  Poor unsuspecting “CK” he has no idea!

Now we get ready for Christmas.  We’ve had Easter and birthdays and anniversaries before without him, but never Christmas. The irony of it all, is that this Christmas he was planning on being in Argentina/Antarctica and now he won’t be there  … and he won’t be here with us either.  We have rented a house near the beach and with a pool -  and we are going to pretend we are in some far off exotic location instead of Semaphore. 

It’s been a winter that was never going to be easy and in the time of COVID to be feeling unwell for most of it with COVID-like symptoms has made it a tad less easy.  Symptoms that require a COVID (yukky yucky) test to see the doctor and jeopardise the Cardiologist appointment I waited three months for (no COVID symptoms at the hospital clinic please!)  I went anyway (next appt was January!) and they let me in the hospital with a mask but the Cardiologist said “NO! NO! NO!” and told me to leave and have a(nother) COVID yucky yucky test -  but he did call me right back to tell me there is nothing really wrong with my heart (just take some pills to slow it down) and luckily the COVID test meant I could get an appointment with the doctor to find out I have a virus - not COVID - just a common one found mostly in children that is no big deal but takes eons to go away!!

So Spring is here now and the eons have passed and everybody (except me) is happy the weather is warming up (it’s no longer 9c-12c during the day) and we continue to be ridiculously lucky (in Adelaide) to be almost untouched by COVID and I feel so badly for those that are … 

and right about now I’m ready for him to come home.

Joseph Edward Dafoe - Story of his life ... July 3, 1950 - April 17, 2020

Some people asked to know more about Joseph's life, so this is his story ... 

according to me, with a little help from some friends.  

70 years is a lot of years and I started out keeping it as short as I could, but it's grown and is now in three parts; 1950-1975, 1975-2012, 2012-2020.  

(apologies for random picture placement ... a new interface has defeated me)

1950 - 1975

LIFE IN QUEBEC

    I originally wrote just a few sentences about Joseph’s family life before he was born; he didn’t know a lot about it and I certainly didn’t, but Tom sent along his recollections and they are included - in his own words. It’s a snippet of life during and right after the Great Depression and World War II, in a small town in the province of Quebec.

For the record; Joseph’s Father (John) b.1909-1984, his Mother (Kathleen Couture) b.1910 lived to be 100.75, she was 42 when Joseph was born and he is the baby of the family.

Before he was born, Joseph’s parents lived in different cities in Ontario.  Both the Dafoe and Couture families were from Trenton and after marrying, his parents moved to Timmins where his father managed to get work (it was the Great Depression) at the McIntyre Gold Mine. He took a correspondence course to become a draftsman and in 1942 they moved to Toronto and a better job. In 1946 he transferred to Loretteville in Quebec with the Dept. of Defence. 

Loretteville is 15kms west of Quebec City and very French.  It also has a HURON-WENDANT First Nation’s reserve (formerly Huron Village) in the middle of it.

These are Tom’s recollections of life in Loretteville:

“Our first apartment at Loretteville was in the country.  We had half of the second floor of a house.  It had two bedrooms.  Things were simple then - wood cook stove, that converted to coal in winter, for heating and cooking, ice box, and not much else in terms of infrastructure. At that time we didn't have a car.  We walked everywhere.  Dad went to work by bus that passed by the house.  It was provided by the establishment as most of the employees lived in Quebec City.  We walked to the village for groceries (smaller things) and sewing supplies but about once every two weeks, on a Saturday, Mom would take the bus to the city and buy groceries that would be delivered. …  In one event a big snow storm came up and Mom couldn't get home that day so she had to get a room in town and another snow storm was so severe that the road was closed for about 10 days while the clearing equipment struggled.  I remember walking a few kilometers with Dad over the snow drifts to find them way down the road.  The drifts were as high as the telephone lines.  Before the road opened fully Dad was transported to work by an early version of the tracked snow machine.  On another occasion, I guess when the usual bus broke down, he was transported by an old forces ambulance. … I remember summer walks to the village -all five of us with Patsy in the baby carriage. … Horses were still an important form of locomotion and transportation in, at, and around farms at the time.  The church parking lot was full of horse carriages and sleds on Sunday mornings.

I suppose these inconveniences and the appeal of a larger place with 220V were a big reason why we moved to the village.  Mom set her sights on a new build in Loretteville proper, that had three electrical wires going to it - that was major as it meant we could install an electric stove for cooking!  We likely moved into the new home in 1949 and perhaps even not knowing that the downstairs would be a funeral home.  That place was still heated with the old coal stove in the kitchen, the electric stove was still to come and the icebox stayed around for quite some years.”

            Joseph was born in July 1950, 

and they lived in that house above the funeral parlour, his parents, Tom, Marie and Patsy. 

 Neither of his parents spoke French and contact with the other English-speaking families was limited to church on Sundays. Joseph learned to speak French while playing in the neighbourhood and at four years old, went to half-day French kindergarten in a shed behind Madame Pepin's house.

            .  

 The rest of his schooling was at an English school in downtown Quebec City.  The bus to school left at 8.00 a.m. and was a 30 min ride to the bottom of a cliff, then another 30 mins to reach school; a walk through an industrial area, then a low-income complex where it wasn’t unusual to be accosted by other children, up a long-steep staircase followed by a climb up a pretty decent hill (tough going up, but a nice slide down in winter) all of this to arrive at school late - at 9.00 a.m.  The Dafoe clan were given special “late” dispensation because of their crazy journey.

                                                

Summer holidays the family drove to Trenton to visit relatives, or went camping.  Little Joe (his Aunt Gladys called him “Little Joe from the Ponderosa”) sat in the middle of the front seat, the others in the back with Marie in the middle and (from Marie) unable to see out and constantly carsick. They loved visiting family in Trenton, especially at the Lafferty’s Farm. It was an apple orchard with a pony (Tony), horses, cousins and lots of space to play - and no stairs.

                                    

Then there was camping  … an inexpensive vacation and everybody, except Marie, loved those camping trips! They were some of Joseph's best memories of his childhood and he continued to camp for the rest of his life.

 Tom remembers …  

“… the vehicle we vacationed in was piled high with camping equipment - six sleeping bags, two tents, and I don't know what else on top, and a trunk stuffed with everything else for a family of six….  In 1955 the family went on vacation to Trenton but also continued on to Niagara on the Lake where there was an International Boy Scout Jamboree.  On the way home we stopped in Toronto where we went to the "Army Navy War Surplus" store and got equipped for camping - two tents, six sleeping bags, camp stove, lantern, and numerous other items.  This was used a few times but the inadequacies became apparent.  So Dad sought to improve the situation.  The first thing I remember is the purchase of steel water piping at a scrap yard to make sure the sides were taught.  To hold the pipes together at the corners he fashioned aluminum fittings.  These pieces he made at work "on his lunch hour".  They were rather brilliant and did the job brilliantly.  The war was over and there was a large surplus of stuff around.  So Dad was able to obtain permission to take some of that home.  There were several square yards of heavy army green canvas that formed a shelter between the two tents.  This project was a joint project with Mom and Dad and the overworked sewing machine.  The result was quite an achievement and solicited many commendations by fellow campers as there was nothing quite like it.  Another item that appeared about this time were a number of hand crafted aluminum tent pegs - also made during lunch hour.  The wooden ones didn't hold up to the pounding.  More canvas appeared (it weighed a ton) that was sewn onto a large canopy.  However it was held up with superb collapsible wooded poles about 8 feet long with brass fittings - these items originally had been used to clean out the muzzles of large guns (like the ones on tanks).  I guess there wasn't too much use for them any moire.  There were a number of other smaller pieces of "scrap" that appeared and Dad would fashion into a stand for the camp stove, nylon mesh fabric that formed the seats of collapsible camp chairs, and many other things that he could dream up to make the camping more comfortable.

ONTO ONTARIO

In 1962, when Joseph was twelve the family moved to Ottawa and he made friends with Les Macdonald, who was two years older and lived over the back fence.  Joseph went to St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, Les went to Woodroffe.  Les had a train set in his basement and he and his neighbour Brian had started a science club.  To join the club, Joseph had to learn the Arabic names of the main stars in several constellations. Mr. Dafoe had an astronomical telescope but it was such agony to use  - by the time you lined up whatever you wanted to see it would be gone the next time you looked.  Still, that August, his dad mentioned there was a meteor shower that night and Joseph told the science club. 

It’s pretty crazy what they did and I’m pretty sure nobody else has a similar story, but with way too many names of Clubs, Societies, Drs,. scientists, observatories, coffins, meteor showers, record keeping., for me to remember, I asked that back-yard friend (of 58 years) Les, to write about it.

