For Corey Williams: 'Gaze. I got this', by Andrew Gaze - 2024

Honouring Corey ❤️

Andrew Gaze had some very special words to remember his great mate. pic.twitter.com/0hm6Unhase

— NBL (@NBL) May 18, 2024

18 May 2024, Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre, Melbourne, Australia

Thanks very much. It's an honour and privilege to be here today to share some time and some thoughts about Corey. And it's one when he'd be looking down on this and be so proud. So proud of the number of people that are here, the turnout and see him. And he'd know I'd be a bit nervous up here and I can hear him saying, 'You got this, Gaze. Gaze. You got this.' And that's the way he was. He had that infectious personality, would light up the room, didn't matter where you were from or what you did, he had a personality that would embrace and would unite.

And for me to see that and learn about him as he went through his challenges, both as a player and a commentator. To see him, the way in which that he would light up a floor, MVP of the competition, the way in which he would antagonise his opponents, the fans, the bravado, the self-belief is something he was born with, and he was infectious in the way in which he extended that out to the larger community.

There's not anyone in this room that's been involved in basketball that hasn't felt that, and also hasn't been on perhaps the wrong side of it as well, because he spoke his mind! And he didn't mind sharing his thoughts. And for me, I can still remember growing up having a love and for Corey and myself and Leonard Copeland coaching the Sydney Kings and playing the Adelaide 36ers and going through, to having a tough one, losing the game, and going through the tape at the end of it and Corey commentating,. And boy, was that an experience.

It's tough when he says 'all the coaches and players should be fired! Get them out of here!' And then the next day you'd run him into him at the airport and he'd give you a hug and give you some love and explain that '! 've got some work to do! And I'm here to motivate you, to make you a better person, a better coach, and better players!'

That's the way he was. And he was so willing to share his thoughts. When he was commentating, it was always going to be a fun experience. You'd go into that to prepare for a game. I'd have my computer, I'd have my notes, I'd have the stats, and Corey would come in with a napkin! A napkin with a couple of notes on there. And I said, 'Corey, you're ready to go here, brother, because we got two and a half hours of TV to do!' And he said, 'Gaze, I got this!' It comes from here and it comes from here. That's the way he rolled. And I got to do that from the commentating booth, and I also got to do that on, he'd come in, Andy Maher and I do a radio show, and he'd come in every week, once a week to share his thoughts.

And when he'd come in there, it wasn't just about basketball that he wanted to talk about. He knew the game, but he loved to share his thoughts on life, on the experiences that he was going through. And this is ... Philly, this was a time before he'd met you, and he was the ultimate multitasker. You'd be sitting there and broadcasting either the commentating booth or doing it in the radio studio. He'd be in the room, he'd be talking, looking at his phone, and you'd think, is he with us? Is he concentrating on what we are doing? And we are having a chat. And out of the blue, he'd come in there with that loud, booming voice and bring that personality that he was renowned for. He'd also, like I said, want to share his time ... with life. And Philly, we were there when you first met and he brought you into the studios at SEN and off air, he came to Andy and I and he goes, 'Gaze, when do you know you found the right one?' A deep question when you're just in an ad break ready to go on the radio. And we talk about it. 'I said, wow, you just got to feel it in your heart.' And he goes, 'gee, I think I've found the right one.' And we are thinking that, well, this is an off air conversation. And then the light goes on and he wants to talk about when we found the right one! And this is a sports radio programme, so we are there and he's there, and he said, 'but you know what Gaze? We all got non-negotiables. We've all got those things in a partner that we can't deal with.' And we go, 'yeah, Corey, what is it? What's your number one non-negotiable?' He said, 'I can't have it when they got cracks on their heels. '

And 'Corey, I know you're talking about maybe the love of your life, the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. I reckon you might have to look past the cracked heels.' Philly, I know you don't have cracked heels because there's no way my man Corey was going to deal with the cracked heels! But that was the way Corey was. He was an open book. He wanted to share his life. He wanted to motivate, he wanted to inspire.

And you learn about the character of individuals when they're faced with the greatest test. Corey was faced with the ultimate test. And to see him, his body weathered, life draining out of him, skin and bones, and to see how he confronted that situation, was nothing short of his continued desire to inspire. He motivated. He wanted those around him to feel better. Even in those darkest, darkest times, he would say, 'I got this.' And I'm looking at him and saying, 'it's hard to believe, but I believe you, Corey', because he had a sense of positivity about his journey and what he wanted to achieve.

You saw in that video, what did he want to become. He wanted his daughter to say, 'there goes my dad'. He wanted his mom to say, 'there goes my son.' He achieved that, and his legacy will live on forever. Thank you very much.

For Ernie Page: 'Ernie Page was Labor to his core', Celebration of Life, by Edwin Plummer - 2018

30 May 2018, Ted Whittle Auditorium, Kingsford, Sydney, NSW, Australia

My sincere condolences to Barbara, to Ernie’s children Harry, Therese, Matthew, Janemaree and Rebecca and to Ernie’s wider family.

It’s an honour to be asked to say a few words here today.

Ernie Page was Labor to his core.

His belief in the values that underpin, and the people who are members of, the great Australian Labor Party was, I think, part of his very being.

It is with that in mind that I want to share with you some of what I believe to be Ernie’s most important public policy achievements,

·       as an Alderman,

·       as a Mayor,

·       as a Member of the NSW Parliament, and

·       as a Minister in the NSW Government.

First, as a member of Waverley Council for a phenomenal 25 years.

One of his lasting, and I believe most significant achievements was to broaden the horizons of local government.

He always believed there was more to local government than just roads, rates and rubbish …. much more.

His vision was clear.

He saw local government as an instrument progressive Labor should use to improve the lives of working people, of ordinary people, and of those who were disadvantaged in our society.

It was one way – and in a local community a very effective way – to promote social justice and equality.

So in Waverley from the 1960s and well into the 1970s – the age of Gough Whitlam and Don Dunstan – he broadened the horizon of local government and in so doing, inspired many activists and future local councillors.

…I know that, because I was one of those inspired.

·       He opened Waverley’s first public library … more on that in a moment.

·       Waverley implemented local government’s first ever affordable housing strategy, to protect the rental housing in which low income residents lived from developers, a first for NSW and a policy future Labor administrations under Barbara Armitage and Paul Pearce were to continue and expand.

·       Council became involved in the provision of child care, its first centre opening in 1976 in Gardiners Road Bondi Junction:

… and I know our former Member for Phillip, Jeannette McHugh, and former Waverly Deputy Mayor and Member of the NSW Legislative Council, Ann Symonds, were leaders in what was then a controversial but now widely accepted and unambiguously necessary area of government activity.

·       Council began directly providing services to support older residents, particularly the frail aged, and children and youth

·       A Community Services Department was established in the council to drive implementation of the community and social agenda within the council administration

·       And Waverley Council started supporting and nurturing the arts, a newfound belief in local government’s role in promoting and celebrating cultural diversity.

And, while he was Member for Waverley, Bondi Beach was saved, quite literally, from the wrecking ball.

A magnificent community-based campaign in the mid-1980s led by Waverley Labor – including Ernie and local councillors – and working with the local Bondi community – repulsed the push by the then Liberal Council to bulldoze the beach front and create, in their words, a high rise “Camelot by the Sea”.

That’s a segue to the Bondi Pavilion, which Ernie passionately supported.

I went down to Bondi on the weekend, and saw that stone tablet in the pavilion foyer, on which is inscribed:

This tablet commemorates the official opening of the Bondi Pavilion Community Centre on 25th June 1978, being the 50th Anniversary of the Pavilion.

Then appear the names:

·       The Honourable Neville Wran QC MP, and

·       Alderman E T Page, BE BComm, Mayor of Waverley

That was 40 years ago, almost to the day.

And as we know, twice since, the community and Waverley Labor have fought to protect the pavilion from privatisation or wholesale commercialisation, and on each occasion successfully.

Turning to Ernie’s time as Minister for Local Government, during Bob Carr’s first Labor Government.

It is my firm belief that Ernie was not only “one of the best” but the best Local Government Minister – and certainly the most popular –this state has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime.

Working then in his ministerial office, along with Paul Tracey and Freda Backes, we saw the local government reform agenda being rolled out.

And if you flick through today’s local government statute book, you will see Ernie’s fingerprints throughout its several hundred pages.

In those four years we saw:

·       Laws to use the rating system to encourage the retention of affordable housing and the protection of high conservation value private land.

·       Laws to require local government to apply the principles of ecologically sustainable development and prepare annual state of the environment reports.

·       Stronger freedom of information laws to ensure residents had open access to council information and council meetings.

·       New laws to significantly strengthen the protection of community land, including public parks and community buildings.

·       New laws to recognise, for the first time, the benefits of local government cooperating and sharing resources regionally.

·       Laws to require councils to exercise their functions consistent with the principles of cultural diversity.

·       Reformed and strengthened companion animals laws

·       New laws to democratise voting in the City of Sydney.

And so on…

I’ll close with what I believe to be perhaps Ernie’s greatest legacy to his local community … Waverley Library.

What he did greatly benefitted the people of Waverley

…of that there is no doubt.

But, more broadly, he showed that public library services and providing free access to books and knowledge was core business for local government.

…and that benefitted the people of NSW.

With his great friend and future Chief Librarian Ron Lander, Ernie bought an old bowling alley in Bondi Junction and turned it into a public library, one that I started visiting as a five year old in 1969 and which, for me, became a window to a wider world.

It was only ever intended it to be a temporary site, so it was a memorable moment when, under Barbara Armitage’s mayoralty, we opened the new purpose-built library in 1999 almost next door, with both Ernie and Ron present as guests of honour.

To give you an idea why Ernie believed so passionately in the social worth of public libraries, I can do no better than quote his own words.

Speaking in the NSW Legislative Assembly on a bill that Ernie argued would dilute guaranteed free access to library resources he said, and I quote:

“Freedom of equity of access to the public library is essential to the democratic process and to the social and economic welfare of the community.  This freedom can be inhibited as much by poverty as by censorship.”

Fine words indeed. He knew well that free access to knowledge promotes equality.

I’ll end where I began….

Ernie Page was Labor to his core

During his long political career, he changed the lives of many in our local community and he changed them for the better.

…we will miss him greatly.

J.R. De Costa: 'The Deafening Silence', Sermon honouring victims of Viscount Air Disaster - 1978

8 September 1978, Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints, Rhodesia

This speech was made at the funeral service for the massacred survivors of the Viscount air crash in Hunyani by Rev: JR Da Costa. Air Rhodesia Flight 825 was a scheduled passenger flight that was shot down by the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) on 3 September 1978, during the Rhodesian Bush War. Soon after Flight 825 took off, a group of ZIPRA guerrillas hit it on its starboard wing with a Soviet-made Strela-2 surface-to-air infrared homing missile. Thirteen passengers survived the crash landing. Ten of those were rounded up and massacred by the insurgents with machine guns. Three people survived.

