Senator Andrew Bartlett
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
 
Stories of my father

Today is my father’s birthday. He would be 81 if he was still alive.

He died of prostate related cancer over ten years ago. His father died of the same thing and one of his brothers was being treated for it at the time he died, so I guess that puts me rather high in the danger zone. Now that I’m over 40 I should get a check-up for it, but I haven’t yet. Labor MP, Shadow Treasurer and fellow Brisbanite, Wayne Swan, has done a good job trying to raise awareness about prostate cancer issues in recent years, after suffering a scare himself.

Because I have the sort of job that means people know how to contact me, I sometimes have people from the past getting in touch. Every now and then I get an email or a phone call asking ‘are you that Andrew Bartlett I used to know?’ from Uni or school or wherever. Sometimes I also get messages asking if I’m the brother or son or uncle of someone in my family, and people use me to pass on a message or get in touch with them. When I got stuck filling the role of ‘scandal of the week’ for the media at the end of 2003, I was amazed by how many messages of support I got from people I hadn’t heard from for many years.

The most recent one of these incidents was a month or so ago, when someone rang my office asking if I was the son of a John Bartlett who used to work in New Guinea 40 years ago? I rang back and spoke to a very elderly sounding man, now living in Toowoomba, who used to work with my father back then. My dad was an engineer, building roads, bridges and the like when my parents lived in New Guinea for about 8 years from 1956-63. All my siblings were born there in Port Moresby, but I was born a short while after they had left and re-located to Brisbane.

This man wanted to get in touch with my mother, but he also wanted to tell me what a magnificent man my father was – “the most honourable and decent fellow he’d ever met” was one quote that stuck in my mind. He had no particular need to tell me that, but he seemed very keen to do so and it was a touching thing to be told.

By chance, I was looking through a few of my father’s old papers a couple of weeks ago which my mother had found. I found an old CV he’d typed out – I presume for job applications – in the late 1940s. Curiously, on his CV he stated his nationality as British, despite being born in Sydney (as were his parents) and never having left Australia! Technically, there was no such thing as an Australian citizen until 1948 when the Citizenship Act was passed, so I guess that’s how people described themselves at the time, but it does seem very strange 50 years later.

In between doing various University degrees at Sydney University, I discovered from his CV he’d done a few months of what appeared to be a form of work experience at Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. This pleased me, as one thing I had a big influence on a few years ago was enabling legislation to pass which established the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, and also ensuring there were enough protections to give some historic sites, including Cockatoo Island, a good chance of surviving and being made accessible to the people in the future. I never realised my father had that connection with the Island.

I have visited Cockatoo Island a couple of times and it really is a fascinating place – an incredible part of Australia’s history, with convict built structures, an old (and rather depressing) convict prison, underground grain silos, it’s own unique powerhouse and what must be the best view from any tennis court in the world - right in the middle of Sydney Harbour and yet unknown to so many people. I saw in the paper the other day that there is a music and arts festival being held there over the coming Easter weekend, so it looks like the Island is starting to be experienced by many people once again and adding another phase to its history.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Wednesday, March 23, 2005 Permalink
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