Late of Zion Aged Care Brisbane. Passed away 15th August 2025. Aged 85 years.
Family and friends are invited to attend Jean’s graveside service to be held at the Mitchell Cemetery on Monday 25th August 2025 at 10am.
Jean’s funeral service will be live streamed at the following link: https://maranoafunerals.com.au/livestream/
Jean Weaver
Lutheran Church Nundah
Wednesday August 20, 2025
“I pray that Jean is resting peacefully and joyfully in God’s care.
My condolences to Jean’s family on their loss.
I am a former work colleague at the Australian Taxation Office Brisbane. However I believe that many of us, who were employed alongside Jean, were drawn into a relationship that was a cajoling blend of the formal and professional underpinned by a deeply interpersonal respect and embodied posture. A mentor more-so than a manager.
In fact, Jean, though a manager to many, was never a formal line manager for me. Hence her real character was the more apparent in those freely chosen late night mentorings and schooling of my work; all for my benefit and very little, if none, for her professional career advancement.
Jean was ecumenical in outlook. Her intellect was focussed, her integrity rock solid but her heart was both sacred and secular- infinite in its intent but firmly grounded in the responsibilities of the here and now. She understood the need for appropriate boundaries but shunned divisions and barriers that demeaned relationships, country or city. Humans are a notoriously “walled-in; walled-out” race of people. Robert Frost, in his often quoted but erroneously mis-understood 1914 poem, “Mending Walls”, repeats a neighbour who thoughtlessly imitates a father’s misguided wisdom that “good fences make good neighbours”.
Words in the poem that represent Frost’s own meaning are:
“……..Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is… that doesn’t love a wall….”
Jean understood intuitively where Frost was pointing – to a deeply felt need for humanity to practice the risk to trust, the commitment to engagement and less words but more dialogue. Jean’s “silences” spoke volumes and in her patience we always found active “endeavour”.
Jean is the visceral personality described by The Seekers in their musical song poem we know as “I am Australian”. The Seekers sung of a character we know as Jean:
“……………I’m the daughter of a digger
Who sought the mother load
The girl became a woman
On the long and dusty road…………”
Jean’s life, her looks, her demeanour, her demands were somehow “ever ancient but ever new”. Jean represents the “dreamtime” that underpins all cultures – times defined by inner intuitions as much as by the logic of the Positivist.
Jean is the Julie Andrews character- Mary Poppins. Poppins is a fictional, even mythical person of literature but, like all great literature, the character traits attributed to her “live” in the real world that we inhabit and yearn to become. For that reason to speak of Jean as a “Mary Poppins” is truthful. Like Poppins, Jean had a calmness in her voice despite the situation, a patient intelligence despite whatever confusion or turmoil was impacting her at the time. Always an edgy warmth; never a distance. Always a connection somehow maintained. Despite an undercurrent of emotion, her thinking was always clear-headed; her “silences” more compelling than any bellicose intonations of a rivalrous but mellifluous barrister. She usually saw both sides of an argument, while obviously favouring only one.
Coincidentally Mary Poppins author, P L Travers aka Helen Lyndon Goff, lived as a very young child in a house across from where Jean once resided in Wooloowin, albeit some years before Jean’s time there. Some have connected Wooloowin’s old name of Maida Hill with the affluent London suburb and with the Bank’s House in Cherry Tree Lane of Book fame.
Jean had her own 15 minutes of fame at a Brisbane’s Rialto West End theatre in the 1960s. Before my time in the ATO, there was an annual ‘follies” type event in which ATO employees of a “performative will and skill” participated. I would love to hear what “dramatis personae” Jean embraced in those events.
My own poem would look something like this:
Jean will always be someone who has “passed on”; never someone “passed away”!
We will never have to live “without her”; rather she created in us a sense that her presence will always be a part of who we are – she will always be there for us in a tangible sense.
She was always someone who somehow transcended the moment. Our current “moment” of “deep lamentation” being no different from those “other” moments. Always and in all ways. It was always who she was to “disappear” – her beguiling presence never an absence but certainly often “just out of reach”.
As we live the day when we can no longer touch her bodily, our memories of her are “presences” that embody us.
Our mournings are not about closure but consequences; not about “moving beyond her going” but “moving with her going”.
Of recognition through taking on a new sight. Ours is now a time of re-configuring –
These are always the goal manifest in all of Jean’s dealings with us – as work colleagues – but never without real personal friendship. They are goals ever ancient, ever new.
RIP
Vincent Hodge
Jean was highly regarded in the workplace for her work ethic, intelligence, commonse sense and concern for staff and clients. She was pure and simple a joy to be around formally or socially. We who worked with her for many decades have always treasured her accompaniment. There will always be a part of Jean in many of us. We can no longer touch her bodily but her presence has embodied who we are today.