Jacqui Lambie will miss start of parliament to scatter father’s ashes in Scotland
Senator Jacqui Lambie’s closest adviser was her beloved dad. Now three years after his death she is going back to his birthplace to scatter some of his ashes.
Tasmania
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Outspoken Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie will miss the first two weeks of next parliamentary session as she travels to Scotland to scatter her late father’s ashes.
She planned the trip with her mother nine months ago to coincide with the winter recess but said in a break from tradition parliament would sit in July.
“I’m trying not to feel guilty but I told Penny (Senator Wong) and Albo (PM) six months ago and it is too hard to change it,” Senator Lambie said.
“I’ve never taken any more than a week off in my parliamentary career.
“I need go and spend some time with my mum and scatter the last of dad’s ashes and just come back fresh.”
Tom Lambie, who was born in Larkhall Scotland and came to Australia when he was just 20 months old, was a truck driver for most of his life.
He lived in a unit built for him at Senator Lambie’s Ulverstone home and died aged 72 in June 2022.
She went to check on him and found he had died in his sleep after suffering a massive heart attack.
“It was a huge shock, not because I found him but it was so unexpected.
“I hoped dad would be around for at least another 10 years.
“He always said to me, ‘don’t you put me in that meat market” – that’s what he called aged care, or ‘you’ll have to put a pillow over my head’.”
Senator Lambie said her father was “always very fit” and had been a trainer at the Turners Beach Football Club.
“You couldn’t keep dad still.
“He turned half an acre of my place into an English garden.
“If you didn’t give him something to do, like a typical Lambie, he’d get up to no good. So it was good to just leave dad a list.”
Senator Lambie said her parents divorced when she was 13 but remained best friends, lived around the corner from each other and she and younger brother Bobby regularly stayed with their father who twice remarried.
“There was no bitterness in the separation. The only person my father was scared of was his first wife, which is my mother, because my mother rules the roost,” she said.
Senator Lambie has never been to Scotland but says her mother Sue is a seasoned backpacker regularly travelling the world and “a lot more worldly than what I am”.
She said the last three years of her father’s life were “probably the best three years of his life”.
“He was having a ball. King Lambie living on the hill in Ulverstone.
“We’ll take back some ashes to Scotland, and that way we can stay there to haunt them over there, to just remind them that’s why we lost the Section 44 and that we’re still about.
“Dad loved the sea, so we’ll just go and scatter him in the sea somewhere.”
Senator Lambie was one of several MPs forced to resign under section 44 of the constitution because they had dual citizenship.
She described her father as her “strongest supporter, my loudest cheer squad and my closest adviser”.
At the time she said: “Anyone who knows my father will be shocked to think of him as anything other than Aussie.
“It is not because of him that I am leaving this place. It is because of him that I am here in the first place.”
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Originally published as Jacqui Lambie will miss start of parliament to scatter father’s ashes in Scotland
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