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.

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.

Le Compte de Bouffon looked to be likely candidate for the origin of the word ‘Buffoon’.
Was the Count a Buffoon?

It struck Paul how very English it all was. Sitting in a trench, sipping tea out of the plastic top of his thermos, breathing great gobbets of steam into the cold morning air on what was going to be the longest day of the Year.

For a while he blew his clouds of steam like a smoker blowing smoke rings. Then he poured himself another capful.

He studied the colour of the tea carefully in order to stop himself from stealing another glance at Alison.

Today she was wearing a man’s shirt over her pullover. Paul tried to tell himself that it was just something that she had picked up from an Oxfam shop. It was a sensible thing to be wearing. Already, it had plenty of dirt on it from where she had wiped her gloves.

Just as he did on every Sunday, Paul thought about what she might look like under all those clothes. He imagined her at the end of the day, propping herself up in the doorway, using the toe of one Wellington boot to hold the heel of the other and struggle her foot free. Then crouching on one soggy-socked foot and gripping the other wellie with both hands and wrestling it off.

She would pull the wet socks off next and stand for a moment feeling the bristles of the hallway mat before padding across the stone floor to the laundry basket. Her footprints would make a pretty pattern. She would lift the lid of the alibaba basket and drop the socks in. She would look at her hands. She would wipe them on the shirt and look at them again and shrug. She might even laugh to herself at how pointless that was and find a clean spot on the shirt to wipe her hands again. Clean this time.

Then she would peel the shirt off over her head.

No.

She would carefully unbutton the shirt so that the grit would not get shaken off.

Button by button.

The buttons on the unfamiliar shirt.

She would slide out of the shirt and drop it onto the basket. She would hook her thumbs into the elastic of her tracksuit pants and bend at the waist. The sudden revelation of her legs a conjuring trick that would make Paul gasp.

Paul imagined that her legs would be perfect. Not a mark on her thighs. No scars. No orangepeely skin. No footballers thighs.

If things went wrong at this point, if what Paul saw was a pair of thighs that looked like they belonged in jodhpurs, like jodhpurs would be the only kind of trousers that they could possibly ever fit into, then he would stop and start again.

Alison would hook her thumbs into the elastic waist of her baggy trousers and bend at the waist. She would straighten up again and step out of the abandoned pile

‘Tea break’s over. Back on your heads again’.

It was Simon, using the same words he used every Sunday to break into Paul’s reverie.

It was the tag line of a tired old joke about people in Hell standing knee-deep in shit. There they are, millions of them, up to their knees in shit, drinking tea out of delicate cups, little fingers hooked daintily in the air, saucers held in the other hand to catch any impolite drips. Simon had told the joke to the group last winter, when the days had been so short and the crackling fire in the open grate at the Faucet Inn had been so inviting.

2

What Paul had loved most was the redness of Alison’s cheeks in the sudden warmth. He loved how her nose went a little red too, and how she pursed her lips after she has taken a sip of her crème de menthe.

Simon was a head taller than Paul. Not that anyone could measure that now, with Paul standing in a ditch and Simon looming over him from the edge.

‘How’s it going today?’.

‘Oh, you know. Nothing special. Same old. Same old. Lift that barge, tote that bale’, Paul said and then found himself grinning like a lunatic, while in his head he was throwing himself down on the ground and kicking himself for sounding like such an idiot.

Simon crouched into a squat. Something had caught his eye. It was a stone that Paul had put to one side.

‘What’s that?’

At first Paul could not see what Simon was seeing, then he saw the stone.

‘Oh that. Nothing.’

‘If it’s nothing, it should really go into Bin B,’ Simon said and straightened up.

‘Simon Says’, Paul thought to himself as Simon went off to continue his tour of inspection.

‘I thought it might be Mrs Thatcher’s heart,’ Paul muttered as he set about choosing whether to toss the stone into Bin B or throw it at Simon. Simon. Peter. Simon, Peter. Peter the Rock. Favourite of Jesus. Cornerstone of the Christian faith, with his lanky legs and his lanky hair and his cowboy boots and his Greenpeace belt buckle and his Alpha male dominance.

Paul would be taken to the walls of the city by an angry mob and stoned to death.

