For Jan Deane: 'I just loved to hear her voice' , 'Our Fiery One' by Joel Deane - 2024

5 September 2024, St Brendan’s, Shepparton, Victoria, Australia

Memories.
Like the corners of my mind.
Misty watercolour memories
Of the way we were.

Those are the opening lyrics of Barbra Streisand’s signature song, ‘The Way We Were’.

Jan loved Babs… And she loved that song… And she sang it more than once… And, believe me, she could sing.

Jan had such a powerful voice. She really did.

The first time I remember hearing Jan’s voice was in a production in the 1970s.

I’m pretty sure it was Oklahoma… but don’t quote me on that.

I was just a kid and there was my aunt – up on stage, up in lights – burning the house down with that voice of hers.

The image and the sound of her up there is emblazoned in my memory.

From 1978 to 2014 – opening with Carousel and taking a final curtain call with A Month of Sundays – Jan worked on a string of highly-professional productions for Shepparton Theatre Arts Group, Bendigo Community Theatre, and the Albury Wodonga Theatre Company.

Over those 36 years, she won multiple Georgy Awards and Victorian Music Theatre Guild Awards.

Out of all those stellar productions – too many to list – two stand out because they demonstrate Jan’s versatility – and longevity.

In 1979, Jan played Maria in STAG’s production of The Sound of Music.

Thirty-four years later – in 2013 – she returned to The Sound of Music… but this time played the Mother Abbess in an Albury-Wodonga production – and, according to reliable reports, brought the house down every night.

As I said, Jan had a powerful voice – but she didn’t just use her voice to sing.

As a TV star on GMV6 in the 1980s – she used her voice as the host of The Morning Show to inform and entertain thousands of people across regional Victoria and New South Wales.

As a co-host on 3SR’s morning radio show – she kept using her voice to entertain and sang live in the studio every Friday.

But – professionally speaking – I feel Jan really found her voice when she moved to Bendigo to work as a journalist at 3BO, then the ABC.

I may be biased there. Jan and I both started working in the fourth estate around the same time – in the 1980s.

And, for the uninitiated let me explain, newsrooms can be a bit like a large, dysfunctional family – except your journo siblings are a collection of pirates and bleeding hearts and broken toys… and they play indoor cricket in the office and have the cheek to call your desk the Jan Deane Stand.

The point I’m trying to make is this: journalism is more a way of life than a job – and Jan loved it and excelled at it.

Speaking as a fellow journo – I know my aunt particularly loved her time at Aunty.

She worked in the ABC’s Bendigo, Ballarat and Melbourne newsrooms – before finishing up back at home in Shepparton.

And I was always so proud when I heard her read the news on 774.

Proud because I knew she’d sweated over every fact and figure – not to mention the syntax – and I just loved to hear her voice.

That doesn’t mean I always agreed with what that voice was saying.

You see, I worked as a press secretary for the Labor Party for many of those years.

Interactions between press secs and journos are often antagonistic, but – I have to say – the ABC journos treated me very well back then.

I suspect they were kind to me because I was Jan’s nephew.

I suspect some of the politicians I worked with also put up with me because I was Jan’s nephew.

One of those politicians – Premier Jacinta Allan – called me shortly after Jan’s death.

It wasn’t a perfunctory phone call.

Jacinta remembered Jan very well and very fondly – particularly from her days at 3BO – and was upset that she’d died too soon.

In the interests of editorial balance – which Jan was a stickler for – I should add that Wendy Lovell, the Liberal Member for Northern Victoria Region, also posted a heartfelt message honouring Jan as her friend.

Jan certainly made her voice heard in public – but what about her private voice?

Born on October 31, 1953, …

daughter of Patrick and Jean Deane, both of whom she adored, …

sister of Barry, Peter, Ann, Paul, Patrick, Denis, Kay and Margo, …

the second of four daughters and seventh of nine children, …

Jan grew up just around the corner from here – at 15 Oram Street.

Castle Deane is gone now but its front verandah was Jan’s first stage.

You see, 15 Oram Street was a drop punt from Deakin Reserve. That meant hundreds of footy fans walked past the Deane’s front yard after a Saturday game.

