John Durack: Folks, I should tell you that we're now going to have desert. After desert there will be more speeches. There is absolutely no obligation, except on Mother and Dad, to stay and listen to the rest of the speeches. I'm really serious about that, because they could go on for a long time.
JOLLY SOUNDS
John Durack:
All right, folks, I remind you again that everybody is at liberty to keep on eating, drinking and leaving when they feel like it.
Mother and Dad, other family members, and friends. On 9th November 1918 (sic) (for the record, date should be December 9th, 1918) almost 80 years ago, and two days before the end of the war that was to end all wars, Dad was born at Claremont in Perth, and his father made the following entry in his diary:
9/12/1918: The little chap made strong protest at being brought into this hard world. Yes, well I've got this out of Mary's book. Yes, well, you know what I've been like about birthdays. Well I just thought I must have been wrong, but it must be a misprint. Anyway whenever the day was, the little chap made strong protest at being brought into this hard world, but all is well with his Mother and himself. Nurse Stevens in attendance. The children excited at seeing the baby.
And then he added, without further comment of Dad's elder brother Reg:
Reg looking very thoughtful.
And well Reg might have done, in the way I might have done when Matthew was brought into the world, because Reg's brother Bill was to upstage all his talented siblings at least in the sense that my brothers and I have never had any doubt that we got the best of a very fine lot for our Father.
APPLAUSE
To his own father, who was something of a Latin scholar, his fifth child was Quintus, or as Dad sometimes mentioned to us, 'Quinty'. But what I never knew until reading the passage in Mary's book that seems to have the wrong date, that it wasn't just Quintus, it was Quintus Superbus!
Bill Durack: You do know what my Mother suggested as another Latin alternative?
John Durack: No, Dad.
Bill Durack: Ultimus.
(LAUGHTER)
John Durack: Anyway. On the other side of Australia, in Bathurst, Mother was already a toddler, and the darling baby of a family which always adored her. Unfortunately, what Grandfather James, or Mem-Mem, may have written on her birth, is no longer recorded, but that the baby's head was wetted well and truly in a Bathurst pub may be the one where Grandfather James is pictured being bucked off a bull, we can all be very certain.
Now it wasn't very easy to make a selection from the last 80 years of what should be celebrated today, because that's what we're here for. Eighty years is, if I may say so, Mother and Dad, a bewilderingly long time. It must cover growing up, first loves, the Great Depression, another war, marriages and children, the deaths of parents and much-loved brothers and sisters. The topics which suggest themselves cover a broad range and in no particular order they'd include childhood, which seems to have been happy for both of them; family, a very big part for both of them; sport, a short chapter for Dad, a long one for Mother and still being written; meeting and marriage, we don't know very much about that; music, letters, letters because thousands of letters have crisscrossed the continent over that 80 years telling of joys and sorrows, of triumphs and despairs. Religion? It's always seemed to me that both my Mother and Father have a healthy scepticism about religion, (with due respect Father Leonard) but nevertheless, religion played a very significant part in their lives and it continues to do so. And, Father Leonard we're very pleased to have you here for yourself, but you are also representative of a very long line of priests and nuns and bishops with whom Mother and Dad have had to do over the years.
Friends, of course, many of them; architecture, writing, sons, grandchildren. If I were to attempt to cover even a fraction of those, it would make a significant dent in the next 80 years. So I'll start with the most important of them: sons, this son in particular.
An old acquaintance of mine, on being told of today's event, said 'You're very lucky, Jack.' She meant lucky to be able to continue to enjoy their company, but I think they're very lucky to continue to be able to enjoy our company, but also I think that we've been very lucky. Apart from all the things children always claim to have got from their parents, the knowledge of right and wrong, high moral principles, all those things of course we've got, good education, I also received from them things that I praise more highly, and they were unstinting love and affection, even at times when I was less than lovable; unswerving loyalty and support, moral and practical; a love of books and music; a love of the land; and the sense of humour I think without which all else is dross.
It's always been plain to us that we were able to receive these gifts because they received them from their own parents; from MP and his Bess, our Grandmother, Perth, and from Grandfather James and his Norah, our Mem-Mem.
For the first 30-odd of the 80 years, I've been able to rely only on hearsay and the stories that circulate in families, this family in particular. The portraits that emerge of both of them are rather different: Dad was clearly a polite child, and an aunt with whom he was staying for a weekend was understandably astonished by his reply to her solicitous inquiry about his bowels, (as aunts were wont to do in those days to little boys staying over with them). At the time he had a crystal set equipped with valves, the old radio valves. She thought he was inquiring about the valves, and he replied, 'They're all blown out!'
