STATEMENTS ON SIGNIFICANT MATTERS
Mr BURKE (Watson—Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and Leader of the House) (09:01): I might say that it's one of the more intimidating things I've been asked to do in this House, to pay tribute to one of Australia's greatest ever writers. On 22 April of this year, David Malouf died.
Even if David Malouf had stuck to just one branch of literature, we would have revered him. This Brisbane boy, this gentle giant of Australian letters, did so much to define for us the adventure of a new page, yet he didn't stop at one branch; he became the whole forest. Whatever form David touched, he made it his own.
He was a master of the poem, the novel, the short story, the memoir, the essay and the libretto. But there was a single unifying feature regardless of the form: if it was David Malouf, it was all poetry. I was introduced to his work as a teenager when I started reading An Imaginary Life for the HSC.
I learnt back then that, whether the narrative was set in ancient Greece, as it was in Ransom, or whether it was set in ancient Rome, as it was in An Imaginary Life, or whether it was set in the Brisbane suburbs, as it was in Johnno, he was always drawing on the Australian experience—the Australian experience of an Australian with proud Lebanese heritage. His work has always been deeply personal to me.
Nearly 20 years ago, he put out one of his poetry collections called Typewriter Music. I bought it at the time. It sat on my shelf in my office for nearly 20 years.
This is the first time it's actually left the office, when I brought it down here this morning. I photocopied multiple copies of his short story, The Empty Lunch Tin. That must have been 30 or more years ago.
It would have been more actually. It was when I was the president of Young Labor. New members of the party would come through and I'd give them a copy of this short story, The Empty Lunch Tin, because I thought the story of the young person who didn't have enough money for lunch and didn't want his friends to know so he turned up with an empty lunch tin every day was one that took people thinking about policy to the reality of people's lives.
In the last election campaign, I was walking through Devonport. It happened to be the Ten Days on the Island festival. In a shop window, I could see that there was a performance of An Imaginary Life, a novel I hadn't read for a very long time.
I had time, so I bought a ticket. It was a tiny hall. There were about 20 other people.
The numbers were inflated with me and the members of the AFP who were following me being there. It was a very small group of people. His prose poem about the power of language being brought forward by the character of the child who had no words was performed in all of its fragile glory.
Nearly 40 years after I'd first read the words of that novel, they were still fresh and still poignant, as his work will always be. David Malouf's work is illuminated by lyricism, intelligence, curiosity, infinite heart and an imagination that came to span the world and the ages. It really glows with this gentleness wrapped around a profound strength.
It's elegant, but it's also an uncompromising humanity. He'd move between worlds without ever losing touch with this one, and he found consequence even in other things that you might find inconsequential. He gave us pages that would involve love and commemoration and innocence through to realisation.
You can open any of his works at random and you might find him digging beneath an ancient myth or finding the heartbeat of a local suburb. All of this was powered by a mind that, even when he was roaming across the greatest of literature's epics, worked on a scale that was intimate and human. David delivered us an Australia in all its complexity.
It was a deeply interconnected mosaic, with generations shaped by our environment, coloured by the experience of war and resonating from the collision of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. He believed passionately in reconciliation, and he believed in the power of language—passions that he united as a lifetime ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
He showed us sometimes surprising places where freedom can be found and, as a member of PEN Sydney, he worked for writers in parts of the world where freedom is more elusive. As he dealt with questions of memory and identity, he never flinched; he never recoiled. He showed us the poetry that surrounds us, how to find ourselves and how to maybe let the universe in a little.
Now, like his imagined version of the poet Ovid, where you get those scenes of the ocean of grass that welcomes him to the end of life's journey, David himself has taken his last step. In Typewriter Music there's a reference where he describes someone else's final moments, where someone whom he loves is clearly nearing the end but not tonight. He concludes the anthology with: 'We are alone.
No need between us for speech. Take your time. Eat the last of the apple.
Finish your wine.' That sort of gentle kindness and joy is what we all hope David himself saw for his final years. Similarly, in the closing lines of 'Parting'—the poem that opens his final poetry collection—he uses these words: 'We look back with no regret to where we lay lost in each other's gaze. Parting is where we began.
Where we begin.' David Malouf the man has parted from us, but we'll never have to live in a world without him. He's left himself to us in so many ways—as a guide, a teacher and a gentle, towering figure of humanity. Ultimately, for all the beauty that he saw in others, the greatest beauty he's left for Australia, was his own words, was himself.