2 November 1997, University House, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
‘Tis the gift to be simple,
‘Tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be
But when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
I hope that everyone here can appreciate the relevance of these words from the well-known Shaker song to my father’s life. Their relevance in death can only be a matter of speculation.
My father’s life is a story of bad luck and bad fortune turned to good.
In early 1946, no one would have predicted the success and the happiness that was to come. As Dad put it in his autobiographical sketch, his childhood was a rather lonely and unhappy one.
Who can say when he felt loneliest? Was it when he arrived at Dover in 1936, an adolescent refugee, or was it as he suggested to me, about a year later when he was summoned to his headmaster’s office and told that his father Willi had died of cancer?
The other great horror was the fate of his mother’s Mariana. Lily, her elder sister, commented to an oral historian in 1978 "I was rebellious against the way I was treated as a child. . . . Mariana was very charming and cheerful and the other way around. My sister was a very beautiful girl. Once her example was put up before me; I was told, ‘Look how friendly she is, look how everybody likes her,’ and so on." Mariana was taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp and survived there for several years. She was moved elsewhere in the dying days of the war. We believe - though we do not know - that she perished in Auschwitz.
If one wanted to be rhetorical one might say that Dad’s luck changed one day in 1940 on his journey between the old and new worlds. He was locked in the hold of the Dunera. It was hit by a German torpedo. But it didn’t go off.
It was in Australia that, so it seems, he came down where he ought to be. Again and again he found himself in the place just right. In his eventual choice of country, in his choice of spouse and his choice of the discipline he would pursue - his life’s work.
Internment was difficult. While, looking back, he would have none of the idea that the Dunera was a scandal - or stronger still, some kind of atrocity - he did quote from George Rapp’s despairing poem which was penned in the camp.
Have you heard my story most brave
of the thousand dead men without grave
in that wonderful town
with the moon upside down
and the wires in need of a shave?
Each man is a corpse, as he sits
decaying and doubting his wits
whilst far, far away,
where the night is the day
his world is breaking to bits. . . .
In retrospect Dad always regarded himself as lucky to be gazing at the upside down sky over Hay rather than in the front line in Europe.
Dad had the great good fortune to meet my mother. He had the looks and charm to successfully court her, and she had the guts to marry him. I think it is probably hard to overestimate what strength of character it took. A Jewish refugee was not quite what my mothers parents - particularly her father - had in mind for her.
Indeed when my parents’ engagement was announced, my mother was staying with her aunt in Melbourne and was asked to leave.
But notwithstanding Dad’s exotic and lowly social status, Granny - mum’s mother - made up her own mind. After a little time with Dad she said to my mother, "I think you’ve picked a winner dear."
And so she had. And so had Dad. To borrow one of Manning Clark’s expressions, my mother worked a great miracle inside him.
Dad cultivated an interest in higher education at Hay. And he was always grateful to Miss Margaret Holmes who helped him and many others study while in the army.
Like so many others of the same generation who are feted today, my father was part of the long post war boom in higher education. He was part of a generation which was confident about its role in rebuilding and modernising society after the devastation of the greatest war in history, which, if it had not consumed their life, had certainly consumed their youth.
Dad liked the idea of economics because he was an idealist. After the depair of the depression and the horror of the war to which it contributed, Dad believed – like many of the time – that social science could help build a better world. I think it seemed to Dad that economics was the social science which could most directly and most obviously be capable of making a contribution to peoples lives. But I think he thought that it suited his talents. It had some of the rigour of science, but it dealt directly with political and social questions about how our lives together should be organised.
Dad had a great spread of talents and, as Keynes observed, it is this breadth of talent, rather than genius at any one skill which is the key to good economics.
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economists must poses a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must use symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie outside his ken. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician. (In Moggeridge, p. 424).
There was another quality which Dad had which was essential to many of his best contributions to economics and public policy. As so many of those who dealt with him rapidly came to appreciate, he was a very nice man.
About ten years ago when I was reading a book on the lives of the composers. I came upon this passage.
