This speech originally delivered by Matthew Condon on 8 August 2015 as the Thea Astley address at Byron Bay Writers Festival.

As Australians, we honour the achievements of others in sometimes curious ways, and there in our vast swathes of suburbia there may be no higher, nor peculiar, honour than having a vehicular carriageway way named after you, the signs proudly cut and stencilled in metal workshops by our brothers and sisters of the prison fraternity, then unveiled with no ceremony atop a steel pole in some distant new street corner on the frontiers of our towns and cities.