To Gaile and to Juliette, to Adam and to James, to friends and family of Chris O'Brien, and to you, friends of Chris O'Brien one and all.
I've just come from Canberra tonight and we've been engaged in the bear pit of Australian parliamentary democracy otherwise known as the House of Representaitves.
Just last night I was on a video conference, a link at midnight with the Danish Prime Minister and the Secretary-General of the United Nations and others about the future of climate change.
The day before that I'd just come back from Singapore, and we had a meeting of APEC with President Obama and President Hu Jintao, again on climate change and on the economic recovery.
Just before that, in India, looking at the challenges of students being safe in Australia, and prior to that I'd just come from Afghanistan and our troops in the field.
None of these challenges, however, compare with obtaining a contract approval from the New South Wales health authority to get the Chris O'Brien Centre going.
But I bring hope.
I bring genuine hope, because today I had the great privilege of spending the morning with Nathan Rees, the Premier, and good on him for having a whack and a go at recent events here in New South Wales. Good on him. I've said to others, the bloke deserves to have a go, to be given a go.
I also used the opportunity of mentioning a certain matter, a matter dear to all your hearts, and the undertaking I have from the Premier is that by the time he and I roll the bulldozers in mid-December it will be done.
Of course, that was based on two profound human fears; one temporal, one spiritual.
The temporal fear of this - the thought of me behind a bulldozer, given that I am singly unqualified to do anything mechanical or practical.
But the greater fear was this - you may recall that when I gave the undertaking to drive that bulldozer by year's end to make sure this Chris O'Brien Centre was begun, I did so at St Mary's Cathedral in the presence of Cardinal Pell. The thought, therefore, of even a further addition to eternal damnation for not honouring that undertaking given in St Mary's, otherwise known in the Australian Labor Party as 'headquarters' - Father Kevin, stop laughing so loudly - it would be frankly, too much for my conscience or my eternal soul to bear.
Of course, as you know, Chris O'Brien and I had many things in common; we were both rugby union stars.
Those of you who knew Chris O'Brien would say that, like myself, his talent somewhat underperformed in relation to his enthusiasm. Speaking for myself, I went to a Marist school in Brisbane, I was categorised as being the ideal star performer for the under 14 Es. It was a big Catholic school - there was an F team, and I always lived in fear of that F team, for one day I could also be relegated, because they seriously were F Troop on the field. We, by contrast, were stallions of the ball. Well, sort of.
The other thing that Chris O'Brien and I had in common was, of course, our significant medical careers.
Chris had achieved some success as a senior surgeon at RPA. I had become the deputy chief wardsman at Canterbury Hospital when I was heading off towards university, so he and I were able to speak the same language. Well, sort of, and I always gave a more basic view.
I do remember in our discussion about integrated cancer care that it only took me an hour or an hour and a half or so to understand what the hell he was on about, and then finally, in the great tradition of effective politicians, the penny dropped with an audible clang and then I understood what he was about.
Tonight it is a truly great occasion to honour a truly great man. Tonight we gather in this great Gothic hall. As Gaile reminded me as we came in this was the hall in which they were married. This is an extraordinary part of Sydney. It's an extraordinary part of this union.
But it also an extraordinary venue to hear afresh the words of the immortal bard, Bill Shakespeare, and to hear again tonight the extraordinary oration of St Crispin's day. Those of you who knew Chris O'Brien well, knew that he was a huge, huge fan of Shakespeare, and I think he would have been honoured to have had the oration from St Crispin's day in Henry V read here this evening, because so much of that oration was about him, about how you in a field of human battle actually go about making a difference.
All of us have to deal with human enemies.
All of us have to deal with human adversaries.
All of us have to deal with very human challenges. Some of them, from time to time, as they were in St Crispin's day, existential challenges, as they proved to be in the life of Chris, existential challenges as well.
But the spirit of St Crispin's Day as reflected in the oration from Henry V was about how the human spirit prevails when the odds are so large, and so huge and potentially so overpowering - and that was Chris O'Brien writ large, five centuries after the Bard.
So what I'd like to do tonight is reflect briefly on this Chris O'Brien; this man of St Crispin's Day; the man prepared to step into breach, once more into the breach, and what he'd done in his life and what he now calls us to do.
If he were here with us tonight, and I sense, in my own small-t theological way, he is, I think he would have some things to say.
But let me talk about him first, and his passion which you've seen on the screen now tonight, about how you make a difference in people's lives when they're confronted with the extraordinarily visceral news that you are with cancer. And in him you have this extraordinary combination of human talents - a person who is gifted and trained in the greatest of medical and scientific traditions on the one hand, and on the other, a person of human heart and compassion and succour and comfort.
Rarely is this admixture of human talents alive in a single human being - in Chris O'Brien they were. He was not perfect; nobody is. But in bringing those great aspects and impulses of his humanity to bear in his professional choice, he was, in my estimation, a human saint.
So how did he translate that into reality? What he did was to say I, as a physician, will make a difference in as many lives as possible; I'll perform the miracles of surgery which I can perform; I'll perform the counselling which is necessarily associated with that surgery; and I'll bring people through in the best way that I can.
