Back when he used to bore in on opponents and pummel them into submission his fans called him “Hammering Henry”, “the Miniature Freight Car” and “the Hustling Hebrew”. At 68 years of age, Henry Nissen is still hustling, still hammering away. He has to. Only now the streets are his arena and, while Melburnians need his help, Nissen feels compelled to give it.
Thirty-five years as a social worker caring for Melbourne’s most vulnerable have left Nissen with an Order of Australia and plenty of esteem in the local community. Yet for that work and his glittering athletic career, he is perhaps not feted with the lasting acclaim that might have come were it football or cricket and not boxing at which he’d excelled. In Melbourne’s close-knit pugilist fraternity he is an adored and revered hall of famer and his family name is the stuff of legend.
“I was always happiest when I was helping people rather than bashing them,” Nissen says with a hearty laugh when he talks to Guardian Australia of his years serving the local community. “I figured that was the way to go.”
In the 1970s the Australian flyweight champion regularly dazzled crowds and looked well set for a world title fight. He and his identical twin, Leon, were household names back then – the pint-sized Jewish-Australian scrappers who had ducked into Mick and Peter Read’s back alley gym as scrawny, 14-year-old neighbourhood easybeats from postwar Carlton in Melbourne’s north and strode confidently back out on to the streets as sporting champions.
“Dad, come quickly,” Peter Read had said the first time Leon followed his brother down for some self-defence training to counter the local louts who picked on him. “There’s two of them!”
Nothing came easy. “We always struggled to have things,” Nissen once said, “and it was difficult for my parents to cope with everything.” The strain of five children, several miscarriages and the horrors of war weighed heavily on Nissen’s mother, Sonia, periodically institutionalised for most of her life after the family emigrated to Australia.
Back then, as father, Simche, worked day and night as a machinist, the Nissen brood moved constantly between the family home on Amess Street in Carlton, various children’s homes and foster care, where they might be separated from their parents for up to six months at a time. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m a Jewish boy living with a Methodist priest. What am I doing?’’ Leon Nissen says of their disjointed family life. “It threw me around a bit. But that made us the people we are today: loving, caring and willing to help others.”
To that end 2016 has been something of a renaissance for the Nissens after the publication of The Fighter, Arnold Zable’s moving work of creative nonfiction, which traces the brothers from their birth as Henry and Leon Nissenbaum in the displaced-person’s camp outside the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, through their arrival in Melbourne’s working-class inner north of the early 1950s and the horrors endured in the aftermath of the Holocaust by their mother.
Zable writes evocatively of “the rage that courses through the single-fronted cottage” and “the woman bereft, in terror of shadows and ghosts”, painting the picture of children heartbreakingly attuned to their mother’s fragile equilibrium, ever alert for the signs that family life is beginning to splinter and fray.
Father Bob Maguire, with whom Nissen has worked for decades helping Melbourne’s most disadvantaged, has said his friend and longtime colleague can empathise with anyone down on their luck because he himself “knows the dark side” of life.
“We’ve had that broken family upbringing,” is how Henry puts it. “When things were good and we were all back at home when Mum got better, and we were all reunited and living as a normal family again, it was good. In the times when it wasn’t good it was terrible.”
Father Bob calls Henry “the people whisperer” and in that role he has worked for love not money, which stopped well over a decade ago when the meagre wage for his social worker role disappeared and Father Bob found him a job on the docks. Nissen remained until three months ago, happily pulling night shifts and doing dangerous physical labour for to subsidise his work on Melbourne’s streets, often within sight of Festival Hall, whose walls once rattled with the fight-night chant “Nissen! Nissen! Nissen!”.
Twenty years on, the wharves came with just as many risks as the fight game. Nissen once fell three metres between the wharf and the hull of a boat, crashing into the water and fracturing his shoulder. The foreman who bravely lowered a ladder into the water and pulled Nissen to safety was himself killed a year later – crushed between two containers before falling 30 metres head first on to a steel floor.
Now, at an age at which most of his contemporaries are settling into relaxed rounds of golf and idle hours of sudoku, Nissen pounds the pavement on his regular rounds, handing out meals and organising crisis accommodation. He reckons he’ll do it until the day he dies, continuing to make countless appearances in court, where he vouches for luckless and forgotten people, talking them into second chances from judges who know Henry like a colleague.
A life devoted to others hasn’t come without its costs. Leon Nissen, who speaks glowingly of his brother’s longtime role as Father Bob’s right-hand man (“Behind every good Catholic is a good Jewish man,” he says, laughing), adds that Henry’s own family has suffered most for his work.
“He’s helped the rest of the world but he couldn’t always help his own family,” Leon says. “That’s the sad part of it. His wife and kids grew up, not strangers, because he loves them very much and they love him, but he couldn’t devote enough attention to his family because he was helping the rest of the world. I used to say to him, ‘Henry, you don’t have to go looking for street kids, I’ve got two at home and I need you to chat to them.’”
