Introductory Remarks

Thank you all for being here, to honour and express affection for Margaret.

This is a sad day. We have lost my great friend and yours.

We meet in a manner requested by Margaret, at a place chosen by her.

When we were listening last year to one of the pieces of music we will hear, Margaret said:

“That’s something you can use at my funeral. But only at the beginning. You have to finish with something cheerful. I don’t want people going away upset and sad. Finish with something played by the Maastricht Salon Orchestra.” Fully reflecting our relationship, I acted doubly on such a great idea – we started just now with music played by the Maastricht Salon Orchestra, and we shall finish with it.

So that is Margaret’s direction to us today, to find happiness, and I will do my best to lead the way in that direction.

We organised our own wedding together, we did as much of this event together as possible.

We went through burial or cremation options.

When Margaret faced a second brain operation in Sydney last November, she said she would like to be cremated there and travel home in the car with us to Canberra.

Then we came here, around Christmas, and found this place, this beautiful park, so close to home, and all our everyday routine.

At that time, the coniferous trees that you can see, if you would like to turn around, had Christmas decorations not of any conventional kind, but by the traditional owners of this place, the sulphur crested cockatoos. They were pruning trees to Christmas tree form, in flocks, working their way down, tearing a foot off the end of each branch to get off the cones, in best Christmas dinner manner gorging themselves, increasingly silently, tossing the scraps to the ground.

If you seek, on this occasion, to identify Margaret’s beliefs - our shared beliefs - you might do well to start right there, with us sitting and watching the cockatoos last Christmas, delighted also by the systematic way they tear up the simple memorial contrivances people place on their graves - our satisfaction at being part of nature, a individual status as of ordinary importance among diverse organisms - delighting in the pleasure of such status, seeking to act in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill towards others, without discrimination across social, racial and indeed species lines, not driven by ideology or creed.

I hesitate over that last long statement, because it is not a bunch of words to be dissected philosophically or critically. It is a practical view of life, a commitment to a secular altruism, a rejection of the need for further complication, an acceptance that life can be real, wondrous and absolutely full of meaning, and of sensuous and intellectual delight, in such simple and decent natural terms.

I wrote the cheque for our grave, Margaret wrote the cheque for this seat, and we have sat here many times, and you will appreciate how wondrous, how typical of Canberra, to find such a place to be bound together, in the midst of the city.

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Margaret was angry about one thing, passionately stirred by it, in recent years, namely the issues of Aboriginal reconciliation and resurgent racial attitudes in Australia.

It was our delight that one of our children, at the age of about 9, came from watching a television program to ask, puzzled: “What is race prejudice?” When we explained this hard to fathom concept, the child in question said: “That is disgusting and absurd and I do not understand it!” We were very proud. Margaret sought no soapbox, but her attitude was clear in the way she dealt with people.

We were listening last June to the radio, while driving to Margaret’s first radiotherapy treatment in Sydney, to an interview with a female minister of the new Bracks Government in Victoria. The minister was asked whether it was important to seek to be remembered for something; she thought it was.

Margaret said to me, with intensity, that she wished to be remembered for her work in recent years at the ACT Historical Places, with Margaret Fleming.

The two Margarets had been the president and secretary of the committee that established the Montessori schools in Canberra 20 years ago, and had come together in the 1990s in a wondrous working partnership again.

Speaking with great vehemence, my Margaret talked of how, with Margaret Fleming, they took groups of children from all sorts of backgrounds, on excursions to Lanyon for less than a day. They sought, in that time, to show the students the happiness and wonder and the beauty of discovery and learning. She hoped that that awareness would stay with them when they went away and their lives would be the better. There was nothing more important in life, she said, than to help children find a love of learning.

Margaret believed deeply that everyone had a chance for dignity and respect. She did not start, in dealing with people, from an attitude. She acted with tolerance and open-mindedness. She loathed intolerance, prejudice, arrogance and unfairness. At times, she carried quietly a burden of sorrow at such things inflicted by others.

For all this dignity and decency, she must be loved and remembered.

