Eulogy for the late Henry Francis Monaghan, MBE, of Sydney 1914 - 1991
"The good done by Dad lives indeed.
Here, for instance, the rendering of the walls, the varnish on the floors, our clothes, our cars, even our health is better in small, perhaps but certain measure, better because of the work of Dad in his professional career.
Career is only one incident of a man’s whole life. Like others, it is a telling incident. Through Dad’s career with NATA he sought and gained practical advance for the lives of people.
NATA people will tell you that, because they’ve told me, particularly recently, more particularly years ago, and when I told Dad those years ago about the penetratingly sincere affection NATA people had for Dad, he stopped, looked for the truth in my expression, and found; Dad briefly, so sweetly, wept. That was in 1973.
Another living incident, in 1969, was an early morning earth tremor. Noeline and I were awake with Dad in his bedroom and the sense he gave us was to relish the rare experience of contained natural cataclysm.
You see, Dad loved nature. In his twenties and teens, he’d trek weekends at the Blue Mountains bush. He took Mum and us on driving holidays – the Snowys, out west, the Darling Downs, Victoria – and we will always remember especially the wonder of millenia geological events and the keen regard to other phenomena he engendered in exact answers and observations.
Of course, it was the combination of nature and people in science that permitted Dad a satisfying combination of wonder and affection in his study and work. That’s as well why he spent those many hours on weekends in his beautiful garden. Dad said it was his only time outside, and he meant the immediate contact with a small but engaging part of nature. Didn’t it flourish under his wish.
The late Bill Barrett told me he admired Dad’s logic. On Sunday Philip Ruddock told me he admired Dad’s strength. Dom Cerneaz described Dad as father of an international system for the good of mankind.
He was, or is, our father, our grandfather, who could tell us our grandparents and great grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins of them, and whence they came, and where they went, and Mum’s side, too, with affection and understanding.
So you see there is this surround that Dad liked and did good with, because appreciating the circumference identifies the centre and there was Mum.
Forty years of marriage, by their vows in the eyes of God, surely truly wed, love triumphant.
That’s the sweetness of this queer grief I feel. We’re sad Dad is gone, yet.
Yet with us from Dad until ever lives a strong, logical, practical smithmanship of love. It’s always been in the character of many fathers to bequeath their fatherhood, otherwise we couldn’t be here.
That’s the gift of God Our Father, whom we honour in this house.
Dad has been here a thousand times in this church. This is his last visit.
Just as Dad has left us all the richness of his spirit of love, I think our common plea to God is likely answered."
* Eulogy delivered by Frank's youngest son Anthony Monaghan at St Kevin's Catholic Church Eastwood August 1991
* Wedding picture, from left, Jo's sister Patricia Brennan (nee O'Neil), Maureen O'Neil later Hathaway, Frank's brother-in-law Brian Scott, the father of the bride James Burns O'Neil, the couple Frank and Jo Monaghan, bridesmaid Joan O'Neil later Slattery, Aunty Bridget & Bernard O'D, on the steps of St Paul's Dulwich Hill - 8 November 1941
*
Frank was awarded MBE in Australia in 1977 for service to technology
"Frank not only made an enormous contribution to Australia's laboratory accreditation system, but he was also a founding contributor to the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), which has been responsible for much of the harmonising of standards of laboratory accreditation throughout the world. In this regard, much of the international community has followed NATA's lead in establishing their own accreditation systems. In 1977, Frank was awarded an MBE for his services to technology in Australia. By the time of his retirement in 1979, Frank had achieved goals that perhaps otherwise may not have been realised. Today, NATA continues to grow and benefit from the solid foundation laid by Frank Monaghan. This recognition and appreciation was translated into real terms when, together with Jack Ritchie, Frank was made an Honorary Member of the Association in 1990 through a unanimous resolution of NATA's Council."
China is a long-term friend and partner with Australia #auspol #beijing
China is a long-term friend and partner with Australia and Australians across many fields of endeavors, including physics and engineering, systematic manufacturing standards implementations, biomedical researches, legal science and more.
'Witness Success - 5 Straight Rules For You To Give Good Evidence In A Court Of #Law'
Click picture - Would you survive the
witness box? Would you appear credible? Would you withstand cross examination?
Even if you never expect to be giving evidence, the techniques you learn in
Witness Success are valuable in everyday life.
This expert text will take you
only an hour or two to read.
Witness Success: 5 Straight Rules For You To Give
Good Evidence In A Court Of Law is written by Court Counsel, a practicing trial
lawyer with the experience of decades of conducting litigation in law courts
around the world.
What you will learn from this concise text are simple
techniques and disciplines to allow you to enter the Court with confidence and
focus.
“Lifespan – why we age – and why we don’t have to” excerpt
So it certainly makes sense when people say that we might continue to chip away at the average, but we’re not likely to move the limit. They say it’s easy to extend the maximum life span of mice or dogs, but we humans are different. We simply live too long already.
They are wrong.
There’s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive – decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty and immobility - is no virtue.
Prolonged vitality – meaning not just more years of life but more active, healthy, and happy ones – is coming. It is coming sooner than most people expect. By the time the children who are born today have reached middle age, Jeanne Calment [a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122] may not even be on the list of the top 100 oldest people of all time. And by the turn of the next century, a person who is 122 on the day of his or her death may be said to have lived a full, though not particularly long, life. One hundred and twenty years might be not an outlier but an expectation, so much so that we won’t even call it longevity; we will simply call it “life”, and we will look back with sadness on the time in our history in which it was not so.
What’s the upward limit? I don’t think there is one. Many of my colleagues agree. There is no biological law that says we must age. Those who say there is don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re probably still a long way off from a world in which death is a rarity, but we’re not far from pushing it ever farther into the future.
All of this, in fact, is inevitable. Prolonged healthy lifespans are in sight. Yes, the entire history or humanity suggests otherwise. But the science if lifespan extension in this particular century says that the previous dead ends are poor guides.
It takes radical thinking to even begin to approach what this will mean for put species. Nothing in our billions of years of evolution has prepared us for this, which is why it’s so easy, and even alluring, to believe that it simply cannot be done. But that’s what people thought about human flight, too – up until the moment someone did it.
Today the Wright Brothers are back in their workshop, having successfully flown the gliders down the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. The world is about to change.
And just as was the case in the days leading up to December 17, 1903, the majority of humanity is oblivious. There was simply no context with which to construct the idea of controlled, powered flight back then, so the idea was fanciful, magical, the stuff of speculative fiction.
Then lift off. And nothing was ever the same again.
We are at another point of historical inflection. What hereto seemed magical will become real. It is a time in which humanity will redefine what is possible; a time of ending the inevitable.
Indeed, it is a time in which we will redefine
what it means to be human, for this is not just the start of a revolution, it
is the start of an evolution.
By Professor David A Sinclair PhD AO Professor of
Genetics, Harvard Medical School Professor of Aging at the University of New
South Wales, in the introduction to his 2019 work “Lifespan – why we age – and
why we don’t have to” published by Harper Collins, available from Amazon, Booktopia, etc.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)