My memories of Rabaul are about as hazy as this old photograph of John 'Pills' Mills, the resident pharma-cist, standing outside Rabaul Pharmacy with his staff, none of whom I remember except for his attractive Chinese assistant standing to his right.
I was a young audit clerk with the firm of chartered accountants of Hancock, Woodward & Neill, and we kept the accounts for Rabaul Pharmacy, including their debtors ledger. Our backdoors faced each other and John's staff regularly visited our office to check on some customer accounts.
I remember only too well the many times my concentration was broken by the arrival of his attractive assistant. Even my colleague Grahame, who was usually dead to the world until halfway through the morning after the night before, would show faint signs of life and his eyelids briefly fluttered open when she walked past his desk.
It must've been during one of her visits that I prematurely signed off on the balance sheet for Kessa Plantation without showing the company's authorised capital. Within days, it came back from the Sydney Stock Exchange with a 'please correct' note attached. What embarrassment!
Within months, I had moved on to greener - and better-paid - pastures on the island of Bougainville where I became senior auditor on the world's then biggest construction job, the Bougainville Copper Project.
Nobody broke my concentration on Bougainville Island, least of all any of those queers who worked as limp-wristed 'typists' on what was in the beginning a very hard-working and hard-drinking men-only environment.
P.S. I've been told by the man himself that the "attractive assistant" I'm thinking of was Claudia Tang, a Rabaul Chinese and pharmacy post-grad from Sydney University who in the 1970s worked for John Mills, but that this photo was taken earlier in 1967. Bang goes another good story!☺