Paul hefted the stone. He raised one eyebrow. He threw the stone directly upward with such tremendous force that it trailed a stream of white vapour. It disappeared from view. Time passed and then, with a roar like an express train, the comet returned to earth, leaving a massive crater in the spot where Simon had been standing.

Paul looked down at the stone in his hand. He raised one eyebrow. With a look of intense concentration, Paul clenched his fist. There was a muffled crunching sound. Paul’s fingers slowly unwrapped themselves from a diamond as big as the Ritz.

He popped it in his pocket.

He would give it to Alison when the time was right.

When Paul dropped Mrs Thatcher’s heart into Bin B it made a loud plastic clunk. There was nothing else in there.

Some of the others looked up. Paul looked over his shoulder as if he too was wondering where the sound had come from.

He went back to his patch. It was neatly marked out with a crisscrossing of twine that had been strung between the pegs that Simon had planted to define the Dig.

The square was his. It had a wooden stake with his name pinned to it with a bras drawing pin. Paul knelt in the dirt. He took the tiny trowel and put it in his teeth. He took the tiny bristle brush and went back to dusting the spot that he had been dusting before he had had his tea.

‘What is this quintessence of dust?’ the worm in his ear was saying. It was in rhythm to the strokes of the brush. It wouldn’t stop. The worm had a lisp, a charming lisp like Alison’s lisp, ‘Thith quintethence of dutht’.

3

Paul could see himself as others would see him now, hunched into a ball like a Muslim at prayer. He could see the tiny man at his prayers in the dust. He could see hundreds of tiny men at their prayers in the dust.

We are all but grains of sand.

Microscopic specks in the universe.

He was sweeping them away with his brush. They were so tiny that he could not hear their screams as the brush scattered them this way and that.

First this way, and then that.

This way. That way.

This way. That way.

Rhythmically.

Quintethence of dutht.

–

Paul had first met Simon when they were both studying Experimental Psychology. The senior lecturer had named Simon the Bright Star of his Year and Paul used to call him ‘BS, and Simon had believed that it was short for Bright Star.

Whatever it was that Simon had learnt from his experiments, he had put it to good use when he got his job at the BBC.

Paul’s own experiments were into what was termed ‘Handedness’.

Are rats left-handed or right-handed? After a few weeks of putting the rats through the maze and letting them get to the food lever and taking meticulous note of which paw they used to press the lever, Paul would drop the rats into liquid nitrogen.

At -273 degrees Celsius, this has the effect of killing the rat. The rat does remain dead after it is given time to thaw out, but dissection is a lot easier when the rat is brittle and the brain comes out more neatly. Paul took photographs of the brain and measured the size and shape and made a note of all this in his Lab Book.

And then one day, Paul had had enough of killing rats.

He took Leo and Bernie out of their cage.

He put them into the pockets of his combat jacket.

Leo in the left pocket and Bernie in the right.

He walked out of the Lab.

He walked out of the University.

He got a job a bookshop that specialized in Comics.

–

3

Paul let the trowel drop from his mouth. It was slimy. Paul raised one eyebrow. He turned the focus of his x-ray vision to another spot. He knew precisely where to dig. He used the trowel like a melonballer and twirled it to take out a neat scoop of dirt. He squeezed the cone of clay with his fingers and felt the coin. He spat on the clay and wiped more of the mud away. He was starting to make out make out the letters ‘NDINIVM’.

It occurred to Paul that the Romans in Londinium might have spoken latin with cockney accents,

‘Quid est hoc?’,

– Hoc est quid. A spankin new Londinium quid. Give it ere.

‘Oi. Leave orf. I sore it firss’

– Come off it. Render unto Caesar de fings wot are Caesar’s

‘Just fukoff ahdovit, you slimey lemonsqueezer. I’m tellin’

– You Big Girl’s Blouse

‘I’ll have you know this is a toga, mate, a toga’.

–

The scream from Alison alarmed everyone. Other members of the dig began to crowd around her. Paul was the last to arrive.

His plot was the furthest out.

–

Alison has offered her find up for Simon to examine.

‘I have no hesitation at all in saying, and I say this quite categorically with no fear of contradiction, that this is definitely part of a roman terracotta drinking vessel.’

