Raimond Gaita isn’t running out of things to say. But he may be running out of time

This story is part of the December 17 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 22 stories.

Driving into Melbourne from Sydney, I realise that after 50 years in journalism, I’ve never actually met a philosopher. Celebrities by the dozen, politicians by the score, but philosophers, none. Having negotiated a narrow St Kilda street, I’m barely out of the car when Raimond Gaita walks up, smiling, opens his arms wide and gives me a bear-hug. “Welcome!”

I know a lot already about him: both in our 70s, we’re mates even though we’ve never laid eyes on each other. Our first phone call, eight months earlier, stretched more than three hours, after which his wife Yael apparently remarked, “I see you’ve found a new friend.” Developing a deep connection so late in life is unusual, between men especially, but our odyssey began further back, not even in this century.

Two books – one his, the other mine – brought us together.

A childhood with enough trauma to send you crazy (which didn’t happen) or suck you into adolescent delinquency (which did), then turning all that around and using the pain, deprivations and lessons learnt to become an internationally acclaimed philosopher: Rai Gaita’s extraordinary story is familiar to thousands of readers.

Romulus, My Father – the 1998 memoir which, as Helen Garner noted, “changed the quality of the literary air in this country” – relates Gaita’s boyhood as an immigrant kid in the 1950s, living in a century-old shack on central Victoria’s windy Moolort Plains. Romulus became a bestseller, translated into seven languages, then in 2007 was made into a feature film directed by Richard Roxburgh and starring Eric Bana.

The isolated setting provided a growing boy with time to think, to weigh up all that harshness and beauty. It was freezing in winter, with no running water, a single kerosene lamp and mice in abundance; the nearest town, Baringhup, had just a handful of houses, a church, a school. And more so, the dark threads of insanity. First in Gaita’s haunted German mother Christine; then in Romulus, the Romanian father with a talent for hammering hot metal, whose friend Hora would become Rai Gaita’s guiding light in harrowing times.

Christine’s adultery with Hora’s mentally disturbed brother, Mitru, led both lovers to suicide – Christine shortly before her 30th birthday, Mitru tormented by her other affairs. Gaita recalls his father later saying, in a resigned, sorrowful tone, “She was a woman who liked men ...”

Stripped of all sentimentality, Romulus was written in three weeks. “I went to where our house stood and sat there for a couple of hours, wondering what I might write,” Gaita tells me. “It was late afternoon, the hills nearby were covered in high, golden grass swaying in the wind. And suddenly I thought, ‘This is utterly exquisite.’ I was knocked out by the place, the landscape.” As he relates in Romulus of an earlier epiphany, it was as though “God had taken me to the back of his workshop and shown me something really special.”

Gaita at the site of his childhood home. Credit: Tony Maniaty

When the book landed on my reviewer’s desk at The Australian, I’d never heard of Raimond Gaita. But after a few pages, I was as spellbound by the truth and rhythm of the prose as Gaita had been by his surroundings. Naming it my book of the year, I received a letter of appreciation from the author.

I put that letter aside for 20 years. Then, after assembling a photo book capturing Parisian life during the pandemic lockdowns, sans tourists, sans traffic – the City of Light at its most fundamental, human level – I wondered whether Gaita would recall my glowing review and knock off a concise preface for me. Taken by the book’s title, Our Hearts Are Still Open, and by our mutual regard for the great French writer Albert Camus, he said he’d be honoured to do it.

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We’re sipping scotches in the afternoon light in Rai Gaita’s Victorian-era home, with its elaborate light fittings and marble fireplaces. This is a house that resists renovation. “We’ve done almost nothing to it since we bought it years ago,” Gaita declares, with a mix of defiance and pleasure.

It’s an urban oasis, with a perfect view from the living room down the street to the darkening sea. I imagine he loves this city, but he says only his student years at Melbourne University had any real impact. “Some of the best minds there would sit and talk with us in the cafeteria for hours, with genuine intellectual passion.”

That sense of “elementary decency” – deciding what is right, and wrong – drew him first to psychology, then to moral philosophy.

Like so many others at the time, Gaita headed ambitiously off to England. “When I got to London, I realised what a real city is,” he recalls. His appointment as lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London offered intellectual freedom. “It completely changed my life.”

Less an academic at heart than a teacher, Gaita describes “teaching with love” as the most important thing any lecturer can offer their students. “It goes back to Plato – ‘We become what we love’ – but also to Romulus and his friend Hora, the intensity with which they lived their moral lives, the belief that nothing matters so much in life as to live it decently.”

