17 May 2022
Dear Reader,
Thirty years ago my wife and I had the good fortune to be introduced by a mutual friend to the Czech Republic’s ambassador to Australia, Dr Jaroslava Moserova-Davidova. Her obituary in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is simply astonishing – do read it here.
US mathematician/comedian Tom Lehrer once remarked about wasting so much of his life on matters of little consequence (I have to quote from memory): ‘it’s a sobering thought, but when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for 12 years.’ When you read Dr Moserova’s stunningly packed life story you wonder why the rest of us don’t do more with our precious time!
She wasn’t always an activist, quietly enduring the awfulness of the regime for most of her productive life, but a brutal suppression of demonstrators in 1989 finally tipped her over the line and she threw herself into a new career in politics. She wrote: ‘I was no hero in the dark days of our history, but I never betrayed my beliefs’. By the way, the obituary omits one interesting thing she told us: the young dissident Palach who died of burns was the son of her piano teacher!
Some of my earliest memories of life are of occupied Austria after the war, where my father served as a director of UN Displaced Persons’ camps in the British zone. He was flown over shortly after VE Day and served with UNRRA (the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency).
MY PARENTS WITH UKRAINIAN GIRLS IN NATIONAL DRESS (I’M THE KID IN THE MIDDLE)
One of his reluctant duties was the forced ‘repatriation’ of DPs to their home countries behind the Iron Curtain. This was done by persuasion and sometimes even by compulsion, in conformity with the treaty between the western occupying powers and the Soviets. Many of these people believed that they would be executed on arrival and there is clear evidence that some of them were. It was a dreadful situation for everyone involved.
‘REPATRIATION’ TO YUGOSLAVIA
My father and his colleagues hated having to do it. It is a shameful episode in hindsight, though deemed necessary at the time in order to ensure that the Soviets reciprocated by sending citizens of western countries home again.
Theirs was indeed an ‘Evil Empire’ and its monstrous abuses over many decades cannot be excused. We are seeing what I hope may be the tail end of it now in the brutish war again Ukraine. May the peoples of the Ukraine, and all the other ex-soviet states, and Russia herself, finally achieve peace and harmony.
Yours sincerely,
David Daintree
THE LATE RICHARD CONNOLLY RIP
I am sorry have to report the death, I believe on 4 May, of Dr Richard Connolly. Richard had been a member of our International Advisory Board since its formation. He was a distinguished composer and hymnographer in an age when such people are rare to vanishing point.
You can find a brief biography here.
One of our colleagues Karl Schmude writes: My favourite story about him is when he and Jim McAuley were at Mass together on one occasion, and most of the hymns were theirs. As ‘By Your Kingly Power, O Risen Lord’ was sung at the end of Mass, Connolly lent across to McAuley and said: ‘We didn’t do too badly today!’
Another admirer, Robert Stove, writes: Richard’s hymn-tune collaborations with James McAuley will live forever, if any 20th-century hymn-tune collaborations can do so. I am convinced that ‘Help of Christians Guard This Land’ and ‘By Your Kingly Power – to name just two of the Connolly-McAuley miniature masterpieces – will always find admirers.
May God rest his soul.