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.

for Fiona Richardson: 'Tanja, she’s mad! Way too intense…..You’re too nice to work for her…', by Tanja Kovac - 2017

28 August 2017, Melbourne, Australia

Fiona Richardson MP was a Victorian ALP Minister for Women and the Prevention of Family Violence. She died relatively suddenly from cancer in August 2017. Tanja Kovac was her Chief of Staff. Tanja is National Co-Convenor of EMILY's List Australia, a financial, political and personal support network for progressive Labor women in Parliament.

I didn’t know Fiona Richardson MP before I went to work for her.

A respected and at times feared factional warrior from the Victorian Right, Fiona’s reputation as a fierce political operative preceded her. I understood the kind of tenacity and toughness it took to mix it with the faceless men of the ALP. Fiona had not only survived in that culture she had thrived. She’d even married into it, forming a formidable partnership with former Victorian ALP State Secretary Stephen Newnham.

A couple of days before taking a job as her Senior Advisor in the new Andrews Government, I bumped into Labor mates at the soccer who were shocked when I said I was going into her Ministerial Office.

“Tanja, she’s mad! Way too intense…..You’re too nice to work for her…”

At the same time I would later find out that Fiona was being told similar things. About me. "You can't employ her. She's a feminazi. She's in the Left!"

The more people warned us away; the more we gravitated to each other. Bad-ass bitches, she loved freaking people out whenever we strode together - Left/Right - on a mission.

She brought me in for gender and legal expertise to help manage her Women and Family Violence Prevention portfolios. I stayed and became her Chief because we found in each other a kindred spirit.

It’s one thing to be a Women’s Minister; yet another to invest in women while doing it. Fiona built an all woman Ministerial Office - a coven of witches - all deeply loyal to her. A passionate, pro-choice feminist, unafraid to speak her mind, I focussed on supporting her to be the best leader she could be.

It was a dream job. I wished I’d kept the note she wrote to me on my first day. "We’ll do this as a team”. And so we did. I regret that it took so long for us to find each other. I needed Fiona in my life earlier – a powerhouse political mentor and ally.

My greatest achievement as her Chief of Staff was to get her to finally accept my hugs and spontaneous praise whenever she gave an awesome speech or did something else amazing (which was often). She was a prickly pear, no doubt a physical manifestation of the family violence she had experienced as a child. I wore her down until she hugged me back. It's how I know the love was mutual.

We travelled to New Zealand and New York together to check out innovative family violence services while we waited for the Royal Commission into Family Violence to hand down its findings. We saw many things that inspired us on those trips. But we also had time to get to know each other. It felt very comfortable roaming the streets of a foreign place, talking about our families, kids and politics.

I discovered her eccentricities. The preference for barefeet, the secret love for all things spiritual. She didn't smoke. She didn't drink. She didn't eat meat. She'd fought breast cancer.

She was complex.

An intuitive, intellectual, innovative, ideas person.
A fearless, fearsome, fragile, factional warrior.
A loyal, loving, larrikin, Labor lady.

She was Boadaceia Fi!

Tennyson described the ancient woman warrior “Standing loftily charioted, Mad and Maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility”.

This is how I think of her: The get-away-with-anything-blonde, with steely blue eyes and patrician tallness. So politically sharp it was dangerous to be around you. A true leader.

She loved ideas. Hers came partly from political nous, but also intuition. It was a wholly powerful combination.

Fiona worked with Rosie Batty on anti-family violence initiatives. (Image supplied.)

It's no accident that she provided the intellectual policy genius in two key areas of Andrews Government Reform - the removal of dangerous Level Crossings and, of course, Family Violence Reform.

She achieved so much in a short space of time.

Overseeing the Royal Commission into Family Violence, getting Respectful Relationships into the State Curriculum, family violence leave for our public sector workers, funding Victoria against Violence and turning the state orange and developing the state’s first Gender Equality Strategy – which the whole nation is now emulating! Her decision to talk about her own family's experience of violence on Australian Story took guts. She touched the lives of so many people. The whole country got to understand why she was such a fearless champion for victim-survivors.

No-one was more destined to be the nation’s first Family Violence Prevention Minister.

What she did for Rosie Batty. Quietly. No fanfare. She’s so grateful. Fiona had unfinished business.

Before she died she was working to create a Family Violence Prevention Agency to change attitudes and behaviours towards violence in the home within a generation. She planned dedicated and long term funding for prevention, protected by legislation. It would be a world first. Now Fiona's Law, as I will think of it, rests with good women and men across Victorian Parliament, to fulfil her legacy.

