CONTACT terrell@neuage.org

# 13 Dear Dad

1988

Dear Dad
Thanks for the Christmas things. We had a hot day, a nice summer. We went to the beach yesterday it was 41 degrees C (100+F)
Leigh was a bit upset yesterday. He saw Sacha received a card from you and he didn’t. I said it was Sacha’s birthday but he was still moody all day. Please send them both cards. They both have a pile of them and carry them with them. Sacha always has a few in his school bag. They love your cards. Also, they request catalogues whenever possible.

I think if it’s OK I will take the insurance money. Leigh is in school. I have a new factory being built but no cash and I am quite behind in things. In 2-5 months, I’m hoping we’ll be OK. As with a German person I’m making cosmetics that are being sold in the US and soon we’ll be into Japan and China so then I think we’ll be O.K. but last year was awful. I still don’t have my truck fixed it needs a new motor, and I don’t want to borrow until I become more liquid.
Yesterday I received a letter from a sister of mine. My birth mother died in 1973 of cancer, and she had two children more, one now 31 is in Hawaii. The grandmother is 80. You’re very much the children’s grandfather but now they have a great grandmother.  Could you look up my grandmother in the phonebook? I wrote my newfound sister and gave her your telephone number. The grandmother is very excited she wants to know if I grew up in Australia. Did I? My kids think I’m still a kid - they say I’m too silly for an adult. Sacha tells me he wants me to be serious. Didn’t you tell me I was put up for adoption because I talk too much?
Anyway, the kids send their love. When Leigh gets mad at Lesia or me he says he’s going to go to New York and live with grandpa in America. You are his favourite person.

January 1988.
I moved fully out of the Meadows Cheese Factory because of not having my truck and into my farm to make all my products. Other than a couple of more great ideas that came to naught and cows who ate my tofu-burger-mix life was not too bad until one fine day when a health inspector popped in and disapproved of my whole set-up. Something about rats and cows and flies and cats and my dog and the openness of my lawless wall-less factory. Fortunately, I found another ex-cheese factory not far away in the town of Myponga, which was twenty minutes from the farm. The name, Myponga, derived from the Aboriginal word maippunga meaning locality of high cliffs. In retrospect I saw I should have stayed at the cheese factory in Meadows or any one of things ‘I should have done’ in life but the Meadows factory had been rented for a car repair. Currently it is the Meadows Cheese Factory Theatre and studio gallery which is located in the huge cool room that was once my tofu factory. Sometime in 1987 I moved my production out of the farm and to Myponga. Myponga is another beautiful South Australian area. If I had those kinds of thoughts I would think the troubles I had for the next decade were due to the uranium in the ground. Uranium was discovered in the early 1950s; however, there has not been any attempt to dig it out as of yet. I thought it would be useful in our advertisement something about the tofu that makes you glow but in light of my health food hippie market decided against it. Maybe it is what inspired one of my more favourite poems later on; Because you glow in the dark I know becuase you glow in the dark I know your love for me is realyour love for me is real.

Myponga consists of three commercial establishments, the Service Station, General Store and the Myponga Take Away as well as the Methodist Church and Hall, built between the years of 1866 and 1883.  The huge dairy factory, which at the time I moved in divided into several sections. The area behind where I made tofu was home to a large mushroom farm. Another section was used to make crepes that were delivered to restaurants around Adelaide. I had two large areas in front of the building. In one area I had my tofu production and in the other, which once was once the store for the dairy company formally housed there, I had a small soy deli.

I had very few customers, as I was the only one selling directly to the public from the cheese factory. In the late 1990s the old Cheese Factory complex was called the Myponga Country Markets and it operated on weekends selling everything from farm produce to handcrafted stuff and bric-a-brac. In the late 1990s I even had a box of my picture-poems sitting in one of the shops in the market.

