Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral was packed, the mourners an engaging mix of the devout, the uncertain, the religiously tepid and the atheistic. Background, vocation and style were also diverse. There were the politicians, left, centre, right, and of course Gough and family; there were the authors, the priests, the critics, the journalists (left, centre, right) and the academics; there were those who looked as if they lived in suits and ties and those who couldn’t wait to change out of them. What drew all together in tribute and a shared sense of loss was the remarkable man whose body lay in the coffin and whose portrait by David Naseby stood at the altar threshold, as compelling in representation as its subject had been in life.
Richard Victor Hall is dead at the age of 65 and a life profoundly shaped by its formation in Catholic tradition has run its course. He was one of my oldest friends. We had met as cadet journalists on the Sydney afternoon newspapers described by John Douglas Pringle as the two worst newspapers in the world. It was probably true when he made his comments in the 1950s, though that was before Rupert Murdoch really hit his straps. We were part-time Arts students at Sydney University and helped found the Evening Students Association where we saw ourselves exerting Catholic influence against a vaguely sinister, and possibly imaginary, Masonic force. We became a factor of some sort (positive, I hope) in the Newman Society and worked with the inspiring Catholic chaplain Roger Pryke whose intellectual curiosity, enthusiasm, openness and lack of pomposity made Catholicism seem exciting, fresh and full of potential.
We edited the university magazine Hermes in 1959 and included a short story by Robert Hughes and (I think) the first published poems of Les Murray. We visited Ed Campion and Brian Johns during their spell in the Springwood seminary and talked theology, culture and current events. Our Catholic contemporaries, as students, included the philosopher Genevieve Lloyd (who became Australia’s first woman professor of philosophy), Bob Vermeesch (later a legal academic), John Woodward (later a judge) and scores of others who became influential in Australian life.
They were heady times to be a fledgling ‘Catholic intellectual’ committed to the life of the soul, the life of the mind and service to the community. Largely because of Hall’s adventurous spirit, we linked up with the key figures in the