“…The three boys put sleeping bags on a tarp on Les’ back lawn and spent the entire night

shouting in excitement as meteors appeared unexpectedly and streaked among the stars. At breakfast the next day, Les’ sister complained about the shouting outside her window, but the boys were hooked on meteor observing. Another venture of the science club was to visit the Dominion Observatory on Carling Avenue during their Saturday night public events, including the opportunity to look through the 15-inch telescope, and to watch films on astronomy and geology.

It was at these visits that Joseph met Dan Brunton, who was an enthusiastic birdwatcher (he seemed to be enthusiastic about everything) as well as an amateur astronomer, and was active in the local Observers’ Group of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC). Joseph and Les were in awe at the knowledge of the people at the Observers’ Group meetings, many of whom they addressed as “Dr. So-and-so”, as they had doctorates in various sciences, but astronomy was their common obsession. They had a “coordinator” for each branch of astronomy, and the Meteor and Comet Coordinator, Stan Mott, told them about an astronomer at the National Research Council (NRC), Dr. Peter Millman, who directed an international scientific program to analyze visual meteor observations collected from volunteer observers all over the world. This project was one of Canada’s contributions to what was called the Continuation of the International Geophysical Year, and it contributed toward knowledge of the density of cometary and asteroidal material along the earth’s orbit, the better (so we understood) to assess the risks of manned space flight. 

Dr. Millman invited the boys to observe a meteor shower with his group at NRC’s Springhill Meteor Observatory south of Ottawa, where they recorded meteors using powerful radar antennae, cameras equipped to record meteor spectra, and heated “meteor coffins” to keep observers warm and comfortable on the coldest nights. Wanting to be a part of that larger adventure, Joseph, Brian and Les quickly built their own wooden meteor coffins at home and invited their new-found Observers’ Group friends to join them for “star parties” in Les’ back yard, where they sat in their coffins, recording the brightness and time of appearance of meteors, as prescribed by Dr. Millman’s methodology. 

All night long during meteor showers, whether a weekend or school night, the boys would sit … outside Les’ sister’s bedroom window, shouting “Time!” at the appearance of each meteor. And just to be sure they had it exactly right, Dan contributed his father’s old electronic tube shortwave radio to broadcast Dominion Observatory time signals to the observers: “Beeb, beep, beep”, every second, all night long. It gradually became clear that Les’ family didn’t appreciate the vital importance of this collective scientific effort. When the group started observing meteors, there were no streetlights in the neighbourhood, so you could see even faint stars and meteors, unless a neighbor close by had forgotten our request to turn their porch light out, in which case, Joseph, being younger and willing, was sent around to throw touques or sleeping bag covers over the offending porch lights, later uncovering them in the morning twilight. Joseph became

exceptional in this furtive role and was affectionately nicknamed, “The Midnight Skulker”, a character in the “B.C.” comic strip by Johnny Hart. As the number of observers increased, more and more meteor sightings per hour had to be recorded, with each observer’s data kept distinct. This required the “Timer”, an astronomical traffic cop, to ensure that this avalanche of information was organized in order to be correctly set down on the NRC’s tailor-made forms. The timer needed to have an excellent knowledge of the constellations, a good short-term memory and authoritative organizational skills to determine which of the many shouts of “Time!” referred to the same meteor. When one of the boys melted down under the pressure of a surge in meteor sightings, Joseph grabbed the forms and pencil and quickly got everything back under control. Everyone understood that Joseph had outgrown his “Midnight Skulker” role and became the group’s preferred Timer.

With increasing glare from streetlights, and glares from Les’ family, the Queensway Terrace meteor observers began to look outside Ottawa for darker pastures. Eventually, a group of scientists at the government’s Defence Research Board at Shirley’s Bay, west of Ottawa, invited the Observers’ Group to share their observatory site, called “The Quiet Site”, being relatively isolated from local radio noise, and incidentally, also quite remote from artificial light pollution. This included a 6- inch telescope in a dome, a 10-foot radio telescope, an equipment building with a washroom (vital!), and a small van in which the meteor observers could keep their own equipment and even sleep, if they found time for that. One of their number, Peter MacKinnon, had a summer job in a government magnetic lab with a well-equipped workshop, at which they cut the parts for an 8-person meteor coffin -- a 14-foot hexagonal wooden “daisy”, “petals” slanted at 45 degrees for each observer - then hauled them to the Quiet Site and assembled them on an unused “mound” in a wide clearing. Their electronics wizard, Doug O’Brien, installed subdued lighting in the coffins to read star maps, and also microphone cabling to a tape recorder (and Dan’s shortwave radio) in the nearby equipment van. Thus began the Golden Age of the Quiet Site Meteor Observatory. … Ken Hewitt-White, later a prominent astronomy educator,…remembers Joseph as one of the more “senior” members, directing the outdoor spaghetti kitchen during Ken’s first Perseid experience. The Coleman stove flamed up at one point, causing excited exclamations from the coffins about the Perseid fireball low in the North-East.

Among the unexpected rewards from Joseph’s meteor observing career: one of his first meteor observing friends, Dan Brunton, introduced him to birding.

So he would watch meteors all night, do his paper round and then cycle out to Brittannia Woods to birdwatch and that pretty much kept little Joe out of trouble. He was the youngest of Les and friends and the youngest in his class at high school (thanks to school in Quebec), and it meant he was also very young when he left for university - just two months after turning 17. 

UNIVERSITY & A JOB

Queen’s University is a three-hour drive from Ottawa, in Kingston, at the start of the Great Lakes, right near where Lake Ontario empties into the St. Lawrence river. He boarded for the first year and then into residence. It didn’t take long for him to realise he wasn’t clever enough for Physics, so switched to Geology, and each summer he would work at Geology camps in northern Ontario - in the bush with nature and mosquitoes and blackflies.  The first year, he was the camp cook!  A 17 year-old camp cook who knew nothing about cooking, and at the expense of those poor hungry geologists he learned how to make bread, cook freeze-dried steaks etc., all with the help of recipe cards his mother had typed up for him.  

The next two summers he worked with the geologists learning how to map and not cooking.

    

At university he would run into Ken Ross a birder from Ottawa, and in 1973, after Joseph graduated and Ken was back from N.S. with his masters, they shared a house with Tom in Ottawa, right across from the Brittania Woods!  Joseph never did work in Geology but went to work at the Canadian Nature Federation (CNF), a non-profit, environmental and conversation organisation. Like almost every other birder in Ottawa he started out packing books for their mail-order book store, and eventually Joseph became the manager.

Just like the cook who didn’t know about cooking, Joseph didn’t know about retailing, so he and Tom took a basic business course at Algonquin College. That course, along with his math-brain, his apparent talent for retailing that no-one knew he possessed, and some help from Alexander Bridge, the new Business Manager at the CNF, sales increased. I asked Alexander, (still friends after all these years) about his memories from those days …”My background was in marketing and I quickly realised when I joined the organisation that the bookstore was under producing, given it’s location in downtown Ottawa and it’s many members across Canada.  I raised these issues with the Federation’s Board and saw Joseph as they key player in expanding the store’s commerce.  Joseph was keen to help make it happen and together we developed the Federation’s first colour catalogue. (Before the catalogue, mimeographed copies of a typed list of books were mailed to members across Canada.) Joseph asked his friend Les to photograph every book, calendar and box of note cards that was for sale, and somebody typed up descriptions of all of the books.  He “cut and pasted” the photos and descriptions and LetraSet the headings and out went copies to the members all over Canada, and sales doubled.

The CNF was in a beautiful old building on Confederation Square, around the corner from the Parliament Buildings and across from the National War Memorial - right in the middle of downtown Ottawa.  The bookstore was up on the fourth floor, open to the public but not many visited. So Joseph turned the store completely around … he built bookcases to display the books and redesigned the layout to be more buyer friendly. He learned so much from his time at the CNF, especially from Alexander, and was getting ready to introduce more nature and birding items; binoculars, bird feeders etc. It was obviously the precursor to our own store, but that was 1975 and who knew.