Twelve-year-old Jan – with Kay and Margo singing backup – made the most of this captive audience, belting out a medley of Beatles tunes.

Jan was also a diligent student at St Brendan’s Primary and Sacred Heart College – she loved French poetry – but she and Kay did cause a minor scandal when they sang the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ during a lunchtime concert.

Apparently, the nuns thought the line about ‘Mother Mary’ unsuitable.

But what was Jan really like with her family behind closed doors?

I think Margo put it best. She called Jan ‘our fiery one’ and ‘a tower of strength’.

Growing up, I saw Jan’s fiery side more than once – but here’s the thing: Jan’s anger was never directed at her many nieces and nephews.

Jan’s anger was almost always about some injustice – some wrong that should be put right – rather than some annoying kid.

I’m not saying Jan was perfect – after all, she barracked for Essendon; which might explain her gift for ballistic profanity – what I am saying is that, within the Deane clan, she was a voice of reason.

I spoke with Jan often in the years after the death of my father, her brother Barry, and she helped me come to terms with that loss – and, in those conversations, she was, as Margo said, a tower of strength.

I know I’m not the only person – within and without the family – to have benefited from Jan’s fiery strength.

And I will never forget something Jan said in our penultimate conversation – after her wonderful 70th birthday bash, before the July funeral of her brother Paul.

We were discussing the factional dynamics of large families when I asked Jan how she dealt with, let’s say, disagreements – and she said to me:

‘You don’t have to agree with someone to love them.’

Wise words from a strong woman.

Perhaps that’s why there’s been such a huge outpouring of love for Jan since she died.

ABC Shepparton and Albury-Wodonga ran on-air tributes. There were articles in The Shepparton News, The Australian and Radio Today. And I’ve spent hours reading wonderful social media posts from dozens of colleagues and friends.

On behalf of Jan’s surviving siblings – Peter, Patrick, Denis, Kay, and Margo – I want to thank everyone for your kind thoughts – and prayers.

Jan Deane had a fierce voice … a funny voice … a forgiving voice … a beautiful voice.

Hers is a voice we will not hear again on this temporal stage – but I believe it is now singing on the spiritual plane.

God bless you, Jan.

For Michael Gordon: "A defining column in the cathedral of Australian journalism and opinion" by Paul Keating - 2018

16 February 2018, MCG, Jolimont, Melbourne, Australia

Well, we're here to celebrate Michael's life and to mourn his passing, to pay tribute to his life's work, to regret his voice having been stilled. We're also here to share the grief and pass on our condolences to Robin and to his son and daughter, Scott and Sarah.

In a place of many pillars, Michael was a defining column in the cathedral of Australian journalism and opinion. He journalism was marked by its integrity and consistency, a point Jim has already referred to. Perpetually characterised by his own lack of self importance, his determination not to inject himself into his stories, the ability to stand back and talk.

He possessed journalism's most fundamental attribute — to dispassionately assemble facts, to present them in a digestible and intelligent way, to give the reader the credit of understanding their import, to allow the reader the opportunity to come to a conclusion without the story needing colouring.

Michael's journalism carried that quality of understatement, which over time engenders regard in a reader appreciative of fact and insight, particularly in the age of self-expression where bellicosity is too often the hallmark. it takes a strong presence of mind and sense of self to remain unharried, to remain both focused and content with one’s judgements. Michael's line was always marked by that focus and conscientiousness of purpose.

Long careers in journalism and the judgments which attend them are part of the skeins which form the fabric of the country and society. And the loss of any one, an important one, carries a loss to us all. This is why Michael's passing transcends even the primal loss carried by his family and friends.

He was always fascinated by ideas and as his career was fundamentally in political journalism, he was fascinated by political ideas. In my case, this brought him to extend his journalism to a book, which Jim has already mentioned, ‘A Question of Leadership’, which he had published in 1993. This was built around what journalists have since labelled my Plácido Domingo speech, the December 1990 addressed to the National Press Club, perhaps, not perhaps certainly my one and only unguarded speech to the gallery. And the cause of my unguardedness was the death of the secretary to the treasury the previous evening, who had returned from Melbourne to Canberra to participate in an athletics event, only to die tragically coming off the field. In the reflection and sombreness of it, the following night, I was not of a mind to offer an entertaining political speech when someone of such substance, conscientiousness and commitment had been taken from us.

