by Sue Williams
‘It was quite incredible,’ says Father Bob. ‘After the fire, Tommy just saddles up and starts the whole thing again. But he was never quite the same. I don’t think he ever properly recovered from it. We used government buildings, buses and help from state schools, and took the kids to summer schools, too. He even went over to Canada and got some Canadians to run a trade school for poor boys. It was interesting. We were becoming popular among a whole new demographic, teenagers and boys, and we set up a football team, a cricket team and basketball games to keep them busy and interested and out of trouble.’ It was a great lesson in what could be done, where there was the will to do it.
This time, however, Father Bob ran foul of Father Murray’s housekeeper who, he felt, was terribly over-protective of her parish priest. ‘We worked well together but she complained that I was taking over,’ he says today. ‘It wasn’t true at all, but after nine months it was then time for me to move on again …’
Next he was sent to the east, to East Kew, to assist a priest who gave him a very warm welcome. ‘It was great to arrive; he and his parishioners said, “Thank God you’re here to help!” which was wonderful,’ says Father Bob. He was, again, a very different character from the priest he was there to serve, but this time they complemented each other well.
‘They were chalk and cheese,’ says Michael Doyle, who was around sixteen when Father Bob arrived at his parish. ‘He was totally different to anything we’d seen and heard. He was like a breath of fresh air. He was so bright and so able to explain the theology that came out of Vatican II in a language that ordinary people could understand, young and old. For us kids, he was like a pied piper. He had a radical style in the way he presented himself, he could be like a stand-up comedian, holding an audience for long periods, and he had a great gift for explaining himself. At the same time, his theology was cutting-edge Vatican II theology but, while he was radical, he was never heretic. He did tend to polarise people a little bit, even back then. I think it was only a very small number of people who didn’t appreciate him, though. The great mass of people, including the young and the old, and even the pretty conservative people, just loved him.’
His Vatican II ways did come as something of a shock to many, though. Robert Byrne, then a fourteen-year-old kid, still remembers the surprise of Father Bob not conducting his services right at the altar with his back to the congregation as was the old way, but turning around to face the people to say mass to them instead. ‘At one point, he even came down off the step to say mass on the same level as us,’ he says. ‘He’d also walk around during the service and say hello to people in the pews, “Bill! How’s it going?” in the middle of it. He’d also tell old ladies to put away their rosary beads because they needed to be present in the moment. “You don’t need them here,” he’d say. He woke people up; it was fantastic!’
He was also adamant that services shouldn’t be overlong. ‘He’d say an hour was enough,’ Robert remembers. ‘He’d say the men should go off afterwards and take their sons to football; it’d be no good coming to church if they didn’t play their roles properly in the rest of their lives. They had to live the message. Or he’d say we could go now in time to see “World of Sport” on TV. That was funny as Jack O’Toole, the world champion woodchopper who often appeared on the panel of the show, was usually in church too!’
One time, Father Bob took to the pulpit talking about those who didn’t like to do anything for the underprivileged as, instead of God’s chosen people, God’s frozen people. The congregation was hugely amused. Another time, he was given the task of reviewing the envelope collection, where he was to exhort parishioners to give a generous donation to the church to support the parish and its building programs. He talked at length about having to raise enough money to feed the hungry budgerigar back at the presbytery. The next week he was back. ‘You remember the budgie I talked about last week?’ he asked his assembled flock. ‘Well,’ he said bluntly, ‘it starved to death.’ That week’s collection raised a great deal more cash.
At the same time, he took very seriously his duty to continue to explain Vatican II teachings, and ran a series of hour-long talks in the local school for anyone interested in coming along. ‘He’d stand there with the blackboard and a piece of chalk and it would be the most entertaining hour you could imagine!’ says Michael, who went on to have a long career in the Catholic education system, including working as a school principal. ‘The way he spoke, with such clarity and a stunning ability to explain complex ideas of theology so simply … He was the absolute vanguard of the new theology in Melbourne. He was a strong influence on me.’
Father Bob also decided now was another chance to put into practice what he’d learnt at the various parishes he’d served in, and develop his expertise in helping the young people of this one. He gathered kids together from all over the area and, just as Father McHugh had once done for him, he’d cram as many of them as could fit into his increasingly battered old VW and drive them to a football match, off for a picnic or down to the river to play on the ropes strung up over the water. When that old VW blew up, he’d buy another decrepit second-hand car and work that into the ground too. ‘I felt we should get the kids together as teenagers, to build a sense of community, and there we also started football and basketball games, and got them to play guitar. It worked really well.’
He started a series of youth camps for children in the holidays too, regularly taking between sixty and 150 from the parish to go camping in Cowes, the principal township of Phillip Island, and Halls Gap in the Grampians National Park. He’d raise money for them by having the kids collect golf balls from the various courses nearby and sell them back to golfers, or try to attract sponsorship. In one inspired move, he had the Sun newspaper write a story on the kids playing at the river, with the headline, ‘Tarzans of the River’, to draw attention to the need for money to give them more to do.
