14 May 2021, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia
Speech starts at 8.00
I speak today on behalf of our family: our mother Sally, my brother Tom who joins us by web-stream from Dublin with his wife Jen and their children Emma and Conor, my brother Charlie and his wife Anna and their son Nick, and my wife Mim and our children Sass, Gus and Nevie.
I must admit this is a very difficult task. I have a short time to sum up a long and eventful life.
How do I sum up the life of a man who achieved so much in the law, who loved literature, history and Louis Armstrong, and who only last Christmas was learning new Tik Tok dance routines from his grandchildren?
Dad’s many achievements as a barrister and judge are well-known and well documented, so I won’t focus on them now.
Rather, I want to focus on his greater achievement in life. That achievement was building a rich web of attachments to a wide range of family, friends and colleagues, who I am very glad to see here today.
This achievement became very clear over the last few months, as Dad received a steady stream of visits, phone calls, emails and letters from so many different people from so many parts of his life.
And it occurred to all of us, that this was truly Dad’s greatest passion: cultivating strong connections with the people around him, and nurturing them throughout his life.
As you all know, Dad’s story begins in Hobart, where he grew up with his younger sister Sue. Sue lives in New Zealand and we are very glad to have her and my cousins James and Sarah joining us on the web-stream from Auckland and Hong Kong.
There is no doubt that Dad’s father Francis Xavier Heerey loomed large in his life. Frank Heerey was a veteran of World War One, where he served in Egypt, France and Belgium. After the war, he ran a string of successful pubs around Tasmania, and was elected to the Tasmanian Parliament as a member of the Labor Party.
Dad learned early from his father that true friendship can and should accommodate any difference in opinion. Some of Frank Heerey’s closest friends were his political opponents Leo Doyle and Bill Hodgman, whose sons Brian and Michael became Dad’s own lifelong friends. That provides a lesson for all of us: we must focus on the many things that unite us, rather than the few things that divide us.
Dad was only 25 years old when his father died in 1964. Any time is too soon to lose a father, but aged 25 is sooner than most. There is no doubt that Dad missed his father greatly, and deeply wished that Frank could have known our Mum, and us, his grandsons.
But while Dad carried that regret through his life, he also carried an absolute confidence of his father’s love and support.
Dad only told me a few weeks ago that he was by his father’s side when he died. His father told him “I am proud of you.”
Dad never had reason to doubt his father’s pride and approval.
In our lives, he also made sure that his own sons had no reason to doubt their father’s pride and approval.
Dad moved to Melbourne in 1967 and has lived here ever since. However, he always remained a Tasmanian at heart. Many of his old friends from St Virgil’s College and the University of Tasmania have told us recently how Dad was instrumental in orchestrating regular catch-ups which preserved their friendships over the decades.
And many, many times Dad provided mainlanders with enthusiastic Tasmanian holiday advice, entirely unremunerated by the Tasmanian Tourism Commission.
On moving to Melbourne, Dad gravitated to Hawthorn, where his mother Jean Eileen Brady had grown up near the Church of the Immaculate Conception. In fact, his parents Jean and Frank were married at that Church. Dad used to take us to Mass there when we were young.
He often told the tale that, back in the early 70s, the church once put up a sign which challenged locals to consider “What would you do if Jesus came to Hawthorn?”
One local character wrote the answer: “Move Peter Hudson to centre-half-forward”.
As it turned out, Jesus did not move to Hawthorn in the 1970s, but Dad’s mother Jean did, and she lived not far from us until she passed away in 1976. I remember fondly how she used to add an extra sugar cube to each glass of lemonade when she looked after my brothers and me. We were bouncing off the walls!
Dad threw himself into community life in Hawthorn. Somehow, as a busy barrister with three small children, he found the time to get elected and serve on the Hawthorn City Council, where he made more friends who are here today.
Charlie, Tom and I attended Auburn South Primary School, where our family met a fantastic bunch of local families who became life-long friends, and are also here today.
During that time, Dad was also forging deep ties with his colleagues at the Bar. Many of his contemporaries who started at the Bar with him became his solid friends for life. Very early on, a group of those young barrister friends, and their much better halves, had a Christmas dinner together. They enjoyed it so much they have kept doing it for over 50 years.
