Rebecca Wilson was a warrior who tackled everything head-on

Alan Jones on the last days of a sports trailblazer.

Rebecca Wilson with husband John Hartigan.

Like a bolt of lightning from the night sky, the news of the death of Rebecca Wilson is still being absorbed by those who had no idea Rebecca was ill.

And that is the nature of this remarkable and indomitable woman.

Yes, she had breast cancer. That is what people knew. But many people have cancer and recover. What no one knew, except Bec and her husband, John Hartigan, and what they shared with no one, not even close family, was the fact that four years ago Bec had a fight on her hands.

But this was Rebecca. She told “Harto” that she knew they had a fight and there would be tears along the way, but why make others unhappy by having them worry about her?

And so this doyenne of journalism signed off early yesterday, just after midnight.

Only hours before that, I’d said to her brother, Jim, a distinguished journalist with the Seven Network (the family was full of distinguished journalists), that Friday was always an important day for Rebecca. If you’re a weekend feature writer, you file your final copy on Friday. And, each Friday, Bec did a wrap-up of sport for the week on my radio program, syndicated around Australia.

She loved it. And she spoke as she wrote — without fear, favour, or ambiguity.

But when I visited her for the last time, only hours before she died, I felt, as I subsequently told Jim, that Rebecca was ready to metaphorically sign off on her final copy on Friday morning. And she did.

It’s impossible for those close to her and for those who knew her only through the printed or spoken word, to distil how this could be, at 54 years of age. There’s such a finality to it all. As the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote of death: “It comes equally to us all and makes us all equal when it comes.”

Of course, there has been an outpouring of grief on the one hand and admiration on the other. I often feel that Joe and Joanne Citizen don’t understand how elegant and empathetic their sentiments can be. Such people often say “I wasn’t good at English” or “I’m not much good at expression”, and then proceed to write with the clarity and simplicity of a 19th century romantic poet.

A brief sample only hours after the news of Bec’s death:

“Outstanding journalist who never got enough credit for the stories she wrote.”

“You were one tough cookie and always said it as you saw it.”

“A fearless pioneering voice in the Australian media.”

But I can’t help but feel that the one, amongst hundreds of sentiments expressed that would have most captured the real Rebecca, was by the bloke who wrote: “Rebecca, you were loud ... and opinionated ... I disagreed with everything you said ... and that’s just the way I liked it.”

Rebecca would have seen that as being real praise.

Where did this all come from, this capacity to be passionate and strong and speak and write without equivocation? She was a product of St Hilda’s Anglican School at Southport. The principal, at a very early age, was Helen Granowski and she demanded of her girls that they not accept, in the adult world, that they couldn’t be as good as or better than the next person, man or woman. She imbued in these young girls the commitment and capacity that were the hallmarks of Rebecca Wilson.

Rebecca was, by any reckoning, a warrior. Every time a warrior. No matter what it was, she tackled it head-on and wondered what the hell was the matter with the rest of them who didn’t.

She loved sport, more so the joy of the game. And that love informed her determination to protect the integrity of sport. And this yielded a body of work that entitles her to be regarded as one of the most formidable writers of the past 50 years.

One of her schoolmates described her as “the higher angel of our better nature — Bec reminds us all what women can do”. That was in her DNA, but it was reinforced at secondary school by Dr Granowski — start with passion, then be obsessive, be brave, take risks, don’t give a damn what others think or say about you, party hard, cover up the broken bits, look for the rainbow in that bit of broken glass. Tell the bastards to stand up straight and have a go.”

Because of this disposition, she wouldn’t want mournful and maudlin tributes. In fact, in thinking of Bec, I’m reminded of what Edward Kennedy said in 1968 at the public memorial service for his assassinated brother, US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. “My brother need not be idealised or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; just to be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it,” he said.

That was Rebecca. She raised millions of dollars for charity and yet no one would have known.

And she was tough, but only on the outside.

Even in the end, while her body let her down, her spirit was still fierce and undaunted. It’s a brutal thing, cancer, to see ones you love brought to such a level of impotence. This was a physically and emotionally beautiful woman.

Her body deserted her but her spirit lingers with us.

There is no sense in this, no logic, no meaning. Bec would just say “it’s life and it’s brutal”.

All we can do, she’d say, is hold each other close and believe what the song says, “Love will keep us alive”.

Her school friend Heather said to me yesterday, of Bec: “She was the best of all anomalies — a tom boy who held her own with the blokes, comfortable in her own skin, fiercely loyal.”

So in our overwhelming grief, we ask the unanswerable. Why did her soul choose this path, to step out so early and so soon? Bec would urge us not to ask questions for which there are no answers. She would just be telling us to toughen up, be strong, or as in one of her expressions, “Suck it up, baby-cakes”.

“We cannot change tonight or tomorrow or the tortured path of her beautiful shining soul, but we can change how we respond, how we choose to honour her, farewell her and remember her,” Heather said.

Well, we do that by standing for something in this life, as Rebecca did.

She would ask no more.

Sport was her love. There was nothing about it she didn’t know. She watched some of the grand finals last weekend. Can you believe that? She knew the results. And last weekend reminded us that sport is not our anthem, it’s our holy cathedral. Rebecca Wilson was an angel who sang the best songs in that cathedral.

But she was comfortable in any environment where news was being made. Rebecca loved the Kennedys. There was a quality and class about them, she thought, just as she loved a beautiful dress, and we always joked about her putting some “lippy” on.

Even at the end, when I’d visit, she’d say that she would “put some lippy on for Alan”.

And she was part of a distinguished journalist family.

Her husband, “Harto”, a towering figure within News Corporation, is a long-time editor and former chief executive.

Her brother, Jim, you see every night on Channel Seven. Her sister, Liz, in Brisbane.

Her late father, Bruce, an international journalistic figure.

But early yesterday morning, a rivergum tree crashed in the forest of journalism. In ways we don’t understand, here we are in grief.

Those of us who loved her and who now take her to her rest pray that what she was to us and what she wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

I always say that no one ever dies until the memories fade away.

The memories of Rebecca are powerful, instructive and enduring.

But at 54 years of age, well may we grieve, gone too soon.

Yet Bec lives on through her two beautiful boys, Tom and Will, who meant everything to her; through “Harto” and her family, and through the certain truth that what she meant to us is embedded within us forever.

Alan Jones is one of the country’s leading broadcasters, who featured Rebecca Wilson on his Sydney 2GB radio program each week.