That sense of “elementary decency” – deciding what is right, and wrong – drew him first to psychology, then to moral philosophy. (Among other roles, he would go on to become professor of moral philosophy at King’s, and professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.) “I’m still the only philosopher I know who speaks of the inalienable preciousness of every human being,” he says. So much of his life’s work is rooted in the trauma of his early struggles.

Even so, he acknowledges the father never understood the son’s commitment to “the life of the mind”. Only when Raimond had made a fully detailed dolls’ house for his daughters did Romulus express some admiration: “I see that you have some brains after all.”

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Rai Gaita isn’t running out of things to say, he’s running out of time. Until now, few beyond family and close friends have known of his worsening condition. “Several years ago, I developed a tremor in my hand. And last year I began having dizzy spells and suffering bad headaches.” He was losing his balance, falling over, too. “Yael insisted I see a neurologist, and he confirmed it.”

Gaita’s father Romulus, at right, in 1981, with his friend Hora, who was a guiding light for Gaita in dark times.

The diagnosis was Parkinson’s. A degenerative disease attacking the central nervous system, affecting the body’s movements and the nature of the brain itself. Cognitive and behavioural problems are typical, including depression and anxiety. Dementia is common in the advanced stages. For a man who’s devoted his adult life to thinking profoundly, this is bad news. He feels the need to share it.

“I reckon I’ve had Parkinson’s for five years or more,” he says. “I get much more tired, your legs stiffen up. Medication reduces it, but with negative side effects, and eventually the medication loses out to the disease. In the end, the legs and much else become immobile, and almost everything atrophies.”

“I’ve always felt that at any moment you could lose everything, whatever gives your life sense.”

He’s surrounded by family, with Yael, four adult daughters and six grandchildren now, but the past and the shadow of Shakespeare’s Lear (“Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” ) is a constant. “I don’t have much time for the muscular stuff about self-made people,” he says. “I’ve always felt that at any moment you could lose everything, whatever gives your life sense. Someone as strong as my father was broken by his mental illness. He never fully recovered …”

We’re heading out of Melbourne into the bush. In 2000, eager to reconnect with the landscape of his youth, Gaita and Yael bought 60 hectares of farmland between Bendigo and Ballarat and built a straw-bale house on a slope dotted with huge granite boulders. They call the place Shalvah, Hebrew for tranquillity. (Born in Tel Aviv, Yael taught Hebrew and Jewish studies for years at Melbourne’s The King David School.)

Gaita and his wife Yael’s straw-bale house in the bush, which they named Shalvah, a Hebrew word for “tranquillity”. Credit: Tony Maniaty

When the devastating fires swept through Victoria in 2019, Gaita was flying home from London. Upon arrival, he went straight to Shalvah. “You couldn’t see for smoke. I felt a need to express sorrow for the earth, the stuff from which things grow and into which everything eventually crumbles, even the noble granite boulders.”

Those grey monoliths, the eagles circling high above: to the philosopher all this matters. “Mortality from one perspective is just that you die. But having a degenerative disease has made my sense of being mortal inseparable from my being a creature of the earth.”

Shafts of bronze sun brush the plains below as we head inside. From his study window, he points to a tall gum. “I think of it as my friend in mortality because it’s dying. I wonder which of us will go first?” He pauses. “Lately, I’ve been thinking I will.”

That afternoon, we drive out to where his childhood shack used to be. At the end of a red-earth track, the only clues to its habitation 60 years ago are a
collapsed dairy shed, iron sheets and old timber beams. Romulus came here initially to work on the vast Cairn Curran Reservoir, among scores of nation-building projects that relied on post-war immigrants.

Romulus Gaita first came here from Romania to work on the Cairn Curran Reservoir.

Gaita stares at the dirt spaces where he ate, slept, did his homework; where Romulus did his best in tough circumstances to keep the boy going, and not fall into disrepair like the world around him. Silently we sift through shards of pottery, bent utensils. I find a Bushells Turkish Coffee jar, the same as my father used. Greeks and Romanians; all were dubbed “New Australians” without cultural distinction, with all the baggage and subtle contempt that implied. “Come on,” says Gaita, pointing up a slope. “I’ll show you the Lillies’ place. They owned the property.”

We trudge for 20 minutes through wheat stubble and reach the once-glorious house, now a stone wreck, and break into a sun-filled kitchen, strewn with rat faeces and cobwebs. The décor is 1950s modern, pink and lime, the latest in steel sinks filled now with filthy plates and cups. Back then, the kitchen and the Lillie women offered a generous refuge. Now the floorboards creak and break under our feet; time abandoned the place years ago. Gaita looks around, searching for memories. “It seemed much bigger as a kid,” he says, finally.

Gaita, aged 6, with his mother, Christine.

