Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I would like to pay tribute to Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who died on 30 August, aged 74. Seamus Heaney was a friend. He was the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays, translations and works for the stage, and he held lectureships at some of the world's foremost universities, including Oxford, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, and the recipient of numerous other awards and accolades, he was admired throughout the world as well as in his native Ireland. At his funeral in Dublin, and outside the church, hundreds of people clapped for 15 minutes in memory not just of the poet but of the kind, generous and wise man that Seamus was. Fifteen minutes of clapping! I can imagine him making a little joke about that because, for all his fame and his serious work, he had a great sense of humour and he was not the least bit puffed up with his own importance.

Seamus was born the eldest son of a large rural family in Castledawson, County Derry, in Northern Ireland. A bright boy, he won a scholarship to boarding school and later attended university—a move that took him away from the rural circumstances of his inheritance, but he always remained grounded in the fields that bore him. His first volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. He was a young man coming of age in Belfast at a time of sectarian strife and bitterness and he looked for inspiration to his own rural past. His father worked on the farm and, in a deep sense, Heaney also saw his own work as carrying on the tradition with a different instrument. As his poem Digging puts it:

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

  …   …   …

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

And dig he did: into history and mythology, into legend and language, and above all into common experiences. He often alluded to the fact that, in the course of a lifetime, he had moved from a culture that was more or less medieval—well water, horse-drawn carts, blacksmiths, thatchers—to one that was postmodern.

He referred to poetry as when 'human experience comes to life' and, as well as insights into the local rural realities of ploughs and bogs and trees dripping with rain, his poems also reflected powerfully on politics, human rights, even terrorist attacks. One poem compares a mobile phone to a horse's pricked-up ears. His voice is distinctive. As the historian Roy Foster put it, a 'Heaney poem carries its maker's mark on the blade'.

By 1973 Seamus was a young husband and father living in Belfast and lecturing in English literature at the university. He had begun to have some standing as a gifted voice in his community, and in this period of sectarian bitterness and strife there were many calls for him to speak out on behalf of 'his' people. But who were his people? Catholics? Northern Irishmen? Writers in English? Republicans? Or maybe even his own family?

He was always a thoughtful man and saw the fatal error of reducing a complex situation to a simple black-and-white issue. So, even though the civil violence troubled and preoccupied him, he saw that taking a single side would be untrue to his lived experience and he absolutely refused to write propagandist poetry. But 'the troubles' did provide the backdrop or underpinning of his poetry. His poem The Other Side is about the divisions in his community but, importantly, it is also about the connections. It describes neighbours in rural Ulster: a Protestant farmer with his fields adjoining a Catholic neighbour, united in their common daily lot but peacefully acknowledging their essential cultural differences. Which was 'the other side'? Without being overtly political, the poem makes it clear that perspectives differ and explain a lot. But such indirect or oblique responses to the sectarian violence aroused criticism in some quarters, and when the young husband and father decided to move his family to a safer home in the south the decision was interpreted by some as a political act.

His new home turned out to be just across the road from my grandparents' farmhouse in County Wicklow. He slipped very easily into the life of the village, and since his death in August I have been remembering the countless quiet acts of kindness with which he enriched the lives of so many, including members of my own family. He had the same gentle regard and respect for everyone, regardless of status or position. He would joke and talk seriously about poetry and life just as readily with my 16-year-old cousin John, working after school in the village shop, as he would with the parish priest, or the doctor, or the gardener at the large estate, or the local guard's daughter. All of these people have treasured memories of their conversations with Seamus, as well as copies of his books dedicated to them.

He made the south of Ireland his home for the rest of his life, at his main house in Dublin and at the Wicklow cottage, which became his refuge and retreat—a place where he could work uninterrupted. He produced over 20 volumes of poetry, essays, translations and plays, his fame grew and, as it grew, his life expanded to include public performances around the world. With the award of the Nobel prize in 1995 came a huge increase in requests for his presence—to judge this prize, or sign that submission, or speak at a function, or recommend an author—and he rarely refused. His Nobel address manifested the poet's struggle in the face of intractable, bloody history. What 'always will be to poetry's credit', he wrote, is 'the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite the evidence of wrongness all around it'.

The poet TS Eliot called the Nobel prize a 'ticket to one's own funeral', and indeed it was very nearly so for Seamus, as the demands on his time and energy made massive inroads on his reserves. He looked on his talent as a blessing to be shared with others even when doing so made it harder for him to continue with his work. In 2006 he had a stroke, which brought him to a temporary halt. 'Blessed are the pacemakers,' he remarked with a wry smile when I inquired then about his health. After he recovered he became more judicious in his acceptance of these invitations, but that is not to say his conviviality or his generosity with his time and conversation decreased.

