Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As representatives in this place we can be defined by various aspects of our work—by the places and communities we represent or by the issues we care about. But we are also defined by the people we work for and with, and often by people who choose us—people who seek us out as local members and decide to share with us their ideas and questions, their frustrations, hopes and encouragement. Today I want to talk about one of the people who shaped me in my work as a representative through that kind of persistent, almost pastoral, contact: an original, wise and gentle man, Dennis Tarrant, who died last week.

From early on in my time as the member for Fremantle, Dennis attended various events I was speaking at in Fremantle and made appointments to meet with me and discuss matters of importance. He wanted to share his thoughts, to support me and to challenge me, but also to give me the strength to lift my spirits for the important political contests ahead. And that is exactly what he did.

Dennis was born in Yorkshire from a long line of coalminers and farmers. He served in the RAF and afterwards completed a degree in microbiology at Nottingham. In 1952, he married his sweetheart, Mary Wheatley, a fellow student from his Thorne Grammar School days. Mary and Dennis were together 74 happy years.

In 1964, Denison, Mary and their four children migrated to Australia, where a fifth child was born. Dennis worked in the dairy industry and, in 1974, a WesFarmers study tour to China sparked a lifelong interest. He would later return to university and complete a degree in Chinese studies. Amazingly, he also completed a diploma in education and worked for five years teaching English to Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees at an education centre he helped establish at the United Nation's Sungai Besi refugee camp in Malaysia.

It would be impossible to understand Dennis Tarrant without understanding his lifelong devotion to organic gardening. Dennis helped create the rooftop community garden in the city of Fremantle. He also contributed to the Apace community garden in North Fremantle and conducted gardening classes for many years. When I met Dennis, he presented as a gardening evangelist, a Sinophile, a poet and a wit. He brought me vegetables, flowers and poems that were pointed and funny. The vegetables could be pointed and funny too. It was challenging in the end, because Dennis wanted, quite rightly, to simply be himself through every day there was.

When I visited him recently, he grumbled that everyone was sending him eulogies, saying all these nice things, when what he was interested in was talking about the big ideas and issues that mattered about politics and geopolitics, climate change and gardening, poetry and China, and about the Australian government's decision to allow a US Marine base in Darwin. He was pleased to know that Malcolm Fraser had spoken to me about that too.

On those last few occasions, the nurses were making arrangements to deal with the fact that Dennis' pain management was not working, yet his main concern was for us to agree on a more focused agenda for our conversation the next week. He was frustrated that his body was failing him. I said to him that whatever was happening to his body, his being was still shining bright.

I was just one of many people nourished and enriched by their friendship with Dennis. Dennis Tarrant is loved and missed by his wife, Mary; by his children, Jane, Simon, Lucy, Stella and Emily; and by the 10 grandchildren to whom I know he must have been the most wonderful grandfather. I love and miss him too.