Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  The two men found they had similar ideologies, and the same burning desire to help kids. Brother Alex told the priest of the increasing numbers of children he’d met on the streets of Melbourne who were sleeping rough. Nearly all tended to be there through home circumstances: some had been thrown out after disagreements with parents or because their parents could no longer afford to keep them; some had run away to escape violent or alcoholic fathers; and some, usually preschool-aged children, had been dumped in parks, on the streets or even in public toilets. Many were getting involved in crime and were now taking hard drugs to blot out the pain, and pushing drugs to others to feed their own addiction. A number, both boys and girls, were turning to prostitution to earn enough money to keep going. For those streets were a hard place to live. Brother Alex himself had been slashed with a knife when he went to help a young boy he saw being cut with razor blades by gang members.

  ‘So at that meeting with Alex, we agreed to form an alliance,’ Father Bob says. ‘We needed someone with experience of working on the streets, and he needed backup. So we almost reinvented the parish of South Melbourne as the parish with a real mission. You just did things like that yourself, and the top of the town [the Archbishop’s office] would say, “Thank God someone’s doing something! Take our blessing.” And off you’d go …’

  As a result of that meeting, the fledgling body Open Family was formed in 1978. ‘We called it Open Family because if you don’t have a family, you’ll be lost,’ says Father Bob, doubtless recalling the hard times of his own youth, when he could so easily have gone to the dark side himself. ‘So we decided we’d be a kind of family to anyone who needed one instead.’ Open Family immediately started gathering food, blankets and clothing for street kids and opening youth hostels in both St Kilda and South Melbourne, in Park Street, near Montague Street. Henry went along to help Brother Alex, going out into the streets at night to look for homeless kids and try to persuade them to come back to one of the refuges. Father Bob spent a lot of his time raising more funds, talking at business meetings about the urgent need for such a venture, rallying parishioners to support it, and having meetings with government bodies.

  ‘It was all about helping people on the streets and befriending them,’ says Henry. ‘We were all talking to them, winning their trust, and often taking them back to the youth hostel where they could sleep the night. Some of them were on the run from the police, or had run away from home because they’d had an argument; there were times I would take the kids home on the train. Other days, I might go to court and speak up for them, talk on their behalf. I’d encourage them to go to school to get educated and try to help them in every way possible.’

  His past as a boxer came in handy in a number of ways. Sometimes a street kid would become aggressive towards him, and Henry would gently mention his boxing, and then invite the kid to take the first swing. ‘They always backed down then!’ he laughs. ‘Also, through my boxing, I became a member of the Variety Club of Australia and asked them if they would give Bob a bus. So they did, and we converted the bus to a mobile home from which we could cook and help people in need as we drove around. Providing food was a good way of connecting with people.’

  TV star Tony Barber, the host of the long-running show ‘Sale of the Century’, as well as ‘Family Feud’ and ‘The Great Temptation’, was heavily involved with the Variety Club at the time and, in helping organise that bus for Father Bob, met up with the priest. He was instantly won over to his cause. ‘He was very impressive and I found his whole approach refreshing,’ says Tony, who had two teenage daughters of his own. ‘It was quite remarkable to see what this guy was doing. He’d formed a good partnership with Alex for the Foundation, and the way he’d got his church to work in a social welfare capacity was much more like a Latin American church in some ways.

  ‘His operation at that stage was pretty hand-to-mouth and I spent a lot of time in the office, helping. Bob was running the whole show, but he’s less of an executive organiser and more of a street person himself! He was always so good with young people. He’d get angry with kids for taking drugs, but he’d never condemn them. He was never judgemental. I came to see him as a guy who really talks the talk, and walks the walk.’

  He was also someone who never missed an opportunity to push the story of street kids and what needed to be done to an ever-broader section of the population. And very soon the chance came to bring their plight, and to propel what he and his organisation were doing, to a whole new, national audience.

  11

  Nothing to Live for

  A dark night in St Kilda. A young girl, barefoot and in jeans, steps off a train, climbs over the high railings of the platform, crosses the road and then slumps on the ground, her back to a concrete post. Her shoulders are hunched, her face is crumpled, she looks lost to the world. She can be no more than fifteen years old.

  ‘I don’t have anything to live for, really,’ she says. ‘I really don’t care what happens to me now. I don’t know why. I just want to die.’

  Further up the street, police officers talk about finding kids already dead in public toilets with needles still in their arms. ‘You see girls, reasonably clean-looking kids, who don’t appear to have any ties,’ one says. ‘You see them over a two-year period gradually destroy themselves with speed, alcohol and prostitution …’ And another: ‘This becomes so much more than a job. It could be your younger sister, slumped in the corner of a railway station or prostate in a toilet somewhere …’

  These were scenes from the streets of Melbourne in 1982, when a documentary called Street Kids, made by two filmmakers who moved into a notoriously sleazy boarding house in St Kilda and befriended a number of youngsters forced by circumstance to live on the streets, shocked the world. In Australia, it premiered at the 1983 Melbourne Film Festival, provoking horror and outrage among its audience. In the US, it was reviewed by the New York Times, which said, ‘Although this documentary is set in a small section of Melbourne, it could benefit anyone wanting to know more about the plight of homeless teens in general.’

