Dear Stan Grant,
congratulations on getting through your interview with Richard Broinowski last night. His suggestion that the Twitterer-in Chief might just be the guy to find a diplomatic solution to the missile tests in North Korea could have made you rise to the bait, but mercifully you had the good sense not to. It would seem that pathological narcissists stick together and, while there are those who might think that a meeting between the Trumpet and President of Russia is going to be like a tennis match between Venus Williams and Mr. Bean, there is at least one person who sees him as the go-to-guy for international diplomacy, just a the ABC sees your interviewee as the go-to-guy for things Korean.
He would be the first to tell you that he is an Elder Statesman and something of an expert on invasions carried out under false pretexts. After all, this is something that he has written a book about. When Margaret Throsby interviewed him about the invasion of Iraq, she asked if there had been WMDs. His reply, ‘Of course not’ was not enlightening and Margaret did not press him further. Perhaps the force of his personality or his patently overweening intellect made her move on to the next question.
This is not a book that i could bring myself to read, but my assumption is that the thesis was that the invasion was carried out for political gain, using the need to track down and neutralize non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction as a pretext.
This kind of invasion is something that Broinowski knows all about.
One Saturday morning, he invaded my home and shouted at me 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 like difficult’ for me and and for my family. Giving me no right of reply, he left, slamming our front door and then our front gate as he went.
The children were upstairs and so I went up to ask them about the mimicking. I feared the worst because my son was a naughty boy. I had been a naughty boy too when i was 11. You can imagine my relief when Matteo said that he had done the parroting. Matteo was my son’s best friend at school, he is now an award-winning composer of film music. He always had a musical ear.
So I went m next door and stood on the street until Broinowski came to the gate. I began by apologizing for what had happened but went on to explain that it had not been one of my sons who had mimicked him but a guest, the son of a single mum who was spending some time with us and that, because he was not one of my children i did not feel that it would be appropriate for me to discipline him although i had told him not to do it again. I tried to be as tactful as i knew how but had no sense of how what i was saying was being received. what i got in reply was a long list of his accomplishments. he was in his own words ‘a damn fine diplomat’. he was a personal friend of Gareth Evans, a man who he informed me ‘is not someone who suffers fools gladly’. He told me that he was also a lawyer and still had many friends in the legal profession and from this gathered that he meant the he would have the full backing of the Foreign Minister and the Legal System should i ever choose to challenge him.

He also took the opportunity to tell me that he did not like my house, that it was not ‘aesthetic’. The house was a wooden Wharfie’s cottage. The roof had collapsed at the first big storm after we moved in. It had been eaten away by those wonderful structural engineers, the white ants, who had taken what they needed and left just enough for the house to still stand. We had been able to fixed it up to satisfy building standards but apparently not to those of aesthetes.

My experience of Diplomacy is limited to having had a father who was the Czech Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1947 and to the newly-formed Republic of India in 1950. My father’s career as Statesman was short-lived. He had spent the war years in various prisons in Germany and had returned to Prague to take part in Reconstruction. It was then that he was made Ambassador.  When recalled to Prague from India by the Communist government in 1951, he sought political Asylum in Britain.

My understanding of diplomacy is that it is supposed to iron out the differences between countries in a civilized way. After all, countries do not have the great luxury that was afforded to us. Countries are not able to sell up and move somewhere else.

This was our first home, an inspiration of my wife’s. My own experience had been limited to being a renter from the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, where the names of all the tenants began with a K, much to the bewilderment of the Postman.

Having fixed the house up and been a part of the small community in the cul-de-sac, organizing the xmas street party, looking out for other people’s kids, we had had no plans to move. The only reason for moving was in order to not live next door to a man who had made threats against our family.

It took a while to find somewhere else and then some more time to sell the house. When it came to the sale, a problem arose because the property lines had not been properly drawn and it was found that our property encroached upon his at one point and that his encroached upon ours at another.

He refused to grant permission for the lines to be redrawn.The reason he gave was that he ‘had had words with these people’. So, for two or more years he had been looking for a further opportunity to get at us. If there was an irony here, it was that we were selling the house to get away from him and he was preventing the sale from going through.

Our solicitor pointed out that it would be an advantage for him to have have the encroachment settled and, speaking as ‘a fellow lawyer’, he conceded.

You did extremely well to have got through the interview with the ‘damn fine diplomat’ and keen legal mind, the aesthete and towering intellect, bigot and moral dwarf unscathed. Mind you it might have been a different story if you had said anything which question his opinion. He worked hard to make you feel comfortable by calling you by name several times and made sure that you were aware that he knew stuff, like there might be more than one stage to an ICBM, but the president of the US sitting down to broker a diplomatic solution? It must have been hard not to point out just what a preposterous idea that is.

