Remarks
at the National Memorial Service for the victims of Flight MH17
St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne
Thursday, 7 August 2014
It is an honour to be here in
this cathedral dedicated to God and to the better angels of our natures, with
the religious and civic leaders of our country, in sorrow and in solidarity
with the families of the victims of MH17 on this National Day of Mourning.
Three weeks ago tomorrow, the
families of 38 Australians woke up to the very worst news imaginable. Their
plane had been shot out of the sky and 298 innocent people murdered, including
38 men, women and children who called Australia home.
Children had lost parents,
parents had lost children and an aching void had opened in hundreds of lives
made worse by the wanton cruelty of shooting down a passenger jet.
There will be a time to judge the
guilty, but today we honour the dead and we grieve with the living.
We cannot bring them back, but we
will bring them home, as far as we humanly can.
We do rededicate ourselves today
to supporting the bereaved, to obtaining justice for the dead and for their
families and to working for a better world.
Today the Australian nation
expresses its gratitude for the lives so cruelly cut short and we express our
solidarity with those who love them.
The dead of flight MH17 reflect
what’s best in modern Australia: doctors who work with refugees, teachers who
work with indigenous people and children with disabilities, volunteers in our
armed forces and with local charities, business innovators and pillars of local
communities, young people filled with passion for the life before them.
What could be more typical of
modern Australia than a Malaysian married to a Dutchman, raising their children
in outer-metropolitan Melbourne? And what predicament could be more
heart-rending than that of a family now bereft of the children that are every
parents’ greatest joy?
When those we love are snatched
away, nothing can ease the pain. Somehow we who have not been bereaved must
reach out to those who have and show, by our love, that love has not abandoned
them.
You have not been abandoned and
you never will be.
As the news of this atrocity
broke right around our country, friends and family began calling and visiting
those whose world had been shattered. Within a couple of hours, consular
officials were making contact with families to let them know that their country
was with them in their darkest moments.
Within 24 hours, hundreds of
personnel had been mobilised in Canberra and hundreds more were being mobilised
to go abroad to bring home our dead with respect and with dignity.
Hundreds of unarmed Australian
police and military have been working around the clock to recover remains and
belongings from a war zone. Because this is what Australians do in times of
trouble. We reach out to people and do what we can to help. We try to create
order in the midst of chaos and we try to inject decency into the vilest of
situations.
We cannot fill the void in people’s
hearts. We cannot dull the ache of loss. We cannot resolve the mystery of
needless suffering and death but we can armour ourselves against despair by
responding to evil with good – unconquerable good.
As the Maslin family have so
beautifully put it – love conquers hate.
So I salute all those who have
rallied to their fellow Australians and to all the other victims of MH17 and I
especially acknowledge Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, our envoy in Ukraine.
Mostly though, I pay tribute to
all those who have lost loved ones. Some of you I have spoken with. Your
decency, resilience and compassion have been both humbling and uplifting.
One of you even asked me how I
was bearing up because in the depths of your own pain, you were still thinking
of others.
Long ago it was written “there is
a time to die, a time to weep and a time to mourn”, there is also a time to
mend, a time to love, a time for peace and a time for keep.
In time, our thoughts will linger
not on how the passengers of flight MH17 died, but on how they lived.
We will remember them as they
were - joyful, open, kind and optimistic. A home-sick poet, Dorothea Mackellar,
once wrote: “wherever I may die, I know to what brown country my homing
thoughts will fly”.
May those who are lost arrive
home to the people and the country they loved.
May the God of mercy comfort
those left behind and may the God of justice answer all our prayers. |
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