[H]e must have been a very nice man to know. A person of singularly sweet, kind disposition, he made virtually no enemies. . . . He was even-tempered, industrious, generous, had a good sense of humour . . . enjoyed good health except for some eye trouble and rheumatism . . .. He [had] good common sense. He had integrity and intellectual honesty - the kind of honesty that could allow him to say, when Mozart’s name came up "My friends often flatter me about my talent, but he was far above me". He liked to dress well.
The description was of the composer Hayden. It could equally be of Dad. People liked him easily and quickly and this meant that Dad was a good leader. People respected him for his knowledge, and his intelligence, and also for his essential modesty. Dad was not pompous. Like the composer Hayden, he didn’t have tickets on himself. But peoples instinctive liking for him, and respect for his talents and good judgement meant that he could be extremely persuasive. As I understand it, it was he who first proposed the 25 per cent tariff cut and he was instrumental in persuading a range of agonisers – or in arranging for others to persuade agonisers – of the merits of his proposal. Even more impressively, Dad was able to lead an extremely heterogeneous group of people to unanimously support the inclusion of the family home in Assets testing for welfare benefits.
Dad’s good judgement and good leadership extended also to his professional colleagues. He was fond of saying that there were a lot of people who were extremely clever but had no bloody sense. (It has to be said that he was in a profession in which it is hard not to notice this phenomenon.) And his greatest contribution to economics and public policy might well be a roll call of the people in his Department who he either hired himself, or who were hired by those he hired. I need only mention some of their names. Bob Gregory, Bruce Chapman, John Quiggin, Adrian Pagan and Steve Dowrick to name just a few.
The 25 per cent tariff cut was a good illustration of Dad’s qualities. Some such as Alf Rattigan agonised about whether or not it fitted a particular institutional model of tariff reform towards which he had striven for nearly a decade. Others who might have been expected to support the move - like senior Treasury officials - opposed the idea, again because it was unusual. It was not their idea. My father was prepared to improvise because he knew that the tariff cut offered an unusually good combination of short and long term benefits, and, at the time it was proposed, comparatively few costs. He was a man of broad talents who understood the issues, and had the courage and the imagination to seize the day - as he put it later, to whisper into the ear of the prince!
Coming down in the discipline of economics Dad came down where he ought to be. And where he ought to be became - by chance of history - a more and more important place to be.
Ironically, as the inadequacies of the discipline of economics were exposed, economics became more and more influential! As politicians, bureaucrats and the populace at large became progressively more anxious about how to restore their lost prosperity, economics became the premier social science - an increasingly indispensible gateway to policy influence.
History - and happenstance - treated my father well after the war in other ways as well. In being what Phillip Adams once called our ‘Dunera Boy extraordinaire’, my father participated in an event which was the ‘Gallipoli’ of early post-war multiculturalism - a defining and mythic event in Australia’s history.
The Dunera’s inmates could never have known as they lived through their voyage and their detention in Australia, the significance which would be made of it looking back. Yet in the days after my father’s death, all of those who contacted me to help them writing his obituary asked "he was on that boat - the Dunera - wasn’t he"? A gardener who read his obituary in The Age said to me that he didn’t know I was the son of a Dunera boy.
A collection of middle European refugees (with a disproportionate representation of egg heads) sitting behind barbed wire in the middle of the Hay plain, entertaining themselves with sports, study, music making, theatre and concerts.
Of course there were plenty of similar camps and there were plenty of migrant experiences, just as there were plenty of Australian battles in World War One other than Gallipoli. But as time passed, the Dunera internees worked their way into the popular Australian imagination.
These were some of the changes in circumstances which changed Dad’s life. But there was also some alchemy at work inside him. I don’t think anyone can really say quite what it was - not even him. Perhaps particularly not him. I think the main thing he did was really quite old fashioned - indeed unfashionable by today’s standards.
I think my father achieved the happiness and success he did because he did not try to ‘work through’ or to make sense of his worst experiences. Indeed much greater minds and spirits than my father have tried to make sense of the Holocaust. But it cannot be done.
