by Sue Williams
The choir became well known for its performances, and Bobby ended up taking part in a number of eisteddfods and choral concerts around Melbourne itself. He even took part in the opera Hansel and Gretel at the city’s iconic Princess Theatre. ‘It was considered one of the best boys’ choirs in Australia at the time,’ says Brian. ‘And Bob played an important part in it. Our “Ave Maria” would put people in tears.’ It was Bobby’s first taste of performing before an audience and, much to his surprise, he found he liked it very much.
Still at school, he also joined the school-based Australian Army Cadets, with its lessons in navigation and orienteering, ceremonial drill, radio communications and basic bush skills. After all those hours playing soldiers in the trenches, it felt excitingly real. He also went away to camp. ‘After the war, it was a way of militarising kids,’ he says now. ‘You’d be hard-put to talk your way out of it, but it was considered a school honour to be in the cadets. I enjoyed it. It got me out, as I’d never really been anywhere or done much in my life, and it was always interesting to me to see boys and young men all working together as a team. I was always attracted to teamwork.’
A teenage Bobby in the school-based Army Cadets.
Bobby was at last coming into his own. Previously quiet and introverted, becoming dux of his class and doing so well with the choir had given him a much-needed boost in confidence. Being expected to give orders in the cadets was also helping to sharpen his leadership skills. He started playing cricket and football at school, and was making good friends, too. As well as Brian, he’d become very friendly with Paul Garland, another boy in his year whose father was a well-known Labor politician. He’d often visit his home for tea – although always arriving late in a habit that would continue throughout his life – and listen to the political debates going on among Paul’s parents and their friends. He found it all quite thrilling.
Paul was much more worldly than Bobby, and far more confident and outgoing, but the pair got on well. Brother Leo looked on approvingly at the blossoming friendship, feeling Paul would be a good influence and help prise Bobby a little further out of his shell. ‘Paul was a lot more articulate and Bob was much more quiet and behind the scenes,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Bob had been brought up with the tradition of talking – although it’s hard to appreciate that now in the light of what he later became! He was also very compliant, which isn’t how you’d describe him now, either. But then, Paul was the intellectual, a great scholar, and he impressed people with his intellect. Bob looked up to him, and some of that rubbed off.’
The two boys had similarly wicked senses of humour, although Paul’s was, at the time, much louder than Bobby’s. ‘I think Bob was a bit of a late developer in a way,’ says Paul. ‘At school, because of his domestic situation, he didn’t have much freedom to do anything and he was still trying to get his hormones together. We were very different in some ways, though. He was into the cadets while I only joined to make a mockery of them. I was the captain of the school, one year, and I’d send him to dances. I don’t know if it did any good or not, but it probably made him more aware of the female of the species and helped him relate to them.’ With the school being such a major influence on their lives, the two boys even started talking about becoming Christian Brothers together.
But just as life seemed to be assuming a rosier hue for Bobby, once again it all fell in a heap. His mum, who’d been poorly for some time and had gone to a convalescent home to help recover her strength, returned home even sicker. She had a congenital heart weakness – something her children were later to discover they’d all inherited too – and now also had trouble breathing and was always tired. The diagnosis was pleurisy. Sometimes it seemed to others that the only thing keeping her alive was worry over what might happen to her youngest son were she to give up the ghost.
She was well aware of his idea of perhaps becoming a Christian Brother, but wanted him to be sure he’d be doing the right thing. He’d led a pretty sheltered life, going only to Catholic schools, working in his first job for the church and being befriended by the priest and nun outside his home. His mum dearly wanted him to have some idea of life beyond the rigours of a religious vocation.
‘I remember her asking me to look out for Bobby after she’d gone,’ says Bob’s brother Jim. ‘If he did decide to become a priest, she wanted him to do something first, to work in another job for a year to get a taste of the world before the seminary. I said I’d make sure that happened.’ She became sicker and sicker and, at last, towards the end of 1950, when she was just sixty-one and Bobby had turned fifteen, she died.
