When Pete Steedman blew into Canberra in 1983, the year Bob Hawke’s Labor Party trounced Malcolm Fraser’s Liberals, no one had seen a member of parliament quite like him.

He wore a leather jacket and jeans, rode a 1949 Vincent motorbike, drove a blazing red Ford Galaxie convertible and filled the air with language that would make a wharfie blush.

Steedman and life partner, model Julie Reiter, who died in 2009.Credit: Steedman Family Collection

He was 40 years old, but he told anyone who asked that he was 28. You’d just about believe him.

He embodied the idea that though nothing can be done to avoid the passing of years, it is not compulsory to grow up. And yet, he held true to the numerous strands of his essential cause: social justice.

The years, however, weren’t to be denied. Pete Steedman died on July 10 this year, aged 80.

Steedman was known for a prodigious thirst.Credit: Steedman Family Collection

His immense army of friends and admirers, and very likely a few detractors, because Steedman inspired conflicting passions, aren’t about to let him go quietly.

They will fill Melbourne’s beautiful old Trades Hall on Saturday to memorialise him, wet their whistles and take in an exhibition dedicated to a long and astonishingly varied life.

We are, those of us who have lived awhile, locked in a dread season of farewells to those who set about changing everything Australia thought it knew about itself in the 1960s and ’70s.

Only days ago we learned the playwright Jack Hibberd was gone at 84. Hibberd gave Australia its own voice half a century........

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