by Sue Williams
But it was the parish that came as a shock to him. While it had a long and proud history as the very first suburban parish in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, its future was beginning to look rather less certain. Originally known as Emerald Hill, in the early 1850s it became the site of Canvas Town, a tented metropolis set up by gold rush fortune-seekers, with a population of about 5000. The first priest to arrive, Capuchin monk Father John O’Connell, was appointed in 1854 and mass was celebrated in a tent on the ground where the present church now stood.
The area had flourished at first, and the two-hectare church precinct on the corner of Dorcas and Montague streets contained a number of impressive buildings housing schools, a kindergarten, convents, orphanages and hostels, with thousands of parishioners – mostly Irish or of Irish descent – regularly attending mass. By World War I, the population of the parish of South Melbourne had leapt to 48 000. At the start of World War II, however, the population had started to fall, and continued to fall, as the city sprawled outwards and private car ownership became more common, allowing people to more easily live away from the city. Yet the major decline came in the 1960s when the Housing Commission of Victoria stepped in to raze many of the traditional working-class terraced homes around the inner city and put up, in their place, a series of forty-five public housing blocks of flats.
‘When I arrived, there were big hoardings up everywhere, and I said, “What’s going on here?”’ says Father Bob. ‘They told me they were pulling all the cottages down and putting up public housing. I hadn’t seen slums since the 1940s – that’s a long, long gap. I’d been around the suburbs; no slums. I’d been to Braybrook; no slums. I’d been with the army; not perfect housing, but no slums. I’d seen TV reports on Vietnam and you thought, Oh dear, their houses look very poorly, but they weren’t slums. And yet here, they had slums! Then the government got its beady eyes on land and space taken up by housing, and they wanted to sell it, they can’t help themselves. But what they put in their place wasn’t much better, and those social engineers physically demolished and socially really diminished the area.’
That housing program hit the population of South Melbourne particularly hard. They received the Housing Commission’s first ‘elevator flats’, Emerald Hill Court, in 1962, along Dorcas Street from the church. The biggest blow, however, was the demolition of four complete streets and eighty-three buildings just one block east of St Peter and Paul’s to make room for the 31-storey Park Towers. On its completion in 1969, the precast concrete monolith was the second-tallest residential building in Australia, the third-tallest of any building in Melbourne, and the highest of its construction type in the world. It dominated the skyline and, from the church, it stood as a constant reminder of the loss of a large slice of the former congregation.
In addition, a swathe of the old weatherboard houses originally built for Irish wharf labourers in the Montague neighbourhood, north of the church, were cleared to make way for warehouses and car showrooms, effectively turning that area into a ghost town and cutting back the number of locals even more. In the ensuing couple of years, the population slumped to just under 27 000. Many of those left were busy rallying together to have the clearances stopped, while the planned building of the nearby Westgate Freeway cost even more homes before its start in 1975.
‘Those planners ripped the heart out of South Melbourne,’ says Father Bob. ‘The slums were pulled down, and the neighbourhood was decimated. So many people had left the community, there was hardly any congregation left. The ones remaining were suffering social dislocation, they were shell-shocked, they were battle-scarred. They were still fighting and at the same time, they were grieving their loss. Massive surgery had been done to their region. The oldies woke up in the morning and it was almost unrecognisable. Whole swathes of it were just flattened. They were, “What the hell’s happened to our town?”’
One local from that time, Carol Leahy, says they were very dark days. ‘When I was a young girl in South Melbourne, we had a very big church congregation,’ she says. ‘In the church, there were pews up to the back doors, and every section would be taken, with people standing at the back. There’d be 2000 people at mass.
‘But then in the ’60s, they started to build Park Towers. Around there the houses were lean-tos, they were slums, and there were as many rats as were people. But what happened as a result was that people started leaving. The girls I went to school with all moved out to Noble Park and beyond. So throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, they moved to the outer suburbs. That left just the older people, which is another reason it went from a big community to a small one.’
Those who remained had mostly lived through both the Depression and the war and, as a result, they tended to be quite traditional, conventional and wary of change. Their previous priest, Father Lou Heriot, had been a dynamic ‘people person’ who’d been at the parish for just four years before moving on. His predecessor, the Irish-born Monsignor Thomas Power, had served for a remarkable twenty-seven years from 1942 up until his death at the age of eighty-five. Little wonder, then, that Father Bob, with some of his more iconoclastic views, was seen by some parishioners as rather like a bull barging his way through a china shop. ‘The distress flare had already gone up for what had happened to the town, and now here I’d blown into a culture that had been there for 150 years,’ he says. ‘The church had become a little like an old cardigan for the locals. Snatch their grandmother’s cardigan from them and you’ll have trouble. And that’s what happened.’
His first curate, Father Kevin Burke, now the priest at Eltham, says it was a complete contrast in style. ‘Lou was quite progressive but more traditional than Bob, although everyone looks a lot more traditional alongside Bob! Bob was a colourful, charismatic type, like a prophet from the Old Testament who challenges people. He had a strange way of talking too, and of presenting things.’
