My father, Jacob Goldstein, did not live to see himself become a Member of the Order of Australia this year for his services to cardiothoracic surgery – which is, I think, just how he would have wanted it. Dad worked in hospitals across Melbourne for over 40 years and led the cardiothoracic unit at Monash Medical Centre for seven years, where he helped train the next generation of heart surgeons, but he was humble about his achievements to the point of obfuscation, eschewing the title of doctor (a misnomer for surgeons in Australia anyway, until recently ) and sometimes describing himself as a “public servant” when asked what he did for a living (which was technically true). Jacob Goldstein with his daughter Elissa in 1992.
Although he was genuinely uninterested in accolades for himself, Dad loved reading about who’d gotten a “gong” – especially when they went to people he knew, which became more frequent in the last decade of his life. Twice a year, he’d pore over the list of names in The Age and the Australian Jewish News , taking equal interest in the big machers (Yiddish for “movers and shakers”) and the lifelong volunteers and community workers. What compelled him wasn’t the conferring of status, but the stories of the honourees who conjured lives of greatness in Australia seemingly out of nothing, many of them refugees and immigrants like him.
However, the very existence of the “gong” lists, with their hierarchies and abbreviations, always stru.