The drive between our farm and the factory in Myponga was a wooded winding country road with the factory representing another out of place stop in my life; though the last stop in this particular relentlessly unhappy drive toward my untimely failed attempted dominance of the world’s tofu market. The factory, badly in need of paint and repair sits in front of the Myponga Reservoir. The reservoir, whose water supplies the south of the City of Adelaide is surrounded by dense pine forest and even in the midst of my pending doom and current gloom it cheered me momentarily. Five years after acting out this sad part of my life I would drive over the Myponga Reservoir wall (a concrete arch dam with a ski-jump spillway) in a large mobile home with my children and my 87-year-old father. We even stopped on the narrow road and looked over the side which was at least a fifteen-story drop on one side to the valley below and on the other side the water splashed peacefully on the side of the dam. I now know what fifteen-story height looks like, but at the time it seemed a long way to the bottom. 

Now I realize it is only a few seconds’ distance. A distance that can take one from one world to another world in seconds. A distance that would be Myponga Tofu Factorymeaningful to me later in my life. Maybe that is what life is;
we are on a narrow road with peaceful gentle water on one side that we do not know or fear the depth of and on the other side is a sheer drop to a rock filled peaceful valley below. Life and death on either side of the wall and we are always just barely balancing between the two.

When we were not going back and forth to our Mount Compass farm we would drive out of Myponga to Victor Harbor and the Encounter Coast through Yankalilla. I had tofu customers in Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills and as far away as Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne but I did not deliver to any shops in the towns that we lived in or so often went through.
Now Yankalilla has made the world map sort of though when we lived there it was nothing more than a yawn and Farmer Union Ice Coffee stop on the way to Victor. Since 1996 it has been claimed that an image of Mary has appeared on the inside plaster wall of the Anglican Church in Yankalilla. The Our Lady of Yankalilla Shrine has been visited by tens of thousands of people without a life; hoping for something that they cannot find in their personal lives. The place has been the focus of numerous documentaries and magazine articles but my take on it is that the local priest had an attendance problem and some peeling plaster looked like an apparition of some one or the other - it is so obvious that it looks more like Janis Joplin than it does some cosmic divinely Motherly Mary though, and the minister dude went to the press and the human masses being gullible as they are believed there was something there. But as one who lived in the area for a decade I know there is nothing more spiritual there than anywhere else and Mary is not hanging out in Yankalilla healing people any more than she is hanging out in the Bronx or Round Lake, New York. Of course in the days of the World Wide Web there is an Internet site that has the Prayer of Our Lady of Yankalilla and that tells us

The Shrine Shop is located just inside the church. There are a small number of souvenirs and devotional items which may be purchased by pilgrims to the Shrine. Icons of Our Lady of Yankalilla are for sale for; Post Card - $20 AUD, A4  - $35 AUD 62 X42 cm - $150 AUD.

Twenty bucks for a postcard No one can say the church does not know how to turn a profit. I have seen many apparitions on many a wall in my days and I would not be surprised if there were not several in the factory in which I made my tofu. There could be the Lord of the Tofu residing over only a select few factories but I was not one of the chosen tofu makers. My faith in tofu was rapidly declining. I was a drift, a lost inebriated curd struggling in an angry sea of fermented whey. The Lord of the Tofu was not present in my factory or in my life.

Robert and Terry Adsit on roof of our farmhouse in CLifton Park in early 1960sOur Mt Compass farm on Tooperang Road-Sacha, Leigh, Terrell Neuage;

The other photo is our Mt Compass Farm on Tooperang Road the last place where I made tofu. -Leaving Myponga for Adelaide is an incredibly picturesque view that at some point in my life could have been a romantic and uplifting soul experience.

 

But in 1988 it was only a delusional outward vision of beauty for the actual view beyond the physical was nothing more than a descent from one series of bad experiences of my life to the next.  Myponga is 400 meters above sea level and it is all downhill from the cheese factory to the ocean.

 

Robert and Terry Adsit on roof of our farmhouse in CLifton Park in early 1960sOur farm Clifton Park Route 9 with me on the roof

Cactus Canyon is on the left and extends into the sea with the right side of the road being cliffs leading to fertile farmland above. Myponga Road at Sellicks Hill is similar to Highway One through Big Sur in California. I would often pretend I was in California driving from a highly successful perfectly organic and pure food production facility to San Francisco or the San Francisco I knew in the 1960s, not the seedy dirty town it was when I stopped there in 2003 in hopes of catching a glimpse of my aura-body I had constructed between 1968 to 1969 and which I was surly convinced was still there on the corner of Height and Ashbury but due to my cloudy vision and lack of belief in anything at all I was unable to see it.

