Mood:
lyricalTopic: culture
Sold for $47m .... this house in Vaucluse.
Photo: Louie Douvis
Well it takes all kinds.
In the last several months we have been noticing our cohort in the news. Yesterday (p3 Sydney Daily Telegraph) it was the rather beautiful kind hearted Marina Ritossa of tall slender Croatian extraction and wife of rich man Ivan Ritossa even back then in 1990-91. Marina started out in the local property section of multinational Baker & McKenzie lawyers same year as us in litigation. We remain eternally grateful for her helping carry a brutish bill of costs up Phillip St in 3 copies by 4 volumes we had to file by a deadline one Friday for senior partner Keith McConnell.
We won that one against a Hong Kong developer but the firm gave moi the flick soon after in the property crash of 91, while she is the rich patron of the Royal Flying Doctor Service today as well as purchaser with Ivan of a $47M pad in Vaucluse. Phew.
17 years back Marina knew all about how the "Title deeds" column in one of the property newspapers indicated who was on the way up and who was going down and now she's in the story herself.
Then there is Gordon Plath, class of 1989 ANU law school now manager of environmental litigation at the NSW Dept of Environment and Climate Change in charge of 15 or 20 bods after starting out in criminal prosecutions. He doesn't look any different to 20 years ago to his picture in the professional pages of the Weekend Australian Sept 13-14 08. Just hope Mr Plath is nailing the white collar polluters and rednecks according to his mandate (?).
Then there is Shane Barber, another lawyer starting out at Bakers in 1990 who turned up in the legal pages of the The Australian as some high power IP and technology lawyer as partner at firm Truman Hoyle. Nothing exceeds like success.
We wrote in our penultimate post about whipper snapper at 36 Kirsty Ruddock on her altruistic and acclaimed trajectory in the public eye as principal of the EDO - not strictly this writer's cohort but a contemporary of sorts.
Other sundry folks - Tom Baddeley from the ANU law school in the eighties on abc tv there in WA, or was now some Economic think tank, and handy Aussie Rules player too. We might even have noticed a relative Chris McLoughlin as reporter on abc Adelaide tv news last night.
Then there's the discovery of grandfather we never met Eric McLoughlin, journo, and confidant of Robert Menzies famous founder of the Liberal Party of Australia, not quite my politics but there you go. I do suspect we express alot of his genes - the good ones!?
Bete noire of HIH corporate criminals is another ANU lad Robert Beech Jones now at the Sydney Bar. Tragically we learned of high school contemporay Brendan Keilar's successful legal career in Melbourne only to hear of his foul murder.
Which in aggregate reminds of a collectivist radical academic in the USA who said it's hard sometimes in the hippie herbal food co-op when your peers are so financially successful and embraced by the Establishment and you are down in the humble grovel as undoubtely the SAM operation is. Yet it is the life we choose, and that's the point really that constantly reinforces our sense of self. We've done a few things so far and it ain't over yet!
Time stands still for no one so best to play the long game:
