Martin Flanagan and David Bridie pay tribute to the life of Michael Tierney (inset) at Springvale winery in Tasmania.

For the past 20 years, my wife Polly and I have had a shack at 9 Mile Beach on the edge of Tasmania’s Great Oyster Bay. Our neighbours were Michael Tierney and Suzanne Williamson. We shared a lot, including a bushfire in 2009 which evaporated the beautiful and utterly original two-storey wooden home they built.

Michael was a large character. We watched as dementia got him in its cruel grip and took him down, Suzanne caring for him until the last. Micky, who was born in 1945, loved rock concerts. As a last farewell for him, Suzanne staged a rock concert at nearby Springvale winery with music from the Gypsy Jazz trio, Ange Boxall, Pete Cornelius and David Bridie. David (My Friend the Chocolate Cake, Not Waving Drowning) performed a 12-minute “Rock Opera to Micky”. This is the welcome I gave to start the day, accompanied by David on the piano, putting notes in, around and through the words.

“Last year, we lent our shack to friends from Melbourne. When they returned, they said, as they were arriving, a wild man with white hair and beard appeared from the neighbouring house shouting, ‘Fuck off! We don’t like people coming here’, and we said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. That’s just our neighbour Michael Tierney’.

One of the interesting things about Michael Tierney is that he didn’t like people, but people liked him. Why? He was playful. He was mischievous. He wasn’t mean. He was a character, a one-off. He was an engineer working on the new Parliament House in Canberra when he decided he couldn’t take orders any more, and conceived this plan of going somewhere where no-one could bother him, where he could watch what he was sure would be the end of the planet because humanity was greedy and self-interested and stupid.

Some groups of people he disliked more than others. Like Collingwood supporters. Collingwood supporters with tattoos really set him off. Sometimes I argued with him, mostly I didn’t. I was more interested in watching sport with him or some doco he had on rock’n’roll.

I watched some great concerts with him. There are children present but I know some of you will understand when I say Micky and I took additives which ensured we didn’t just watch the concert. We were at the concert, a few rows from the front. Micky and I saw concerts in New York, London and Toronto without ever leaving 9 Mile Beach.

He was a gracious host. He cooked a beautiful Asian dish with scallops and prawns. He had sophisticated taste in wine. I do not have sophisticated taste in wine. He never stopped bringing expensive wines to our house and getting shitty when I couldn’t say I liked them as much as he did.

Micky had history. He was one of the pioneers of Tasmanian surfing, known to his mates in the water as Moondog. He was the first person in Tasmanian history to be arrested for possession of a cannabis plant. He was the Tasmanian drug squad’s first arrest. Imagine their excitement. Micky lived with his grandmother. The Tasmanian drug squad started pulling up his grandmother’s sweet peas, Micky said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong plant’.

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He was in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, when the ‘60s exploded, saw all the big bands, told me Janis Joplin and Big Brother were best. He worked in America and the Middle East. But this is where he finally chose to live – on the country, before whitefellas arrived, of the honeysuckle people – a beautiful place with the jewel that is Freycinet not far away.

This is where he studied the stars. Outer space fascinated him, So did watching the tides and moods of Great Oyster Bay. He was as much a part of the place as the Pacific gulls. In the end, he looked like one.

The last conversation I had with him, he wanted me to grab a car so we could go for a drive. I got the idea he envisioned driving. He drove like Ayrton Senna, dropping back gears to boost the car’s acceleration. Suzanne says Michael was a good driver. I thought he was fucking terrifying, and that was before he got dementia.

It could be said he was never the same after the 2009 fire. He and Suzanne lost their home – and what a home! Made of golden wood, two storeys high, looking across the bay to the Hazards. And what parties they had there! What laughter! Always ending the night on the couch with Micky, watching a concert. Then finding the torch and walking home in the dark, tripping and falling through the tussocks, Micky yelling, ‘WATCH OUT FOR SNAKES!’, trying to scare us, thinking this was funny.

Something else he found funny was the idea that writers call what they do work. I don’t know how many times he asked me: ‘Are they still paying you for that stuff you write?’ But he said it with a grin, a wicked grin, that made him look like Spike Milligan. That’s what I called him – Spike Milligan. Two months after he died, Suzanne sent me a photo of the real Spike Milligan with his mad brilliant grin and the words: “The cracked – that’s how the light gets in”.

Michael Tierney wasn’t cracked – he was stuck in a few places and free as a bird in others, and kind and thoughtful, too. At his funeral, his daughter Eliza, in a speech which showed how deep a daughter’s love can run, described him as cranky. He was. Yet he was a man with friendships that lasted 50 years or more.

He found his match in Suzanne, and what a couple they were. Little was hidden from public view, so people knew their differences which were as large as everything else about them. But together they were a formidable pair. Here was an entirely unconventional woman with extravagant good taste and a work ethic which matched his own. The pamphlet she produced for Micky’s funeral was a work of art. A photo of him looking blond-haired and handsome on the outside – and inside, no text, just a list of the great bands and performers he loved.

And so today we have a concert. Why? Because Micky loved concerts. They were as close to a church as Micky got, The place where all life’s moods and tempers were brought into a raucous unity. So here’s to Michael Richard Tierney, let’s ride one more wave with Moondog.”

The day was a hoot!