Martin Flanagan: ‘The lord of the dance and everyone, male and female, was his mate, his equal.’

Pete Hay’s latest work … Physick …

I never attended a single lecture or tutorial he gave, but Pete Hay was the academic who most touched my life in four years at university.

We met because he was coach of the Tasmanian University Football Club 4th XVIII for which, in 1972, I played. In the university’s political science department, he was Doctor Hay. To us, he was Hazy. Coaching the Fourths was largely a bardic role as we mostly lost and, when Hazy abandoned academia to go and work for the Whitlam government, I was honoured to be elected his successor.

I wrote an essay on Hazy in Island magazine about 10 years ago titled “A Tasmanian Intellectual”. It concluded: “Peter Hay was the only teacher I met during my university years who excited in me the belief that the place I was from, its stories and ghosts and mystifying absences, were deserving of serious explanation…” He took me seriously as someone who wanted to write and, in 1984, published my first book, a collection of poems called “Shorts”.

In my student days, usually in post-game drinking sessions, we talked lots. He was a bushwalker learned in Tasmania folklore. He was into the ideas of interesting people like the aesthetic socialist William Morris and had developed tastes in folk music. He was a working-class boy who identified with Claremont, the Collingwood of the southern Tasmania amateur football association, because they were a working-class club. Unfortunately, at the height of the Vietnam war, Claremont did not identify with us long-haired students.

He read voluminously and would, with caution, lend his books. He was the epicentre of every social occasion. What he did best was be egalitarian – Hazy was the lord of the dance and everyone, male and female, was his mate, his equal.

Hazy and I both suffered major reversals in matters of the heart around the same time, another bond of sorts. There was a sunshine in Hazy that went out around that time and he entered a prolonged darkness. He revived when he met his wife Anna during a spell in Warrnambool …

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Martin Flanagan, The Age