I have not been back to the area since the proposed Myponga/Sellicks Hill wind farm development was approved that would have changed the peaceful landscape with the placement of 20 wind turbines in clusters on ridgelines outside of Myponga. I probably will never go back except in my memory as I reconstruct what happened to my tofu business and why my business had to die in order for the future to change the landscape of one of soy production to energy production with giant windmills.


But before I launch further into the murky and often misinterpreted ends and beginnings of new phases and the why and wherefore of experiences and the metaphysical backdrops to our irrational thoughts, I should go back to what I began to discover about myself in 1980 when I received a letter from the Department of Social Services of Rensselaer County in New York with my mothers name being spelt as (Maureen Elizabeth) Bellenger and not Billenger. This story, confirms the thoughts I often have that I have no idea what the hell is going on in my life and the only control I have in life is whether I put one teaspoon of honey in my lemongrass tea or none at all and I probably do not even have control over that because I never add anything to my lemongrass tea because I am under the assumption that it does not need it and that assumption could be merely embedded in my mind by some alien force to prevent me from adding honey to my lemongrass tea. In other words we, as humans, and that includes every human that is alive now or has ever been alive, do not have a clue about anything. We just tell ourselves we do and we even latch onto a philosophical belief or two to give proof to our lunacy that we know anything. Now that I got that thought off my chest I will continue.
For most of 1988 we did not have telephone service. My bill had become too large for me to pay it and when I finally was able to I decided not to. My primary reason to have the telephone off was because of the children’s grandparents, especially the grandmother. She would call frequently and threaten me with taking the kids away. She would say the most stupid things but it was primarily that she just disliked me so much and she thought that the children should be living with her. She could not understand why they were living with their father and not their mother. I avoided the grandparents for close to a decade but toward the end of the 1990s I became casual friends and visited them a few times. Now they are in a nursing home and are senile and have no idea who it is that is visiting them. This is really our life story; rush around, do a bunch of shit, end up drooling and shiting all over ourselves and having no idea of who we are.


Toward the end of 1987 and throughout 1988 were exceptionally rough years astrologically for me. Saturn and Uranus were going through my second house; the house of one’s possessions or their money house, for years, but now both planets were together in the same degree, 25 to 27 degrees of Sagittarius which is opposite my Uranus at 25 degrees Gemini and Mars at 27 degrees Gemini. Uranus rules my fourth house, which is not only the home but also the end of the matter. 

 

Any matter for that matter. My financial world was a mess.  Even with the injection of ten thousand dollars from some silly investors, nothing looked quite good. I had dinner with my investors and I found that very depressing. There were these two hustling businessmen, one a Chinese fellow and the other an Australian who was in his mid-twenties and who believed that he knew the world of finance and how to make fortunes at will. I remember his first name was Michael and he liked the name of my company so much that he said he was going to change his name to Michael Light though I do not know if he ever did. I did not trust or like either one but seeing their cars in my driveway was encouraging.  They both had new Jaguars. It was all really quite out of place. My old farmhouse and the dairy shed that I was making tofu in and these expensive cars. We all went to dinner for me to meet my investors. I believe they invested a lot more than the ten thousand that I received, and I wanted to tell them then and there that this was a mistake. They were a retired couple that had worked hard all their life and they were looking to invest money that would be more profitable than putting it in the bank for a small interest rate. The people liked me and thought they were making a wise investment, and we never got to meet again. I signed some papers, and the money went into my bank account and I paid off a lot of bills but there was nothing left to invest into new equipment.

 

One of the bills I paid off was my telephone and a few days later after having my telephone put back on, I received a phone call from my sister.

