by Sue Williams
‘It felt I spent my whole childhood locked up,’ says Brian. ‘Every so often, it seemed I was being re-arrested and being sent somewhere worse.’ At fifteen, he finally escaped, and went to work in a brickyard. Then he decided that he desperately wanted to see his family again, and set out for South Melbourne, where he’d been born, to look for them. The news he could glean about his brothers wasn’t good. One, he learnt, had hanged himself. The suspicion was that he’d been sexually abused in his children’s home. Another brother had jumped off a bridge and ended up breaking his back.
Undeterred, Brian continued searching for his mother. It took him a long time to trace her but, when he finally knocked on her front door, there was nothing like the warm welcome he’d so fondly imagined all those years. ‘She didn’t want to know me,’ he says bluntly. ‘It was horrendous. It was extremely hard to realise even my mother didn’t want me. She wasn’t even sorry that she’d been made to give me up …’
Devastated, Brian wandered the streets until someone noticed him and reported him to the social welfare department, which contacted Father Bob for help. Brian was more than willing to meet up with the priest. ‘I’d heard Father Bob was a good bloke, and I had nowhere to stay,’ he says. ‘So he said I could stay there for a couple of nights. But I was wary because in the homes I’d been in, priests sometimes abused children. So I refused to come in, but slept out in the garden. Then I started to realise that he wasn’t like that. And he became a very good friend to me. If he hadn’t looked after me back then, I wouldn’t have survived.’
By then, in 1975, the forty-year-old Father Bob was steadily winning back the local parishioners who’d found him too different and had either avoided his services, or gone off to another church. Many were now drifting back, persuaded by stories from the regulars that, while his ways were pretty unconventional, his beliefs were extremely orthodox. ‘You know,’ someone was heard to remark one day, ‘he’s a funny bloke and he does go overboard at times, but there’s no doubt that he really is the genuine article. He’s the full bottle with the gospel!’ A woman even approached him one day to say he was dangerous. ‘You’re an orthodox posing as a revolutionary,’ she told him. ‘That makes you doubly dangerous …’
Father Bob was known to play up to their doubts, too. One Sunday, he thundered from the pulpit, ‘I know what you’re thinking! I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking you’ve seen greater fools than me come and go!’ Another time, frustrated by the way people tended to cluster in the back pews, he moved the altar to the entrance of the church so they’d be, in fact, in the front row.
He’d also regularly jest in his services about his ‘wife’, waiting in the wings for him, by the name of Grace. On other occasions, he told the congregation that they were listening to ‘the ravings of an idiot’ but interspersed this with socioeconomic issues allied with faith. ‘Religion; forget religion,’ he was fond of saying. ‘It’s full of mumbo jumbo. It’s always a question of faith and The Truth.’
One day he even managed to scandalise nearly everyone by turning up after the death of Pope John Paul I in 1978, just before his successor was named, carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and declaring, ‘I’ve got the form guide!’ But, slowly and surely, he managed to charm the locals with his passion for his cause, his firm faith, the way in which he made the gospel so accessible and engaging, and his eagerness to take his ministry to the people, rather than wait for them to come to him.
In that, he was also extraordinarily inclusive. The hymn ‘Glory to God in the Highest’, the words the angels were said to have sung when Jesus’s birth was announced to the shepherds, he loved instead to paraphrase as ‘Glory to God in the Lowest’. He made it his duty to call on sex workers in the area, responding to any critics that they were just as much his parishioners as any regular churchgoer. Occasionally, he’d take along visiting seminarians, established clergy and even the odd nun working with him too. ‘But they’d generally only last about twenty minutes,’ he chuckles. At one point, he received a male truckie into the church who’d undergone a sex change to become a woman, and performed a baptism for her new self.