TRAVELLING

Joseph was friends with Monty Brigham, a well-known birder about town. He loved birding with Monty, mostly because Monty had a car and his mother made the most delicious sandwiches.  They worked at the CNF together and decided to go on a trip to the Amazon that summer of 1973.  Joseph’s brother Tom was driving his Peugeot from Ottawa down to the tip of South America (and back) so they arranged to meet him and take a boat down the Amazon, from the mouth to Leticia in Columbia.  Tom could speak Spanish and was familiar with how things worked and Joseph and Monty weren’t. Joseph and Monty were birders -  Tom was not.  It was also a chance for Joseph to spend time with Tom, who was eight years older than him and I know Monty was in awe of Tom’s ability to solve any problem that came along. Sadly Monty died in 2017 so back to Tom to see what he could remember of that pretty amazing/crazy trip… 

“The first time I remember meeting Monty was when he and Joe got off the airplane from Cayenne, French Guiana, in Belem after being delayed a day for some reason.  Monty was fully equipped with his Nagra recorder (about the size of a small tablet), his parabolic microphone (very large) that caught the attention of the customs officer (and led to days of chasing him around and extortion to get it back), bird books, binoculars, gear for capturing beetles, formaldehyde for preserving them, and who knows what else. (Monty planned to record bird sounds.)  I could speak Spanish (more or less) but more importantly by that time I had a working vocabulary of essential Portuguese.  That was particularly useful for our interactions with the customs officer (Señor Leal) and getting to the harbour for discussions with the Admiralty in finding a boat to head up the Amazon , the ultimate destination of Leticia, Colombia.  Actually the last port in Brasil is Tabatinga which is just across the river (through Peru) - another adventure. We needed their permission but it wasn't an issue. We spent a number of days around Belem doing business (getting money), dueling with the customs guy, finding a long term place to stash my car, and went for a trip to the mouth of the Amazon to a place called Salinapolis where we saw some exciting birds (skimmers).  Things settled down (we got the parabolic mic back, the boat arranged), parked the car, bought hammocks, bought some foodstuffs (oatmeal and a huge bushel bag oranges, etc.) and got on the boat. 

  BOAT #1

This boat, the "Perla do Raimunda" was rather good with bunks in cabins, meals, and good company (other passengers) and crew, with a destination of Manaus.  The scenery up the river was unique with random stops, for whatever reason, where we could wander to see some birds, be amazed at the size of the river, and, with research that Joe had done, he was able to keep us informed on the physical features along the way - mostly floodplain from my perspective with floating homes, cattle on rafts, and locals getting around in canoes with pointy paddles.  Once night along the way, there was a great rocking of the boat with branches breaking on the deck, but the boat was still floating.  When we got up in the morning we found out that the boat had got caught up in a very strong back current and had crashed into the shore which resulted in the rudder being broken but not totally inoperable.  The crew were able to fashion two very long and strong planks that were onboard and lashed to each side of the boat.  These planks kept the boat on a relatively straight course, with alterations being made with what was left of the rudder.  That was all good enough to get us to Manaus.  

  BOAT #2

Our first job on arriving in Manaus, was to find a boat going further up-river, hopefully all the way to Tabatinga.  Within minutes (well perhaps a couple of hours) we found a boat, gave it the once over and decided it would be great.  So we put our stuff on board, paid our money, and went for a tour of Manaus where we saw the Opera House which then, was unfortunately in very poor repair and all we could do was walk around the outside and see the many pigeons nesting in the nooks and crevices of this architectural and historical marvel.   

Boat number two was named "Castro Alvez II".  Our initial euphoria over our find rapidly evaporated as the two decks filled up with freight leaving only a small space for passengers which by departure time had numbered twenty-two.  From the rafters were strung hammocks that overlapped each other (I got peed on one night by a young girl sleeping above me).  Luckily there was a small "poop deck" behind the sleeping area where Monty, Joe and I would take refuge and eat our oranges as well as make up some of the porridge with the stove I had brought along.  Conditions on this boat were abominable.  The latrine was as bad as any of had ever experienced.  Food was rather disgusting often featuring bony fish caught from the boat. (Joseph is deathly allergic to fish.) The preparation was carried out on the floor just outside the latrine!  Despite the conditions we were slowly making our way upstream with the effort of a 3-cylinder Yanmar diesel engine without any noise suppression.  This went on for a number of days till the prop fell off!  It turns out that the boat captains plying the waters of the Amazon support each other and eventually another boat came along that was able to tow our derelict craft to the community at the mouth of the Putomayo river.

  BOAT #3

Here at the mouth of the Putomayo we saw ourselves as stranded, particularly as our captain could not provide an estimate of when we might get underway again.  At this point we weren't in a very good mood but were lucky enough to find another conveyance upstream to our destination.  It was a larger boat with a barge tied to each side and loaded with freight and local goods.  A Land Rover and very large balls of natural rubber were two of the items that struck me.  If this boat had a name it has long been forgotten.  However it provided space to move around and try to avoid the engine noise and vibration.  There was no real passenger space.  One night Joe and I while looking for a place to spend the night fell on the idea of sleeping on the upper roof (likely with the dream of watching the stars).  We settled down in our sleeping gear and soon realized that it would be impossible to sleep due to the vibration of the ship - it was bearable except for the residual bit at the tip of our noses.  That little bit drove us to distraction and led us to abandon our idyllic location and find a place to curl up around the rubber balls.  But we did arrive at Tabatinga!

They arrived home a week late and a few pounds lighter!  Then the following summer Joseph drove his Peugeot 204 across Canada by himself - stopping to camp and bird when/where he wanted. He visited relatives in BC, fell in love with the west coast and then turned around and drove back again. Back in time for Monty’s wedding to Jane in October.  

On that trip to the Amazon, Monty’s girlfriend Jane Lafontaine was in London. Joseph didn’t know Monty had a girlfriend and he for sure didn’t know that while the boys were vibrating down the Amazon, Monty's secret girlfriend was meeting Joseph's future wife!  So, on October 5th, 1974, Joseph was in Jane and Monty's wedding and I appeared out of thin air and we liked each other and eventually went out and I went home and came back to live with him until we were married July 1975.  If you want to read more about how I met Jane and ended up at their wedding and then ended up marrying Joseph you can read about it in a blog post from June 2020.

Somehow, Joseph and Monty were signed up to lead a birding tour of Alaska; no tour-leading experience, no qualifications at all other than being birders and certainly not based on their experience in the Amazon. Mostly it was an opportunity to bird in Alaska by leading some poor unsuspecting birders (young and old, rich and … mostly rich Americans) around Nome and to the Pribilof Islands (a group of four volcanic islands off the coast of mainland Alaska) the ultimate birding spot - Russia just an arm’s length away!  Roger was also a leader but he was a manic birdwatcher so Monty and Joseph muddled along. 

Whatever Joseph did, a few of those birders remembered him and, a professor from Florida and his wife, came to visit us in Adelaide, and we visited Will Russell in Maine.  Will went on to form his own tour company WINGS and I’m guessing, based solely on his experience in Alaska, he included the following hints on his web page: 

 “Tour Leaders  ... The leader is the single most important element of a birding tour. He or she is responsible for every element of the tour once it’s underway, including bird finding, identification, and interpretation; tour logistics; and sensitive, patient attention to the needs of the group. It’s a remarkably challenging task. A brilliantly designed tour with a terrible leader will never be a great one, but a logistically challenged tour with a brilliant leader sometimes can.”

While Joseph and Monty were away in Alaska, I was back home in Ottawa, adjusting our wedding date, so Joseph arrived to find out he was getting married in two weeks!!

1975 - 2012

MARRIED LIFE

Once we were married, of course Joseph’s life changed.  He always carried his binoculars with him, and when driving was always looking at the sky instead of the road (typical birder habit) but now not so much birding. Once I started working at BNR we would take small trips - mostly to visit Alexander, now living in Kennebunkport Maine, to enjoy the company, the coast and beaches (there is no coast, no beaches (not real ones) and no salt water in Ottawa), to see the odd bird but mostly to discover the world of Outlet Stores!!

We moved out of the house with Ken, to a 16th floor apartment a few streets away and Ken married Eileen and they lived across town. For a year or so, life was pretty normal as we learned about each other and how to live together, without a lot of money and a few friends.  Somewhere in the middle, we decided to go to Australia so that Joseph could meet my family. We decided it wasn’t worth going all that way for just a few weeks, that it would take time to get to know all my family and learn about life down there.  (I think it helped that Australia is a birder’s paradise.)  So Joseph made a budget that we stuck to the fridge and we found a cheap fare and we would leave at the end of November 1976.