We find the key and enter his old school, Baringhup Primary, no longer in use. Abandoned textbooks sit on desks, covered in veils of dust. “Write something on the blackboard, Rai,” I suggest, hoping a phrase as deep as “To be, or not to be” might result. Instead, in chalk he scrawls: “Elvis: Hero or Devil?”

Inevitably, it was sexual awakening that led Gaita to rock ‘n’ roll. “There was a girl, I was about 10, and she was about 11. She pulled me to the ground and lay on top of me, rubbing her groin into mine.” She had a little transistor radio and Elvis was singing Baby Let’s Play House. “I was completely electrified. I took her Elvis fan pictures, stuck them in an exercise pad and gave it a provocative title: Elvis Presley, Hero or Devil? My first book, a minor revolt against the adult world.”

The rebellious streak took on more serious tones: riding his father’s Bantam motorbike down country roads at 11, driving without a licence, attempted car theft. The kid was heading for trouble. Busted by a local cop, the young Gaita ended up before the children’s court: fined, but with no conviction recorded. Saved by literature, the force of big ideas. Traces of the rebel remain. In the ute, he’s playing early Elvis: All Shook Up.

Gaita visits his old school, Baringhup Primary. He recalls his first sexual awakening, aged about 10, while listening to Elvis’ Baby Let’s Play House. Credit: Tony Maniaty

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Cartoons portray philosophers as big brains on puny bodies, but roaming Shalvah under thinning blue skies, wielding a machete with accuracy on saplings of wattle considered a weed around these parts, Gaita displays the strength of an ox, his silver mane blowing in the high-country wind. He’s still muscular, proud of his looks and happy to be photographed in action. I’m not surprised when he tells me he once seriously considered a career as a mountain guide. (Climbing was an early passion; his conquests included Europe’s highest peak, Mont Blanc.) But the years have wings, he knows.

The wind whistles around us as kangaroos gather in shady corners. Here they are multiplying fast, and he can’t get rid of them, or the cactus growing from boulders, or the flocks of mynah birds scaring off the native species. To these and other annoyances, he’s resigned. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” he says. “I never feel lonely. I can be here at Shalvah for weeks without talking to anybody, except Yael.” He nods. “That’s how I grew up, of course.”

Perhaps because his mother was largely absent in his life, he still longs for her, a longing so deep, he wrote in After Romulus, published in 2010, “I cannot think of myself without it.” He shows me something he scribbled as a boy: Dear Mummy, How are you? Do you know when you are coming home? I am sitting in the sheering shed, riting this letter. It is very hot in the sun. Xx Raimond xxx.

Christine, Gaita’s mother, who was largely absent from his life.

The dread now is becoming an “angry old man”. Rare bouts of crankiness are directed at life’s mundane frustrations. In nearby Maryborough, served coffee that looks and tastes like watery mud, he fumes. It’s the only time I see Gaita angry. “I know I have deep failures,” he confesses. “In that sense, I’m not happy with myself. I wish I was a better person – kinder, more thoughtful, sometimes less selfish …”

Should we as humans be fearless in our thoughts, able to think anything, no matter how bad? Is there good in every human being, even those who do evil? Reflecting on questions like these is the stuff of Gaita’s often provocative writings, and the public lectures he organised in Melbourne for 20 years. “What one should affirm,” he declares as he cooks a country dinner at Shalvah, “is that no human should ever, no matter how terrible their deeds, be treated like vermin. I mean, every human being is owed unconditional respect.”

“I know I have deep failures. In that sense, I’m not happy with myself. I wish I was a better person – kinder, more thoughtful.”

High among his concerns is the plight of Indigenous Australians (the idea of even linking the two words is problematic for him). With moves towards an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, I wonder if he believes any agreement is likely. His response is delivered as formally and precisely as if he’s giving a speech, out here in the bush. “If non-Indigenous Australians are to fully understand the significance of the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of their lands, they might have to recognise that, if there’s to be some expression of a political fellowship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, it might not take the form of ‘we Australians’.”

You mean about agreeing on the name “Australia”?

“You can see how far away from that we are if you just try to debate Australia Day,” he says. “If treaties were to be negotiated now, they’d be so far from a full recognition of any significance of the dispossession that they could hardly be adequate treaties.”

A cultural bridge that could be impossible?

“It’s a conversation with outcomes nobody can foresee, that might deploy concepts that at the moment don’t exist. People will say, ‘We gave you the Treaty. What more do you want? Now take your place …’ But it seems to me utterly absurd, for example, that Indigenous peoples are not consulted on who comes to this country.