LAUGHTER
His sister, Elizabeth, who wishes she could have been with us today, described Dad as a very law-abiding boy, who always followed the path of peace. The only exception she could recall about Dad was an occasion when aged about 10, felt obliged to return to school to beat up the boy who had bullied his younger brother, David. She also recalled that Dad was, in her words, 'easily enchanted', and that his two sisters more than once took advantage of his suggestibility to blindfold him and take him down into the dark mysterious shadowy underworld of the trapdoor spiders, with whom they were very familiar, and Dad was apparently very pleased to join them. But although Elizabeth noted that Dad was a pliant child, she also noted a characteristic of which his sons are well aware: he could dig his feet in. As she said, 'He can still do that, and when he does, you cannot shift him.' She recalls him pressing for a banana, and it had been suggested that he should share one with his brother Kim, and he said, 'If I can't have a whole banana, I won't have any banana at all.'
One's impression was that Mother was less pliant. She was too impatient to crawl, walked at six months and never stopped being active thereafter. She was a great sportswoman, had university blues in hockey and athletics, and was chosen to represent Australia in hockey. This was a dream, the realisation of which was prevented by the war. She is remembered as a young woman by her nieces as having been always full of life and liveliness, and spoiled the same nieces mercilessly. She was a great student, but not of astronomy, having memorably commenced one of her university essays with the words, 'The sun in its eternal journey round the earth ...'
LAUGHTER
To which her lecturer appended the comment, 'Really?'
But her love of literature was one of the sustaining passions of her life, a passion which she managed to communicate at least to me. And there can't be too many of her generation who are still writing articles for literary magazines, or who were able to discharge the duties of writer-in-residence, as she did only very recently.
Mother and Dad met in the shadow of the war. Their courtship was a rather interrupted one. Dad, however, secured himself from other temptations by isolating himself with his brother Kim at Carlton Reach, where a dam on the Ord River was then only a dream. It is not recorded what Mother did during this period, although my cousin Margaret recalls at some time, not necessarily this period, hearing Mem-Mem say to Margaret's mother, Jess, rather fiercely, 'They're only earrings, she's not engaged.' And how many couples in the mid-1940s would have chosen to honeymoon in Wyndham? But they did.
My own memories of Mother and Dad begin in North Queensland on stations north of Julia Creek and Cloncurry, a time which must have been difficult and anxious for them, with young children, but an introduction to the wonder of the most lonely parts of Australia which I have never got over, at any rate. The memories travel with the family to Toowoomba, to unaccustomed greenery and the country suburbia of the 1950s where the lawns were mowed on weekends and we all listened to 'Journey to Mars' on the radio on Saturday nights.
But always there were excitements. Weekends on the farm, Dad's memorable introduction to Mick and I to camping on the farm: middle of winter, one blanket each, and the grass; well digging; and travels of course, lots of travels to Bathurst, Caloundra, Hervey Bay and Perth; and the stories. It is stories about people that I mostly associate with my youth. From Dad, about the builders and other architects: the builders, Alf Camputti, Joe Fachen, Jack Primus, George Strohfelt, Ron Trotter. And of course, the clergy. I won't name them, or some of the stories we heard about them.
From Mother, it was stories of Mem-Mem and Mary and of family members, cousins, aunts and then on to the garage man and the man who ran the property on the outskirts of town, and so on and so on. I thought because stories were such a significant part of my young life, that I'd tell a few stories about them, because they are stories that reveal something of their essential qualities. I'll start with Mother.
She has a certain forthrightness. On discovering on coming down to breakfast after a party that we had, a couple of dozen 20-year-olds camped on the loungeroom floor after the party, and being assured by me that nothing untoward had occurred, she said, 'That's even worse; that's not normal!'
A mastery of domestic science: Now Mother is really a good cook and a home-maker, but finesse in domestic science is not really her strong point. Nor was she really a school tuckshop kind of mother, but at least on one occasion she resolved to do her bit when Mick and I were students at Holy Angels Convent. The house seemed to be filled for the whole of the week with huge containers of pea soup. It was wintertime. Only on Friday morning did the significance of the soup being full of bacon suddenly occur to her, and only a last minute dispensation from the Bishop relieved us of the mortal sin of eating meat on Fridays, or saved us from eating pea soup for the next fortnight.
