Rare is the state funeral that lifts a nation’s spirit

The first state funeral I ever attended was also the most curious.

It began on a warm summer’s day in a little church in Corryong, a town in the foothills of the Australian Alps in Victoria’s Upper Murray, and ended on the slope of a paddock with a view to the mountains. It was February 1984.

Tom Mitchell was accorded the courtesies of state as he was farewelled, but he made his own rules about where he would be laid to rest. He was a member of Australia’s landed gentry with a large grazing property called Towong Hill not far from Corryong, and he was a barrister who had served as Victoria’s attorney-general in the early 1950s.

He was a former prisoner of the Japanese in Changi; a ski adventurer who sizzled down slopes around the world and Australia’s most remote frozen mountainsides.

Mitchell insisted he was descended from French aristocracy, and was known as eccentric, partly because he was given to knitting during parliamentary sittings to exercise a hand all but crippled during his time as a POW.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was marrying Elyne Chauvel, horsewoman and daughter of General Sir Henry Chauvel, the commander of the Anzac Mounted Division, and Desert Mounted Corps in World War I.

As Elyne Mitchell, she told stories about wild brumbies to amuse her children on lonely nights on the Mitchell property. The stories grew into the wonderful Silver Brumby series of books and a movie.

When Tom Mitchell died in early 1984, there was never doubt he would be accorded a state funeral.

However, he had taken unusual steps to ensure it would be like no other. There would be no cathedral, for starters – it had to be in his local town.

More to the point, while attorney-general, he had secured special permission to avoid the law stating that citizens could not be buried outside designated cemeteries – a law that still stands. He would be buried, he insisted, in a paddock on his own property overlooking the western face of his beloved Snowy Mountains.

And so, when the last hymn of his state funeral in little Corryong faded away, his coffin was borne in procession to the gates of the Mitchell family’s Towong Hill station.

There, the state’s involvement ended.

The Australian flag was removed from the coffin, a fleur-de-lis – symbol of French royalty – was draped in its place and the coffin was carried up the hill to a grave dug into Tom Mitchell’s own paddock.

He had got his final demand.

Precisely who gets a state funeral was a question that came to mind this week as sections of the political and populist media classes sent former senator Graham Richardson’s mortal body off to wherever it might rest, complete with a prime ministerial eulogy and much reminiscing about long boozy lunches that mostly skated around the ticklish question concerning why such a controversial life deserved the gravity of such a service.

Truth is, prescriptive rules don’t exist.

Who gets such an honour is decided by the prime minister or a state premier, usually acting on requests from MPs, leaders of industry or members of the public.

Former and current governors-general and prime ministers are all but guaranteed a state funeral. So are Speakers of parliament and presidents of the Senate, and often state governors and senior military officers.

Increasingly, cultural figures and entertainers, the occasional prominent sports star and those deemed to deserve public mourning by reason of widely cherished achievement, like heart surgeon Dr Victor Chang, are granted funerals hosted by the state. Even commercial radio’s John Laws was sent off in such style recently.

Sometimes, though rarely enough, state funerals are events so significant they have the power to lift the nation’s spirit.

Bob Hawke’s at the Sydney Opera House in June 2019 was a great musical shout of celebration of his life.

The coffin of Tim Fischer, a lifelong rail enthusiast, was borne in August 2019 to his state funeral in Albury by a little old train that once swept through his lonely childhood on a farm at Boree Creek.

Thousands lined the route, some on horseback, to wave their country hats in respect.

Malcolm Fraser’s funeral in Melbourne attracted hundreds of mourners but was a relatively intimate family affair, his children and grandchildren speaking their love and one of his granddaughters playing her own ethereal composition on piano.

Outside, former Vietnamese refugees, granted entry to Australia by Fraser’s government in the 1970s, stood silently holding placards declaring “Rest in peace our father and saviour”.

The most affecting of all state funerals I have attended was for a man without a name.

Dug from a war cemetery in northern France, the remains of this unknown soldier, representing all Australians who had died in wars overseas, was brought to lie in state in Canberra’s Old Parliament House until Remembrance Day, November 11, 1993.

The coffin was wheeled to the Australian War Memorial up Canberra’s long Anzac Avenue, 25,000 mourners lining the route, the funeral procession of massed military units and bands led by mounted troopers with black plumes in their slouch hats.

And there prime minister Paul Keating delivered a eulogy for the ages, the poetry of it preserved permanently at the memorial, its key words to be found within the tomb of the unknown soldier itself.

“We do not know this Australian’s name and we never will,” Keating said.

“We do not know who loved him or whom he loved.”

And yet, this anonymous soldier had always been among those we had honoured, Keating said; the 102,000 Australians who had died in the 20th-century wars and the hundreds of thousands more who had volunteered.

“He is all of them. And he is one of us.”

We learned that day that a state funeral could float far above the small and sometimes venal nature of life, capable of taking your heart with it.

As it should.

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