PROFILE: Childhood dreams bring German wanderer to Australia

By Sid Astbury Dec 30, 2009, 5:04 GMT

Sydney - Joerg Berger was an 11-year-old in Leipzig, Germany, when the adventure film Storm Boy put the idea of living in the Australian Outback into his head.

It was 1977, East Germany was still communist, and the only way to see foreign films was by stealth. His father had hidden an antenna in the roof cavity of their house so the family could pick up television stations in the West.

In 2009, Berger is a 43-year-old immigrant living in Coober Pedy in the Australian Outback. He mines for opals some of the year and is a tour guide for most of the rest.

What reminded him of his early devotion to the 1976 Australian film Storm Boy, a heart-warming tale of a boy's love for his pet pelicans, was the death in Adelaide Zoo this year of one of the birds that starred in the film.

The film was based on Colin Thiele's novel of the same name, about a boy who raises three pelican chicks after their mother is shot. While his father forces him to set them free, one bird - Mr Percival - returns. Mr Percival died at the age of 33 in September.

The film captures the reclusive life that the boy and his father live in South Australia's deserted coast.

'I'm living my daddy's dream,' said Berger, recalling that his father was a bit of a recluse like the boy's father in Storm Boy and had always imagined retiring somewhere close to nature where there was lots of space.

Berger has space aplenty, and his massive plot in Coober Pedy has its own water supply. The house, where he lives with his wife and two dogs, is classic Coober Pedy: an underground cavern, scooped out of the rock, the better for the inhabitants to bear the fierce southern hemisphere summer heat, where temperatures can go as high as 52 degrees Celsius.

The Australian Outback suits a technically minded person like Berger, who has built most of his own house. There are vehicles in his yard with which he likes to tinker, and he has developed an augur that can bore through up to 10 metres of rock a day in the search for opals.

'The others, normally, one metre a day is all they can do,' he said.

It's a world away from Leipzig, where, according to Berger, 'You can't look at a landscape without a power line.'

It is as though Coober Pedy has transported him back in time.

'Before, we were close to nature,' he said. 'But in Germany there is no space, not after the industrial revolution.'

In 1989, Berger was among those who escaped East Germany after Hungary opened its borders, creating a passage to Austria. Only months later, the Berlin Wall came down, and East and West Germany were reunified in 1990.

He settled in Cologne and did very well for himself as an engineer. His work took him to most of Europe, the United States and Iran.

'What I earned working in Iran for a few weeks would be enough to keep me going here in Australia for a year,' he said.

But the wanderlust remained. Berger next moved to Scotland and worked in a bank while developing a business plan for a guest house.

It wasn't until 2004 that, after several visits, he decided to act on that boyhood dream and make his life in Australia.

'There are 20 German speakers in Coober Pedy,' he said. 'We speak what we call Denglish, because some are Swiss, some are Dutch, and some are Austrian.'

A lot of Berger's work as a tour guide is with German visitors.

'They ask me how I manage to live here,' he said.

Generally, he is delighted to show those from his homeland around his new land.

'They can't believe the desert is green, because they always expected it would be sands like the Sahara,' he said. 'And they like the idea of driving for 460 kilometres and only turning left once and right twice on the trip between Alice Springs and Uluru.'

It is as though he has found his spiritual home. He has a keen interest in Aboriginal culture - perhaps dating all the way back to Storm Boy. In the film, shot in coastal South Australia, the boy is secretly befriended by a local Aborigine called Fingerbone Bill - from whom he gets his moniker Storm Boy.

'The Aborigines in central Australia are shy, not like those from the coast,' Berger said. 'They will not look you in the eye. This is something I have to explain to tourists.

'You've got more freedom in Australia than in Germany, but if you cross the borders you're in trouble with the authorities.'