.

(Continued …)

.


I had many long discussions with Loudmouth – usually about Aboriginal affairs. We rarely agreed on anything. More than once he told me I should come home to Australia and catch up with reality. But, of course, my reality as a Queenslander was a little different to his as a South Australian.

Adelaide was the only capital city in Australia that was not settled by convicts. It was also the first city to give women access to voting, recognise Indigenous land rights, and criminalise sexual and racial discrimination.

I’m afraid Queensland was a bit of a laggard when it comes to most of that. It was the penultimate state to grant voting rights to white women and the last state to remove restrictions on male and female Indigenous voting in state elections in Australia.

Joe spent most of his life studying Aboriginal affairs, colonisation and the so-called “first” settlers. His (first ?) wife, Maria Rigney (1949- 2008) was a Ngarrindjeri woman.

While I had many long debates and disagreements with Loudmouth here on OLO, strangely enough, I cannot recall ever having had any direct discussions of any sort with Loudmouth 2.

I guess it was because we had nothing much to argue about.

An anecdote that amused me was that Joe (Loudmouth) had mentioned during one of our exchanges a few years ago that he enjoyed singing in his local church choir and, more recently, that he (Loudmouth 2) was a convinced atheist.

Perhaps like a few of the rest of us here on OLO, he was a man of contradictions or, perhaps he simply mellowed with age and became wiser as he became older.

Maybe there’s still hope for us yet.

.

Thanks for that BP, Joe would tell me he was named Joe after Joe Stalin, his parents were ardent communist. I would tell him I was named after St Paul, the true founder of Christianity.

It's good to see people responding to Joe's passing.
Joe was unique and I'm sure he would enjoy reading
the various views expressed.

cont'd ...

Thanks BP for reminding us about Joe's extensive work
and for reminding us about his and his late wife's contribution
to the Aboriginal flag. I notice that the Aboriginal flag
is featured in all of the death notices - with the words
"Love you dad."

It appears that this Memorial to Joe has now run its
course. So as a final say I'd like to add a few
paragraphs from W.H. Auden's poem " Stop all the clocks,
cut off the telephone..."
To me it represents overwhelming grief and the themes of
grief and loss which his family must feel. I'm sure that its
an elegy Joe would know:

" Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone
Silence the pianos and with a muffler drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come...

He was my North, my South, my East and West
my waking week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my say:
I thought that love would last for ever:
I was wrong."

Rest In Peace Joe Lane!

.

Dear Foxy,

.

Mourning, the sense of sorrow and emptiness is perfectly human and terribly true but declaring “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong” is neither human nor true.

In my view, he (or she) who no longer loves never did and death is not the end of love. It is the end of life.

While some may consider Auden to be one of Britain’s great poets (I personally prefer T.S. Eliot), what his poem says to me is that he obviously never had the good fortune of experiencing true love – otherwise, he would have written a very different poem.

Please forgive me for saying this, Foxy, but Auden’s poem strikes me as the epitome of self-pity, not the sublimation of true love.

.