So I focused on the topic of why we were all there. What would we doing there? What was the essence of our mission? What was our duty to public life? And what was the appropriate role of journalists in the political side show? And in the speech I spoke of participants and voyeurs — whether journalists wish to be part of an integral integral to the national project, or whether they wish to sit on the fence and remain voyeurs, to report the high points but too often in the context of sensationalism. Or were they going to be in it for the policy ride and share the uplift, the psychic income or then to be diverted by the then opposition’s alternatives?

I argued what was central to national progress was leadership. That politicians as a class change the world, and that good ones make it very much better.

That is providing they have support on the big upshifts —when we move the whole structure up. I was trying at the time to convey the righteousness of the project and the constructive role journalists had already played in the big reforms to that time, and to not now fall for what was then the Thatcherite agenda of the then opposition.

Well, this whole notion of leadership and the role of leaders and the co-option of the media in the project really got Michael's attention. Mainly for the reason he was already a committed participant, as both Jim and Robyn's remarks make clear, the patriot in him always willed him to the high road agenda. In reality, he could not resist it. The speech got me into great trouble, of course, because of my focus on leadership, where I had said that Australia had never had leadership of the kind that had been provided in the United States at critical by Washington Lincoln and Roosevelt. As it turned out, this caused certain offense in some quarters <laugh> that the United States had a deeper sense of itself than we had, and that it had snatched its independence had written a constitution to guarantee and protect it.

Nevertheless, Michael saw the Plácido Domingo speech as me laying out the contours of an even larger canvas than the reformation of the economy. And hence his book ‘A Question of Leadership’ was written to alert people to that possibility, to that likelihood. So when I became prime minister, it was no surprise to him that having given the country a new economic engine, I wanted to reorient Australia towards Asia, attempt a true reconciliation with the indigenes and embrace a Republic — to let the country discover its blood energy, to let us know who we are and what we are, to give us the power to head full steam into the fastest growing part of the world but with our heads held high.

Michael loved the whole set of ideas, from Mabo to native title, the throw to Asia and of course the Republic. He would occasionally opine what a terrible loss the shift to a Republic had been in later life in conversations I had with him, and agreed that Australia could never be a great country whileever it borrowed the monarch of another country. He understood that there are no queen bees in the human hive, and as Jefferson has said, a monarchy was, of its essence, a tyranny,

Michael believed in an enlightened cosmopolitan Australia, one at a point of justice with its indigenes, open to the world, and ready to embrace its vast neighbourhood. Like the rest of us, he had to end endure the provincialism and the halting progress, but he never stopped believing in the larger schematic.

We will truly miss him.

for Michael Gordon: "He would tap me on the shoulder and say, 'You're OK. You're strong'", by Ali Mullaie - 2018

16 February 2018, MCG, Melbourne, Australia

It is a great honour to be asked to share my story of my relationship with Michael Gordon.

I keep thinking and dreaming of Michael and the many things that were between us.

It is impossible to find the words that describe who he was to me.

He was the closest friend a person could have.

He was a father figure. A brother. A role model and he was my colleague when I worked at The Age in Information Technology.

He introduced me to his family Robyn, Sarah and Scott and I became a part of his family.

He helped me with job opportunities.

He was always there for me and I was there for him.

I could pick up the phone any time and speak to him.

We would meet for coffee, go for lunch and dinner.

He would take me on drives to Phillip Island.   

He took me to the footy and to the beaches where he went surfing.

He discussed his designs for the holiday house he was building.

He introduced me to the Australian way of life.

We hugged each other whenever we met.

We sent each other messages. When I was feeling down, he would tap me on the shoulder and say, 'You're OK. You're strong.'

We would talk about everything, or we said nothing and enjoyed each other's company. Or we would just have a laugh.

What can I say? We connected.

We first met on Nauru in the computer lab at Nauru College, where I was a teacher of English and computer science.

