Canberra Times 2 Tuesday December 27, 2005

GET THE MESSAGE

ALL AT SEA WITH A MAN OF NO LAND
by Robert Messenger

Adventurer and Citizen of the World George Dibbern sailed under his own flag and with his own passport. The inscription on one photo read, 'Something that even the sea spit out again.’

THE RESCUE by Vietnamese fisherman,last week, of Hobart yachtsman Mark Smith and his Nelson, New Zealand, first mate, Steven Freeman, along with the disappearance in the South Seas in June of Nelson woman Verona Hunt and her Australian partner Gary Cull, recalled memories of a Christmas 48 years ago, when a dismasted 32-foot ketch out of Hobart and drifting toward Nelson was wrecked on a beach 11 km from where I lived.

I reached for my autograph book of that distant, dismal summer, and found the entry written by George Dibbern, adventurer, Citizen of the World, a man who sailed under his own flag and with his own passport.

In my book, Dibbern had written a brief description, dated December 22, 1957: ‘‘Te Rapunga came into Seven Mile Beach and got wrecked, but was towed off and brought into Greymouth. We had a welcome meal at the Messenger home made by Joyce’s [my sister’s] fair hands. Now we are ready to move . . . on-on-on. Perhaps you, Robert, when grown up, will take up the ‘long trail’, maybe we’ll meet again. Good luck, George Dibbern.’’

We never did meet again, but I never forgot George Dibbern. And when I tracked down, at Manson’s Landing, British Columbia, the author of Dibbern’s biography, Dark Sun, Erika Grundmann said,‘‘You’ve provided another ‘George moment’ that sent shivers up my spine! . . . It never ceases to amaze me how people, some after just a single meeting, years later still remember Dibbern. I’m planning to write an article about the ghosts that have surfaced since the publication of Dark Sun.’’ Te Rapunga means ‘dark sun', or that longing wait for the sun before dawn.

When I read excerpts from Grundmann’s book, I started to realise how little I knew about the eccentric yet loveable and amazing Dibbern. I knew that he had competed successfully in the the 1934 Trans-Tasman race (Auckland-Melbourne), but had no idea just what a character he was, and what an inspiration and a hero to freedom-lovers around the world.

One such was Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.Talk about six degrees of separation: Miller is a writer I have deeply admired from an ultimately impenetrable distance for almost all of my adult life. Just knowing someone like Anais Nin would have made me complete. And here I find that, as a child, I once shook the hand of the man that Miller would have dearly loved to meet. I need not take the fantasy any further . . .

Miller considered Dibbern a hero because Dibbern had taken the Te Rapunga out of his home port of Kiel in 1930 to escape the impending tragedy of German totalitarianism. Dibbern knew where he was headed: after jumping ship as a 20-year-old in Sydney in 1909, he had lived for many years with the Maori in New Zealand, and wanted to return to his ‘spirit mother’, Rangi. All his childrenhad Maori names.

Grundmann writes that when Miller learned of the Te Rapunga wrecking, he sent a news release to a Chicago newspaper and the San Francisco Chronicle, appealing for donations to help Dibbern sail again. Miller also published and mailed out a broadside titled ‘George Dibbern’s Quest’, which included a sales pitch for Satellite (now Woody) Island off Midway Point in Tasmania, which Dibbern owned.

Miller wrote, ‘‘It seems to me that a man who has done so much to demonstrate that life is worthwhile, and that it can be lived in peace and joy without other protection than the goodwill of the world, deserves help. Let us get Te Rapunga afloat again with Dibbern at the helm as a bridge of good fellowship between man and man.’’ Miller added the words of Socrates. ‘‘I am not an Athenian nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.’’

All this time, Dibbern was cleaning the dunnies at the Union Hotel (‘‘In the end,’’ he wrote to his wife, ‘‘the appropriate recognition comes: The Order of Merit of the Crossed Toilet Brushes!’’). While theGreymouth Post Office was receiving letters for him from Miller in Big Sur, no more than a few hundred metres away James Joyce’s sister, Sister Gertrude, was teaching music at the Sisters of Mercy convent. Such delicious thoughts, Miller’s adopted brother and Joyce’s sister so close and yet so far away—though, I confess, Joyce’s letters to Gertrude were destroyed by the nuns. The six degrees diminish, as Grundmann points out. Under Dibbern’s message to me is one from Craig Clark, dated July 20, 1958, ‘‘With hopes that we may have you in our crew when you decide to go a-wandering.’’ Clark was Miller’s close young friend, who had come to Greymouth from California to join Dibbern’s new crew, taking the place of four young Tasmanians.

I never did join a crew, but I did go a-wandering, far and wide, and I did so, I’m happy to claim, in the true spirit of the vagabond visionary that was Dibbern.

Miller, in his 1962 Stand Still Like theHummingbird, said Dibbern’s voyage was an attempt to find humanity in an inhumane world. He empathised with Dibbern as a man before his time, yet also as one who wrote openly about the anguish of family estrangement. Dibbern was literally the ‘Man without a country’. ‘‘My life is one with the sea,’’ he said. ‘‘We respect each other and I have no other master.’’

Grundmann’s Dark Sun: Te Rapunga and the Quest of George Dibbern, published by David Ling, is available in Australia through John Reed Book Distribution or email books@paradise.net.nz

The pages from Robert Messenger's autograph book. The signatures not mentioned in the article are from Murray Harris and Rod Buchanan.  Courtesy Robert Messenger