That July I asked Joseph if we could go to Disneyland before we left for Aus. If you came from Australia (back then) Disneyland was a place you couldn’t even dream about and I figured this might be my last chance to visit and from Ottawa you can drive to Florida and DisneyWorld!  Joseph said OK, added another line to the budget and in November we packed up our apartment- mostly returned the borrowed furniture to their owners - and what was left was packed into “book-rate” boxes to be shipped at “book-rate to Australia! We left our jobs, moved in with Ken and Eileen, rented a car (with unlimited mileage) and drove 3,000+ kms to Florida to visit, Cape Canaveral and DisneyWorld and on the way back, an extra 1,000 kms up the east coast around NYC, and Boston to Maine to visit Alexander one last time.  We returned the rental car to the poor rental company, said goodbye to Ken & Eileen and left for Australia.

Not sure how we found the cheap fare to Adelaide! We rented another car (different company), said goodbye to Mr & Mrs. Dafoe (we didn’t know if/when we would be back) and stopped off along the way to say goodbye to family. Returned the rental car and joined others in a Towne Car that drove across the border to Buffalo NY.   We flew to Hong Kong with a one-hour stopover in Anchorage, Alaska, the whole time wishing I had ordered the Kosher meals because they were served first.  Three days in HK to bird (Joseph), visit the border with China (99 years not up yet), watch our Australian dollars devalue by 17.5% and buy a record player to play our two albums; Gordon Lightfoot’s Greatest Hits and Hot August Night, to our unsuspecting family and friends in Adelaide!  In Singapore, the plane from London that we were to join was overbooked so they sent us off to a glitzy-looking but cheap hotel with a few $$s for meals and no luggage. The only good thing about this unexpected layover was the early-morning birding for Joseph.  We landed in Adelaide, December 1976 with no jobs, no money, a record player and eight book-sized boxes full of our worldly possessions about to arrive, but we did have somewhere to live!

LIFE IN AUSTRALIA

A friend of mine had lived at the back of her father’s place when they were first married and they now had a house of their own, so the “back of Mr. Mont’s” was available. It was in Semaphore, 17kms north-west of Adelaide and a few streets from the beach, at the back of his weatherboard/fake-brick house. The back of his house had been divided off into; one bedroom, a living room, a (useless) hall, eat-in kitchen, an add-on bathroom (shower and handbasin), and a hand-wringer washing machine and toilet outside at the back (next to the chickens). There was a spare lot attached with a large lawn, a palm tree, a weeping willow and a quince tree. Mrs “Mont” lived next door, connected at the back by the chook yard.  Joseph would mow the lawns for Mr. Mont (always crashing into the head-height rock-hard quinces), put eye drops in for Mr. Mont and listen to the phone that rang incessantly on Saturdays as Mr. Mont took off-course (illegal) bets on the horse races.  Mrs. Mont would pass our window every night as she took dinner to Mr. Mont.  In the summer the chooks stunk and the constant blue skies and sunshine drove Joseph insane! 

                

I started working and Joseph arranged to find a volunteer position to tag seals in Kangaroo Island with the Museum of S.A.  He never did get to the seals or K.I. - my boss’ husband mentioned a job at Standard Book, as the “Education Rep” so Joseph applied.  This dream job took him all over S.A. seeing the new country, birding on occasion, selling some books and getting paid  - pretty good for his first job in a place where nobody knew him.  He went on to work in the city store, manage the store in West Lakes, open a Standard Books in both Noarlunga and Elizabeth Shopping Centres, then back to manage the city store.  He introduced “remainder sales” (cheap but often excellent books at the end of a print run etc.) .  “Price ‘em low, stack ‘em high” was his mantra and it worked, and sales increased.  He hosted authors in the store; Dick Bruna my favourite.  He met Thor Heyerdahl and Colleen MacCulloch and worked there from 1977 - 1983.

We moved from Semaphore to Crafers in the Adelaide hills, to build a house; a one-level modern wood/brick home on a south-facing fairly steep slope. Our friends Carol and Graeme had the same house one street away but we promised to make ours look different,  Theirs had sweeping views of Adelaide  - ours was literally perched among the trees.  Trees were our view outside the windows and on the balcony you were right there in the middle of them.  The slope was so steep the first grader on site sunk in the mud and had to be towed out. 

 The driveway was (almost) impossible to drive up backwards with the gravelly surface so we (Joseph), with bits of help from my Mother, set about to pave the slope, and brick the gutters and two level areas at the back of the house.  A (very, very) lot of bricks. Somebody said they “stuck” better to the mortar if you soaked them in water so he did. After a few bricks it was no longer just water but an acidy mix of goodness knows what.  He finished it all and it’s still there today, but his hands never recovered. He suffered with a kind of excema, insanely itchy, cracked hands and fingers until December 2019.

        

Part of the agreement the council gave us to build our house on the south-facing fairly steep slope, was to keep a reserve of water in the rainwater tanks (we had no mains water) and to clear the undergrowth in front of the house.   The water was easy to keep - the tap simply mounted two feet above the bottom of the tanks - the undergrowth was another matter.  Unless you were willing to spend every waking minute outside of your regular job, working on it, it was useless. It was full of blackberry bushes and Broom!!  (As per Wickipedia: “…Broom thickets harbour vermin and increase fire hazard. English broom is a Weed of National Significance and a declared plant in South Australia. Landowners have a legal responsibility to control it under the South Australian Natural Resources Management Act 2004.)…”. It also has spikes and we (Joseph) tried.  

        

Joseph didn’t play a lot of sport and for some reason I decided he wasn’t a “natural athlete”!!  Maybe he wasn’t like me, but (unlike me) he had the ability to read and learn and the determination to persist at whatever he did.  Back in Canada his parents curled and so did he and he was pretty good at it.  (Curling is like lawn bowls on ice!! ) On the plane-ride to Australia he read a “How to play squash" book and started playing, in Semaphore and now in the hills. He enjoyed the exercise and beer-supper after the game and even won a premiership, but he also made his own friends that weren’t mine, and weren’t birdwatchers! 

Mischa was born in December 1979.  We both worked in the city and Mischa went to day care there as well.  After a 10-month drought, on February 16 1983 came the Ash Wednesday Fires. It was 40+ degrees with a vicious north wind - prime bush-fire conditions and you just knew it was going to happen - and it did!  The hills above Adelaide caught fire and there was our little house, on the south-facing slope, sitting above a gully full of broom (gullies create their own wind in a fire).

Joseph went home early to “save” the house. By the time I collected Mischa and tried to reach the house the roads were closed and I was sent to an oval 12kms away.  The only thing that saved our house (and Joseph) was the wind change. A cool change turns the winds from north to south and it sent the fire back where it had come, with fireballs jumping kilometres ahead (eucalypts explode!), trapping people who thought they were safe.  (In SA, 28 people died, 1500 people were injured, 383 homes and 200 other buildings were destroyed and 160,000 hectares were burnt.). I was safe on Uraidla oval but nobody knew where I was for 6 hours, in the days of no mobile phones and the electricity cutoff and reports of a death and burnt cars on the road I took.   So after Mischa and I finally limped home, trees still smouldering on either side of us, I decided I couldn’t live in that little house on the hill and Joseph said OK. He had outgrown Standard Books, and tried selling books wholesale but that didn’t work so we decided to move back to Canada before Mischa started school.

(If you want to know more about the bushfire I wrote a blog in February 2013.)

BACK TO CANADA

To make the move easier on Mischa (now 4) and to save money outfitting a house in Ottawa, we decided to fill a container with all our "worldly possessions”..  The sum total of our “ worldly possessions” being; a nice dining room set, our Ikea-style double bed, purchased with our lottery winnings ( built by a Finn, some 40 years before Ikea arrived in Adelaide), our Norwegian dinner set and 12 boxes of home-bottled wine, labelled “books”.  A friend suggested filling the empty space above those possessions with something uniquely Australian. (On our trip back to Ottawa, we remembered how the Canadians were fascinated that Mischa slept on a sheepskin.). So we bought 2,000 sheepskins from G.H. Michell and paid $10.00 CASH for each of them. Joseph did his research and there was no import tax on them … we would sell them for double and be rich. 

