Sam the Dinosaur

People always say to me "There are NO advantages to smoking." but they are so wrong.  Over the years, this dire vice has enriched my life in so many and varied ways.  It's the people you meet.  The conversations you have. The things you discover.  I've already told you about stumbling across Tung Chung Fort here in HK while on a fag quest, but I've not yet told you about my greatest and best ever 'sneaking off for a cigarette' discovery.

It was decades ago, when I was doing my first Masters at Queensland University in Brisbane.  The English Department on the third floor, where I had my office, was a "Zero-Tolerance No Smoking" zone, so I had to sneak down to the Great Quad to indulge.

However, to get down there, I had to go through the normally unexplored dark and dingy basement floor lobby, where, on the left as you come in, there was a winsy little museum, little more than a storage room. The elderly curator was also a smoker so, over the many months we'd sneak cigarettes together, we became very good friends.

In this room was a jumbled mess of the material remains of former students research projects and, although the university owned all these objects, no one was quite sure what to do with anything, so, for over a century, these materials just sat in their glass cases and accumulated dust, occasionally added to but mostly neglected and left alone.

Treasure trove, huh! I couldn't help myself and was forever getting down and dirty, diving in to explore the varied contents and, like some annoying four year old, bombarding the curator with lots of questions. It was astonishing the many strange and curious things I learned this way: like the fact that Australia has an exquisitely tiny marsupial mouse, almost extinct, called 'a delicate', and the fact that perfectly ordinary house cats, when they become feral, suddenly grow to four times their natural size, no matter what age they are when they return to the wild.

But the very best thing I have ever come across, EVER, was in a very dusty case under many other cases: "We call him Sam" the curator told me.  And that's when the world suddenly stopped turning as I fell hopelessly in love.

Sam was the fossilised bones of a baby dinosaur, about four foot tall, found many decades earlier by QU students on a dig in the Australian Outback. He had mostly kept his shape, only a little squashed here and there, and was just so cute and beautiful. But there was more. Not only was he fossilised, he was opalised. Yes, over vast millennia, Sam had turned into a single giant opal ... and not just your average ordinary opal ... he was fire opal; the most exquisite opal you can ever imagine; all blues and reds and greens and scintillating perfection; sparking light and fire; more than you can ever hope for or even endure beautiful.

Normally I attempt the Buddhist mantra "desire nothing" but for Sam I made an exception.  I wanted to own him so badly I actually ached for him; a real and physical ache. I instantly lost interest in everything else in that room and dusted off the case and sat on the floor just gazing at him. And I did that for many days to come. And it got harder and harder pulling myself away to go back to regular life so, like nothing else I've ever known, I wanted to take him away and put him someplace where I could gaze at him night and day for ever more.

And, really, what was there NOT to ache for. "How can I have him?" I asked the curator.

"I don't know." he replied "I'll have to ask."

The news wasn't good.  Days later: "The university says he's probably worth thousands of dollars. Can you afford him?"

"I can certainly try."  I said. "Just give me a price and I'll do it."

So that's when the University decided to establish his value in the marketplace and the buzz started and folks turned up from all over and, yes, the bidding war began and it quickly spiraled out of my league and beyond anything I could ever hope to afford.

The Japanese won him. A$7 million, from memory. And they crated up Sam and prepared to ship him back to Japan.  However, after neglecting him for decades, Australia now started screaming about how Sam was "A National Treasure." and "He is not allowed to leave our shores." and by an Act of Parliament, the Japanese were stymied.

I met Sam again in 2000. He's in Darling Harbour down on the Sydney foreshore, in a glass case outside an opal shop. And strangely, somehow, without that dust and the element of those years of neglect, he didn't have that strange magnetic pull.  "Hello again Sam" I said, and stood there for only a minute, and after deciding, yeah, he seemed happy enough, I went off outside for a cigarette.