Margaret was a deeply and assertively sensuous person too, in our private life, and in her appreciation of everything around her; in appreciation of, and confidence in, her own unaffected beauty and the oft-remarked astonishing quality of her skin. She was proud of all that. She loved herself and that was the security of her ability to smile upon others.

Margaret was very determined about how this occasion should be, just as much as she was determined about how her wedding was to be, over by the lake in 1974. On that occasion, she drove Andrea, her bridesmaid, to the wedding, in her little purple Datsun. Oh, that they could have arrived here together so happy again today.

I am directed by Margaret, and delighted, to say that anyone may speak here today. (and, I must mention now that you are ALL welcome back at our place later).

We shall continue as follows:

In a moment, we shall have the piece of music Margaret did not want at the end, because too sad. You will probably recognise its provenance, at least if you are thirty or more. [Sean Connery’s reading of George Martin’s setting of John Lennon’s “My Life”]

Then we will have a silent minute for reflection and memories of happy times.

Then another piece of music. I’m sorry, but that’s going to be a bit of a tear-jerker too.

In the second half of the nineties, Margaret took great pleasure in belly dancing. It was the private ‘women’s business’ thing; it was a little exotic, it satisfied a need to be immersed in the foreign; it was wonderful exercise. A woman coming home flushed from belly dancing is a wondrous thing.

During that time, we saw and fell in love with the Tunisian film ‘Silences of the Palace’. This piece of music, from the film sound track, is ‘Cry of Sorrows’. I would like to suggest that at that point, we raise our eyes, smile at each other and look around at the beauty of this place, and see Margaret in that context, for having sought beauty, and shared it with us, to the last.

Thereafter, Mary, Margaret’s sister, will speak.

I shall then invite contributions from the floor. I have sought to orchestrate that just a bit, with some prodding of individuals, but I have deliberately not done much such urging, so feel free to speak.

There are no rules, but I suggest this:

- that you might bring someone forward with you, for company or to exchange smiles or remarks;

- that you feel no need to be formal, to make a speech, just tell us something you’d like to share.

On the day of Margaret’s death, lots of people dropped in to talk to her. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to welcome a young man who has been many times in our house as a member of our daughters’ circle of friends.

He, Ryan, sat with Margaret to thank her for things she had taught him that made his life better, starting with how to cook broccoli properly.

And, of course, this being Canberra, with few degrees of separation, he came into Margaret’s room and said ‘hello John’ to my old friend John, who had been his maths lecturer at university, as today Ryan may have said hello to Gregory, a studen in his current maths and computing class at school. Gregory is here today with his father Denis, (helping also with the video), but these men are not with Denis’s wife and Gregory’s lovely mother Marg, who died so very recently with the same kind of brain tumour. Marg and Margaret only met this year and shared some private moments; Denis and I met when we were working in Parliament House ten years ago.

The beauty of life, as also the meaning of history, is to be found in the interstices, in the small kindnesses, the eddies in the stream that make it a pleasure to put your toe in the water or immerse yourself in life.

The beauty of life, as also the meaning of history, is to be found in the interstices, in the small kindnesses, the eddies in the stream that make the it a pleasure to put your toe in the water or immerse yourself in life.

For Margaret, and for our children and family gathered here, I thank you all in advance for what you find you want to say, or just the smiles you bring to share. Margaret was more a smiley person than a wordy person. Words count for much less than smiles or kisses.

A friend, in tears, a week ago said: “I shall miss Margaret so very, very much” to which I replied “She will still be with you. And hey, YOU have had in mind sometime going to live in the country, and leaving us, and Margaret would still be with you then. And, you would be going off with this man here, with whom you have such an intense relationship, but when you get to such a farm, he will no doubt go down the paddock to fiddle with things best left alone, while you remain in the kitchen making jam and scones. You will still be in each other’s hearts all the time.”

Of course, she protested, with a wail: “It’s not the same” and it’s very definitely not the same, but it is real and it is the only thought that can help me finish these remarks and be positive today.

May Margaret remain with us, as a smile warming our hearts…

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[music – CD – George Martin, My Life, last two tracks]