  This was the grim milieu in which Father Bob Maguire, Brother Alex McDonald and Henry Nissen now found themselves working. Brother Alex, who helped produce the documentary, also made an appearance on screen. He talked about how, by 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning patrolling the streets of Melbourne for Open Family – which in 1981 had become incorporated as the Open Family Foundation – he might have seen twenty to thirty young people between the ages of ten and eighteen wandering around and sleeping rough, gradually drifting into a life of crime, drugs and sex work to survive. ‘You can’t get a job without somewhere to live,’ says one fifteen year old. ‘And you can’t get a place to live without money from a job. You’re in a hole and there’s no way to get out.’

  For Father Bob, it was a situation completely beyond his experience and expertise. ‘Back then, you didn’t know what to do, you’d never come across this before,’ says the then forty-seven year old. ‘Some of these kids even then were too far gone to help. You didn’t know what the social prognosis was for them. In those days, there was no social prognosis. It was something completely new. All people were doing was juggling them, warehousing them and recycling them through the courts. We knew we had to do something. Once you go on the streets and become involved, you always run the risk of exacerbating the alienation, but offering them a safe place to sleep was the first step.

  ‘It was hard work, though. Alex was the one who went in and tried to sort out most of the dramas. I don’t mind causing drama, but I’m not a great lover of reacting to drama. And, like Costas, a lot of them were very difficult. They were unloved and unloving, and they’d lost the art of being nice or hadn’t had the chance of developing any niceness. Some people used to talk about the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”. The distinction was ridiculous, and it was good to have the clout of the Catholic Church to help them. But it wasn’t always easy.’

  Studies were beginning to d
elve into some of the reasons for youth homelessness and coming up with explanations such as physical, sexual and emotional abuse by parents, step parents and/or siblings, the breakdown of families, neglect, separation from the birth family, time in state care and witnessing violent acts, particularly in the home. The result was often childhood trauma, which would then make it difficult for young people to form and sustain relationships with others, sometimes for the rest of their lives. This, in turn, could lead to mental illness or substance abuse, with drugs or alcohol, in an attempt to blot out the pain. Being homeless for any period seemed to increase the trauma, with the constant risk of assault on the streets, and desperation likely to lead to crime or prostitution, for both boys and girls, to earn money.

  In that same year, publicity around the Open Family Foundation and its work, the documentary and the increasing amount of research on street kids led to the 1982 Senate Standing Committee Report on Youth Homelessness. It was the first sign that the Federal Government was starting to recognise the issue as a growing social problem. While they had few concrete facts on its scale, parliamentarians also began talking about trying to put some money into helping with emergency accommodation.

  For Father Bob, it was all too little too late. With the Foundation’s hostels in St Kilda and his own Cecil House full of young people, Costas more often than not at the presbytery, and Brian still sometimes dropping by, he realised he and his parishioners were now playing a vital role in keeping these youngsters alive. And, more and more, those parishioners were signalling their willingness to become involved.

  The parishioners themselves were still a disparate mix of long-term South Melbourne residents, Italians who’d arrived in the 1960s, residents from the public housing developments, overseas migrants and the children of those migrants, and middle-class newcomers just beginning to move into the area. ‘Many people began to feel at home in this diverse parish community because, under Bob’s leadership, it opened itself up and invited a great range of people to come into the parish house, the schools, the church, the basketball court out the back, and the other facilities,’ says Damian Coleridge.

  ‘Among them were homeless people, young people wanting to get off the streets, local young people often from immigrant families, people looking for a word of encouragement from someone, and many, many others. Many different people began to feel accepted and at home there and, as parishioners, we began to understand more and more that in the end we belonged to one another; that a local church had to do what Jesus did and be a home for people who had nowhere else to go. Experiencing this ourselves, with Bob enabling it to happen and giving it direction and meaning, we wanted to share it with others. It became the mission of the South Melbourne church and, in doing this, we found ourselves living out the gospels. It was real and it was wonderful. And Bob was a key figure through it all, a prophetic figure, leading by word and example.’

  Costas, loud and rambunctious, could always be a challenge, especially if he’d been taking drugs, but Father Bob insisted the parish had a duty to look after him. There were a few who disagreed, but it was usually much easier to go along with what the priest wanted than argue against him. As a compromise, at one stage Damian swapped homes with Costas, so Costas moved into his rented house and he moved into the presbytery to give everyone a break.

  TV news and current affairs journalist Geraldine Doogue, later to host the ABC religious affairs program ‘Compass’, encountered Father Bob when she was writing a documentary in 1986 about the Catholic Church, ‘A Shifting Heart’, and also met Costas. ‘He was a gorgeous-looking boy, but he was really feral,’ she says. ‘He was seriously deranged. He was right on the edge. For Bob, there were tremendous ethical dilemmas. He could cope with the boy stealing from him, but when he realised he was being violent towards a girl, he told him he would be out if he laid a finger on her again. Bob was working with some seriously damaged people, for whom there might not be any redemption, and I really admired him for his open-eyed compassion.’

