Nineteen years after his passing, former South Australian premier Don Dunstan is still fondly remembered by the Italian community. Here is their tribute.

A RICORDO DI DONALD ALLAN ‘DON’ DUNSTAN

(21.09.1926 – 06.02.1999)

by Giorgio Venturini for Resistenza and A.N.P.I., the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani in Australia.

One of the last – possibly the last – public engagements of an already terminally ill Don Dunstan was at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 21 April 1998. He spoke on the theme “We intervene or we sink”, to emphasise that “It is possible to build a society in which individual citizens have security of food, shelter, work and services which will celebrate their worth as individuals … where all citizens have an equal and effective say in their own governance and an opportunity to participate in and to influence decisions affecting their lives.”

After leaving office in February 1979 he had continued to lend his devotion, intelligence and humanity to many public causes. It was this activism, outside of office, which enhanced his reputation as a man of the people as much as his period as a social reformer whose fight against injustice and discrimination were a symbol of his government.

Friends of Lionel Keith Murphy had him to deliver the Seventh L. K. Murphy Memorial Lecture, at the Ninde dana Quarenook (Aboriginal Centre) in Morwell, on 11 November 1993. And we were hoping that an early intervention had eradicated the throat cancer; some years later it metastasised into a lung cancer – inoperable. Death would follow in February 1999.

Some five thousand persons paid their respects to Don Dunstan at the same Adelaide Festival Centre, and an equal number followed the proceedings of the memorial service on a big screen on the lawns outside. Most of them were part of the ‘popolo minuto’ as Don, a lover of the Italian language, might have expressed his feeling for the common persons.

Towards the end of his life he was asked what had sustained him in his various struggles. “The love of people,” he replied without hesitation.

The survivors in Australia of Resistenza and of the National Association of Italian Partisans remembered Don Dunstan with these words:

Rebellious in youth,

artist and art critic,

gentle persuader, humanist, Renaissance man,

defender of freedom for all,

pioneer of social and legal reforms,

… he upheld justice for the First Nations of this land.

Not for that alone, he became the scourge of insularity, ignorance and indifference,

not for that alone he was deeply hated and branded ‘class traitor’

by the poltroons and the beneficiaries

of ‘inherited positional goods’.

Don Dunstan,

brilliant and cultivated orator,

consummate performer among shallow dilettanti,

leader of governments,

patron of the arts, a cultivated man, a dynamo of ideas

… in a country of philistines,

of pavid conformists

and boring imitators in the ‘Westminster tradition’,

he remained loyal to his convictions,

sustained them against the fashionable tide,

and for that continued to win the respect of the common person.

Across the world he stood

… a friend of the oppressed, of the underclass and of the needy.

In Dunstan the men and women of Resistenza and of A.N.P.I.

recognise the coherence between thought and action,

the liberal socialist in the tradition of the European Resistance,

the democratic socialist anchored to principles

… not to personal advancement.

Away from the continuing circus of post-colonial yokels,

he died a “why not” visionary of undreamt-before dreams.

Resistenza and A.N.P.I. mourn the passing

of a man of civic courage

and of great dignity even in adversity,

and of moving stoicism to the end,

and a lover of Italy

and of justice and liberty.