The connection was instant. I could feel it. I was appointed his interpreter.

We spent a lot of time walking around the island.

He wondered if my name was Ali or Sir, because everywhere I went, the students called me Sir.

He saw how they ran up to me and how we walked together.

He saw that the locals respected me because I taught their children and because I was engaged with the community. He understood my achievement.

On Nauru, I taught myself English and Computer Science.

I did not waste my time. But I had no family. Michael could truly hear me. Until then no one outside Nauru knew me. No one had told my story.

And because he was there, and spent time with me and with those inside the camp and because he listened he wrote the truth about our despair and our aspirations.

He did not see me as a victim.

Our friendship had nothing to do with this.

It was not based on sympathy.

He was human and he saw me as human.

I want to get the words right as if Michael is listening and can feel what I am saying.

We were born in separate countries and came from different cultures.

I was Hazara but it made no difference.

Our friendship was not about the past.

It was about now and about the future.

It was about total trust and about two human beings.

Two Australians.

I deeply miss him.

For Michael Gordon: 'I always thought of him as like a man putting the shattered glass back together' by Don Watson - 2018

15 February 2018, MCG, Melbourne, Australia

I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm just about the last thing standing between you and the bar, so I'll be quick. But I've learnt more about Mick in the last couple of hours than I ever thought I'd know.

I first met Michael in the Hot Man Bar in Jakarta. Not the sort of place you'd expect to meet a Hawthorn supporter, I thought, but it is as it sounds, a low and seamy dive, where we'd all been led by some dissolute embassy official, the tropics or something.

I remember as many people have said today, and I've been looking at it all afternoon [photo on screen], I remember his grin. That sort of hope-affirming world-reforming grin. Anyway, Mick's behaviour was of course beyond reproach and as it was for the next 25 years, and as it always was, impeccable.

In Canberra, just to try and put myself in context, I realise I didn't know him anywhere near as these people who've known him so well for so long.

In the Keating years we used to meet most Wednesday nights at the Tang Dynasty. It was known as 'The Fang', for good reason, and we always drank at least one or two bottles of Cape Mentelle Sauvignon Blanc. If it was a 'two' night - something about that se'nd bo'l which gives you a shocking hangover - I don't know what it is. It wasn't a power dinner in the sense - for instance up at the Ottoman Richo [Senator Graham Richardson] might be sitting down with Laurie Oakes. Ours was a pleasant little affair, there was no power around really. But sometimes ... with Mick you were never conscious of power, but it was there.

But sometimes in his Saturday column he'd refer to a 'Labor insider'. Or 'sources close to the Prime Minister'. I'd have to concede very modestly that, that might have been me. For years afterwards when we were back in Melbourne and he was writing, he'd ring on Thursdays,very often when he was writing his Saturday piece. Even after I could no longer be described as close to - pretty well anyone.

He'd flatter me by asking what I thought, and read his column or a part of it out to me. And invariably after I'd hung up I'd feel like this raving soap box fool who couldn't stop - a dogmatic, a tribalist, an unbalanced person. All I could hear was my own voice coming back, and of course Mick had hardly said anything, he's just waiting. It took me a while to get over it each day.

Mick of course was a balanced person. Since his death, and after he left The Age, 'balance' is probably the word along with 'integrity' that has been most used most often, to describe him. It never seemed to me that his journalism was balanced in the way that critics of the ABC talk about balance. For instance if you have a highly qualified scientist on, then you must have a complete nong on the other side as well to balance it up. Or two people from the IPA, will provide the same balance basically speaking.

Mick's idea of balance was different and I've been thinking about this a lot, and it came from his nature I think. Several people today have been trying to work out where this innate decency in Mick came from.

It was that ... I think it was because of the way the world appeared to him, and I think it was reflected also in those broken staccato sentences in which he spoke. He very rarely finished a sentence, Mick, if you broke it up. And some he didn't even start, they just ... when he was talking, he was like a sort of Victa with a bad carby. But you were never in any doubt about what he was saying, but he wasn't going to get a gig on Brideshead Revisited, or something like that.