  The first child to die hit Father Bob particularly hard.

  He was a teenager who’d been living on the streets and who’d been rapidly sliding into alcoholism. Everyone had tried to help him but had been unable to get through. He seemed a child completely lost to the world around him. Not long after his sixteenth birthday, he died of acute alcohol poisoning.

  Father Bob was distraught. ‘He died on our watch,’ he says. ‘He should never have died. A young boy like that … it was a terrible thing. But you’d talk to these young people, and ask them how long they think they’d live. They’d say, “Till our twenties.” That was shocking to me that they didn’t care about life at all. But I wanted to keep them alive, they all had so much promise. All men and women are born equal, but they don’t get equal access to the world’s rewards. It’s important to give a leg up to the people at the bottom of the ladder, because they’re just as talented as those at the top; they just don’t get the same opportunities. I wanted to keep these young people alive, I wanted them to fulfil their potential. But we failed with him.’

  That was only a taste of the grief that was to come, too. These youngsters were incredibly vulnerable to exploitation and, without hope that things would ever get better for them, and without much guidance, often made bad choices. One eighteen year old from a Greek family had become mixed up with a gang working the streets of Melbourne. The Foundation had given him somewhere to stay, and was helping him find a job and get his life back together when gang members managed to hunt him down. He was executed on the streets. ‘He got involved with some nasty underworld characters,’ says Father Bob. ‘A lot were dying on the southern front. I’d had no idea that kids would die or be forced into such nasty business.’

  As the number of child deaths climbed, the tragedies attracted increasing publicity and local concern, and gradually the police began to become more and more involved. At a meeting with senior Victorian police officials in 1982, Father Bob and Brother Alex pressed them to crack down on the people trying to exploit the homeless youngsters, particularly sexually. At first, the police were wary of conceding the extent of the problems but finally agreed to set up a ‘child abuse’ unit, the Delta Task Force, to try to counter child molestation, child prostitution and the paedophile rings known to be preying on the vulnerable youngsters. It was the first time the police had tried to infiltrate such rings, and set out specifically to help prevent kids being exploited.

  There were certainly some successes: the news of the formation of the crack squad was known to have deterred some people from taking advantage of youngsters, and the street kids themselves, often via Brother Alex, Father Bob or their growing band of street workers and parish volunteers, started providing information about activity on the streets. ‘It worked extremely well at first,’ says Father Bob. ‘The young people could tell us if people were bothering them, or new drug-pushers were arriving on the scene, and we could inform the police. The police then would take action. It was always difficult, though, gathering enough evidence to actually prosecute. But it was a good lesson in the importance of forming strategic alliances and with the police involved, the public were keener to see street kids as victims rather than offenders.’

  Their involvement and cooperation also gave the Foundation more credibility. Brother Alex was often invited to meetings of business leaders and charity groups to talk about its work, and often ended up leaving his audience in tears at his heartrending stories – and with sizeable sums of money in donations. ‘He was extremely good at that,’ says Father Bob. ‘People sensed, somehow, that he was the real deal.’ Delta was finally wound up in 1986 after infiltrating a paedophile support group and its attempt to set up in Melbourne, with the Victorian Police Child Exploitation Unit later set up in its place to continue its work.

  Meanwhile, at home in South Melbourne, parishioners continued to become more and more involved in looking after kids, and in raising funds to allow the work to continue. Some volunteers would traipse
around the platforms of railway stations, looking for homeless kids to divert to the refuges, while some prepared food to serve them and others helped staff the hostels. Still more helped out at all the sporting facilities Father Bob had made available around the place. As well as the produce store, locals also participated in Nightwatch, where they minded the presbytery on weekday evenings to keep an eye on the kids there, and were often rostered on overnight to answer the phone and door, give out food and vouchers and provide 24/7 support to people who needed it.

  Parishioners started an op shop to raise money for the work with the kids, ran English classes for migrants, conducted a clinic opposite the church in Montague Street with a doctor, naturopath and masseur, and put on civic masses, debates and lectures. They also put on a number of plays, one written by Damian, with hundreds attending each production.

  Building a fresh sense of community in the area, with the church at its base, also helped when they protested unwelcome changes happening in the neighbourhood, such as new massage parlours applying for planning permission – which locals feared might merely turn out to be brothels – and, even more urgently, the idea of relocating the historic South Melbourne VFL club from its home on the lake oval to Sydney. Since the population of the area had fallen to half its postwar figure, support for the club had slumped with it and it hadn’t won a premiership since 1933. Now it had the chance to be reborn as Sydney’s first Australian Rules team, the Sydney Swans. But since the club had been an intrinsic part of the local landscape since 1874, Father Bob joined in arguing against the move north wholeheartedly.