Angus Baird emailed from Indonesia:

Hi Peter,

I see so many familiar names on your site that I am inspired to add mine.

I am Angus Baird and I worked at the Anewa bay Power House from (I think) 81 ~ 86 and then again returned after two years and stuck it out until we were sent home. I remember that the day before I got on the plane to go back for the second stint I heard that they had started blowing things up. ‘What have I done!’ I thought to myself.

Like many of the other refugees, since BCL, I have worked all around the place on various projects. Currently I am Owner’s rep on a 660MW coal fired project in West Java.

I should be thinking about retirement (62 next month) but can't see it happening for a while yet. I still enjoy work even though I do tend to complain about it a bit. There are many of us Boomers now still working and I have worked with guys well into their 70s and still going strong.

Your site is wonderful, thank you for all the effort that you must have put in to creating and maintaining it.

Are there any recent photos of how things look now?

Take Care

Angus
angus.baird[AT]cirebonpower.co.id

Just another night at Camp 6 at Loloho

Christmas 1970

From left to right: Neil Jackson, Bechtel Head Timekeeper, already well into his drinks but still some time before he would turn ugly and disagreeable, who eventually finished up back in Melbourne where, having inherited his auntie's million-dollar-mansion in blue-ribbon Toorak, he was surrounded by a whole lot of cats and empty bottles and neighbours who were trying to have him evicted; Peter Goerman, Bechtel Senior Auditor, sitting on the donga's most important piece of furniture, the beer fridge, and wondering how he'd finished up in this company of alcoholics and misfits; Bob Green, recently married Bechtel Timekeeper, whose young wife back in Australia would write him one long, multi-paged letter every day which he would receive by the dozen each mail-day, and then spent all night in his donga replying to them. Of course, such mental torture was too much and he only lasted a couple of months before returning to Melbourne.

A friend who was also there in the early days, posed the question, "Why did we all look so fabulously happy and healthy when we were there? Could we re-capture that if we went back there?" He answered his own question when he continued, "Actually, camp life is camp life and ... it is a real pleasure to be part of it and it never changes. I have had the opportunity to experience it in recent times and it is fun and brings back a lot of memories and really makes you feel young again, although when you try to leap over tall buildings like you used to, you hit the wall halfway up, but it's the trying in the right atmosphere that makes you feel good."