It was a bit the same with reading him, that you never felt that he was offering you the whole answer, because I think he didn't really think there was a whole answer for anything. You could read Mick on a Saturday and sort of long for some sort of brutal flourish, some elegant ending that would sum it all up for you. But he always denied you that satisfaction, and I think he was right to do it. Because I think what he saw in politics and the world itself was too complex and multifaceted. The motivations were too obscure, the deceits too general, the personalities too hard to fathom, too hard to judge, too much of the past was flowing through it that wasn't actually past ...

In other words it was just like life.

And that's the way he wrote about politics, like a man ... I always thought of him as like a man putting every week putting the shattered glass back together, as much as of it as he could. Week after week, month after month, year by year and so at the end he had left, what Paul Keating said, was a mountain, a formidable record of what went on in politics and policy and public life over so many decades.

That's a serious accomplishment.

The other word they used all the time is integrity. Now integrity's not always what it's cracked up to be. It means absolutely nothing in a mission statement. It's equally pointless as a company value, and not to be, read it and you know you can't trust them. But more generally and not infrequently in this town it's worn to mask moral or social superiority. It's a bit like a tiara, or an RSL badge or something. It doesn't actually share a room with hypocrisy, but it's on the same floor.

But Mick's integrity came from a different place I think, that's the whole thing. Somebody was talking before about decency, it might have been Fergus. And Fergus it's fabulous to see you because when you were four, you came into my office, that's the last time I saw you, and you pulled the plug out of my computer when I'd just finished a speech. Bauldo (Fergus's dad] was there, he did nothing about it, and there was no back up and that was the end of it. Four hours work. I still get shivers when I think about it. You might have only been three it's alright.

You know the thing about Micks integrity is it came from ... I mean you can hand integrity down but ... you have to be able to take it up yourself, I believe. I think Michael's integrity stemmed from the fact that he actually felt things very deeply. He was vulnerable, I've seen him, as they now say, 'tear up' many times over things I wouldn't have expected. He felt things, he felt hurt himself and he felt it when he saw the hurt between other people. I think that's what his integrity consisted of, that what was good and fair was everything, and should be encouraged and rewarded. And when it wasn't he was hurt.

He was ... I was looking at him before [gesture to photo], he was a Celt after all. His name was Gordon, and he looks like a Celt the more I look at him. So behind all the balance and the evenness and the integrity and the decency in Mick, all these great qualities was passion. He was an incredibly passionate person.

He channelled most of it into Hawthorn, but not all of it. He actually converted me a bit to Hawthorn, I never thought it would happen. But gently over many years he did. He and Cyril Rioli.

So Mick would go off to some .. with this sort of, this 'interior Mick' he'd go to off some blighted Aboriginal community, or to Nehru, or Manus, and do his best to make the case for the dispossessed and maltreated. Say with all his usual balance, 'in the light of this how can we say we are good?'

I think that's what he did, that was the question he was asking us all the time in those essays he wrote.

Now no doubt Mick would be gratified that politicians from all sides have come to praise him now he's dead. We were all of us glad that they did and I don't doubt their sincerity. It would be even more gratifying if they tried to be a bit more like him. Imagine that. I just have one more thing.

I'm sorry, I know, Tim Costello's is going to be doing the prayers but there is this one, it's secular, so don't panic. It's by a Scot called Don Paterson who's a fabulous poet, it's called 'Funeral Prayer'. He says:

Today we friends and strangers meet
Because our friend is now complete.
He has left time, perhaps we feel we are the ghosts and him the real
So fixed and constant does he seem
So star like
May the human dream arise again to find him woken
At it's heart that it be spoken
Once is as miraculous as a thousand times
What utters this by nature told the trees and bird
And bright stars
Yet of all the words we knew his name was the most dear
We give thanks he was spoken here.

For Harry Gordon: 'His storytelling just flowed, clear and purling like a mountain creek', by Les Carlyon - 2015

5 February, 2015, Melbourne Cricket Ground

 I shouldn’t say this . . . but I can’t help thinking that Harry would see today as a missed opportunity.

Harry loved a lunch, as many of us here today know.

