by Sue Williams
During the holidays from the seminary, Bobby always worked. Although he received generous gifts of money from his old Black Rock supporters Father Gorry and Sister Claude to enable him to continue, he had to supplement that with what he could earn in his time off. He did a huge variety of different jobs in those periods, including working back on the wharves, delivering mail for the post office and running children’s playgroups. ‘Today, it seems quite astonishing that people felt back then that priests, and people training for the priesthood, were the best possible people to entrust their children to,’ he says. ‘But at that time, no-one thought anything of it. Parents trusted us, and we looked after their children on camps as well as we possibly could. I even received notes from people thanking me for a long time afterwards. I enjoyed the work, and it was fun helping those kids have holidays. It never occurred to anyone that anything untoward would ever happen.’
At that time, Bobby even went away for his first holiday. With Paul Garland and another friend, he caught a sea ferry to Tasmania and hitchhiked around the island. It had been Paul’s idea. ‘For both of us it was our first time away alone,’ says Paul. ‘We had a good time, travelling around. I like Tasmania and have been back a number of times. But I don’t know that Bob has travelled much since.’ He’s right. It was Bobby’s first holiday, and also his last.
Physical conditions at Werribee improved after 1959, when a second campus was built at Glen Waverley to accommodate extra students, and Bobby and Paul transferred there for their last year. By then, they were both keen to get out and get on with their chosen careers. But first, of course, they had their ordinations.
Bob in 1959, studying at the seminary in Glen Waverley.
Bobby’s ordination on 24 July 1960 became a great family occasion. His sister Eileen sewed him his first set of vestments for his ordination. ‘She put so much love into those,’ says Peta. ‘I think everyone knew what a tough time he’d had in childhood, and this felt like a whole new start.’ One of his mum’s sisters, Sadie, gave him the classic The Book of Scotland, bound in tartan, a keepsake he treasures to this day.
And then the 25-year-old Bobby was finally ordained at St Patrick’s Cathedral, in front of his family, his friends and the faithful Father Gorry and Sister Claude, under Bishop Justin Simonds, the Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, who would three years later become the first Australian-born Catholic priest to reach the rank of archbishop and would begin implementing the reforms of Vatican II. Bobby’s most vivid memories of the occasion were his first-ever taste of alcohol to celebrate, now his teetotal pledge had expired – a glass of the sparkling sweet white wine Porphyry Pearl at Russell Collins Cafeteria – and how bitterly cold the day was.
‘You had to throw yourself onto the floor of the cathedral and it was so cold down there,’ he says. ‘From the word go, you were supposed to be prostrate. But you can’t do much that’s creative or innovative when you’re lying flat on your belly. I couldn’t wait to get up and get out and start work.’
Father Bob’s ordination photo.
6
A Forward Scout
By the time the newly minted Father Bob Maguire emerged from the seminary in 1960, preparations for the Vatican II series of seminars were well underway and there was a mood of excitement throughout the Catholic world. It felt like something historic was about to happen, only no-one yet knew quite what.
For Father Bob and his mates, it was a time of enormous promise. They were hoping not only that Pope John XXIII would throw open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air, as he’d promised, but also that the doors would be permanently unbolted. They felt the news that nearly everything was up for debate and that other religions had been invited to come along as observers at the Council were very good signs.
It was in this atmosphere that Father Bob made his way back into the world after spending the last eight years ‘locked away’. He’d entered the seminary as a quiet, anxious boy, subdued by years of poverty, insecurity and the grief of having lost everyone close to him. He emerged as a young man a great deal more confident about his place in the world, well read and eager to explore many of the new ideas that were being tossed around. At the same time, however, he was still keen to please his superiors, and eager to make a go of his role as a 26-year-old new priest in one of the most turbulent, and dynamic, decades in the western world.
The Church hierarchy immediately saw him as someone showing enormous promise: an energetic yet faithful and obedient servant they could place almost anywhere in the Melbourne Archdiocese. And so they did. For the next thirteen years, Father Bob was posted to no fewer than seven separate parishes to serve as an assistant to the incumbent priests, with a variety of jobs. He’d spent the whole of his youth moving around from house to house as the rent fell due; this felt like simply more of the same.