 

Text Box: birth mother Maureen Bellingermy birth mumWhen I was unable to re-connect with my family when I was visiting at my father’s home in Clifton Park in October 1982 I began to write the supervisor at the Department of Social Services of Rensselaer County that I had actually made contact but that I had lost the number. I explained that it was the change in spelling from Billenger to Bellenger that had caused me to realize that all these years I had been pursuing the wrong surnamed people. I was also back in Australia and could she please help me get back on track and she wrote back saying that she could not give me the information but she did in the only way I suppose she legally could. She sent me a page from the Capital District, New York, telephone book with the Bellengers on it and said it was the third one. I started writing at the end of 1983 and I continued to send letters and cards to that address for the next four years. In December 1987 I decided enough was enough and I would send one more letter and that would be it. I had sent dozens of letters and cards over the years from very long twenty-page letters explaining all about my life at the beginning to cards at Christmas. My last envelope was addressed to the family of Maveureen Elizabeth Bellenger, and inside was a short letter stating who I was and that this was my last letter in my five years of trying to get a response. I put in my address and my phone number and mailed the letter.
Meanwhile, my sister, Susan Moore, who at this point I only knew existed because my aunt had told me I had a sister and a brother but not what their names were was visiting our uncle, Floyd Bellinger. She did not visit him very often but it was nearly Christmas time and she was stopping in with her family. Whist there she saw an envelope in the trash can addressed to the family of Maveureen Elizabeth Bellengerwritten on it and retrieving it and reading she discovered she had a brother living in Australia. She managed to get the aunt to confess that our uncle would throw the letters away when they arrived and that was it. Sue telephoned me a few hours after reading of my existence. She said that our mother had died of cancer in 1974 and that she had talked about me and she told me the story of my adoption.

 

When it became clear that my mother was pregnant my grandmother was quite upset because my mother was 16 and not married. It was 1946. Mom was sent off to Michigan with her stepbrother and somehow or for some reason they were married in Michigan. That part of the story is unclear and my sister is not quite sure how it exactly goes. I have met and spoken with my grandmother a few times. She is still alive at the age of 96 but she will not give me much information no matter how persistent I am. Her story is that my mother went off with a sailor who was passing through town and that no one knows whom the good fellow was. 

 

She will not waver on that story. She would always say she does not know who he was, but last year, 2003; I took her with us when we went to visit Sue in Oneonta, New York. The grandmother lives in Albany and it is an hour’s drive. Narda and I asked her on several occasions about who my father is and she would just say she did not know or that it no longer matters. When we got to her house, she said a name of a man who lives in the area, and we wrote it down and she said that is who your father is but not to contact him as it was so long ago. She said he was no good and not someone to ever meet. We have no idea whether she made it all up but she did look his name up in her address book and it was a French surname like Lafabre or something.

 

Unfortunately, I lost the name, and the grandmother would not give it again and now in 2004 she is in a nursing home, and I have not visited her for close to a year and probably will not. My sister believes my father may be the stepbrother and the reason the mother will not say anything is because it is too much of a scandal in her mind. I telephoned the person whose name appears on my birth certificate, Lawrence Miller, in 1992 when I was visiting my father with the children in tow and said that I thought he was my father but he said that he didn’t think so. However, if this person had never had sex with my mother he would have been very angry at my claim and would have said that it was impossible and that I was making a terrible claim. My sister said that when my mother was dying this stepbrother was at the hospital and that it was apparent that he loved her very much. How far this love was taken I suppose I will never know, I should never know.


My sister said that my mother got married in the 1950s and my brother and sister are my half-siblings. Their father died around the same time as my mother and at the time my sister was fourteen and my brother was eighteen. I met my brother in Hawaii in 2002 and we stayed with him for a few days and that is the only time I have seen him. I met my sister in 1992 for the first time and I will mention that later in this story. I have seen her two times during the past couple of years now that I live only an hour away and I sort of care


The story my sister has from my mother is that soon after I was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in August of 1947, she returned and her marriage to the stepbrother was annulled. My grandmother insisted that I be put up for adoption and I was placed in the Vanderheyden Hall estate, originally called the Troy Orphan Asylum

. At some point my mother got me out and we were living together and then the grandmother got me put back in Vanderheyden Hall and she had my mother.

committed to a psychiatric hospital. My mother escaped the psychiatric ward and went to Vanderheyden Hall and retrieved me. My grandmother caught up with the two of us and I was placed back in Vanderheyden until I was adopted in October 1950 at the ripe old age of three. My sister, Sue, said that my mother had wanted to find me after she was married and had given birth to my brother and sister but did not know where to look. Interestingly they lived not far from where I grew up in Clifton Park and when I described the farm I grew up on the corner of Route 9 and 146 they remembered seeing it.

