Old chefs never retire, they just move to Sydney

In Australia last week for a few days of cool air, to find Sydney as pleasant as ever. We had chosen a hotel within walking distance of Darling Harbour, Chinatown and the Central Station. The first to provide some modern tourist fare; the second to ensure a good, late breakfast; the last so we could easily visit taitai's uncle in suburban Ashfield.

Uncle Ping left Kowloon City for Australia at the end of the 1950s to study accountancy. He got his qualifications in Sydney and a wife from Melbourne but not a job, Australia then being less welcoming to Chinese immigrants than nowadays. So he became a cook.

For many years he ran the Ping Sun restaurant in Ballina, a coastal resort town in northern New South Wales. There he became a pillar of the local community and his two sons had an idyllic upbringing in a bungalow with a big garden next to a wide river, the likes of which you don’t find in Kowloon.

But at heart he was still a city lad. On occasional returns to Hong Kong he would talk of bringing the family here so the boys could learn Chinese. That didn’t happen, not least because the boys (with a European mother) were ardent Aussies.

Now the restaurant is rented out to newer Chinese Australians and Uncle Ping and family are back in Sydney. He has another bungalow with more rooms and a larger kitchen but a smaller garden and no river. His boys have their own places nearby and the shopping is better. The faces are predominantly oriental too, Ashfield and next-stop Burwood being districts favoured by the Chinese diaspora.

Taitai was eager to show off her culinary skills to her uncle. After our first visit to the Ping Sun restaurant in 1987 she his example convinced her that the best way to get into Australia should calamity strike in Hong Kong was to become a chef: she took a course, acquired a certificate and had her picture taken wearing a tall white hat. After careful selection of fresh fish and vegetables in the local stores, she cooked up a memorable dinner for us. Uncle Ping was allowed to do the fruit salad.

Uncle's only complaint is that, now that he has finished doing up the Sydney bungalow, he cannot find a job. "But at your age you should be retired!" I protested. Then I remembered that Chinese people never retire; even in old age they describe themselves as unemployed.
They way things are going, it’s an attitude the rest of the world might have to emulate.

Itchy feet

Someone who hardly lacks that attitude is my old friend and colleague, Andrew Halkyard. Andy recently withdrew, I dare not say retired, from Hong Kong to Sydney. On our visit we looked him and his wife Alisa up in Rozelle, the pleasant suburb that shares with Balmain a peninsula jutting into the middle reaches of the harbour.

Andy beat me to Hong Kong by a few days in 1981. He was initially a revenue man but by the middle of the decade had left the government for HKU to teach, naturally, revenue law. For the next 24 years he was a mainstay of the Department of Professional Legal Education, an active teacher, lecturer, author, sportsman, visitor to the mainland, and chairman of the Board of Review.

For a couple of years before basing himself back in Australia Andy split his time between there, Hong Kong and the rest of the world. So much so that he defied the taxman’s idea that everyone has an ordinary residence.

The Halkyards' residence in Roselle is far from ordinary: a spacious lowrise second floor flat full of Chinese things with swimming pool in front and clear view of the islands in the harbour. But somehow I think Andy is already getting itchy feet. He is talking about his two planned visits to Hong Kong next year. I suspect he will be more successful than Uncle Ping in returning to these shores.

You don’t have to be Einstein, but it helps

The debate about open justice is usually confined to arguments about hearings being open to the public. But there is more to it than that. It has long struck me as anomalous that a statement of claim endorsed on a writ is available for all to see, yet if the claim is filed separately from the writ, its contents are closed. Strange too that the allegations in a statement of claim can be published by the press but the response in the defence may not be. This leads to one side only having its complaints publicised.

In Australia the legal profession is having a debate about the revelation of the contents of pleadings to the public. At a directions hearing in Sydney early in August a judge astonished the lawyers by proposing that the contents of all the pleadings be made public. They resisited but succeeded in having only one paragraph -- the most interesting one – kept confidential. Mr Justice Einstein had evidently taken seriously all the propaganda about open justice.

It’s a fair point that if the parties are to have recourse to public justice, their dispute should be open to the public. If they want privacy, there is always arbitration or mediation.

Malcolm Merry is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong and a Hong Kong barrister. He is the author of Hong Kong Tenancy Law (4th ed, LexisNexis 2003) and co-author (with Paul Kent) of Building Management in Hong Kong (2nd ed, LexisNexis 2008).