Clergymen, I am frequently told, should keep out of politics. I thoroughly agree. For this reason, I will not allow politics to be preached in this cathedral. Clergy have to be reconcilers. That is no easy job. A minister of religion who has well-known political views, and allows them to come to the fore, cannot reconcile, but will alienate others, and fail in the chief part of his ministry.

For this reason, I personally am surprised at there being two clergymen in the Executive Council. It is my sincere prayer that they can act as Christ’s ambassadors of reconciliation.

My own ministry began in Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah preached: "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these things will be added to you." We know what became of Kwame Nkrumah. We are not to preach a political kingdom, but the kingdom of God.

Clergy are usually in the middle, shot at from both sides. It is not an enviable role. Yet times come when it is necessary to speak out, and in direct and forthright terms, like trumpets with unmistakable notes. I believe that this is one such time.

 Nobody who holds sacred the dignity of human life can be anything but sickened at the events attending the crash of the Viscount Hunyani. Survivors have the greatest call on the sympathy and assistance of every other human being. The horror of the crash was bad enough, but that this should have been compounded by murder of the most savage and treacherous sort leaves us stunned with disbelief and brings revulsion in the minds of anyone deserving the name "human."

This bestiality, worse than anything in recent history, stinks in the nostrils of Heaven. But are we deafened with the voice of protest from nations which call themselves "civilised"? We are not. Like men in the story of the Good Samaritan, they "pass by, on the other side."

One listens for loud condemnation by Dr. David Owen, himself a medical doctor, trained to extend mercy and help to all in need.

One listens and the silence is deafening.

One listens for loud condemnation by the President of the United States, himself a man from the Bible-Baptist belt, and again the silence is deafening.

One listens for loud condemnation by the Pope, by the Chief Rabbi, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, by all who love the name of God.

Again the silence is deafening.

I do not believe in white supremacy. I do not believe in black supremacy either. I do not believe that anyone is better than another, until he has proved himself to be so. I believe that those who govern or who seek to govern must prove themselves worthy of the trust that will be placed in them.

 One looks for real leadership. One finds little in the Western world: how much less in Africa?

 Who is to be blamed for this ghastly episode?

 Like Pontius Pilate, the world may ask "What is truth?" What is to be believed? That depends on what your prejudices will allow you to believe, for then no evidence will convince you otherwise.

 So who is to be blamed?

First, those who fired the guns. Who were they? Youths and men who, as likely as not, were until recently in church schools. This is the first terrible fact. Men who went over to the other side in a few months were so indoctrinated that all they had previously learned was obliterated. How could this happen if they had been given a truly Christian education?

Second, it is common knowledge that in large parts of the world violence is paraded on TV and cinema screens as entertainment. Films about war, murder, violence, rape devil-possession and the like are "good box-office". Peak viewing time is set aside for murderers from Belfast,, Palestine, Europe, Africa and the rest, to speak before an audience of tens of millions. Thugs are given full treatment, as if deserving of respect.

Not so the victims' relations.

Who else is to be blamed?

The United Nations and their church equivalent, the WCC. I am sure they both bear blame in this. Each parade a pseudo-morality which, like all half-truths, is more dangerous than the lie direct. From the safety and comfort of New York and Geneva, high moral attitudes can safely be struck. For us in the sweat, the blood, the suffering, it is somewhat different.

Who else? The churches? Oh yes, I fear so.

For too long, too many people have been allowed to call themselves "believers" when they have been nothing of the kind. Those who believe must act. If you believe the car is going to crash, you attempt to get out. If you believe the house is on fire, you try to get help and move things quickly. If you believe a child has drunk poison, you rush him to the doctor. Belief must bring about action.

Yet churches, even in our own dangerous times, are more than half-empty all the time. We are surrounded by heathens who equate belief in God with the Western way of life. In many war areas, Africans are told to "burn their Bibles". If this call was made to us, what sort of Bibles would be handed in? Would they be dog-eared from constant use; well-thumbed and marked? Would they be pristine in their virgin loveliness, in the same box in which they were first received?

There are tens of millions of all races who call themselves believers, who never enter any house of prayer and praise. Many are folk who scream loudest against communism, yet do not themselves help to defeat these Satanic forces by means of prayer, and praise and religious witness.

 For, make no mistake, if our witness were as it ought to be, men would flock to join our ranks. As it is, we are by-passed by the world, as if irrelevant.

 Is anyone else to be blamed for this ghastly episode near Kariba? I think so.

Politicians throughout the world have made opportunist speeches from time to time. These add to the heap of blameworthiness, for a speech can cause wounds which may take years to heal.

The ghastliness of this ill-fated flight from Kariba will be burned upon our memories for years to come. For others, far from our borders, it is an intellectual matter, not one which affects them deeply. Here is the tragedy!

The especial danger of Marxism is its teaching that human life is cheap, expendable, of less importance than the well-being of the State. But there are men who call themselves Christians who have the same contempt for other human beings, and who treat them as being expendable.

Had we, who claim to love God, shown more real love and understanding, more patience, more trust of others, the churches would not be vilified as they are today. I have nothing but sympathy with those who are here today and whose grief we share. I have nothing but revulsion for the less-than-human act of murder which has so horrified us all.

I have nothing but amazement at the silence of so many of the political leaders of the world. I have nothing but sadness that our churches have failed so badly to practise what we preach. May God forgive us all, and may he bring all those who died so suddenly and unprepared into the light of His glorious presence.

Amen

For 'the 96': 'You've taken on the wrong mums too!', by Bill Kenwright, Hillsborough Memorial - 2013

15 April 2013, Anfield, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Bill Kenwright was chairman of Liverpool’s great Merseyside rival, Everton. This is one of the most beautiful sporting speeches of all time.

[Fans singing for the 96] I'm not going to stop you!

When I was asked if I would say these few words, I was worried on two levels. One, I've had the most emotional day of my life earlier this year, actually nine months ago, and I knew that this was going to be a really emotional one for me too. To be honest with you, I didn't really feel half of what I'm feeling now and my life will never be the same after today, I promise you that.

I was one of those kids brought up in the late forties and early fifties who lived in a soccer mad family, but would go one week here, and one week to the other place. [laugh] And these were the days when a kid could play out at night, when you could go to see your team on your own. And I was quite a small, timid kid, and I used to enter the Kop - there was an entrance there and there was a big stanchion here. And the main reason I came to the Kop to see Liverpool was because of my family, because I loved my uncle Cyril Immoderately, and I just wanted to be him with him and his mates on a Saturday afternoon when Everton were playing away.

And there was this big stanchion here, and if you stood a couple of inches on it, you could see right up in the Kop. And my uncle always used to stand around about there. And all he had to do was put his hand up like that, and this little eight year old would see him. And I would start my journey. And I promise you, I wouldn't get a yard before someone would pick me up and I would be handled over heads until -- it's true! - until I'd found my uncle in the Kop.

And I've never forgotten that. And I've never forgotten the warmth of this amazing site here. And two dates stick in my memory of when I was closest to Liverpool Football Club. One of them was when my all-time idol, Dave Hickson joined you, and alongside 10,000 other Evertonians on a December night in 1959, we came and watched you beat Aston Villa two one and you worship Dave as we worship Dave.

The other day, of course, was 24 years ago today, when I was at Villa Park, not as a chairman, not even as a director, but as a fan. And I know you know all this, but from an Evertonian point of view, that was an extraordinary day for us, Because that was a time when you really wanted to win a semifinal. It was probably more precious to you than getting to the final because it was in the days when the final was at Wembley, and you got there.

And that day, all of my mates and I gathered together afterwards as the news came trickling in, and it was a trickle. And we felt like we'd been relegated. We didn't feel like we just got to Wembley. The journey home was terrible, not nearly as terrible for what you go through. But we all knew people, had people. We all thought it could have been us. If those balls that come out of the bag differently, it could have been us. And it happened tragically to you. And I hope since that day, you have known the support of Everton Football Club for you. [applause]

I don't want to go on too much longer. But like all of you, I watched that Liverpool documentary a few weeks back. And of course the words Hillsborough, the words justice were mentioned all the time. But there were two words that were mentioned an awful lot and resonated to me hugely. And I think to me that the two most important words in the English language, certainly to people from Liverpool, that the two most important words in the English language, the words were 'Me mum'. And all of us here are lucky enough, some of us have got our moms beside us, but we've all got mums. And I saw your banner on Saturday at Reading saying, 'you've taken on the wrong city'. Well, you've taken on the wrong mums too!' Because we all know about Liverpool mums and the way they fight for their kids and their family. And you mums here today, you mums here today. I know the pain ... I don't know the pain because I'm not you. But I appreciate the pain that you would've felt on that day. But let me tell you, the 96 are here with you today as much as they've always been.

And I hope by next year, the 25th anniversary, you'll be celebrating the greatest victory that any team in this country has ever had. Not just in football but in life. Everton Football Club, our manager, David Moyes over there, we salute you. And if you ever want to come and have a service for them over at our place with some blues, the door's always open for you. God bless you.

For Father Bob Maguire: by John Safran - 2023

5 May 2023, Melbourne, Australia

I spent so much time with Father Bob over 20 years, I feel I can auto-generate an A.I. chat between him and me, regarding today.

“Bob, you’re dead. Do you want a state funeral?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Ooh, I’m not sure about the state and the church colluding in matters spiritual. It worries me… I want a Tibetan sky burial, where they take you up the mountain and you’re eaten by the birds”

“Or I could push you out to sea on an iceberg”

“Oh yes, I’d like that”

“But Bob, a state funeral, because it’s such a rare honour, will really annoy your enemies, so it will be like, ‘needless to say I had the last laugh’”

And he’d go “Hmmm, enticing… but still no!”

And then I’d say “You always said, there’s no you and me, there’s only we. And the great we - all the people who loved you - need a chance to come together and say goodbye. And they’re not going to fit on top of that mountain in Tibet”.

And he’d say “Oh go on, have the state funeral. But no flags!”

Bob was like a reverse Native American. He thought his soul would be taken away if a camera wasn’t pointed at him. But it wasn’t because he was vain, it was because he felt such joy, and he knew it provided others with joy, grappling with the important questions of life in an irreverent way. A funny way of being serious, he would say.

While he might have been ambivalent about a State Funeral, he was always interested, obsessed even, with gauging the success, or otherwise of projects he was involved in. Calling me to ask about podcast download numbers, overnight ratings, book sales, follower counts. So, Bob you’ll be delighted to know that the eulogy I tweeted about you, was a blockbuster, my biggest ever, with 400 thousand views, 12 thousand likes. I’ll read it for you Bob, upload it to the cloud you’re no doubt sitting on now:

What was Father Bob like privately? Somehow kinder and funnier than he was publicly. We somehow ‘fought’ nonstop from the moment the record button was pressed in 2003, through documentaries, radio shows and books, right through to filming this year, but we never once fought. More than being kind in broad brushstrokes, he was kind in small ways. When an elderly congregant couldn’t catch the Collingwood matches, he organised tapes from Channel 7 that he would slip to her, along with the Eucharist wafer, during communion. Bob was wise as Buddha. He attracted all manner of outcasts, not all pleasant, but he was open hearted to those people too. I asked him how he did this and he said, “You don’t have to like people to love them.” When filming, it was an editor’s nightmare to cut from the shot before I’d burst out laughing each time Bob finished a sentence. I never thought Bob would ever stop making me laugh, but with the sad news of today, he finally has.

