In May 2004, little over a year before he died, Donald Horne took to the stage at the Sydney Writer’s Festival for an event to mark the launch of the fourth edition of Griffith Review: Making Perfect Bodies. Donald had written an essay called “Mind, body, age” that vigorously burst from the page with life, while addressing death. He was 82.
With a voice frayed by age and the breathlessness that would eventually claim his life, Donald talked about the medical emergencies that had shadowed him since the “complications” accompanying his birth on Boxing Day 1921. He was frail but determined, outshining the other panellists, enjoying the adulation that came from the packed audience, proving the National Trust right in appointing him, a few years earlier, as a Living National Treasure.