So my father did something else. He tried to forget about the worst of the past. He never tried to deny or conceal it. But he tried to focus on more productive things. Perhaps that is where he got some of his great enthusiasm for so many of the things going on in the world, from architecture, to philosophy to politics, world history and world affairs.
He was gregarious in his interests in others also. But, for someone with his early experiences, he was blessed by not being an introspective man and his bridge to others was often through common public events.
When I visited him in his last days of consciousness in John James Hospital, he was engaging several nurses who had either returned from, or were soon to depart for, far flung locations.
One nurse was soon to go to Kenya. Dad filled her in on the state of civil unrest there as it unfolded. He continued to engage another who had recently returned from the Middle East on what life was really like in Bahrain and what sort of constitution they had. Dad took considerable care to pronounce Bahrain in a way which served to indicate its exotic location outside of Australia, although I must admit it left me wondering that Bahrain was so near Vienna.
Dad combined a civility which, one might speculate, he brought with him from Austria, with an Australian unpretentiousness and straightforwardness. I think when I was young I thought that the expression ‘g’day’ was particularly my father’s. He certainly took to it with great gusto.
A episode which illustrates these things and his great sense of humour occurred one day in 1967. We were being entertained for lunch by a rather straight laced American economist in the Mid-West of America. He introduced lunch in a way which he thought appropriate but which we found intensely embarrassing.
He said that although we might not have voted for Harold Holt, he wanted us to know that he was extending the hand of American friendship and condolence to us in our national grief. My father showed the depth of his assimilation into Australian culture by defusing the situation. "Yes Ken. It is sad. But that’s the good thing about living in Australia. Its a small country. And when something like that happens, we all just move up one!"
But Dad’s sense of humour was at its greatest as an appreciator. He had an infectious and hearty laugh. So much so that, if I intended to watch "Yes Minister" or "Faulty Towers", I would make the trek out to the farm so that I could increase my enjoyment many-fold by watching the program with one eye, and Dad with the other. There were times when I honestly thought he might do himself an injury.
My father was a great charmer. His charm came from his natural extroversion, and uncomplicated buoyancy of mood, his sense of fun, enjoyment of teasing, his modesty and appreciative sense of humour.
I remember skiing holidays with Dad. In the space of a week an entire chalet full of the most unlikely people (of a range of backgrounds, temperaments and ideological dispositions sometimes sympathetic but often odious) would all succumb to his charm. They would want to sit at his table and enjoy the high of talking with him, being teased by him, flirting with him and debating him.
He was a man who inspired admiration and indeed devotion from many. Bruce Chapman lectured me for about an our one night at a party on what a marvelous man Dad was.
I remember one surreal moment about six months later when Bruce and I met quite by chance each refueling our cars in the wee hours after Saturday night - like two strangers in an Edward Hopper painting under the anonymous glare of the fluorescent lights at the Shell garage in Manuka. As Bruce got back into his car, he yelled at me over the roofs of our respective cars - and a propos of absolutely nothing - "I still envy you your father".
Dad was affectionately famous - perhaps more within his family than anywhere else - for his vagueness at certain times. When engaged in routine social interactions Dad sometimes allowed himself the luxury of thinking of things other than what he was talking about. This could generate comic effects - with occasional lapses into complete anarchy.
One of the gravest of these occasions was in 1967 in Raleigh North Carolina when family friends Fred and June Schönbach were visiting us for lunch, having traveled down from Washington. The night before, Dad had fought one of his many fights with David and I about when we would get undressed and go to bed. This must have drifted into his consciousness during a lull in the conversation when, in the presence of Mum, David, myself and Fred Schönbach, Dad listlessly turned to June Schönbach and said "Let’s get undressed".
I presume that, like us, June imagined that she had misheard him. Indeed, not an eyelid was batted. But subsequent family post-mortem revealed that we had all heard the same thing. And the moment passed - fairly or otherwise - into family mythology.
Since then Dad has suggested to at least one other unsuspecting person that they get undressed - apparently seeking to induce them to open a gate in front of the car. Dad has also on at least one occasion left workmen wondering quite what they were being taken for when he said something about them getting into their pajamas.