Thank you.

For John F Kennedy: 'He was vigorous and healthy and smiling and friendly', Senate memorial service, by Jacob Javits - 1963

November 1963, Washington DC, USA

Mr. President, hundreds of thousands of words have been published, and hundreds of thousands more have been spoken into the microphones of the world since John F. Kennedy was struck down in Dallas, but none of them were really adequate. Words never are in the face of senseless tragedy.

Words cannot describe how the American people felt when they lost their president. Not until the vacuum of disbelief was filled with the horror of comprehension did any of us realize how much we identified ourselves, even apart from personal friendship, with the president — this intellectual, vigorous young man — and he would have been that if he were eighty — expressing the very essence of the youthfulness of our nation. It seems of little consequence now that there were political differences, or objections to this or that legislative product, though as far as I am concerned there was a very large measure of agreement. What matters is that feeling of loss — that personal sense of emptiness — that all Americans feel because their president was cut off in the prime of life. As a nation, we have lost a president who understood the institution of the presidency, gloried in its overwhelming responsibilities, and discharged his duties with dash and joy, which were an inspiration to the youth of our nation.

But John F. Kennedy was more than that. He was a man filled with the joy of living. He was a husband, a father — and my friend.

For myself, I remember coming to Congress the dame day he did. We were sworn in together on the same January day in 1947. A photograph on my office wall shows that we two, returning veterans, looked a little uncomfortable at the moment in our civilian clothes. It shows us looking at the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill, and it recalls the first job we did together when we called on the National Veterans Housing Conference of 1947, which we had organized, to back this bill. It was the beginning of an association which extended throughout our careers in the House and Senate. We collaborated in many bipartisan matters, as is not unusual in the Congress. Indeed, in our service together in the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, we worked closely — as did Senator Morse and others — on the minimum wage bill, the Labor-Management Disclosure Act, and other similar measures which were major aspects of Senator Kennedy’s legislative career.

I am a personal witness to the fact that he was resourceful, optimistic, and creative. He became and was my friend, and this is a deep source of gratification to me and to Mrs. Javits and our family.

Mrs. Javits, too, knew President Kennedy well and admired him greatly. She will, I know, always think of the president’s graciousness and the warmth of personal friendship which he exuded.

Only a week before his tragic passing, I saw him in the Oval Room at the White House when he accepted the report of the Advisory Committee on Medical Care for the Aged, in which Senator Anderson and I joined, and issued a statement offering encouragement and help.

He was vigorous and healthy and smiling and friendly — a complete human being, concerned about other human beings who were no longer as vigorous and not quite as healthy as they used to be.

This concern for the unfortunate by a many with all of the social graces and all the social status and as much power as America allows one man was what made him so much the symbol of the youth of our country. His wife, Jacqueline, who has given Americans so much reason to be very proud of her and of all American womanhood as she reflected in it, in these last mournful weeks, in the way she carried herself, has said the most beautiful tribute — that John F. Kennedy had the “hero idea of history,” and that she did not want people to forget John F. Kennedy — the man — and replace him with some shadowy figure in the history books.

She need not fear that. There are already thousands upon thousands of people in the world working to keep his memory alive. I have been privileged to join with many others in this body in cosponsoring a bill to rename the National Cultural Center and make it a living, vibrant memorial to this vibrant man who loved the arts. And with Senator Humphrey, I have joined in a bill establishing a commission to ensure that only the most appropriate memorials be created in his honor.

These are well-meaning, deeply sincere tokens — necessary, but still tokens. In reality it will be John F. Kennedy’s youthful freshness in his aspirations for our country that will keep his memory fresh.

In a real sense we, his former colleagues in the Congress, are the only ones with the power to write words which can transform these aspirations into memorials with meaning. We can write legislative acts, like a meaningful civil rights law, which would consecrate and perpetuate John F. Kennedy’s love for personal and national dignity. We can exorcise from our country — and the American people are doing that even now — those extremes of hatred and disbelief in public affairs which create a climate in which terrible acts become much more likely.

Acts such as these will be his final memorials. It is within our power to establish them. Perhaps his noblest memorial is that he would have wanted such memorials almost as no others.

So, in common with my colleagues in this solemn service — and that is what this is today — I bespeak for Mrs. Javits and my children — and I would place their names in the Record, so that as they read this Record when they grow up, I hope they will read their names in it and see that their father spoke with deep sympathy — Joy, Joshua, and Carla, to Mrs. Kennedy and the children, and to the president’s father and mother and his brothers and sisters and their families our deepest sympathy on this terrible bereavement, for our nation and for all mankind, and in the deep expectation that flowers will grow from his grave for the benefit of man.”

Source JFK Presidential Library

For Gerard Ford: 'He played in the middle of the line', by Tom Brokaw - 2007

2 January 2007, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

Mrs. Ford, members of the Ford family, President and Mrs. Bush, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, President and Mrs. Bush, President and Mrs. Carter, President and Mrs. Clinton, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans; it’s a great privilege and an honor for me to be here.

For the past week, we have been hearing the familiar lyrics of the hymns to the passing of a famous man, the hosannas to his decency, his honesty, his modesty and his steady-as-she-goes qualities. It’s what we’ve come to expect on these occasions.

But this time there was extra value, for in the case of Gerald Ford, these lyrics have the added virtue of being true.

Sometimes there are two versions to these hymns – one public and one private, separate and discordant. But in Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.

Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was and he didn’t require consultants or gurus to change him. Moreover, the country knew who he was and despite occasional differences, large and small, it never lost its affection for this man from Michigan, the football player, the lawyer and the veteran, the Congressman and suburban husband, the champion of Main Street values who brought all of those qualities to the White House.

Once there, he stayed true to form, never believing that he was suddenly wiser and infallible because he drank his morning coffee from a cup with a presidential seal.

He didn’t seek the office. And yet, as he told his friend, the late, great journalist Hugh Sidey, he was not frightened of the task before him.

We could identify with him – all of us – for so many reasons. Among them, we were all trapped in what passed for style in the 70’s with a wardrobe with lapels out to here, white belts, plaid jackets and trousers so patterned that they would give you a migraine. The rest of us have been able to destroy most of the evidence of our fashion meltdown, but presidents are not so lucky. Those David Kennerly photographs are reminders of his endearing qualities, but some of those jackets – I think that they’re eligible for a presidential pardon or at least a digital touch-up.

As a journalist, I was especially grateful for his appreciation of our role, even when we challenged his policies and taxed his patience with our constant presence and persistence. We could be adversaries but we were never his enemy, and that was a welcome change in status from his predecessor’s time.

To be a member of the Gerald Ford White House press corps brought other benefits as well as we documented a nation and a world in transition, in turmoil. We accompanied him to audiences with the notorious and the merely powerful. We saw Tito, Franco, Sadat, Marcos, Suharto, the shah of Iran, the emperor of Japan, China with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping all at once, what was then the Soviet Union and Vladivostock with Leonid Brezhnev, and Helsinki at one of the most remarkable gatherings of leaders in the 20th century.

There were other advantages to being a member of his press corps that we didn’t advertise quite as widely. We went to Vail at Christmas and Palm Springs at Easter time with our families. Now cynics might argue that contributed to our affection for him. That is not a premise that I wish to challenge.

One of our colleagues, Jim Naughton of The New York Times, personified the spirit that existed in the relationship. He bought from a San Diego radio station promoter a large mock chicken head that had attracted the president’s attention at a G.O.P. rally. And then, giddy from 20-hour days and an endless repetition of the same campaign speech, Naughton decided to wear that chicken head to a Ford news conference in Oregon with the enthusiastic encouragement of the president and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney.

In the next news cycle, the chicken head was a bigger story than the president. And no one was more pleased than the man that we honor here today in this august ceremony.

When the president called me last year and asked me if I would participate in these services, I think he wanted to be sure that the White House press corps was represented: the writers, correspondents and producers, the cameramen, photographers, the technicians and the chicken.

He also brought something else to the White House, of course. He brought the humanity that comes with a family that seemed to be living right next door. He was every parent when he said my children have spoken for themselves since they were old enough to speak – and not always with my approval. I expect that to continue in the future.

And was there a more supportive husband in America than when his beloved Carol began to speak out on issues that were not politically correct at the time. Together, they put on the front pages and in the leads of the evening newscasts the issues that had been underplayed in America for far too long.

My colleague Bob Schieffer called him the nicest man he ever met in politics. To that I would only add the most underestimated.

In many ways I believe football was a metaphor for his life in politics and after. He played in the middle of the line. He was a center, a position that seldom receives much praise. But he had his hands on the ball for every play and no play could start without him. And when the game was over and others received the credit, he didn’t whine or whimper.

But then he came from a generation accustomed to difficult missions, shaped by the sacrifices and the depravations of the Great Depression, a generation that gave up its innocence and youth to then win a great war and save the world. And when that generation came home from war, they were mature beyond their years and eager to make the world they had saved a better place. They re-enlisted as citizens and set out to serve their country in new ways, with political differences but always with the common goal of doing what’s best for the nation and all the people.

When he entered the Oval Office, by fate not by design, Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?

But he was prepared because he had served his country every day of his adult life and he left the Oval Office a much better place. The personal rewards of his citizenship and his presidency were far richer than he had anticipated in every sense of the phrase.

But the greatest rewards of Jerry Ford’s time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.

Farewell, Mr. President. Thank you, Citizen Ford.

For Chris Cornell: “I’d like to tip my hat to the darker corners of Chris’s soul’, by Tom Morello - 2017

26 May 2017, Los Angeles, California, USA

For Jackie Robinson: 'Steal away home', by Jesse Jackson

27 October 1972, New York, USA

Today we must balance the tears of sorrow with the tears of joy, mix the bitter with the sweet, death and life. Jackie, as a figure in history, was a rock in the water creating concentric circles and ripples of new possibility. He was medicine. He was immunised by God from catching the diseases that he fought. The Lord's arms of protection enabled him to go through dangers seen and unseen, and he had the capacity to wear glory with grace. Jackie's body was a temple of God, an instrument of peace. We would watch him disappear into nothingness and stand back as spectators and watch the suffering from afar. The mercy of God intercepted this process Tuesday and permitted him to steal away home. Where referees are out of place, and only the supreme judge of the universe speaks.

for Midge Decter Podhoretz: 'Where did she come from?' by son John Podhoretz - 2022

11 May 2022, Riverside Memorial Chapel, New York City, USA

This eulogy appeared in Commentary on May 12th 2022 which is a magazine John Podhoretz edits.

Where did she come from?

That’s what we were asking ourselves, my sister and my father and I, after she left us and this world on the morning of May 9, 2022. Of course, we know where she came from in the strictest sense. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. Her mother had also been born, amazingly enough for a Jew, in the Twin Cities in the year 1894, the youngest of ten whose parents had immigrated from Lithuania quite a while earlier. And her father? His mother bore him at 14 in Poland after marrying a much older man over her own parents’s objections. He was a widower with children of his own who turned out to be a drunk. He beat her one night when she was newly pregnant.

