Fr Ted Kennedy (1931–2005)
Life and death abound in ironies. While some are droll, others are cruel. Yet few of the 1500 or so people who attended the funeral of Fr Ted Kennedy on 24 May—the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, Patroness of Australia, the response of antipodean Catholics to Empire Day—could have imagined what was about to transpire. Fr Kennedy had not been buried a week before his successors called the police to that fraught inner-city church to deal with ‘trouble-making’ parishioners. This unflinching and selfless friend of Australia’s indigenous people never once in his 30 years as parish priest at St Vincent’s, Redfern called for police assistance, for both philosophical and pragmatic reasons. That funeral, like so much else in the life of this remarkable man, was both a sign of, and a challenge to, the fractures and factions in Catholic life in Sydney.
It was at that very church where the funeral began, with a traditional Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony followed by a long procession to ‘The Block’, the site of so much heartbreak and inter-cultural violence in Redfern. Some of us felt, for reasons of a different (but really less valid) symbolism that the ceremony should have been held in St Mary’s Cathedral, but Ted’s remarkable elder sister, Marnie rscj, insisted that he wanted it in Redfern. ‘If it were in the cathedral,’ she told a mutual friend, ‘Ted would climb out of the coffin and walk out of the building.’
The assembly at his funeral would make rich readings for a sociologist. There were, of course, many Aborigines whose welfare had been his burning concern for 30 years. Some were outside the huge marquee, tending a fire which provided a constant and emotionally pungent smoke. As an Australian incense, it reminded us of the land that means so much to us all. Others were inside; their chanting enriching the ritual with an intense eloquence. This proved unexpectedly moving for so many of the white people present. This keening cut deep to the soul; yet others bore aloft a small cross, decorated with indigenous colours and symbols. The dispossessed, from around the nation, proud and profoundly saddened by the loss of their unswerving friend.
The other part of that grieving congregation—journalists, artists, politicians, atheists, professionals aplenty—were, mostly, those who had encountered, and been influenced, by Ted as young students and graduates. They represented that other dispossessed group in