Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  Others ended up in jail, and Father Bob made it a point of honour to stay in touch. He might one day receive a letter from one asking for the money for new razor blades, or from another asking him to remember a girlfriend’s birthday. ‘These are often kids without hope, who’ve had no families, been wards of the state, or have suffered violence and abuse throughout their young lives,’ the priest says. ‘They need us to be good friends to them. They are thought of as nobodies. They’re the forgotten generation. They’re fighting for their lives.

  ‘It’s not just the poor, working-class kids, either. Other kids are now joining them, from middle-class families. Their parents are often too busy with their own lives to give them the attention they need. We’re seeing more of those on drugs like Harry the Horse [heroin] now, and more of those with mental illnesses.

  ‘Yet they constantly amaze me. One kid said to me one day that he didn’t have much hope himself – his father was a drunk, his grandfather was a drunk, and now he was a drunk. But at least he recognised that, which was the first step to doing something about it. These kids now are so wise compared to previous generations. And while we may think some of these characters are bad, and they certainly do bad things, the amount of good in them always staggers me. It often comes from left field when you least expect it. It might be in the way they care for each other, or do someone else a good turn.

  While he still saw an enormous need for the Open Family Foundation, there was another problem now arising. Many of the people approaching him for help, including his first street kids, were now older than the eighteen-year-old cut-off point for clients of the Foundation’s work. Yet they obviously still needed a helping hand. ‘And I’m not bloody well going to abandon them now!’ he vowed.

  To solve the problem, he set up an alternative project in 1989, The Emerald Hill Mission, expressly for older people in the neighbourhood. With a group of local businesspeople volunteering to raise funds, and Henry Nissen happy to move from the Foundation to the Mission, he launched this new initiative.

  Henry, in particular, was delighted. ‘I was always getting into trouble for helping the older people who were overage but who’d been our younger clients originally,’ he says. ‘They still needed the support. Unfortunately, you don’t always know when a person is going to be able to help themselves. All we can do is guide them, encourage them, help them and support them where we can along the way. Sometimes people will respond, and sometimes they won’t. We can’t teach them the skills of life if they don’t have the ability to learn!’

  Father Bob, however, had immense confidence in his band of troops helping him realise his vision and, as the ‘commander-in-chief’, he watched everything that was happening like a hawk. Everyone became used to him dropping by to check up on things, and to have a chat with the ‘associates’ – he refused to call the people they were helping the traditional term ‘clients’ – to make sure all was well. Everyone, ‘associates’, workers, volunteers and the general public, regarded him with growing admiration.

  That same year came a concrete expression of that appreciation. Father Bob was summoned to Government House to receive a Medal of the Order of Australia. When he was interviewed, he joked about it. ‘Don’t know why they’re giving it to me,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’m only the commander-in-chief. I’m not the one doing the bloody work.’

  But secretly, he was pleased, very pleased. Not for himself, but because he knew the honour would give his various projects even more standing and profile, and, hopefully, most importantly of all, help boost the coffers.

  Father Bob receiving his Medal of the Order of Australia, with his sister Eileen.

  The financial situation by now was becoming quite perilous. Father Bob made numerous appeals for more money and even applied to the state government, for the first time, for public funds – something he’d always avoided as he said he hated the red tape and rigid rules that invariably went along with it. The request was turned down; officials said they’d received the forms for emergency funding past the cut-off date.

  Father Bob went on the attack through the media, saying he was in dire need of $30 000 to keep operating, otherwise he’d have to start shutting down projects. At one point, with an unerring instinct for what makes news, he threatened to return his OAM to Governor-General Bill Hayden as a symbol of his disgust at the government refusing to help. But then his old charge Chris Apostolidis, who’d been running his dance school in the old warehouse up the road, heard about the need for cash, and offered to help. The warehouse was being sold by its owners World Vision, and Father Bob had offered him a place at the old run-down Emerald Hall after it had failed to sell to bring in more capital and a report he’d commissioned on it came back to say it needed $600 000 worth of work to make it habitable. As a result, a long-term lease sounded the best option, especially as Chris had signalled his willingness to undertake a complete restoration to provide a new home for his Dance World, with Father Bob as its patron. But now Chris decided to take some time out to help his old mentor.