My great-grandmother would have none of it. She went back to her parents. They got the drunk to give their daughter a get—a Jewish divorce. And then it was off to America with the baby in tow. By the time my grandfather was a teenager, there was concern he was heading into trouble on the Lower East Side and so he was sent to live with a relative in St Paul. It was there, in 1916, at a Zionist meeting, that Harry Rosenthal met Rose Calmenson. Eleven years after that, their daughter Marjorie was born. They called her Midge.

So this is where my mother, who was known to the world as Midge Decter, came from. From a Polish Jewish grandmother with an iron will and an unbreachable sense of self that remained with her until she died at 89. From a Litvak mother whose immigrant father almost made a huge fortune in scrap metal but died before the business, Paper Calmenson, took off. From an immigrant father who migrated from Poland to New York to Minnesota and began an increasingly successful career as a small businessman once he had returned from World War I. By the time Midge had grown into a teenager, the Rosenthals had become highly respectable burghers, perhaps even more starchy in their commitment to the most conventional social rules even than the Gentiles who made up 99 percent of the population of the Twin Cities. The Rosenthals kept kosher, but in all other ways they were more Catholic than the Pope.

And yet my grandparents must have had certain radical tendencies. Being a Zionist in 1916 was far from conventional. Their passion for Zionism predated the state by three decades and was pretty much the only passion they ever really had. What’s more, my grandfather fancied himself a Reconstructionist and quite pointedly spoke brachot without God’s name in them.

Harry and Rose started the first Zionist summer camp in the Midwest, called Herzl, which remains a going concern in Wisconsin to this day and was where Bob Dylan and the Coen brothers got their Jewish educations. Harry was also on the leading edge of a new business category founded at the end of the Second World War. He became an early mass wholesaler of Army-Navy surplus goods. Remember Army-Navy stores? My grandfather sold them their wares. Made a lot of money, but less than he should have, because he was stubborn and was unable to modernize as he got old.

Interesting lives, without question. Yet neither of Midge’s parents ever actually said anything remotely interesting. They were both, either by training or by inclination, dull. And they passed that dullness on to two of their daughters, my mother’s older sisters. But the dullness didn’t take with Midge.

So I ask again: Where on earth did she come from? My parents met in 1946 on a registration line at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where my show-offy 16-year-old future father was trying to make time with a girl and misquoted T.S. Eliot—whereupon the 18-year-old with a thick Midwestern accent turned around and corrected the quotation.

How had she come to T.S. Eliot? There had been barely a book in my grandparents’ house. My dad says that when he met her Midge had already read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. Proust! And yet this was a woman who spent her life regretting the fact that she never graduated from college. One of the few times in her life I saw her choked with guilt was when Rachel, my oldest sister, dropped out of college. She said, quietly, and over again, “I did this, I gave her permission.” But what on earth did Midge ever need college for?

Let’s talk about that 18-year-old and college and the Jewish Theological Seminary. She had wanted to go the University of Chicago upon her graduation from St. Paul Central High School. Her parents said no. They told her the University of Minnesota was just as good as any other school—if my grandparents had a faith besides Judaism it could have been called Minnesotanism—and to forget such things.

She enrolled at the University of Minnesota. But she was not going to stay. Her older sister Connie—the pretty one, because you know there was always a pretty one—was already following the path her parents had charted for her; she was engaged to her sweet high school boyfriend, who went to work for his father-in-law and never took a free breath for the rest of his life. Her oldest sister Sheva also went to the state U but then followed her high-school boyfriend to Washington, where they both went to work in the war effort at the Department of Defense. Sheva’s husband Marver Bernstein later ended up the president of Brandeis University. One sister got out. One sister didn’t. But the one who got out got out because of a man. What was Midge going to do? She came up with a plan.

My grandparents were pious about their Judaism. So my mother used what was at hand. She told them she wanted to go to New York to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which at the time was an academic institution as well as a rabbinical school. She wanted to learn about our faith, and our faith traditions. And to participate in the burgeoning Zionist life in New York, as excitement built about the revolt against the British Mandate in Palestine and the hopes for a Jewish state.

What could they do, my grandparents? Minnesotanism simply had to give way to Judaism. Midge had outfoxed them. She boarded the train to New York. She met my father in her earliest days at the Seminary, but he was almost three years her junior. Instead, she paired off with Rachel and Naomi’s eventual father, whose name was Moshe Decter, who was also a student there.

I once asked her why she married him, and she said, quite succinctly and enigmatically, “because he made me feel like shit.” She stopped studying at the Seminary and started working for a new little magazine called Commentary as an assistant to its editor, Elliot Cohen. But then she had my sister Rachel and a year and five days later she had my sister Naomi, and she stayed at home in Queens raising them. At some point she could take no more, and she left her husband and took the girls and moved into Manhattan to a dump of an apartment. She went back to work at COMMENTARY, for an editor named Robert Warshow, who was then the mentor of the young writer Norman Podhoretz. Warshow wrote to my father, who was serving in the Army. He said, “I’ve hired a young woman you know named Midge Decter and if she just learns to type a little better, she’ll be a keeper.” Then Warshow died at the age of 37 and it fell to my mother to write to Norman to inform him of this loss. Norman wrote back. Midge wrote him back. A year later he returned to America, to New Jersey, to finish out his military service. He came into Manhattan on his first leave. He knocked on her door. She opened it and threw herself into his arms.

The young woman who had married a man because he had made her feel like shit—well, she was no longer that person. After several months of dating, she told my father that they were either going to get married or they were through. He said really? She said yes. He said can I walk around the block and think about it? She said yes. He walked around the block.

Imagine the sense of self she must have had then, the knowledge of herself she must have possessed, and the deep self-esteem this must have taken. She was a divorcee. She was 28 years old. She had two kids. It was 1955. This was not a power position, a place from which to make demands. To prove my point, when my father told his mother they were going to be married, she told him she was going to take my grandfather up to the roof and throw him off and then come down and take the gas pipe. My grandmother eased up, especially after meeting Rachel and Naomi. But she was terribly fearful of her own Haredi father’s disapproval, and when the wedding was rolling around, she suggested to Norman that the girls (who were 5 and 4) not be present for the nuptials. He said, “No, Ma, of course they’ll be there.”

The divorcee’s kids at her second wedding? “Who does she think she is?” my grandmother said. “Rita Hayworth?”

When Orson Welles divorced Rita Hayworth, she famously said, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda”—the sexpot character she played in an iconic 1946 movie—”and wakes up with me.” Ah, but waking up with my mother…that was the jackpot. My friend Joseph Epstein wrote me yesterday to say I had won the lottery in the parent sweepstakes, but the truth is, they were the winners, Norman and Midge. They were married for 66 years.

The great irony of my mother’s life is that she, a trailblazing female intellectual in a frankly misogynistic world of New York highbrow jerks whose views of women were reductionist and noxious, would end up being America’s most formidably serious anti-feminist. What she could not bear was the culture of complaint. She once said something slighting about Gloria Steinem and I asked why. She told me Gloria Steinem had once whined that she had wanted to write about politics but that they wouldn’t let her. “Who,” this woman who had written plenty about politics by this point said, “were ‘they’?” She felt the same way about Betty Friedan and the idea that Friedan and her cohort had somehow been tricked by the capitalist powers that be into moving into beautiful upper-middle-class suburbs in nice houses.

She was appalled by the misandry of the feminists—the idea that they were basically the victims of men. Her life experience had told her something different. She had allowed her first husband to make her feel like shit. But then she married a man who loved her and appreciated her and cultivated her gifts. She took jobs and she quit jobs at will, because my father was there to support her both financially and emotionally. Not that he made much money, by the way. My parents were almost comically unmaterialistic. Their dining room table was a door from the Door Store. Yes, she was fortunate in her marriage, and she knew she was fortunate, but she knew also that you had to make your own fortune, and had no patience for those who believed otherwise and who believed their complaining was the mark of a higher truth.

She felt the same way about the ‘60s and post-‘60s youth she portrayed and satirized in her uncategorizable masterpiece of a book, Liberal Parents Radical Children, from 1975. These youth were similarly full of objections and complaints and woes and wounds, and in the final analysis, what she really wanted to know was just what the hell it was they were whining about. These kids had had the inestimable good fortune of being born into the freest and most pliable society the world had ever seen­. And she thought their effort to belittle the country and belittle its gifts to us was a moral crime. And who would best know this than a member of the most beleaguered tribe in this planet’s history? Why, she could hardly believe her own luck, as a Jew with a knowledge of the horrors of Jewish history and the improbable journey her parents had made to end up together and give her life, that she had been born an American.

Most of her best writing has this quality, like someone telling you to believe the evidence of your own eyes and not be seduced by theory. Go read her essay, “Looting and Liberal Racism,” published in COMMENTARY in 1977 in the aftermath of the New York City blackout that year. The word “bracing” hardly captures its clarifying, revivifying, saddening effect—and just how prophetic it sounds today. It concludes in part:

The young men who went rampaging on that hot July night were neither innocents nor savages; they were people in the grip of the pathology that arises from moral chaos. They were doing something they knew to be wrong but had been given a license for, and had not been able to find the inner resources to overcome their temptation. A New York Times editorial written in response to a flood of mail from readers condemning the looters reiterates the proposition that poverty and race were the salient factors in the looting: “Denounce them, jail them, hate them. Still the question lingers. . . . They appeared only in the poorest sections of town and drew recruits only from the poorest population groups, albeit only a tiny fraction of them. The question is why these and only these? Why, bluntly, no white looters in white neighborhoods?” The real answer to this question, I am afraid, is not to be found in the economy, nor even in the hot, nervous streets of summertime New York. It is to be found in a decade’s worth of the spread of this very liberal and very racist idea: that being black is a condition for special moral allowance.

In the course of the radio coverage of July 14, two little black boys, sounding about twelve years old, were interviewed and announced that they had taken no part in the looting going on all around them. They seemed a bit sheepish. When asked by the interviewer, “Why not?” one of them said, “I was scared of the cops,” and the other one said, “Because my mama would have killed me.” A brave and lucky woman, that mama—no thanks to the culture intent on whispering sweet nada into her little boy’s ear.

This was my mother. She cut through the bullshit. I don’t know any other way to put it. She always did, and she always knew bullshit’s seductive quality as well. When she was an editor at Basic Books, a publishing house, in the 1970s, a manuscript came in. It was a fancy-pants work of high intellectual argle-bargle, and her boss at the time was inclined to reject it. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “It’s utter nonsense and it will sell a billion copies.” That book was called Godel Escher Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. It won the Pulitzer. It is still in print 43 years later. It is utter nonsense. It has sold, if not a billion copies, then a million copies or more. In her seven years as a publisher, she edited books by a writer named George Gilder, one on the sexual revolution and the other on life in the underclass, neither of which made much of a mark. Then came Wealth and Poverty, which helped lay the philosophical groundwork for what came to be known as Reaganomics. Sales: a million copies.

