6 January 2020, St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, Melbourne, Australia
Unlike my father’s speeches, I’m not planning on speaking for two hours or using a slide presentation, but hopefully I do some justice to him all the same.
And I want to do justice to him because I owe him so much. He was a loving and extraordinarily generous man who gave me opportunities and possibilities unavailable to either him or his parents.
My father would never refer to himself as a self-made man, but in essence that is what he was. He was born into a family that valued education, intellect, hard work and generosity, but which was not wealthy by any stretch.
His father, Lloyd, worked in insurance while my father was growing up. It was a career, place and mindset a world away from his true love, which was farming at the Weaver home for the best part of a century, the Mallee town of Boort.
His mother, Olive, was a teacher whose intellect was keen and whose sense of practicality was finely honed. Dad was in many ways his mother’s child. At her funeral, my aunt stated that Olive “was a clever woman who admired people who did clever things”. It is a neat summation that remains an apt description of my father: a man who respected intellect and intellectual rigour very highly.
Dad often spoke about his childhood as being very happy. The family moved at intervals due to my grandfather’s commitments at Victoria Insurance – each move coinciding neatly with a chapter in my father’s life. He was born in Brighton; a pre-school boy in Woodend; a primary school pupil in Bendigo; and finally a high school student in Hamilton.
The Hamilton years were particularly profound. The Weavers moved to Hamilton when my father was 11 and the Western Districts town was to be the Elysian field to which his mind often returned. It was not, however, without its challenges and a watershed moment in Dad’s life occurred when he failed his matriculation at the first time of asking – a consequence of a bright boy being failed by an under-resourced system and his own immaturity. While he returned and passed at the second time of asking, the experience was profound: he became a tenacious student and, many years later, a committed and generous supporter of my own education. I don’t profess to have my father’s intellect, but I have benefitted enormously from his generosity and commitment to receiving a well-resourced education.
From school he transferred to Melbourne, where he was a resident at Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. He originally embarked on a Science undergraduate degree, before transferring into Medicine. He graduated from Melbourne in 1970, worked as an intern at the Alfred Hospital and in late 1971 met Pamela Pettitt – his future wife.
It will never cease to amaze me that a man as profoundly unromantic as my father got lost in love’s mist so badly that he asked a woman to marry him after knowing her for just ten days. It amazed his own father even more when it turned out to be purely for love, and not because of any need for a shotgun wedding.
The next decade was a whirlwind of work, postdoctoral study and a long stint living in the United Kingdom. My parents lived overseas between early 1974 and January 1982, variously living in the Scottish town of Perth, the West Middlesex Hospital and a house they decided to buy on the spot in 1976 in the London suburb of Kew.
Dad’s diplomacy was generally positioned somewhere between Jeremy Clarkson and Sir Les Patterson. Channelling the wisdom of Australia’s famed cultural attaché, he once described the strike and inflation-riddled UK of the 1970s as being “almost a Third World Country – like Italy.” Yet they were emotionally (if not professionally) rewarding years, which my mother will talk about in greater detail and with great fondness.
Soon after returning to Melbourne, I was born: two days before the devastating Ash Wednesday bushfires, which had eerily similar consequences to current events. I am an only child, which in itself tells the tale of another long and at times deflating journey which my father undertook.
At this point, I believe I should state that my father’s persistence and resilience were remarkable characteristics, present at various stages in his life. They were the traits that ensured he made the most of his intellectual talents (in spite of resources) and which served him so well in two major illnesses: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2007 and the brain cancer which he fought stoutly for the best part of four years.
In the early 1990s, his resilience and adaptability enabled him to change careers, switching his practice from orthopaedic surgery to medico-legal assessments, principally diagnosis and assessment of workplace injuries. He worked assiduously, running a business in a field that frustrated him immensely, but which provided my mother and I with stability and security.
He was astonishingly generous, both in time and money. On the latter front, he spent several decades tutoring and assessing students in anatomy – a field in which he was passionate. His strong memory and keen eye for complexity suited him to this field and it was an ongoing source of frustration for him that Australian medical schools did not value anatomical teaching in the way that he expected it to be taught. He was a proud Fellow of two esteemed professional bodies – the Royal College of Surgeons, and its antipodean equivalent, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.