I mention Dad’s occasional vagueness, not just because it formed part of a family mythology which was too much fun for his two sons not to inflict on an occasionally protesting but generally accepting father.
I mention it also because of the contrast it made with situations where his interest was aroused particularly as a professional and an academic. When he was in a seminar, he was not on automatic pilot. He was intensely engaged probing for weaknesses and searching for insights. In debate and discussion in a professional context, Dad was the model of the scholar he aspired to be. At the same time aggressive, scrupulous and gracious.
About a week before Dad lost consciousness, I managed to get him a program enabling him to play bridge against a computer. I had keeping my eye open for this for literally years. I brought it to him in the hospital. He was weak from the cancer, from malnutrition and analgesics. He was also unfamiliar with my portable computer. Accordingly I sat next to him on the bed and operated the game for him.
Dad’s demeanor took on an intensity not seen for some time. He became quite agitated and indignant if I made foolish moves which he would have avoided. "Take that trick back" he ordered me.
But I was yet to learn how to take tricks back on the new program. So he scoffed "Well if you play a trick like that you can’t call it my hand".
Like Dad, I hadn’t played bridge for at least one decade - possibly two. So when I saw a hand with at least three cards in each suit and 17 points in high cards, I suggested an opening bid of one no trump. Dad despaired. "Darling, you can’t bid one no-trump with no club-cover."
He was equally sharp, and funny as well when mum remarked about one of his impossible relatives - no longer with us - "She’s her own worst enemy". Dad responded "Not while I’m around".
It would be quite wrong, and self indulgent to paint Dad as ‘haunted’ by his past. But of course it was always there. I remember sometime, probably about a decade ago when I visited Dad in his corner office just before his retirement. Asked how he was he said something like "Oh . . . a bit depressed". Not a remarkable comment but it upset me quite a lot.
When I reflected on it, I realised that, in all the time I had known my father, I could not remember him saying he was depressed or sad. His focus on the positive was not false or forced. And no doubt he felt the demands of parental obligation. One does not want to project sadness towards one’s children. It was also because he was part of a whole generation which lacked the obsessive introspection of later generations.
But I think there is more to it than that.
I think Dad largely trained himself out of the luxury of being depressed and of being sad. There is a literature growing up in Australia - and I imagine elsewhere - of children of Holocaust survivors. Mark Raphael Baker and Romona Koval have each published books on this subject and the story is the same.
None of the holocaust survivors have ‘come to terms’ with what happened. They have found ways of living on after the experience, but they do so mostly by trying to forget, by focusing on other things. In today’s psycho-babble, Holocaust survivors have been unable to grieve adequately for their past losses. But their grief cannot really be confronted, because if acknowledged it would have no limit. It would be bottomless.
Dad was not a Holocaust survivor in the literal sense, but he was touched by the infinite malevolence of the Holocaust in the most direct way.
Certainly in my family, my mother has shed many more tears over the holocaust than my father. Her sympathy for him was perhaps a luxury he felt unable to allow himself. I don’t know how often it broke through into Dad’s consciousness: I suspect, with the possible exception of the last year or so, not all that often.
But sometimes it did. I remember just once when I was about eight or nine, watching a documentary on World War II with David, Mum and Dad in the rumpus room in Harkaway. I doubt if I said anything, but my recollection is that I was mesmerised by the audacity of Hitler and the Germans in just the same way I was attracted to the swashbuckling of Hannibal and Alexander when I learned of them. But as the credits of the program rolled up the screen, my vague musings were torn asunder by my father’s uncontrollable sobbing.
And then three nights after Dad’s huge abdominal operation, I was with him until well into the morning hours. He was hooked up to a vast array of life support systems and was clearly fretting in his drug induced slumber. When he awoke, I asked him what his nightmares were about and he shook his head lightly and said "Ghastly, ghastly". For some reason I wanted to know and I pressed him. He said "Shindler’s List".
But most of the time his focus on the positive and the outward did not fail him.