This suggests she could have been one of the most successful book editors of her time, but she didn’t want to publish nonsense even if it sold, and she wanted to do good as she saw it. So she started a modest enterprise called the Committee for the Free World, a kind of clearing-house-way-station activist organization to promote anti-Communist ideals in the 1980s as the intellectual world reared in horror at the supposed vulgarity of the Reagan administration. I had come to adulthood by this point, and it was then that I began hearing from people the things I would hear for the rest of my life: Oh, I love your mother. I had a life-changing conversation with your mother. Your mother is my role model. Your mother had lunch with me and now I know what to do with my life. Your mother is so kind.

I would go back to her and I would say, “Mom, I just met this person and they said you changed their life.” And in response, she would roll her eyes, or make a dismissive wave. She was like this with praise too. You could not tell her you loved something she wrote. It made her actively uncomfortable. She didn’t like her own writing. She thought it mannered and overly ornate. What she liked was simplicity and clarity and she felt she came up short in those departments. In this way, and in no other way whatsoever, she was utterly bonkers.

But she was an absolute bear about this as someone who guided writers. And as someone who guided me. When I was just starting out as a writer, and I would tell her I thought something I was writing was boring, she would say this: “You are incapable of being boring. All you need to worry about is being clear and saying what you mean.” Now, whether or not it’s true that I am incapable of being boring is a subject for another time. The point here is that this was the greatest editorial advice I ever received, and it is advice I’ve passed along to others: Your job is not to be interesting. You are interesting. Your job is to be clear.

She was so very clear. And her clarity came from the quality that made so many people look up to her, emulate her, or feel she was their lodestar. It was an inner thing. You might call it serenity, but while she was very level of mood—except for when she raged under her breath about the little elves her children seemed to think were going to clean up the kitchen after them—she was too engaged with the world to be truly serene. She just had an iron sense of self, as her grandmother had had when she marched away from her widower drunk and chose a different life when nobody did such a thing. Midge had it as a teenager, reading Proust in a home without books. She had it as she planned her escape from St. Paul. She had it when she ended the marriage in which she felt like shit, and when she gave my father her ultimatum. She had it when she put pen to paper, even though writing was very difficult for her. She had it when she was asked what she would do if she were you.

Two terrible things happened to her in her life. The first, of course, was the loss of our beloved Rachel, her first-born, who died at 62 in 2013. That was nine years before her own passing, and while she was always the same, she was also never the same. A vagueness came upon her, a kind of retreat behind her eyes. I envied her this, in a way, because her inferiority gave her some kind of solace.

The other terrible thing was an act of amazing aggression on the part of her own mother. The year was 1989. Her mother had died in 1973 and had left a will, the contents of which were not disclosed because all the proceeds from her estate were to go to her husband Harry until his death.

My mother’s mother never forgave Midge for leaving St. Paul, then never forgave her for divorcing her first husband, then never forgave her for marrying my father, who had written Midge explicit love letters her mother had found one day rifling through her drawers. Her daughter, married to a sex maniac; such a thing never happened in Minnesota! So this was not a good relationship, but it was more distant and chilly than it was openly hostile.

My grandfather died 16 years later. My aunt Sheva was the executor of his will. Sheva called my mother one night, distraught beyond words. Rose had, it turns out, disinherited Midge at some point before her own death in 1973. Cut her out of the will. The problem wasn’t the money; there wasn’t, as it turned out, all that much of it. No, it was as though my grandmother had reached out from beyond the grave and slapped my mother across the face. And my grandfather had known about it, and had done nothing to stop it, and had even spent the years following Rose’s death extolling her virtues. “If there ever was such a thing as a saint in Jewish life,” my grandfather told my mother, “your mother was that saint.” So it was not just her mother who had delivered this punishment from olam ha-bah. It was her father’s repellent piety about Rose when he knew, he surely knew, his daughter would soon enough come to know different.

Of all the qualities she had, the one I most envied in my mother was her ability to sleep. She could lay her head on the pillow and wake up eight hours later. It was inner serenity at work. But she plunged into a crisis. She was 62, a year older than I am now. And for the first time in her life, she could not sleep. For four nights she paced, and sat, and lay unrested.

And then she cleared her mind.

“I have decided,” she said, “that my life is a treasure.”

And that was that. Really. It was. I’ve never seen the like of it. The only rueful echo of this monstrous parental abnegation came a few months later when we were at some conservative conference or something and she turned to me and said, “I don’t understand how it happened that I became this great champion of the family. I hated my family!”

But no. She did not. She loved her family—the family she made. She loved us four. And she loved and admired and was fascinated by and charmed by and interested in her grandchildren, the first of whom was born when she was 53 and the last of whom was born when she was 83. Midge Decter has left behind books and articles of uncommon grace and brilliance and an impact on American society at large in the form of those she inspired and the ideas she championed.

But what she has really left the world are those whom she has left behind. There are three of us children who survive her and a fourth, Rachel, who survives her in the form of Rachel’s three children and the eight great-grandchildren they have produced. Ten other grandchildren survive her as well—my three, and Naomi’s three, and Ruthie’s four. Another five great-grandchildren have come from their number, and likely there are many more yet to come.

Midge Rosenthal Decter Podhoretz decided her life was a treasure. And it was a treasure. Because she was a treasure. An unfathomable treasure.

Where, oh, where, oh where did she come from?

This eulogy was delivered at the funeral of Midge Podhoretz, which took place on May 11 at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City. She died on May 9, 2022, at the age of 94.

Patty Hearst: 'Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people', eulogy for fallen SLA members - 1974

7 July 1974, Los Angeles, California, USA

Greetings to the people. This is Tania. I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades because the fascist pig media has of course been painting a typically distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers.

Cinque loved the people with tenderness and respect. He helped me see that it’s not how long we live that’s important, it’s how we live.

Gelina was beautiful. She exploded with the desire to kill the pig. She taught me how to fight the enemy within through her constant struggle with bourgeois conditioning.

Gabi practiced until her shotgun was an extension of her right and left arms. She taught me that patience and discipline necessary for survival and victory.

Zoya, female guerrilla. Perfect love and perfect hate reflected in stone cold eyes.

Fahizah was a beautiful sister who taught me to shoot first and make sure the pig is dead before splitting and I’ll always love her..

Kahjoh was the gentlest most beautiful man I've ever known. Neither Kahjoh nor I had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other. Our relationship’s foundation was our commitment to the struggle and our love for the People. It’s because of this that I still feel strong and determined to fight.

Our comrades didn’t die in vain. The pig lies about the advisability of surrender have only made me more determined. I renounced my class privilege when Cin and Kahjoh gave me the name Tania.

While I have no death wish, I’ve never been afraid of death. For this reason, the brainwash duress theory of the pig Hearsts has always amused me. Life is very precious to me. But I have no delusions that going to prison will keep me alive.

And I would never choose to live the rest of my life surrounded by pigs like the Hearsts.

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.

For Diego Maradona: 'I‘ve just never seen anyone have such a beautiful affection with a football', by Gary Lineker - 2020

26 November 2020, London, United Kingdom

He‘s so revered, he’s so worshipped in Argentina. He constantly had a huge entourage around him.

I went to see a game and I’ll never forget it, to see Boca Juniors play. He had his own little box there. I went with his family. And he was standing …. the atmosphere was unbelievable at this game.

And his family, one of his daughters was literally holding him as he was screaming over the balcony, holding him so he wouldn’t actually fall off. He had such an incredible passion for the game.

I never thought in my lifetime I’d see anyone come remotely close to Diego, in terms of ability with a football. I think we’ve seen Messi, who’s very similar in many ways, Argentinian, diminutive, brilliant left foot, but Diego was incredible.

I played, I actually played with him as well for half a game, played for the Rest of the World at Wembley, against, funnily enough, an English league side because it was a centenary, I played for the Rest of the World, because I was at Barcelona at the time.

And all the player, there were people like Platini on the pitch, lots of great great players from around the world. And everyone was totally in awe of him.

The first thing he did was in the dressing room, he sat there; just a pair of shorts. And you know you roll your socks up? He did that and just juggled them on his left foot for about five minutes. And everyone was going whoooah whoooah.’

Then we went out on the pitch and he did something incredible, one of the most unbelievable things I‘ve ever seen on a football pitch. it might not sound that amazing to you at home, but I think you’ll appreciate this.

He juggled the ball all the way out to the centre circle and then he got to the centre circle, still juggling it, and then he went bang, he whacked it as hard he possibly could (up into the air) and he waited. And then it came down and he went bang and did it again. He did it 13 times, and the most he ever did was walk three paces to it.

All of us were standing there going, ‘That’s impossible’. I remember going to training the next day at Barcelona. We all tried it and the best anyone did was three, and they were all running for the third one.

I‘ve just never seen anyone have such a beautiful affection with a football.

For Ben Chifley: 'On this sorrowful occasion, the festivities of tonight should end', by Sir Robert Menzies - 1951

13 June 1951, Jubilee Ball, Canberra, Australia

Mr Chifley, former Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the Opposition, collapsed and died of a cardiac arrest during the course of a jubilee ball. The Prime Minister announced his passing.

It is my sorrowful duty to tell you that tonight, during this celebration, Mr. Chifley, former Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, has died.

I do not want to try even to talk about him, because, although we were political opponents, he was a great friend of mine and yours, and a fine Australian.

You will agree that it is appropriate on this sorrowful occasion, that the festivities of tonight should end, and, therefore, in the circumstances there will be no more music.

I do suggest that you have supper and that we then leave quietly, having in our minds very great sorrow for the passing of a fine Australian.

It does not matter about party politics in a case like this: Oddly, enough, in Parliament we get to know each other very well, and we sometimes find we have a warmest friendship among people whose politics are not our own.

Mr. Chifley served this country magnificently for many years.

Sorrow of his own people is shared equally by myself and members of the Government.

I hope this cruel blow for Mrs. Chifley will be softened by the knowledge that there is no Australian who hears this sad news tonight will not have a tear to shed for a man who has served his country.

Indeed, he has served his country and undoubtedly he has hastened his own passing by his devotion to his own land, and, indeed, to the people of the world.

For Douglas MacLeod: '‘What luck, what luck for all of us to have known him!, by Colleen Burke - 2021

Facebook won’t allow embed video. Visit link here and go to 2:11;20 to watch Colleen beautiful speech

3 December 2021, Victorian Pride Centre, Melbourne, Australia

Doug and Stephen have spoiled me rotten almost my entire adult life. When I was in my twenties, I told them I wanted a sperm cocktail if I wasn’t married with kids by the time I was 35. I didn’t care who was the Dad, you couldn’t choose one over the other.

‘DougnSteve’ has been one word for a long time: Doug who made laugh and Stephen who loves to laugh. If the baby was blonde or dark we’d know who the Dad was.

