It was a Saturday morning. Having worked all week, we used to start the weekend by tidying the house. The boys would do their rooms upstairs with Fee supervising and I would do the downstairs, unsupervised. With the chores done, I had just sat down when he burst in through the front door and started yelling, ‘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.’

The flecks of his spittle were still in the air when he turned and left, slamming the front door and the front gate behind him as he went.

Like a mugging, like so many things in Australia, it had come out of a clear blue sky. Nothing had prepared me for it. One minute I was about to sit down for a rest, the next a senior Australian diplomat was making threats against my wife and children. I needed to find out what was going on and I went upstairs to talk to the boys, but it was with a heavy heart. I feared the worst. At 11, my son Nat was a naughty boy. When I was 11, I had been a naughty boy too. I had been given detentions at school, I had been disciplined. I had been caned.

‘Did one of you just copy the man next door?’

Matteo piped up, ‘Yes, but he is so loud. He said ‘Anyone for tennis?’ and I thought he sounded funny so I said, ‘Anyone for tennis?’

I could have kissed him, which would have been totally inappropriate because Matteo was not my son. He was my son Nathanael’s best friend and he was staying with us as he often did. Mattel’s parents had separated and he was now living with his Mum. He had a musical ear, which made him good at parroting, but is also the reason he went on to become a talented composer of film music, like his hero, Ennio Morricone.

To stand outside the Ambassador’s front gate until he noticed that I was there seemed like the right thing to. Eventually he did. With as much tact and diplomacy as I could muster, I started by apologising for what had happened and went on to explain that the boy who had done the parroting (‘Mimicking’, he corrected me), mimicking. had not been my son but his friend and that since he was not my son, I had not disciplined him but I had told him not to do it again. I did not say what the boy’s name was and, thankfully, he did not ask. But he did treat me to a long talk during which he informed me that he was ‘a damn fine Diplomat’, that he he was a close personal friend of Gareth Evans (a man who ‘does not suffer fools gladly’) that he had studied law (from which I was to infer that he would be able to use his knowledge of The Australian legal system to make life difficult for me and my family? Or that he had a coterie of like-minded thugs and bully boys who were lawyers?) and that both he and his wife did not find my house to be ‘aesthetic’. So I was in the wrong on aesthetic grounds too.

The house was a wooden Wharfie’s Cottage.

But wait a minute

Why did I allow this buffoon to wreck my life? The process of selling the house lead to a sticking point. The boundaries of the property had to be defined and a question of encroachment came up. The dividing line was not straight and the two properties overlapped by centimetres at some points. When approached by our solicitor, Broinowski refused to grant the easement. He told our solicitor that he to was a man of the Law and that his reason for not granting it was that he ‘had had words with these people’.

Some irony here. We were selling the house in order to get away from him and he was preventing the sale from going through. But why? Yes, he had ‘had words’ with me and his words were that he had it in his power to make life difficult for me and my family. His reason for using these words was that he thought that my son had mimicked him. So it would seem that he had not accepted my apology and had not believed that it had not been my son who had ‘mimicked’ him. And he now referred to us as ‘these people’. There was no doubt in my mind that this was a perjorative term, that he was referring to us in the way he might refer to Romany Gypsies or Jews or Slavs or Muslims or whatever target group any bigot might have in their sights.

Our solicitor went back to him a second time to tactfully point out that since the Ambassador’s property did also encroach on ours, there would be something to be gained from having the matter cleared up if, at some time in the future, he might wish to sell. He was not being asked for money, but he made a point of saying that he would not pay a penny toward the redefining of the property boundaries.

It became clear to me that this man was going to take any opportunity to make black mischief for this family. He had so much invested in being right. He was a Right Man. The kind of man who continues to believe that his is the only conceivably explanation because he knows best. The kind of man who would commit murder sooner that be wrong about anything. The kind of man who writes books in order to showcase the superiority of his intellect. The kind of man who believes that the Earth is flat and that anyone who thinks it is round is a fool.