by Sue Williams
Father Bob was, more and more, being dubbed the local ‘people whisperer’, as someone you could go to with problems and, although he couldn’t always solve them, he would still make you feel so much better about yourself. And even when he occasionally downright refused to help the odd visitor, no-one complained.
One homeless man, Robert, came by one day to eat breakfast out the back. Afterwards, he called up to Father Bob to ask for some cash. The priest came out on to the balcony and shook his head. ‘I know you’ve got a bottle of whiskey in your coat pocket,’ Father Bob shouted down to him. ‘And a bottle of pills in your backpack. So no! Get out of here!’ At that, the man laughed uproariously. ‘Good on you, Father,’ he yelled back. ‘See you next time!’
Brian Rudd’s visit to St Peter and Paul’s changed both the lives of Father Bob and his parish in other ways, too. The next year, Brian, by now a regular visitor, called by to tell Father Bob about another young man having terrible problems in the neighbourhood. ‘He’s even worse off than me!’ he exclaimed. His name was Costas and he was, in turn, to have a massive impact on everyone he came into contact with. And for Father Bob, he was to end up, years later, causing more heartache than anyone could ever have thought possible.
10
Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk
Costas Vasiliou was a wild kid, the likes of which Father Bob Maguire had never before encountered. He’d first come across him at the age of fifteen, after a social worker called to see if the priest would be prepared to mentor the boy. Costas wasn’t a bad kid, but he desperately needed a kindly guiding hand, she’d said. He needed a personal mentor, someone who could spend quality time with him on his own. Could Father Bob help? Would he?
Father Bob was reluctant to get involved with such a young child. ‘No, no, no,’ he insisted. ‘A Catholic priest and a fifteen-year-old boy? Can you imagine how that would look to the outside world? I’m not the right person for this.’ Of course, the priest had helped many boys and young men before, but either they were always together with their friends, or there were plenty of other people around them all the time. That way, he felt both he and his charges were protected from anyone thinking there was anything untoward happening from either side.
‘Some of the kids we helped were precocious, and they’d insinuate themselves into the kitchen of the presbytery to get a feed,’ Father Bob says. ‘If you saw that now, kids in a Catholic presbytery, you’d jump to the conclusion that the priest was a paedophile. But those kids always travelled in groups, thank God, so that made it all so much easier. You wouldn’t be alone with them. You wouldn’t even give anyone the chance to think anything bad was happening. But now they were suggesting I mentor a fifteen-year-old boy, and I knew that could be a recipe for disaster.’
The social worker, however, was just as determined. ‘But you have a great reputation for helping kids, and you’ve been a probation officer for years,’ she replied. ‘You could make a huge difference to his life.’
The priest sighed. ‘Well, why don’t you get him put on probation then?’ he asked finally. ‘Then I can be his probation officer, and I’ll help him that way.’
Then, in a totally unrelated approach, Brian Rudd also came along, suggesting he give Costas a hand. Father Bob, by then forty-one, suddenly felt he had no choice but to meet the boy, and see what he could do for him. It was a decision that would have repercussions for decades to come.
For Costas, Father Bob soon discovered, had real psychological problems. Many could be traced directly back to his family, who’d migrated to Australia from Cyprus in the late 1950s. Back home, his father had been a member of the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, a Greek Cypriot paramilitary group fighting a violent campaign for an end to British rule in Cyprus, and had been imprisoned for a time, possibly tortured. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when they arrived in Melbourne they were all put to work by the member of their extended family who’d sponsored them to come. ‘I think the father was already mad by the time he got here, and then the indignity of discovering his family was being put to work by better-off members of the family finished him off,’ says Father Bob. ‘He never got over that. He had a strong sense of justice, and that felt unjust. He felt he’d suffered a grave dishonour. Here he was, a man and his wife and their seven sons and one daughter installed above a fish and chip shop having to work long, long hours, with very little freedom …’
He and his wife were already traumatised, and found it extremely hard to look after such a large family. As a result, they put each of the boys, from time to time, into boys’ homes to be looked after. They imagined they’d be better cared for there, but sadly, some of the boys emerged even worse, having suffered physical or sexual abuse. Two died young.
