David Brabyn Mills was a seventh-generation Australian. Brabyn being the name of the first family ancestor to arrive in Australia in 1796. Another forebear, Captain John Brabyn Mills, was a Port Fairy pioneer and harbour master.
David had a gift for making and keeping friends. His passion was to bring reconciliation based on a change of heart and he had a way of including people in programs to do this.
In 1987 he took Tony Abbott, then a journalist with The Bulletin, to Broken Hill after a crippling strike in the mines. The mayor had hosted a series of meetings to bring 'consultation, not confrontation', and David and the team from Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) facilitated them. Abbott, in a two-page article, wrote of their belief that 'only at the deeper level of the human spirit is lasting change effected.'
Following the Cronulla riots in 2005, David invited Abbott to a community forum where he shared the platform with the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, and Cardinal Edward Cassidy. One of David's convictions was that the great faiths had common values that Australian society needed.
In August, hearing of Mills' death - aged 63 - after a 2½-year struggle with myeloma, Abbott described him as 'one of those fragrant individuals who tried as hard as he humanly could to understand others and to be a force for good in a troubled world'.
David launched out at quite an early age as part of a group of 53 young Australians and New Zealanders who in 1966 accepted an invitation from Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma) 'to help create a clean, strong and united India'. A budding songwriter and performer, David had helped create a musical that played to packed houses in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. David in his last year at Carey Baptist Grammar had persuaded his parents to allow him to do six months' schooling 'on the road' by correspondence to complete his studies. By day he studied and at night was on stage as a lead guitarist and ensemble singer.
Another 17-year-old in that group was Kim Beazley, now Australia's ambassador to the US, who, on hearing of David's death, wrote from Washington, DC: 'I have an image in my mind of David bowling to me at a cricket match in India. He was horrendously quick, having been coached at Carey Grammar by Frank 'Typhoon' Tyson, once the bane of Australian batsmen. David was an athletic, good-looking Australian who loved his country and loved people. He was also a citizen of the world. His commitment was to the idea that everyone he met should experience the full potential that God's grace could instil in them.'
David went on to be a prolific songwriter. His songs opened a window on such truths as 'Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future' and 'Walk a mile in another man's moccasins–and you'll find that he's just the same as you inside.'
He became a leader in the work of Initiatives of Change and with his wife, Jane (née Lovering), organised a series of international assemblies with outreach to Australia's neighbours in the Pacific and Asia. With Matthew Wale, a member of the Solomon Islands' Parliament, they later set up two reconciliation conferences in Honiara. The second, in 2009, was timed to coincide with the launch there of a truth and reconciliation commission by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. David's extensive work earlier in Africa with Jane–who grew up in Kenya–helped facilitate Archbishop Tutu's participation.
Speaking at David's funeral, Wale said: 'It is not an overstatement to say that Dave has had a disproportionate impact on the reconciliation process in the Solomon Islands.'
A natural sportsman, David took his tennis racquet on his travels and at an international conference at Caux in Switzerland drew a crowd when he produced an Australian rules football to have a kick-to-kick session with the then youthful Galarrwuy Yunupingu.
At his funeral in Sydney in September, his tennis racquet, cricket bat, 12-string guitar and his Demons memorabilia were front and centre.
Just weeks before he died, although drained by months of treatment, David emailed friends and colleagues urging them 'to work towards getting our parliamentary leaders in Australia to find a regional bipartisan approach to the asylum seekers–one of the great human tragedies of our time'. He hoped that, as with the 1967 referendum for Aboriginal citizen rights and with the repeal of the White Australia Policy, leaders could be encouraged 'to take the political heat out of it and produce clear, compassionate thinking'.