And for all of you in the room this evening who are trained in the medical sciences, I salute you. Your talents are great, your studies formidable, and your excellence is beyond comparison compared with those of us who occupy lesser professions.
But Chris then goes the extra mile. Some time ago he discovers that these talents he deploys one after one in the field can actually be taken to a different level. What is this concept of integrated cancer care, about which we've spoken this evening? How do you actually take the proper, shall we say, integrated healing of the person? How do we actually integrate the diagnostics, with the therapeutics, with the palliatives? How do actually bring all dimensions of, let's call it, the human healing experience and the scientific disciplines associated with it, and the compassion which is necessary to make it possible, how do you bring that together into institutional form and being?
And so was born the concept of integrated cancer care.
And his great talent was the great patience in explaining that to the likes of me when I was merely the leader of Her Majesty's occasionally loyal Opposition.
And so what is the product of this man stepping into the breach, making his difference on his St Crispin's Day?
The Budget this year in May, following three months after I saw him in Canberra, this was May of 2008, just on the very day of the Apology to Aboriginal Australians, we began a process of unfolding what we would do with cancer care, and so we did - $1.3 billion worth of investment in integrated cancer care across the country.
Once such centre will bear his name - the Chris O'Brien Centre. There will be another in Melbourne. But critically across the whole vast continent that is Australia, it'll be also reflected in a half-billion dollars worth of investment in cancer care centres across the country, in rural and regional areas as well. And this friends is just the beginning, because we are dealing with the nation's largest killer.
So that's what Chris O'Brien, in his determination to make a difference, did. Directly, with people in the RPA, in his consulting rooms and in the theatre, but more broadly with the likes of yours truly and trying to make a difference to the country at large.
Now, I think there's a second message from the spirit of Chris O'Brien this evening, and I think he'd also be saying to us this, because what I have said just now he probably would not say at all, because he would regard that as immodest. I think what he would say to us all in our own respective spheres is how too can you rise to your own St Cripin's Day? How can you also be the one that steps into the breach once more? How can you make a difference where you are, in whatever field you are active and where your talents are deployed?
Whether it's in the field of commerce; the field of politics; whether it's the field of community service; whether it's the field of medicine or the other caring professions; whether it's in the sciences; whether it's in the arts or across all disciplines, how can you make a difference? Because his great message to all of us is, you can live a journeyman's life or you can step outside that and make a vast difference with the talents with which you've been divinely appointed.
And that, I think, in his own quiet and effective way, would be his message to us this evening, because I believe in Chris O'Brien you have the combination of two great spirits of history. You have Henry V, once more into the breach, a great and stirring command to human courage, to go beyond that which is physically possible, or seen to be even physically necessary.
That is one strand, but it's animated by something else, and that's the spirit of St Francis. The spirit of St Francis, very simply, is that in giving, you receive.
I was sharing this thought with the Governor before I came up to speak. I said, 'Governor, the happiest people I ever meet in life are those who give the most, and the most miserable are those who give the least.' It is an eternal principle of life in whichever civilisation or culture or community in which you grow up. And I think, therefore, in Chris O'Brien we see this great swirling mixture of St Francis and his healing balm, and Henry V, with his wielding sword, and that's the Chris O'Brien we know and love.
I asked Gaile this evening what she would have me say about this great man, but importantly for her, a dear, dear husband and life partner, and she said, reflect a bit on your own experience of this guy.
We met at a hotel in Sydney called the Radisson. He came because I had heard he was interested in cancer, and at about that time my mother had recently died of cancer. Most of our stories, at the end of the day, are very personal.
As we sat and talked about anything from literature to history to a bit of medical science where I gave him the benefit of my knowledge - well, I was the deputy chief wardsman at Canterbury, and I'd seen it from the ground up - he explained to me with great patience what his concept was about.
He was an extraordinarily good conversationalist. He had an extraordinary capacity to engage you as a person, and to be interested, genuinely, in the ideas of the person whom he was engaging. He said to me, 'I have a brain tumour. You have just become the leader of the Australian Labor Party. I think I've got it tough?', he said. 'You've got it much worse, mate.' And that was Chris to a T.
And for now many, many conversations since then, including in Canberra; including here in Sydney; including at the Governor's residence; including at their home not long before he died; many conversations on the phone; many text messages between us, often in Question Time, where occasionally I was distracted more by his messages than by questions from those opposite - they also made more sense, but that's a different and more partisan story for a different occasion, and I said to Gaile I would not be partisan, and I won't be.
But here was a guy who actually knew how to engage any person, man or woman, high or low as they may be defined in this society's order, as a fellow human being, as a fellow traveller seeking to make our difference in the world in which we survive.
We spoke a lot. We laughed a lot. And I cried a lot when he died.
So to Gaile, and to Juliette and to Adam and to James, what we experience in this great hall at this great university tonight is one small part of what you have felt and known throughout your lives - that we are all privileged to have shared the life of this truly great Australian, Chris O'Brien.