Costas, the middle son, was so eager to avoid being put into care that he’d race home from school every lunchtime to wash the breakfast dishes, and then run back at the end of the day to tidy the house ready for his mum to come back from the factory where she worked to earn extra money. He’d hoped she’d never make him leave home but when he too was put into residential care, he was devastated. ‘The mother just couldn’t handle her kids,’ says Father Bob. ‘But Costas was always angry about that. He felt so betrayed. He resented that all his life. He’d been the one who looked after his mum and the other children. He’d come home from school to clean and polish and be the good, reliable son. He couldn’t believe what she’d done to him. He too ended up with a great sense of injustice, just like his father.’
By the age of fifteen, he’d already become a regular drug user and had a criminal record. ‘He was sad first, then mad, then bad. Costas went from one home to another to another, but he would never talk about his times there. He felt abused, mostly emotional abuse from his family, but then the persistent post-trauma stress of having been a ward of state. At one place, he had weekend leave and one of his brothers was meant to pick him up and take him home, but he’d often be left at the gate, waiting, waiting, and no-one would come. Imagine that! You’re looking forward to two days away and then it would get darker and darker and you’re still standing waiting, always at the risk of the manager coming out and saying, “You’ve got to come back now.” He’d then hide, just in case his brother would still come. And if his brother did come, he’d immediately put Costas down, saying he was only a drug addict. Whether that convinced him he might as well carry on like a lunatic, I don’t know …’
Father Bob tried hard to get Costas professional help, to have him put into rehab, a health unit, a halfway house. But no solution ever stuck, or seemed to work out. Costas would reappear from time to time to sleep in the back room, the Outback House and sometimes in the presbytery itself. At other times, he’d just disappear, roaming around the neighbourhood. He never took drugs in front of Father Bob, but the priest often had reason to suspect he was still using heroin. There were times when Father Bob dearly wished he hadn’t taken on Costas but, then again, he knew the boy had nowhere else to turn and, because of his own life, he knew that feeling well. He saw himself as having an inescapable duty to help, especially since no-one else would. ‘We were very protective of Costas but, in hindsight, we should never have got involved,’ he says. ‘We thought he’d thrive with opportunities and the chance for redemption but redemption was never on the cards, really. We had no idea that the care would last so long …’
Costas’s plight had also helped alert Father Bob to a fast-growing problem in Melbourne: youth homelessness. Costas had nowhere to go, neither did Brian, and more and more young people were turning up at the church also looking for somewhere safe to sleep.
Back in the mid-1970s, youth homelessness wasn’t recognised as a significant social problem; it was seen merely as a predicament affecting a few isolated individuals. But throughout the decade, it was emerging more and more clearly as a major crisis in society brought about by changing economic, social and political conditions. A shortage of affordable housing, rising unemployment, the breakdown of f
amilies, an increase in domestic violence and the availability of hard drugs all played a part. Two influential reports, the Report of the Working Party on Homeless Men and Women, in 1973, and Homeless People and the Law, in 1976, both revealed youth homelessness to be a growing problem, with estimates that there were between 3000 and 4000 people homeless each night in Melbourne alone. Ten years later, in the mid-1980s, the accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand put the national figure at close to 40 000.
Father Bob was now seeing with his own eyes a growing number of young homeless people arriving at his door, often traipsing down to South Melbourne from St Kilda and Fitzroy along a route he nicknamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Always touched by their stories of difficulties and desperation, and having never had a secure, stable home himself as a kid, he empathised hugely with their plight, and wondered what he could do.