For those wishing to financially support Fiona's legacy, make donations to Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre safesteps.org.au or the Luke Batty Foundation lukebattyfoundation.org.au.

For Edward Kennedy: 'I knew it was Jupiter, but it was acting a lot like Teddy', by Caroline Kennedy - 2009

23 December 2011, JFK Presidential Library, Washington, USA

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 John Button: 'While as a politician he was skilled with words, as a father he was sometimes uncomfortable with them'', by James Button - 2008

15 April, 2008, St Michael's Church, Collins Street, Melbourne

It was exciting growing up around Dad. He brought the heady outside world into our house. The phone was always ringing, visitors were knocking on the door and being ushered into dad's study, which was the classic smoke-filled room. And plots were being hatched – plots to reform the Hawthorn branch of the ALP or to transform Australia, it was the same job. My brothers and I got to meet some intriguing characters. In our living room Nick, aged 10, took the liberty of asking Gough Whitlam if he hated John Kerr. ``Well Nick,'' said Gough, ``as a good Christian one shouldn't hate anyone.'' But Gough, Nick replied. ``What about as a bad Christian?''
                  
In the 60s and 70s the ALP was not so much a party as a cause – and a doomed one, it often seemed. In the wisdom of some in the party, the reason why Labor was unelectable, and the Liberals born to rule, was that Australians were hopelessly conservative and ignorant. My father never believed that. He loved Australia and he thought that if the ALP could come to its senses and change, Australians would come to their senses too. The road was long, though. In the 1961 federal election, he ran for the then blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Chisholm, a seat in which his mother happened to live. The sitting member was Wilfred Kent Hughes, a pillar of the establishment, and dad was predictably slaughtered. At the declaration of the poll Kent Hughes stood up and said in patrician tones, ``It was a fair fight.'' In his speech Dad replied: ``It was neither fair nor a fight. I gained a swing of one – my mother.''
 
Dad told a lot of stories like this around the dinner table. Adventures seemed to happen to him, or else he had the story-teller's gift of turning ordinary life into adventures. Like the time in the '50s he tried to smuggle himself into the Soviet Union with a delegation of Italian communists but was detained at the border. As the Soviet guards on the train examined his passport with no visa an Italian man -- who became a lifelong friend -- leant over and whispered to him: ``Siberia.''
 
He told these stories at our urging, because our family was happiest when he was making us laugh. At night sometimes we would play murder in the dark: he would switch off all the lights in the house and we three boys would hide, screaming in excited terror, as he boomed out one of his kooky poems: ``The grip of steel you soon will feel; it crushes boys to savaloys.'' When we kicked a football in the yard he spent hours assuming a bent over position so that my friend Graham and I could climb on his back and take screamers.
 
But he was away a lot with work, too, and even when around he was often lost in thought. He could be a moody bugger, and cranky too. For us kids he had an elusive quality. Part of him was a mystery, perhaps even to himself. Last week John Cain described his utterances as ``Delphic''. At dad's 70 th birthday party Paul Keating said that ``arguing with John was like wrestling with a column of smoke.'' 
 
He also said last week that John was a political loner, and he was. His honesty helped to make him a loner, and being a loner helped to make him honest. I admired that side of him. When he was a minister I once asked him about a crucial cabinet decision that had not yet been made public. ``I can't tell you,'' he said. ``It's not that I don't trust you – I do – but if it leaks and Hawke eyeballs us one by one I want to be able to look him right back and say I told no one.'' 
 
As a father, though often physically distant, he always kept us close. Whenever I traveled he would demand a detailed itinerary and I would wonder why – until I found myself in a far-flung corner of Mexico and one of his postcards packed with news of home turned up, right on time, at my hotel. One thing Nick and I will never forget is the deep friendship and fondness he and my mother Marj kept for each other. Despite their divorce in 1983, he still came round for tea most Sunday nights; there was never a sense we were not a family. And I know that dad had happy times with his second wife Dorothy and her daughters Kate and Jane, whom he helped to raise.
 
The upside of dad's terseness was that he was never windy; he didn't bang on about his achievements. After my partner May met him she looked forward to hearing dinnertime tales of life at the molten core of politics. But although she and dad had a very good relationship, he parried all her questions with one-line replies. When she asked him to name the hardest thing he had to do in politics he said, ``Going to country Victoria and being demonstrated against by textile workers who had lost their jobs.''
 
I only once saw him completely unbuttoned, if you'll pardon the pun. In 1989 he visited me in New York, where I was living, and we went to a bar in Greenwich Village to hear the 73-year old blues player Jay McShann and his band. We got drunk, banged the table, clinked glasses with strangers, met Jay and the band and at 3am had to be turfed out by the management into the freezing night. We had so much fun we came back the next night and did it all again.