Then there was this memorable exchange: Mother to my brother Michael, who had finally sewed a button back on his school shirt, 'There's nothing very remarkable about a 14-year-old sewing a button on a shirt.' Michael in reply: 'There is, when his mother can't.'
Musical appreciation: Mother has had a long love affair with music; she has an eclectic taste, she's been a long and active member of the Chamber Music Society, but has also had an equally long time love affair with The Boy from Oz.
Motherhood: I descend to the serious for a moment, but no son received more loving attention or support than Jim throughout the serious illness which afflicted him and lasted nearly two years. Unswerving support for all her sons was provided through all the various vicissitudes of youth and, alas, adulthood. Grandchildren can expect the same, and that it will come with the same sometimes devastating preparedness to express her opinions on life and love.
Literature: Of course Mother's had a lifetime love of books. She's a writer of books, short stories, plays, the famous Toowoomba Saga, articles in literary magazines, and so it goes on.
Capacity for Friendship: There have been a lot of them responding to Mother's fun, energy and vitality. There have been literary friends, university friends, tennis friends. Many of them alas have moved on. We think of Paddy McCallum, Mrs Valerie Tod, Bob Houghten the list goes on forever. But it's great to see some of them here today.
I move on to Dad: Dad has a quality of decisiveness which we've often noticed manifests itself in bursts of sudden action. Now my other brothers may have forgotten this, but we once lived next door to some nice people, the Jensens. But the Jensens had a camphorlaurel which was the bane of Dad's life, and one memorable weekend (and I presume this had been preceded by some sort of diplomatic negotiations that failed to bear fruit). But one memorable weekend he flew at the camphorlaurel. All I can say is that when the main power lines came down on the house lines, and the Fire Brigade arrived and there was a large insurance claim on domestic appliances, and his children were all hiding in the garage, I resolved to recall it on some appropriate occasion.
But there are other occasions I remember also from my youth, when builders refused to work on digging the foundations of house on the Darling Downs, saying that the ground was too hard. And I remember Dad returning home that night with blistered hands, having spent all day in the trenches with the builders. But the house got built.
There's also about Dad, a certain propriety, and don't worry Dad, I'm not going to say anything very embarrassing. But I think it manifests itself in the fact that although we went as a family to Bathurst for many, many years for our Christmas holidays, and although Dad had a very close relationship with his mother-in-law, Mem-Mem, and Mary, my aunt, when it came time to make the various phone calls back to Toowoomba to keep an eye on jobs and what was happening with them, Dad always made them from the public phones down at the Post Office. And that's what I mean about a certain element of propriety. I could give lots of other examples, but in a way that's the most significant.
Then there is the steadfast consistency manifested in a lifetime of leaf-raking. But also in the Nobby Pool Maintenance Saga, and I was pretty upset to hear that a kangaroo had made a hole in the liner, and I hope you haven't felt that you've been relieved of the duty to keep that pool absolutely crystal clear. But of course the greatest indication of consistency is the diary, the diary that has been maintained, as far as I know, for the best part of 70 years. Frank Brammer, Dad's partner of 40-odd years, once said to me that he never felt any obligation to remember any of his life, because he knew that if he needed to pick up on it at all, it would be in Dad's diary. And I think it's probably that that has meant that Dad has had such a great affinity with the English diarist, Samuel Pepys, although (and I haven't combed through the diaries to check on whether there were any dalliances with chambermaids of the kind that Samuel Pepys specialised in) but I think that Dad felt, with Samuel Pepys, and Brian of course gave him the tapes of Samuel Pepys' diaries, that he had discovered a kindred spirit. But I should say that in the last five or ten years, a disturbing feature has emerged in Dad's diarykeeping, and that is a predilection which indicates some sort of Messianic tendency, a predilection for filling out the events of the following day! On the night before!
Bill Durack: I haven't written up today's yet John.
John Durack: As children we wouldn't have thought that Dad would have been capable of what euphemistically is called colourful language, until the day when John Tully dropped the stilsons (which for anybody who doesn't know, children, are these great big spanners about that long, for screwing up pipes) dropped the stilsons down the well on top of Dad, who was at the bottom of it. We had a revelation that day.
