March 22, 2007
A LITTLE over a year ago, the journalist and pleasure-seeker Morgan Mellish was living in a Bronte apartment overlooking one of Sydney's most tempting surf beaches.
He liked to tell friends: "I wake up, lift myself up on one elbow and look out the window. If the surf's up, I get straight out of bed. If not, I go back to sleep."Yesterday, in Bronte, the surf was up.
By rights, Mellish should have been chest to the board, paddling out towards shafts of pink sunlight that broke through heavy cloud.
But Mellish - the Jakarta correspondent for Fairfax's The Australian Financial Review newspaper - was killed along with 20 others in the crash of Garuda flight 200 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on March 7.
He was cremated at a private ceremony on Tuesday. Yesterday, there was a memorial service at St Andrew's Cathedral in central Sydney, attended by his family, surfer friends, colleagues, members of the Fairfax board, including chairman Ron Walker, and News Limited chief executive John Hartigan. It was a fortnight, almost to the minute, since Mellish - full name, Henry Morgan Saxon, or HMS Mellish - died. His funeral was the last for the five Australians who were killed in the crash, following services in the past week for federal police officers Mark Scott and Brice Steele, AusAID Indonesia chief Allison Sudradjat and foreign affairs official Liz O'Neill.
Mellish's family had hoped to bring some levity to the occasion, inviting mourners to wear Havaianas (a brand of colourful rubber thongs) with their suits. But only a few managed it; the mood was as gloomy as the sky overhead; the church was filled to overflowing; the white fans were mostly useless in the muggy heat.
Friends tried to put the emphasis on all Mellish had achieved: he was living his dream, working as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta; insisting that his glorious Indonesian girlfriend, Nila Tanzil, speak to him only in Bahasa Indonesian; surfing the globe; mountain climbing; cycling; last year winning a Walkley Award for excellence in journalism.
But how to escape the fact that he was also only 36, a sandy-haired, handsome man in extraordinary physical health, cut down in the prime of his life.
As Dominic Steele, of Christians in the Media (yes, even they joke that it's a small organisation) said: "There will be no children, no grandchildren."
An old friend, Ben Hunter, said Mellish had the "work-life balance" almost perfect.
AFR editor Glenn Burge said Mellish was hired as a cub reporter even though colleagues could tell, just from looking at all six laconic feet of him, they would have to "put a rocket up him occasionally".
Burge recalled the time Mellish took a long period of unpaid leave to surf South America. He carried with him five surfboards, all of which got lost. Exasperated, friends asked him why he needed five. He explained that different boards for different beaches were, to him, as necessary as different shoes for different terrain.
After the service yesterday, two of Mellish's surfboards were offered up to mourners to sign. Friends intend to paddle out with those boards this weekend.
The Australian
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