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In his fine eulogy for Dame Roma Mitchell, Sir William Deane suggested that "there has been no better loved vice-regal representative in the whole history of this land". On his retirement these words would seem to very many Australians applicable to Deane.

The place that Sir William Deane was eventually to assume in our public life could not have been predicted. When he was selected as governor-general by Paul Keating very few Australians even knew his name. For five-and-a-half years, however, he travelled across the country, speaking to audiences, large and small, time and time again. His words were both eloquent and simple. At the heart of what he wanted to tell us, with a kind of quiet insistence, was that our country would ultimately be judged by the way we treated the powerless and the vulnerable.

According to him, the highest praise should be reserved not for the high-flyers but for those who devoted their lives to working with the downtrodden and the poor. For Deane, as he made clear in his great eulogy for Sir Donald Bradman, depth of character mattered more than worldly achievement. For Deane, our greatest new public virtue was multicultural inclusiveness, which had helped us transcend the old ethnic and religious bigotries he remembered so vividly from his childhood years. Above all other things what Sir William Deane wanted us to see was that there was no greater cause in contemporary Australia than Aboriginal reconciliation.

I suspect that it was because of the sincerity of his commitment to reconciliation that Sir William won the love and respect of vast numbers of the moral middle class. I suspect, however, that he entered the hearts of an even larger number of Australians because of the words he found at times of national grief - Port Arthur, Thredbo, Interlaken, Childers.

What I think Australians gradually came to understand about Sir William Deane was his plain goodness. They came to understand this, in part, through listening to his powerfully rhythmic prose and precisely chosen words and, in part, through observing, in his face, the sweetness of his spirit.

Not everyone, of course, agreed. Sir William's kind of unprotected public innocence acted upon certain people as an intolerable provocation. During his period in office, there was, from the ideological right, persistent mockery of his supposed sanctimony. Graeme Campbell's nickname, "Holy Billy", somehow stuck. Deane was never forgiven for having, in his High Court Mabo judgment, called Aboriginal dispossession "a national legacy of unutterable shame". One commentator even accused the man who was responsible for the most moving and authoritative account of the meaning of Gallipoli in national memory, of wishing to "rob us of our history".

Throughout his period as Governor-General, Deane was, moreover, accused by conservatives of exercising, through his speeches, an undue influence on Australian political life and, therefore, of being single-handedly responsible for dangerous constitutional innovation. Unlike the accusation of sanctimony, this issue is a serious one.

For my part I have little doubt that Sir William Deane, whether consciously or not I do not know, did refashion the role of the governor-general. Almost all Australia's deepest constitutional instincts are ultimately derived from Britain. In Britain, during the period between the rule of King George III and the reign of Queen Victoria, the monarchy lost its power. Since that time, in Britain and derivative Westminster systems like Australia, not only political impartiality but also political invisibility have been seen as major constitutional features of the monarch or the governor-general.

It was an Australian governor-general, Sir Zelman Cowen, who first suggested that the political invisibility if not the impartiality of the office were unnecessary; that is to say that the most important function of a governor-general might be to deliver speeches that, as he put it, interpreted the nation to itself. It was Deane who first demonstrated where Cowen's idea might lead.

Throughout his period of office, Deane avoided speeches in the areas of obvious party political sensitivity. It goes without saying that he did not speak about the GST. He also avoided speaking at all on issues where what he said would almost certainly be interpreted as criticism of the Howard Government. Deane did not, for example, ever tell us what he thought about the treatment of the Middle Eastern boat refugees.

And yet I am convinced that, in his speeches, Sir William Deane did venture on to constitutional territory where previous governor-generals had not gone. Concerning reconciliation, Deane was for several years Australia's most influential non-indigenous voice. It is true that the Howard Government has always been in favor of its own conception - practical reconciliation. It is also true that Deane always avoided explicit criticism of the Howard Government's performance over reconciliation. Nevertheless, in both their substance and, even more, their tone, his contributions to these discussions consistently put the Howard Government to shame. Sir William Deane was a major player in the politics of reconciliation. Because of the role he played here he was also, in my opinion, a clear constitutional innovator.

His was a constitutional innovation that I welcome. In many non-British-derived parliamentary democracies, non-executive heads of state assume, through the power of their words, a pivotal place in debates of fundamental national importance. There seems to me no good reason why ancient suspicions about the political ambitions of the monarch, which have remained somehow frozen in our constitutional thought, need forever dominate our understanding of the role that might be played by our present de facto head of state or, later, even better, by the first elected president of the republic.

When Archbishop Peter Hollingworth spoke to the media at the announcement of his appointment as governor-general, he hinted strongly that he intended to restore to the office its traditional political invisibility. This seems to be a great pity. Conservatives generally exaggerate the dangers and underestimate the benefits of the constitutional part Deane pioneered.

Sir William Deane civilised and humanised our public life. This is why he is now so deeply and broadly loved.

Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University. E-mail

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