Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

‘ “We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan’—that is right. The reason why it is funny and is such a favourite poem of so many Australians, I think, is because it touches on that essential Australian characteristic of enduring. It is an Australian characteristic that started with the First Australians, the Aborigines, I would suggest, and then the settlers. It is a tough land, a very tough land, a land of flood and fire and famine, and that idea of enduring is something I wanted to touch on in the poem. But I am not going to read Said Hanrahan by John O’Brien. I will leave that to the speakers following me, perhaps.

Instead, the poem I am going to read is called The Dead Woman, or ‘La Muerta’, by Pablo Neruda, who is not Australian. I went offshore to a Chilean poet, writer and socialist politician, who won the 1971 Nobel prize in literature—quite an epitaph to have on your gravestone. I am no Alan Rickman, for those who know the movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, but I will do my best:

If you are not alive; if you, beloved, my love, if you have died,

All the leaves will fall on my breast, my darling;

It will rain upon my soul night and day and the snow will burn my heart,

I shall walk through cold, and fire, and death, and snow;

My feet will want to march toward where you are sleeping,

but I must go on, because you wanted me to be, above all things, indomitable,

and, my love, because you know that I am not just one man but all men.

I commend the bill to the House.

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