FAREWELL PAUL COCKBURN

MOTOR RECENTLY LOST ONE OF ITS LEGENDS. IF YOU EVER RAILED AGAINST STRAIGHT-LINE THINKING, COCKBURN WAS YOUR MAN

- DAVE MORLEY

HERO TO THOUSANDS of MOTOR readers, inventor, industrial designer, poet, musician, entertainer, adventurer, raconteur, gentleman, father, husband, grandfather and my mate, Paul Cockburn, has died after a long battle with cancer which, though it eventually overcame him, could not diminish the bloke in any other meaningful way.

It is often said of people past that 'they really knew how to live! This is usually code for 'they took the grandkids to Disneyland in 1988 and managed to stay out of prison for the rest of the time. But Cockburn (forgive me, we never called each other anything but Cockburn and Morley the Statler and Waldorf comparison was made more than once) took the idea of understanding how to live to a PhD level. In fact, he might have invented the concept.

He often warned me of the dangers of fixating on the struggle to earn and accumulate the things we would need in retirement. And then completely forgetting to retire to die wealthy but unfulfilled.

"You spend your first years sowing," he told me. “But at some point, you have to harvest."

So can I just say here that you may all have no fears about that in Cockburn's case. He worked hard but he also worked clever (that came pretty naturally) and, in the process, piled up the wherewithal to call it quits and enjoy life. He bought a motorhome (which we cruelly dubbed the Wino-Bago) installed a pool at home just outside Sydney and created a bull market for the wine and a cheese manufacturers of the universe.