“If there was a Treaty, a Voice to Parliament, one of the main things would be for them to be able to say, ‘We have a distinctive voice in determining who comes to this country.’ About refugees, for example. The idea that Indigenous people should have no greater say on immigration policy than some powerful lobby group or bureaucrats in Canberra strikes me as absurd.”

He pauses. “Yes, I’d be very sympathetic to the idea that Aboriginal peoples have certain vetoes in regard to immigration policies.”

“No human should ever, no matter how terrible their deeds, be treated like vermin,” says Gaita. “I mean, every human being is owed unconditional respect.”Credit: Tony Maniaty

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Sunrise at Shalvah: before us is rolling landscape, Gaita’s “country” that needs caring for. I wonder if the Parkinson’s is affecting his ability to run the property. “Not yet, and recently in a moment of exuberant optimism, I bought a generator with a four-year guarantee.”

He shrugs. “People can have Parkinson’s for 10 or 15, even 20 years. But I think it’s progressing quickly in me. Some days I feel okay, other times not.” With further probing, it turns out Gaita has a string of life-threatening ailments, all of which he regards with detached amusement. “I had a heart attack in early 2019. It had its comic aspects actually – I got up feeling crook, but I had an optometrist’s appointment, and I said to Yael that after that I’d drive to Shalvah to gather firewood.

“She said, ‘Go and see a doctor!’ So, outside the optometrist’s, I phoned my cardiologist, who said: ‘Get straight into Emergency.’ And I thought, ‘Well, shit, I’m here, I might as well get my glasses.’ And the optometrist said, ‘How are you?’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay, but I’ve got to go to Emergency with my heart.’ He said, ‘You must be joking,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not joking. Let’s get on with it, I haven’t got much time.’ And I went to Emergency and they said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’ ”

He delights in telling me this story, if only to illustrate his down-to-earth credentials as mortality approaches. “One artery was 100 per cent blocked, another one 90 per cent blocked. But the one that was 100 per cent had established a bypass of its own, which is why I’m not dead. I have a benign attitude to my heart.”

Earlier he suffered a stroke; more recently a pacemaker was installed. “Because Parkinson’s has a nasty end, I’m hoping my heart might come to the rescue.”

And on the mental side? Writing, and thinking?

“Yes, the writing’s slowed down. For my birthday last year, I let it be known to my family that I would quite like a really good fountain pen. I needed something thick to grip just so I can write.” They all chipped in and bought him a Montblanc, the size of a Cuban cigar. Gaita laughs at the comparison. “It’s so expensive, you have to work out who you’re going to leave it to in your will.”

Above all, it’s the psychological effect of Parkinson’s that he fears: its impact on his mind, his ability to make clear judgments. He accepts his “marbles” will progressively lose their edge. “I’ll need to increase the medication; the side effects can make me anxious, and then perhaps I won’t be able to trust my judgment, or my ear for tone. Instead of writing with an authentic voice, I’ll just become kitschy – or yield to pathos, have a tin ear for irony. If that happens, I may as well just stop writing.”

Gaita, 14, with his father Romulus in 1960 on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In the grip of friendship, we’re talking about Camus and the “cruel mathematics” of death, the unavoidable outcome for us all. But our lives are all about talking, our curiosity about what makes people behave the way they do. Tell me, I ask, was Romulus a believer?

“My father believed in a God to whom he prayed,” Gaita says. “I don’t think he thought much about the complexities of it. He was prone to superstition but he didn’t see an afterlife as in Heaven and Hell. Or coming back as a grasshopper ...”

Does he think he’ll come back as a grasshopper? He laughs heartily. “Socrates told the judges who condemned him to death that he hoped to be doing in the next life exactly what he did in this one – putting himself and others to the question concerning how one should live. For me, there is no afterlife …”

It’s a view forged by decades of observing, reflecting on and writing acutely about the human experience. Will he keep going, clutching that chunky new pen? With another two books in the pipeline – a volume of essays, and portraits of people who’ve mattered greatly to him – he’s asked his friend, La Trobe emeritus professor and vice-chancellor’s fellow Robert Manne, to look out for any loss of capacity for judgment in his writing. “I’ve told him to be ruthless and not spare me his opinion. And if my judgment goes, I’ll stop, absolutely.”

In all my conversations with Gaita, fallibility is a big theme. Right now, he’s a climber on a rock-face, clinging to the time he has left; thinking about when that inevitable moment comes, when the words in his head stop making sense. “I mean,” he says, “it’s not as if I can lower my sights.”

Even a phrase as simple as that carries his philosophy. You only live once, Rai Gaita is telling me, but if you do it well, with truth and dignity, with faith in a
common humanity and a deep love of the world, once is more than enough.

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