The odyssey that was our trip from Adelaide to Ottawa - with a four-year old and five suitcases with not a wheel amongst them; overnight train (sitting up) to Melbourne, fly to Auckland, visit Trish (London friend), five days in a camper van touring the north island, then fly to L.A.  Three days to see the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland then fly to NYC.  Except, the hypnosis sessions to deal with my fear of flying hadn’t worked and once we landed in L.A. I declared I would never fly again and Joseph said OK. So no $99 cheap LA-NYC flight, instead we spend goodness knows how much to travel by train (first-class sleeper cabin) for 3 nights/2 days, via Albuquerque, Chicago, to New York.  In NYC, now with no money, no credit cards, an impossible-to-feed four-year old and rain for our two day stay!!   Next to Boston by train, with five wheel-less suitcases and a vomiting/starving four-year old. Outside the station Joseph accosts a taxi driver so we can pile everything into his cab for the drive to the bus station - two streets away. One hour on the bus to Portsmouth N.H. and Alexander is there to rescue us. Thanks to him and Kathy they feed Mischa food he eats, and we all recover in that beautiful town by the sea, and then it’s off to Concord MA for a five-hour bus to Montreal. On the way, Canadian Immigration process my permanent-resident application and make Mischa a Canadian citizen and we arrive in Montreal at some ungodly hour of the night with Joseph’s father there to meet us and drive us, and 21 days, two hours and 45 mins after leaving Adelaide, we are finally in Ottawa.

The container arrived and the sheepskins are now designated as “finished goods” by Canadian Customs so we have to pay import tax, GST and a million other taxes (the “book” boxes go unnoticed). The sheepskins now sell for $40 instead of $20 and we never do get rich.  Our rented townhouse is filled with our old familiar furniture and we drink very good wine for the next three years, and wish, with every bottle, we had sent more, but mostly we appreciate that after almost seven years away, our friends welcome us back. 

                    

I managed to find a job back at BNR while Joseph looked after Mischa and school. Then he’s back in the mail-order business. On our way to Ottawa, in Maine with Alexander and some wine, The Wallaroo Sheepskin Company was born and it was just the right name to sell “Baby Lullaby Lambskins”. Alexander produced the perfect brochure to mail-out, give-out or whatever was needed to sell 2,000 Baby Sheepskins. 

So there’s Jospeh, mailing out the sheepskin orders that trickle in.  To supplement our income he needed a full-time job, and so in April 1985 he answered an add in the paper for a Marketplace Manager at IKEA. The add is an amusing memo from Ulf to Rob, so Joseph’s application is a slightly brazen/funny memo back and it works.  (We fell in love with IKEA in 1980 on a trip to Ottawa and can’t believe Joseph is now working there.)  He loves the work, he loves the culture, he loves the people and he loves his boss (Ulf) and management team but the best part of the job is the annual trip to Almhult in Sweden, the birthplace of IKEA. He always took an extra week to drive and camp (you can camp anywhere in Sweden) and birdwatch.  

Cassia was born in 1986 and Joseph moved from Marketplace Manger to Furniture Manager but a new boss changed everything and in September 1989 he was let go. It was devastating. His qualifications now bigger than anything Ottawa had to offer,  he agonises over what to do; open the bookstore he’s always wanted? Move to a bigger city? We (still) have no money.  Alexander had a side business to his advertising agency, Watermark, selling rowing prints, designing t-shirts, bumper stickers and posters, and asked Joseph to manage the orders in Canada. So Joseph fills the year on unemployment selling at regattas; Boston, San Diego, Montreal, and St. Catherine’s Ontario. Working at rowing regattas means early mornings to setup tents and racks and display the items, then at the end of the day, pack everything back into bins and into the back of the car (no sides to the tent, minimal security).  Joseph would sometimes work alone but often Alexander would join him and they made a good team; Joseph with his money neatly line-up in his fanny-pack - notes grouped together always facing the same way,  Alexander with his notes at random, could never find the right bill for change - Joseph always could.

                                                    

                                                        

Somewhere in the middle of the rowing and mailing, Alexander mentioned a store he has seen, called The Nature Company and thinks it would be perfect for Joseph.  So we take a trip to the Burlington Mall, 17kms north of Boston and it’s love at first sight. 

                                                        

 The store front has a gap at the bottom of the windows where water flows out and trickles over stones; inside the door is the most beautiful Tom Torrens bird bath with bubbling water. Kites, mobiles and a million other things hang from the ceiling, tumbled stones, drawers of fossils and mineral specimens, semi-precious stone jewellery, bird feeders, binoculars, telescopes, bookcases full of natural-history books - but what takes our breath away is the music they are playing. It is Inti-illimani a Chilean group we know of from LPs that Marta, Tom’s wife, smuggled out of Chile in 1973, and also from our Chilean friends in Adelaide.  The store is perfect - it includes every one of Joseph’s interests or skills. … We ask the Nature Company if they are franchising but they aren’t. We ask if they are coming to Canada but they aren’t.  So - we decide we will have to open our own.

OUR NATURAL WORLD 

STORE NUMBER ONE
Alexander designs another name and logo for us. The logo is a diamond shape with the store name “The Nature Trading Company” printed around the edge and different images emerging from the centre of the diamond; a wolf, a whale, a butterfly, a quartz crystal and Jupiter and????.  It brings tears to Joseph’s eyes - it is so perfect. We spent a week that summer camping on the outskirts of Washington DC and researching The Nature Company stores in Washington and Maryland.

 We plant Cassia for photos but they ask us to stop.  

                                        

So Joseph clicks away with his camera over his shoulder and we secretly tore off product tags from anything we could. We do this at any store we find that has products we like and by the time we are home we think we maybe have enough to create a store. With no money, Joseph arranges loans from his mother, relatives and friends. 

Those days at the CNF and then opening stores for Standard Book back in Adelaide come in handy, and along with his experience in birding, astronomy, geology, bookselling and retailing, he’s ready. With a (very) small budget and being “new-kids-on-the-block” a store in a mall out of the question, he found a store downtown Ottawa, on Murray Street, in the market-tourist area, where stores are open on weekends. It was one street away from the action but on the way to the Art Gallery and we signed a five-year lease .  No help from Google or the internet in 1991, so he calls, faxes even writes to companies in the hopes they will sell to us. He chose Darrell from Kris Kustom Furniture to build our (cheaper) version of the cupboards and cabinets, and the rest we did with the help of friends. Painting (so much painting), removing carpet - the floor is now bare concrete - somebody builds a fountain that leaks for five years, my boss feeds us, 

the Ross’ bring Easter dinner to us at the store 

            

...and on Monday, April 1st 1991 The Nature Trading Company is open for business. 

 It’s a soft opening but people come and shop!  

                            

We had an opening party two weeks later and at Alexander’s suggestion, we invited every single person in Ottawa that we knew; family, friends, friends of family, friends of friends, school friends, doctor, dentist even our chiropractor, all with the hopes that they would spread the word.  The party was one of the highlights of our life together.  Joseph thanked everybody who helped us and Alexander (fittingly) cut the ribbon.  Those invited guests shopped that day and they must have told their friends because more people came to shop and Joseph worked seven days a week.  To keep the family and the store going I kept my job at BNR with the promise that one day I could work there as well.

                    

The store looked so good, and so much like The Nature Company that on June 17th they sued us!  After the panic and (free) advice from a lawyer friend, we agreed to change the name as well as the look of the store and they accepted.  Back to Alexander and “Our Natural World” was born.  The new name fitted the existing logo and only some letterhead and envelopes were wasted, and, as with so many things that seem like the end of the world, the forced changes gave us a name that we liked even more than the first one.  

              

We kept the store open late for any events or festivals happening within a 100km radius of us and we stayed open on Canada Day because that’s’ the day the city core is closed to traffic and over-run by a million people wearing red and white - and we were right there in the middle of it. Joseph kept working until he could afford to hire an employee and with help at the store, he could attend the Gift Show in Toronto where a whole new world of suppliers and products opened up.  So, other than the leaking fountain and people preferring to shop in a warm mall at Christmas (instead of a cold street-front store), the store was doing well. We were becoming well known and customers travelled all over town to shop with us (except at Christmas).

            

STORE NUMBER TWO

A year and half after we opened, Jospeh was approached by Carlingwood Mall. It’s a smaller-sized mall that included more independent stores than in bigger malls and they wanted us!   We still had no money but it was too good to miss out on, so off went Joseph to ask friends and family to loan him more money! 

Back to Kris Kustom Furniture for more cabinets and cupboards, more help from friends, and late nights and weekends as well as running the market store and in June 1993 we (well it was Joseph really) opened a second Our Natural World. Joseph managed both stores with the help of Charmaigne at Carlingwood and Michelle in the market and a growing list of part time students. Carlingwood was popular but at the expense of the market store and so it closed at the end of the lease. It seemed that everybody had jumped on the “nature” theme so Joseph and Charmaigne made some important changes to Carlingwood -  they added gardening! The bird feeders moved to the back wall and still sold, but the addition of the gardening theme was a brilliant move.

