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 Gough Whitlam: 'He was an enhancer, an enlarger', by Malcolm Turnbull - 2014

21 October 2014, Canberra, Australia

I am very pleased and very honoured to associate myself with all of these fine speeches today remembering my good friend and constituent Gough Whitlam. Gough Whitlam was always at pains to remind me that he was my constituent, addressing me generally loudly and at a distance as 'My Member, My Member', just to make it quite clear that I had certain obligations to him.

We are here also to extend our condolences to Tony, Nick, Stephen and Catherine and their families. It is a time of great sadness for the Whitlam family and for Gough's friends but it should also be a time of joy. Gough lived to a great age and he had a great life. He was a big man with a big vision for a big country. He was an optimist. He was funny. He was witty. He always said, 'Don't say I'm funny; say I'm witty.' Well, he was witty and funny. In all of that we should celebrate his life.

We know Gough Whitlam's government was not unmarked by error. It was a controversial time and I will say a little bit about the influence of that on the Labor Party in a moment. We have to remember that the economic arguments of those days have largely receded into history. The truth is that nobody on our side or on the Labor side would agree with Gough's economic agenda. We would not agree with Billy McMahon's economic agenda. Life has moved on, but what is remembered is the myth of Gough or, as Gough would say, 'the mythos of Gough'. What is that thread, that narrative that emerges from history out of the humdrum daily grind of political argument? What is it? It is an enormous optimism and all of us admire that, whether we voted for him in the seventies or our parents voted for him, or whether we approved of what John Kerr did or not, all of that recedes. What people remember of Gough Whitlam is a bigness, generosity, an enormous optimism and ambition for Australia. That is something we can all subscribe to.

As many speakers have said, Gough was a great parliamentarian. He loved this place—not this chamber so much as the one he served in. He loved this parliament but he was also an active citizen. He did not just make his political contribution while he was a member of parliament; he continued to make a contribution to Australian politics and to public affairs and to cultural debate throughout his entire life. He left the office of Prime Minister nearly 40 years ago, yet he has been an active voice in the Australian public debate ever since. He was, as the member for Watson and the member for Sydney recalled, very active in the Republican Movement, in the campaign for Australia to have one of its own as its head of state. I remember recruiting Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam to come onto the same platform and speak in favour of the yes vote in the referendum. I thought I would share with honourable members my recollection from my account of that time. I rang Gough on 8 July 1999 and I noted:

I spoke to Gough Whitlam today, or rather he spoke to me, for about 40 minutes. He is happy to speak for a yes vote and with Malcolm Fraser. Gough said, 'Malcolm, I'm tired of these professors, no, associate professors of Constitutional law theorising about constitutional crises. I know about constitutional crises.'

Interestingly one of the features of the republican model in that referendum campaign, as some members may recall, was that, while the President would be appointed by a joint sitting of both houses of parliament in a bipartisan vote, the President could be removed by the Prime Minister, but the President could not be replaced by the Prime Minister. The senior state Governor would fill that place and then there would have to be a bipartisan appointment of a new President. Both Whitlam and Fraser were of the view that, if that arrangement had been in place in 1975, Kerr would not have sacked Whitlam because both of them were of the view—Malcolm Fraser especially and perhaps with more insight—that the reason Kerr had sacked Whitlam was to pre-empt Whitlam sacking him—an interesting footnote to that history.

Gough was remarkably generous to everyone he dealt with. As the Prime Minister said, he was a very hard man to disagree with and an almost impossible man to dislike. He was full of arcane knowledge; the Prime Minister referred to his knowledge of ecclesiastical matters, and he had an extraordinary interest in genealogy—almost anybody's genealogy. If he learned one thing about your family—a third cousin or an aunt or a great-aunt—he would remember it and then remind you of it. He was very, very well informed about this. I saw this in action in 1986, when I called him as a witness in the Spycatcher trial to give evidence on behalf of my client, Peter Wright. I was hoping that Gough would be indignant about the evidence we had produced that the British security service, MI5, had been—without any legal authority at all—bugging all sorts of people in Britain, including Patricia Hewitt, who had been the secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties and was at that time Neil Kinnock's private secretary. She went on, of course, to become a cabinet minister and so forth. I tendered some evidence about this, and Gough immediately lit on Patricia Hewitt's name. He said, 'I know this one—Mr Kinnock's private secretary. I've known her all her life. I went to school with her mother. I've known her mother since I went to school with her in 1930. I've known her father since they were married in 1941. I've known her and her sisters and her brother her whole life.' He went on, and so I said, 'Do you regard her as a person likely to be plotting the violent overthrow of the British government?' Gough said, 'No. I've never felt myself at risk in her company.'

