I thank Diane Kerr for the Welcome to Country, and honour the traditional owners of this land, to whom Clyde Holding was such a true and faithful friend.
Former Governors-General Sir Zelman Cowen and Dr Peter Hollingworth.
My distinguished predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
The Honourable Ted Baillieu, Premier of Victoria and your eminent predecessors John Cain, Steve Bracks and John Brumby.
Ministerial and parliamentary colleagues, state and federal, past and present.
Distinguished guests.
And above, members of Clyde's family.
We gather today to express equal measures of sorrow and celebration.
We are sad that a loved and familiar figure is no longer among us.
Yet celebrating that he lived such a long, vivid and productive life at the heart of our nation's affairs.
Clyde Holding was part of an extraordinary generation of Victorians, born in the years before World War Two, who so greatly and distinctively enriched our country:
I think of figures like Zelman Cowen and Barry Jones, John Button, Frank Crean, Jim Cairns and Peter Karmel.
Great Australians, many from modest homes, who flourished through the transformative power of education and who saw the primary purpose of their lives as being dedicated to public service and the common good.
Clyde Holding was just such a man.
He grew up in ordinary circumstances, the son of migrant parents.
He won scholarships for school and university places.
And like so many of us, he sought expression of his impulse for community service in the Labor Party and the law, leading, in due course, to elected public office.
Clyde Holding was made for politics.
From first to last, from 1962 to 1998, he was - above all else - a proud and effective local Member.
But someone as pugnacious as Clyde Holding could not remain on the backbench for long, and he did not.
Instead Clyde found himself leading the Victorian Opposition in some of Labor's darkest days.
The days following the turmoil of the split.
The days when our community confronted the issues of public morality surrounding the death penalty.
Dark days, but also purposeful days, because they were the years of soul-searching that restored Labor to relevance.
Clyde Holding paid a price for being part of that modernisation.
But the years of success under John Cain, Joan Kirner, Steve Bracks and John Brumby are unthinkable without the Holding decade.
In 1977, Clyde joined the federal Labor caucus as it began the long journey back to office.
And when Labor achieved that goal in 1983, he did a remarkable thing:
He sought the portfolio of Aboriginal Affairs - a true measure of his commitment.
In typically blunt and unromantic terms, Clyde likened his new job to being a tail gunner on a bomber during World War Two.
And indeed it proved to be a harrowing ride.
There were great victories along the way:
The appointment of Charlie Perkins, who was to become one of Clyde's dearest friends.
Commencing the long and difficult process of repatriating Indigenous remains from museums.
Protecting much of Kakadu for the people as a national park.
Completing the hand-over of Wave Hill station begun by Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari.
And securing the agreement to hand Uluru over to its traditional owners.
But on land rights, his greatest ambitions were dashed.
And yet disappointment in 1986 led quickly to triumphant vindication with the Mabo judgement and the Native Title Act a few short years later.
Indeed, Clyde had helped fund Eddie Mabo's case at crucial points, despite the Commonwealth actually being the defendant.
It was cheeky and courageous - and it put Clyde Holding where he will always be remembered: on the right side of history.
Clyde said of the Mabo judgement that it provided our nation with a matchless opportunity to:
“redress Australia's oldest and most continuous social wrong and to recognise the depth, nature and spiritual attachment of Aboriginal people to this land.”
And nothing could have given him greater pride than to be one of those 78 Members of the House of Representatives who inscribed the Native Title Act into law.
Our nation is truly capable of great things.
Friends, after holding the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio for a record term, Clyde held other portfolios, including the Arts, where he was a staunch supporter of a robust and generous cultural policy against the cost-cutting impulses of his Cabinet colleagues.
And Territories, where he gave self-government to a somewhat reluctant Australian Capital Territory that now treasures its local democracy.
From 1990 until 1998, Clyde served proudly as a backbencher.
He saw great dignity in the role of a local MP and once told John Howard of the contentment he found in that role.
I think that speaks so eloquently of this remarkable man and his career in public life.
It was a career with more than its share of setbacks and disappointments.
He didn't get to be the father of national land rights legislation that he ought to have been.
Or the great Premier of this State he might easily have been.
And yet through it all there persisted an unwavering spirit of integrity and duty, informed by a passion for social progress that bespoke a true Labor heart.
In the end, it was enough for Clyde Holding to be a faithful servant of his party and his nation.
To have done some good.
And to always believe that Australia was at its best when we took the counsel of our own better angels.
I think it was for these reasons that Bob Hawke described Clyde Holding as “pre-eminently a good, decent and remarkably brave man.”
And why his successor in Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby was able to say: “we have lost a true hero of equality and justice.”
We have lost such a hero.
We have lost such a man.
Clyde Holding's remarkable life of 80 years is at an end.
And he leaves us honoured and remembered.
Much-loved and very greatly missed.