Christmas at ONW grew from a few bows and some hanging gold balls to a “Christmas explosion” as Cassia once described it.  Those first few Christmases, Eileen would tie some of her world-class bows on anything with a neck and we would hang some gold balls in the windows of the downtown store. At Carlingwood, Charmaigne embraced the bows and they added a garland and some lights around the front of the store. Then along came me… On a trip to the Montreal gift show, a third of the Toronto show, we found these crazy wobbly-tin Christmas statues, nothing like we had ever had but we liked the silly things. When your goods are made in China, ordering quantities are critical, so right there Joseph worked out a schedule to manage quantities and delivery times, starting in October, so we could afford to pay for them with money that didn’t arrive until early December. These crazy wobbly things made such a difference to the front table display, that we kept going back each year to Montreal to find more and more elaborate items - Brenda now joining us to help with the “vision” for that year!  Displays not limited to the front table but on top of the store as well. The store was now so full that every time I found something new Joseph would ask (right after he asked his standard “what does it have to do with nature ?“ question) “where will you put it?!”

                                                

           

STORE NUMBER THREE

At the end of 1996 we heard word that the Canadian Museum of Nature was going to be outsourcing their gift store (Joseph had been dreaming of running the Museum store for years).  In any Canadian government institution you must be able to serve customers in both official languages (English and French) and Joseph could speak French, so with Alexander’s help, they worked on a proposal and somehow, a “Christmas Miracle”, we were chosen.  Alexander created yet another name and logo, and friends and family loaned us more money and Kris Kustom Furniture made more cabinets  The store went from pale (insipid) green to vibrant navy blue cabinets and yellow walls and an awning at the entrance with the beautiful polar-bear logo and the name Nature Boutique (in French - Boutique Nature).  

The store opened in February 1997 and sales more than doubled.

 

The museum was mostly a children’s museum … with dinosaurs. The differences between the mall store and the museum store, made it tricky for Joseph to manage both, so Charmainge took over Carlingwood and Joseph concentrated on the museum. Sales were good at the museum until the renovations started; renovations that lasted for six years and Joseph had to move the store three times. The effort involved in moving a store is impossible to appreciate unless you have managed it yourself. The skill to make it as cost-effective as possible, to be as efficient as possible and limit the time the store is closed (no income), to have as much help as possible and to keep them busy. I popped in to “help” with each move, so I had a teeny tiny idea, but as with so much of those years, it wasn’t until I managed the Carlingwood store myself that I really understood and appreciated just how good he was. Each move he used and modified the existing cabinets and cupboards until they could be moved no more.  Sales decreased as more and more of the museum was closed, but he stuck it out. 

Finally, in May 2010 it reopened to massive crowds. As a reward for the tough times, he had timed our lease so that there would one more year after the reopening.  There were some people who thought the new store looked amazing; the customers came in droves, and he did recoup the money he had missed out on during the renovation years, but he didn’t design the new store and the layout drove him crazy. So when the new proprietors made him an offer to leave a couple of months early he was ready . The president of the museum wrote to thank and congratulate him on his retirement … they knew how lucky they were to have had him.

Mischa and Cassia both worked at our stores. Mischa in the early days at Carlingwood and then Cassia at the Boutique (thanks to French Immersion at school).  When Nortel, the company I worked for, went bankrupt and I was laid off, I went to work at the Carlingwood store.  Poor Charmaigne had me forced upon her because we knew I wouldn’t get a job anywhere else.  With the Boutique sales dropping we decided that the two stores couldn’t support two families (ours and Charmaigne’s) so we bought back her share and I managed Carlingwood until we retired. The day Cassia left for university we moved into a tiny town house downtown and devoted most of our time to the stores.  It was the perfect arrangement, Joseph in charge of the finances and me buying pretty things to sell. Our travel budget doubled and every now and then he would tell me to STOP spending (buying) but we turned out to be a pretty good team. 

In the middle of opening and closing stores Joseph always made sure we took time to enjoy ourselves/himself. Even early on, with only weekends in the summer to spare, and no money, we would join the Ross’ at “the Cook’s cottage” (mutual friends Greg & Florrie Cook were living in Yellowknife). Such a special time.

Then later, with hundreds of thousands of air miles from paying for stock with credit cards meant we could fly wherever we wanted (we still didn’t have any money). We could also buy tickets for our children; Mischa travelled to Australia (Adelaide) after 9/11 and (after he met Simone) settled there, Cassia met Pablo (Spanish) while on a university exchange in Adelaide and they lived in all three countries at various times. So if it wasn’t us travelling there, it was them coming home, alone or as a couple and we loved having those miles to share around, sometimes with friends and even with an employee!  

                                                    

We went to Australia for their weddings, we saw a total eclipse of the sun north of Adelaide, we visited Spain (and Pablo’s parents), we went to Paris a few times and finally I could take him to see David, in Florence. Joseph travelled to Cyprus to see the Leonids in 1999 with Les and Gwen (the Leonids peak every 33 years and the boys missed out in ’66 because of cloud cover). We flew to the west coast and east coast and to Florida and a special trip to Cuba, with our less than basic Spanish.  We drove (8 hrs) to NYC and it became our favourite place to visit, as tourists and as retailers at the gift shows.

CLOSING TIME

Joseph was proud of the stores he made - other than the help from Alexander, he did it all by himself. He hired good staff (still friends today). Charmaigne was an important part of the company in the early days of Carlingwood and then Danielle, who could switch between English and French and happily (she seemed happy) shuttle between the two stores, became our rock. Summers were busy at the Boutique and Christmas was crazy at Carlingwood. The girls (they were mostly girls) would work as long and hard and fast as they could. The customers loved our stores and the girls who served them. We also had excellent suppliers, some with us from the start (and friends even now) and even when the cash flow was limited Joseph always paid his bills.  He tried to be an ethical business, investing in green power long before it became fashionable, but what he was most proud of was … ( his own words, dictated to me from his bed)  “I was very proud that I paid our employees a good wage - above minimum - that I didn’t feel the need to get rich off of their backs, but respected their input and contribution and paid them accordingly”. … and that would be why they all adored him.

I worked at the store for the last ten years, after the loans were paid off - the easy years. It was Joseph who managed the others; the openings and closings, the moves, the good times and bad times and he kept the store alive where others might not.  We didn’t sell Our Natural World, we decided that so much of the store was Joseph, that there really wasn’t anybody who could take his place and we didn’t want to ruin the reputation he had worked so hard to acquire.  So he managed a three-month long sale at Carlingwood. The discounts increased each month as we went along.  He collected all of the bits and pieces of rocks and mineral specimens he had in storage (he’d already sold the best bits) and sat at a table at the back of the store during the day and some nights, pricing them and packing them into their specimen boxes with his hand-written labels. 

    

 Even though we sold everything in the store (including the display tables and gift boxes)

 it was perhaps those forgotten bits and pieces he worked on that gave us the most profit. 

We closed the store (and Our Natural World Inc.) on June 6th 2012 just over 20 years since opening the first store downtown and it was, as we say in Australia, “a good innings”.

So we packed up all of our worldly possessions and retired to Toronto ...

2012 - 2020 RETIREMENT

Our retirement plans went something like this:

- celebrate getting there, 

- empty store (to the bones), 

- sell townhouse and move to Toronto, 

- keep excess items in storage, 

- settle into Toronto condo, 

- entertain Australian guests, 

- fly to Australia for a year-long holiday in our van, 

- visit Europe and Spain on the way, 

- enjoy year in van and with new grandson and other family, 

- return to Toronto, 

- enjoy Toronto and travel to wherever we want at will … for the rest of our lives.

Retirement went like this …

Sell house.  

We somehow managed to sell our town house during the retirement sale and even made a profit! 

Celebrations. 

As if the sale at the store wasn’t enough and then selling the house, we decided to have a party to celebrate not only that we had Mischa, Simone, Jasper (and Simone’s parents) and Cassia with us, but also a chance to celebrate our retirement. The best bakery in town (Art Is In) happened to be our neighbour and they let us gather there, on a Saturday night, in amongst the flour and dough machines! As we added more and more guests, we realised it was becoming our “Goodbye ONW party” and so more invites extended (and I’m sure some missed) until it turned into the most perfect gathering of (almost) everybody who had been a part of ONW. (Sadly, the speed of the escalation from “little party” to “most-important-party-of-our-life” meant Alexander couldn’t make it.) 

    

On the last day at the store we shared a cake with the customers and then drinks with staff and a few friends afterwards.

                                       

Empty store. 

It took a couple of days of hard work -  some people took bookcases and one even took the mineral cabinet, but most of it went in the dumpster. So that was the end - one of those crazy circles-of-life happenings that are both happy and sad.

