5. arrival

5 – arrive in Australia
June 1981

• June 01 – stayed overnight at Royal Hawaii
• June 2nd – closed bank account, insurance mail etc left Royal Hawaii at noon – terrible day – fought with Lesia all day June3rd. Left at 10.48 AM arrived 12.55 am next day Adelaide
• 6th Lesia says it is her house and if I want to stay, I have to live by her rules
• 10th first day on own in Adelaide went to library looked up newspapers of Melbourne and Sydney thinking of moving there on my own
• 11th signed up for unemployment

We took photos of the container that held the few things we were sending as it was loaded into the hold of the ship. We had purchased a wooden cupboard at a flea market a month earlier and because Sacha’s first clothes were kept in it we became emotionally attached to it and could not toss it out so it became our packing box. I had that in my many homes until I finally let go of it in 2002. When I was preparing to leave Australia with the woman who would be my next wife I would get rid of the one piece of furniture
I had started to Australia twenty-one years earlier. Maybe there was someone in the hold of the ship stowing away like I had earlier in my life but this time the only part of me that was going to be in a hold of a ship were my clothes and some trinkets that I had created an emotional attachment to and wanted with me in Australia. Sacha seemed content in the foldout baby basinet at the front of the section of the airplane we had been assigned to. We arrived in Adelaide, South Australia and once in Lesia’s home we had a drink and she told me that this was her home and if I wanted to stay, I would live by her rules.
I became homesick92F quite quickly like within hours and within a day I was thinking of how I could escape the situation I was in. I was in someone else’s home, someone else’s country.  Being married did not seem to give me any rights; I was in a foreign country with no friends and no job. Perhaps Lesia wanted me to experience what she had just experienced in Hawaii. Her
parents were not at all friendly and on my first evening with them at the dinner table, the mother-in-law suggested that it would be best if I went back to America. It would never get better.
I began going to the library in town and learning about other cities with the thought that I would go to a nearby city and live and see Sacha as much as I could. Melbourne immediately appealed to me and I started to read books and newspapers and magazines from and about Melbourne. My immediate problem was that I did not have much money as we had used it all to get to Australia.
- June 25th talked to David about buying his tofu gear
- July 2nd David’s tofu equipment arrived at 6.25 pm –
- 11th – general clash with Lesia
- 15th first batch of tofu
- 16th sold first batch of tofu to Clearlight Cafe
- 18th made first tofu cheesecake
- 20th collected stuff from docks from Hawaii
- August 4th registered name ‘Protein City’
- 15th smashed Lesia’s parent’s car into her garage
- 21st article in Adelaide Advertiser about our tofu
- November 10th made nine batches of tofu. None of it came out
- 17th made ten batches of tofu nine OK eight sellable
The days became weeks and on and on and within a couple of months we had gotten a small business grant to begin a business. We got $4000 from the South Australia government and with it we bought our first tofu making equipment. We found a person, David, who had been making tofu and selling it to a few of the health food shops in Adelaide but he had quit a year earlier and gone into the soap making business. We had tracked him down through the local health food stores and he was willing to sell us what equipment he had and show us how to make tofu or soybean curd as it sometimes referred to. As if life was not strange enough, we set up making tofu in Lesia’s parent’s house. They had a large home in Torrensville and there was a section of the house that had a lounge with a kitchen, bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms attached to it and that was all separate from the main part of the house. What we had gotten from the original Adelaide tofu maker was two large 20-liter cooking pots and an industrial burner and two boxes with holes in them to make the tofu in. We had to use a large kitchen wiz to grind up the soybeans. Making tofu has a few basic steps and no matter the size the same process in some form is used:

• Soy Beans are soaked in water overnight then drained. This meant going the night before to the parents and always putting up with some sarcastic remark or dozen.
• The beans are pulverized with a small quantity of water. The resultant mash will have the consistency of baby poo which I was becoming so familiar with. I suppose baby poo would be the metaphor for my life.
• The poo is ladled into boiling water and allowed to boil for about 10 minutes. This stage of the process is crucial as a certain enzyme in the bean is broken down during this time. If the enzyme is not destroyed, the Soy protein will not be humanly digestible.
• The resulting slurry is filtered. The liquid is Soy Milk, and the pulp is called Okara. I used the okara in several products I made including breads and burgers.
• A small amount of something is introduced to coagulate the Milk. I used gypsum.
• The Milk will then separate into Curds and Whey. The Curds will float to the top.
• The Curds are scooped off the top of the whey and placed into a box lined with a porous cloth. We used curtain material. The box has many small holes in it to allow leftover whey to drain. A lid is then placed on the box.
• A weight is placed on the lid of the container and allowed to sit for several hours. This part of the operation determines whether there will be soft or firm tofu.  The heavier the weight and the longer it is left on the box the firmer the resulting block of soy cheese. The resulting block of tofu is placed into a tub of cold water for an hour or so.

I refined this process and used larger and more sophisticated equipment over the years but to begin with it was all done very simply. We learnt quite quickly that soft tofu was more profitable than firm tofu as we could get more out of our production with soft tofu instead of letting the weight sit on top for a long period and have the tofu squashed down. It was an incredibly laborious task, and we would get two boxes of tofu or 25 times five-hundred-gram blocks for a day’s work which was a good eight hour shift. We sold our first batch of tofu on July 16th 1981 and sure enough I did an astrological chart for it and there were enough good aspects or at least I thought the lovely Venus trine Neptuneat the time was good enough to make this a prosperous start.
Of course, with Neptune in the second house of the “first sold chart” I was living in la la land thinking this was a good start. The 500-gram blocks of tofu sold to the shops for one dollar and we did this process twice a week and for our efforts we were making about 30$ a week. This was right up there with what I made in a week’s effort whilst in the Order. I could sell hot dogs for a week and make thirty dollars. I would make this awesome amount of cash in a week if I were lucky selling picture-poems in New Orleans. I imagine nations rising and falling on the taxes I pay from my earnings. Our first customer was Clearlight Health Foods at 203 Rundle Street and they would take a dozen to twenty blocks a week. We soon sold tofu at Athens, a Greek continental and small goods shop in Central Market, Australia’s oldest and my favourite produce market in the world, or at least tie to one I would visit in Barcelona twenty years later. They took twenty blocks a week and we gradually collected more customers with From the Earth, 195 Magill Road being our next customer. After that I am not sure who took our tofu but we gradually added more and more health food shops and even a large grocery store, Foodland, on O’Connell Street in North Adelaide.
Our first business name that we chose was ‘Protein City’ after hearing the song on radio, ‘Boy from New York City’;
Oo ah oo ah oo oo
Tell us about the boy
From New York City
And we held on to that name for a few months until we finally realised how stupid it was and changed to Light Foods for several reasons:

• Adelaide was chosen as the capital of South Australia and designed by Colonel William Light (1786 - 1839) in 1836,
• We hoped our products would appeal to those on diets and wanted a light food (low-calorie and reduced-fat foods),
• Still having a smidgen of spirituality left in me still I liked the line ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.

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.