I have lived with his threats for a long time, life is tough enough without the complete disillusionment that he brought. Faith is not a word he likes to use and he left me with no faith in the classless society, equalness of opportunity,the presumption of innocence, the legal system and Australian Diplomacy.

It was a terrible thing to be made aware of the the priviliged class and how spiteful and vindictive they can be.

It was not my son who mimicked him and h threats should be lifted and yet

His family would have been given Tamiflu and mine would not have.

 

‘Inherent Vice’ is a novel by Thomas Pynchon which was made into a movie in 2014. It stars Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello and is set in the West coast of the Seventies, when Richard Nixon was president and America was still at war in Southeast Asia.

‘Inherent Vice’ in a Marine Insurance policy is anything that you can’t avoid.
Eggs break, Chocolate melts, Glass shatters.

Here are some of the names from the cat of characters:

Rhus Frothingham
Crocker Fenway
Adrain Prussia Friend
Sauncho Smilax Esq.
Riggs Warbling
Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd
Dr. Threeply
Dr. Lily Hammer
Dr. Buddy Tubeside
Puck Beaverton – ‘a bald-headed asshole with a swastika tattoo’
and
Agent Flatweed
and
Agent Borderline

Dick Bonkowski would have ben a name that would not have sounded out of place in this list.
Given a chance to cast him in the movie, I would have made him the anonymous Agent who makes a point at sitting next to Joaquin Phoenix at the table in the Interview Room. The Unnamed Agent leans in and says, ‘Do you realise how thoroughly we can fuck your life up?’

Here’s another moment from the film:

SCOTT WILSON – ‘I’m living in a house in Topanga Canyon. A band I used to play in, The Boards, but none of them know that it’s me.
JOAQUIN PHOENIX – ‘How can they not know that it’s you?’
SCOTT WILSON – ‘Even when i was alive, they didn’t know it was me.’

The Princess sprang to her feet with a cry of terror at this sudden apparition for really the Enchanter was no beauty. To begin with, he was very big and clumsy, then he had but one eye, and his teeth were long, and he stammered badly; nevertheless, he had an excellent opinion of himself, and mistook the Princeess’s cry of terror for an exclamation of delighted surprise. After pausing a moment to give her time to admire him, the Enchanter made her the most complimentary speech he could invent, which, however, did not please her at all, though he was extremely delighted with it himself.

Adi

APPARITION

The keening was a knife scraping on a plate. It was the moment the chalk breaks on the blackboard and the next sound you hear after the crisp snap of the stick is the sound of the teacher’s nail grincing on the board.

But it is more than that.

It is cotton wool snagging on the jagged bit of tooth that the dentist has created.

It is the higher part of the sound of his drill.

It is the smell of burning hairs when the dog has sat too near the fire.

It is the wire of the staple going up under your fingernail.

It is that piece of grit that some bastard at the Thai place has dropped into the soft noodles that cracks when you bite it. Or is that a tooth breaking?

It is a Greek Wedding with plates smashed and littering the terracotta tiles. The guests, who are running full tanks of retsina and metaxa, are dancing the Twist, the Froog and the Mashed Potato on broken shards of crockery. They grind them into grit on the floor of the taverna.

Timothy’s teeth are on edge. A skeletal finger has just drawn a line down his spine.

Timothy wonders if his hair is standing up as straight as it feels. He wonders what his hair looks like. He wonders what he must look like.

The Apparition is the same colour as the glow-in-the-dark silly putty that Timothy used to put on the lampshade of his bedside light. He would switch the light off and watch the gloop ooze itself down the lampshade and into the plastic eggcup where it lived.

He knew that the green glow would keep the gorillas away. The gorillas wouldn’t dare to come out from behind the curtain. Timothy could go to sleep. The green glow would keep him safe.

–

The Apparition flickers like a faulty neon light.

It looks something like Jane, but Jane would never wear a spiked dog collar or a leather jacket. If it is Jane, then Timothy is secretly pleased that she is wearing such a short skirt and that her eyes and mouth have been sewn shut. Mind you, with all that black shadow around them the eyes still looks they are open. Only they look like the eyes on a marble sculpture.

White.

Pale.

Blank.

Empty.

But Timothy knows that they are looking at him.

He has seen the stare before. It is the way that Jane’s cat would stare after it had done some careful scraping in the flowerbed and gathered itself up, a furry accordion, tail straight out pointing to some cardinal point of the compass.

The Apparition oozes toward him. Why him of all the people in the checkout queue?

No-one else seems to know that it is there. No-one but Timothy sees that it is passing through the mesh at the end of his shopping trolley.

