A fitting farewell for former Victoria Police Chief Commissioner ‘Mick’ Miller
As the great and the good arrived to farewell Victoria’s greatest police chief commissioner, it was obvious that in death as in life, “Mick” Miller still casts a giant shadow.
VIC News
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In life, the man they called “Mick” Miller towered over Australian policing in an era when it needed a hero to counter the corrupt, the incompetent and the lazy. In death, he still casts a giant shadow.
The great and the good and the merely important came in chauffeur-driven cars on Tuesday to farewell Victoria’s greatest chief commissioner at the Police Academy “chapel”, a modest name for what is really a suburban cathedral: a cream brick Byzantine basilica originally built as a seminary.
There was a Governor here, a General there, Premiers past and present and a herd of senior police in dress tunics straining from the weight of service medals and the spread of advancing years and waists. Protocol demanded their presence, and fair enough. Many had known the grand old man in the casket in his heyday.
But it was the others, the ones that swelled the crowd to double what the chapel could hold, that would have pleased their old boss just as much.
Well before the service, one mourner pulled up in a ute in a side street opposite the academy in View Mount Rd, Mt Waverley. The middle-aged driver was probably a rookie when Miller was chief commissioner from 1977 to 1987, but is now clearly in another line of work.
He wasn’t in Sunday best but he whipped off his battered Blundstones and pulled on a pair of well-cleaned boots. Some things stick with you long after you leave “The Job”, and shiny boots is one of them.
The ute driver was one of hundreds who gathered in a marquee near the chapel. The service started an hour after the hearse arrived and lasted nearly two hours.
But time didn’t drag. There was much to say about Sinclair Imrie Miller, the keen-eyed young clerk who joined the force in 1947 after a tour of duty with the army occupation force in post-war Japan. And many to say it.
The current Chief Commissioner, Graham Ashton, revealed in his tribute that he (among others) had sometimes quietly sought Miller’s advice at home over a cuppa.
Even in private, he said, his long-retired predecessor had always called him “Chief Commissioner” and had never told him a story that didn’t have a message.
At least three former chief commissioners in the congregation knew what Ashton was talking about. The respect that Miller showed his successors went both ways.
As longtime family friend John Silvester said in a sparkling eulogy, rank gives the right to issue orders, but only character earns respect. That, and the steely Miller gaze “that could melt glass”. It was clear that Miller had earned respect all his life.
It was typical of him that he had organised much of the memorial service himself. He had warned friends and family “It’s not to be a mournful occasion” because he’d had “a long and interesting life” and a happy one. So naturally, they did it his way.
One of his seven adult grandchildren, Rowan Miller, played piano while brother Lloyd sang What A Wonderful World, a performance as pitch perfect as their grandfather’s famously pithy speeches.
How proud of them he would have been — and was, in fact, right up until he died last week. But no more proud than he was of his other five grandchildren, each of whom claimed in their tributes, tongue in cheek, to be “grandpa’s best friend”. The remarkable thing was, all of them were right.
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There was much more, of course. You only had to see photographs of Miller meeting royalty and FBI directors to know that here was a life that could fill a book. After six former Special Operations Group officers carried his casket to the waiting hearse, a huge honour guard lined the length of the street outside.
Four police horses led the way. Then five pipers and three drummers from the police highland band that Miller loved ever since he was a drum major. As the skirl of the pipes echoed over the suburban streets, a police helicopter thumped overhead.
All pretty well as if he’d planned it that way. He was, as one speaker said, in a class of his own.