This was published 7 months ago
From Victoria’s troublemaker to India’s hero
By Alex Crowe
Arnold Dix apologises to Age photographer Paul Jeffers for his look. He is a Kmart man, he says.
We’re in the Melbourne laneway besides West Lake Restaurant and Dix is having his portrait taken. It’s not one of the more fancy Chinatown restaurants, but it’s much more appealing than Burger King, Dix’s first suggestion for lunch (a joke, I think).
Manager Raymond Foh is at the front door inviting people in, and plenty of people are accepting. It’s midday and the ground floor of the two-storey restaurant is almost full.
Arnold Dix has been heading to Little Bourke Street for more than 20 years to eat at West Lake Restaurant. Credit: Paul Jeffers
Foh tells me that’s normal; on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays he serves lunch and then works through the afternoon until the last food order comes in at 2.30am. And Sunday? Staff are run off their feet all day serving yum cha to regulars packed inside as hungry crowds queue down Little Bourke Street, he says.
Formal photo done, Foh ushers us to our seats to begin selecting a few things to start: steamed ginger prawn dumplings, barbecue pork and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce.
From the kitchen, owner Mr Chen sends out trays of steaming dishes that wait staff roll past our table on trolleys. Dix tells me some of them have been working here for more than 20 years – almost as long as he’s been a regular diner.
The tunnel expert from Monbulk, whose role in the rescue of 41 workers trapped in a Himalayan mountain last year earned him fame around the world and fandom in India, first ate at West Lake as a young barrister. He was introduced to the Chinatown stalwart by a senior colleague who had taken his young trainees out to celebrate passing the bar exam.
Dix describes it as the closest thing you will get to a family restaurant in the middle of the city.
“In a world that’s crazy, it’s a bit of a sanctuary,” Dix says as our first dish – prawn steamed dumplings – arrives.
Returning to somewhere familiar is unsurprising for a man who has travelled to more countries than he can recount and spent just 11 weeks in Australia last year. As a child, Dix lived in three jurisdictions and averaged a new school every 12 months before finishing primary.
Born to a father who had emigrated from New Zealand as a used-car salesman (“probably with people chasing him for money”) and a mother who had graduated from Melbourne’s Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy, Dix and his brother were moved around when his parents became publicans. First in Melbourne, then Benalla and Jindabyne, before returning to the city.
Arnold Dix (left) travelled to India to spearhead a successful rescue of 41 workers in the Himalayas.
Dix says his parents got into the hotel industry because it combined their skills: his father was a good drinker and his mother was good at everything else.
“Mum was cleaning, cooking and sort of ‘mum’, and dad was drinking, playing the trumpet – I think he played the organ as well,” Dix says.
“I remember him doing Louis Armstrong impersonations actually quite well, especially if he’d had a few sherbets. He was an excellent role model for how not to behave.”
Dix worked in pubs from the time he could wipe a table, and he would wait floors again if he had to.
Arnold Dix became a celebrity in India after safely returning the workers to their families.Credit: Supplied
“I’ve always felt that I have to serve; it’s sort of in my DNA. So if someone asks me to do a job for them, I’m serving them. Whether it’s a beer or whether it’s a human rescue, it still sort of activates the same part in me.
“I’m watching the staff here in this restaurant. I’m watching how they’re attending the tables – I know they’ve got a bottleneck out there on the way to the toilets – because I did it.”
We take the opportunity to take a plate of fried calamari off their hands, and a few minutes later, a steamed rice-noodle dish before it goes rolling past.
Dix and his brother were often left unsupervised when they weren’t working alongside their parents in a pub, and they got away with a fair bit, he says.
Of his brother, Colin, Dix says: “I don’t know if he’s a criminal or just naughty. He did things like sneak recording equipment into prison to record Chopper Read.”
His late brother, I find out later, was the second half of a two-man band with the Melbourne mobster and kept the Blue Flames alive by recording the convicted criminal’s musings from inside Risdon prison.
Dix says he was a bit of a loner as a child, moving around a lot and with a home life other children’s mums considered unsavoury, and flew under the radar until about grade 5.
“I remember being brought into the headmaster’s office, and there was some specialist of child education or psychology, plus the headmaster, my room teacher, someone else, I can still see them,” he says.
Dix says it was during a period he’d been spending a lot of time thinking about how deep space missions could have enough fuel. Lasers were a big deal then, so he had been thinking about them too.
“I was wondering whether I could combine lasers, and some sort of propulsion system,” he says.
“I remember I told them about this. I remember them looking at me going, ‘Oh, shit.’”
The meeting at the school in Canberra was enough to push Dix’s parents to seek some stability for their children back in Melbourne.
”I’m reliably informed by my mum that basically she blackmailed my dad and said, ‘If you want me to work like I do, like a slave, you have to give these kids some education.‘“
The barbeque pork at West Lake Restaurant in Little Bourke Street. Credit: Paul Jeffers
Dix was a teenager at Melbourne’s prestigious Haileybury school when his parents surprised him with a sister. Sixteen years his junior, Helena Dix, is now an opera singer awarded a fellowship by the Royal Academy of Music.