He was never shy about calling in favours from people he knew to help, either. One was a local electrical company, owned by a man who had a boat and water skis. Father Bob asked him to bring them down to Phillip Island and no kid that time left without a turn at water-skiing. ‘It just showed the respect that everyone held him in,’ says Michael. ‘Most of the kids were alienated from the Church at that stage, but most of them stayed in touch with him long afterwards, asking him to marry them, baptise their children, and then marry their children and baptise their children’s children.
‘He was also extraordinarily generous. He’d drive up often in a different car and, when you’d ask why, it’d often turn out he’d given the last one away to someone he felt needed it more than him. He went through cars like no-one on earth. First, it was a series of old VWs, then it was early-model Toyota Corollas, utilitarian cars, nothing flash. As a result, he’d often still be paying off cars that he’d long given up. All in all, he was a very memorable stage in all our lives.’
Tony Grieve was a local teenager at the time, and also affectionately remembers Father Bob’s energy and enthusiasm. ‘I was in an under-seventeen football team when he arrived, and we’d lost our coach,’ he says. ‘So Father Bob parachuted straight in, and turned up the next week at training, dressed up in footy boots and a shirt and all the rest of it. I reckon he hadn’t really played much football himself, but he volunteered to help us kids out. He ended up coaching us for three months. He didn’t seem terribly well schooled in the art of footy – most of his advice was general in nature, perhaps to cover any shortcomings in experience – but he was very, very enthusiastic. He would encourage us and kept us together, telling us to be a team, and play as a team. He melded us together at a point when we might have gone our separate ways, and the team would have ceased to exist. He saved our side.
‘Our football ground was a very difficult one because it had a slope. There was a definite home ground advantage. Father Bob cottoned on fast to that and made sure we always played that way. He would really let rip, and he was a great enthuser and motivator and
a man for all seasons. He’d always be urging us to get in there and go for the ball. In fact, that was the greatest aspect of his coaching. We just all really appreciated him being there for us, and my affection for him has stayed ever since. We just loved him. He was the best!’
That year, 1967, Father Bob started attracting more attention elsewhere for his work. He was invited to take part in a radio broadcast for one of the first commercial radio stations in Melbourne – and one of the very first to try talkback – Radio 3DB, in its studios located in the basement of the old Herald building where his father had once worked. The show was the Sunday-evening ‘Ask The Ministers’ program, where figures representing three different faiths answered questions and discussed issues, as part of the religious broadcasting element imposed by the licence conditions. One of Father Bob’s first outings was memorable for even more than his spirited arguing of his corner, often against far more conservative clerics. The show was cut short by the news that Prime Minister Harold Holt had gone missing, presumed drowned, off Cheviot Beach.
He proved such a natural on radio, however, that he continued being asked back. Producers loved that he didn’t mind being outspoken, and he had a quick wit that often brought a touch of levity to the sombre religious spots that were coming under increasing pressure to attract the kinds of listeners and advertisers that their great rival pop music was routinely enjoying. And that was a gift that became even more valuable when the Australian Broadcasting Control Board in 1970 removed some of the onerous licensing conditions on radio stations to include religion. He started to appear regularly on a number of different radio stations.
After three years at East Kew, Father Bob was told it was time to move on. Many of the parishioners were broken-hearted. Robert Byrne said he’d never forget him. ‘When he’d first arrived, my dog had been run over, and Father Bob rocked up one day and gave me another dog. He just saw that’s what I needed, and it was what he should do. He would just do things like that. He saw a need and did what had to be done.’
From there, Father Bob was billeted to Ivanhoe, a few kilometres to the north, to help out the parish priest. There, he found a wealthy, educated bunch of parishioners who weren’t slow to tell him what they thought of both his sermons and his style. He welcomed most of the feedback, and took praise and criticism equally on board to try to improve. ‘It was the most affluent spot I’d ever been in, and Ivanhoe parishioners were well placed to criticise because they were, many of them, professional people – doctors, professors and musicians. They were upwardly socially mobile. They had won the right to criticise, and I was grateful.’
The resident priest wasn’t quite so keen to have Father Bob try out new things from his pulpit. He complained to the Archdiocese about him, and Father Bob, after just a year, found himself moved on yet again. ‘The Church would send me somewhere because there were problems, knowing they’d be putting the cat among the pigeons, but then when it caused some difficulties, they would never stand by you,’ he says. ‘It was all about a clash of cultures, and having no backup when it mattered. I think they ended up sending me to too many parishes too soon. But then they topped all that by sending me out into the bush. The bloody bush, for God’s sake! I’d never really visited the bush before, let alone had to live there …’
Seymour, almost 100 kilometres north of Melbourne, is a township just off the crossing of the Hume and Goulburn Valley highways, mainly servicing the local cattle, sheep and wine industries. It was a vastly different lifestyle, and Father Bob found adapting to it tough. He tried at first, but failed miserably. While he’s still remembered affectionately by many within the parish, and at least three families travelled down to South Melbourne – where he was later posted – from time to time to attend his Sunday mass and keep up their relationship with a chat afterwards and a visit to the presbytery, his memories aren’t quite so fond.