There has been a lot of discussion about Gough's regard for the great beyond. Gough is resolving his relationship with God as we speak, no doubt, but he was always very entertaining about those issues of the divine. I remember 25 years ago, when I was in business with his son Nicholas. Nicholas and Judy brought Gough and Margaret up to visit us at the farm in the Hunter Valley that I had inherited from my father some years before. Unfortunately, a fog had descended on this particular part of the country and you could not see anything. It was just white everywhere you looked; it was like being in a white cloud. I said to Gough, 'I'm really sorry. It's a nice view here but you can't see any of it.' He said, 'Oh, don't be concerned. I'm at completely at home. It's just like Olympus.'

We recognise that all prime ministers capture the attention of the Australian people. Not all prime ministers capture their imagination, and even fewer capture their imagination and retain it for so long. Gough Whitlam was able to do that because of his presence and his eloquence but, above all, because of that generosity of vision I spoke about earlier. He was an enhancer, an enlarger. He was not a mean or negative politician in the way, for example, that another great Labor leader, who also lived to a similar age, Jack Lang, was. Jack Lang was a great hater. Gough Whitlam is a great example to us. He obviously never forgave John Kerr, but look at the way he was able to be reconciled with Malcolm Fraser. That is a great example to all of us. We can learn from Gough Whitlam about the importance of optimism and the importance of having a big vision for our country. I might add that it is important to execute that vision with competence; but, nonetheless, think about the way he did not allow hatred to eat away at him. The reality is that hatred, as we know, destroys and corrodes the hater much more than it hurts the hated, and so many people in our business, in politics, find themselves consumed by hatred and retire into a bitter anecdotage, gnawing away at all of the injustices and betrayals they have suffered through their life. Whitlam was able to rise above that, as we saw in his cooperation and work with Malcolm Fraser on many causes—not just the republic. I recall at one point I was on the opposite side when they were busily campaigning to stop a group I was part of to acquire Fairfax. They had many unity tickets on different matters. Nonetheless, it is a great example for all of us not to be consumed by hatred.

Gough will never be forgotten. He will be given credit, I imagine, for many things that were equally or perhaps even entirely the achievements of others. I heard earlier that Gough Whitlam had ended the White Australia policy. I could just hear Harold Holt turning in his watery grave to hear that! Nonetheless, he was there at a tipping point, a fulcrum point, in our history, and he was able to embody and personify a time of change. By capturing our imagination with such optimism, he will always be a symbol of the greatness, the importance, the value of public life—an example to all of us. We can leave the political agenda to one side, we can leave the debate about his measures to one side and just remember that big, generous, witty, warm man—that giant—and, above all, we must remember that nearly 70 years of marriage, that extraordinary love affair. If Gough is in Olympus, I have no doubt that he is there with Margaret. I think that, in some respects, one of the things we can be happiest about today is the fact that that old couple are no longer apart.

For Tom Uren: 'You were a champion, Tom. You’re in the company of legends now', by Martin Flanagan

4 February 2015, Sydney Town Hall, Sydney, New South Wales

There is no video or audio of this speech.

Tom Uren was a mountain of a man. I first met him in 1987 when I rang and asked if I could do a story on him. I’m interested in boxing, I said. He said, I don’t talk about boxing. I said my father was on the Burma railway with you. He immediately invited me into his home.