And at this time – around two o’clock – he’d be calling for a third bottle of wine.   And he’d be telling people -- usually John Fitzgerald -- not to interrupt him while he told a short anecdote that would only take another twenty or thirty minutes.  

And, if it happened to be a large gathering -- and Harry’s lunches usually were -- he’d eventually make a formal speech and go around the room, singling out people for praise and reminding them of something they wrote in 1953.

You tried to avoid eye contact, hoping Harry wouldn’t see you – but he always did.

And Harry not only loved a lunch.   He loved this place, this stadium that once had a red-brick cinder track.

So what an opportunity missed today.

The MCG: he could have picked out someone he knew in the Ponsford Stand and called him ‘old bloke’.

What an opportunity missed.   All these people, all of us his friends and more than that his admirers . . . people who owe him simply because of what he was and what he taught us by example.

I’m so old I first met Harry fifty-four years ago.   He was assistant editor of the Sun News-Pictorial and I was a first-year cadet, wide-eyed and clueless.  

But I felt I had known him long before then.   As a kid growing up in the bush I used to read his stuff in The Sun.

This was the era of Dave Sands and Vic Patrick in the boxing rings, and of Betty Cuthbert, John Landy and Dawn Fraser at the Melbourne Olympics.

And even as a teenager I sensed there was something special about Harry’s work.   I couldn’t identify what it was then. It was just a voice inside me saying: ‘This bloke’s different’.

His storytelling just flowed, clear and purling like a mountain creek.  

Here was someone who seemed to live in a different place to most other journalists.   There was a relaxed quality to his prose – no clichés, no showing off, no agenda.   He led you along by the hand.   He was the master of the anecdote that widened out into the bigger story.

Here was someone who obviously crafted every word, every sentence, someone who lived in this exotic halfway house between journalism and literature.

And you also felt that here was a generous spirit.   Harry could scold in print without being mean.  

And when I eventually met Harry in the flesh at The Sun he was exactly the way he seemed in his copy – friendly, with a radiant smile that came from somewhere deep inside, a great finisher of other people’s copy and an island of civility in the alcoholic haze that hung over the subs’ room in those days.

That was my first view of Harry and he never changed.   In his late eighties he was still boyish, still curious, still enthusiastic, still generous.

He’d send you an email about a new book he’d just read.   “This bloke can really write,” he’d say with all the excitement of an explorer who’s just discovered a new continent.   He was eighty-nine going on seventeen.

Harry became editor of The Sun at the same time as Graham Perkin was editor of the Age.

On the night of the Faraday kidnappings the Sun was hours -- many hours -- ahead of us at the Age.   The Sun had photos of the kidnapped school children in its first edition and we didn’t.

Graham rang Harry around midnight – I overheard the conversation -- and suggested Harry should give us the photos.   In the public interest was the quaint way Graham put it.   Harry, always the gentleman, said, yes, of course, he’d help, he’d never do anything against the public interest.

He put the phone down and after a very long delay – some say hours -- he handed the photos to a copy boy and told him to walk very slowly to the Age.

Harry, the former middleweight champ of Melbourne High, might have had gentle ways, but he was always the fiercest of competitors.   If he had to knock you out, he always sent flowers to the hospital afterwards.

Harry held lots of other high editorial positions after he moved on from the Sun.   But I’d suggest these were the lesser things.  

Harry’s legacy is the stuff he wrote in newspapers and books – his words.   His was always a human voice.   I can’t recall him ever writing anything about infrastructure reform.

It was a voice so natural that it almost seemed that Harry wasn’t trying – which of course he was.   But the effect was to give the reader the impression that the whole thing was just a happy accident – it just wrote itself.   And so often it gave us, the readers, words and images that still run around in our heads.

We’re here to mourn Harry today.

But I remind you of something Red Smith, the great American sportswriter, wrote long ago after the death of a colleague he admired.   Don’t mourn for the dead, Smith wrote, and went on to say:

This is a loss to the living, to everyone with a feeling for written English handled with respect and taste and grace.

So while we mourn for Harry today, we also need to mourn for us, the living. . . because Harry elevated us all, and made journalism look better than it really is, simply by his presence in the world.

[ends]