this week, in your introduction to a segment, you mentioned that you are sometimes late in tuning in to a trend. You put me in mind of a ‘Fable of our Time’ by james thurber. it is the story of three sisters. one sister i was very inventive with had a flair for making clothes that were ahead of their time. The second sister would wait to be well and truly sure that a style was really in fashion before adopting it,so by the time she got around to wearing it, the clothes ere out-of-style. the third sister wore the asme outfit year in and year out and, every now and then, her clothes would come back into fashion.
being a fable it must have a moral and the moral here reads: ‘A fast clock is never right. A clock that is slow s never right, but a stopped clock is right twice a day’
i hope that you would like that, but this letter was also prompted by something else you said this week
it is quite possible that i misunderstood, but i took it to be an invitation to talk about a case of abuse
this is a long story and it goes back a long way and from your appearance on the book show i know that you have little time to read, so perhaps i should start with the sort version and then put myself through the writing of the long version
a senior diplomat barged into my house and started yelling that i was to discipline my children, that he had just heard one of them mimicking him and that he had it in his power to make life difficult for me and for my family. having barked out his message he left the way he had come slamming the front door and the front gate behind him as he went
now the long version
we came to australia when the boys were 3 and one and a half years old. in the summer of 1982, i had taken a teaching position near toronto so that we could see what canada was like. canada a is beautiful and the people are nice, but everyone talked about how harsh the winters are and Fee did not like the sound of that. having grown up close to the sea in the south of portugal, she would often ask where i used to play as a child, what i used to do.
because i was born in London it hadn’t really dawned on me that it was not a great place to raise children, but once the boys came along, i came to realise that it was no longer the place that i had grown up in. a place where t you were taught your manners and taught your place. where as a schoolboy you were told that you should give up your seat for a lady on a bus and that you should raise your school cap as a mark of respect to your elders. it was also a place where schoolboys at the age of 8 could make their own way to and from school by bus or underground
we arrived at the tail end of 1982. unfortunately 60 minutes had only recently aired a segment about the ‘whingeing Poms’ and anything that we said was taken to be a whinge. not that aim whingeing about that. don’t get me wrong.
my parents are both Czech and had sought political asylum in england in 1951, when my father was recalled to Prague and would have been caught up in the show trials which are known as the Slansky trials. he was tried in absentia and deemed by the communist court to be a ‘capitalist imperialist bourgeois running dog’ or something of that sort.
growing up i would often heard him talk about the decision that he took to leave in the dead of night it was not an easy decision. he wanted to face the music. he was, at first, prepared to go back to prison. As a member of parliament during the inter-war years, he had been arrested by the gestapo soon after the invasion and he had spent 5 years in various prisons in germany. his a name appears in the golden book of jerusalem for his friendship to the jewish people.
but then he had been tied in a nazi court. the second time around he was going to be tried and possibly imprisoned by his own people for his belief that communism was not in keeping with the spirit of the czech nation.
in england, if you have a foreign name, you are always seen as a foreigner. So being seen as a Pom wasn’t so bad. It was something that it would have been nice to be seen as while i was in england.
ten years later, the animation studio was doing well, we were keeping quite a few people in work and we had done an audition of 4 minutes of animation to convince Disney that australian animators could understand and interpret a script.
Fee was canny about these things, i had always been a renter from an organisation called the czech refugee trust fund which had been set up at the ned of the war by the czech government in exile. Fee wanted us to buy a house and the house w that we bought was run down wooden cottage in an area that had been home to the wharfs of woolloomooloo. it was in a cul-de-sac, so no through traffic with trumper park just across the road.
we rebuilt the house after the roof caved in, the boys were at a school at waverley and together with our neighbour, Amanda Ziebeck, we organised the Harris street xmas parties. we got on with our neighbours, but then Joelle sold the house next door. for a couple of years, the house was rented out. we even got on with the renters because Fee, who always keeps her ear to the ground had alerted a friend, a single mum, who moved in with her son who was our son Nathanael’s best friend
But then the broinowskis moved into the house that they had bought. they made their presence felt on the first morning by throwing cardboard boxes from the balconies at 6 in the morning. it should have been an omen.
the ambassador set about painting the front fence. this was an activity which allowed him, like the ancient mariner, to collar passers-by and tell them his story, so it was something that i had already heard quite a few times before my turn came. essentially it was about establishing that you were someone who was not a threat in any way because you were not important, and in presenting his own credentials it was being made abundantly clear that he was someone who was. we did our best to keep to ourselves.
in london you hope that if you are considerate to your neighbours they will be considerate towards you. you wear headphones to listen to music at night. perhaps you even carpet your floor so as not to thump on their ceiling. it may be a little oppressive, but you hope for quiet life.
it was a saturday morning. we would start the weekend by tidying the house. the boys would tidy their rooms upstairs, Fee and i would do the kitchen and living room downstairs. chores done, i had just sat down when richard broinowski barged in through the front door, which was never locked. he was in a rage. “John. you are to discipline your children. I have just heard one of them mimicking me. If this sort of thing is to escalate, i have it in my power to make life difficult for you – and your family”. There were flecks of spittle on his lips. he had taken me completely by surprise. I wouldn’t have known what to say, but he had gone. stormed out the way he stormed in, slamming that front door and front gate as he went.
Of course i feared the worst. that would have ben so typical of nathanael when he was 11. it would have been so typical of me when i was 11.
i went upstairs to talk to the boys. Matteo had been staying over and i almost hugged him when he told me that he was the one who had done the mimicking, but i did stop him when he started to demonstrate. matteo has a musical ear. he is now a well-known composer of film music and winner of several awards. ennio morricone was his big hero even then. i told him that nothing was wrong, only best not to do it again. “But he is so loud”, Matteo said.
So.
I went and stood outside the newly-painted fence and waited to be seen.
I knew that this was going to be the time to muster all that i knew of tact and diplomacy and started by apologising for what had happened. then i said that it was not my son who had done the parroting (I was corrected. the word that i should have used was ‘mimicking’) and that since it was not my son, there had been no disciplining because i did not feel that it would be appropriate for me to s disilplibne someone s else’s child. I had however had a word with the boys.
God. what else f do i remember about what was said? i remember him telling me that he was ‘ a damn fine diplomat’ and i had to pinch myself to stop myself from laughing. i was y told that he was friend with gareth Evans ‘and that gareth was someone who ‘does not suffer fools gladly’ and that along with his other talents,
Richard Philip Broinowski was also a lawyer, which i later took to mean that he had friends in the judiciary.
i also remember the line’ we do not lie your house. it is not aesthetic’ and i remember puzzling over whether this was grammatically correct.
somewhere along the line i have heard a diplomat defined as someone who can tell you to go to hell and leave you looking forward to the journey.
the reason i was born in London in 1948 was that my father was the czch ambassador to the court of st james from 47-49. he had the wanted to be posted to India because it was about to become an independent republic. My father was 17 years old when the republic of Czechoslovakia had been formed at the treaty of versailles, and this must have been a pivotal experience in his life. He died in exile 16 years before the Berlin Wall came down. So my experience of diplomacy is limited to having had a father who was very strong on manners and self-discipline and who as a result of his years in prison bordered on the ascetic.
i think of it a being something which is designed to make it possible for countries to live alongside one another because they do not have the great luxury of being able to move away to somewhere else.
we moved. it was made abundantly clear to me that my explanation had not been believed and i felt that any opportunity to make life difficult for me and Fee and Zac and Nat was going to be taken. it had not been in our plans to sell up and move.