The article meant a lot to me but the Sydney magazine for which I wrote chose to take my portrait of this big, complex man and make him smaller and simpler to fit their pre-conceptions.  I rang Tom and told him I was resigning. His voice thundered down the phone: “Don’t you ever resign!!! You stay in and maintain the struggle!!” That was when our relationship started in earnest.

Tom was a magnificent mixture of a man. The fact he had been a boxer was used by his political opponents to denigrate him, but the aesthetic side of his nature was unusually strong. He loved beauty and saw it in both his wives, Patricia and Christine.  More than once, in his later years, I saw him call Christine Patricia and, being the remarkable woman that she is, Christine received it as a compliment. Tom was so proud of his friendship with the painter Lloyd Rees. He often related how Whitlam said he made Tom spokesman for the environment because Whitlam admired the home environments Tom created.  Tom could laugh, he could cry. He had wisdom; he had ego. Tom Uren was more than happy being Tom Uren.

I told Tom a couple of months before he died that I thought he had a great life. He saw two Australian legends up close, Weary Dunlop and Gough Whitlam. If he was smeared and attacked for his political beliefs in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, he lived to see himself become someone regarded with sufficient affection by the general public to have him declared a national treasure.

The way Tom told me his story, the major influence on his early life was his mother Agnes. He had an older brother who’d been given to a grieving relative to bring up so that Agnes had twice the love to shower upon Tom. “She taught me to love myself,” he told me. And he did. Tom was the also big kid who has the supreme confidence that comes with being good at most sport. He was a junior champion with the Freshwater Surf Club, he was a good rugby league player. He left school at the age of 13 because he could get a job and his father couldn’t. He took up boxing and aimed to become a champion. At 20, he fought for the Australian heavyweight title and lost.  Tom told me the flu beat him, not the other fighter.

One of the things that sustained him on the Burma Railway was the desire to become a champion boxer. Another was the beauty of the jungle - each evening, he made a point of taking in the trees, the flowers, the birds. At the time, he was still a Christian who kneeled to say his prayers each night. Presumably, none of his army mates said too much because Tom had, after all, fought for the Australian heavyweight title. My father once told me that as a young man Tom Uren had a magnificent physique.

 The five men I have known well who were on the Burma Railway have not been not like other men I’ve met, except maybe some Aboriginal elders. They saw a lot, suffered a lot and each of them had  a deep well of compassion. They went to Hell but weren’t defeated spiritually. Up close, 21-year-old Tom saw a true leader, Weary Dunlop, save lives by taxing his officers to buy medicines and extra food for the seriously ill.  An English group of 400 prisoners camped nearby.  In four weeks, only 50 were left  alive. Tom never forgot stepping over dead bodies going to work each morning.

What kept the Australians alive in greater numbers? Tom’s answer was their “spirit of collectivism”. Tom’s creed became that the strongest man takes the heaviest end of the log. Tom was the strongest man. He stepped between guards and prisoners being beaten. When Tommy got hit, he told his mates it was okay - he could take a punch. He was going to London after the war to be a champion.

He spent the last year of the war in a prison camp in Japan. He saw the discoloured sky above Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. That last year, working in a mine with Japanese civilians, changed him. He realised he didn’t hate the Japanese people. He hated what he called militarism.  And that may have been Yom Uren’s biggest achievement - he grew beyond hate.  

The war ended and he worked a passage on a steamer to England. He took a job stoking the furnaces but the heat re-activated the malaria in his system. A British sportswriter wrote upon his arrival, “He dresses like Anthony Eden, has tons of personality and his name is Tommy Uren”. Another sportswriter wrote that he’d never seen a fighter get up off the canvas as m any times as Tom did in his first fight. One hundred bouts of malaria had taken something from his physical vitality that could never be restored. In the dark of a cinema trying to straighten his broken nose, he was overcome with loneliness. He returned to Australia and Patricia.

If you can judge a man by his friends, you can surely judge him by his great enduring mate from the Burma Railway. For Tom, that was Blue Butterworth. Blue was Weary’s batman and if Weary Dunlop’s is a legend then Blue is a necessary part of that legend also because most of the risks that Weary took  Blue did too. As brave as Weary and as quick-witted, Blue was a bricklayer after the war. He died in 2011; Tom told me he missed Blue every day thereafter.

