Julie and Owen have been steadily important in our lives for over 60 years. And this is in spite of the fact that there have been long periods when we have seen little of each other. There is an inevitable trend in the later years of your family lives, for your children and their children to become the main focus, rather than your own contemporaries. But this has never in any way diminished our friendship. It has even enhanced it. We have always known that Owen and Julie were there and have been able to talk to them as if we were continuing our last conversation. They have been steadily present to us throughout our married lives!

But I want to talk about a few particular stages when our day-to-day lives were close to Julie, and when I had a chance to know and appreciate what a unique person she was. I had met her some years before I met Owen.

The first time was as a student on my first visit to Queensland at the beginning of 1949. It was at an interstate student conference in Burleigh Heads. Julie must have been about 20 and near the end of her medical science course. I described Julie to a young person the other day as a student activist when I met her, to be met with the amazed rejoinder, "but she was always a very gentle person". Well she was, but this is not the whole story. She was serene, but committed, responsible and practical. She had an air of quiet authority that was very impressive to that very strident audience. On this occasion she and her small group had organised Colin Clarke, the star economist of that era, to speak to the many hundreds of us that were there. He and Julie's group were very different from anything we had heard up to then, and if that had been the only time I ever met Julie, I would have remembered her.

The second time was in 1952. Max was recovering from a bout of TB, and we had a period on Bribie Island. This was a peaceful, but intellectually moribund setting and we sought out Julie and her contemporaries in Brisbane. They included Colin Apfelt, John Sullivan, John and Marie Simpson as well as Marie and Des Dooley. They were all by now young professionals with a lively, witness- bearing, intellectual life, centring around the Catholic Library. But in quiet times we had time to really talk to Julie about her family, travelling with her father who was then the Labor Premier of Queensland, and even more about the premature deaths of her young brother and later her mother. She was open, mature and giving on this deeply personal level, as well.

The third stage was when Owen and Julie invited us stay with them in Manchester, during the summer vacation in 1955 and 1956. Max had been doing a PhD in Louvain, and Owen in Manchester. Both families had two very young children, and had had to learn to survive on a single student's stipend one way or another. Actually it was a wonderful time together. We were really on common ground with our intense interest in the new role of parenthood and the laughs and ideas we shared in our non-stop discussions.

To finish I will mention one more important endeavour in our lives we also shared. This was about 1960. We had both come back from a considerable period overseas with a growing young family. We had come across the Équipes or Teams of Our Lady in Belgium. To us they raised the question of what a vocation to marriage could actually mean and something we had been searching for, for a long time.. The movement was too foreign an idea altogether for our New Zealand friends, among whom we had passed the last three years. But Julie and Owen completely grasped what we were on about, and very much took up the running themselves. They started their own Team (which still continues), and a number of others. Julie was gifted as a catalyst and she and Owen were a backbone and anchor for whose who later took on responsibility for developing the movement so that it grew to include thousands of couples in Australia and the Pacific.

This Mass is so much in keeping with all Julie stood for and reflects some of the richness Julie brought to all our lives.