In the end, despite the oratory and anthems in Sydney’s immense town hall, this was a sad occasion. Gough Whitlam lived forever but his time in power was so short. The more speakers eulogised his achievements, the more pressing the question: what might he have done if he had been allowed more time?



Even on a great state occasion, crowds can be brutal. Julia Gillard was given an immense ovation. They stood for her, shouting, whistling and stamping. She was kissed. Flowers were pressed into her hands. Kevin Rudd walked the aisle in stony silence. The Labor faithful sat as if stuck to their seats.



Whitlam chose the music. That sublime pot boiler None Shall Sleep played softly as ancient faces gathered in front of the stage. Old governors-general and old prime ministers sat cheek by jowl aware, no doubt, that nothing on this heroic scale was likely when they departed.



Though Whitlam spent years finessing details of this event, the Sydney Town Hall was not the site he wanted. “His first choice was to have a funeral pyre in the Senate,” claimed Kerry O’Brien, the ABC television journalist who once served on Whitlam’s staff. “He rather liked the idea of taking the Senate with him.”



His old nemesis Malcolm Fraser was there. The two men had long reconciled. He was received politely. So was Tony Abbott. None of the speakers said so directly, they didn’t have to, but in mourning Whitlam they were also mourning that power was back in the hands of his old opponents, the men and women who had done so little for so long.



Two men brought Whitlam most alive at the microphone: his old speechwriter and collaborator Graham Freudenberg, and his old friend and confidante Senator John Faulkner. Faulkner even dropped into The Voice as he told Gough jokes. But in his own voice Faulkner declared: “Whitlam made the Labor party electable. More importantly, he made the Labor party worth electing.”



But Noel Pearson raised the roof. He is beyond contest the greatest Lutheran preacher in the country. He barely mentioned Whitlam’s name as if he were honouring the dead in his own people’s way. He called him: “This old man.” He said: “This old man was one of those rare people who never suffered discrimination but understood the importance of protection against its malice.”



Pearson was not the only the only speaker to acknowledge Whitlam’s great mistakes. But to a roar of applause he declared the government of 1972 to 1975: “The textbook case of reform trumping management.”



So many in the Town Hall had invested such hope in Whitlam. The word tolled through the speeches: hope. And bursts of applause offered surprising evidence of old causes that have never died. Who would have thought mention of Whitlam abolishing conscription would electrify a crowd in 2014?



He loved a long meeting. This was as long as the grandest requiem mass. Margaret Whitlam was not there to do as she did for years: bang her stick on the floor and suggest we wind things up. No one shifted in their seats. No one drifted out as the clock ticked over into a third hour.



The great William Barton played the didgeridoo. Whitlam had left instructions for the Sydney Symphony and Philharmonia Choir to perform Bach and Verdi. It would seem his strategy was to remind us of the Crucifixion with one and the liberation of Italy with the other – a couple of events against which he seemed to think now was the time to measure himself.



Tony Whitlam, a big, elegant man, did all the right things: he thanked those who had worked for his father in and out of power through all those years and “endured his occasional changes in temperament”. He reminded us that stamina is crucial in politics and that until a couple of months ago his father, at the age of 98, was still turning up to the office a few days a week. He spoke of the “grace and serenity with which he accepted the decline of his health”.



And then the orchestra played the only possible recessional for any Labor leader, even an old atheist like Whitlam: Jerusalem, William Blake’s great hymn to the coming of civilisation to the satanic mills of industrial England. You suspect Whitlam sees it as a work in progress.