As a barrister, Dad was more of a quiet achiever than a loud attention-seeker. However, he was prepared to make a rare exception. Once he was part of a delegation of Australian barristers who travelled to Dublin to meet their counterparts at the Irish Bar.
At their black-tie dinner, it turned out that one of the Irish barristers was a famous tenor who proceeded to entertain the crowd with song after song. The Australians were completely at a loss at how to respond, until Dad jumped up, stood on a chair and recited from memory the whole of Banjo Patterson’s “The Man from Snowy River”. By all accounts, he brought the house down.
The Bar has a strong tradition of formal and informal mentoring. Dad forever appreciated the guidance and assistance provided to him by his mentor Jim Gobbo, and other leading barristers with whom he worked as junior counsel, like Jeff Sher and Tom Hughes.
As he progressed up the ranks, it became his turn to mentor junior barristers. Dad had a string of readers who started out with him and went on to illustrious careers of their own. He took immense pride as each of them took silk and four of them became judges. Again, we are delighted to have them here today.
Dad’s focus on mentoring junior lawyers continued when he was appointed to the Federal Court. Over 19 years he had a string of associates working with him. Each new associate joined an expanding club of former associates which enjoyed an annual Christmas lunch and other ongoing contact with Dad so that he could keep up with progress in their professional and family lives. Many of them now live in other states or countries, but we are delighted to see so many of them here today.
A new chapter opened up for Dad after he retired from the Federal Court at the mandatory age of 70. He returned to the Bar to work as a mediator and arbitrator, and spent 11 years with a group of younger barristers in Dawson Chambers, and later Castan Chambers, named after his old mate Ron Castan. Throughout that time, Dad was the convenor of a regular Friday morning coffee catch-up, and took great interest in how his younger colleagues were getting on.
Those friends at Castan Chambers kindly hosted a farewell function for him in February this year. As it turned out, it was the last public event he attended. All that week, he was quite unwell and it was touch and go whether he would make it at all. In the end, he tapped into some hidden reservoir of energy so that he would not miss the opportunity to spend some quality time with a range of friends from so many different chapters of his life.
His old friend Alex Chernov gave a great speech about their decades together as colleagues and friends at the Bar. Then it was Dad’s turn, and he delivered the last speech of his life. I can’t do justice to it now, but we have a video of the speech skillfully recorded by my brother Charlie on his iPhone – if any of you are interested to see it, please send me an email and I will send you a link.
By that time, Dad had been fighting various types of cancer for several years. He did not want to draw attention to it. On the contrary, he was determined to carry on business as usual, enjoying his regular contacts with old and new friends and colleagues. Somehow, numerous bouts of chemotherapy made no dent at all on his thick head of hair, and he was able to keep doing most of the things he loved right up to late last year.
There is no avoiding the fact that the last four months were difficult for Dad, and for all of us, as his health steadily deteriorated.
But Dad was repaid in spades for all the efforts he made throughout his life, nurturing his wide range of friendships. Day after day, he received visits from friends old and new, travelling from near and far to come and spend time with him. He also received countless calls and emails from those who were unable to travel to Melbourne.
And, thankfully, despite all the challenges of the pandemic and various hotel quarantine debacles, our brother Tom was able to visit from Ireland and spend some significant quality time with Dad and all of us in February and March.
And I would like to pay a special tribute to my mother’s younger sister Jane. We call her Cool Aunt Jane. Back in the day, Jane was a registered nurse. For the best part of three months this year, she put her life in Brisbane on hold and came down here to live with Mum and Dad. She provided priceless care, company and a cheeky sense of humour. Jane: we can never thank you enough.
Only a few weeks ago, I had a brief discussion with Dad which took a sudden profound turn. Indeed, I was running late for a meeting when he decided to raise the biggest question of all: is there a life after this one?
I said to Dad, well, that’s why we make the best of this life. And I held Dad’s hand and said to him: if someone offered me a contract, and that contract guaranteed that I would live 82 years, that I would have children and grandchildren who love me and love each other, and that I would spend the last four months of my life receiving a constant stream of visitors wishing me well – I would sign that contract.
He nodded. And he said: “I’ve had a good life.”
Dad, you’ve had a good life. You’ve had a great life, and you touched the lives of so many others.
On behalf of our family, I thank all of you for the parts that each of you have played in making Dad’s life the life that it was.
A long life, well lived.