Vivianne De Vahl Davis
It's been wonderful listening to people speaking about Dad's talent, leadership, kindness and perseverance. I want to add something about Dad, the father, the ordinary man because, however great he was in all his spheres of influence and profession, he never big-noted himself, never talked down to anyone who worked for him or didn't have his intellect. At his funeral, I believe everyone who had ever worked for him was there, even my piano teacher from 27 years before. Robert Menzies at Dad's Shloshim told us things about him we had never heard before.
Dad's been gone 31 years but scarcely a day passes that something doesn't crop up to remind me of him, where his influence helps me make a decision, when I don't miss him. Whenever I do something of which he wouldn't approve, I hear his voice loud and clear: VIVIANNE ELLEN!
I remember so many things about our relationship, some touching, some amusing, some amazing.
Like the morning of my wedding day - a costly affair - when he sat on my bed and said: 'This is your last chance, Vivianne, to change your mind!' This from a self-made man who took his money in new 10/- notes which he pulled out one at a time, reluctantly. I didn't change my mind but I've often wondered what he would have said or done if I had.
We had a holiday home at Frankston - then a beach resort - which had become three interconnected cottages as our families grew, backing onto the little Kananook Creek. This, I believe, was my father's favourite place. We all gathered there for the summer holidays, a close-knit family. Dad was completely relaxed there, untroubled by the law, party politics and the community. His greatest love was his little runabout with its 2-stroke engine, his putt putt we called it. (Mum bought him a fancy speedboat one year - but he hated it.)
Dad had a mischievous streak, too. Way back then, when I was single, I used to invite my current - or intended - beau to Frankston. We would go out in the boat and, while our backs were turned, Dad would remove a spark plug. When it came time to go home, of course, the engine wouldn't start. The behaviour of said beau meant that many a romance was nipped in the bud. Needless to say, I was seldom amused at the time. Graham was the only one not fooled and suggested that he put the spark plug back!
My mother spoilt Dad. He really did nothing for himself. She would carry his case, pick his clothes up off the floor and make sure he was never really involved in the housekeeping. When he travelled - something he did only on communal business, and once on international jurist business - he took enough clothes for the whole trip. One year, however, he came to visit us in England - Graham was reading for his Ph.D. at Cambridge - for an extended visit. He was staying at a hotel in London and each morning he would dress, go out and buy himself clean underclothes, shirt and sox. I was charged with having to fill in a customs form declaring the parcel to be sent home contained a month's supply of dirty clothes. (Funnily enough, he washed his own handkerchiefs because he was fascinated by the fact that if you plastered the wet hanky on the tiles, it didn't need ironing.)
It wasn't only in the house that Mum looked after him. On the way to Geelong Grammar once, to visit my younger and now tragically late brother, Neville, we had a flat tyre. Dad directed the traffic while mum - an ex transport driver - changed the tyre.
He was good at getting others to do the work. He was a keen gardener, although he was better at supervising his weed-pulling children than doing the work himself. But he did mow the lawns every week - and they were extensive - usually just pulling on a pair of old slacks over his pyjamas!
There's another Maurie Ashkanasy that few in the community know - Dad the sportsman who, in 1918, stroked the first Melbourne High Crew to win a boat race, who used to go skiing regularly, who was so keen on tennis that he had a tennis court built in our garden while Mum was in hospital having me, who lobbied the rabbis to allow tennis at the Ajax club - as it was then known - on Saturdays (racquets of course left there the day before), who was one of the founders of what is now know as the Maccabean Interstate Carnival. He also worked hard to have plenty of time allocated for sport at Mount Scopus College.
Twenty years after his death I was awarded my Ph.D. Pleasing as it was, with congratulations coming from all quarters, the occasion was flat without Dad. I wanted so much to hear him say 'Have you met my daughter, the doctor' or even, when my brother Neal became a Ph.D. and a professor,'My children, the doctors!'
But I have a limited time to speak and I decided to concentrate on Dad's army career and his relationship with the family during that time, for this is a period of his life not well known. In 1940 he became a King's Counsel - the youngest ever appointed, I believe, at that time. In the same year, he enlisted for overseas service in the 2nd AIF. Remember that, in World War II, there was no conscription for overseas service. He was quickly promoted to Captain in the legal corps but insisted on being in the infantry where he started life as a Lieutenant.
This is when my real memories of Dad began. Mum was shocked when he enlisted, but being a man, as Sir Robert Menzies put it, of 'the rare and beautiful quality of personal integrity,' he saw it as his duty. He trained at Seymour and Puckapunyal. My brother Neville and I were born 2 years and 4 hours apart, so as children we always celebrated our birthdays together.
One was at Puckapunyal, where the cooks made us a wonderful party and we were allowed to ride the parade horses - somewhat terrifying since they obeyed followed their training as we moved the reins this way and that, and they moved sideways, backwards and around - certainly not what we had expected! But we kept our mounts and Dad looked on with pride.
He sailed for Singapore on the Queen Mary in 1941. Hundreds of people surrounded the ship in little boats to wave goodbye. They all had great faith in the Allied forces. (Strangely, when we visited the Queen Mary, now a tourist attraction in the US, her Sydney to Singapore trip was not shown on the record of her wartime career.) Dad went to Singapore a lieutenant and came back a lieutenant colonel and deputy assistant adjutant general. As a DAAG, he had to wear a red armband but there was no material in Singapore to make one, so he wrote to Mum to ask her father, Louis Epstein, a tailor, to make him one. He was ever the resourceful one! I have his letters to Mum from Singapore and in the early years he wrote of his tennis games with the Sultan of Johore and of being entertained right royally, as they say.