Divina Dix at home in Monbulk.
Dix says of his parents: “They came to Melbourne, and they got the Albion Charles hotel in Northcote and then the Hampton Hotel, then the Riversdale Hotel, and the Black Prince on Chapel Street, Prahran and the Court Jester – but they got divorced in between all that.”
A teetotaller who skipped his party phase, Dix finished a science degree, with post graduate research on the impact of Ranger Uranium Mine on the Kakadu National Park. The science and engineering background supported the later law degree that established him as a serial Victorian government troublemaker. He has subsequently undertaken professorships in engineering both in Australia and overseas.
“In the Kennett days, they were putting through these infrastructure projects and I would put through – I would say – very learned arguments that no one had thought about, not based on law but based on science and engineering,” he says. “It would catch everyone off guard and delay major projects.”
Under the Baillieu government, Dix lobbied for the scrapping of the East West Link and then led a campaign against Daniel Andrews’ attempts to avoid paying for it.
“My understanding, and it’s been corroborated, is that there was a meeting at a very high level in the state, in Victoria, and they decided it would be a good idea that the state employ me,” Dix says.
He was a coronial specialist during the investigation into the Burnley Tunnel fire that killed three men and put another in prison, while advising on an investigation into Lakanal House, which at the time was Britain’s worst tower block fire.
Studying disasters has taught him that people don’t usually act how they are supposed to in emergencies, Dix says. Since the Burnley tragedy, he has been involved in running simulated emergencies in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel to better inform infrastructure design and how best to stop people dying when things go wrong.
“We learn that we want to really communicate, not with everybody, but with the few people in the group who show leadership because mostly people follow,” he says.
From investigating 9/11 (“I really struggled with how people could kill people they didn’t know”) to being imprisoned in Qatar (“I had to go through the process of signing a confession”), Dix has spent much of his working life abroad, planning for or responding to disasters. Most of which don’t end like the Indian rescue.
Dix has three adult children from his first marriage – Sam, 32, who has recently moved into the home in Monbulk, Hannah, 30, an engineer who is working on the West Gate and Edward, 27, who as fate would have it “is currently in love with and planning to marry an Indian girl”.
He became a stepfather to 16-year-old Trish Dix after his first 23-year marriage ended. He met Divina Dix, a safety officer from the Philippines, while working alongside her in Qatar.
Arnold Dix won the hearts of Indians when he got a blessing at a local temple.
“In a technical sense, that’s an arranged marriage, because my daughter arranged it,” he said.
In an attempt to make up for being away so much, Dix says he often takes his children to work. Hannah was with him in Qatar when she decided he should be dating and, like a true engineer, used an Excel spreadsheet to find him a partner.
“She was right – we got on really, really well and we got married, and I’ve never been happier,” he says.
Dix wore Hannah’s shoes during the Indian rescue after grabbing them by accident when he decided on a whim to take his emergency gear on a planned trip to Europe.
“My daughter is the same age as the kids who were trapped on the other side, so it was like a reminder to me that other people’s children are there,” he says. “My feet are wrecked because of it.”
Dix was in Slovenia when he got the call to head to India. He says that by the time he was helicoptered to the site of the landslide everyone was “a bit depressed”.
“When I arrived on the 19th, everything else had failed. There was a little air pipe that they were feeding lentils and medicine and things down. The horizontal drill to put in a new lifeline had failed.
“All of us who work underground know there’s a pretty thin line between life and death. These guys aren’t stupid. They know that there had been a pretty major collapse. And they knew that normally this ends not well.”
Dix won the respect of the men he would be working alongside and the hearts of Indian families watching every update of the rescue by heading straight to a local temple to say a prayer for the men trapped inside the tunnel.
Despite seeing very quickly how grave the situation was, Dix says he kept those thoughts quiet.
“I felt that we were going to do this so long as we kept focused and steady. Normally people are dead, but actually no one was hurt. I’d never had this before. It’s like going to the casino: the house is in my favour at the moment.”
It paid off – all 41 workers were recovered uninjured on November 29 – after rescuers dug a tunnel by hand to remove rocks and rubble and inch towards the trapped workers.
Arnold Dix won the hearts of people in India when he got a blessing at a local temple.
Dix says the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel, part of an ambitious project aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through a road network, had been planned with the best intentions.
An investigation into whether the 17-day ordeal could have been prevented is under way, which Dix says he could be involved in. An audit of 29 other tunnels being built across the country is also being conducted by the national highways authority of India.
“I’m not so interested in blaming anyone; I do that in my day job as a lawyer,” Dix says. “It’s like when the music stops, someone is caught holding the package. Everyone blames them, and we all feel better because someone’s in prison.
“It’s no surprise that the Himalayan mountain is difficult, but in this case the mountain overwhelmed us. We have to understand how that could possibly happen.”
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