In 2008 on a visit to Ireland I spent a lovely afternoon with Seamus and Marie at their cottage in Wicklow. He was a little unsteady but mentally alert and animated. He talked about coming back to Australia—he had been here in the 1990s—and about how pleased he was by our apology to the stolen generations. It struck him as justice that had waited a long time to be served. He observed that 'its balm wasn't just an ingredient to ease the pain: it was part of the healing'. But he was not being pompous. In fact the whole family shared the self-deprecating humour that often punctured moments that might have been in danger of becoming inflated. As he was signing a copy of his Collected Poems for me to bring back as a present for Prime Minister Rudd, one of my companions remarked that this would be a very valuable gift, at which Marie chuckled and said he had signed and given away so many volumes that it would be the unsigned ones that would become collectors' items.

But in times of fear, suspicion and economic hardship, Seamus Heaney was always a very hopeful man. His work reminds us of the importance of never giving up on the possibility of transforming life for the better. It is vital for politicians to remember that whatever we are faced with—

Can always be reimagined, however four-square,

Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time

It happens to be.

Former US President Bill Clinton, who praised Heaney as 'our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives' and a 'powerful voice for peace', was infected by that poet's hope. When he chose Between Hope and History as the title of his book about his vision for the USA in the 21st century, he was paying tribute to Seamus Heaney's 1991 verse play The Cure at Troy.

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and, although there is still conflict in Northern Ireland, it is nothing like the violence that pervaded in Heaney's time and a great part of his legacy is his contribution to the peacemaking process. He knew how important it is to keep trying, to keep on going, and to be true to yourself.

One of his poems from the sequence he titled Squarings, is a about not kidding ourselves, about squaring up to the truth, which is particularly relevant to our profession as politicians where even the temptation to tell the unvarnished truth can end up varnishing it. No-one knew better than Seamus Heaney the seduction and the betrayal of the nicely turned phrase. Here in his poem Squarings, xxxviii that came out of a visit to Rome and the stirrings evoked by the city's classical history and its contrast with the more humble and ordinary experience of a daily lives, he wrote:

We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt

The Transports of temptation on the heights:

We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

Then something in me moved to prophesy

Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble

And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

'Down with form triumphant, long live,' (said I)

'Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend

The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.'

To which a voice replied, 'Of course we do.

But the others are in the Forum Cafe waiting,

Wondering where we are. What'll you have?'

Down to earth, that was Seamus! He never forgot that this is where we all belong. While he was serious he also had an enormous sense of fun and enjoyed the absurd moments of life. He told me a story about being a young teacher organising a discussion about birds and then setting his class to write a composition. Observing two little boys with their heads together, he deduced that the less able boy was being helped rather a lot by his more gifted friend so he separated them. After a few moments he wandered down to see how the little fellow was managing on his own, and read, 'The swallow is a migratory bird … It have a roundy head.' We laughed as we both recalled the many roundy heads we had encountered not just in our teaching days but also later on.

Seamus, Marie and their family have lived rich and interesting lives. They travelled extensively and met people from all walks of life. Last year when our parliamentary delegation visited Ireland I had dearly hoped to catch up with them, but Seamus was on a lecture tour in America so it was not to be. My cousin Sheila Clarke remembered not long ago passing their house in Ashford and being surprised to see a squad car and four guardai outside. She wrote, 'It flashed into my mind the price of fame—what could have happened? I returned with mounting concern and inquired if everything was all right.' Indeed it was. It was just that Emperor Akihoto and Empress Michicko of Japan had just dropped in for a cup of tea!

Generous, fascinating, gifted, modest and very good at quietly being a wise man, Seamus Heaney is sorely missed. At his funeral, which was broadcast live by the RTE and the BBC, Frank McGuinness, the Irish playwright, said:

During the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict he was our conscience: a conscience that was accurate and precise in how it articulated what was happening.

His poems are a brilliant record of what Ireland went through, and to produce it he must have gone through many trials. He carried enormous burdens for us and he helped us. He was a great ally for the light … He was the greatest Irishman of my generation: he had no rivals.

Michael Higgins, the President of the Irish Republic said:

The presence of Seamus was a warm one, full of humour, care and courtesy, a courtesy that enabled him to carry with such wry Northern Irish dignity so many well-deserved honours from all over the world.

Seamus is survived by Marie, his children Christopher, Michael and Catherine, and their granddaughters. Vale Seamus Heaney.