His first posting was to Belgrave, 45 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD, known as the gateway to the Dandenong Ranges. It was a quiet, pretty spot where nothing much happened, and it was a gentle easing into the kind of life he might lead in the future. He felt himself relax. ‘I was always daunted by new things, and nothing came easily to me,’ he says. ‘Life had been a challenge from the word go and I still felt a bit lost. Being in the seminary for the last eight years meant I’d lost contact with all my friends too, but Belgrave was a very nice place to work in.’
Six months later, Father Bob’s next stop, the former Olympic village of Heidelberg, north-east of the city, was much more of a struggle. For a start, his responsibilities as an assistant priest were spread over a far bigger geographical area, often well beyond the parish itself, and after spending hour after hour on a series of buses and trains, he realised he’d need a car to be able to properly fulfil his duties. That was a major hurdle. ‘I’d never had money of my own and as an assistant priest, you were dependent on the parish priest to pay you,’ he says. ‘And if he didn’t want to pay you, he didn’t. It was a clerical caste system: the top clergy went from plum to plum; the others went from slum to slum. It wasn’t until later that they struck a minimum wage you’d have to be paid, and there was never any talk of the maximum!’
His old mentor, Father Gorry, again came to his rescue with funds. With that money, Father Bob bought his first car, a battered old second-hand VW Beetle. It made a world of difference to his life as suddenly he was able to drive to all the far-flung places he was expected to minister to, including two hospitals, a sanatorium, a children’s home and the local cemetery.
Being out in the world visiting such places proved an invaluable learning experience. The nearby Austin Hospital, previously the Austin Hospital for Incurables, was by then the largest cancer hospital in Australia, and also had a number of patients with paraplegia and TB, or battling the after-effects of strokes, as well as children who’d survived polio and car crashes. His experiences there had a major, and lasting, impact on the way he viewed the world. ‘I met great sufferers at the Austin,’ he says. ‘I met incredible people who’d lost the use of their hands, so they’d trained themselves to paint and turn book pages with their toes, and I learnt that hospital chaplains can be a breath of fresh air from the outside, reminding people that they’re not just patients, but they’re people, with real lives beyond the hospital and families and hopes and dreams, but who just happen to be, at this time, in distress.’ He became determined to help try to brighten their lives, and often worked hard at making them laugh. But from those who didn’t make it, he learnt too. ‘I developed a love for the dying, which I still have today,’ he says.
Heidelberg made a lifelong impression on him in another way, too. As a kid, he’d first been a supporter of his sister Kathleen’s footy team, Essendon, then of Father James McHugh’s Richmond. But after so long cocooned in the seminary without TV, radio or newspapers, he’d completely lost track of the football. ‘It cleansed my mind and heart of previous footy contamination,’ he jokes. ‘So then I was free; I could see the light.’
In Me
lbourne, it’s considered a sin to switch team allegiances even once, but Father Bob did it now for an outrageous second time. Heidelberg back then was one of the pre-draft catchment zones from which Collingwood used to recruit players, with staff and veterans visiting schools and sports clubs to talent-spot. As a result, most of the population there were fervent Magpies supporters, inordinately proud of local boys Jack Regan, Phonse Kyne and the Twomey brothers, Bill, Mick and Pat, who’d all proved stalwarts of the team. And there was also the team’s historical association with Catholicism, with its powerful patronage in the 1920s by influential businessman and prominent Australian Irish Catholic John Wren, whose life was fictionalised by writer Frank Hardy in his Power Without Glory. Collingwood’s fans back then were mostly working-class Catholic and Irish, sharing a general sentiment of exclusion and being discriminated against. ‘So I had a spiritual awakening when I went there, and emerged a Collingwood supporter,’ Father Bob says, laughing.
