ony: “And it’s not the usual Holocaust horror. I’ve never heard a story like it. The luck that followed my father was unbelievable, specially since he took great risks. But my new play also ties in with my life, with the conflict between us. I’m not at all comfortable, making it public. I feel vulnerable.”

LSJ: “Are you using your real names?”

Tony: “Yes. The two characters are Max and Tony Laumberg, father and son. Max is a doctor and Tony’s a lawyer/writer. Tony’s interviewing his father.”

LSJ: “What kind of personal stuff is embarrassing you? After all, Jewish writers have a patent pending on the subject of dysfunctional families”.

Father-son conflict, he says. Laumberg senior lived till he was 89 and his son’s dual careers grow daily more brilliant. So the conflict could hardly have been too destructive.

But there was suffering. “My father was ultra-conservative. That had a huge impact on my life. It made me risk-averse. I had been very unhappy as an employed solicitor yet I couldn’t take the plunge to go into sole practice. When my father discovered how desperate I was feeling, he decided to tell me his story. To my amazement I discovered that during the German occupation of Poland he took the most terrific risks – and got away with them.”

Inspired by this new role model his father had become, Laumberg not only set up his legal practice at home but embarked on a second career as a dramatist.

“Hearing my father’s story had made me a lucky one too.

“This whole project has been a tribute to him. I taped a lot of interviews with him a few years before he passed away.
He knew I was a writer and that I would do something with the material, but it’s taken me some time to work out quite what to do with it.”
Having read the script, LSJ can confirm that Tony Laumberg’s father was blessed with chutzpah which sometimes charmed people originally intent on killing him into letting him go, and in other instances helped him to escape by centimetres, hands about to seize hold of him. Where others around him were taken off to certain death, he would be miraculously released.

But of course there’s a growing sense of desperation in lucky Max: when is this amazing luck going to run out? It can’t last forever.
That worry, and the rapid succession of menacing events that demand and attract luck, maintain the tension in the play.

”That kind of dedication would certainly have won approval from Max Laumberg, whose luck was significantly linked to his tenacity. It took him ten years to gain admission to a medical school in Poland, where a quota system ensured only a handful of positions were open to Jewish applicants. Luckily he managed to graduate as a doctor the day before German tanks rolled into Poland.

On arriving in Brisbane in 1947 Max determined to resume his medical career, but Queensland had no medical school. So he applied to Sydney University and four years later was again a doctor.”

“It will be very emotional for Mum, seeing the play,” says Tony Laumberg.
He recalls having been amazed to discover that his parents had had a “Holocaust” marriage, one of the wartime unions young people, fearful of dying any minute, often rushed into when their world was collapsing around them.

“They divorced when I was seven, but always remained friends.”
“And have you had any good luck, yourself, lately?” asked LSJ.
Laumberg beams: “Last year I had two big matters. Believe me any solicitor knows how lucky that is. Two big matters in one year. It was my tenth year in sole practice and my best.”

So far Laumberg’s characters have been Anglos, Greeks and Jews. His next big project, a commissioned screenplay, will be even more ethnic: its subject is Australian soccer.

The Lucky One “a true story about hope, humanity and humour” will run at the Parade Studio, NIDA, 215 Anzac Parade, Kensington, from 3 to 28 March.

For bookings phone 9645 1611 or visit www.mca tix.com.
As usual, mentioning the password ‘lawyer’ will produce four tickets for the price of three. •

Mary Rose Liverani

Law Society Journal
March 2004