Senator TROOD (Queensland) (7.20 p.m.)—It is with great sadness that I advise the Senate of the death of a great Queenslander and servant of Australia, Mr Hugh Alexander Dunn. Mr Dunn was part of that extraordinary generation of Australians who joined the then Department of External Affairs either during or in the aftermath of World War II and who went on to lay the foundations of an independent Australian foreign policy. They were an academically accomplished group of men and women and they had a strong belief that Australia should have its own distinctive voice in international affairs. Hugh Dunn personified the best of them: dedicated to creating a professional foreign service and, as time went on, especially committed to Australia’s closer engagement with Asia.

Hugh was born in Rockhampton on 20 August 1923. The Dunn family eventually moved to Brisbane, where he was educated briefly at state schools and then at Brisbane Boys College. At the college he was both an academic and an athletic star. He was captain and dux in his final year and received colours for cricket, rowing, rugby and athletics. He was an especially talented rugby player, eventually representing Queensland. After leaving school in 1942, Hugh was drawn by the war into military service. He was attached to General MacArthur’s headquarters and was to become part of the first signals intelligence unit in Australia. He served with MacArthur in New Guinea and the Philippines and after the war made his way to exotic locales in Asia, especially Japan and China. At the war’s conclusion he returned to Brisbane and a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Queensland. It was here that Hugh began to explore the subject which was to become a defining dimension of his public and private life: a fascination with China and its place in the world.

When he was announced as the Queensland Rhodes Scholar for 1949, it gave him the opportunity to undertake Chinese language training at Oxford University, where he studied with some of the most eminent names in the field. He graduated with first-class honours in Chinese in 1952 with a thesis that translated some of the poems of the second century poet Cao Zhi. The translation was later published in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic.

Hugh joined the Department of External Affairs for a brief period in 1952-53 and was to return as a permanent officer in 1954. He then spent over 30 years in the foreign service, with postings in places as widely diverse as Japan, New York, Washington, New Delhi and Saigon.

During the 1960s, Australia did not have diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, so Hugh was frustrated in his efforts to put his expertise in Sinology to professional use. An opportunity came, however, in 1969 when he was appointed as Ambassador to the Republic of China on Taiwan. He served in Taipei until 1972 when, at very short notice, he was required to close the Australian mission following the Whitlam government’s recognition of the People’s Republic in December 1972. Afterwards, Hugh hoped that he might be sent as Ambassador to Beijing, but it was not to be. He was sent as head of mission to posts in South America and Africa.

Hugh finally realised his life’s ambition when appointed by the Fraser government as Ambassador to China in 1980. He served there until 1984 and became one of Australia’s great heads of mission to the Middle Kingdom. His language skills and commitment to Sinology as a field of study earned him considerable respect and made him widely popular in Beijing. It was with considerable pride that he often recounted that he was the only Australian Ambassador to China who had visited all of the then 30 provinces.

Hugh’s posting came at a time of revolutionary change in China. Deng Xiaoping had only recently returned to the Communist Party leadership in Beijing and began turning Chinese communist orthodoxy on its head. It was a period that required diplomats to employ the classical analytical skills of the Sinologist. Most importantly, they needed to decipher the opaque messages being conveyed through China’s official media as to the depth of the political and policy changes that were under way. Profound political signalling was invariably conveyed through historical and literary metaphor. It was in this milieu that Hugh’s skills and craft came to the fore. His dispatches from Beijing were invariably penetrating, stimulating, elegant and, above all, an accurate analysis of China’s transformation.

As China became more important to Australia, Hugh was a man whose season had come. He dedicated a lifetime of classical scholarship to the analytical and diplomatic needs of his country at a time of far-reaching change in our region. He greatly admired China for its history, the richness of its culture and its increasingly impressive economic accomplishments. He was, however, very hardheaded about its importance to Australia and strongly disapproved of efforts to romanticise it. The relationship flourished, he held, because each country was of use and of some importance to the other. Economics was at the core, but, because more was needed to sustain a healthy relationship, he encouraged ties into other fields such as science, technology and culture. For the Australia-China relationship alone, the nation owes Hugh Dunn an immense debt.

Beijing was Hugh’s last foreign affairs posting and he retired from the foreign service to take up a visiting professorship at the School of Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in 1985. In the same year, he was also made an officer of the general division of the Order of Australia. In the years that followed, he was as dedicated an unremunerated public servant as he had been a professional diplomat. Griffith University was eventually to award him an honorary doctorate, but well before this it became an institutional base for an extraordinarily full and rich retirement, allowing him to engage his many interests.

He served on the Queensland China Council, helping in particular to promote Chinese language teaching in Queensland schools. He served several terms as President of the Queensland branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He returned to his old school, Brisbane Boys College, on regular occasions and, when time permitted, pursued his passions for golf, trout fishing, reading and conversation.

Perhaps one of his greatest legacies from this time was his editorship of the Australians in Asia monograph series, published by Griffith University’s Centre for the Study of Australia-Asia Relations. Hugh’s own memoir, The Shaping of a Sinologue of Sorts, began the series with a very personal and slightly whimsical account of his very active life. Hugh was then responsible for bringing 21 additional monographs to publication. The series stands as one of Hugh’s most enduring legacies, providing a permanent record of Australia’s changing relations with Asia after the Second World War.

Hugh was a wise, witty, generous, humorous, considerate and charming companion to his very wide circle of friends. A man of conservative tastes, he was a professional diplomat of the old school, serving governments of both political persuasions with equal dedication. His wife, Marney, shared many of his life’s adventures, providing marvellous support in his diplomatic role and becoming an equally devoted servant of Australian diplomacy. They had an extraordinary partnership which endured until Hugh’s recent death.

Hugh Dunn died in Brisbane on 5 November after a long illness. It was a mark of the esteem and affection in which he was held in the community that his funeral in Brisbane was attended by not only his family but a very wide circle of friends and colleagues connected with his many life pursuits. He had a very rich and active life and will be greatly missed by family and friends alike. The nation should remember him as a wise and devoted servant of Australian diplomacy and a leader in Australia’s engagement with Asia, especially China.