‘Football is often likened to religion; there’s a ritual involved and while you go in hoping for the best, you know you’re going to suffer along the way. Collingwood suits my temperament. I’m a Virgo, a drama queen, and I thrive on the agony and the ecstasy, and Collingwood always has both. Watching them is like a Greek drama: you’re either on top of the world, or a long, long way below it. But it’s always cathartic to go through the tragedy, blame and shame with them, and then the euphoria and the feeling that you’re in heaven on earth. One moment, it’s, “Oh God, Oh God, what’s happening?” and then just as you’re on the brink of despair and plunged into misery, they’ll come good. So they then have their proudest moments while you’re in the car park, having been persuaded to leave early.’
He also saw footy as a way for the Church to reach out to young people. Many of the local kids were bored and didn’t have enough to do. So Father Bob, with his experience of running play centres and camps in the holidays for kids when he’d been at the seminary, appealed for footballs, cricket bats and balls and other sporting equipment and set up friendly games for all the kids to join in. ‘While they were playing sport, they weren’t getting into trouble,’ he says. ‘And you could also talk to them about things like teamwork and how they led their lives. It was a good way to connect with them.’ And even if they did get into trouble, Father Bob was determined to help out there too. He volunteered to become an honorary probation officer, so he could speak up on behalf of any kids who hit difficulties, or help to supervise them if that was deemed necessary.
The priest in charge of Heidelberg, however, was a strict, old-fashioned man who didn’t take kindly to an underling so different from himself in both interests and outlook, and so active in his parish. In his professional life Father Bob was keeping track of all the discussions about relaxing, modernising and reaching out with Catholicism in the run-up to Vatican II, and was fast developing his own ideas about the way to do things, and his own much more irreverent style. It wasn’t long before the pair clashed. Father Bob’s predecessor had left in a hurry after a row about taking a day off; now it was Father Bob’s turn to feel the priest’s displeasure. Relations between the pair froze to the point where the priest would communicate only via notes slid under the door of his assistant’s bedroom and would lock the kitchen in the presbytery at 6 p.m., leaving milk for him in a saucepan outside. ‘It was like I was the cat!’ says Father Bob.
Even worse, the priest made a number of complaints about his young charge to the Archdiocese, accusing him of ‘insubordination’. As a result, Father Bob was hauled in front of the auxiliary bishop Francis Fox, one of the state’s most hardline conservatives, who made his name denouncing left-wing unions and the Australian Labor Party’s links with communism. It was to be Father Bob’s first clash with the more traditionalist elements of his Church, and the forerunner of many more to come.
After eighteen months, Father Bob was transferred to Ashburton, in Melbourne’s south-east, a growing area with a large pool of postwar Housing Commission homes. It was a much happier fit. The priest presiding was a gentle man, hardworking and dedicated to his mission, despite being in poor health as a result of TB. Father Bob saw him as a tremendous role model and supported him energetically. ‘We had everything a priest could wish for,’ he says, nostalgically now. ‘A full church, great attendance at sacraments, a strong lay leadership and hordes of teenagers and school children.’ Again, he set up footy and cricket games for the kids and found they responded well to him.
In his second year there, Father Bob was put in charge when his boss was sent to the cool reaches of Mount Macedon to recuperate. Taking mass regularly, he worked hard on his own style of preaching. That curious voice and delivery – a sharp sawmill and steam-hammer tone, forged among the steel mills of Glasgow and flattened by a childhood in the suburbs of Melbourne – began to make him a distinctive presence in the pulpit, quite apart from what he actually said.
The beginning of Father Bob’s stay in Ashburton coincided with the actual start of Vatican II. It had opened in October 1962, with the first session’s attendees including the four men who’d later succeed Pope John XXIII as pontiffs, as Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The sessions were all packed with participants and observers from all over the world and, back in Melbourne, Father Bob read the reports from all the various sessions avidly, transfixed by much of the debate, and heartened by many of the changes being foreshadowed. He even knew some of those in Rome at the time; they included his old CBC teacher Brother Leo Griffin, who’d gone to the Vatican twelve months before on a three-year term of international study.