In 1960, Tom returned to Japan and attended a conference on banning atomic and nuclear weapons. He delivered a speech, giving the Japanese a forthright view of Japanese politics at the time and ended by saying the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was a crime against humanity. And this was just the start of his political career. One day, I asked him, “When did you become an environmentalist?”. He replied, “When I went back to Thailand and found the jungle cut down”.

Tom could drive you mad. How well I remember the day we went to see Gough Whitlam in his offices in central Sydney. Tom was responsible for the building as Minister for Administrative Services in the Hawke government.  The man behind the front desk didn’t know who Tom was.  Didn’t know! He was the Minister for Administrative Services in the Hawke government! There was a minor scene. Then we met Whitlam, which was like looking Australian history in the face. Afterwards we caught a train down to Woy Woy to see Blue and Tom used my left ear to broadcast a speech to the people of western Sydney urging them to rise up against the state government. In the end, I got up and went to another carriage.  When Christine told me it was Tom’s wish that today’s service only go for one hour, I did say to her, “I take it he won’t be speaking then”.

But I also know I’m not the only person here today who can say that Tom Uren was like a godfather to them. Tom believed humans could grow. He had grown -  during his early years in the Labor Party, he had been, in his words, a bigoted anti-Catholic; as an old man, he would list Pope John XXIII as one of his principal influences. If Tom was a person who thought highly of himself, he never stopped thinking of others. When he poured his belief into you, it was like standing beneath a waterfall from which you emerged larger.  Tom lived a public life that ran in a straight line from first to last.  He shrugged off going to prison for his political beliefs and, ultimately, he never despaired,  because Tom Uren believed that, regardless of race or colour or creed, there are always in the world what he called “people of goodwill” to whom we can appeal. You were a champion, Tom. You’re in the company of legends now.

for Gough Whitlam: 'I was but three when he passed by but I shall be grateful 'til the day I die', by Cate Blanchett - 2014

4 November 2014, Sydney Town Hall, Australia

When I heard Gough Whitlam had died, I was filled with an inordinate sadness. A great sorrow. I wasn't even in school when his primeministership was ended. Why was I so sad? His public presence over the course of my life was important, but he was no show pony. So what had gone?

The loss I felt came down to something very deep and very simple. I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education. When I went to university I could explore different courses and engage with the student union in extracurricular activity. It was through that that I discovered acting.

I am the product of an Australia that wanted, and was encouraged, to explore its voice culturally.

I am the beneficiary of good, free healthcare, and that meant the little I earned after tax and rent could go towards seeing shows, bands, and living inside my generation's expression. I am a product of the Australia Council.

I am the beneficiary of a foreign policy that put us on the world stage and on the front foot in our region. I am the product of an Australia that engages with the globeand engages honestly with its history and its indigenous peoples.

I am a small part of Australia's coming of age, and so many of those initiatives were enacted when I was three.

In 2004, after working overseas for a few years, I returned to Australia to work on a production of Hedda Gabler at the Sydney Theatre Company, a company I love. A theatre company, like so many theatre companies, that would not exist without the Whitlam initiatives, or more importantly, the ongoing Whitlam legacy.

Anyway, I also shot an Australian film that year called Little Fish. This was a decidedly urban story set in a culturally diverse suburb of western Sydney. The tale of a young woman in a relationship with an Asian-Australian man, a chequered history with drugs, and a lot of personal ghosts. A story like Little Fish would not have been told without the massive changes to the Australian cultural conversation initiated, and shaped, by Gough Whitlam's legacy.

In 1972 an Australian film or drama would have been a kind of country idyll, with no connection to urbanity or multiculturalism. Little Fish starred Hugo Weaving, Noni Hazlehurst and Sam Neill; all wonderful actors and themselves direct beneficiaries – and indeed products – of the wave of Australian cinematic and theatrical creativity unleashed by Gough Whitlam's time in government.