 The only other place I saw my dad really let himself go was at the football. He was seriously, battily, obsessed by football, and by the Geelong football club. More than once, in the Geelong changing rooms, I caught Dad staring a little too intently at Gary Ablett's thighs.  Week after week, year on year, he would draw an oval on a sheet of paper and compile his team in his crimped handwriting, which a secretary of his once compared to the scratchings of a chook. Sometimes he would mail them to the coach, always he would mail them to Nick and I. I think football was a great release from politics. More than that, though, it gave him a chance to be with his two sons, and I know that his love of football was also a love of us.

As the years went on he learnt more how to enjoy life. When we were young his favourite food was a horrid tinned meat called Camp Pie. Once a year, with great palaver, he would cook a family meal. It was always the same: tinned ham steaks, tinned pineapple and boiled rice. But in retirement he taught himself how to cook an excellent prawn curry. He bought a house at the beach, became a gardener, discovered the pleasures of grandchildren. If he did mellow, I give a lot of credit to the partner of his last 10 years, Joan Grant.

 In 2000 Joan nearly died of meningococcal meningitis. Dad found her unconscious in her flat after calling a policeman who knocked the door down. As she lay in a coma for 10 days, dad was with her every day. It was a miracle she survived and I think some fabulous bond between them was forged at that time, one that perhaps makes dad's passing a little easier for Joan, because they knew their time with each other was precious. From the time Dad was diagnosed with cancer six months ago, Joan was with him every moment. She never stopped smiling, teasing him, stroking his head, even when she was exhausted and in despair at the cruelty of the cancer. Nick and I will never forget what you did for dad, Joan. You taught us something about how to live. Typically, Joan will have none of this. When I tell her she has been wonderful she just shrugs and says, ``What else would I do? He gave me the 10 happiest years of my life.''

 Dad died as he had lived. Though he had wanted to live more, he didn't want any ``bullshit'' – one of his favourite words – about his condition. He knew what was happening to him. In the last weeks he was terribly sick and reduced, but he never lost his dignity, his curiosity about the world, or his nerve. I know he had nightmares and Joan and I both tried to talk to him about his fears, thinking it might make things easier. But he was never one for grand speeches. There was a job to be done, the job of dying, and he just wordlessly got on with it. He still liked to banter, though. After one gruelling day in hospital, a young nurse came in with a name tag saying Chelsea. Dad said: ``Hello Chelsea. Are you related to Bill Clinton?'' No, she said. Lucky for you, he said.

 In the last week my family and I have been tremendously moved by the many tributes to him. I think they would have surprised him. He had a healthy ego but he stayed ordinary, he was not conceited. I think, though, he would have been particularly tickled that he was written up on the same day in the literary pages of The Age and in the Footy Record.

 On Saturday Nick and I and my family went to the Geelong St Kilda game at Telstra Dome. For the first time in about 30 years we were going without dad. We met at the top of the stairs at the end of Bourke Street and flowed with the crowd across the footbridge toward the ground. It was warm and festive, everyone was dressed in tribal blue and white and black and red and someone was blowing a trumpet. And there it was, that moment I know dad loved, when there is a fleeting but great sense of collective endeavour, a sense that we're better when we do things together, that the best of the day and of life is still to come.
 
Dad would have enjoyed many things about Saturday. The sun, the grass, the packed stands, the colours, his grandchildren demanding drinks, the moment you recognise each player as he runs out. And as the Cats clocked up the goals on the scoreboard he would have let himself go. He would have embarrassed me by shouting ``Moons'' at Cameron Mooney's marks. David Wojynski's extravagant third quarter running goal would have made him sit back and laugh. So many times on Saturday Nick and I thought, Dad would have loved that. And it really came home to us: we're going to miss him.  

Dad was a friend of ours. You'd always come away from coffee with him with a good story or something sparky he said. He knew things about the world and gave good advice about how to find your way in it. But he'd also ask your advice and listen carefully to the answer. I admired the way he was able to get on with many different kinds of people without being all things to all people. 
 
He was proud of what he did in his writing, and rightly so. Yet while, as a politician and a writer, he was skilled with words, as a father he was sometimes uncomfortable with them. 
 
I have a strong memory of walking back from the MCG to his house in Richmond in about 1983. Geelong had won the last game of the season and dad sat down and drew one of his teams, which he claimed preposterously would win a premiership in about three years. Then he walked us to the gate and we had one of our warm but awkward goodbyes. Nick and I walked off. I looked back and he waved. Then we walked a long way down the street and I looked back again. He was still standing at the gate, looking after us. That was our dad.