‘It was a whole new experience for me, and I hated it!’ he says. ‘At that point, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I think I was exhausted from starting out afresh in so many new parishes over a comparatively short period of time, and working so hard in each one. And then to find myself in the bush … The bush? It was all too much.’
The only even faintly bright spot on the horizon was that Seymour was very close to the Australian Army’s military training base of Puckapunyal.
Father Bob (left) holding his first mass, at St Cecilia’s in Glen Iris.
7
Talking Underwater for Vietnam
The savagery of the war being waged overseas in Vietnam was brought starkly home to Australia with images of the bloody Tet Offensive unleashed in January 1968.
The graphic TV footage of the ferocious fighting during the series of attacks by the Viet Cong on towns and cities throughout South Vietnam, the heavy casualties and the sheer mindless desperation of the war shocked Americans, Australians and their allies, and brought the horror right into lounge rooms.
Five months later, Australian troops were sent to Bien Hoa province to intercept Viet Cong troops retreating after Tet and its subsequent campaigns and they became embroiled in the Battle of Coral and Balmoral, which lasted twenty-five days, their longest and deadliest single engagement with enemy soldiers. As well as more than 300 Viet Cong casualties, it cost twenty-five Australians their lives.
This intensification of the Vietnam War and the realisation of how much better organised the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were, certainly compared to Allied propaganda to the contrary, brought more pressure on the Australian defence forces to improve the preparation of the men they were sending into battle. As part of this, they decided to step up their ‘character-training’ program, a course for members of the army, navy and air force that had been founded after the Korean War. During that conflict it had been discovered that in extreme conditions of stress, in battle, in captivity or under interrogation, some American servicemen lacked the spiritual strength or emotional resilience to cope, which contributed to the high number of deserters and defectors. The Australian defence forces wanted to avoid similar problems, especially because Vietnam had the additional pressure of working with South Vietnamese soldiers, among whom it was always likely there were spies for the enemy – a factor that later became acknowledged as one of the major causes of post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans.
So there seemed to be an urgent need to stiffen the moral fibre of the new recruits to the defence forces, by chaplains who could work well with young people. And looking around for instructors, everyone agreed: Father Bob Maguire was their man.
Living at St Mary’s Church in Seymour, he was already a regular visitor to the army base at nearby Puckapunyal as a part-time army chaplain, and was delighted to receive the call. He had no hesitation in agreeing to work full time with the army character-training team, and started in 1969.
‘It suited me down to the ground,’ he says. ‘I’d worked with the army for a while as a second string to my bow, and now the character training was perfect for me. I’d never been anywhere or done anything adventurous and they wanted me to stay safe on Australian soil, so I wasn’t outside my comfort zone. I could relate equally well to religious people or secular people, and I could talk underwater …’
Character training was a two-or sometimes three-day course that many new recruits, both regular servicemen and conscripts, did as part of their initial training. It was designed to develop their interpersonal skills and start them thinking about what they stood for, their ethics, their respect for themselves, the importance of giving everyone a fair go and the moral conduct of war, and what they should do in the various situations they could find themselves in.
Father Bob proved a good choice as an instructor. He already had a deep affinity with the armed forces, and he knew how to talk to young people from his work with kids in the parishes he’d served in. As a consequence, he proved able to relate well to the twenty-year-old men before him, who were often leaving home for the first time to sign up for
an uncertain future. He’d always had great regard for the young, feeling they were Australia’s hope for the future, and this belief shone through in all his dealings with them. As a result, they tended to react well to him, as he asked them how they felt about themselves and how they saw themselves as soldiers, and talked to them about the different scenarios they might face, quizzing them on what they’d do in each circumstance. Previous instructors had merely preached at the men; Father Bob led small discussion groups of around ten soldiers each time, encouraging them to come to their own conclusions – with a little guidance from the sidelines.
‘Bob was so good at asking difficult questions and starting debate about them,’ says Monsignor Tony Toms, who served as an army chaplain for nineteen years, and is these days the parish priest of St Mary’s at Seymour. ‘He’d never give them the answers, but he’d ask them so they’d have to work them out themselves, to try and discern what they should do. His style was very confronting and his slight eccentricity was part of his teaching method but, afterwards, it turned out that out of all the instructors – Catholic, Anglican or Protestant – Bob was the one who was universally remembered!
‘He’d talk and everyone would listen. He knew youth and understood the language they used and was able to bring that into the course. He never spoke for long, but he was always worth listening to. He was entertaining, and was a great facilitator of discussion. He had an expansive vision and a universal outlook on things. He could always see the big picture.’