Move to Toronto. 

Days after closing the store, on a ridiculously hot and humid day (no matter where/when we move it is always hot and if it’s Canada it’s always humid!) we stuffed our storage bay with excess items, and trucked the rest to Toronto.  (The Toronto condo was already full of previous-excess items.)

Settle in: 

Joseph couldn’t wait to bike everywhere, I couldn’t wait to sit and do nothing… he did bike, and I did sit, but we also did renovate the closets and we did settle in.

Australian Guests: 

Mischa et al came in May, brother John et al in July, friend Julie in August and so three trips to Niagara Falls and two trips to NYC  that summer, but that’s OK - I can go to both a hundred times and I love visitors - especially from Australia.

After the visitors and after the unscheduled kitchen renovation (I asked Joseph and he said OK) we left for Australia.

                

Europe and Spain:  

After Paris with Carol & Graeme, our side-trip on the way to Australia turned out to be a bit of IKEA nostalgia … Poor Joseph started off with a kidney stone the day before we left Toronto and it wouldn’t move so he was miserable in Paris and London. In Edinburgh we visited with Karen and Rob (IKEA)- and the stone left somewhere on the train ride up from London. Onto Sweden, to Almhult and IKEA and the IKEA hotel. This was the original IKEA store and it was closing (a new one opening a few streets away) and we were visiting Göta and Sven-Göta, (their daughter Marie worked for Joseph in Ottawa) and Sven-Göta was the first store manager for IKEA… at that store!!!  Onto LUND to visit Marie & Tedde before we flew out of Copenhagen for Spain. 

A few precious weeks travelling and visiting with Cassia and Pablo and Pablo's family in Elche, where they mentioned they were moving to Australia the following year!  It was shortly after the GFC and there were no jobs in Spain so they figured they had nothing to lose -and hopefully a job to gain. Then we were off… finally … to Adelaide, Australia.

A Year in the van.

We arrived mid-November 2012. Joseph purchased the van (a small motorhome) over the internet so we were pretty excited to see it and even more excited to see Jasper for his (slightly late) first birthday, and his parents and of course all of my family.  We planned to leave on our trip around Australia in March, so for the four months until then, we lived in the van at a caravan park. 

    

Caravan parks are full over Christmas and (any) school holidays, so we parked at Simone’s parents houses (in the city and the beach) over Christmas and then up in the hills to Lenswood and our friend’s Graeme & Fiona’s apple orchard (squash friends from all those years ago). 

                            

We parked in their drive-way under the huge oak tree (note to self: falling acorns are noisy!). Since we were right there, we thought we should “help” them out by picking (Joseph) and packing (both of us) their apples. 

                            

“Packing apples” is so much more than putting apples into a box; you need to know the difference between a good apple and a bad apple, then a really-bad apple (destroy) and a not-so-bad apple (juice apple) - sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes not so much and with a continuous stream of apples rolling along the conveyor belt, your job, other than removing the bad ones, is to make sure you fill your crate without letting a single apple land on the floor. Once you’ve made those critical decisions and your crate is full, you stop the conveyor then place (or stack) your 14kg crate onto pallets. Lucky for Fiona and Graeme we left in March.

We travelled across the Nullabor, 400km of dead-straight road across a tree-less plain, around the southern coast of Western Australia and up to Perth.

                

 Visited with Erin (Ross), then on the 2,000km drive up to Broome, we saw the stromatolites at Hamlin Pool (you have to be a geologist to really enjoy this), snorkelled just off the beach at Coral Bay (joseph) and swam with whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef (joseph) even though by now we (Joseph) had a broken wrist and needed a cuff to cover his cast.  

                            

We drove inland to Karajini National Park and regardless that there were no powered sites (=no ac), and it was so ridiculously hot and flushing “our toilet” woke everybody in the site, so we (Joseph) had to use the bush toilet!  Even with all that - it was one of my favourite stops. Making it down to the watering hole was a perilous climb (for me - not for any of the parents carrying children on their shoulders or minions underfoot), and once down you had to shimmy onto a ledge so you could sit in the cool (or sun), but the reward was a divine natural pool, just shallow enough on the edges for the Australian non-swimmer (jill) to paddle in and deep enough for everybody else to swim.

    

In Broome we met up with the Ross’, Cooks and Frigons, friends from Ottawa and they each rented vans similar to ours. The caravan of vans travelled and birded across the Kimberlys, into the Bungle Bungles, Katherine, onto Kakadu and ended in Darwin eight weeks later. 

                        

 There was one minor inconvenience (flat tyre in middle of nowhere (us) and one major inconvenience (Ken & Eileen) with a van that broke down more than once and eventually had to be replaced.  It was Joseph who organised this trip; so much planning and such responsibility to make sure the trip was money and time well spent, and, most importantly, see as many birds as possible. It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. 

  If you want to read all of the nitty-gritty details of this trip look back at blog posts from 2012.

 

Originally, our plans were to travel right around Australia, but at some point we decided to divide it into two seperate trips. The humidity was getting to us (Jill) and the air-conditioner in the van was so loud we (Joseph) couldn’t sleep so we “agreed” that instead of taking two weeks to drive the 3,000km south to Adelaide, we would limit our stops and drive as fast as we (joseph) could. 

                                    

We did stop at Daly Waters

 and Alice Springs,

 then made the 600km return trip to Uluru, although it rained and we missed dinner in the desert

... instead of the underground motel at Coober Pedy we stayed one last night in the van and made it back to Adelaide almost three months after we left.

LIVING IN AUSTRALIA - a slight change of plans!

Somewhere on that trip; between the humidity and the loud air conditioning, I realised that we would soon have all of our family living down here, and I wondered why on earth we would take (yet another flight) back to Canada and end up thousands of miles away from those that meant the most to us. So I asked Joseph if we could change our minds and live in Adelaide  … and he said OK.  I also asked if we could live in a house instead of the van … and he said OK.  So within days of arriving back we found a beautiful house to rent, on the dock in Port Adelaide, just feet from the river. Of course all of our worldly possessions were in the other house  - a million miles away.

Joseph had only a one-year Visitor Visa, so he would have to return to Canada to apply for a Partner Visa.  We went to Immigration in Adelaide and, the child helping us explained how it would all work, gave us the appropriate papers and information we needed, and off Joseph went to tidy up affairs in Canada, submit the Visa application, pay $1,000 and be back soon.  Of course soon after he paid $1,000 and submitted “those” papers we found out the child didn’t really know what it was talking about … so Joseph had to start over again, with the correct papers and $4,000 this time and four more months to wait. To accompany the visa application we all had to submit a character reference and I’m sure Australian Immigration couldn’t believe how amazingly wonderful this person was so they let him back in - pretty much permanently.

I managed to fill the rented house with donated, second-hand or IKEA ASIS furniture and it was a beautiful house, with dolphins leaping in front and the best layout for parties, but I guess, back when I asked Joseph if we could live in Adelaide and he said OK … he must have said  “provided I can go back to Canada every two years (at least)” … and I must have said “OK” - because that’s what he did. Much as he enjoyed living here and especially his grandchild, (slowly becoming four) he missed Canada. I’m pretty sure the friends who thought they missed him while he was away, changed their minds after having to accommodate or entertain him on so many of those trips back.

I did go back occasionally - especially when it seemed we would be in Adelaide for a while and we decided to ship some of our “worldly possessions” down here.  Not in “book-rate” boxes this time - but on pallets.  Joseph did all of the work; somehow, he located a shipper and the logistics of where/how to ship and then that math-brain of his was able to workout how many boxes of different sizes would fit (exactly) onto a pallet; big ones for dining chairs (they are nice chairs), smaller for computer (the old iMac) and all of our records for ONW (that we had to keep for 7- 10years).  The storage room in Ottawa was emptied, boxes filled the Ross’ garage, then trucked to Toronto to have more items from the condo added in, then off to a random slice of the container world, in an industrial park somewhere in Toronto, to pack all of those boxes onto three pallets and watch them shoved to the back of a container with the hopes we would be reunited. If Joseph is to be applauded for running a business for 20+ years then he deserves a Nobel Prize for this quietly-executed, brilliant feat of engineering - so much math, so much measuring!

In between returning to Canada and babysitting grandchildren, we moved to an apartment on the 7th floor of the first apartment building in Adelaide, just on the edge of the city, within spittin’ distance of the zoo so that you could hear lions roar in the middle of the night, and the grandchildren close by (in their houses, not the zoo!)  