Cheers from the group. Some pat Alison on the shirt. All smile. Alison looks down in modesty and then up at Simon.

Then down again.

And then up.

Paul is watching her. The others drift back to their duties.

Simon is still examining the small fragment of earthenware.

Alison is still examining Simon.

Paul is still examining Alison, when Simon looks up and sees him.

‘Oh hello, Paul. Did you see what Alison found? Fantasic. Well done Alison.’

Alison says nothing.

Paul says nothing.

Simon says, ‘Have you two met? Alison, Paul. Paul, Alison.’

Paul says, ‘Yes’.

Alison says, ‘No’.

Paul, who has been keeping his hands warm inside his jacket, opens the fingers of his right hand.

The coin drops to the bottom of his pocket where it finds a bed of blue-grey lint spun through with short white animal hairs. The coin snuggles up in the lint and soon falls asleep.

nterview with Nell Hanson, Production Designer on ‘Clubland’.

Nominated for an AFI Award for her work on ‘Suburban Mayhem’ (2007)

Nell is thirtysomething and lives in Sydney.

(‘Clubland’ is due to go on release tonight)

–

Nell has elected to meet at a Deli on the Lower East Side during a break in shooting.

It’s my first time in New York, New York, and I have had an aitch ee double toothpicks of a time finding the place. Above the counter is a bewildering array of salamis. Pastramis and chorizos dangle from hooks. There is baloney in the air.

They know her here and she orders her ‘usual’.

CUT

I hear the click of her stilettos on the tiled floor. Chairs scrape back as people scrabble to get out of reach of the leopard that she has on a leash. Nell is wearing an unexpected wrap. Surely that is faux fur? Gloved hands, a cigarette holder a mile long and anonymous sunglasses, Nell must be breaking several council bylaws at once. Small wonder that the leopard seems pissed off.

CUT

We meet in a plastic coffee bar. Nell’s choice. She orders a double-double decaf skim macchiato. No froth. Just a twist. The waiter seems to know what that means. He brings a towel for her hair. It has been raining for most of June.

It becomes immediately apparent that this is an interview which is badly in need of some Art Direction.

Nell sweeps the tabletop with her forearm. The Nagra, the Telefunken U47, the spare batteries and tapes disappear. The table is transformed. We have a clean slate.

–

Metro – Hopefully you are not going to think that this is too dumb a question, but what is a Production Designer?

Hanson – It’s not really dumb at all. Nobody knows what a Production Designer is. Basically, my job is to help the Director with the purely visual aspects of the story.

Metro – Where do you start?

Hanson – My starting point is always the Script, and if ever I get stuck for an idea during production I always go back to the script and reread it.

Metro – I imagine that you must read quite a few scripts without knowing if you are actually going to be working on that particular film

Hanson – Absolutely

Metro – So how did you come to work on ‘Clubland’?

Hanson – I had worked with Cherie (Cherie Nowlan, the director of ‘Clubland’) before on ‘Small Claims‘, but I knew that I wasn’t the only one who was up for the job. We met and talked about the script and I put some of my ideas on the table. Basically we were seeing eye to eye, but I had completely misread the principle character (Jean played by Brenda Blethryn), and so my ideas about where she lived and how messy her place would look were way off the mark.

Metro – But Cherie must have liked some of your ideas.

Hanson – I guess she did. We did talk for quite while and we do get on well together. She is great to work with and I see my job as tuning in to her ideas and then taking responsibility for getting things done so that she will be able to concentrate on what must be her main concern during the production – the Actors and the Performances.

Metro – so she has to put a lot of trust in you?

Hanson – Not just in me. In everyone in the Art Department, the Art Director, the Set decorators, the Construction Crew, the Scenic Artist and we have to decide on a ‘look’ and the Look needs to be coordinated so that there will be a colour palette that will be consistent for each location. Everyone needs to know what everyone else is doing and why we are doing it – like not using Blue in a certain set.

Metro – And you have to put your trust in the Art Department?

