None Other

Sometimes it is best not to look too far  under the smooth surface of a long term friendship. The wisest people understand this, but usually only after age has mellowed them, and sandpapered and refined the spiky demands and adrenaline-fuelled ambitions of youth. 

Our expectations and their degrees of relationship to reality are a huge factor in our collective lives. If grossly unrealistic, and fuelled by egoism, the disappointment of unfulfilled hopes can feel abrupt and serrated, unexpectedly cutting us off from a line we had thought secure because it was untested. 

A realization of this kind happened to a friend of mine, because of something a person told him in confidence. His wife had been nominated for a major award. And she had no knowledge of it. But he had been told of it. Because the committee had been so surprised, that a person who had been nominated by the candidate in good faith to write a testimonial as a referee for her would have been so apparently off-hand and casual about it. 

It was for a National honour, you see. People throughout the nation were asked to nominate people, in various categories of achievement, anonymously. And people who received a lot of recommendations were then further taken up for consideration by the committee, who investigated all the claims and assertions, and asked for detailed character references - not only from the candidate’s employers but from their peers - that final court of tribalist judgment. 

The candidate in question, the wife of my friend, was an outstanding person of colour. Her curriculum vitae, seen in full, was a thing of beauty, unfolded like a painted fan. Her certified career path was a long, starry list of ‘firsts’: First Class Honours, first person from South Asia to graduate in her subject from Oxford, first woman from her nation to be internationally published, first woman from her family to enter into the corporate world. She was peerless.

And the immigration policies were such in that progressive era that it would look good to have a woman of colour, burnished bright, on the national Honours list. If Australia had still been calling them Queen’s Birthday Honours that would have been a different matter. The candidate would have sent a polite refusal to the proffered tribute, being proudly anti-colonial in her views. No way would she have wanted to be called a ‘Dame’ of the British Empire. 

And so the lengthy process of selection continued through its various checks and balances, unknown to all the considered candidates, until the peer review stage was reached. And at that point, four out of the five referees responded with a chorus of glowing recommendations and personal reminiscences, barely containing their statements within the indicated word limits. 

But, (and this is a big discourse marker), one referee, self-described as a personal friend of her family for 20 years, wrote only a few brief, understated words, saying ‘This lady doesn’t need any help from me’. The committee were at a loss to understand this laconic comment. Could the national traits of terseness and abbreviation in the vernacular republic be operating at cross purposes with the committee’s requirements as explained? What sort of support was this? Was it self-deprecating irony? Of the ‘this person needs no introduction from me’ variety at a Rotary International Luncheon meeting? 

Deliberations ensued, and eventually the referee was courteously asked by follow up letter to go against his own ingrained habits and expand on his statements, until what was deemed to be a suitable standard of positive endorsement was reached. 

The candidate received her well-deserved national honour at the age of 50. She looked wonderful in her colorful national robes at the ceremony of investiture, where other people in their Sunday best - from journalists hosting infotainment shows to public-minded people who had cleaned racially and sexually offensive graffiti off the walls of Australia’s cities - joined her and her family at the sandstone colonial home beside the harbour, in a congratulatory haze on a beautiful, clear winter day. 

It rained a little, in the afternoon, but the photographs were full of colour and life. There was a particularly gorgeous one, with the candidate serenely seated near the sandstone fountain, with every pleat of her silk garment perfectly in place. 

It took a quarter of a century before the person who recommended her was honored in his own field. It was sad, really, because by that time the photographs were not so beautiful to look at, in the annual email roundup the family sent out to all their friends and acquaintances, celebrating their many experiences and achievements.