His lay interests were principally in biology, human history and natural history, with the latter field being crucial in his decision to undertake a Master of Philosophy after retirement. He was an unashamed Anglophile, whose life passion for Britain and its relationship with Australia informed many of his public talks and much of his private reading. In 1990, he spoke at Turkish universities about the Gallipoli landings and their significance to the First World War, while as recently as 2018 he spoke at the Medical History Society of Victoria. Dad had an eidetic memory for facts and a memory suited for lecturing. Less charitable observers might refer to it as pedantry, with a tendency to lecture.
This is the outline of the man whom many of you will know. The man I knew was not, in truth, much different. My father was not someone who adapted his persona greatly according to the audience. Instead, the changes in his behaviour were largely driven by subject matter. This meant that he could be passionate and pompous in his views, but never insipid or insincere.
Dad instilled in me the virtue of being present as a parent. For all the late nights and long shifts, he could still provide the best accounts and memories of my infancy, be the father who volunteered at junior sport and be the driver who ferried everyone else’s kids from one school or sporting commitment to another. He was generous to a fault with his time as I grew up, even when he had little of it to spare.
And he indulged my loves. Several people have mentioned to me his passion for the Melbourne Football Club, but in truth it was less his interest and more his commitment to build a relationship with his own father and his only son – two generations who have been far more stupidly invested that him in the fortunes of a mostly dreadful football team that occasionally hits purple patches of mediocrity.
Former St Kilda and North Melbourne coach Alan Killigrew said: “There are two great cons in life – communism and soccer.” My father would have agreed wholeheartedly with both elements of the statement, but it didn’t stop him from taking me to English lower division club Brentford (where the bathroom hand towels did not appear to have been changed since the Blitz), nor prevent him from encouraging me to keep touring European football grounds even once he’d been diagnosed with serious illness in 2007. He may not have understood the subject, but he always respected obsessions.
Occasionally our interests dovetailed, and we developed cherished memories of a trip to the UK in 1989, when a six-year-old boy became besotted with Westminster Abbey, the Natural History Museum and several other landmarks that represented the most keenly held of my father’s interests.
In recent years he came to know and love a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, who formed a significant part in the final years of his life. My commitment to my children and my determination to build memories with them is driven by the realisation that it honours the same commitment that my father made to me.
I am grateful for all that my father provided me and very much intimidated by the scale on which it was offered. To be able to provide the same opportunities to my children is a major ambition, one which I know my father would rate highly.
No novel means more to me than ‘The Great Gatsby’ and no line resonates more than the final line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Jay Gatsby believed in the green light at the end of the pier. I believe in the green field in my mind.
And in my mind, my father is leading me there. I am six years old, walking up a gravel slope clutching a copy of the Football Record and a homemade Demons streamer. Dad is holding my hand. The greensward field opens up before us and we have reached a special place. Thanks, Dad – I love you. And I always will.
for Jim Stynes: 'There's never been anyone like Jim Stynes and there never will be', by Garry Lyon - 2012
2 April 2012, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia
Big Jimmy would have loved this.
He thrived on a big crowd. If he was here, he'd have us all standing up, waving our hands above our heads, and singing, and turning to the person next to you giving them hugs and shoulder massages. It's the sort of weird stuff he did and it took us a long time to get our head around it.
He loved to take people outside their comfort zone, to get them to do things that they didn't think they were capable of, which is not surprising really when you strip it all back to the very start of his extraordinary journey.
How else is a young lad form Ireland arrive on the doorsteps of the Melbourne footy club, another world away in very sense of the word, if he wasn't prepared to step out of his own comfort zone?
It was to be a consistent theme throughout his time here. That he would struggle initially was inevitable. That he would eventually fail was likely. That he eventually debuted as a Melbourne Footy Club player in 1987 was admirable. That he was the best and most dominant Australian Rules footballer in the country four years later, was to begin to understand and appreciate the sort of athlete and person we were dealing with.