Finally, after talking it through with everyone around him, he decided to set up a halfway house in a two-storey terrace on nearby Cecil Street to provide emergency accommodation for some of the young people. It was to be staffed by volunteer parishioners and, in time, hopefully, qualified youth workers. The decision was made that the philosophy of the project should be ‘to encourage the local community to fulfil its Christian obligation in providing emergency accommodation and counselling to needy youths without counting the cost’. While the Victorian Government provided a grant for its setup, most of the funds from that point on were raised by locals. ‘A fantastic amount of work was put in on a voluntary basis,’ says Father Bob. ‘It ranged from volunteer live-in workers to cooks and cleaners and local businesses donating goods and services. Also, a local businessmen’s group was formed to raise funds and encourage donations. It showed that with genuine effort on the part of ordinary people, great things can be achieved.’
One of the people pledging a huge amount of time to the project was Henry Nissen. A former Commonwealth boxing champion, he’d just retired from his fighting career and was running a clothing business with his family, working as a volunteer with disadvantaged youth at Pentridge Prison and doing welfare work in a children’s home in Burwood, when he met the priest. ‘I was doing well, and felt it was about time I gave something back to the community,’ he says. ‘The next thing I knew, I was doing street work and helping run Cecil House and doing … well … whatever Bob wanted me to do.’
In Henry, Father Bob had found a great asset. He too had endured a difficult childhood, so he was naturally empathetic with kids going through tough times. He and his twin brother Leon had been born to a Jewish family in 1948 in a refugee centre in what had been the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen. Their father, a tailor, had fled Poland for Russia and served in the army, marrying a Ukrainian girl. The couple, their son and their twin boys migrated to Australia when Henry was one, with his mum immediately suffering a nervous breakdown. His dad was working so hard to keep their heads above water that Henry and his brothers were in and out of children’s homes until the age of ten.
A little kid and a natural target, Henry was beaten up by a school bully and decided to learn how to fight. Leon soon joined him and the pair won numerous boxing titles throughout their careers, appearing as regulars on the television show ‘Golden Gloves’. Henry represented Australia in the Commonwealth Games, won the Australian and the Commonwealth flyweight titles and was, in the early 1970s, the number-three contender for the World Title. His nickname as a boxer was ‘Hammering Henry, the Hustling Hebrew’. Now he invested a lot of that hustling into raising funds for Cecil House, and much of his passion into helping kids. As well as working for a tailor during the day, he ended up one of the most regular locals at the halfway house, donating money to help with its upkeep as well as fundraising, running it day-to-day, cooking meals there in the evenings, and sleeping over. ‘Boxing was good training in becoming a youth worker,’ he says. ‘You need a lot of discipline in boxing, and that spills over into keeping your life in order and trying to help others manage their lives better too.’
He was extremely well equipped for his work in other ways, too. Many of the young people staying at the house were drinking heavily or taking drugs and were sometimes violent. Henry could defend himself seemingly effortlessly and was the perfect person to wade into a fight and stop it stone dead.
Father Bob often found such behaviour terribly disheartening. It was obvious some of the young people had given up all hope of ever living a normal life, and he was regularly taken aback by the degree of desperation.
‘They were only young but some of them seemed twice their age,’ says Father Bob. ‘I’d tell them, “If you keep on going like this, you’ll die.” I didn’t realise they didn’t give a rat’s arse if they lived or died. But I just wanted us to get through to them. They had so much talent; they were full of it. I tried normal things, like basketball and cricket and football, but they couldn’t do anything as they were so often under the influence of drugs. Some of them were crazy kids. They could no longer do normal things. Sometimes we wondered what was wrong with these kids. They were drinking cough mixture, sniffing glue, injecting themselves. But at least they weren’t on the streets; they had somewhere safe to sleep.’