I learned about the world through both these men. I always thought of them as much, much older as they were, always so good at being adults. They’d take me to beautiful restaurants, to a 5-star resort and tell me stories about exotic things like mortgages and volcanoes. I’d often find a fiddy in my bag after visiting, to pay for a vet bill or a bald tyre when I thought acting in profit share plays was the way to go. They have always been there for me when pets, parents and people I loved died. ‘You know where we are, we are here,’ is Stephen’s most common phrase. Stephen who sends a thank you note if you had them over lunch. Who says “oh poor baby, when I had a cold” or some minor ailment. Anyway we’ve heard beautiful stories about Doug’s past and I’d like to talk about the end of the story for our storyteller, when the heroes shine through. Some of you know it and some of you won’t.

Doug had an amazing career but the most important part of Doug’s life was Stephen.

I’ve followed their love story for a very long time. They had been together for a short time when I was first smitten by Doug’s charms. It’s been a 40-year marriage that became official in 2018! Stephen would like to thank Magda for her contribution to marriage equality. Stephen had been a carer for Doug after his stroke for a long time, and Doug had survived his first bout of encephalitis when they got married. When Doug was in ICU the first time with this disease, surrounded by machines, the doctors were completely mystified, it took them quite a while to diagnose. Stephen was terrified, there were a million tubes and wires to Doug’s skull and Doug was delirious and when he told the nurses scurrying around him, “This is my boyfriend and this is my girlfriend, and they both like looking at naked men.” Anyway he made it through but he knew he had come close to dying that first round with encephalitis and was determined to marry his man.

His speech at their wedding was very typical of Doug, “there is enormous pressure on me as a writer to come up with the right words so I looked to the greats: I searched through the sonnets of Shakespeare, none of them were good enough for my Stephen; I looked to Chaucer, to Blake, none of them were right. So I looked to the words of the great…. Ronnie Barker: “What luck! What luck to have met this man, this beautiful, kind and sweet man, what luck, what luck!“

I’ve put up a photo of Doug with Sascha my dog. They had something special going on —we’d go for walks and Doug said he felt really powerful walking my wolf. Walking was still a challenge after his stroke. I took him to a bar for dinner in Fitzroy Street where the barman had invited me in previously, and made of a fuss of my dogs. I thought it would be fun for Doug. Anyway, it was a busy Friday night and the owner was pissed off because the dogs were taking up room as they do, spreading themselves out on the floor. He still served us dinner but he was grumpy, and as we were leaving Doug slipped him a 20 to thank him. That’s who Doug was, gracious and polite.

My dogs were a way to reach Doug when he had no words, when he was very ill. He could commune with Sascha but not Tinker so much…. her head was too big apparently. You will see them together later and thank goodness The Alfred and the rehab allows pets on the bed, on the white sheets, no questions asked. During that very harrowing time which, fortunately, Doug had little to no memory of, there were moments of great beauty where his soul, character and talent shone through. On the few occasions I visited him when Stephen wasn’t actually there, (Stephen would have to be almost terminal himself to not be there, he showed up from breakfast to dinner every day for a year bringing Doug delicacies and comfort, never leaving his side, you couldn’t drag him away). Anyway there was a time when Doug could only communicate in verse, he complemented me on fine attire, I can’t remember how he rhymed, something brilliant… and when Stephen called on the phone “You’re company to me is sweeter than wine” and another brilliant rhyme, I won’t even try. Apparently, this rhyming thing happens to other patients too but Doug sounded like Shakespeare. No wonder the nurses loved him

Another time he was really distressed as he could only hum — words weren’t coming out. The man who could repeat the script from a movie word for word after seeing it once, couldn’t speak! So I played him the humming chorus. He calmed down, the composer, the musician that he was, began humming the notes perfectly. A moment of great beauty. No wonder the nurses loved him.

Once he was really concerned, as he was convinced that every object in the rehab room was about to fly and he wanted me to leave to be safe. Our very own Dr Who episode. Stephen and Doug shared a great love, and Doug and I shared a great love of Dr Who. This is who he was even in his confusion, he wanted to put my safety above his. Doug always wanted to write a Dr Who episode. What a fucking cracker it would have been. Great beauty.

When Doug came down with encephalitis a second time, he came close to dying many times and the doctors were convinced he would never leave hospital. And the reason he survived this long is down to one thing, and one thing only — Stephen’s love, and his mantra “you’re getting better Douglas, You’re getting better”. Stephen who moved heaven and earth and brought in a High Court judge to bring him home after a year in hospital. And he gave Doug the best life he possibly could. Stephen who would bring books to any nurse in hospital who was kind to Doug, the nurse who took Doug for wheelies in his wheelchair, the nurse who took the time to hold Doug’s hand. Pretty much every nurse who cared for Doug would fall in love with this man, who was always polite and courteous even when he was in great pain.

Stephen created a family of carers in their home. ‘Home’ that sacred word. I’m bringing you home, Doug. They brought Doug joy; Andrew, Sachie and Nathan, their good friend David and the lady who brought cake, I’m sorry I can’t remember your name, all these amazing humans were Prozac to Doug. They showed up the day he died, showed up to his cremation and showed up today. I think true love is not that heady romance at the start of a relationship, it’s showing up every day as Stephen has done for the last 10 years when things were tough. Let’s face it, things the last three years were hellish. This man who is made of integrity and warmth and empathy. Who tethered the lifeline to Doug in his astronaut pyjamas and kept him going, kept him wanting to live. Despite all the pain that Doug was in, he just wanted to keep waking up and seeing Stephen’s face. I know you all want to show Stephen how sorry you are but keep it brief today. He’s keeping it together beautifully, but there’s years to come when you can show Stephen some love.

I’d like to thank everyone who has showed up today, who’ve given their time and brought their love. I’d like to pay tribute to the people at this amazing venue, the people on the front desk who were always so welcoming, to Justine the CEO who gave us so much time, to Ingrid the venue coordinator who bought those stunning rainbow cups for us to use, and to Dannii and to Michael from Joy FM who went above and beyond to make all this happen. I hope it’s the start of many marriages, celebrations and funerals for this community. What a gorgeous space for it to be held in.

When Doug was dying, I played him the humming chorus again. The doctors told us that hearing is the last sense to go. I thought I must sing, I must sing, bring him some comfort, but I’m really not a good singer. I started playing him my Spotify playlist on my phone, it was all so sudden, just to give him some music. Mama Cass came on — ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’. I tried to sing along. Poor Doug who we thought was unconscious raised his hand in an ‘oh god, make it stop’ motion. Stephen got more morphine for him. Doug had given his last bit of feedback which we all valued so much. I think the review of your life is who shows up to your funeral. The love of your life and a large group of beautiful friends.

What luck, what luck for all of us to have known him!

We love you Doug

For Bert Newton: 'He cut his 21st cake on television and stayed there for his entire life', by Eddie McGuire - 2021

12 November 2021, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia

Thank you to Patti, to Matthew, to Lauren for the opportunity to speak of Bert. And if I can be so bold I’d like speak on behalf of those who worked with him,. who loved watching Bert over a lifetime in showbusinesss as the consummate entertainer,

I have the impossible job of condensing our feelings for Bert and his legacy into 4.5 minutes according to the office of protocol, but as Bert would say, we’re live and I have the microphone so I might go a bit longer.

Albert Watson Newton AM MBE, to Graham Kennedy he was ‘Herby’, to Don Lane he was 'Moonface' and to all of us he was Our Bert.

Today we honour his life with a state funeral and Premier Andrews, Patti has asked and the family have asked for me to pass on their deepest gratitude to you and the state of Victoria for bestowing this honour.

Since Bert's passing there has been recognition of his incomparable compering and performances but what has been underlined from story after story is Bert's amazing generosity of spirit.
On camera, on stage, behind the microphone, Bert Newton gave of himself to make a show work, a segment pop, make his colleagues look as good as they could be, to give everything for his beloved audience.

Friend and colleague Peter Ford was one of the many with stories of Bert's generosity, of his noblesse oblige, ‘to whom much is given much is expected’, and Bert never forgot. Peter told the story sworn to secrecy until Bert said he'd carked it, of Bert hearing of a man dying of HIV/AIDS at a time when sufferers were stigmatised and isolated. Not only did Bert visit and spend hours with every person in the ward but gave the man one of his beloved gold Logies, An amazing gesture, one that lifted the morale of all in the depths of their despair with the only reward being that Bert gave those on their worst day something to remember as their best.

Patti had never heard the story until last week when Peter broke it. It did, however, go some way to solve a family mystery. Bert had won some 36 Logies over his career but the family could only find 17. Suddenly it all made sense.

It was just one of a myriad of stories shared by friends and colleagues and strangers and fans. Sam Newman reminded me of the famous Mr Anonymous speech written by Paul Keys, and delivered by Richard Burton in 1983 in paying tribute to Frank Sinatra, another giant of show business. I feel it articulates perfectly the essence of Bert Newton so to paraphrase: 'Bert was a giant, among the givers of the world he stands tallest. He has more than paid rent for the space he occupied on this planet, forged as he is from loyalty and compassion, carefully hidden, hidden because he ordered it. I appear as the heralder off grateful multitudes who have opened those unexpected envelopes, special delivering answers to prayers, those awakened by late-night phone calls which remedied their problems. Those performers, business people politicians and the sick, down on their luck, who suddenly landed the role they never expected and still don’t know who to thank. And for untold beneficiaries of the caring and kindness of this splendid man, who truly was, his brother’s keeper. And they are legion, those whose lives took a turn for the better, because of this man.’

Bert was such a legend that to be even acknowledged by him was to feel like you'd made it.

When he named his toupee ‘Eddie’, he said at the time I was on everything else I may as well be on his head, I was honoured and gratified, first that he knew who I was, second because I'd become part of his act. But thirdly because it was pure Bert - a punch line, a laugh and a nod of support to his colleagues. We've heard of people getting a segment on his shows, the note of congratulations, a phone call, a text, on your best day but more importantly on your worst, because Bert knew both.

Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar that “it is common proof that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, where to the climber upward turns his face, but when he attains the utmost round he then turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.” The first part is pure Bert. The second is the antithesis. For Bert never turned his back on his people. He joked, he sent them up, he understood them, but was always there for them and he never left them.

But lowliness was his young ambition's ladder. When Bert was a boy, having lost his father age 11, the Fitzroy of the 1940s and 50s was a far cry from the hipster headquarters that it is today. It was one of the toughest parts of the country, it was a notorious slum. So fired by his imagination of what could be, inspired by the Marist Brothers who saw something in this Year 7 boy who had a knack for radio plays, that he walked from his family home to the city, down the very streets outside as a 14-year-old to 3XY.

One year later he was on air, self-taught, self-driven, what he missed in the classroom he learned in the arena of life. Elocution, diction, general knowledge, music, panelling, timing, vaudeville, how to adapt in a fast-changing world, how to interview, how to perform.

He cut his 21st cake on television and stayed there for his entire life. At 84, he was still making headlines with posts on Instagram from his hospital bed. Bert never stopped evolving, never stopped learning, never lost his insatiable appetite for what's new. He was the least jaded old-fashioned performer you would ever meet.

Probably the first performer poached by Channel 9 from Seven, his partnerships have been the most successful and enduring in Australian television history. With Graham Kennedy, they lit up the small screen and would then do an encore performance the very next day on the radio. Bert, the perfect foil for the genius of Kennedy, never there to upstage, always to deliver. Later it would be Don Lane, live crosses to the world, Bert's Wheel, always there was this sense of adventure. As Shaun Micallef said, waiting for the Bert moment that would be the talk of the schoolyard and the workplace the next day, that sense of danger, excitement in a suburban Australia.