Then of course there's that intense practicality, and I could suggest numerous examples, but Dad and Patrick were (well I'll describe them this way) were my drivers on one of the outback tours which my little business periodically leads, and this had been a particularly disastrous tour, with a seemingly endless series of vicissitudes, mechanical, personal, navigational, everything that could go wrong, went wrong. And we were camped one night on the Gibb River Road at a place called March Fly Glen, and the usual sort of terrible things seemed to have happened during the day: wheels falling off, engines boiling, and springs breaking, and people fighting with each other. And I'd gone for a little walk to attend to the wants of nature beyond the campsite. I was walking back and I ran into Dad and Patrick, walking west on the Gibb River Road in the moonlight, and I just joined them, and we walked in silence for a little while and then Dad said, 'Well boys, we could just keep walking!'
Then of course there's the sense of tradition. There are numerous traditions that go back a long way. I remember the traditions of the liquorice allsorts, the caramels, and the Cadbury's block of chocolate on Saturdays at lunch time; and the barbecues on our old farm when we learnt to appreciate charcoal chops. And so they go on.
(BELL RINGS)
Thank you, Jim. (LAUGHTER)
Empathy with members of the clergy is this one, Father Leonard: Dad's had a lot of friends in the clergy over the years, and not just the Catholic clergy. And they're not always religious doings which have contributed to many a story. They're also responsible for a new expression, because on returning from a trip to Quilpie with one of their members, they'd been obliged to drop in on every parish priest in the west, so that it turned into what Dad described as 'a presbytery crawl'.
Finally of course, as a great architect: I'm not sure what makes a great architect. If it means a huge stretch of this State dotted with comfortable homes, livable buildings, convenient schools, dignified churches and useable toilet blocks, then Dad is a great architect, and moreover, his partner of 40 years, Frank Brammer, said to me the day before yesterday, 'I suppose I don't need to tell you, John, that your father is a gentleman of the first degree, and regarded as such throughout the profession.' What more really can be added?
I could go on with the stories about both of them; they might grow somewhat in the telling, but no more than necessary, to show that we boys have been incredibly lucky to have for our parents two people who figure so largely in them. There are many more to be told, much more to be done, but occasionally it is necessary to pause as we have today, from doing, and to tell the stories and remember the names and the places. I don't want to embarrass them unduly with public thanks, but I personally am very grateful for so many stories and look forward to the ones still to come.
APPLAUSE
Addendum
DavidDidn’t realize you were on Patrick’s list for these reminiscences......The Boy from Oz was the campy but very likeable Peter Allen, of “I still Call Australia Home” fame, as well as many others. Mother was always a fan of his. “The Boy from Oz” was a stage show in New York based on his life, with Hugh Jackman playing Allen.As to Mum and Dad’s wedding, some years ago I produced a chronological list of significant events in Dad’s life, most of it compiled from sixty or more years of letters from his family which Dad had kept in his papers and which I read after his death. I later gave these to Patsy for incorporation in the archives and eventual gift to the Battaye Library in Perth. In due course she returned me a summary of all of the letters I had sent her. Here is the extract dealing with Mother and Dad’s wedding and honeymoon, from the chronology I prepared -16 Aug 1945 Mother comes to Perth to “see the wildflowers”27 Aug 1945 Mother and Dad announce engagement2 Sep 1945 Japan surrenders, Germany having done so on 8 May 1945, bringing the Second World War to an end.5 Sep 1945 Mother’s father James Braham writes to Dad regretting they cannot be in Perth for the wedding, saying they “heartily approve of Noni’s choice” and saying she should not miss their absence too much as “judging from my essay into matrimony the parties engaged have only the thought of each other”.15 Sep 1945 Dad’s “bachelor’s party” at the Adelphi Hotel17 Sep 1945 Mother and Dad marry at St Mary’s Cathedral Perth, intending to go by the “Koolinda” to Wyndham next day for their honeymoon but instead leave six days later by plane to Broome after the “Koolinda” is delayed by a strike. They spend time on “Argyle” with Eric and Marjorie Durack and two or three weeks on “Auvergne” with Enid and Reg, returning to Perth on 27 October. Tiny black and white photographs of this honeymoon appear from time to time over the next sixty odd yearsHope you and Carmen are well. Do you find you are missing the place down at Ball’s Head (I think that is what it was called...) or is it a relief not to have to worry about it? All well with us and Robyn has staged a remarkable recovery from her double knee replacement back in October last year.Best wishesJack
