Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Next month, on 17 April, my dad would have been 81. But, if he had not died, as he did, I would not know him as well as I do now. I am pleased that I know him well. I wish he had not died, but I treasure the love we did share, and I am proud of Dad—proud of how he died and proud of how he lived. It has been six summers now since my father, Gordon, died. He was a mate, a partner and a supporter that I often did not know I had. Dad died in August 2009. He was proud of me, of my brother David and of my twin sister, Carol, and after 53 years he was still in love with our mum, Olive.

Dad's death came at the hands of cancer—an oesophageal tumour identified in late January 2009, which meant that in 202 days Dad was dead. There are worse things than a cancer death. After his diagnosis, Dad and I could talk about our relationship. We talked about our conflicts—many matters I came to understand which before he began dying I just did not know about. There were many things I did not know, but by the time of his death I understood more. We had taken long walks together throughout March, April, May and June 2009 and by July he could not walk, but we could still talk.

I learned about my dad before he died. That was a blessing. That he died was simply inevitable; an oesophageal tumour is a fatal opponent. I had been impatient and sometimes aggrieved by Dad. He was a good bloke. He enjoyed a beer, did not work too hard and lived by a simple working-class ethic. 'The kids will be okay if I look out for Mum'—and he did that. He would vote Labor nationally, and he said, 'Workers will get whatever little bit is able to be given by a Labor government.' He would also say, 'The Liberals, by their nature, won't help at all.' He would vote conservative in local government elections. He would say, 'They will keep the rates down.' And he would vote communist in union elections: 'They'll give the bosses hell,' he'd say. None of that is a philosophy I agreed with, but it was Dad.

Gordon Gray was born at home in Dalton Brook, Yorkshire, in 1934. His mother, Fannie, was 22 years old. His father, David, was a 28-year-old stonemason. Gordon often talked about his father's work as a stonemason on the maintenance of All Saints Church in the centre of Rotherham. Gordon attended Doncaster Road Primary School and was a full-back with the school soccer team. He grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression and was a boy during World War II. Gordon talked of the bombings of Sheffield, of the life of a child in air-raid shelters, of growing up when there was not a lot to go around, and how his mother's sister—his Aunt Kath—became the most important person in his life. Kath lived with the family in Dalton Brook. She gave Gordon the love and support his mother could not.

Gordon's grandfather, Robert Gray, had been a coalminer at the Silverwood colliery. Like his father, Gordon was determined not to work down a coalmine. Gordon left school at 14 to start an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic. He worked on Bedford trucks. However, in 51 years I never, ever saw Dad display any mechanical skill whatsoever. I guess that is why, in 1949, answering the call of the Navy, Gordon began training with HMAS Raleigh. Over the following six years he visited ports in South Africa, South Korea and South America. He later transferred to submarines, serving on T-class submarines HMS Telemachus. Gordon enjoyed life in the Royal Navy—in particular, the raucous life of a stoker. In 1955 Gordon's father succumbed to cancer—he was 48—and Gordon returned to England.

That year Gordon met Olive Lees and they married on 14 January 1956 at All Saints Church in Rotherham. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s Gordon worked as a steelworker and he and Olive began a family. David was born on 11 July 1956 and the twins, Carol and I, on 30 April 1958. Gordon was convinced that his young family would have greater opportunities in a new country. In June 1966 they packed a few suitcases and a tea chest of belongings and boarded the Fairsea and moved to Australia. Gordon thrived in Whyalla. Indentured to the Broken Hill Proprietary Company as a labourer, he enjoyed the town, its life, the sun and the beach, the Ada Ryan Gardens, and the people. Most of all he enjoyed the opportunities on offer for David, Carol and myself. The family even bought a car—a Volkswagen beetle—in 1967, in which family tours of the Flinders Ranges and Eyre Peninsula would be taken. Gordon held positions in the local naval club and the RSL. He was not just a club joiner; he was a doer. As a long-term treasurer his financial numbers always added up. He took pride in getting his numbers right, and he was a popular and social person—very smart, very clever.