Bobby was absolutely heartbroken. In just a few short years, he felt he’d been robbed of everyone he’d ever loved. And now the future stretched before him, empty, uncertain and desperately lonely. ‘I felt completely alone,’ he says. ‘It felt like everyone had left me.’ He wondered whether he’d ever survive. But summoning every last vestige of his courage and stoicism, he managed to help his mother to the very end, serving as the altar boy at her funeral.
4
Behind the Eight Ball
Bobby Maguire felt himself sinking lower and lower. He was struggling to breathe; his chest was hurting with the effort. The water was closing in over his head until he was completely submerged. His eyes were stinging. He felt sure he was going to die.
He saw a religious icon appear over him. He heard a voice from somewhere far away. And he had just one thought: ‘Bugger it, I was supposed to play cricket on Sunday.’ Then the next thing he knew, he was being pulled roughly from the water and heaved onto the tiled floor by the pool. It was then he remembered that he’d fallen into the swimming pool, that he couldn’t swim and that he’d hit his head on the side on the way down.
He was sixteen and it was yet another brush with death. ‘But it just wasn’t my turn,’ he says bluntly. Although he was feeling utterly bereft at the loss of his loved ones, he knew it wasn’t time for him to give up and fade away. ‘Once your father’s dead, your mother’s dead and your house is gone, you can become feral. But instead, you have to start looking after yourself. I didn’t have much in the way of role models. I didn’t have much support. I had nothing else to run on, except my merits. I knew that I had to do everything I could for myself to make sure I came out of this.’
It was Bobby’s last year at school yet he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. Other kids had mums and dads to guide them, to push them into jobs or advise them on careers. Despite having his sister Eileen and brother Jim, he still felt very much on his own.
When his mother died, Eileen and her husband Jim had moved back into the family home in Prahran to look after him, but it was an arrangement that was to last only three months. ‘He was brought to our doorstep one day because he’d been doing something he shouldn’t have,’ says Betty, the wife of Bobby’s brother Jim. ‘He was a good kid normally but he’d been sent on an errand and he’d gone to a shop where there was a pinball machine, and he’d spent her money on that instead. Eileen wasn’t impressed. She didn’t have much money, and she couldn’t afford money being spent like that. So Bobby’s stay with them was short-lived.’
It was a rare bout of childish mischief but it had dire consequences. Bobby was suddenly homeless. As a result, he moved in with Jim and Betty instead, at their unit in South Yarra. Later, they bought a house in Glen Iris and Bobby came with them there too. ‘He was very easy to get along with,’ says Betty, who was just seven years older. ‘He was rather quiet and a bit shy but he had a terrific sense of humour and could be a bit cynical. We didn’t see too much of each other, though. I was at work all day and Jim worked and had an extra job pencilling for bookmakers, so I’d make the meal in the evening. And at weekends, he was often off playing cricket with the church, and we had a dog and Bobby used to take him for a walk. But I always felt sorry for Bobby. He was only a young lad but he’d had a hard time, and never had much fun.’
Because of the eight-year age gap between Bobby and Jim
, the two brothers didn’t have too much in common and Jim went away for big chunks of time with the air force as well, effectively missing out on most of his childhood. ‘But he was with us for quite a time while he was doing his schooling,’ Jim says. ‘During that time, Betty was like a second mother to him. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what the score would have been for Bobby.’
Bobby with his brother, Jim.
He was now doing well at school, a conscientious student. Steered away from maths and sciences, he developed a fondness for literature, language, Latin and the classics. ‘In Year 12, there was plenty to stimulate you,’ he says. ‘I think that’s when the poor buggers who were teaching us set fire to my imagination. I’d been diverted from science as I’d been no good at it, but that last year provided me with a good education. It was enough.’