He feels the trolley go cold, but his hands still grip the handlebar.

The brief was to send an invitation to passing terrestrials.
Carl Sagan came up with the idea and everyone had an opinion about the information that should be included. Photos, bits of music, Bibles and Korans. Someone suggested that maybe the aliens might not speak English, so someone was delegated to write part of the message in mathematics. There were specific directions on how to get to Florida.
A big fuss was made over the images of man and woman that were to be etched into the surface of the laser disc. The assumption was that Martians would have their own laser disc player.know what to do with a laser disc. On Betelguese, the disc would have been hung from a lampidary tree and used to ward off the lilac-footed fulmar, a flying animal that pretends to have bursitis and walks with a limp to invite your sympathy and then, when you are close enough blinds you with vitriolic acid which it shoots through its nostrils. It has more nostrils than a shower hose.
There was a discussion about the nakedness of the man and the woman which became heated at times. The sticking point was whether they should be naked or not.
The final decision was to send Barbie and Ken and this was an image which withheld some pertinent information about the process of human reproduction.
Understandable of course since one of our major myths down here is a story about the creation of man and woman and how they lived in wonderful place and ran around in the nude until the day came when they realized that they were naked and that there was a big difference between naked and nude.
Michelangelo’s David is nude. Botticelli’s Venus is nude. La grande Odilasque is nude. Willam Shafter and Vickki Broadhurst are naked. But then they are porn stars and spend much of their professional life braving the cold.
The quandary about whether to show Mr and Mrs Earth Person as naked or nude is as old as the hills, although the hills are not that old.
Imagine that you were to live a hundred years. That would make a date like 1066 only ten lifetimes ago. Seen in that way, a thousand years does not seem like such a long time and it does seem amazing how much things have changed in what had a moment ago we had been thinking of as the vast span of human history.
Only fifty years ago, great pains were taken to shield the public from the sight of a naked shop window mannequin. Window dressers would have to wrestle with unmanageable sheets of brown wrapping paper to keep the dummies covered until they could be clothed.
What John Ruskin had learned of the human form was through classical painting and sculpture. He never recovered from the shock of what he saw on his wedding night. The marriage was never consummated. Some say that he fainted, others that he ran from the bridal chamber screaming. Poor man.
His wife later married the painter Millais. Millais was commissioned to paint a portrait of Ruskin.
Millais’ new wife bore him eight children. She is the model for the drowning Ophelia in Millais’ painting.
So if we are ever going to send another Voyager with some follow-up information on a memory stick, this time we should include a move file of ‘What the parrot saw’ starring Willian Shafter and Vikki Broadhusrt in which two girls apply to rent the same apartment with hilarious consequences. With any luck it will have the same effect on whoever is Out There as the glint of a slowly spinning laser disc has on the Betelgusian Lilac-footed Fulmar.

Here is the opening paragraph of an article by Gillian Triggs writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 9/10th:
‘Gender rights are no joke.Australian law gives us all a legal right to live and to work free from sexual harassment.
But where does behaviour that is inappropriate, disrespectful or just plain rude cross the line to become unlawful? This is a question the Australian Human Rights Commission has been working on for 30 years.’
When someone barges into your home and starts yelling, ‘You are to discipline your children. I have just heard one of them mimicking me’. ‘I have it in my power to make life difficult for you and your family’, is that home invasion? Is that harassment?
Is that inappropriate, disrespectful or just plain rude?
As it turned out, it was not actually one of my children who had done the parroting (‘Mimicking, I said mimicking’). It turned out to have been my son’s best friend, who is now a composer of music for film and living in the States on the West Coast.
You could argue that the 11 year-old boy’s behaviour had been rude or disrespectful, but inappropriate? Given that we were not at any time accorded any kind of consideration, most especially when it came to being shielded from the noise from next door, the boy had no choice but to have to listen to what was being said. He chose to imitate (Mimic, I said mimic) a, possibly loud, announcement about a game of tennis which he happened to find funny. Already then, he had a musical ear.
Barging into our house, ordering me to discipline my children, making threats against me and my wife and my children was ruder, more inconsiderate and more inappropriate. But what rights do I have? What can you do if the man is an Australian Diplomat?
Given that the Human Rights Commission has been mulling over what constitutes sexual harassment for 30 years, don’t expect any answers anytime soon.
My choice back then was to sell the house and move away from the man who had made those threats. But this was no solution. I have been living with his threats for 24 years and they still affect the way I live.
Australian Diplomacy? A Fine Example.
There may be those who lament that a man such as that should be representing his Country. There will be others who think that it is entirely appropriate.

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