Vale Phineas Meere
Vale Phineas Meere
Friend of Speakola Phineas Meere died suddenly this week aged 43. He was a speech spotter extraordinaire, with the eye of a hawk.
With it’s working staff of one, Speakola relies on suggestions and contributions from people out there in the wider world. People who see or hear a great speech and think ‘I’ll send that to Tony’.
I’ve had no more dedicated speech finder than Phin Meere, who I met over twenty years ago when he was a regular attendee at Triple R events and I was part of Breakfasters. Later, he’d have his own segment on Michelle Bennett’s ‘Spoke’ and cohost 3CR’s disabilities current affairs show ‘The Boldness’. He had cerebral palsy, and his quickfire texts during a broadcast would ping in with telltale speech-to-text spelling glitches, but there were no glitches in his logic or passion. We shared a love for Hawthorn, and in recent years, since Jack started going to games, he’d come and visit us in the wheelchair spaces at the ‘G’,
My friends at
counted Phin in their community too, and they paid tribute this morning.
Phin suggested so many speeches for me to add to the Speakola library. Just glancing at our messages history, in recent times he offered up:
Mitch Marsh’s speech at the Allan Border Medal
Dylan Alcott’s ‘I love my disability’ Australian of the Year speech, 2022
My heart breaks for Phin’s parents Jules and Mike who have lost Phin so young. I wrote a short tribute on facebook yesterday.
Thank you for the speeches, Phin! Thanks for the Hawthorn comradery. Thanks for two decades of support and compliments for my media work. I know you’d like me to finish this with Stella Young’s TEDx talk, whose loss you felt so keenly in 2014.
RIP Phineas Meere. Friend and speech spotter. You’ll be missed.