Hanson – Of course I do. On ‘Clubland’ I was working with a terrific Art Director in Charlie Revai. I don’t know enough about trucks (although I can learn fast). Jean’s son, Tim (played by Khan Chittenden) has a truck. He makes money being a removalist. Charlie was the one who came up with all the ideas about the truck. It had to be obviously second-, or even third-, hand. Something Jean would have put most of the money up for. It needed to be a sad-looking truck in order give her son an air of vulnerability. In other words, the truck was a major prop and the way it looked had to provide clues about the characters. (In fact, we were going to need three of them in order to get the story told – one to drive around in, one to crash and one to chop up and use to get close-up shots of the characters while they were driving and talking).

Metro – So it’s not just you that comes up with the ideas?

Hanson – God, no. It often happens that I suggest a certain prop and the Props Buyer will say, ‘But how about this?’ and I can see that that would work a lot better and I tell them that and we go with their idea. This happened with a sofa that I wanted to get and Beth Garswood came up with one that was so much better. And there are so many great graphics in ‘Clubland’ that contribute to the Look. Nadia King did a terrific job.

Metro – Can you give me an example?

Hanson – Posalutely. Nadia created all these publicity stills of Jean in her heyday when she was working with the likes of Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise…….

Metro –  So. How did you become a Production Designer?

Hanson – When I went to Art School, I wanted to be a painter. Before long I had found that I loved to sculpt and so I came out of art school with two skills – welding and model-making. At Film School I channeled these skills into designing models and building sets and my first job in the film business was as a Modelmaker. Since then I have worked in most of the jobs that make up an art department. I have been a Props Buyer, a Set Decorator, an Art Director, a Scenic Artist, a Graphic Artist, and that certainly helps you appreciate the work that all those guys do.

Metro – Are you the one who works out the Budget?

Hanson – No, no. Budgeting is all part of Preproduction. Getting the budget approved is part of getting the go-ahead for the Production and doing the budget is a tough job, but it is an abstract exercise – a guessing game. My job is to work within the given budget. It is kind of a juggling act. Sometimes I need to take a bit of the money that was allocated for this and put it into that. I have to make the decisions as the situations arise. I try not to make a drama out of a crisis. I have to be a problem-solver and it helps if you are good at doing jigsaw puzzles.

Metro – What sort of schedule do you work to?

Hanson – On ‘Clubland’, we had a 6-week shooting schedule. The shooting took place at several locations. At 4 RSL clubs and on a set that was built for Jill’s (Tim’s girlfriend played by Emma Booth) place. To give you an idea of what that meant, there were some days which involved shooting Tim driving his truck at one location Jean doing her shtick at Marrickville RSL and setting up for the final scene at a Function Centre in Campsie

Metro – Criminey. I see what you mean about a juggling act. It sounds hellish.

Hanson – Actually, no. ‘Clubland’ was a Happy Shoot.

Metro – A Happy Shoot?

Hanson – A Happy Shoot is when the Crew has confidence in one another’s abilities. When everyone is being allowed to work to their full potential, and when you are able to stay ahead of the Shooting Crew, and when the Director is getting what they have been looking for.

And ‘Clubland’ was a Happy Shoot

–

And that seemed like a nice way to end the interview.

Nell had been generous to a fault. She had not only made up for the interviewer’s deficiencies, she had made him feel knowledgeable about areas of the Film Business that had previously been a blank, leaving the lasting impression of someone who would be great to work with. A team leader who is also a team player. Someone who accepts the ideas of others and gives them credit for coming up with them. Someone that it would be good to have around when the shit hits the fan. And has there ever been a shoot when that hasn’t happened?

Wouldn’t it have been nice to be at the launch of his book about the invasion of Iraq? Never managed to read it, but listened to him expounding on his favourite subject in an interview with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM. At some point they got round to talking about his book rather than his self. ‘Were there any weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?’, she asked. ‘Of course not’ was the answer. That was it. ‘Of course not’, an argument carried across the line by sheer force of personality.
Surely there was a bit more to the book? It would have made for a quick read if that was all there had been to it, but i could never bring myself to look at it. The usual wearines that comes with the mention of his name or thoughts of him take the wind out of my sails. But there is the scene at the Book Launch, as imagined many years later:

There would have been a talk of the ‘How great I am’ variety which could have lasted for quite some time and eventually the audience might have been permitted to ask questions of the author.