 

I have often thought that we pass people that we have connections with and have no idea that we are seeing them or where they live. If there are other lifetimes, we are very likely pass souls we have been connected with, but we have no idea. Perhaps someone we sit next to on the bus or on an airplane was our lover or our murderer or parent in another lifetime, but we do not know it and of course why it matters? Maybe that would be a good line to use in a club; hi, my name this lifetime is Terrell and I don’t know if you remember but we were passionate lovers in 1576 in the South of France and you said you would love me forever and well here we are and though I don’t have a horse drawn carriage like the one we first made love in I do have my car out back and well...  I spoke with my brother, Euclid, in 1988 and he wrote suggesting he should come to visit me. I was having such a terrible time with my life that I said that it would not be a good idea to come and visit. I think he was offended and thought I did not want anything to do with him, but it was just that my life was in such turmoil I did not want anyone new to enter it at this time.


The name was changed in 1942. See, Women's History Collections held by the New York State Library Vanderheyden Hall; Records. (1834-1976). 14 boxes. Collection Call Number: SC18820. “Vanderheyden Hall began as the Benevolent Society of Troy, New York, founded in 1800. The Society was established by 52 women to aid the indigent women and children in the area. By 1834 the Society had become an orphanage called The Troy Orphan Asylum.” Viewed at  http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/msscfa/women.htm  3/18/2006 12:34 PM.

 

with my half-brother Euclid - in Hawaii - the only time we have been together 2002
With blood brother once and only meeting; Hawaii - 2002

The tofu business was struggling but it was not the products or the sales of them. Sales were continuously increasing, and I struggled to make enough products. My most innovative move in making tofu was to get my soybeans ground before they got to me. I found a milling company in Tarlee, north of Adelaide, that brought my organically grown soybeans from Queensland to their mills and ground them dry. What I got was a very fine granulated soybean that I would dump into my one-hundred-gallon cooker of boiling water, one bag at a time.

 

From that I would get between 150 and 200 blocks of tofu. This was a big saving in time for me as I no longer had to soak soybeans or grind them. I had experimented with using milled soybeans often and on for years and it took until late in my tofu manufacturing career to get it right. If the soybeans were milled too fine then they would not make a good batch of tofu and if the beans were to coarse, I would get such a low yield of tofu that I would lose money. Somewhere along the way we got it right and I was making good progress. I still had to make burger patties one by one but I learnt to live with it. I sent products to Brisbane by plane and it was almost exciting to go to Adelaide airport Monday mornings and put my Styrofoam boxes into the warehouse to be loaded onto a plane bound for Queensland. I also sent boxes by bus to Melbourne and by refrigerated truck to Sydney.

 

I had distributors in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney who delivered to individual health food stores. I do not recall what I should have been making but I know there was a time when I had figured out I should be making more than a thousand dollars a week profit. But the reality was that I was not keeping track of who owed me what and the bills piled up. The first thing that went bad was that my Melbourne distributor owed me more than three-thousand dollars and had not paid me for a couple of months. They said they were having financial difficulties and were going to trade out of their debts, and they were asking their manufacturers to continue supplying them and they would pay everyone what they owed them within a month. This was in August 1988 and by September they notified me that they were filing for bankruptcy. Within a few weeks of that my Sydney distributor also filed for bankruptcy. They were different companies and together they represented about two thousand dollars a week in sales and that was close to two-thirds of my sales. By December 1988 these two health food deliverers owed me ten thousand dollars and in turn I owed everyone money. The end came without ceremony and without warning.


