E&OE..................
Well thank you very Mr Rosenbloom. To Professor Kune, to Betty, Mark and
Monica, and to the late John Saunders many other friends and work mates
and associates over a long period of time. I'm very privileged to have been
asked to launch this book. I did know John well. I met him as Professor
Kune said, in 1977 and I retained a great regard and respect for him for
the remainder of his life and I do regard it as a privilege to launch this
book, particularly here in the Holocaust Museum which was a testament to
much of John Saunders dedication to the county he embraced so warmly, Australia,
but also to the memories of so many Australians of Jewish Descent.
Ladies and gentlemen, what Mr Rosenbloom said about the character of this
book is true. It's the story of a very remarkable man. Like all of us he
was a complex person. None of has are really of easily readable.ready explanation.
Each of us have our contradictions and our complexities. John's story is
a phenomenal story. It's a story of somebody who endured and witnessed the
most unspeakable deeds of mankind's history. It's the story of a man who
was incredibly successful in business. It's the story of a man who suffered
a great deal of personal heartache. The loss of his first wife at the early
age of 42. The end of a marriage to his second wife.
It's also the story of a person who retained an incredible sense of hope
and optimism throughout the whole of his life. And that to me is one of
the things that makes this book, as Mr Rosenbloom said, something of a metaphor
for a remarkable group of Australians. And they are the Australians who
came to this country from Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and through the
1950s. Many of them, and John amongst them, were Jewish who had suffered
the terrible losses of the Holocaust, and who came to this country and despite
that appallingly tragic background began to give to this country in enormous
measure.
And I began to have some contact with that contribution myself, ironically
about the very year that John became an Australian citizen, 1957, because
that was my first year at the Sydney University Law School. And for the
first time in my life as somebody I suppose who'd grown up in a fairly traditional
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Australian background in the suburb of Earlwood,
I came into contact for the first time in my life with a significant number
of people of eastern European background, not totally, but predominantly
Jewish. And I remember my first experiences of being received into the home
of the late Paul and Vera Strasser in Dover Heights through my friendship
with their son Peter who remains one of my closest friends to this day.
And through that I began to know something of this remarkable group of Australians.
I began my articles of clerkship with Myer Rosenblum, spelt with a 'u-m',
in 1959, and through that also I developed and further nurtured that association.
John was in so many ways a metaphor for that remarkable group of Australians
who've had such a profound influence beneficially on our nation, and such
a particularly profound influence on the city of Sydney.
He was a businessman of remarkable tenacity and success, of very great integrity.
Professor Kune records that in their early associations in business John
Saunders and Frank Lowy resolved on two things - there would be no corruption
and no lawyers. That they would avoid like the plague, so to speak, they
would avoid any extensive litigation involving lawyers and that they would
always try and settle their disputes.
The book is also of course a chronicle of Australia's extraordinary post-war
economic boom starting in the early 1950s with some temporary interruptions,
all those pretty short lived, through to the relative stalling in the early
1970s and then on again.
It's also a very interesting study of the political and personal philosophy
of a man. John to my mind exhibited throughout his life the characteristics
of what I would call the liberal European approach to politics. He was a
person who was always alert, as one would understand from his background
and experiences, he was always alert to any sense of prejudice or discrimination.
He was a person who dealt with people on their merits, and he was a person
who believed in openness. He certainly had liberal economic theories. Professor
Kune records that he was a fan of Milton Friedman's, but he was also a person
who believed genuinely in a social security safety net. He took great care
of his employees. He was very rewarding of loyalty. He drove a tough business
bargain but it was a fair bargain and it was a bargain based on integrity.
I found him to be a person with a great sense of humour and a great sense
of fun, exemplified by the story in the book of how he offered a long standing
employee at Westfields in reward for great service, a plane ticket from
under his blotter, and then when that employee went into Frank's office,
Frank offered him from under his blotter a plane ticket for the employee's
wife. And it was just one of those many stories and one of those many illustrations
of a person who had a sensitivity to those around him, and a sensitivity
to those who cared for him and demonstrated business loyalty to him.
John's life of course is not just bound up with business. He cared for his
family very deeply. The establishment of Hope Town to care for mildly intellectually
retarded people on the Central Coast was a manifestation, not only of particular
care but also of a general philanthropic spirit. He was an incredibly generous
supporter of charities within the Australian community. He quite properly
lent very strong support to Jewish charities, but his generosity was not
specific to Jewish causes. He was generous to the entire Australian community.
We meet here of course, in the site of the old Maccabi Hall, of the Holocaust
Museum, and this was a monument by John Saunders to the suffering and the
devastation that descended upon the Jewish people of Europe, and a reminder
to their children and their children and so on in subsequent generations,
and indeed to the Australian people, of what occurred those years ago, and
a symbol of the hope out of that disaster and sadness which was represented
by John Saunders' life and John Saunders' achievement.
Today's gathering brings together many people whose lives were touched by
John. Of course his children and other members of his family, those who
worked with him in business, those such as myself who knew him through our
connection in politics and the life of this city. He was a person who was
I found very loyal to his friends. I met him when I was Treasurer and I
retained contact with him at every stage of my political career. I remember
that he was one of those people that had bothered to retain contact with
me when I was not the most fashionable figure in my party or in Australian
politics. And of course one always remembers those things and it was the
mark of the person that he would do that.
I found the book amusing, interesting and uplifting. The stories of the
early business activities, the attaining of that crucial bank loan from
the late Les Irwin, the manager of the Commonwealth Bank at Blacktown, the
establishment of the first Westfield Shopping Centre, of the debate that
went on between Frank and John about how they would fix upon the name of
Westfield. I found it a very entertaining book and one that tells in a very
simple and direct way a very remarkable story. It's the story of somebody
who triumphed over appalling evil. It's the story of somebody who struggled
against a great deal of adversity in health and other personal circumstances
throughout his life. And as somebody like myself and others in this audience
who've lived all their lives in Australia and have taken it for granted
that freedom and equality and non-discriminatory treatment by governments
is your inherited right. I can only but be filled with admiration that a
person such as John who was not always in that situation, but nonetheless
was able to triumph over it and display such an enormous sense of hope and
optimism.
And the great thing that I take out of John Saunders; life, as I take out
of the lives of so many contributors to this country as passionate Australians
that he represented, was their incredible sense of hope and optimism. But
it passes understanding for many of us that somebody who could have suffered
so much retained such an incredible sense of hope and optimism, And they
were similar thoughts that passed through my mind when less than a week
ago I invested Nelson Mandela with the Honourary Order in the Order of Australia,
and I marveled at that man's incredible sense of forgiveness and compassion,
and despite the extraordinary suffering and depravation that he suffered,
he retained such an extraordinarily generous disposition indeed towards
some of the very people who persecuted him.
John Saunders' life is a remarkable one. It's a great inspiration to Australian
Jews. It's a great reminder to the rest of the Australian population of
the incredible contribution of the Jewish community to the life and the
strength of Australia through its entire existence. I count as one of the
very honoured experiences of my life to have developed over the years in
different ways by circumstances of friendship and otherwise, a close association
with the Jewish community not only of Sydney but around Australia.
John Saunders never forgot that he was Jewish, he never forgot that he came
from eastern Europe, he never forgot the experiences that he suffered along
with so many Jewish people in Europe. But he became forever Australian and
contributed an incredible amount to this country, and Professor Kune's work
is a lovely memorial, a great reminder, and a very heart felt tribute to
a great Australian and I'm delighted to launch it. Thank you.
[Ends]