Henry Johnston

Henry Johnston

Henry Johnston, Australian author, essayist, and poet, was born in the UK in 1951. He is a contributor to both The Australian Independent Media Network and Independent Australia. In his career, Johnston served as an ABC Radio producer, speechwriter, and senior policy adviser. In the Independent Australia 2023 writing competition, his essay “In The Company of Giants”, won the Most Compelling Article award. Other pieces of work encompass the short story “An Upturned Sky” (Stringybark Publishing), and an anthology Port Out Starboard Home, which was released as an eBook on Smashwords. He has written two novellas: Best and Fairest and The Last Voyage of Aratus and Other Stories. Set in inner-city Sydney during the 1960s, Best and Fairest chronicles the lives of 13 young men united by their love of Rugby League. In The Last Voyage of Aratus and Other Stories, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is given a modern twist. His current project is a collection of poetry called The Gardens of Stone.

from Chapter 2: Red, White, Red

My father, Maximillian Liebler, began his morning constitutional on the Penzinger Straße, then walked past Embassy Row, before taking a brisk stroll through Auer-Welsbach Park. On mornings when I accompanied him, Papa paused after crossing the boulevard and, with hand on heart, turned toward the Schönbrunn Palace with a formal bow, to bid a silent ‘good morning’ to the memory of the old emperor.

Papa began this tribute to Franz Joseph after surviving the terrible Ninth Battle of the Isonzo against the Italians in November 1916, in the weeks before the grand aristocrat’s death. Fidelity to the emperor prompted my parents to buy the estate on Penzinger. Within its leafy confines we celebrated a life of good fortune as proud subjects of a monarch who gave succour to all his peoples, both near and as far as the borders of the Pale of Settlement.

Papa always wore a sprig of alpine Edelweiss, the insignia of his regiment of the Imperial Hunters, and an important element of his ritual. I wove the small white flower heads into a dense cluster so precise only touch could reveal it as an imitation.

I am Shoshanna, Susan in English, Maximillian Liebler’s only daughter. Either my mother Ruth or I pinned the totem to his lapel, impossible for him to do so now since the loss of the first joints of his fore and second fingers from frostbite during military service in the Tyrolean trenches.

Teeming summer rain thwarted Papa’s morning walk in those fatalistic hours, so a comfortable chair by the wireless listening to the BBC World Service served as a suitable substitute.

Papa heeded my brother Rudolph’s advice to be sceptical of the domestic press. Editorial bias, Rudolph said, had grown conspiratorial since the calamity of the brief, bloody civil war. Rudolph said the Austrian press barons had abandoned impartial reporting in the tense days after Chancellor Dollfuss suspended parliament in 1933.

Any type of trade with Italian clients, and Dollfuss’s obvious fascination with fascism, spiked my father’s blood pressure. The trusted BBC News service detailed the breadth of Dollfuss’s political naivety, which led to the slaughter of hard-line socialists holed up in the nation’s Red redoubts. The majority of casualties fell in Vienna’s Karl Marx Tenement in the 19th district. According to my father, far better to establish a détente with the former President of Parliament Karl Renner, and the socialists – who numbered about half the population – than shoot them.

My father, brother and mother, along with thousands of like-minded citizens, abhorred Dollfuss’s authoritarian world view.

Papa championed liberalism over mindless discipline. The wanton destruction of the centrepiece of Red Vienna shook his faith in the possibility of a secure Austria. This tenement building, inpired by Otto Wagner, an architect Papa lauded above all members of the Vienna Secession, crumbled under a barrage of shellfire.

And though much had changed since the fall of the Habsburgs, my father admired the early initiatives of Karl Renner. As a veteran, he welcomed the introduction of state aid for disabled ex-soldiers, who had lost limbs or the use of lungs from phosgene gas. But, from the time of Dollfuss’s ascendancy, Papa recounted a growing pessimism amongst old comrades in arms and close associates.

I watched the golden days of the last century fade with the steel grey tones flecking his goatee and thinning hair. But life continued. An unselfish son, the love of his life and, dare I say, me, imbued Papa with a determination to keep the Liebler enterprise safe from travails. And London beckoned.

My father gave me the nickname ZaSu, in honour of his favourite American actor ZaSu Pitts.