“Next time you watch ugly anger and rage on the news, try standing in their shoes first. Kindness is built on the opportunities created by those who came before,” writes Kindness columnist ANTONIO DI DIO.

So, I was talking to Jenene. Tremendous person; quick and brilliant, used to be a dancer on the Don Lane Show and a legend in musical theatre. 

She was expressing a rare moment of frustration on account of a dear friend of hers who had started collecting the most amazing hand-made Italian shoes but they were far too large for her to borrow. 

Intriguing but it didn’t mean all that much to me, as in 50-odd years the only three things my feet have known, other than socks and tinea, are Bata Scouts progressing to Dunlop Volleys and imitation RM Williams. My foot choices are Zuckerberg repetitive, but the strategy has not made me a Captain of Industry.

Anyway, Jenene’s plight made me think of standing in other’s shoes. I once stood in a pair of heels and it gave me an understanding of what many high-heel wearing people go through. 

For many years I was pretty judgey about my nonna. An extraordinary woman, I remember her pulling my hair at various times till I was 11, and telling me about all the times she’d had to lie and cheat and steal to get what she needed, and that I was soft and weak and would never survive the harshness of life. Obviously I have survived, but I realise that she was right, too.

In 1918 my nonno had just returned from what our town called “the 15-18 war”. He walked into his home to find his son Angelo, from his first wife. She had died in her teens. Also there was young son Pasquale, from his second wife, but he learned that she too had died in her teens in his absence. 

No vaccines in those days, and mums weren’t much older than their babies. 

Anyway, along with these two kids was second wife’s sister, 14-year-old Maria. She boldly said: “My sister is gone, I will be your wife now”, and the padre made it official. 

They waited to have more kids, but in 1922 had success with Luigi, my sweet beautiful dad. Then they were unstoppable! Twenty more kids followed (four of them while dad was away during World War II) although the lack of vaccines meant that only six survived the age of eight. 

All through this my nonna arranged marriages as local matchmaker, soothsayer, fortune teller and part time witch, and cobbled together survival for them all in three rooms around a courtyard. 

She was tough and hard and uneducated and racist and bigoted beyond measure and we were complete aliens to each other, as she yelled at me in the 1970s in those three rooms. 

Her poverty was bound in pride, her shoes were handmade Italian, I guess, but made by herself with offcuts and brutal skills negotiated with cobblers and Virgin Marys and sly grog and all the compromises that people with few choices have to make.

She’d never read, multiplied (other than with her ovaries), had a kind word directed at her in childhood, or learned a single lesson that did not cost her pain. 

I came along in 1966 to television and men on the moon and rock ‘n’ roll and we looked at each other with incomprehension, like mammals staring at each other from the opposing sides of the enclosures at Taronga. I always thought I was the one in the cage.

Years later, I look at my kids (one glories in the middle name of Luigi) and think with pride how much they turned out like their mum, strong and generous, loving and kind. 

And I wonder. I did not end up an occasionally nice person to reject my nonna, to be better than her. I just got soaked in a never ending line of love, support and opportunity, from parents, friends, teachers, a town, an Australia. A thousand chances nonna never had. 

Maybe if kindness and love sits on a chromosome, we ain’t fully mapped yet, she had it. Maybe she turned out awful, but so much less awful than she could have. Thank God I never stood in her tiny, feisty, angry, survivor shoes. I’m only here because she did somehow survive.

Next time you watch ugly anger and rage on the news, try standing in their shoes first. Kindness is built on the opportunities created by those who came before. We should not judge them, or anybody else, harshly. I hope you figure it out 50 years quicker than I did.