He turned out to have a great way with children, too. He talked to them in a remarkably egalitarian way, as if he were taking them into his confidence, never talking down to them. If, when he was taking mass or giving a talk to a school, he spotted a child who had anything wrong with them, or were perhaps in a wheelchair, he always made reference to them, to try to make them feel special, and included. His old curate Father Kevin Burke remembers him taking his first communion at a South Melbourne school when a father pushed his son in, lying on what looked like a hospital trolley. Father Bob immediately snapped to attention. ‘Park over here!’ he yelled, pointing to a spot near the front. ‘There’s no meter here!’ And when he felt the service had gone on too long, he asked Father Burke if they could leave out a part of it, then went back to the microphone to say, ‘Look, we’ve had a committee meeting here, and we’ve decided that’s enough …’
His experiments weren’t always successful, though. One of his early group of kids, John Cindric, remembers how the priest built a ramp for them to use with skateboards and rollerskates. ‘He was always helping us, and we loved that!’ he says. ‘It was just great hanging out with him and catching these snippets of thought balloons that came from his head. But two weeks later, some of the mums came down and beat the shit out of it. They thought the kids could get hurt.’
Father Bob would also regularly go down to the wharves to see members of the Painters and Dockers Union, against the advice of many people worried about his safety. But the army had prepared him well for facing tough people who frequently used strong language. In fact, he was never averse to using similarly colourful language himself where he felt the occasion warranted.
‘He did a lot of work with people who were un-churched, unhappy, dysfunctional and might be considered by others to be outcasts,’ says former army Major John Guy, who first met Father Bob at a character-leadership course and, inspired by his example, went on to devote his life to helping kids in trouble through his own Southern Cross Leadership Program. ‘In that, he was a true priest. He didn’t require people to come to where he was; he would go to where the people went. Some people might find that side of life ugly, and rough and difficult, but he saw the beauty in people whatever they were up to. I saw him as imitating Christ in that work.
‘He was operating on the fringes of the Church even back then. A lot of officials of the Church didn’t like what he was doing but that’s what Christ experienced as well with Judaism. The God “experts” didn’t recognise him, but the poor people did. Father Bob is about the ministry of Christ, of the miracles of love and healing rather than about the institutions of the Church. He was never judgemental, either. He just had this great joie de vivre, with a lovely humour. Listening to him was like listening to Alfred Hitchcock. He looked like him, he told a great story, and he had this wonderful dry humour. As well, he was totally unaffected. It didn’t matter to him who he was talking to; he was always himself. He’d talk to a room full of generals and majors and captains of the army, and he’d still say, “Now, darlings, let’s talk about such and such …” And then he’d speak in such a good, earthy way, everyone would listen.’
In his determination to make his church all-embracing, he wasn’t prepared to toe anyone else’s line. Well-known Labor Party senator and official Pat Kennelly, a South Melbourne local, had been banned by his own church in the bitterness over the 1950s Labor ‘split’ in which he’d battled hard against the influence of the right-wing Catholic movement on the party. Father Bob instead invited him along to services at St Peter and Paul’s. He even offered an apology from the Catholic Church for their treatment of him. And after the discovery of the body of Jack ‘Putty Nose’ Nicholls, the man who’d followed murdered Pat Shannon to become the secretary of the notorious Painters and Dockers and was infamous for uttering the immortal line about the union turf w
ar, ‘We catch and kill our own’, Father Bob volunteered to perform the funeral.
On the day of the service, union members brandishing their banners marched in a long funeral procession along Dorcas Street to the church and then stood outside. Father Bob immediately shouted out, ‘Tell them Dockers, if they’re not going to come in, we’ll have to come out!’ They all obediently filed in.
Damian Coleridge had moved to South Melbourne for a job teaching art history at the Victorian College of the Arts the same year that Brian Rudd first knocked on Father Bob’s door. Damian’s brother Mark, later to become the Archbishop of Brisbane, suggested he go along and listen to this most unusual priest. He did, and was startled by the figure at the pulpit.