But also for us, that sense of pride as we watched "our Bert" match it with the best.

To watch Bert with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr and Debbie Reynolds was to watch kindred spirits riffing out live on TV, unrehearsed, unrestricted and hilarious. In a business known for its enenity and jealousies it was no fluke Graham was best man at Bert and Patti’s wedding, that Don on winning his Gold Logie said, ‘six months at your house, six months at mine pal.’ To watch Bert in his natural habitat at the Logies was a television highlight of the year. How he'd glide onto the stage moving like a dancer, his newly cut suit as he would describe, his patent leather pumps with that air of "I know you've seen all the stars and acts tonight but get ready for this." That mildly amused grin on his face as he readied himself to bring the house down again.

Alongside Bob Hope, John Wayne or an inebriated foreign star it made no difference, Bert either made a performance great or saved the day. As we saw a moment ago, his celebrated sparring with Mohammed Ali was made even more memorable in hindsight by not the so-called faux pas, but by the way Ali realised there was nothing sinister, that Bert was a good man. The Greatest knew greatness when he saw it.

But it wasn’t just the superstars that inspired Bert’s work. He never missed an opportunity. Ali was one thing, Belvedere and Moira, they became household names. Max Morrison, Peter Win, his great friends Pete Smith and Phil Brady, when you were part of Bert's crew, you were there forever.

Bert encouraged so many.

Hugh Jackman said, "By watching Bert I learned how to handle the spotlight with grace, dignity, honour and class."

Rove McManus said, "I lost a mentor and a friend. Our country lost an icon. But most importantly, a family lost their hero and soul mate."

Rhonda Burchmore spoke of Bert being there always with encouragement.

Paul Hogan said he was Mr Television, never took himself seriously but took his job seriously.

Phillip Adams wrote: "Bert is the electronic friend, he is there when you want or need him. Bert is company."

Russell Crowe: "Bert is not about fashion or trends, he's watched them all come and go. He is about intellect, he’s about wisdom born of experience. My life is richer having him as a mate."
Channel 9's Michael Healy said, "Bert was a star."
And Jane Kennedy: "Bert would always support new talent, was up for the gag, he wanted you to succeed."

New Faces' may have been his show, but behind the scenes, Bert lived its ethos.

So Vale, Our Bert, who turned a piano factory in Richmond into television city. The first Melburnian to become the king of Moomba. When the marquees dimmed it was Bert who helped relaunch theatre in this town. He was a star on the wireless and ran the first sports-based radio station. He loved his footy and his beloved Fitzroy and his horses, fittingly passing on Derby Day, the day of the champions.

He sang "It's Time", he looked forward not back. In passing, he has been recognised by the Prime Minister, afforded a state funeral by his beloved Victoria with a flag of his country draped on his coffin, which Patti said he would have loved.

The other constant in his life is the Catholic faith, his funeral here at St Patrick's Cathedral. Last night, the theatres of Melbourne dimmed their lights in Bert Newton's honour.

Seventy years ago, could that young boy have dreamt of what was in front of him? And while there was Bert and Graham, and Bert and Don there was nothing like Bert and Patti.
What a combination. Patti, you shared your husband with us all. Your highs and your lows, your family, Matthew and Lauren, your grandchildren who filled Bert's last few years with love and joy.
There would always have been a Bert, but he was enhanced so much by his Patti. Whether the Gold Logie becomes the Bert Newton award or a theatre, or similar be named in his honour, show business and this city will never be the same.

The young boy from Fitzroy who became a star, then a legend, then an institution and now our greatest memory of the golden years of television. Forever, our Bert.

For Bill Graham: 'How do you like your blue eyed boy now. Mr Death?' rap by Ken Kesey (with Grateful Dead) - 1991

3 November 1991, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, USA

I was in D.C. and when I got the message I thought of two things:
I thought of my son going over a cliff and Bill Graham sending a thousand bucks
to put a thing on the hill that points in all directions in Oregon,
so you can always find your direction from the top of that hill.

And I thought of one more thing, it's a little heavy, but that's what it's about,
Nobody else reaches across the distance and puts your hands on your shoulders about this shit,
I mean, that's the way it's been for a long time, reaching across --
when you guys played Brokendown Palace at that gig,
I knew, Shit, This is the Grateful Dead telling me about my son.
It's as big a time as it gets and old Bill knew it, you know he knew it, he knew it.

And the other thought. The second thought, the warrior thought, the hard thought, the final thought is that we ain't many.
In any given situation there's going to be more dumb people than smart people, we ain't many.

And the second thought was this poem by e.e. cummings

A simple old poem that goes:

Buffalo Bill is defunct
Jesus he was a handsome man
He used to ride on a white horse and shoot clay pigeons
1,2,3,4,5 just like that
and what I want to know
is how do you like your blue eyed boy now, Mister Death?"

For James Crawford: 'Leave the ladder down behind you', by Douglas Guilfoyle - 2021

2 June 2021, Adelaide, Australia

Many of us were profoundly saddened on Monday 31 May to hear of the passing of a titan – Judge James Crawford SC AC FBA* – and a mentor, colleague and friend to many. I do not wish my recollections to intrude on tributes from family or his closest friends, but I would like to add my pebble of remembrance to the cairn of our collective grief. There is no need here to recite once again his astonishing career and his contributions to the field. I would, instead, like to reflect on what he taught me about being a good PhD supervisor. I was fortunate to have James as a supervisor, and the debt I owe him was one I could only ever pay forward. (In the UK and Australia one usually has a primary supervisor lightly supplemented by a secondary supervisor, rather than a larger advisory committee.)

Ivan Shearer, another great Australian international lawyer sadly no longer with us, once told me a story about James. It is among my favorites. James was visiting Australia and staying with Ivan.

“I got up in the night to go to the loo,” said Ivan. “It was about four in the morning. I passed James’ door and the light was on and I could hear his keyboard tapping. I asked him the next day what on earth he was doing. ‘I was awake,’ James said, ‘so I was helping a PhD student’.”

This, for me, sums up a great deal of James as I knew him. His relentless travelling schedule, his seeming never to sleep, his astonishing capacity for work – and his dedication to his students.

Indeed, I was speaking earlier in the week with another former student of his. We recalled other PhD students at Cambridge would submit a draft chapter to their supervisor and – in the two to four weeks it might take to get comments – relax. Possibly even go on a short holiday. This was not our experience. I once sent James a draft on a Friday morning and, by the time I got in from the pub that night, had a heavily red-lined mark-up sitting in my email with a suggestion I meet him at 9.30 the next morning, a Saturday, in his office at the Lauterpacht Centre. (That I finished my PhD early was not entirely my own doing.) And I was but one of many: I think by the time he left Cambridge for the Hague he had seen over 80 PhD students graduate across the span of his academic career.

We were all of us, the graduate student cohort at Cambridge, in awe of James. I had met him first in 1998 as a competitor in the Jessup Moot, appearing before him in the final round in Washington DC. I had no contact with him again before arriving as an LLM student in Cambridge in 2003. He was not teaching a course that year, though he gave a single guest class in one of the courses I was taking. Thus, I was not well-equipped with confidence for our first PhD supervision meeting. I had been assigned him as a supervisor quite late, Christine Gray having first agreed to take me. (“I have given you to James …,” she emailed me. “This will probably be good for your career. Do not become one of his research assistants.” More on that later.)

At that first supervision meeting in 2004 he asked me, somewhat unpromisingly, to remind him of my topic.

“Stopping and searching ships on the high seas in times of peace and war?” I stammered.

“Not a field I know a great deal about. I am sure I will learn a lot from you. But the topic seems too big. How will you halve it?”

I gulped: “Um, I wrote a bit on the law of naval warfare for my dissertation, so perhaps I should focus on peace-time law enforcement?”

He nodded. “And what will you do first?”

“The treaty practice seems to grow out of narcotics interdiction agreements, so I should probably start with drug smuggling.”

He nodded again. “Good. Write a paper on drug smuggling treaties, then.”

So I left and I did. Most of my early meetings with James were like that. Brief discussions, although thereafter always based on a draft paper he’d already minutely commented on. I left each of our meetings feeling I’d had at least an hour of his time with my head stuffed full of things I needed to think about. In truth, I don’t think any lasted longer than 15-20 minutes. There was little small talk and every sentence he spoke was always precise and densely freighted with meaning.

It took me a year to realize he quite liked me. It also took some time for the modesty of his claim that he learned a great deal from students as he supervised them to sink in. In retrospect, my awestruck approach said much more about me than him. He was notoriously kind to students. So many stories have emerged in the last few days of him corresponding extensively with PhD students or early career academics at other institutions who wrote to him out of the blue. Everyone was worth his time.

It also took me quite some time to realise that James was an excellent supervisor of both the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ of a PhD. His extensive red-lining was a masterclass in drafting. His legal English was both plain and accessible but was always – always – deeply informed by his vast hinterland of knowledge. And frequently dryly humorous. But the depth of his comments on the tactical level of a text could obscure the clarity of his strategic view.

Our face-to-face discussions were often in retrospect about strategy, the architecture of a PhD. I recall his advice now mostly as axioms. “I think it’s a good idea to write the PhD as the book.” Insanely, I took this advice and it worked. Or, once, when I was really stuck about how to tie my research together into a coherent whole: “I’ve always thought of yours as a dissertation in three parts …” and somehow, something clicked. I was unblocked.

Modesty was a theme in his advice, too. Once, in desperation to show him anything for a month’s fruitless work on the Lotus Case, I showed him a terrible draft – acknowledging it probably had no place in the thesis. His reply: “I’ve more than once had the humiliating experience of drafting 20 pages only to realise at the end of it that I was wrong and had to start again.” Yes, he gave me the crushing, necessary advice that this 20-pages was indeed rubbish – but wrapped in great empathy.

James’ other great gift as a supervisor was that, having achieved the summit of his profession and discipline, he was determined to leave the ladder down behind him. He created opportunities and was encouraging. The stable of researchers he seemed to maintain at all times (and which Christine Gray oddly warned me off joining) were talented young lawyers paid to assist with his prodigious case-load and his academic writing. Many have gone on to PhD study, academia or the bar. Working with James in this capacity was great experience and undoubtedly opened doors.

James was also always ready to pass opportunities to junior lawyers and scholars. He first introduced me to Philippe Sands who was looking at the time for someone to help write a memorandum of advice on a law of the sea issue. Philippe went on to become a colleague, friend and mentor with a profound impact on my career. Philippe, indeed, invited me to join his team for an arbitration, which was the only time I saw James arguing a case on his feet.

Finally, James took a continued interest in the careers of his PhD students and was a tireless referee. In December 2019 I was lucky enough to be able to visit him at the Peace Palace. He was exceedingly kind, talking a little about the issues in the cases before the Court, but showing keen interest in my current work and insisting I send him my recent articles. I did, and within a few days received a pithy reply showing he’d read them closely.

