As I am fond of remarking, I think Tina Turner was wrong.  We need all the heroes we can get.  I have quite a few.  Most of them are hanging up at home – pin-up boys and, when it comes to the stage, girls.  (I may add to the list with Edith Cavil.  She stared down her end with the deathless line, ‘Patriotism is not enough’.  It should be put up in every public flag-waving building – especially in the U S.)

Some of our heroes just take your breath away.  Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Matchless, breath-taking courage and compassion.  When the Nazis closed down Jewish shops, his grandmother breezed past the stormtroopers: ‘I will shop where I always shop.’  When he buried her, Bonhoeffer said: ‘This spirit, for which we are grateful, will not pass into the grave with her, but it puts us under obligation.’  There, indeed, are words for our times.

These thoughts come to me with the passing of Neale Daniher.  I need not rehearse the heroic but humble terms of his sacrifice for others in his fight with a most ugly disease, and his building of a fund to treat it.  Neale Daniher aroused a real response from his whole community, especially the City of Melbourne.  And, yes, because I was bred a Melbourne boy, this man was dear to me.  It was only fit that the height of the celebration of his cause took place each year before a devoted crowd at our great community center – the Melbourne Cricket Ground.  It reminds us of similar efforts by Glenn McGrath in Sydney, and the charity pursued in the name of Jim Stynes here in Melbourne. 

As it happens, the causes of both Daniher and Stynes are associated with the football club I support.  For many reasons, I see sport as essential to life in a civilised community.  But I am not talking of charity in our sports.  I am talking of people who have found it in themselves to awaken what Abraham Lincoln finely called the ‘better angels of our nature’.  They understood one basal truth.  Any group in our community depends on the people who have got on to pass it on to those coming after them.  That is the timeless truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of.

Well, I am wobbly, but I am still above the ground.  Neale Daniher is not.  And I stand in awe of him.

I am left with the wistful reflection of a desolate Danish prince.  ‘He was a man and, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.’

And only God knows how much we need this relief in these dark, bleak Godless times.

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 [GG1]