John Makita

speaker

219 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

John Makita’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Case Of · 15 The Two Intruders | We talk to Irma’s grandson · 7 May 2026 podcast

My grandma was a five-star Michelin chef as far as I was concerned.

And she'd make wonderful walnut cakes and lots of different Hungarian sweets and things.

So, yeah, it was just...

It's a lot of really great memories which came crashing to an end on that night.

We have to remember, too, that back where my grandparents came from, so they came from Hungary during the revolution.

And they left the country with basically the clothes on their back.

My grandmother was cooking and cleaning, I think, for one of the Russian soldiers.

And she had learned a little bit of Russian and she had worked out one evening that the government was going to clamp down on Russia.

the revolution and close the borders.

So she literally went home, grabbed my auntie and my mum and my grandfather, and they walked across the border that night into Austria.

And so coming to Australia with nothing and starting from basically scratch, I think my grandmother had a bit of a fear of losing money and leaving things behind.

And

the best way of coping with that was just to keep it somewhere within close reach.

Also, look, I've got to admit too, back in those days, it was a cash economy.

So they had a family business making kitchens and cabinets and a lot of people would pay cash.

And so they had quite a bit of cash around, which they still had a good amount of money in the bank, but they just wanted to have it readily accessible.

And that's the reason why that they had such a large amount of money in their home in Redhill.

And I think that continued to follow them, obviously, when they moved to Mackellar, that they still felt safer if they had some disposable income at ready hands reach, yeah.

No, I was one of the ones that didn't.

It was only a few of the family members, my mum, my dad, my brother who built the kitchen.

Showing 41–60 of 219 · page 3 of 11