I write from Sydney, where I am in temporary residence away from my native Canberra, doing a 4-week course of intensive studies.

In February 2012, on the other side of our vast continent, on the outskirts of the little town of Nannup, West Australia, in a depression in large paddock, human bones were found. Nannup, insofar as it is close to anywhere known anywhere else, is close to Bunbury, which is 94 kilometres (58 miles) north. I’ve never been to Western Australia, but from what I can infer from the omniscient Internet, Nannup would have been a one-horse town until the last horse died of terminal boredom.

The state of the bones showed that they had been there a considerable time. The grass in the paddock had been long until the owner began grazing horses there, and it was only when it had been nibbled down that the bones were noticed. A few days ago DNA testing identified them as the human remains of Richard Kerley. The people of Nannup and wherever else Richard had drifted would have known him as an amiable, harmless vagrant They would have found him a lucid, thoughtful and interesting conversationalist, but one whose conversation would drift seamlessly from the real word into a delusional world of conspiracies which to him was just as real. Richard had schizophrenia. Anyone who has seen or sees that extraordinary movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, about the genius economist, Nobel Prize winner and schizophrenic John Nash, will understand Richard despite having never met him.

Richard was my good friend, and the good friend of very many others. He came from Melbourne, Victoria, and he did an undergraduate degree at the Australian National University in Canberra in the early 1970s. He was one of the founders of the John XXIII Fellowship, a movement of orthodox Catholic intellectual activists which I think I have previously mentioned and which subsequently became the Campion Fellowship of Australia, and did much good (and from which the U.S. Fellowship of Catholic Scholars took the term “Fellowship”). Richard (Dick to his friends) was indirectly responsible for the “John XXIII” part of the name. When the inter-state communications were in progress in 1972 which led to the foundation of the Fellowship in Melbourne at the end of that year, Richard, who was in residence at John XXIII College at the ANU, read Pope John XXIII’s Journey of a Soul. He spoke to me about how profoundly orthodox and traditional in his pieties and outlook the Pope had been, and how utterly different he was  from the mythology spun concerning him by the anti-orthodox factionaries in the Church who, even by 1972, had done vast harm. This inspired me to suggest John XXIII’s name for the nascent movement. I also suggested that it be called a Fellowship, my inspiration being Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Rings, plus the fact that I had written the history of the Victorian Campion Society, which was founded at Melbourne University in 1931 and was enormously influential. I observed when researching the Society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the instigation of Australia’s foremost historian, Professor C.M.H. Clark, who supervised my Honours and Masters theses, that even though it had faded away in Victoria in the mid-1950s, its former members remained united by powerful bonds of fellowship.

It was many years later that Richard, by then back in Melbourne, showed the first signs of schizophrenia. What could be done by his loving family was done, and chemical treatment was successful when Richard could be kept to it, but that was never for long. He would arrive at our door in Canberra every year two, or at the door of our mutual good friends and Fellowship members John and Ruth Harris, and would be our or their guest for as long as he chose to stay. That meant he was part of the six Harris children’s and the eight Jory children’s lives, and they will always remember him fondly. Further details regarding Richard’s peregrinations are unnecessary here, but when he landed in Western Australia we discovered the fact from indirect evidence, and John Harris sadly predicted that his end would be exactly (and I mean exactly) as happened. It is very unlikely that there was foul play. Richard’s brother, Peter, telephoned the news of the identification of Richard’s bones through to my wife Paula last night, 19 April, and she telephoned the news to me.

Richard held only a few jobs, none for long, and he never married – although he did much good work in Canberra and Melbourne for the pro-Life cause. He believed, fatalistically, that his life had been a waste  So would anyone who met him in his wanderings and had not known him before. We, his friends, and his family, know better. God writes straight on crooked lines, and Richard was one of his quills. May his soul, being of the faithful departed, rest in peace.