Once Leon “bollocked” his brother for neglecting family duties and Henry pointed immediately to a headline in that day’s newspaper – a young man who had overdosed after another crisis call to Henry hadn’t come through. For once he’d turned off his always-buzzing mobile phone. “Henry took it as a life-and-death situation through all of them and as a result he’s spent all of his life helping these people and giving them his all,” his brother says. “But it’s not easy.”
Leon now works in insurance. Though he is cut from the same cloth as his brother and they remain close, he says their paths since their boxing careers ended reflect the subtle differences in their character. “Henry is very tolerant,” Leon says. “I could never do what he does because I can’t forgive. I would put them all in jail and throw away the key, but that’s not the right way. You can’t always judge everyone the same.”
As athletic champions, the twins were chalk and cheese. Leon had ring craft. He was a true boxer. Henry was a fighter. “Leon could move around better and box, whereas I just went in there to knock the hell out of them,” is how Henry puts it. “I finished the fight as quickly as I could. Leon was a much more skilful boxer, whereas I was more of a brutish type of fighter.”
At the peak of their renown they concurrently held the Australian title for the flyweight division in both professional and amateur ranks, an unprecedented feat. “The Nissen family had a monopoly,” Henry says, laughing. On account of work commitments and a mutual reluctance to fight against or hurt his brother, Leon never turned professional – a truly selfless gesture and a poignant insight into the love and respect the brothers share.
“For years later I felt something lacking but eventually I got used to it,” Leon says with no hint of jealousy. “I would have loved to have continued but it wasn’t to be. I just took it as fate, respected that I’d retired and focused on watching Henry.”
Rumours always lingered that the Nissens were fond of puling a switcheroo when it suited them, stepping in for one another in fights. “We won’t confirm or deny that one,” Henry says. “But our records aren’t exactly right because we didn’t always tell them what we were doing.”
Henry’s greatest victory was taking the Commonwealth title off Scotland’s John McClusky, a belt he eventually lost himself to “Big Jim” West, whose number he felt he’d had. A slew of state and national titles came too, and for Leon, a Commonwealth Games appearance in 1970.
There were no truly individual wins. When Henry claimed gold at the 1969 Maccabiah Games – the highlight of his amateur career – he did so raging against the treatment of his brother; Leon had been robbed by the judges in his semi-final so Henry came out swinging in his own fight, knocking out a taller, stronger opponent within two minutes in a flurry of angry blows. The gold medal bout was a walkover.
Henry’s great disappointment and regret is that he didn’t take a world title fight offered when he’d first cracked the top 10 in his division. He and the Reads – finally reaping some financial reward for the years of free training – thought he wasn’t quite ready. Two fights later he was ranked third in the world. Too great a risk to those above him, he couldn’t get a fight, so retired in 1974, disappointed but proud, with 16 wins from his 18 professional bouts.
The selfless work life that followed, Henry says, was the result of a simple but compelling need to give back. He sold his share of a burgeoning family empire (the Nissens had a chain of sportswear stores and Henry Nissen’s Jeans Joint outlets) before linking up with Father Bob. “There was a big void in my life and I thought, ‘What can I do now to fill that void’? I thought I’d spent so much time bashing people up that I’d like to try and help them and win back some good karma.
“All you can do is try and help and encourage people. You can’t force people to change their ways. I use friendship and encouragement and whatever I can to try and help them to change their ways. Unfortunately a lot of them die of drug overdoses and accidents. But there’s quite a few success stories too.”
Henry reckons his childhood as a small, bewildered Jewish boy being moved in and out of houses of different faiths gave him a worldliness and respect for other people that helps in his work. It also sent him on a spiritual quest in life and an ongoing journey to understanding fellow human beings more fully. He has studied theology and spiritualism, visiting the Vatican and Jerusalem. He lived on a kibbutz in Israel, studied faith healers in the Philippines and sat at the feet of gurus in India. Out-of-body and near-death experiences have also influenced him greatly.
“Just having that broken family upbringing and having been brought up in different families – some Jewish, some Christian – whatever the home you were taken to, whatever the way it was being run, we just went along with it,” he says. “I guess it was a way of learning and becoming more cultural.” The care he gives others is simply an extension of his upbringing and the lessons he learned from boxing. “I know what it’s like to be down and out.”
Decades after they won headlines and filled TV news bulletins, Henry and Leon Nissen are still finishing each other’s sentences. “Becoming a boxing champion made me feel better in myself because I’d achieved something, and I’d never achieved anything beforehand,” Henry says at one point. Leon finishes with a quick thought of his own, like a reflexive jab: “And self-esteem.”
Asked how he wants people to remember him, Henry doesn’t linger on the answer. “Just as a kind, caring person,” he says, thinking back for a moment to all the people he’s helped in life and parting with a message on their behalf. “I’ve learned one thing: while there’s life there’s hope. We’ve got to keep them alive until we can help them to improve.”
