Ross Greenwood

Richard Hockey, born Richard Hokeidonian, would have been so proud when, in his final year, he heard stories of his grandchildren creating chaos in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C.

He would have been just as proud to discover that the Humpty Dumpty Foundation has donated the Kanmed Baby Warmer to the Royal North Shore Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in his memory.

As a baby born in Bethlehem, Richard Hockey survived war and civil strife before he landed in Australia at 21, setting up a deli in Bondi before eventually settling on Sydney’s North Shore.

It was here that he found peace, happiness and success with his wife Beverley, four children and a self-named real estate business that prospered.

Witnessing in 2016, his third son — and some of his grandchildren — welcomed into the White House by the then President Barack Obama, was an incredible finale to a lifetime’s journey for Richard Hockey. As Joe Hockey himself said of Richard, “My father has been my lifetime hero. He speaks six languages and has skills I haven’t got.”

Earlier this year at a Humpty event, Joe Hockey chatted about his time in Washington as Ambassador and Australia’s relationship with America. Joe was involved in many high-level meetings during his time in the US, but it would have been the personal recollections, rather than political ones, that would have made Richard Hockey smile the most. One of Joe’s favourite anecdotes involved a tense moment with his son and the President.

“Anyway, the bottom line was President Obama opened the door, and I knew President Obama from the G20, and he said, ‘Joe, it’s great to see you come in.’ We had the official photo taken and then he asked each of the kids a question.

“He asked Xavier, ‘What do you want to see in the United States?’ Xavier said, ‘I’m really nervous about guns. I hope you can get rid of guns.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s great. Yeah, it’s a real problem here.’

“He then said to Adelaide, ‘What do you think?’ and she said, ‘Well, I really hope we don’t have a war.’ To which he said, ‘Yeah, I really hope so too Adelaide, and you know that we want peace.’

“And then there’s Iggy, who is six. Obama says, ‘What do you hope to get out of America?’ He says, ‘I want to be black.’

“Oh my God,” was Joe’s internal reaction.

“President Obama looks at me and says, ‘Okay, why is that Iggy?’ And Iggy says, ‘Because I want to jump really high in basketball.’ Thank God, right? He said, ‘You’ve got a great family, Joe.’ I said, ‘Yeah. This is my first family, Mr. President.”

But this is one of the great skills of Joe Hockey, to be able to tell an important story about our relationship with America, while at the same time humanising it. To make it real.

He noted, in this conversation, that America is the biggest investor in Australia “by far”, that Australians are embedded with the US’s 16 security agencies, as Americans are embedded in ours, that of 15 potential terrorist attacks on Australians, 12 of them were thwarted with the help of US assistance.

He says the special bond between Americans and Australians can be traced back to one event; oddly, in France played out brutally over two hours in 1918. That was the Battle of Hemel, a part of the bloody Somme campaign on the Western Front in the First World War. As Joe Hockey puts it, a British commander came to General Monash and said, “You have to take Hemel.” Monash argued that he didn’t have enough troops, so the British commander gave him 600 American soldiers who were considered to be inexperienced and poorly trained. So, Monash took the Americans and trained them alongside the Australians. As Hockey puts it, they got on. “I think one of the things that united them was we all hated the British. And it’s a bit of history of both sides,” he joked.

But eventually, Monash said he was ready to take Hemel, but the American General Pershing heard about this and protested that US troops would not fight under a foreign general. “We never have; we never will.”

At which point, “They started peeling off their uniforms and putting on Australian infantry uniforms. They said we’re not going to abandon you now. So Pershing gave in and gave two companies to Monash and they went into battle. And they turned the First World War. The Battle of Hemel, it’s a great story.”

And, as Hockey says: “We’re the only nation in the world who fought side-by-side with them in every single major conflict.”