The ice bucket challenge and a long ago final meeting with an ALS friend

The ice bucket challenge reminded me of a long ago final meeting with an ALS friend, writes John Henzell

You’d be the exception if the ice bucket challenge has escaped your attention. Millions of people have doused themselves in ice water then nominated friends to do the same. This includes thousands in the UAE. The idea is to raise both money for and awareness of a lesser-known fatal neurodegenerative condition known variously as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease (MND).

I didn’t need this internet craze to make me aware of the disease because it claimed the life of my godfather, the prominent Australian political journalist Wallace Brown.

So instead of ice bucket challenge videos being a summer distraction, they served instead to make me recall our final meeting.

ALS is a particularly cruel disease because sufferers steadily lose the physical abilities while the mind remains sharp.

When I last saw him in 2005, he had just started using a wheelchair. I’d flown over from New Zealand and was about to move to the US on an extended sabbatical. We both knew this meeting was to say goodbye. Neither Rob (as he was known, Wallace being his newspaper nom de plume) nor I had any time for sentimentality, so my visit turned into a celebration of his long career.

As we settled into a couple of battered old chairs in his comfortable Canberra home, I had no idea the seats were central to the story.

One was a 1940s-style swivel chair made of leather and oak. The second was a well-used leather armchair.

He obtained the first through the ministrations of Tadeusz, a Polish-born man who did some modest factotum role at Australia’s original Parliament. When Pope John Paul II was appointed in 1978, Tadeusz bounded up to Rob and others he knew in the Parliamentary press gallery, claiming the new pontiff had been his childhood best friend.

He and the others were interested but sceptical. The others soon forgot, but Rob would raise the subject with Tadeusz occasionally, which is why he was the only correspondent to whom Tadeusz eventually showed a letter bearing the papal insignia and signed by the new Pope himself. The letter thanked him for the good wishes at his appointment and recalled fondly their time as close childhood chums.

The story that followed probably barely made a few paragraphs in the newspaper, but Tadeusz never forgot. Later, when Rob needed a new chair for his office inside Parliament House, he went to Tadeusz and asked him to find one.

The next morning, the leather and oak swivel chair was in Rob’s office. He recognised it instantly as one of the chairs from the Cabinet room, on which generations of ministers had held court. He heard later that there was a brief fuss at the following cabinet meeting when they discovered there was one fewer chairs than required.

The other chair in Rob’s collection had come from the office of Bob Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, and the first of the 10 prime ministers on whom Rob reported.

Following Menzies’s resignation as PM in 1966, the chair managed to end up in Rob’s office, where he dubbed it the “confessional” and it undeniably had that effect – you’d sink back into its deep leather recesses and, combined with Rob’s innate loquaciousness, you’d understand why ministers and others would find themselves saying far more than they’d ever intended.

Both chairs nominally belonged to the government but became fixtures in Rob’s office.

When the new Parliament House opened in 1988, everything was moved from the old building.

But when Rob arrived at his new office, it turned out the person organising the move had decided to dump these two chairs at a used furniture shop. Some minutes later, Rob was at the shop on the outskirts of Canberra and found the chairs sitting on the footpath.

“How much for those chairs?” Rob asked the proprietor. The dealer’s eyes narrowed as he made a quick assessment about how much he could charge for what were clearly worthless chairs.

“Ah, how about $20 [Dh68]?” he replied. Done. Soon afterwards, they were in Rob’s home. His chair is now empty but I’m left with memories of a long afternoon replete with fascinating stories.