Henry, Damian, other helpers and later the authorities themselves saw Father Bob as becoming the pioneer for this kind of work in Australia. He was even more unusual in that he began regularly talking to the press about the problems of youth homelessness, one of the first people with a public profile and in any position of authority to do so. When he sensed that some people just didn’t believe that such poverty existed on the streets of Melbourne, he even persuaded a TV station to send a camera crew out with him. The story they came back with caused a sensation when it was aired.
Henry enjoyed Father Bob’s approach, liked the work, got on well with the kids and proved an expert at encouraging other volunteers to come and lend a hand. One of them, Liz, a teacher at St Peter and Paul’s Primary School and a volunteer cook at Cecil House on a Monday night, he even ended up marrying – with Father Bob officiating on the steps of St Peter and Paul’s, since Henry, not being a Catholic, could hardly be married inside. ‘It wasn’t a terribly romantic way to meet,’ says Liz, who at the time of writing had just celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. ‘But the halfway house was a very worthwhile project. Father Bob was very open all the time to trying new things to make a difference.’
After three years of Cecil House, Father Bob realised this experiment couldn’t go on for too much longer. He needed more people with expertise, he needed more money and he needed a proper structure in which to run a youth refuge for street kids. He still had local young neighbourhood people staying in the presbytery from time to time and in the Outback House, but for these street kids from all over, he felt he needed to offer them a lot more help.
And it was then that he came across Brother Alex McDonald.
Reading the newspaper one morning, Father Bob saw a story about a Jesuit brother in St Kilda working with young homeless people. He called him and arranged a meeting.
‘I thought I’d better get some expert advice on this, call in the specialists,’ Father Bob says. ‘No-one seemed to know much about this. No-one was doing much about it in those days. It was all so new. You can’t stand back and ask, “Who will come and help us?” You have to get out there and bloody do it yourself.’
Brother Alex McDonald was a tall, thin, gangly young man, with a scruffy beard and an earnest expression, who looked much older than his twenty-eight years. But he had, it turned out, plenty of experience of homelessness – both professionally and personally. As a child in Scotland, he’d been put in an orphanage as a baby. A nun told him both his parents were dead. He still remembers vividly the day when, at six years of age, all the children were gathered together and a nun called out, ‘Hands up all those of you who would like to go to Australia!’ Obviously, none of the youngsters had a clue what Australia was. They imagined it might be a nice place for a day out. Everyone’s hand shot up.
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sp; As a result, in 1953 Alex was one of around 50 000 children shipped to Australia after World War II under the British child migration scheme, an arrangement that was later to spark massive controversy with the youngsters at its heart dubbed ‘the lost children of the empire’. Many suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse, and many, it turned out, had parents back in Britain who’d left their children in temporary care as they sorted out personal crises, only to discover they’d been shipped to the other side of the world, with no hope of contacting them.
Alex ended up in a Christian Brothers’ orphanage in Western Australia, where the six year old was raped, and endured regular beatings. At twelve, he was put to work on a farm, managed to escape, was caught and sent back to the orphanage, and escaped again and went on the run. Now homeless, and all alone, he slept in parks, ate leftovers from rubbish bins, broke into houses for money to survive, joined a bikie gang and ended up in a reform centre. Eventually, a kindly couple took pity on him and took him in, allowing him to continue his education at night school.
In his late teens, however, he was shocked to be approached one day by a man who introduced himself as his brother. He, it turned out, had been shipped to Australia a few years earlier and had seen his social welfare file when he was enlisted to fight in Vietnam, discovering letters sent from their mother, and the name of his brother, Alex. The pair spent one very happy day together, vowing to stay in touch. But Alex’s brother never returned from the war. He was killed in action.
Alex continued studying and eventually trained, and qualified, as a youth worker. In 1971, he joined the Jesuits in Melbourne and began his work with street kids, running the Manresa People’s Centre in Hawthorn and the Mother Teresa Centre in Greenvale. Just like Father Bob, his own childhood had been tough, and he wanted to help others having difficulties, who felt they had nowhere to go and no-one to turn to.