James Button is a guest on episode 38 of the Speakola podcast

For Ronald Reagan: 'We have lost a great president, a great American, and a great man', Margaret Thatcher - 2004

11 June 2004, Washington National Cathedral, Washington DC, USA

By video link

We have lost a great president, a great American, and a great man. And I have lost a dear friend.

In his lifetime Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism.

These were causes hard to accomplish and heavy with risk.

Yet they were pursued with almost a lightness of spirit. For Ronald Reagan also embodied another great cause - what Arnold Bennett once called 'the great cause of cheering us all up'.

His politics had a freshness and optimism that won converts from every class and every nation - and ultimately from the very heart of the evil empire.

Yet his humour often had a purpose beyond humour. In the terrible hours after the attempt on his life, his easy jokes gave reassurance to an anxious world.

They were evidence that in the aftermath of terror and in the midst of hysteria, one great heart at least remained sane and jocular. They were truly grace under pressure.

And perhaps they signified grace of a deeper kind. Ronnie himself certainly believed that he had been given back his life for a purpose.

As he told a priest after his recovery 'Whatever time I've got left now belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs'.

And surely it is hard to deny that Ronald Reagan's life was providential, when we look at what he achieved in the eight years that followed.

Others prophesied the decline of the West; he inspired America and its allies with renewed faith in their mission of freedom.

Others saw only limits to growth; he transformed a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity.

Others hoped, at best, for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War - not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends.

When his enemies tested American resolve, they soon discovered that his resolve was firm and unyielding

I cannot imagine how any diplomat, or any dramatist, could improve on his words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit: 'Let me tell you why it is we distrust you.'

Those words are candid and tough and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust.

We live today in the world that Ronald Reagan began to reshape with those words. It is a very different world with different challenges and new dangers.

All in all, however, it is one of greater freedom and prosperity, one more hopeful than the world he inherited on becoming president.

As prime minister, I worked closely with Ronald Reagan for eight of the most important years of all our lives. We talked regularly both before and after his presidency. And I have had time and cause to reflect on what made him a great president.

Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles - and, I believe, right ones. He expounded them clearly, he acted upon them decisively.

When the world threw problems at the White House, he was not baffled, or disorientated, or overwhelmed. He knew almost instinctively what to do.

When his aides were preparing option papers for his decision, they were able to cut out entire rafts of proposals that they knew 'the Old Man' would never wear.

When his allies came under Soviet or domestic pressure, they could look confidently to Washington for firm leadership.

And when his enemies tested American resolve, they soon discovered that his resolve was firm and unyielding.

Yet his ideas, though clear, were never simplistic. He saw the many sides of truth.

Yes, he warned that the Soviet Union had an insatiable drive for military power and territorial expansion; but he also sensed it was being eaten away by systemic failures impossible to reform.

Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's 'evil empire'. But he realised that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors.

So the President resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of these pressures and its own failures.

And when a man of goodwill did emerge from the ruins, President Reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and to offer sincere cooperation.

Nothing was more typical of Ronald Reagan than that large-hearted magnanimity - and nothing was more American.

Therein lies perhaps the final explanation of his achievements.

Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for - freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.

As an actor in Hollywood's golden age, he helped to make the American dream live for millions all over the globe. His own life was a fulfilment of that dream.

He never succumbed to the embarrassment some people feel about an honest expression of love of country.

He was able to say 'God Bless America' with equal fervour in public and in private. And so he was able to call confidently upon his fellow-countrymen to make sacrifices for America - and to make sacrifices for those who looked to America for hope and rescue.

With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world.

And so today the world - in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself - the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer 'God Bless America'.

Ronald Reagan's life was rich not only in public achievement, but also in private happiness.

Indeed, his public achievements were rooted in his private happiness. The great turning point of his life was his meeting and marriage with Nancy.

On that we have the plain testimony of a loving and grateful husband: 'Nancy came along and saved my soul.' We share her grief today. But we also share her pride - and the grief and pride of Ronnie's children.

For the final years of his life, Ronnie's mind was clouded by illness. That cloud has now lifted.

He is himself again - more himself than at any time on this earth. For we may be sure that the Big Fella Upstairs never forgets those who remember Him.

And as the last journey of this faithful pilgrim took him beyond the sunset, and as heaven's morning broke, I like to think - in the words of Bunyan - that 'all the trumpets sounded on the other side'.

We here still move in twilight. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had.

We have his example. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God's children.