‘I’d never been a regular churchgoer and, when I sat halfway down the church listening to him, I thought he must be nuts!’ says Damian. ‘He was just so different. Then someone there asked me to come to a liturgy meeting, so I did. I was just intrigued by what Father Bob was all about. And one thing led to another …’
As a result of that first meeting, Damian ended up staying on at the church to organise parish liturgies and become almost Father Bob’s right-hand man. As a volunteer, he tried to put into practice many of the priest’s ideas, schemes and pet projects aimed at involving his congregation in helping those less fortunate. Their relationship fell into a steady pattern. Father Bob would go off early in the morning for his daily bicycle ride in the neighbourhood, around South Melbourne, Albert Park and Middle Park, cheerfully hailing everyone he met along the way. On his return, he’d call Damian aside to tell him he’d had yet another idea.
‘Whatever needed to be done, I’d do it,’ says Damian. ‘Bob’s always been a great entrepreneur, full of ideas, some more ambitious than others. One day, he rode his bike past a place opposite South Melbourne market and saw a For Rent sign in the window. He said, ‘That’s an interesting spot! We should try to get hold of it!’ Then I’d go and look at it and think, How could we make use of it? Eventually, that place became The Produce Store, involving eighty of our parishioners.’
Damian helped rally everyone to renovate the old store, paint it, furnish it and then run it for local people. It became a tea, coffee and scones shop and a popular meeting place. One visiting German sailor went there and declared it his favourite coffee house because of the friendliness of all the staff and other customers. It helped make money for Father Bob’s other projects too. After all the running costs, and the voluntary work of parishioners – aged from just ten years old to eighty-three –who cleaned, cooked, sewed, washed the tablecloths and served customers, it was making a profit of two hundred dollars a month. But even after it was up and running, Father Bob didn’t stop planning. He immediately went on to work out what could happen in its next phase: possibly young people opening it for other young people on Sundays.
For Father Bob, it was all about bringing his Vatican II philosophy to the parish. He wanted to empower parishioners to start and run projects, for them to take the initiative, for his church very much to be ‘the people’s church’. ‘Youse blokes I expect to personify the Jesus of the twentieth century in this neck of the woods,’ he explained. He was simply, as he was becoming so fond of saying in a flashback to his army days, merely the commander-in-chief. ‘Or think of me just as the conductor of the orchestra,’ he’d tell the congregation. ‘You are the ones playing the instruments, you are the ones making the music. I’m not a one-man band.’
Local Frank O’Connor says Father Bob didn’t want even liturgy to be a spectator sport; he wanted it to be interactive and to be the people’s liturgy. ‘He didn’t want the Scriptures just to be read,’ Frank says. ‘He wanted them to be dissected, the meaning for today, here and now, understood and implemented, with people really living the gospel message. He felt that the Vatican II message was to “flatten the model”, that the Church couldn’t remain dominated from the top by the Pope and bishops, but that it belonged to the people, the parishioners. They were part of his constant message to encourage us to take responsibility for our parish, with our liturgical celebrations designed by and for local people, and where people have an idea or the passion to do something he would support them to the hilt and give them the authority.’
As a result, members of the congregation started playing an active part in services, taking over the readings and coming up with different ways of celebrating religious occasions. To begin with, this different way of doing things baffled some people but gradually they became used to it, and many began to relish being more involved. ‘Instead of just preaching to us about religion, he let us live religion,’ says parishioner Carol Leahy. ‘At first, a lot of things flew over our heads. But then he made us use our brains and delve a bit deeper. My spirituality and faith grew. It became an everyday faith instead of just once a week.’
A number of projects around St Peter and Paul’s were also taking off and flourishing. Even the basketball had grown to the point where four male teams and one female team had been formed, with locals helping to coach and run the teams, as well as entering them into various tournaments. Two men had also come forward to run the boxing gym, as different from each other as chalk and cheese: Bob, who’d migrated to Australia from Burma in 1964 and was an amateur who’d won seventy-five of his seventy-eight fights, and went on to train Olympic boxers; and Charlie, an Italian and a professional boxer with eleven fights behind him.