Consistency was a cornerstone of Jim's footy career. He was consistently our best preseason performer, defying logic as he powered up mountains, leaving us all in his wake. There's enough team mates of ours here to know that he was consistently our worst in season trainer, as he hobbled around the training track from Monday to Friday, attempting to overcome all manner of injuries from the previous game. He was a horrible trainer during the season.
And then he was consistently our best performer when it mattered most, as he wheeled himself from contest to contest, game after game, year after year. So I wanted Jim to be consistent today, and he would be disappointed if I didn't take the chance to have a laugh at his expense. It's what I enjoyed doing most with him. So here's some home truths.
If he wasn't tight with his money, he was very careful with it. You only had to look at the way he dressed to realise he didn't spend money on a wardrobe. I've never seen a man get more excited about a club issue of a pair of runners every year. Mainly to discard last year's and move into the new fashion.
Which is why recently he turned up at our blazer presentation night, only a ... You know where I'm going with this Sammy ... a week or two ago, and he was crook and his eyesight was failing him. And I realised how crook he was because the raffle tickets were being handed around. Jimmy wasn't a big raffle ticket buyer, he was a $5 man. And I saw him and Sam arguing, having a blue over the envelope, and there was 20s and 10s and 50s flying everywhere and I thought, "Shit, Jimmy's crook. He's going for a 50." And it wasn't until two days later I spoke with Sammy and she said no, even with his failing eyesight, she saw Sam put a 50 in, and he was diving in to try and get 45 out.
He wasn't opposed to stretching the boundaries in the pursuit of victory either, and at the risk of starting an international incident, and I know there's a strong Irish contingent here, I've got to get this story off my chest. Some of my favourite times with him were in the International Rules series where I was coaching and he was assistant. And they were tense times, and we were always in the back of my mind wondered whether he was a double agent or not. And we got to the game and Croke Park, 75-80,000 people there. Not sure who you were barracking for either Brian.
And I said to him, "Jim, get the walkie talkie sorted out. Make sure we've got two way down to the bench."
And he said, "Yeah okay, okay." So he's fiddling around with it, trying to get onto the right channel and all of a sudden he said, "Shut up, listen." And there was a cross reference and we logged into the Irish coach's box.
And I said, "Jim, you can't do that." And he said, "Shut up." So for the first five minutes, we listened to the coach of the Irish team make his moves, and we trumped them and we eventually went on and won the game, and I reckon the next day I heard or read somewhere they said the Australians were well prepared, they anticipated every move the Irish team made. Damn right they did, because Jimmy was listening to the coach all the way through.
So he was a bit deceptive. He didn't lose his temper much, but he did on that day. The game was really close and it got towards the end of the match, and we were a few points down and he was in charge of our whiteboard, with all the magnets and the men around it. And someone did something wrong and I smashed the table in frustration, stuff went flying everywhere but I kept watching the game. It was about 30 seconds to go and I said, "Jim, who's on number 20?" Nothing. So I was getting a bit agitated at this stage, so I said, "Jim, who's on number 20?" And there was still nothing. I said, "Jim, if you don't tell me-" and he cut me off and he said, "Well how to fook do I know? He's crawling round on the floor trying to pick the magnets up." They'd been flying everywhere. Fook's an Irish word for flaming, so we're okay with that.
That was about it. That was about it. It's all I got. The truth is finding fault in anything he did was a fruitless exercise. I sat down and wrote a list of words that best describe him as a footballer: consistent, reliable, dependable, trustworthy, honest, strong, durable, sincere, loyal, courageous, caring and resilient. They're wonderful qualities to possess in a footballer. They're even more significant qualities to possess as a man. And what I find most amazing of all, is that all the kids from around the world we could have attracted in the game when Melbourne took the audacious steps of looking beyond our shores in the albeit unlikely hope of unearthing a footballer, we found him. Jim Stynes. And as a result, we knew never to question the boundaries of what one man is capable of achieving on the playing field, but also to never question the ability of the same man to have an impact away from it. There's never been anyone like Jim Stynes and there never will be, which is why we loved him, and we miss him so much today.