About this time, Joseph started birding and volunteering with some local groups. He walked for miles in the heat and cold, he trudged through (and got stuck in) stinky mud flats, rode in little tin boats, planted trees, picked up garbage, monitored mounds, trapped rats, counted birds and eventually became the resident “bird expert”!  

I could never keep track of where or what he was doing so I asked Marianne, President of FAIBS to explain it all …

“The Friends of Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary (FAIBS) was formed in 2016 and Joe was part of the original steering committee and then became a Committee Member and Treasurer.  … FAIBS was formed to provide volunteer support and improve awareness of the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary, a 60 kilometre stretch of coastline of Gulf St Vincent from Barker Inlet to Port Parham.  It is a key feeding and roosting area for tens of thousands of migratory shorebirds which breed over 10,000 kilometres away in the Northern Hemisphere and spend the summer months in Australia resting and fattening up before heading back to their breeding grounds.  Our group, assists Rangers in protecting and improving the habitat within the Sanctuary and assist in educating members of the public about the importance of the area to migratory and resident shorebirds.  As well as volunteering his time as Treasurer and providing his knowledge and valued opinion at committee meetings Joe was our birding Subject Matter Expert (though he refuted that).  When we held events he was regularly one of the first people there helping me set up and when the event involved bird spotting he really came into his element, skilfully explaining the finer points of bird identification. … Joe also conducted shorebird counts in the Sanctuary and mentored myself and several others as we delved into bird counting and identification.  Joe’s volunteering for our group also included planting seedlings and coastal clean ups.  He also produced a pictorial hand out / checklist of birds seen in the Sanctuary for children for our Fun in the Sun day, held at Middle Beach in April 2018 and wrote an article about the Sanctuary and FAIBS which was published on the East Asian-Australiasian Flyway website.  Any bird survey or count that we conduct whether an official count or an ad hoc few hours birding in the Sanctuary or in other areas we submit the data to Birdlife who hold and collate data of all bird sightings across Australia.

        

Joe also conducted Atlas bird counts at Gluepot Reserve (near Waikerie) and Mallee Fowl counts there as well.  He also did shorebird counts on the Coorong and Orange Bellied Parrot counts, which both are run by Birdlife… “ 

Way back in 2002 on our trip to Adelaide for the total solar eclipse, Joseph headed off for a couple of days to a place called “Gluepot Reserve” (aka Gluepot). Nobody in my family had ever heard of it, nobody we spoke to either, but he found it and off he went to camp and drive that poor little rental car over the bumpy, bumpy washboard road.  I can’t remember what he saw, but I guess he enjoyed himself because when we ended up back here in 2012 that’s the first place he headed for.

Background … “Gluepot was established by Birds Australia (now BirdLife Australia) in 1997, by a purchase, through a public appeal, of Gluepot Station, a pastoral lease with an area of 540 square kilometres (210 square miles) in the semi-arid Murray Mallee region of South Australia. The decision to purchase Gluepot Station, Birds Australia's first reserve, was taken in order to protect its outstanding floral and fauna values, under threat because of an application by the lessee to burn the property to provide grazing for sheep.”

BirdLife mention in their description that Gluepot “ … is located 1.5 hrs drive on well-maintained dirt roads north of Waikerie, SA. …”.  Maybe so, but those “well-maintained” roads were nearly the undoing of our van, and the tiny little Suzuki we had as a second car wouldn’t have made it over the first groove so we had to trade it in for a small 4-wheel drive SUV. There is also a reason for the word “glue” in the name, because when it rains those “well-maintained” roads turn to glue!  Still none of that seems to bother the people who fall in love with the place. 

 At Gluepot he met all kinds of retired people; some doctors who volunteer to maintain the buildings, couples volunteer as rangers and stay four months at a time (they can do this at National Parks all over Australia) and he met uni students doing research (a lot of French to help keep his French alive). Joseph also offerred to create an active list of birds that occur, and that activity required regular seasonal visits.  He had been to Gluepot more times than I can remember and he so wanted to take me with him. Without the van we needed to stay in one of the rooms set aside for rangers/volunteers, so fitting it in between, him being around, the babysitting, the heat, the wet, and whether there was any room at the inn, proved tricky and I never did make it.

On one of his volunteering trips somewhere, Joseph met Graeme Tonkin. As with the other Graeme (Schultz) in his life, there are no university degrees here, just smarter than most average bears and able to make or fix just about anything, and Joseph was always in awe of (both) their talents.

Graeme (Tonkin) is Training and Database Manager for the “Mallee Fowl Recovery Team”, and to help you (try to) understand why/how/why those folks become so passionate about those pesky birds, here’s an excerpt from their Wikipedia Page. 

“… Malleefowl are shy and elusive birds, making counts of the birds themselves very difficult. However, their mounds are conspicuous and provide a reliable means of measuring the abundance of breeding birds in an area.   … The monitoring of Malleefowl sites is the agreed method for determining Malleefowl breeding trends on a national scale. Historically, Malleefowl sites have been set up in areas where mounds have been known to exist, and/or where opportune sightings of birds have been recorded. Sites are located in Malleefowl habitat, which is largely found in the semi-arid to arid zone in shrubland or low woodlands dominated by mallee. Malleefowl require a sandy or loamy substrate and an abundance of leaf litter to construct their mounds. … The primary aim of the Malleefowl monitoring program is to track changes in the number of breeding birds inhabiting specific areas. Observers (mostly volunteers) examine and categorise all the known mounds at each site as either active i.e. currently used as an incubator or not active….”

Joseph happily followed Graeme (T) around to sites in South Australia, W.A. (just over the border, off the Nullabor), Victoria and even into NSW.  They use anything and everything; GPS, Smartphones, Cyber Tracking Software, remote cameras etc. 

                   

                                    

 The cameras record everything that moves at a nest; a blade of grass, a visitor (foxes), and Joseph would sit for hours back home, flipping through every photo to try and decide what caused the photo. Monitoring requires walking (many) kilometres a day, in a grid, in the heat, with the flies, but they seem to love it and this is what Joseph had been doing with Graeme, the week before his diagnosis.

                                                    

So our retirement didn’t go according to plan... Joseph made so many meticulous plans; for our stores, for our trips, and for our life. Some plans he worked on twelve months (or more) ahead, and they did work out, so there was no reason to think that retirement wouldn’t be the same … but it wasn’t to be.  That advanced cancer diagnosis, December 5, 2019, caught him by surprise and shook him to his core. He started out positive and hopeful that he could steal a few more years, but it was so aggressive and it wore him down.  He didn’t want to go - he would miss his beloved grandchildren growing up ... and so many more birds to see!

Along the way, through the volunteering, the treasuring, the mentoring and birding, he ended up with more friends and acquaintances in Adelaide, than me!  His final contribution was to donate books to Gluepot and most importantly his seventeen-volume Birds of The World collection to Birds SA, a significant donation and I know greatly appreciated.

Once he had taken care of everything he possibly could (car for me, finances, will, what to donate, etc.) he would wake me in the middle of the night to record his thoughts (about his ethical store and this).  He would ask me again and again to show him that I had everything written down, and, if he could have, he might have made some edits … to these words…

“Dear friends … One of the best things that has happened in my lifetime (since high school) has been the acceptance of the LBGT community.  When I was in high school there was a young man called Chris McLeod who was obviously different (and in retrospect LBGT). He was picked on by the bullies in our class and most of all by the priests.  Much later I found out that he committed suicide.  These priests also picked on a black kid in class who came in with his hair dyed red and he picked on me at the tender age of 13 for not being able to describe how to “SPIT-SHINE” leather shoes!!  He was a bully - he was a priest and he reinforced the bullies.  Chris was clever - had good marks like me - didn’t cause trouble - but he was different.

Later on in the 80s Jill and I made a trip to New Orleans and were able to see black Americans mixing freely and socially in coastal Mississippi, at the bars and casinos and restaurants (where the servers were often white and customers black). How wonderful that these days everybody (for the most part) is accepted when it wasn’t so long ago they weren’t … at least that there is now a movement that recognises differences.

Along these thoughts are immigrants and how they contribute in so many ways to their new “home” and enrich the lives of their new friends.”

So many “sliding-door” moments in our lives to be grateful for, especially those that lined up and let us find each other and he spoiled me for 45 years.

He didn’t discover the cure for cancer, or win a Nobel Prize; and he wasn't a saint ...

 he was just a nerd, a birdwatcher, a geologist, an astronomer, an environmentalist, 

a reader and a retailer ... 

and somewhere in there, people found inspiration from him

 and I know he was deeply honoured by that.