Olivia Read Free Page A

become an academic instead. It must have been a difficult decision for him to make, but Olivia never once heard him express any regrets. Instead, she has fond memories of her father regularly singing along to and enthusiastically ‘conducting’ selections from his vast collection of 78rpm opera records, stacked near the family gramophone. To young Olivia it seemed her father was familiar with every opera known to man and that he knew every note. Brin’s record collection comprised mainly, but not entirely, classical music, but there was room for the odd lighter musical genre, including Tennessee Ernie Ford, best known for his 1955 US chart-topper ‘Sixteen Tons’.
    In church on Sundays, Olivia soon came to realise what a beautiful, strong and deep voice her father possessed when ranged against the vocal efforts of the rest of the choir and congregation. His powerful singing far outshone anyone else’s, she noted, even if it caused her a little embarrassment to think that perhaps he sang too loudly for everyone’s liking.
    Olivia’s main memories of early childhood are of walking around the Cambridge colleges and of family boat trips punting down the river Cam. Her early years were uneventful apart from a worrying few hours for her parents when she contrived at the age of eighteen months to swallow several medicine tablets she had spied on a bedroom table. When she rapidly became ill, she was rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped.
     
     
    Olivia was five years old when Irene and Brin decided to move their family to Australia, after Brin accepted a new post as dean of Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Olivia’s only recollection of the boat trip over from England is of her sadness and tears at somehow losing her favourite soft toy animal comforter, called Fluffy, somewhere along the way.
    A large lodge house went with Brin’s new post in Melbourne, and the family settled quickly and comfortably into their new life down under. From Olivia’s point of view, all that was missing from their new home was a few pets. From a very early age she had developed a love of animals and, after falling in love with a neighbour’s red setter she called Pauly-Orly, she was forever trying to bring home any stray four-legged animal she came across. ‘It was a big campus where we lived,’ she says, ‘and people used to dump unwanted animals there, half-drowned cats in sacks, greyhounds that couldn’t race. It was criminal.’ Unfortunately for Olivia, keeping pets wasn’t permitted on the university grounds and Olivia’s mother had little option other than to make her take the strays straight off to the ASPCA.
    When she was seven, Olivia showed an early determination to stand up for animal rights in the face of anything she perceived as cruelty. She was stung into action when she witnessed a man with a horse-drawn cart, which was used to pick up rubbish, beating his nag far too zealously. Without a thought, she shouted at him to stop and stepped forward and managed to wrench the whip out of the offender’s hand. She even threatened to report him if he didn’t leave the horse alone.
    Such a courageous stand on behalf of a dumb animal was a sign of steely resolve to come. In future years, Olivia would put her name, her time and her energy behind anti-cruelty campaigns on behalf of creatures great and small, from dolphins to cheetahs.
    Most notably, while at the peak of her post- Grease fame in 1978, she threatened to cancel a month-long tour of Japan unless Japanese fishermen agreed to stop slaughtering dolphins inadvertently caught in their tuna nets. Olivia was appalled that 1,500 dolphins had met their deaths in what she perceived to be such a callous and needless manner. ‘Thank goodness I didn’t see any of the pictures on television,’ she would shudder. ‘They would have made me ill.
    ‘Animals need some kind of protection whatever and wherever they are. I’m hoping that in Japan those who were looking