‘Excellency, with your kind permission can the question be asked as to what extent this book is autobiographical? You do after all know what it is to invade a home on the mistaken assumption that the 11 year old boy who mimicked you lives there. You barge in with all guns blazing. You tell the man to discipline his children because you have just heard one of them mimicking you. You warn him that should this situation escalate, you have it in your power to make life difficult for him and his family. Job done. You withdraw. But not without slamming his front door and his front gate behind you.

In this case you are telling us that the Invasion of Iraq was carried out on a false pretext. In your own case did you make the home invasion fully knowing that the pretext was false?’

Is that what happened? Did he actually know that it had not been my son he heard but saw this as an opportunity to establish his power over his neighbours and make damn sure that they would know their place?

 

Don’t forget to look up the correct form of address. It will be somewhere on a Government website. ‘What is the correct form of address when writing to the Foreign Minister?’.

Dear Foreign Minister,

could you please be so kind as to outline the powers that are accorded to senior diplomats?

Some time ago, a senior australian diplomat walked into my home and said, ‘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 like difficult for you and your family.’

Those were his words, and while it would be better to say that he said them, he was in fact shouting and when he had finished shouting, he left, slamming the front door and the front gate.

It took a moment to recover from this assault, but the next thing i did was to go upstairs and talk to the children.

My son Nathanael was in his room with his best friend, Matteo. Both boys were 11 years old and at school together. Matteo had a musical ear. He is now living in LA and writing scores for movies. I asked the boys if they had just copied the man next door. Yes, they had, but it was not my son who had done the ‘mimicking’.

I went and stood at the front gate of the man next door and waited until i was seen. When he noticed me, he approached and i asked if i could speak. When he said that i could, i started by apologizing for what had happened.

I explained that i had not been my son who had copied him, at which point he corrected me. ‘Mimicked me’, he said.

I stood corrected. It had not been my son who had mimicked him. It had been his best friend who was staying with us while his mother, who was divorced, was having some time to herself. Since it was not my son, i hoped that he would understand that it was not my place to discipline the child but i had spoken to both the boys.

I was trying to be as polite and tactful as i know how. I was trying to appease a man who had just threatened to ‘make life difficult’ for me, my wife and my sons. I had a feeling that he was not going to be mollified.

Whether it was to reinforce the threat or to outline reasons to give him respect, he said that he was a friend of Gareth Evans, that Gareth Evans was a man who did not suffer fools gladly, that he had been a lawyer and that he was ‘a damn fine Diplomat’.

My experience of Diplomacy is limited to having a father who was a diplomat. As a memeber of the Czech government, my father was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Nazi tribunal

following the invasion of Czechoslovakia. He spent five years in various prisons in Germany. His prison number was ZWM 4201. After the war he returned to Prague and in 1947 became the Czech ambassador to the court of St. James. in 1949, he became ambassador to India on the eve of Independence. In 1951, when recalled to Prague, he warned by friends not to return and sought political asylum in Britain. The Slansky show trials resulted in the death or imprisonment of many members of the previous government who were not communists and it seems likely that this is what my father would have had to face, not form Nazis this time, but from his own people.

It is not easy to live next door to people who treat you with scorn and who have made it clear that they they are not to be approached. Under normal circumstances it might have been possible to talk about noise, about, for example, how much sound travels in a neighbourhood of small houses. The solution the Ziebels came up with was to nail their window shut. The lines of communication were not open and we were constantly being reminded that the rules that apply to ordinary people were not to be applied here. Ordinary people might decide against playing music at one in the morning, or throwing boxes out of upper floor windows onto the paving stones below at 6 in the morning. living in a tight neighbourhood is not the same as living in an ambassador’s residence where, possibly, you do not have to show consideration for others.

It became clear that it would be preferable to move house. Confirmation came when we needed to be granted an Easement in order to complete the sale of the property. The ambassador refused to grant the easement. The reason that he gave was that he ‘had had words withThese People’.

My apology had never been accepted and the explanation that it had not been my son who mimicked him had been ignored. The scorn had not been in my imagination and if a grudge was still being held then the threats were still in place.

If there is an irony here it is that the man who was our reason to move house was now making it difficult for us to complete the sale.