Personality-wise, Bobby was still quite reserved, with no hint of any of his later rebelliousness. He was a passable sportsman, too, playing football and cricket in his house teams. He also loved being in the Army Cadets and was turning out to be pretty good at it, attaining the rank of Cadet Lieutenant, and winning a trophy as Best Instructor of 1950. On Fridays, he’d come to school in his cadet uniform on the train, and he liked the feeling it gave him of belonging to an organisation.
His old teacher, Brother Leo Griffin, felt the brother taking the cadets, Brother William Lewis, a man with a very strong personality, was a good influence. ‘He was in charge of both the cadets and sport, and he could do a lot of things and I think Bob looked up to him,’ he says. ‘He learned a lot from him. To Brother Lewis, nothing was ever an obstacle; he could overcome everything. That was a very good example for a boy to have. I think Bob took that lesson very much to heart, and he later managed to adopt that kind of persona too.’
Like any boy, he was also fascinated by the guns. At school, he remembers there being racks and racks of 0.22 calibre rifles, and the handball court during the day was converted into a shooting range, with a big wall of wooden cladding behind the target, backed by another wall of steel to stop bullets flying through. At Williamstown, on the other side of the bay, there was a purpose-built firing range, where teams of boys could also practise with a Vickers machine gun or Bren guns.
‘The Vickers was one of my specialties; the other was the Bren gun,’ he says. ‘It was good fun. It was also an opportunity for an emotionally repressed boy like me to let off some steam. It helped build up your confidence, having to yell out, “Attention! Attention!” in public. We were all in pecking orders and I was quiet, but standing up in front of the younger ones, articulating about the weaponry and explaining how to do different things, meant you had to come out of your shell. We’d go away on camp too, which was good, and I’m sure I can remember taking a .303 British rifle home with me.’
At school, he’d also become a prefect and was captain of his house. ‘God knows how that happened,’ he says now. ‘We were poor, and that kind of thing didn’t usually happen for people who were that poor because people tend to bully the poor, they sense a weakness and go for it. But I was being given responsibility both as an officer in the cadets and as a prefect in the classroom. I liked it. It felt good. It started giving me a sense of self-esteem, which is something I’d never really had before.’
Bobby Maguire still had no clear idea of what he wanted to do after school. He continued to toy with the idea of becoming a Christian Brother, particularly since the lack of financial support seemed an almost insurmountable obstacle for any other career choice. He’d done well enough in the cadets to be considered a good candidate for the Royal Military College in Duntroon, the Australian Army’s officer-training establishment, and he dearly wanted to be a soldier, but he had no way on earth of paying his living expenses while he trained. By the same token, he’d been offered a scholarship to go to university, but again, he knew he simply didn’t have the funds.
‘Poverty as a boy meant I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere, and it was the same story at the end of school,’ he says. ‘All things being equal, I think I would have gone to Duntroon, but you’ve got no hope because you’re behind the eight ball. You’ve got no family, you’ve got no stability and you’ve got no dough. So even if you took the Commonwealth scholarship for your fees for university, where would you end up? Where would you have lived? How would you have paid for food? How could you buy books? It would have been impossible. And while I was all right at English, I was no good at maths and science. Uni mightn’t have done me any good.’
The other option was to join a religious order. He’d been brought up by his mother, the priests who’d helped him over the years and his school to believe that a religious vocation conferred a certain amount of respectability, kudos and prestige. He’d won the school prize in religious studies and knew that path in life would be a much less costly choice. He wouldn’t even need to make a vow of poverty, he thought caustically to himself; he’d been living that already his whole life. But when a recruiter from the seminary came to visit his school, at first he flat-out refused to see him. ‘I made it pretty clear to the headmaster that I wasn’t interested,’ he says.
Slowly, however, he began to reconsider. His tough childhood had left him with a highly developed social conscience, and he liked the idea of public service. Maybe if he went into the Church, he’d be able to do some good for those who were similarly struggling.
