Neil McMahon
March 22, 2007
A GATHERING of mourners can be about many things, but is a ritual shorn of meaning if love isn't one of them. It can be grieved in gratitude or regret, but there seemed none of the latter where Morgan Mellish was concerned - he was a man well loved and who loved well; a buccaneer who romanced life. Life swooned.
It still does, even now he's gone, dead in the Garuda air crash that claimed 21 lives in Indonesia 15 days ago. At his memorial service in St Andrews Cathedral in Sydney yesterday, it was clear Mellish didn't die wondering about much. He once told his mother, Dawn: "I want to live as close to the edge as I can without falling off."
He did that, with a spirit that made it easier for grief to give way to a smile. Hundreds gathered to honour him a day after his cremation: his mother and his mates, his father, Peter, sisters Caroline and Lucy, a boy and girl who called him Uncle, his Indonesian girlfriend, Nila Tanzil, and important figures from Canberra - Joe Hockey, Julia Gillard, Mick Keelty - who called his name at press conferences.
Mellish was there, too, beaming down from giant screens - scaling a cliff, sailing a boat, swimming, always smiling. The politicians would have been hard pressed to miss him - he may have written for the dry Australian Financial Review, but the shock of hair and the smile told another story. He had a grin like a grand piano, tuned for honky-tonk and rock'n'roll. That, it seems, was how he lived his life, confident of his rhythm and keeping a sometimes frantic beat - Elvis with a surfboard and a laptop.
His editor, Glenn Burge, told that story, of the time Mellish, the AFR's man in Jakarta, turned up to cover political talks in Indonesia carrying both those things. "Morganesque moments", Burge said. He loved his work - a Walkley award tells us that - but a decent wave could mean as much. Maybe more.
A childhood friend, Simon Dale, said Mellish only had to be near a beach and he'd be smitten. "He'd see the waves and start running." When he lived in Bronte, said schoolfriend Ben Hunter, Mellish would prop himself up in bed to see if the morning was worth a proper greeting. The swell was outside, and that was the morning news the reporter tuned to first.
He was "the kind of guy who made you suck your stomach in", Burge said - athletic, a whirl of energy, smart but sometimes frustrating, because it could be hard to judge his focus. But you had to like him. "If he did have a temper, I never saw it."
That much was evident from the turnout of Mellish's colleagues yesterday, who came by foot from Fairfax headquarters and by plane from Jakarta. It's hard to get journos to cry, and perhaps harder to get them to swallow too much God. Good reporters take nothing on faith, but they had to yesterday.
This was a service heavy with prayer and religious imagery - God, like Mellish's parents, had lost his only son in his 30s, said Dominic Steele, of the group Christians in the Media. One of Mellish's sisters, Lucy Chik, chose a reading that said: "Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart."
Simon Dale spoke of what he'd lost, concluding: "I'm going to miss that smile." And there it was, larger than life on the screens above, tossing some honky-tonk and rock'n'roll among the hymns.
SMH
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