Tribute
by Nigel Westlake
With a broken heart, I thank you for joining us as we mark the site where Eli fell.
We have just been listening to ‘Unfulfilled Dreams”, composed and performed by Sydney musician Tony Gorman.
It is an appropriate and poignant underscore for our business here tonight.
“Eli,” - in Hebrew, meaning “the ascended one.”
Twenty two years on, who could ever have imagined the implications and resonance that translation holds for us now.
Its taken us almost eight months to muster the courage to return here to this place and pay our due respects.
Thirty one weeks of relentless grief, lost dreams, the memories and the yearning, the likes of which I could never have imagined.
This piece of ground.
Just another anonymous stretch of path in the urban concrete jungle that we call Sydney.
Nothing special about it.
No views.
No park.
No redeeming features of any sort.
A strange place for one who had such a gifted intuition for visual aesthetics and beauty.
A young man who had witnessed some glorious sights on earth and recognized them as such.
Who had spent much of his life growing up and reveling in the splendor of the Australian bush.
To meet his end here.
On the cold hard ground of the inner city.
I am underwhelmed at the urbane banality of this place, as Eli would be also.
But now this piece of dirt has a spiritual significance for us.
In a sense it has become our sacred ground.
“X” marks the spot - of a place we will never ever forget.
And tonight we leave a small mark of respect for the one who was, and is still, so loved and so sorely missed by so many.
The idea to install a plaque here was suggested to me by Phil Ritchie from the gym upstairs.
He discovered me with Joel, Brig & Stu, drawing tributes to Eli on the path with chalk, several days after the event ,
and kindly made the offer of the garden here for something a bit more permanent.
I sincerely thank Phil and also John Tully from the Rugby Club for permission to install this memorial on their property.
Jan and I have lived through the terrible events of that night in our imaginations,
hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.
In our waking hours and in our sleep.
And through the eyes of those that witnessed the tragedy,
and those studying the case in great detail,
namely the crown prosecutor and the detectives in charge of the investigation.
We remain in complete disbelief and horror at the brutality and the injustice of this appalling act.
We remain in deep & grave shock that such an awful fate could have befallen our dear Eli.
In the midst of supposedly sophisticated society.
In times of peace and prosperity.
We have been robbed of our precious son.
And Eli has been robbed of his precious life.
Of his rightful tenure to a rich and fullsome existence
Of his three score years and ten.
Of what could have been.
A promising career.
A family of his own perhaps.
A chance to realize his potential.
A wonderful young man he had grown up to become.
Always the good listener, expressing empathy and wisdom way beyond his years.
I would, from time to time, seek his advice on certain matters.
I was always surprised at the insight, judgment and perception he would bring to the table when we spoke in this way.
I always imagined him as a wise old sage or counselor.
He was our laughing Buddha.
God knows, by his late teens he had certainly accumulated enough experiences of his own to draw upon.
The heritage of a rich and crowded life and a sometimes troubled adolescence.
His memorial under the tree here is a simple statement of fact on a bronze plaque, mounted on sandstone.
It features a couple of reminders of his deep love of the sea and of things maritime.
A lighthouse and a pod of dolphins.
These images were some of the last I shared with Eli as we sailed up the coast of NSW just a week before he died.
The lighthouse is also a metaphor for the foundation we have formed in Eli’s memory, the “Smugglers Of Light Foundation ”.
Jani will talk further about this a little later on.
I would like to share with you some music that Eli played quite frequently as we were sailing up the NSW coast just a week before he died.
Whenever he played this track, Eli's eyes would glaze over and look wistfully into the distance, a faint smile appearing at the edge of his lips.
I was never sure if he was thinking of someone in particular, or if it was just the idea that one day, he might find a lifelong companion.