St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney chocker with mourners at Roddy Meagher's funeral mass ... Dyce raced through the eulogy, but everything else took a very long time ... I'm just a soul whose intentions are good ... Oh Lord don't let me be misunderstood ... Notes from the Pelladium
Roderick Pitt Meagher had his big two-hour send off this morning (Friday, July 8) at St Mary's Cathedral.
The great and the good turned-up, along with Little Johnnie Howard. How the deceased is going to make it to heaven after having Howard mourning his death is a vexed and under-debated issue.
There was so much incense tossed about the Pelladium that eyes were watering and throats seized up. It was like a major Aboriginal smoking ceremony.
Actually, no Aborigines were in attendance, nor were there any hairy-legged lesbians or people cloned in bottles (that I could detect).
It was mainly a show for fat, old, white, male Tories. There was also the departed's family, including his retired bullfighter brother Christopher, aka Cristobal Morales. Devout Philippine women made up the numbers in the side stalls.
Francois Kunc SC (Knight Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre) sporting his vestments, was in fine voice with, "The Lord is my shep-herd; there is no-thing I shall want".
The service booklet ran to 25 pages and no collect, liturgy, epistle, gospel, prayer, homily, offertory, preface, communion, hymn, motet, commendation, or incensing was overlooked.
The whole pageant had been scripted by Meagher himself, which is why much of it ignored the second Vatican council's attempts to rush headlong onto the nineteenth century.
Dyson Heydon gave the eulogy. He looked like a tortured egret bent over the lectern.
In his characteristic manner Dyce galloped through his encomium at breakneck speed, half the words lost to the echoes of the cathedral. He could have been talking in Latin.
He explained that the deceased, like Edmund Burke, "found change less harmful if it proceeded organically".
We were reminded of Maurice Byers' observation that Meagher's clothes sense lay somewhere between that of Oscar Wilde and a Regency buck.
Glitter on Oxford StreetThe shiny, leather trousers that Roddy sported where more Gary Glitter meets Oxford Street.
Indeed, there was a careful silence surrounding the issue of Meagher's latterday campness. The dabs of makeup, the elaborate "neck furniture", the strange half-dyed fuchsia hair and his penchant for the company of young men were matters best left undisturbed in George Pell's basilica.
Heydon said that Roddy obscured his true nature with a mask he fashioned himself. Mistakenly, "people took the mask to be the real man".
"If there is one word that could sum up Roddy it was 'misunderstood' ...
Some thought he had an aristocratic air of distain ... in fact he was a sympathetic, generous person of faultless courtesy ... a supremely brilliant and civilised man."
There was also the element of "the tragic clown courting laughter".
Meagher's cruel, vitriolic assaults on others should, apparently, be explained as a misunderstanding.
His attack on Mary Gaudron in his book of pen portraits was so nasty it couldn't be published. The proposed second instalment of Portraits on Yellow Paper never appeared because collaborators pulled out of the project, believing Meagher had lost the plot.
His speech at a particularly laborious bench and bar dinner in 2004, not long after he retired from the court of appeal, was a shocker, regurgitating all his ancient cat calls about political correctness and cruelly trampling over the sensitivities of those who hadn't quite cottoned onto his "faultless courtesy".
Heydon asked the cathedral of mourners, "How was he who loved beauty to respond to the ugliness of modern life?"
The way he did respond to it was, on occasions, to give the impression that the mask was the real man.
He got away with it because everyone thought he was an endearing eccentric, which wasn't difficult amid the grey sea of the Sydney bar.
There is a tribe in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea that anoints itself with the decaying bodies of deceased relatives. Consequently, they pong quite strongly. Their custom is to sit about the fire at night and remind themselves of the unpleasant qualities of the dead.
These primitive natives have worked out that this is a far surer way of retaining stronger, more faithful memories of those who had shuffled off the mortal coil.
The Christian faith is not so evolved, so inevitably half the congregation sits at funeral services, or masses for the repose of the soul, wondering if they have turned up at the right place.
For instance many today were surprised to hear that, according the Heydon, Meagher loathed cant and pretention.
Maybe, as Sam Goldwyn is said to have said of the huge crowd that attended Louis B. Mayer's funeral, "they wanted to make sure he was dead".
Jack Kenny QC said Roddy was the only genius he knew. But, Roddy was far from all bad. There was plenty of good in him and, like Hitler, he loved dogs.