From BHP Gordon moved to the Electricity Trust of South Australia. He enjoyed his work as a storeman, but, most importantly, he enjoyed his life with Olive and his children. David became an electrical engineer at BHP and now lives in Brisbane, I am a parliamentarian and live in Western Australia, and Carol is a carer in Whyalla, South Australia. Throughout their adult years, Gordon and his children often mused that Gordon's Victa lawnmower arrived after David and Gary left home, and the air-conditioner and the colour television set were purchased when Gordon and Olive moved out of their housing trust house into one that they owned themselves once all three kids had left home. Gordon and Olive planned and built their lives together and around each other. In later years Gordon and Olive travelled on yearly pilgrimages to Brisbane and then Canberra and Perth to visit David's and my families. Carol lives in Whyalla, and Gordon played an important part in the life of her daughter, Victoria. This relationship was reminiscent of the one he had enjoyed with his own Aunt Kath while growing up in Dalton Brook, Yorkshire, 70 years before.

Gordon was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in January 2009. And Gordon died as he lived—in Olive's loving care—on 17 August 2009. He was strong and in complete control of his life and his death. You see, Gordon had made an informed and thoughtful decision about dying. Under care, Dad could have lived longer. He did not want that, and he told me so. He told me that if the positions were reversed he could not bear to see mum as sick as he was, and he could see that his pain hurt mum more and more. He chose his end carefully, thoughtfully and with some humour. He checked into palliative care on a Friday night, having first checked the detail of his will with his solicitors—checking again and again that Mum would be okay. On the day he died—on the Monday—from his room at the palliative care ward at Whyalla hospital, I was able to ask Mum to go home, so that she could get dressed in her best clothes and return, as she did, looking beautiful. By then I had all the medical machinery, the bottles, the pipes and the like removed from Dad's room. The bedsheets were changed. Dad was clean, neat, tidy and rested. The room was full of flowers, full of the music Mum and Dad loved—and there was Mum and Dad, he with a central line delivering him the peace and ease he wanted. Dad died, as he lived, in mum's care. And he died, as he wanted, in mum's arms. Dad died at 12.30 pm that day.

Later that week we celebrated dad's life where the sun, the sand and the beach meet at Ada Ryan Gardens on the Whyalla foreshore. Mum did not like the idea of a funeral at the funeral home. 'It's too dark,' she said, preferring the beach, the sun, the trees, the grass and the sounds of children playing—even during the funeral. Dad's casket was near the garden seat where she and he had often sat watching children play.

You see, there are worse ways to die than cancer, because with cancer I had the time, and dad had the time, to say goodbye. How we die is important. It is not as important as how we live, but we should be able to die peacefully and, as best as we are able, with dignity, as dad did. I will miss Gordon—husband, father, grandad and great-grandad. He is survived by his wife Olive; his children David, Carol and Gary; his grandchildren Sonia, Andrew, Victoria, Riley, Darcy and Toby; and his great-grandchildren Aydan, Charlotte and Oliver.

I do not support many of the calls for legalising processes that govern how we die. I do believe that, in our modern hospital system, in our modern systems for providing care and palliative care, with good general practice, with good doctors, and with consent, care, compassion and love, it is possible to die with dignity, without attempting to regulate and unnecessarily create black-letter law around those provisions that govern our dying. I think my dad demonstrated that, and the doctors who cared for him and his family demonstrated that it is possible in our current system—perhaps especially possible in a regional hospital, or perhaps especially possible with a GP who has known a patient for 20 or 30 years, or perhaps especially possible with a person like my dad who realised he would not get well and that mum would only get more worried, more sick and more uneasy by dad's slow and painful death so he made the choices that he made. He made them as a loving husband, he made them as a person who enjoyed life and he made them in a way that made me proud. Thank you.

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