QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

A man keeping his own time

It reveals more than a little of the man when he says, “from the point of view of freedom of expression, it is very limited because you follow the conductor’s baton to the minutest second. The wage too was only one fifth of what I had been earning in Stuttgart, which also made things very difficult.” Dietrich resigned from the orchestra and did a typically Aussie thing – he ‘went Bush’ – to probe his psyche and try to uncover the secret of a happier life. He was was rescued from this existential cul-de-sac in 1990 by Helen Lancaster, who ran the Mackay branch of ‘The Con’. Helen invited him to start a string section there, so he formed a little chamber group, called ‘Lyrebird Ensemble’ which was subsidised by the Arts Council to travel and perform around North Queensland. Dietrich recalls one highlight when he played viola in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra and Warwick Adeney played the violin solo. Warwick is now the leader of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Financial strictures led Dietrich to re-audition for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Once more successful, he was able to rejoin the viola section, but his restless being continued to seek new outlets. He began selling strings to his colleagues and business gradually expanded to selling violins to the public from his garage. Business was becoming brisk until the Department of Consumer Affairs called in and asked to see his second-hand dealer’s licence. Dietrich was thus forced to seek commercial premises and found a small shop on Musgrave Road in Red Hill, a rather bohemian inner northwest suburb on the edge of Brisbane’s CBD. He found work for an unemployed instrument repairer under a government scheme for 13 weeks and, at the end of the program, the business had improved enough for him to be kept on. Things continued to improve until the shop was trading an annual turnover of $1.6million – the largest of its kind in Australia. Playing in the orchestra and running a thriving business was something Dietrich could not manage concurrently, so he once again resigned from the orchestra, placed the business in the hands of two managers, and returned to the South Seas he’d discovered in 1985, buying a property with two cottages on the remote Fijian island of Koro. “I thought that this is where I would like to spend the rest of my life. It was so peaceful with ocean views out over the coral reef. The people were so happy and living on next to nothing! This I considered to be the ideal lifestyle for me!” As ever with Dietrich, doing nothing was never in the same field as living next to it so, with regular income from the faraway shop, he started a small business in Fiji making noni juice (from the Morinda citrifolia tree), and another manufacturing biodiesel from coconuts and used oil from tourist resorts.

Something of his ‘wanderlust’ karma must have begun to catch up with Dietrich. First, one of his Brisbane managers offered to purchase the shop and he returned to Brisbane to seal the deal, but a change of heart led to the offer being withdrawn after he arrived. Back it was to Fiji but then Dietrich heard the two managers had resigned and were going into competition with his own shop! He was forced to return to Brisbane to take control once more. “With new investors, we have created a new company called Designed in Italy , which trades as Animato Strings . I wanted to use the words ‘designed in Italy’ in reference to the Stradivari instruments which everybody strives to imitate.” More recently, Dietrich bought land on Russell Island in southern Moreton Bay, an hour’s drive from his Brisbane store. Perhaps another karmic circle closed with his discovery that two of the island’s thoroughfares are called Fiji Street and Koro Street! – the legacy of a previous Fijian inhabitant of that area. Always with many strings to his bow (all things considered, an unavoidable pun), Dietrich maintains his “night job” designing web pages and search engine optimisation. “The internet is marvellous because I can sit here and contact anyone anywhere on the globe at any time. This has enabled Animato Strings to offer its products worldwide, and we recently launched a new brand called ‘Animato Maestro Strings’.” In March 2012 Dietrich visited the former German province of Schlesien, now in Poland,

to join his relatives in their search for the crumbling ruins of old castles once the property of their ancestors. “It was an interesting trip but it is great to be back in Australia, my home.”

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