Local man Kevin Lee attended his first mass and was astonished by the new priest. ‘I thought, what the hell has the archbishop done to us?’ he recalls. ‘He seemed gruff and angry, and wanted us to do more for the poor. After that, I saw some people dodging his masses to go to one of his assistant priest’s. He got stuck into people, said we weren’t doing enough. So it was easier for some people just to go to a different mass and hear sweet things. But after a while, I got used to him, and liked what he was saying and doing.’
Father Bob’s outbursts could sometimes be pretty intemperate. ‘He’d say that we should be solving other people’s problems, especially those of us better equipped to help,’ says Frank O’Connor, who’d first met him as the cadet chaplain at CBC and had started attending his church after being intrigued by a sign on the side of the church bearing a quotation from Che Guavara about struggle being a part of life. ‘It was very challenging stuff he would throw at people and occasionally, in typical Bob fashion, he would go over the top. You’d feel harangued about doing something about those less well-off, and that used to turn a few people off.’
Carol Leahy felt much the same. ‘He was very, very different to anyone we’d ever known,’ she says. ‘He came in with his own ideas, and just went for it. He was so confronting with his thoughts, and he rattled a lot of people’s cages. It could be hard sitting there, with him yelling at you sometimes from the pulpit! Some people left, and never came back. Some people left, but then came back later, over time, while some new people came in too. At the beginning, I really didn’t like his ways and how he handled things. But then, all of a sudden, one day I understood what he was saying and how he was applying it to everyday life, and it all started to make sense to me.
‘A lot of people used to come out of church on a Sunday after the service and say he’d made them rethink a lot of things and how they’d agreed to do one thing that week they’d never done before, like go out of their way to help someone, smile and say hello to someone or look carefully at their attitudes to others, try to listen to people with a different point of view and share their ideas. Then you’d fi
nd out that person wasn’t that different to yourself. He always made us think.’
Father Bob during his early years at St Peter and Paul’s.
There were other aspects of the parish that made it a less-cohesive community, too. The underworld war for control of Melbourne’s waterside was in full swing at that point and, just a month after Father Bob’s arrival, the feared Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union top dog Pat Shannon was gunned down in a South Melbourne pub, the Druids Hotel. With Australia’s most corrupt union pretty much a criminal subculture, a network of gangsters later featured in the ‘Underbelly’ TV franchise whose crimes included murder, standover rackets, theft, extortion, drug dealing and prostitution, locals lived in fear that the fighting, as well as the incipient drug wars, would spread. ‘I wasn’t used to things like that,’ says Father Bob. ‘It didn’t fuss me, but South Melbourne hadn’t been terribly welcoming in the first place … But one of the assistant priests went off to give a comment to the media, and I started thinking that maybe we should set up a room in the house as a radio studio …’
Some parts of South Melbourne, particularly around the new estates, were also plagued by many of the same problems that the planners had hoped to solve. A number of the new tenants were unemployed, living in poverty and suffering poor health, conditions made worse in the early ’70s by economic stagflation (caused by the dramatic rise in oil prices as a result of the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries’ embargo), and the increasing rate of divorce and family breakdown.
After World War II, South Melbourne had received a large number of migrants too, many of whom were refugees and displaced persons still suffering the trauma of leaving their homelands. With the increase in Housing Commission homes available in the 1960s, the number of migrants to the area rose steadily, from 5.7 per cent of the population before 1960 to 8.9 per cent up to 1970. The newcomers were usually on lower-than-average incomes, forced to work in unskilled jobs, and they routinely suffered the kind of discrimination common before the abolition of the White Australia Policy in 1973. In short, many were getting a pretty raw deal.
And it was often their children, torn between their parents’ culture and the desire to fit in with their peers at school, who were struggling the most. ‘I found many of the kids were really alienated,’ says Father Bob. ‘They didn’t know which way to go, which culture to be a part of. They were under terrible pressures. Some of them had left home, looking for somewhere to stay, while others were still at home, but they were alienated at home. I decided we should really try to help these young people, we should do a lot of social justice work, we should be looking outwards to help others. We should remodel ourselves as a missionary church, a parish with a mission.
‘Our patron saints, Peter and Paul, two giants of Christian strength, made it easier for me to find a focus for South Melbourne pastoral and missionary strategies. Ordained for the old Church, but destined to work in the new, I was already inclined towards ambivalence: orthodox and unconventional is the style I personally adopt. To do the Church’s thing in one’s own way is the best combination I can propose. In a nutshell, Peter kept the faith, he was the orthodox one, while Paul was orthopractical: he got things done and made sure the faith was shared around, especially among people previously thought ineligible. Peter was blessed with a rock-solid conviction that Jesus had conquered sin and death. Paul couldn’t rest until everyone everywhere had heard the Name and been shown the Way.
‘The name of the church suits me. Both have to exist together. You can’t have one without the other, and that’s the problem with the clerics in the Church today. They say the faith is more important, whereas I believe what you do with it is the most important thing. The faith had been preserved in South Melbourne by staunch and loyal Catholics, but each generation has to find its own expression of Catholicism.’