This story embraced Asia and multiculturalism. It was a brutal, sharp and unromantic tale. It was made by a wonderful Australian director, Rowan Woods, and an Australian writer and now producer Jacquelin Perske, both of whom graduated from the AFTRS – probably without fees – and produced by Porchlight Pictures, with the help and guidance of government film bodies that all found their voice, and their true shape, under and out of initiatives made in Gough Whitlam's time in government. Little Fish represented in its own small way a maturing of the Australian dramatic voice on so many levels – nearly 30 years after the initial changes and support were put in place by Gough Whitlam.

I tell this story not to wave a personal Little Fish flag, but for this simple reason. It was a film shot, for the most part, in Cabramatta – hello everyone in Cabramatta – the heart of Gough's seat. And quite simply today I was faced with talking about the impact of Gough Whitlam on women and the arts, and I was overwhelmed.

So, I stuck a random pin in the map, because his effect on the geo-cultural-political map of Australia is so vast that wherever you stick the pin in you get a wealth of Gough's legacy. Hugo Weaving, Noni Hazlehurst, Sam Neill, Rowan Woods, Jacquelin Perske, Vincent Sheehan, AFTRS, STC, Cabramatta, multiculturalism, urban stories, Australia's relationship with Asia, a complex national identity scrutinising itself through difficult and well-wrought drama; the list goes on. And that is just one pin stab in one art form from one beneficiary's perspective. It's exhausting just trying to conceive of it.

Speaking of exhausting, I am a working mother of three, and when I took on the role of Little Fish I had just had my second child. Noone batted an eyelid. No one passed judgment. And no one deemed me incapable. Because the culture around women and their right to work as equals in Australia, had already been addressed significantly by Gough Whitlam.

Supporting mothers' benefits. Before 1973, only widows were entitled to pensions, and thus the new benefit created the choice for single mothers in how they raise their children, and began combating some of the stigmas surrounding single motherhood itself.

Equal pay for equal work began with the 1972 equal pay case at the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commissionand was extended in 1974 when  the Commission  included women workers in the adult minimum wage for the very first time.

In the early '70s there were a series of international conventions to which Australia was not yet a party. Gough, who was a huge believer in the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was active in signing us up to those agreements and initiatives.

The Whitlam government was also a pioneerin awarding numerous senior positions to women in such crucial areas of government as the courts, the public service, and the diplomatic service. Whitlam was the first leader to appoint a prime ministerial adviser on matters relating to the welfare of women and children – enter, the great Elizabeth Reid.

He established the Family Court – a cornerstone reform – and in the Family Law Act of 1975 he made the space for fault-free divorce, which allowed women to exit from abusive relationships and re-engage with society with dignity and with equality.

Women were probably the main beneficiaries of free tertiary education. So here today I may stand as an exemplar, but if you combine the modernising and enabling capacity afforded women by his legislation you can begin to see that the nation was truly changed by him through the arts and through gender, thereby leading us towards an inclusive, compassionate maturity. So much of this achievement is directly attributable to policy initiatives Gough Whitlam began with a series of reforms to extend the degree and quality of social opportunities to women in Australia.

But there is so much to say. Even from my own small, tiny, irrelevant experience, that what I would actually love to do at this memorial is pretend to be Gough Whitlam for a minute. (Don't worry I'm not going to imitate him, no-one could).

He said of his government:

"In any civilised community, the arts and associated amenities must occupy a central place. Their enjoyment should not be seen as remote from everyday life. Of all the objectives of my government, none had a higher priority then the encouragement of the arts - the preservation and enrichment of our cultural and intellectual heritage. Indeed I would argue that all other objectives of a Labor government – social reform, justice and equity in the provision of welfare services and educational opportunities – have as their goal the creation of a society in which the arts and the appreciation of spiritual and intellectual values can flourish. Our other objectives are all means to an end. The enjoyment of the arts is an end in itself."

I was but three when he passed by but I shall be grateful 'til the day I die.

The scale of Gough Whitlam's ambition and vision will be forever remembered.