To help further along my despair of my faltering tofu business was my home life. Leona and her husband had decided to sell their farm in Mount Compass where we lived and invest everything into their farm in Strathalbyn. What this meant was that we had to move out. There was not another home for rent in Mount Compass and we began to look elsewhere. We did not want to move back to Adelaide so we headed toward the Encounter Coast towns of Victor Harbor, Middleton and Port Elliot. We found a new house in Port Elliot.


Governor Sir Henry Edward Fox Young selected Port Elliot in 1850 as the site for the ocean port of the Murray River trade and he named the place after his friend, Sir Charles Elliot. It became a township in 1854, the same year in which the first railway line in South Australia was opened between Goolwa and Port Elliot and is now a tourist steam train called The Cockle Train. When my father came to visit in 1992 at the age of 87, he rode this train with us and he had a poster with the train going along the sea to Victor Harbor on his refrigerator until last year – 2003. Now that poster is above my desk at Albany Academy. The good Governor Fox’s choice was unfortunate as the bay was not well enough protected, and following several shipwrecks, the docking place was moved to Granite Island at Victor Harbor in 1864. Now the bay is a favourite place for swimmers, fuckers and vacationers from Adelaide.
The house belonged to a policeman from Adelaide who said we could rent the house for another agreed five years then he was going to retire and move in. Five years sounded like a long time to us but we lease the place one year at a time. I was still in hopes at this time to get my business back on track and sell it and move the children and me to the States.


We took several loads to get our belongings to our new home in Port Elliot and each time we tried to take Bob-The-Cat but he refused to go and the last time we put him in a box in the back of the truck but he managed to claw his way out and the last we saw of him he was running back toward the farm. Our last time we stopped at the farm it was dark and there had been a storm that day. It was a very eerie feeling being there. The electricity to the farm was off and a large tree branch had fallen onto the roof and a section of the roof had fallen in. Leigh said he saw a ghost, but he could not identify whether it looked like anyone. Leigh often saw things. Once Leigh had said he had seen Sacha standing in the middle of his bedroom one afternoon when Sacha was at school. I had felt quite spooked in the farmhouse several times, but I just chalked that up to my active mind and the fear that something would happen and there would be no one to help us. Soon after I contacted my sister, Sue, she sent me a ring that my mother use to wear and I wore it but it made me so sad that I stopped wearing it and I often felt my mother was in the house but that too I put down as my overactive mind. I kept my mother’s ring in my wallet for seven years then my girlfriend, Kris, began to wear it in 1995. When we separated in November 2000, she was still wearing the ring. We never saw one another again. Perhaps she is still wearing it.


Our home in Port Elliot was a big change from the old farmhouse on Tooperang Road. We were the first to live in this house. It was three bedrooms and on a hill that overlooked paddocks that lay before the distant hills. In back of us at that time there were no other homes, and we had a short walk to the beach. Where we lived very few tourists would go to. The sea was calm because of the slight bay. Further down the beach there was Boomers Beach a surfing area known for large waves and further on was Horseshoe Bay, which was heavily populated. There was a shark net at Horseshoe Bay, so the area was often awash with humans.


We went to the beach every day and our first few months, September to mid-December, were good. We started to meet other people from the local school. Sacha was in third grade and Leigh was in first and the school, Port Elliot Primary, was located on the edge of the small town of Port Elliot, a fifteen-minute walk from our house. I had the children continue their school year at Mt Compass Primary School and they began Port Elliot Primary at the beginning of 1989. Port Elliot Primary was the children’s third school, and they had just begun their education but they were not concerned and for that matter neither was I but the mother seemed to get herself into a state over it. I had Sacha in Meadows Primary for one term prior to moving to Port Elliot as the school was near the tofu factory in Meadows and it was too far to drive the children to Mount Compass for school.


