I said yes to doing the speech because I like the bloke who asked me. It was a few days before I went back to his text message and read the event's official title: The Multi-Faith Opening of the Legal Year at Government House. Faith and law are two very big subjects that great minds have pondered for thousands of years. I was to speak for 12 minutes.
I was advised that judges would be attending. I have a law degree. One of my big life lessons came in my one and only student or "moot" court. I learned you can't get away with pretending to know about something if you're being scrutinised by good minds schooled in the subject. There were going to be plenty of good minds at The Multi-Faith Opening of the Legal Year. But I also believe the law, like the press, is a bulwark against tyranny – something we need to start talking about like we need to talk about the bushfire threat each summer.
The other part of the equation, the multi-faith part, I felt a bit more confident with. I am a man of no faith, or I am a man of all faiths. I travelled the world as a young man and, the best qualities which I identify with being human, I found common to all races and cultures. I don't believe in a particular faith because, to my mind, numerous faiths are plausible and they can't all be divine. Well, actually, they can be if we don't attach literal meanings to their words and go instead to the spirit the words are written in.
What I tried to say in the speech is that maybe the time has come to stop disagreeing about the words and start agreeing about the spirit. I told a few stories about experiences I had with people around the globe and here in Australia which persuaded me of these beliefs. One of my biggest influences in this regard, I have to say, has been Aboriginal Australia. If Aboriginal Australians I met could believe in the essential oneness of humanity after all they'd been through, I could, too.
So over a couple of weeks, I arrived at some idea of what to say in the speech, but the news from America kept coming like kicks in the head and I was infiltrated by a sense of futility. Once again, I started hearing Shakespeare saying life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing – a large part, I fear, of what Shakespeare was actually on about. Do words matter? Do speeches?
Last Saturday, with these thoughts in my head, I went to the city to meet a friend for a beer, but first I wanted to see the flowers left in the Bourke Street Mall after the horror of January 20. To a withered bunch was attached a blue card, slightly bent by the weather.
Inside, in very deliberate printing – an old hand not overly used to writing, it seemed – was one whole verse of John Keats' Ode To A Nightingale, the verse that begins: "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!" It was signed, in the same laborious script, "Frank D. and Family".
Do words matter? John Keats died at the age of 25, in 1821. A month before his death, he wrote of his poetry, "If I had had time I would have made myself remembered." If I could speak to John Keats I'd say, you're remembered alright. I'll bet Frank D. knows that verse by heart.
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