of course selling the house and moving might have solved the problem of feeling constantly under threat, of not being able to say anything when i learnt that his daughter had walked into the house and gone upstairs and ordered my son to turn off his radio because she was filming documentary next door or being subjected to the moonlight sonata at 1 in the morning or what can only be called ‘orgasm theatre’ or the soundtrack of a blue movie which was something i did not want my boys to hear. The Ziebells, two doors down had nailed their window shut in order to deal with the noise and while i thought that i would have an ally in frank, he only told me that should calm down and learn to live t with it.

one person said that i should tell him that he would look pretty silly with an axe sticking out of his head. i took that to be another example of australian diplomacy, but all in all the consensus of the opinions that i was given was that there was nothing to be done. so the lesson was that far rom being a classless society, this is a society with a malevolent class of untouchables. As an animator, a place where birds s chase its and acts chase dogs had been hard to deal with, but a place where diplomats are rude and spiteful boorish oafs was beyond the pale. what was this place i was living in? certainly a place where the rule of law is that you are presumed guilty.

part of the broinowski effect was that i did not dare to go before a magistrate when i felt that a fine from the highway patrol was entirely just. i wanted to stay under the radar. i did not want Broinowski to be aware of me. i wanted to fade into the background and that is where i have been since then

it was after visiting a barrister in her chambers above the lindt cafe in order to do sketches for he portrait that it finally occurred to me that i might dare to go before a magistrate,

so i went into a police station to ask about it. ‘Did you pay the fine? i was asked and when i replied that i had, was told that i was guilty and that that was that.

when you find yourself behind a car from a driving school and it becomes painfully clear that this is a learner driver on possibly their very first lesson, you hang back and keep your distance and leave them room to make mistakes. Of course the guy in the ute behind you berates you for preventing him from getting to where he is going and leans on his horn

and calls you all the names under the sun.  Perhaps i shouldn’t take it to heart, but i am being falsely accused and that hurts.

can we step back and take another look at this? What have i done wrong?

did i raise my son to be a vile mimicker of extra-ordinary australians? My elder son is currently in a place that cannot be named doing his duty to his country while Nathanael has removed himself to a place where he knows the names of all the plants and birds and animals. i wonder if this is because he watched his dad become fearful of others and remove himself from life.

I used to love listening to the Margaret Throsby interviews. When Broinowski’s turn came, Margaret asked ‘were there weapons of mass destruction?’ the answer was. ‘of course not’. This was not the reasoned exposition that i would have hoped for, but sometimes sheer force of personality can carry an argument across the line. There is a danger of course in the ‘Right Man’ as Colin Wilson has  pointed out, they would sooner commit murder the be wrong.

Stan Grant fared a little better, weathering the constant assault of being called Stan and not questioning the wisdom of the proposal that Donald Trump might just be the guy to sit down with Kim Jong Un and make a deal. I guess pathological narcissists have to stick together. It takes one to know one..Maybe they have an association. a secret society. Ooooh.

Writing in to Column 8 was the first thing to give me heart, although the crossword solutions would often be embassy or ambassador or tact or diplomacy. Far more often than comfortable. Far more often than bully or thug or Brobdingnagian.

How many times have i written to the Minister for fr foreign affairs to ask exactly what are the powers to  make life difficult  for ordinary australians are? I have lost count. Certainly the name of the Minster has changed several times, but i have never dared to put the letter in the post.

While there are those who might lament that a man such as this should represent his country to the world, there will be others who feel that it is entirely appropriate. For my part, I pray that one day the curse will be lifted.