He helped clean up the city and got rid of the flies in the food shops - he was very proud of that. I've a horrible feeling he probably used DDT. He bought us gifts - my carved camphor wood chest still has pride of place in our home although he misjudged my size when he bought the material which was to be for my wedding dress.
He wrote regularly and answered the silliest questions. Mum was worried about taking us to Frankston in case of invasion, and he wrote back to say:'You're right - I can just see a battleship cruising down the Kananook with guns blazing on both sides.' When she bought a cottage in Belgrave Heights and asked what to name it, he replied 'tid-apa,' which is the Malay for 'who cares!' And that's what she called it.
While stationed in Singapore he found time to write a detailed analysis of the European war. Some of his predictions were spot on but he never thought there was a possibility that we would lose the war. He didn't think Germany would invade England and felt that the morale of the British people would never fade. This in 1941!
In one letter, however, pessimism did surface in that he was terrified that if Germany was not stopped it would turn to the Middle East and the possibility of a Jewish State would vanish. But this was a flash in the pan, as he consistently refers to the establishment of a Jewish State as a given.
Indeed, after the war, when he was trying to establish a practice as a silk, he did not hesitate to speak out about the behaviour of the British in Palestine despite the damage to his practice and the risk to his reputation among the Melbourne establishment.
Things were changing in Singapore. The Japanese were coming. Singapore fell and Dad escaped in a daring manner. He took 40 men with him. He purloined a boat, got the men to bend over so that from the air they looked like sacks of rice. He stood, holding an oar upright with a khaki shirt tied onto it, so that the effect was that of a Chinese sampan. The Japanese flew over them without spotting the ruse and eventually they arrived at an uncharted island called TAND-JONG-BALEI-KARIMON from where he was able to send a telegram: 'Safe, trying getaway.'
It was, I remember, an agonizing six weeks before we heard again.
I was at a boarding school, Korowa, when I read in the newspaper of his arrival in WA. It was a moment of exultation and relief - even if the ghastly headmistress punished me for using the phone without permission. (I wasn't very popular at boarding school, not least because whenever they had an air raid rehearsal the whole place trooped outside to the trenches, except Vivianne who, at her father's insistence, stood under a door jamb or sat under a table. He reasoned she would be safer there than in a trench.)
Dad arrived in Fremantle on a destroyer after a harrowing six weeks. He knew no-one, but the name Breckler was well known as a major Zionist supporter. So he rang them and of course they welcomed him. While he showered, they wondered what special treat could they give him to eat. When he came to the table there was that wartime luxury, baked beans on toast. He didn't want to insult them - but for six weeks he had eaten nothing but baked beans. He did confess, but history doesn't relate what they replaced it with.
The Brecklers became our closest friends. When Dad was posted to Perth after a few weeks recovery from his ordeal, Mum and I eventually came to join him. Mum went first, then Neville and I, aged 13 and 11, travelled on our own from Melbourne to Perth on the train. I have no doubt we raised hell; neither of us was a very disciplined child. Neville went back to Geelong Grammar, and I stayed at school in Perth. Indeed Dad's unit was stationed in the main school building, and my class was in a room at the back of the Brecklers' home.
Uncle Alec Breckler, in whose house we were staying, was at that time a non-com soldier; Dad, as I've said, was a lieutenant colonel. So if he was visiting the house when Uncle Alec came home he would climb in the bedroom window and change into civvies, protocol requiring that officers and non-commissioned officers did not mix.
Dad was out of favour with General Blamey because of his escape from Singapore - with 40 men, mind you. He was caught up in the controversy over General Gordon Bennett, who had also refused to surrender to the Japanese. Nevertheless, when the war came to New Guinea Dad was posted there and became AAG. He had by this time been mentioned in dispatches and I have a letter from General Gordon Bennett advising Dad that he had been recommended for a higher award but whatever Bennett wanted, Blamey refused.
Dad's letters from wherever he was posted showed a continued concern for our welfare. I wrote him long convoluted letters which he always answered. I once told him I had changed my name to Anne. His next letter was addressed to Miss Ann Mud in the Slush - that was the end of my name change.
He was travelling to the front line and among the troops (accompanied by his adoring batman who carried on mum's tradition of looking after him and who always carried a mattress and the makings for a cup of tea) when I, back at school in Melbourne, wrote to him that I had to do an analysis of Shakespeare's Richard II. I received a long and wonderful essay from him on that subject. I copied it word for word, of course, and my teacher failed the essay. I tackled her and she told me that it was the best analysis on the topic she had ever read and it was quite clear that I hadn't written it. She didn't think much of my ability - I've hope I've improved!
Dad was discharged from the Army in early 1945 and our lives as a family started again. There was quite a period of adjustment, but adjust we did. In all his life he was a caring man. He worked hard for the law and for the Labor party, but the Jewish community and Israel were, I believe, his first love - after his family, that is.
For what he felt was a bad decision against a client he suffered. He dissuaded my brother and me from following in the law although, with me, it was double edged. He felt that no-one would marry a blue stocking, but just in case I didn't find a husband, he insisted I do Latin - then a prerequisite for law - in my first year at University. I failed!
I have a photo of Dad, relaxing in a chair beside his bookcase, a pipe in his mouth, a thoughtful look on his face. This epitomizes the father I knew and loved.
He was sometimes a bit difficult - as fathers were wont to be. But I was a dutiful daughter, as daughters were wont to be - at least in those days. But my memories of him are of a loving, caring father and grandfather.
Family was central to my father's life. He was a devoted husband and father. Our successes and our failures were just as much his. He gave an added dimension to everything we did.
Vale, Dad.