 

Things had a pattern.

There was School every day.

My father would wake me up and i would get dressed. In winter i would get dressed near the fire in the front room, warming the long grey socks beFore i put them on. there was a ritual to getting up and getting dressed and going to school. the clothes were the same every day, the school uniform. long short and long socks, a shirt a tie a jacket and a cap.the jacket was not called a jacket it was was called a blazer. all of those things were grey. there was a cap too and it was also grey. the only thing that was not grey was the raincoat. the raincoat was not called a raincoat it was called a mac. the mac was dark blue. you were supposed to button it up and do up the belt. now, when i se a man wearing a coat that has all the buttons done up and the belt done up, i imagine that he has been dressed by his mother. motherless children do not button up their coats. they do not do up their belts. they do not like being snug. they do not ike keeping their tummies warm.

was there breakfast? there must have been. i remember Ovaltine. Ovaltine was a chocolatey drink. to make it you had to put some milk in a saucepan and heat it up. if you weren’t careful, the milk would start to boil and froth up and over the sides of the saucepan. even if you were careful dn it didn’t froth up, it would still sizzle loudly on the sides of the pan when you poured it into the cup, over the small mound of Ovaltine powder. The thing you certainly did not want to happen was for the milk to form a skin. i don’t know what made it form a skin and i couldn’t tell you why sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.  if you didn’t clean the saucepan straight away, it was going to be much harder to get it clean later on.

and there was something else. a cereal. in france it would have been a half slice of a section of baguette with butter on. something that you would dip into a bowl of hot chocolate to soften it. but this was london. in summer you would put cold milk on the cereal. in winter you would put more milk in the saucepan and pour some of it over the creel as well as into the Ovaltine.

we would leave the house together and walk to the bus stop at notting hill. my father would look me over and ask if i was sure that i had everything. ‘everything’ meant what was in my school satchel and that meant last night’s homework and whatever else was going to be needed at school on that day.

my father wore a hat. in those days most men still wore hats. part of wearing a hat was also knowing when not to wear a hat. you did not wear a hat inside a house or inside a church. you took your hat off if a funeral procession went by. you raised your hat when you greeted a lady. a lady was anyone who was not a man. there weren’t some women who you didn’t take your at off to and others that you didn’t. not to take your hat off would have been rude. if you wanted to be rude to someone, you would not take off your hat. it was not so much a question of actually lifting the hat right off you head and holdng it by your side or over your heart. it was more question of reaching up and pinching the front of the hat like you were going to the it right off, but only raising it a little. if there had been a gust of wind you would have felt it between your hat and the top of your head. if you weren’t being quite as polite, you might not actually raise the hat at all. only touch the front part of it. it’s like the hand kissing thing. when you kiss a ladies hand, you don’t actually kiss it. it’s not like slobbering over the glow ted had of a cardinal or a pope. you are supposed to just go through the motion of kissing her hand. you take the hand in yours and ou bow forward and you stop your lips about an inch (2.5cm) before they would make contact with skin or glove. it goes without saying that you do not grab her hand. you would only do all this stuff if she was to proffer it. this applies to a not-so-fancy handshake too. you do not shake a lady’s hand unless she offers it to be shaken, just as you are not supposed to go up stairs behind a lady. when having to go upstairs, you always go firstt. that way you are not going to be looking at her behind, which would be about the only thing that you would be seeing if she was to go first.

when you go to a fancy place, you do not rubberneck, you are supposed to just take it all in without moving your head around. if you really want to let the side down, you gawp at something, lie a ming vase and then you point at it and the you say ‘wow. check out the vase. is that a ming?’ someone would no doubt let you know in the driest voice that it was from the tang dynasty. if you really wanted to make a complete fool go f yourself you would insist that it was among and at that point they would no doubt flick the side of it with their finger and the whole room would hear it go, ‘Tang’.

so.

we have just closed the big black front door of number 5 Ladbroke Square. it is a house that house belongs to the czech refugee trust fund. it is divided up into flats. we have the flat on the ground floor. there are five doorbells. each of the buttons has a name next to it. all the names begin with a ‘K’. to get to the front door you have to go up seven stone steps. we go don the seven stone steps and turn right and start to walk to the bus stop.