Much earlier in my career I had once, during a flurry of applications, apologized to him for asking for so many references when his time was so valuable. He wrote me that it was in the nature of the supervisor-supervisee relationship that I could call on him for a reference without advance notice for “the term of our joint lives”. It was an act of great generosity, expressed with his usual dry wit.

I am just so sorry that that term has come to an end.

In the end much of what he taught me by example about PhD supervision boils down to: everyone is worth your time; read closely but guide gently; leave the ladder down behind you. Or as Wordsworth put it: “That best portion of a good man’s life [is] his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”

For Michael Gordon: "A defining column in the cathedral of Australian journalism and opinion" by Paul Keating - 2018

16 February 2018, MCG, Jolimont, Melbourne, Australia

Well, we're here to celebrate Michael's life and to mourn his passing, to pay tribute to his life's work, to regret his voice having been stilled. We're also here to share the grief and pass on our condolences to Robin and to his son and daughter, Scott and Sarah.

In a place of many pillars, Michael was a defining column in the cathedral of Australian journalism and opinion. He journalism was marked by its integrity and consistency, a point Jim has already referred to. Perpetually characterised by his own lack of self importance, his determination not to inject himself into his stories, the ability to stand back and talk.

He possessed journalism's most fundamental attribute — to dispassionately assemble facts, to present them in a digestible and intelligent way, to give the reader the credit of understanding their import, to allow the reader the opportunity to come to a conclusion without the story needing colouring.

Michael's journalism carried that quality of understatement, which over time engenders regard in a reader appreciative of fact and insight, particularly in the age of self-expression where bellicosity is too often the hallmark. it takes a strong presence of mind and sense of self to remain unharried, to remain both focused and content with one’s judgements. Michael's line was always marked by that focus and conscientiousness of purpose.

Long careers in journalism and the judgments which attend them are part of the skeins which form the fabric of the country and society. And the loss of any one, an important one, carries a loss to us all. This is why Michael's passing transcends even the primal loss carried by his family and friends.

He was always fascinated by ideas and as his career was fundamentally in political journalism, he was fascinated by political ideas. In my case, this brought him to extend his journalism to a book, which Jim has already mentioned, ‘A Question of Leadership’, which he had published in 1993. This was built around what journalists have since labelled my Plácido Domingo speech, the December 1990 addressed to the National Press Club, perhaps, not perhaps certainly my one and only unguarded speech to the gallery. And the cause of my unguardedness was the death of the secretary to the treasury the previous evening, who had returned from Melbourne to Canberra to participate in an athletics event, only to die tragically coming off the field. In the reflection and sombreness of it, the following night, I was not of a mind to offer an entertaining political speech when someone of such substance, conscientiousness and commitment had been taken from us.

So I focused on the topic of why we were all there. What would we doing there? What was the essence of our mission? What was our duty to public life? And what was the appropriate role of journalists in the political side show? And in the speech I spoke of participants and voyeurs — whether journalists wish to be part of an integral integral to the national project, or whether they wish to sit on the fence and remain voyeurs, to report the high points but too often in the context of sensationalism. Or were they going to be in it for the policy ride and share the uplift, the psychic income or then to be diverted by the then opposition’s alternatives?

I argued what was central to national progress was leadership. That politicians as a class change the world, and that good ones make it very much better.

That is providing they have support on the big upshifts —when we move the whole structure up. I was trying at the time to convey the righteousness of the project and the constructive role journalists had already played in the big reforms to that time, and to not now fall for what was then the Thatcherite agenda of the then opposition.

Well, this whole notion of leadership and the role of leaders and the co-option of the media in the project really got Michael's attention. Mainly for the reason he was already a committed participant, as both Jim and Robyn's remarks make clear, the patriot in him always willed him to the high road agenda. In reality, he could not resist it. The speech got me into great trouble, of course, because of my focus on leadership, where I had said that Australia had never had leadership of the kind that had been provided in the United States at critical by Washington Lincoln and Roosevelt. As it turned out, this caused certain offense in some quarters <laugh> that the United States had a deeper sense of itself than we had, and that it had snatched its independence had written a constitution to guarantee and protect it.

Nevertheless, Michael saw the Plácido Domingo speech as me laying out the contours of an even larger canvas than the reformation of the economy. And hence his book ‘A Question of Leadership’ was written to alert people to that possibility, to that likelihood. So when I became prime minister, it was no surprise to him that having given the country a new economic engine, I wanted to reorient Australia towards Asia, attempt a true reconciliation with the indigenes and embrace a Republic — to let the country discover its blood energy, to let us know who we are and what we are, to give us the power to head full steam into the fastest growing part of the world but with our heads held high.

Michael loved the whole set of ideas, from Mabo to native title, the throw to Asia and of course the Republic. He would occasionally opine what a terrible loss the shift to a Republic had been in later life in conversations I had with him, and agreed that Australia could never be a great country whileever it borrowed the monarch of another country. He understood that there are no queen bees in the human hive, and as Jefferson has said, a monarchy was, of its essence, a tyranny,

Michael believed in an enlightened cosmopolitan Australia, one at a point of justice with its indigenes, open to the world, and ready to embrace its vast neighbourhood. Like the rest of us, he had to end endure the provincialism and the halting progress, but he never stopped believing in the larger schematic.

We will truly miss him.

for Gough Whitlam: 'You would go to the barricades wth such a man', by Graham Freudenberg - 2014

5 November 2014, Sydney Town Hall, Sydney, Australia

For Allan Jeans: 'What a man', by Cameron Schwab - 2011

20 July 2011, Melbourne Cricket Ground, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Allan Jeans was never a dreamer, he was way too pragmatic for that, but clearly understood that he had the capacity to make or break dreams, and that often proved a heavy burden.

It would be rare that a football conversation would pass with Yabby without some reference to a player who he had dropped from a grand final team.

One sensed that the moment was burned into Yabby’s soul as it surely did with the player concerned. These memories for Yab, were as profound as the outcome of the game itself.

In our game dreams become hope. Hope becomes expectation, often without substance or rationale.

For a man like Yab, with a propensity to personalise obligation like no other, he was often required to do some very heavy lifting.

So it was when Yab was appointed Senior Coach of the Richmond Football Club in 1992. Such were the circumstances of his appointment, and whilst he would never be so indulgent to say it himself, he clearly understood that dreams had already become expectation by the time he had donned the yellow and black tracksuit.

Here was a proud football club, Tigerland, dragging itself up by what were very frayed boot laces, its skin recently saved by the shaking of tins, and the passions stirred by the appointment of an icon coach arriving into the dilapidated rooms which seemed to be held together by nothing more than the smell of liniment, ankle tape and the ambitions of young men yearning to be led.

Our game likes to look at the events of history as a predictor for the future as though somehow we can will these events to repeat themselves.

When Allan Jeans was announced as coach of Richmond, immediate reference was made to the appointment of the first non-Richmond person for almost 30 years, in fact the first since Len Smith in the mid-60s, who himself was the first non-Tiger coach that anyone could recall.

The appointment of Len Smith at Richmond would be a catalyst to a great Tiger era, after many years in the doldrums, with the Tom Hafey coached club becoming the team of their generation. Nothing less was expected of Allan Jeans when he became coach of Richmond.

Adding to the colour of this story was Len Smith, the lesser-known brother of coaching legend Norm was also a great mentor of Yab’s.

Len is widely credited for the invention of the modern running game, and his handwritten exercise books on football are the stuff of football folklore.

Len shared these notes with a young Allan Jeans, although Yabby somehow never seemed young, as he prepared his St Kilda team for the 1965 Grand Final.

To say the Saints were inexperienced on the big day would be an understatement. It was only their second Grand Final and their first since 1913.

Yab kept the letters from Len, and I am sure he read them often, particularly in the last months of his life. They gave him context as the coach he was then, and the coach he would become.

History in fact did repeat, as with Len Smith, Yabby’s stint as Senior Coach of the Tigers would be very short – just one season before ill health cut short his time, but in many ways didn’t reduce the impact on those young ambitious men, most of whom would reflect on the time shared as the most significant of their lives.

The reason for this is simple. For Allan Jeans, identity was fundamental, and he educated and coached based on ensuring you had an understanding of where you have come from, where your place is now, and providing a clear understanding of where you were heading.

This was not a compartmentalised thing – it was one continuum – much like the game plan he preached and his famous three phases.

The basis from which he built this was trust, and Yab was the type of person who trusted easily, and trusted freely.

Whilst he had a somewhat intimidating veneer, his warmth and wisdom quickly become apparent, as he did what he could to help you find who you are, what you want to be, and what you want to stand for.

And for many young men finding their way in this most distracted of environments, identity can be elusive.

You quickly learn however, to benefit from the Yabby’s wisened methodology meant leaving your ego at the door, opening yourself up knowing that your confidences were safe, and you would be emboldened by Yab’s preparedness to reciprocate your openness.

Whilst the Yabby voice is legendary, his silences were often more profound.

“I was born with big ears, so I figured I might as well use them”, he would say, and listen he would. He also had a unique way of creating the space required for you to work it out for yourself – surely the best form of coaching.

He was also the master of the metaphor, often used to provide perspective and reality for a player who may be a tad ahead of himself so as to ensure they knew their place in the natural order.

I remember him talking to a young Tiger Tim Powell, who had played a pretty good game off half-back at Victoria Park against the Magpies. After receiving praise, Powelly mentioned his disappointment at not being given a chance to play on Peter Daicos who had kicked a match-winning 7 goals.

“Son, you’re a car salesmen aren’t you?” asks Yab.

“That’ right” says Powelly,

“Well let me put this in a way that you should relate to”.

“Well Son, you’re a Volks Wagon, and Daicos he’s a Mercedes Benz”.

“Now, do you understand?”

“Yes I do.”

“Success needs no explanation, failure accepts no alibis”, he would say, knowing fully that building resilience means you have to learn from your disappointments. That’s how you find out who you are.

Identity based on self-awareness.

And perhaps his best measure of character, “It’s not how you get knocked down, it’s how you get up”.

When Yab arrived at Richmond, he was asked to have a photo taken with the famous tiger skin that adorned the Richmond Board table. He refused. It wasn’t a snub, he would often talk of the club as ‘your club’, rather than ‘our club’, which could be misconstrued by those who didn’t know the man.

In his mind, he had to earn the right to be a part of it. For him it wasn’t a matter of signing a contract, it was about building respect, which he had earn the right – pay the price.

He had a deep respect for the game, the clubs and its people. He understood the Richmond story, the club from ‘struggle town’ that had once been mighty and wanted to be mighty again.

But the weight was heavy, and his health faltered, and so did the dream. He got through the year on pure courage, and his overwhelming sense of duty.

Somewhere from his moments of silent reflections these past months, he realised that he wanted Richmond to be recognised on this day as one of his clubs. “They were good to me” he said, “I want people to know that, please tell them”.

That photo with the Tiger skin was never taken, but the learnings are imprinted in the minds of those who happened to have the good fortune of spending just one very tough season listening to, and being listened by, Allan Jeans.

What a man.