At the same time, many within the Ashburton congregation were alarmed by the breadth of the changes being discussed and felt keenly that both their Church and their faith were under attack. Father Bob took it upon himself to act as an emissary for the new guard, reassuring everyone that this was all for the better. He himself embraced the new order enthusiastically, seeing it as giving him licence to experiment with the way he ran masses, preached and said catechism. He took off his clerical collar, wearing it only on occasions when he felt it might ‘frighten the horses’ not to, and embarked on what was to become his lifelong habit of talking directly to members of his congregation from the pulpit in a much more informal, casual and, for some, shockingly unceremonious way.
But even as the Vatican II Council was drawing to a close towards the end of 1965, a movement was forming with the express aim of rewinding some of the changes. As says Father Bob’s old mate Paul Garland, who was ordained at the same time, ‘For us, Vatican II was a blessing; it was what we’d been hoping for. Bob was always on the side of the angels. But I can remember, even before the Council finished, one of the great men of the Vatican saying that it’d take them forty years to undo what had been done, but that they’d started on it already …’
Father Bob, like the other great supporters of the changes, saw one of his roles as to defend the new order, and as vigorously as he could. He drew on his cadet days as inspiration. ‘We were part of the forward scouts moving among the people to educate them, and tell them that just because Mother Church had opened her windows to let in the fresh air, it didn’t mean we were all going to freeze to death. On the contrary. It meant that Catholicism was going to be more open, more welcoming, and it was going to embrace change rather than fight against it. We were rallying the troops to understand that.’
Father Bob’s enthusiasm for all things military wasn’t confined to metaphors about his new-look Church, either. While at Ashburton, he was also invited in 1965 to be a part-time chaplain in the Army Reserve. The Vietnam War had been going for three years at that point, and conscription had been introduced in Australia following a US Government request for more support. Father Bob, sensing this was a war that wasn’t going to be won any time soon, and feeling there was a great need for spiritual support and comfort among those making up the armed forces – as well as, it has to be said, needing a bit of extra cash to top up the
meagre allowance he was paid as an assistant priest – immediately agreed. He’d had a soft spot for the army ever since growing up playing in the air raid trenches close by his primary school, and then his time in the army cadets. It was still with a faint pang of nostalgia that he remembered wanting a career in the armed forces. Now, finally, he was able to combine both these loves and do some good for each side. As part of his duties, he attended his unit’s weekly parade, as well as its annual two-week tented training camp. It was a role he would continue to play, in his spare time, for the next four years.
Along with that post, Father Bob was also appointed chaplain to the cadet corps of his old school, the CBC. One of the boys in the cadets at the time was sixteen-year-old Frank O’Connor, who listened, spellbound, as the priest spoke. ‘There was something about the way he engaged with people that grabbed your attention,’ says Frank, who was to come into contact again with his old chaplain much later. ‘You felt he was focused around people, he enjoyed people. He’d only been ordained a couple of years, and he had a huge amount of energy. Listening to him, you felt energised too.’
As the Vatican II Council finally drew to a close in December 1965, so too did Father Bob’s stay at Ashburton. In 1966, he was sent to the newish parish of Braybrook in the western suburbs, an area presided over by an enormously enthusiastic and energetic priest, Father Thomas Murray. ‘He was a tall, flash Irishman who’d been sent out to Braybrook, a place that was poor and working class and had mud everywhere, by an HQ who wanted to cut him down to size,’ says Father Bob. ‘But he’d just risen to the challenge. He’d done a social audit and found the parish needed a school, so he managed to set one up.’
In fact, he’d been so determined to start a school in the area, he’d approached nearly every single order of nuns in the entire state of Victoria to ask for teachers. Eventually, in 1955, two had come forward, and they’d helped establish a temporary school in some railway huts near the station, which eventually became a fully fledged primary and secondary school, with 900 students. In 1961, however, disaster struck: the entire school was gutted by a fire set off by an electrical fault. But by the time Father Bob arrived, the school was again up and running out of a collection of portables and buildings gradually being rebuilt. It grew to become Christ the King College, and later still part of the present-day Caroline Chisholm Catholic College.
