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Cliff

 

In 1994, he stood at the door of my faculty office, short of breath, a little untidy, a bag in hand and a cynical look on his face. His questions were short and his manner impatient.

I immediately pigeonholed him as “RSL type; probably racist” and definitely a lateaged intellectual pretender. I did my best to fob him off, to avoid this grumpy old man enrolled as a student in the course I taught. But I couldn’t avoid him.

Cliff wouldn’t go away. And how wrong I was in my judgment of him: a proud veteran, yes, but a racist no, and certainly no pretender. In the months following that first contact, he became a regular visitor to my office, and then to my home. Much more than just another student passing through my classes, Cliff became a de facto member of the Wolfgramm family.

Indeed, I would become his student, and he, my friend—a mate and mentor in the finest Australian tradition.

 

I learned that Cliff had served in intelligence in Timor during World War II, and that he felt a deep debt to the East Timorese.

In fact, they’d saved his life, shielding, feeding and hiding him from the enemy.

His treatment at the hands of the Timorese in that difficult campaign “surprised” him, and “turned” him into “a human being” (as he often put it). He learned their Tetum dialect and produced the Australian government’s first English– Tetum dictionary. He gave me a book of traditional Timorese stories and poems he’d translated.

My respect for him was immediate: here was a person who had done what his country asked of him in a crisis, who had mastered another language, and who had published books. I was envious. Cliff never let me forget that while I had the degrees, he had experience . And before long he had me involved in his passion and cause—independence for East Timor—and providing a sanctuary for their asylum seekers.

 

As we talked of the common ancestries and linguistic similarities between the Timorese and Pacific islanders, I realised Cliff and I were looking for common threads between us. And we found a few. Only a few. But we made the most of them.

He’d been a farmer in Deniliquin in the 1970s—a town I’d often passed through as a country and interstate truck driver at the time. He laughed at our jokes and we laughed at his. He berated me for not being in charge of my university and for not being famous. I told him that was up to God; he told me he didn’t think about God. I told Cliff I always did and that I wanted to see him in my heaven—even if I wasn’t in his.

In 1994, he stood at the door of my office, short of breath, bag in hand, a little untidy and a cynical look on his face. And that’s how our friendship began. Like all friendships—not as a given, never automatic but making something out of nothing, requiring effort before it can become effortless.

Overcoming first impressions in order to make lasting ones. Seeing past our different skins and situations to enjoy heart-to-heart fellowship.

 

In the last years of his recurring illness, I admired Cliff ’s resilience, for his stubbornness, independence and courage. I somehow imagined he might just go on and on. But he died in October 1998, just months before the Indonesian government expressed its willingness to allow the people of East Timor a free vote on their future.

In May 2002 (as I write), East Timor became the world’s newest independent nation. How Cliff would have celebrated that crowning step in their 400-year odyssey from colonial subjugation to freedom! His public work—his cause— had finally borne sweet fruit.

Cliff ’s faith inspired me to believe in and long for another nation whose birthday has yet to arrive. It’s a country I see only dimly, over the horizon in the “Commonwealth of Heaven.” But I believe it is a nation whose citizenship is worth dying for. Oh that I meet Cliff there.

 

 

Extract from Signs of the Times, August 2002.

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