there is someone further down the street who is coming our way. it is mrs. mcbride, she is the wife of major macbride. my father is going to reach up to his hat and say ‘good morning’, but he is not to to raise his hat off his head. he whispers to me to say good morning. i know that he does not like the major. those days we would b probably say that the major was an asshole, but in those days the word asshole did not exist. in fact assholes did not exist and neither did talk of anything which could be classed as the general province of medicine south of the border. In france, they had livers and intestines and stomachs and pancreases and kidneys. in england we had ‘tummies’.

my father did not like the major and he was not going to lift his hat off his head for the major’s wife, but he wanted me to say ‘good morning’ to her at the same time as he said ‘good morning’ to her.

karen told me recently that when her mother would drop her off with her aunt, she would cry as her mother drove off to work. as soon as the car was out of sight, she would turn off the tears and get on wit having a lovely day with her aunt. she would turn them on again at the end of the day when she heard her mother’s car approaching so that her mother would think that karen had a had a miserable time.

what i was about to do was not quite the same, but it was something similar. the idea was to torture my dad by letting him say ‘good morning’ to the major’s wife and build up some tension in him by leaving my saying ‘good morning until the last possible moment. that would have been a moment after he had already said ‘good morning’ but before we had passed her by completely.

let’s just take a moment to figure out what is going on here.

my father is teaching me about manners. i am supposed to do what he does.to mape sure that i do, he whispers to remind me to d say good morning and maybe even do something similar with my school cap to what he does with his hat. if i don’t provide a demonstration that i am a well-behaved, good-mannered, polite boy it is going to be evidence that he is a bad father. I am being a little shit and making him think that i am not about to say ‘good morning’ when he does, and then the world is going to know what a terrible job he is doing of bringing me up properly.

i wasn’t any kind of star at cricket, but i was a good all-rounder. i was good in the field, i could throw the ball in from a long way out. i was not so hot at batting and would be 10 or 11 in the batting order. there are eleven players in a cricket team, so number eleven is the last one to get sent in to score some runs or get out for a duck and some wild cheers from the other team. i could bowl. not like keith williams who would run up from somewhere on the horizon and with the opposing batsman quaking in his boots, hurl a meteor down the pitch which anyone in their right mind would do their best to get out of the way of. i was a spin bowler. with a run-up of only a few steps, i had learned how to grip the ball in tricky ways and how to flick my wrist so that the ball, when it hit the ground, would leap off surprisingly to the left, or, if i wanted it to,to the right. bringing me in to bowl after a few overs would be such a change of pace for the batters that they would be dismayed to find themselves dismissed.

saturday mornings were for cricket practice. chris curtis had the bat and three or four of us were taking it in turns to throw the ball to him. the idea was that he would hit the ball and then one of us would catch it. it was catching practice. we weren’t standing that far away from chris, so when he decided to give the ball a really good whack, there was nothing that i could do to avoid it hitting me in the eye.

my eye swelled up and closed straight away. it really hurt, but i didn’t cry. i just held my head and experienced a new kind of pain. when i took my hands away, the others gasped. i had a black eye. an instant ‘shiner’. if it hadn’t happened at cricket practice with just a few of us there, if it had happened during a game or during a match, i would have been some kind o hero. as it was, it was sort of a non-event with just the others saying are you all right? and looking at me funny.

my dad showed up. i saw him walking across the sports ground when he was still a long way off. at last i thought that iwas going to get some s real sympathy and gain some points for not having cried when horribly injured. what happened instead was that he looked at me and scowled. with practice over, we all walked off together. my father bought all the boys ice creams. he chatted with them and totally charmed them with what a nice man he was, and every now and then he would give me a hateful look.

it took me twenty something years to figure out what was going on. it finally dawned on me that he was worried that the neighbours would think that he was the one who had given me the black eye. and it was a classic. there was no missing it. from swollen and black it went to purple and red and later to dark green and yellow. from my side of things it wasn’t that hideous. unless i was looking in a mirror, it wan’t something that i could see, and once that i could see properly again, it wasn’t bothering me. but it did bother my dad. it was only after i had become a father myself that the penny finally dropped.