Looking at some letters I found in a box of my father’s papers I found this letter that Sacha had written to my father at end of 1988 when Sacha was seven years old:


Dear Grandpa
Its seems you live a good life in your letter. Life is brity (I had crossed the word brity out and put pretty) hard in this month. We have to move to port elliot. Well thats all for now. Love sacha

My letter with Sacha’s
I can’t find Leigh’s card he made for you hopefully in the move well find it. I can’t believe how much stuff we have to move. The children try to help but they’re too much into playing. We are one block from a train line where the steam train goes on weekends and next to that is the sea. It’s quite beautiful; we can hear the waves at night. We’ve moved into a new house, quite a change from our 150-year-old farmhouse. The children are still at Mt. Compass School, a 28-kilometer drive.

I’ve started a food eating shop. The first few weeks were slow, but I think summer will change that they say the population goes from 3000 to 11,000 and 3Xs that on weekends because of the beach resorts. The children check the mailbox every day as this is the 1st time in 4 years that we lived in a place where we get mail delivered to our house.
We love you say hi to Sue I haven’t heard from her in a long time.
Terrell, Leigh, Sacha  247 Allendar Place Port Elliot.
When I was not off to Myponga to make tofu and the children were not in the city visiting their mother on their fortnightly weekend visits we would spend the time on our project of writing a sitcom. It was quite a simple story, and I had hoped that one day I could sell it for a weekly television show. We had given up trying to find anything we liked on TV. In the 1980s before cable, satellite and Internet delivery of shows was available in Australia there were only three commercial and two government channels. The premise to our story was that a single father with two young boys won the lottery and decided to start a tour company in our local area; the Encounter Coast. The tour company was called Encounter Tours and as far as I know there was not such a company at the time. Of course now there are lots of tour companies with this name, Goggle Search lists 317,000:

  • 8-Day Tibet Encounter Tour
  • Encounter Tours Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland and the centre of the region's trade and commerce, offers a lively city location as an alternative base for your search for Santa.
  • Encounter Tours on Wedding SA - the ultimate wedding planner for South
  • Australia.
  • Egyptian encounter tour 10 night/11 day
  • The North Coast Encounter Tour (East End Jumbuck Tour)
  • Wilderness Encounter Tour
  • Churchill Wilderness Encounter
  • And of course lots of sex encounter tours
  • Let Encounter Tours take you to McLaren Vale, Victor Harbor, Barossa Valley and Hahndorf on a day tour highlighting the attractions and wineries of the region

The last one I mentioned above (Let Encounter Tours take you to the McLaren Vale, Victor Harbor, Barossa Valley and Hahndorf on a day tour highlighting the attractions and wineries of the region) sums up what we were writing our scripts about. These are even towns we had included in our sitcom. We wrote some twenty or so shows and we would discuss them in the evening. The jest of it was that we got our tours mixed up by sending the wrong group of people to the wrong place, a Christian convention to the nude beach at Maslins Beach half an hour away from us; dropping off youth on the way to a rock concert at the Christian convention; getting tourists lost in the Outback and a whole range of wacky silly adventures. I told the children that with these great stories all we had to do was get a television studio to purchase it and we would have lots of money. We would probably act in some if not all the shows ourselves. One of the common threads in our storylines was that I was often getting involved with a female in the tour group and the children would try to sabotage it. In our storyline we had three buses and several limousines as we also catered to weddings and a variety of events. 


The folder with all the stories got left somewhere along the way in our moving and travels and our hope for living off of the proceeds of our story lasted for less than three months. The difficulty with great ideas and fantasies of how things will be if only they would work is that reality rears its ugly head and that is what happened to us.


The tofu business was driving me nuts and I had no one to help me. I made all the products myself as my Vietnamese workers lived an hour away in Adelaide and I lost them when we moved to the Meadows tofu factory. I was alone with the production at the Mount Compass farm too. I owed the people who rented the farm to me several thousand dollars as they tried to help me keep the business afloat. What sank me were the two large distributors that I had in Sydney and Melbourne going out of business owing me thousands of dollars and I owed all my suppliers a lot of money. The end came quickly and without warning.

Christmas  1988 Port Elliot , South Australia , with my children

 

 

14 - tofu's end

About Terrell Neuage
PhD

Terrell Neuage at Kerala beach, February 2025

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.