There were also plays put on at a local hotel, film nights, parish dinner-dances and tea and coffee served at get-togethers after the Sunday mass. Although attendances were still dwindling from the huge masses of the 1930s and 1940s, and the church had been reconfigured to seat 225, between 700 and 900 people would still attend services at Easter and Christmas. At Easter there was also an Easter parade, and on Shrove Tuesday a procession through South Melbourne complete with a Scottish pipe band, clowns, banners and streamers, followed by pancakes at the town hall. At Christmas, one of the parishioners would craft a Christmas tree into a cross and a group would go carolling to raise funds. At Pentecost, to symbolise the flame of the Holy Spirit coming down to the apostles, the tree would be burned.
A young mothers’ prayer group was set up, a children’s liturgy group and kids’ camps of the kind Father Bob had run in his younger days as a seminarian. Talks were held with the great Sydney-based humanitarian Reverend Ted Noffs about starting up adult education centres, and a weekly newsletter, the ‘Southerly Buster’ – that’s continued to this day – was launched. Meanwhile, the parish council was revitalised, and encouraged to become more flexible, open and engaged with the local community. The house at the back of the presbytery was turned into a meeting place and a venue for young people to gather, and sometimes sleep overnight, and was dubbed the Outback House.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing, however. Some of the young people were quite volatile, particularly if they’d been drinking or taking drugs, and incidents weren’t uncommon. One helper once had a knife held to his throat, the police were called and everyone was pulled out and lined up against a wall until the police accepted that the situation had been brought under control. Also, some of Father Bob’s ideas were so audacious, no-one could even begin to imagine how they might be acted on successfully or ever work in the way he outlined. Others foundered on a shortage of funds. The priest also sometimes clashed with his parishioners over what some saw as his haranguing them to help those less well-off.
Father Bob saw it a little differently. ‘You’d throw the cat among the pigeons, and the pigeons would flap their wings and run around until they all eventually settled down,’ he says. ‘And if it hadn’t all eventually settled down, of course, then I’d have been forced to move on. I wouldn’t have stayed.’
But stay he did, and he embarked on more and more far-reaching changes. One of the most important was opening up the presbytery to become a house in which everyone was welcome. Father Bob had said early on that it wasn’t the church’s role to lock its doors against su
ch a sea of misfortune. Now, on any single day, its occupants might include someone helping him out in the house, a youngster who’d needed somewhere to stay for a night, an outreach worker, local volunteers having a meeting about an event or project, one of the basketball coaches, a visiting priest from another area, a pastoral worker, a parish group having a meeting, or someone preparing a dinner for another bunch of parishioners. ‘More and more, the presbytery has become the parish house, a meeting place, a home for the heart and open to all,’ says Father Bob. ‘Inch by inch, the door has been opened. Even at times if it’s a little like a madhouse, still everyone is welcome.’
Damian, along with Father Bob and the priest’s newly acquired dog, a standard poodle called Rocky, was often at the centre of all the activity. ‘My main interest was involving other parishioners in the life of the parish,’ he says. ‘And that’s where I discovered the body of Christ. His body isn’t dead and buried; it was with that motley mob in South Melbourne, an incredibly motley bunch of people, marvellously motley. Someone once said that it’s easy to experience God in your world, you just have to open the door. And that door was opened in South Melbourne back then.’
Damian now had a job as a teacher’s aide in a local high school to help support himself while continuing his voluntary work for Father Bob and the church, including involvement in Sunday masses. ‘There were some people who were wary of Bob and his ways, but once they’d got to know him, they liked him,’ he says. ‘Not many people dropped out. People in South Melbourne were generally very faithful. Bob was someone who’d found a home in South Melbourne and fallen in love with the people, especially the outsiders and the ones who didn’t have homes themselves. So while the locals might have gone over a bit of a speed hump at first, once they’d adjusted, they really liked him. You might have strong disagreements with him but the bottom line is that he speaks from the heart of Christian matter, he lives the gospel of Jesus Christ full-on. I don’t think anyone who came through that place didn’t leave the better for it. No-one felt short-changed.’