Mark Raphael Baker writes about his parents (both Holocaust survivors) quoting a Yiddish lullaby his parents sing to their numerous grandchildren as they ruminate upon what their lives might have been had the holocaust not intervened to diminish them:
Sleep now child, my pretty one,
Close your dark eyes.
A little boy who has all his teeth
Still needs his mother to sing him to sleep? . . .
A little boy who will become a great scholar
And a successful businessman as well.
A little boy who’ll grow to be a bridegroom
Has soaked his bed as if he’s in a pool.
So hush-a-bye my clever little bridegroom
Meanwhile you lie wet in your cradle
Your mother will shed many a tear
Before you grow up to be a man.
And their son sings to them:
Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.
Tomorrow your children will shed your tears
Tuck in your memories in bed and say good night.
It is so sad that Dad has gone: That we’ll never be able to speak to him again. That we’ll never be able to tell him things we know he’ll find funny and be rewarded with his laughter. I’ll never be able to enjoy an episode of "Faulty Towers" or "Yes Minister" in quite the way I did when I made the trek out to Hall.
Dad leaves a gaping and incomprehensible hole in the lives of those who loved him. Like any person who has made the journey of life successfully, there is, nor will there ever be anyone quite like him. He was singularly himself. To invoke a cliche, we will not look upon his like again. And so we are filled with grief.
One last story which sums up a lot. After Dad had gone through two harrowing months of chemotherapy, he gave up Taxol and Carboplatin and was due to start on Methotrexate in a few weeks time. Mum had briefly been in bad health herself and so her friends Margie and Juddy were staying with us on the farm. I had come up from Melbourne. The house being over full, I was sleeping in the study. Dad was enjoying a stint of good health which had stretched for a month or so, and so he was showing some of his natural buoyancy.
The atmosphere had some of the crowded, festive atmosphere of an extended family turn at a holiday beach house as we crowded around the kitchen table. And it reminded me of the skiing holidays. At lunch time Hillary Webster arrived, ebullient as usual, like a benign whirlwind. She greeted each one of us heartily and gave us all hugs before turning to Dad who was sitting looking rather frail in his chair. She gave him a very special hug, and said with great emphasis. "And how are you, you lovely man." For the next twenty minutes or so, everyone, including Dad joined in the hilarity of various people, including him, modelling the truly ridiculous wig he had reluctantly agreed to purchase as a result of losing his hair.
So let me close this service by saying thanks Dad. Thanks for everything. Thanks for your fun, your laughter, your affection. Thanks for believing in what you did and living the way you did. Thanks for keeping despair at bay, and living with the cancer that came stalking you for as long as you could bear it.
And thank you to those who have come today.
To end this service I thought the best music to celebrate his life was music which he himself loved, and which captures his ebullient civility. The Blue Danube.
Farewell to a lovely man.
Postcript: A great deal of effort was expended to ensure that the song ‘Tis the gift to be simple’ could be played over the University House public address system - so much effort in fact, that no backup means of playing the recording was brought to the service. The rendition was the title track of Yvonne Kenny’s ‘Simple Gifts’ which I had given Dad as a birthday present a few years before. Dad loved it so much that it almost displaced Strauss waltzes on his car cassette on his many trips between the office and the farm in his car.
As might have been predicted, there was a technical problem and the track could not be played. Having quoted some hundreds of dollars to do the service, the sound engineer, got word to me of the complete failure of the system some three minutes before his services were required! To my extreme chagrin, the best I could do was read the text of the song to the audience. The next morning an uncanny re-run of the scene I sketched at the end of my speech was played out before my eyes. Mum, Margie and Juddy were all there along with others around a crowded kitchen table. And then Hilary Webster arrived. Quite agitated, she exclaimed "Were you listening to ABC FM". None of us had. But that morning they had played Yvonne Kenny’s rendition of ‘Tis the gift to be simple’. NG
portrait by Erwin Fabian, 1941. Speech at unveiling of this portrait by Nicholas Gruen also on Speakola.
Nicholas Gruen