At first, Father Bob used all his old tried and true methods. He organised football games, he opened up a nearby tennis court, he turned an old vacant block behind the church into a basketball court and he started a gym for youngsters to learn how to box at the back of the presbytery. In 1975, the new Labor government launched a disadvantaged schools program to provide additional financial assistance for more than 1000 schools whose students suffered special socioeconomic difficulties. ‘Someone rung us up and told us we were a disadvantaged area, and asked what our primary school on the property needed to make a difference,’ says Father Bob. ‘I told them we’d like a PE teacher because we’d never had one and I thought that would really help the kids. So they eventually said we could have the money for that.’
The trouble was, some of the young people Father Bob was trying to help had much more serious problems. Heroin and substance abuse was just becoming a part of their lives, and much more dramatic action was needed. ‘The place was awash with drugs at that time,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know anything about those. In the suburban parishes I’d been in, we’d have a game of footy or basketball and have a chat, and everything would be all right. It was all so simple. This was a completely different world. These kids were in inner-city Melbourne in an area that had been decimated by social engineering, their lives were tough and it was pretty hard for them to play basketball, and both impossible and dangerous for them to box, if they were drunk or out of it on drugs …’
But if all those people weren’t coming to the church to receive help, Father Bob made a monumental decision: he would take the church to them.
9
Greater Fools Than Me
Father Bob Maguire knew reaching out to a bunch of young people who weren’t regular churchgoers, with many never having been to his church – or perhaps any church – in their lives, would be a tough call. But he was determined to try. It would just take a bit more creativity to find ways of making contact and then taking the church, and its resources, to them. He could use the church buildings and grounds to give them a safe place of refuge, as well things to do with all the sporting areas he’d started, while he could work beyond the church as well to find new ways of making sure they could survive and thrive. So immediately he set out to visit those kids in the places they liked to go, where they felt comfortable, on street corners, in parks, in coffee lounges and outside hotels.
‘We’d go to wherever they gathered to connect,’ he says. ‘As a result, we ended up making contact with a lot of young people in the district. It didn’t come naturally to us because a lot of the people needing our help were migrants, and they were Greek Orthodox, Muslims, Catholics – but not Roman Catholics – Kurds and so on. It was fascinating to interface with them, but we had to work out what we could do, what we had to offer them. As part of that, I also did more work as an honorary probation and parole officer so I could be on hand if anyone got into trouble. We were never there to proselytise; we wanted to offer them good, practical help.
‘While there were homeless kids around, many of the kids in the neighbourhood were still at home, but they were alienated at home. Their parents were from one culture, and they were growing up in another and they were having to work through a big clash of those cultures, and it was often very difficult for them. But one thing we did have was a back room behind the presbytery. We thought we could open it up and offer them that as a safe place to go. These days, I know the last place a kid goes to look for safety is with a Roman Catholic priest, but in those days it was the only safe place.’
Slowly but surely, the neighbourhood kids responded and started dropping by for a chat, or a coffee, or to meet up with other young people in the presbytery. Father Bob, as a young boy, may have been denied a church meeting place by his old priest, but he sure as hell was going to make sure these kids had a safe space of their own.
Then, one day, he had a call from Social Services. They’d found a young man from Sydney wandering the streets on his own, sleeping rough. Could Father Bob extend his help to him? He was only seventeen, yet he had the haunted, world-weary look Father Bob had seen so often in the eyes o
f men returning from fighting in Vietnam.
But Brian Rudd’s battles, the priest soon learned, had been of a completely different kind. And they’d started at the age of just three months when the authorities took him and his four brothers away from their parents, both chronic alcoholics.
From that point on, Brian’s life as a ward of the state became even tougher. He was sent to a boys’ home in Ballarat, 110 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, where the regime was hard and disciplined, and if any one child overstepped the mark or played up, everyone was punished. Brian still felt luckier than most, however. Often his older brothers would try to protect him, and the five little boys made an earnest vow to each other: to always stick together and look out for one another.
But at seven years old, Brian’s world again came crashing down around his ears. The brothers were summoned and told they were being moved on – and each to a different children’s home. ‘I think they thought if they split us up, we’d be easier to control,’ says Brian. ‘It’s harder to push you around if you’re a tight-knit little group. There were 170 boys in that home, and they saw us as a threat! So the easiest thing for them to do was eliminate the threat. I was sent off to a boys’ home in Surrey Hills, Melbourne, and I never saw my brothers again.’
Five years later, he was moved again to another home and, at the age of twelve, he tried to take his own life. He survived – just – and was later transferred to yet another home. Three of these homes were to become notorious as places where cruelty to children was routinely practised, as described in the 2004 report of the Senate inquiry Forgotten Australians. In one, youngsters were locked in isolation in cupboards, dark rooms, attics and cellars for long periods as punishment for minor misdemeanours; in another, a common punishment was forcing children to scrub toilets and corridors with toothbrushes.