He was standing at boat stop 14 in the shadow of Santa Maria della Salute, a rotund, slightly gnome-like figure with a shock of just-greying hair and a huge smile that managed to appear both joyous and mischievous. The year was 1974, the place Venice, and I was about to meet Bernard Hickey for the first time. This encounter would change my life.
My job was to teach for a term in the Australian literature course he had founded and, to begin with, personally funded at Ca’ Foscari, the University of Venice. He presented me with a timetable that would have kept a whole department flat out for months and we got down to work — though I was disconcerted to find him on edge, tense — a condition which I would soon discover was wholly uncharacteristic of him.
Slowly, over several pleasant dinners at the end of some rigorous classroom days, the truth emerged. The Sirocco — one of the more notorious of Mediterranean winds — had made an unseasonable appearance and was causing him agonising sinusitis. And the Australia Council, which had been providing critical financial support, seemed to be threatening to pull the plug. Since the Council was funding my visit, he told me, I would be required to write a report on the work going on at Ca’ Foscari, and on that report would probably depend the future of the whole enterprise! Such was my first, but not remotely my last experience of a Hickey bombshell.
But all was well. Within a few days I realised that the Prof, as I ever after called him, was a brilliant teacher whose students adored him; that the courses were exceptional, especially given the difficulties of language, acquiring texts and finding reference material; that my impossible schedule transformed itself into a demanding but comfortable rhythm by virtue of subtle metamorphoses known only to Italians; and that Hickey himself was a cornucopia of ideas, allusions, amazing erudition, innovation, cheek, daring and sheer old-fashioned pizzazz.
In Venice he was an institution. When we walked through the Venetian campi or along a canal or a rio terra he would be greeted constantly by passers-by and shopkeepers standing at their doorways. Waiters and chefs would call out from their restaurants and pizzerias, "Buongiorno Professore". Bar keepers would wave him in for a drink — a grappa or un’ombre di bianco — and since