There’d been no dramatic moment of hearing God, or experiencing a revelation about the need to follow a religious vocation. Instead, he’d simply absorbed Catholicism his whole life. ‘Religion is caught, not taught, like the saying goes,’ says Bob. ‘It’s not only biological. You inherit an ethos of Catholicism. It’s not necessarily the doctrine; that has to answer to the ethos, rather than the other way around. The bishops might ask you to suspend your ethos and just admire the doctrines, but that’s asking too much. You can’t live off fairy floss on its own.
‘Over the years, I’d caught Catholicism from my mother, from Eileen, from Kathleen. You acquire certain advisories from people. My brother was probably “a-religious”; he would have advised to beware the priests and clericalism. But the others, as well as the priests and the nuns, the Presentation Sisters, they would have had a big influence on me. I’ve met good people all my life. The teacher who helped me when I failed that first year, he identified something worth investing in, and that’s what I’ve continued to do all my life. I’m made an altar boy, so I invest in that. If they make you chief altar boy, you have to invest. If they make you an Army Cadet captain, you invest. I’ve never believed in sinecures. If there’s an opportunity, you make the most of it, and invest.’
When the religious recruiters came round a second time, he marked the box with the B, indicating an interest in becoming a Christian Brother, like his teachers at school: men whose mission was chiefly about educating the young. His mate Paul Garland, however, tried to talk him out of it. ‘I thought he shouldn’t go that way,’ says Paul. He’d decided already that he wanted to become a priest, and Bob started to think seriously about maybe taking that step instead.
‘I’d already indicated to the Christian Brothers’ recruiting officer that one minute I wanted to be a Christian Brother, but the next I said, “Take my name off the list and put P down for Priest,”’ he says. ‘Paul was going to the seminary, and I thought I might as well go too. He was the same age as me, but he was a firebrand and a social activist. The only time I went anywhere interesting was with him to Labor Party meetings; everything else I did was pretty boring. But it wasn’t just because he was going. I had this belief in DIY, and I wanted to work towards making the world a fairer place, to help people who were up against it get ahead. It was also serendipity. It meant I’d have a home, and food, for the next few years.’
Yet even if it was going to be the most economical career option, Bob still needed funds to get by. Here, his sister Eileen came up trumps. She contacted his old Black Rock mentor, Sister Claude. The nun was delighted to hear that h
er young protégé was thinking of entering the priesthood.
‘My sister would have said, “Look, this bloke wants to go into the seminary and we can’t afford it,”’ Bob says. ‘So Sister Claude, being an activist nun, would have said, “Don’t worry, I remember you lot down at Black Rock and I remember Father John Gorry who was the parish priest had a few quid, so I’ll ring him up.” So she did. And Father Gorry, who was by then parish priest at St Kilda West, said he’d pay whatever fees had to be paid. I think if you were poor, you got away with half fees at the seminary, but that still left some to pay. Then of course you had all the extras, the clothes, like the cassock or soutane – the black dress thing – and incidentals like books. It was basic but it does all cost a few quid. So when he said he’d help me out, the deal was sealed, so to speak.’
But first, his brother Jim and Eileen had to think about his mum’s wish that if he were ever to decide to go to the seminary, he should have a go at another job first. He shouldn’t go straight from school, with no experience of any other life. It was a wish she’d repeated as she lay on her deathbed.
Bobby was surprised to hear of it, but agreed to go along with what she’d wanted. He didn’t have any idea of where to look for work, but Jim quickly stepped in. Working at the wharves as a customs officer, he knew plenty of people, and organised Bobby a job as a cooper’s assistant, helping make, and attach, the binding hoops that go around barrels. Bobby worked on Victoria Docks for the next three months. He quite enjoyed the physical work and the camaraderie, although he was anxious about what he should drink when the wharfies invited him to the pub after work, and asked Betty for advice.
‘I told him to ask for something like lemon squash,’ she says. ‘So after that, he’d go into the pub with them, but he’d always order a soft drink.’ Although he left after just a short time, nothing like the year his mother had hoped for, it was the start of a lifelong association with the maritime unions.