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Richard Woolcott: An exemplary envoy
JP “You’re Muslim?” I nodded
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JP “You’re Muslim?”
I nodded.
“Then I have the finest Australian apple juice for you. I’ll have white wine.”
Richard Woolcott thus displayed considerable thoughtfulness when offering me drinks.
Woolcott was Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia from 1975 to 1978, a testing time in Indonesian-Australian bilateral relations because of the situation in then East Timor.
He retired from the diplomatic service in 1992 and now lives in Sydney. The 83-year-old now resides alone in a comfortable four-bedroom apartment. Birgit, his Danish-born wife of 56 years, died in 2008 from lung cancer.
Woolcott is arguably one of Australia’s more adept and accomplishment-driven foreign service officers who has advised prime ministers from Robert Menzies in the 1950s to Kevin Rudd 50 years later.
In his Indonesia posting, Woolcott perhaps ran the best-informed embassy in Jakarta and was able to read the policy mindset of then president Soeharto. He had access to Soeharto’s Cendana residence.
Woolcott’s first overseas posting was in Moscow in 1952-1954 at the time of Stalin’s death. His measured climb up the foreign service ladder led him to become ambassador in Indonesia and the United Nations (1982-1988).
Woolcott finally reached the top career rung at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as secretary of the department until he retired age 65 in 1992.
As secretary, he served as Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s emissary to promote Hawke’s initiative for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC).
The first APEC ministerial meeting took place in 1989.
Even though he is long retired, the government of the day still calls on him. In June 2008 Kevin Rudd appointed Woolcott as special envoy to pitch Rudd’s ideas for an Asia-Pacific community traveling to 21 countries in the region.
The essence of this is already in place in the East Asia Summit process. Woolcott gave an account of his special envoy mission in an address at the Australian National University in Canberra last November 3.
Over minced beef on lettuce and braised duck in piquant-flavored curry at a nearby Thai boutique resto called Anong, Woolcott asked a direct question. Who could be Indonesia’s president in 2014 (after Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ends his second and final five-year term)? A recent poll shows Sri Mulyani Indrawati is a favored frontrunner, I replied.
The competent, highly regarded, feisty finance minister left the SBY Cabinet in May to become a managing director of the World Bank after a row with the House of Representatives over the Bank Century fiasco. “I met Sri Mulyani. She likes her work. I think she does not want to leave Washington,” Woolcott said.
In 1986 the Woolcotts bought a two-room apartment in leafy Potts Point, a 10-minute walk from the King’s Cross train station.
They then purchased an adjacent apartment, knocked down the dividing wall and created a single, spacious, living, dining, and cooking area. The well-kept, clutter-free apartment is a gallery of artifacts, a living testimony of Woolcott’s worldwide travels. But a Bali feel dominates the interior design.
One big painting takes up an entire wall: The work of Ian Van Weiringen, a Dutch Australian who has lived in Sayan, near Ubud in central Bali, since 1967. Van Weiringen’s distinct, freestyle brush work is in the taksu tradition, the Balinese belief that work results from a person becoming a vehicle of the gods.
Another reminder of this island of gods in Woolcott’s home is a pair of ornate, exquisitely hand-carved wood-frame doors usually found at the entrance of Balinese homes.
In the former diplomat’s home, one door is placed at one wing of the apartment to the entrance of two bedrooms while the other is in the opposite wing facing the first door.
Apart from the large desk and book shelves behind it, one distinct feature of the décor is the conspicuous absence of a particular set of photos.
Usually active and retired ambassadors are proud to show pictures of themselves together with the movers and shakers of the day. One resident envoy in Jakarta has a big circle of such photos displayed on a central table in his reception room.
Most of the photos Woolcott displays in his home are of his family: him and his wife, their three grown-up children, Peter, Robert, and Anna, and their children. Woolcott has 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
One beautiful photo of Woolcott in a batik shirt and Birgit in a white short sleeve jacket and wide dark glasses stands out from the rest. Both, in sunny radiance, are sitting at their Jakarta residence in 1977.
A head-and-shoulders shot of Birgit in a head band covering her blonde hair is framed on Woolcott’s desk.
His apartment is at street level but the terrace at the back of it showed the house is on a cliff.
The view from the terrace is a fantastic sweep of the city skyline, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the twin icons of Sydney. A green knoll bulges out of the Opera House grounds, which is none other than the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Woolcott says he exercises by walking down the cliff and to the Opera House and bridge. “It’s a 20-minute walk,” he said.
The man wearing a blue dress shirt and dark slacks is relaxed. His dark hair has turned gray-white and is still neatly combed to the back. He is sound in mind and body. He speaks with a clear, soft voice. His eyes are bright and attentive. His smile is easy and infectious. He walks upright without a stoop and without a cane.
