When we first began to talk about ‘the things that matter’, you said you wanted to go on to the bitter end, to experience whatever dying could add to life. In the past year, you expressed a wish to go as cleanly as possible when the time came. As my mother would say, it’s better to wear out than rust out

I was in Surfers Paradise when I heard the news. My first thought was how to get back for the funeral, because I knew how much sharing in its rituals would help me cope with your no longer being just around the corner. By Friday morning, I’d decided not to return but to go on to Brisbane to see my mother as planned. If you could die so unexpectedly, then so might she.

One of the things I’d wanted to tell you about on our next walk was the candlelight memorial along Oxford Street in memory of people who’d died of AIDS. You’d said that Bob Brissenden’s jazz funeral was the only secular send-off that had ever worked for you. The candlelight procession did the same for me. The silence of the marchers, the quiet of the onlookers, the flickers of a thousand points of light, the a capella choir, the suppressed sobs as we passed the St Vincents’ Hospice, culminating with the reading of the names of those who have died, gave me the chance to express my grief for a friend who’d suicided while I was in Japan.

Maybe our ‘age of ruins’ is producing its own rituals and ceremonies? Again, I understood why ex­Diggers go – and do not go – to Anzac Day, and why getting drunk afterwards is a fair enough response.

And so the benefits to the living of sharing mourning ceremonies was very much on my mind when I decided not to return. I knew I had to find another way of accepting that you were no longer just a five-minute walk away, and this public letter is part of that acknowledgment.

You’d be pleased to know that I did my ‘moral duty’ and saw The Master Builder on my way through Sydney. Like Master Builder Solness, I cannot climb as high as I can build. I can pile up words about what is wrong with the world and, to a lesser extent, how to improve matters but my capacity to put those criticisms and principles into practice remains at ground level. I more than suspect that you felt the same whenever you saw the six volumes stacked on top of each other.

Ibsen’s other theme of the challenges of youth became clearer when I thought back on how I had upset you during the first year I taught at the ANU, after you and Henry Mayer – also recently dead – had got me a tutoring job in 1970. During the last eight years, you acted as if those storms had never happened. Yet you overcame your dislike of me then to reappoint me because I had published a book, instead of talking about how books should be written, if ever one were to write one.

Sometimes you showed flashes of resentment about historians of your own generation. I never glimpsed as much as a trace of envy in you towards those who were establishing reputations. In that, you were the opposite of Master Builder Solness. Part of the reason for your indulgence towards the young was that your own approach to history was so personal that no rivalry was possible.

As ‘Mr Passion’, you too were vulnerable to the challenge that led Solness to his death – the excitements that youthful energy displays. Six days later in Brisbane, this aspect returned to my thoughts about you when I heard Joan Carden – whose company you’d so much enjoyed in Italy last year – sing Marguerite in Faust. The Faustian temptation was not one that I associate with your temperament, least of all in regard to the acquisition of power. Yet you were fascinated by those who were obsessed with power, whether they were reporters or politicians. The Keating–Hawke challenge would have had you up at the House seeking meaning in the faces of the contestants, and Keating would have come around afterwards to talk about music. In part, you seemed amused by the politicians’ capacity for self-delusion, with their ability to justify personal ambitions with a rhetoric of the general good.

In addition, you wanted to be there, whether the ‘there’ was a farmers’ protest or a moment of parliamentary drama. Hence, you accepted Zelman Cowen’s invitation to Yarralumla in 1978, and began the long and painful break with Patrick White. I’m going to miss our strolls after I’ve read David Marr’s biography. Now, with Dorothy dead, there’s no one to whom I am as close as you two had been to White.

Although we often gossiped about people and books, in running through what I wanted to discuss from these two weeks away I’ve come to realise how important music was to our afternoon teas. Often you would be practising Bach on the piano when I arrived.

The last time I saw you was when you and Dymphna drove me home after Mozart’s Coronation Mass and the Cherubini Requiem for the Bourbons, and that was the last live music you heard. Though you liked its Dies Irae more than the Fauré we’d heard on Anzac. Day, the Cherubini wasn’t the requiem I’d have chosen for you. I’d go for the Dufay for myself though, even he didn’t get the music he had ordered for his death bed.

Brisbane was at the end of its first musical Biennial and as well as the Faust I wanted to talk with you about the Alexander Nevsky cantata that accompanied the film. I wondered how its message of Great Russianism would go down today with the new Soviet men you wrote about, with hope, in the late 1950s.

Thoughts of Australian and Soviet politics intertwined watching the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which could have been set in the Perth branch of the Australian taxation office.

You would have been interested in the two productions of Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera which I saw in Brisbane and six nights later in Sydney. The Sydney version was superior musically, but the Brisbane one worked better because the conflict between masters and servants had not been removed from the plot line. How much of Mozart’s recurrent concern with this theme came from his own experiences as a servant to Archbishop Colloredo while being a master builder of music?

Once in our weekly exchange of letters between Tokyo and Canberra, you lamented that the only man you could talk to was in Queanbeyan cemetery, meaning David Campbell. I’m not yet in that situation, but I accept that the conversation we began in 1983 is over. Around Dymphna’s meal table I met other people with whom I might develop a different if parallel discussion.

By the way, when the Government Inspector praised the stuffed mullet he had been given for lunch, my mind moved to all the fish you’d caught for Dymphna to bake.

The third part of your memoirs remained unfinished and I trust it won’t be published because it will lack the rewriting that gave your sentences their distinctive qualities. I’m especially glad that the first two volumes have appeared, because The Puzzles of Childhood and The Quest for Grace let me understand why you long ago insisted that I read the final paragraph of Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Like Clem Yeobright, you deserved to be kindly received once the story of your life had become generally known.

My love to you,

as ever,

Humphrey