I sat on a plane with Davey once, maybe 20 years ago now. At that point in our careers I had done much more flying than Dave. Shortly after the safety briefing, something I’d heard about 8 million times, I turn to Dave and said:

“Seriously, if this thing goes down, if we slam into a mountain at about 600 km/h, it’s not going to matter one little bit if our tray table is up or down down  - or our hand luggage is tucked securely under the seat in front of us.” He looked at me and giggled.

Some months later, I was in the audience listening to one of Dave’s routines. He had taken the observation that I had made and turned it into an absolutely hysterical, 6 minute diatribe on plane flights and safety briefings.

True artists enrich our lives by interpreting the world around us, by helping us see where we are and who we are. True artists to help us see where we’ve come from and where we’re going,

My friend, Dave Flanagan, was an artist. More importantly, Davey was an Australian artist.

I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to work out what it means to be Australian, and how to reflect that in my work. I also spent a lot of my early years trying to persuade the rest of Australia that being an Australian, talking like one, giving artistic work an Australian context was important and worthwhile - and set us apart from all the other people in the world.

Davey never had to think about that much. He just knew. He was, first and foremost, an Australian. He talked like an Australian, he looked at his world through Australian eyes and he helped us understand what it meant to be Australian - and just how good that is.

Davey had a number of voices, characters he would deploy. My favourite was Ted of Tennyson. Ted was my father, Ted was my father’s mates, Ted was the old bloke down the road who looked at life through older, wider eyes.

I remember watching television reports of the Bali bombing. One Australian bloke emerged from the smoke and the flames and the rubble, alive but singed by fire and bleeding from a few minor cuts and scrapes. An idiotic television reporter poked a microphone under his nose and asked him:

“What would you say to the people who did this?”

Without a second’s thought, without a moment of self-consciousness, the Australian said:

“I’d say you blokes need to have good, hard look at yourselves.”

It was that dry, classically Australian understatement that Davey refined to an art form.

I think it was Pablo Piccaso who said “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Again, Davey - bless him, met that challenge. Certainly he was a mature, sensible responsible adult - with all the virtues and vices that we all carry through life. But at the same time, Davey was an eternal kid - no one was ever going to make him grow up.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. Those of us who knew him well knew that behind his kind, twinkling eyes and his belly laugh, Davey lacked a bit of confidence. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

There is a lot about grief that is selfish. The reality is that nothing can hurt Davey again. He can’t get sick, he can’t have an accident, he can’t suffer misfortune. It’s us who are left who have to face the world and all it has to throw at us.

And now there’s one good mate who won’t be in our corner, one good mate who won’t be there to watch our backs, one good mate who won’t be there to get on the turps with and laugh wildly with in the face of the terror, the heart-ache, the loss and the pain that is a part of life.

I’ll miss him. We all will.

I want to say to Susie, Purnima and Annie, that it does get better. But it does take time. You’ll cry inconsolably for a while and then, without realising it, the crying periods will get further and further apart. One day you’ll smile to yourself or laugh with at something Davey said or did and the healing process will be well underway.

However, there will always be that deep, aching chasm of sadness that never quite goes away. That’s what comes when you love somebody.

I saw Davey 4 or 5 days before he died. He and I always managed to have conversations that somehow wandered between seriousness and intellectual depth - and an acute sense of the absurd which we shared. Our last conversation was pretty much like that. We talked about death and dying and I was lost in admiration for him when he said that he wasn’t frightened, that he had it all worked out. He was groping around for a way to express himself and I suggested that what he was trying to say was this:

“The closer you get to death, the greater your understanding of everything becomes. It’s just that the understanding becomes greater than your capacity to articulate it.”

“That’s it! That’s exactly it! Shooey, write that down for me will you?”

And I did.

Nothing in his life became him more like the manner of his leaving it.

I don’t understand too much but I understand this. Davey enriched our lives and our world will be the poorer for his passing.