  ‘The Open Family Foundation was going through a rough patch,’ he says. ‘It was a dark period when they were in a bit of debt, I think to the tune of about $200 000. My girlfriend at the time – who became my wife – was a bookkeeper and she helped him do all the books, and I decided to try to help him raise money. Father Bob always wants to help people, and he’d really helped me, and I felt this was a chance for me to give back.’

  Chris had an inspired idea. In 1989, the British singer, songwriter and Genesis frontman Phil Collins had produced his most successful album yet, … But Seriously, featuring the anti-homelessness anthem ‘Another Day in Paradise’. The song highlighted the issue of homelessness existing side-by-side with great wealth amid complete government apathy, and peaked at number one in the US, number two in the UK and was an immediate hit in Australia, too. As a result, Collins embarked on a world tour with the album in 1990, setting four dates for concerts in Melbourne in March.

  Chris contacted the Australian promoter with the suggestion that Collins sing ‘Another Day in Paradise’ at the finale of each concert, and volunteers from the Open Family Foundation would come along with buckets to collect money at the end of each performance. He had a call back a few weeks later, to be told: Phil likes it. He’ll do it. At the end of each concert, he announced from the stage that there’d be a collection for the homeless outside. They ended up collecting over $200 000.

  ‘It was great to see it all work out so well,’ says Chris. ‘Father Bob always wants to help people in need so it was good to be able to help him. He’s helped me shape my point of view on so many topics, and I implement all the things I’ve learnt in my life, and ultimately they become morals, your way of being. He’s had the biggest impact on me.’

  The success of Chris’s first fundraising effort inspired others to join in too. A local businessman came up with the proposal that the Foundation should be nominated as a charity recipient of some of the profits from the lucky envelope machines being installed in pubs and clubs around Melbourne. A kind of poker machine dispensing bingo tickets with certain letters, numbers or symbols that have to be matched to the ones showing on the screen, they started to provide a real injection of cash.

  At that point, more help arrived for the Foundation. One was Father Bob’s old mate from his army and National Council of Priests days, Father Hal Ranger. He’d gone to work at the nearby Sacred Heart Mission in St Kilda and Father Bob offered him a place to stay at the presbytery. He was always happy to lend a hand around the place in his spare time and proved a helpful sounding board for some of Father Bob’s ideas.

  ‘He’s always been such a generous guy and it was pretty much open house at his place,’ says Father Ranger, now the associate pastor at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Toowoomba, Queensland. ‘Everyone was welcomed in a fairly eccentric way, even if it often meant being yelled at from the top veranda, “Who’s there?”

  ‘Others might avoid the kind of people he
was helping. They were broken and hurting and often took refuge in grog or the needle. For many people it would have salved their conscience just to put some money in an envelope but he went into their world, and opened his heart, his arms and usually his pockets to help. People responded so well to him. They sensed his own pain from a difficult past, his great strength and the free spirit within.’

  Also coming along to help in a more formal way with the Open Family Foundation was former Christian Brother teacher Nathan Stirling. In the early 1980s, he’d wanted to set up some kind of project to help street kids in Canberra and, seeing Father Bob and Brother Alex McDonald as the Australian pioneers for that kind of work, he’d met the priest back then to talk about what they were doing. Their street work in particular impressed him and, as a result, he’d set up Open Family ACT. Now, the two men started talking about merging the two enterprises and in 1992, it became Open Family Australia. Nathan was appointed CEO, running the organisation from Canberra, with the idea of making it truly national.

  There still seemed to be a need for someone to take charge in Melbourne itself, however. TV star and volunteer Tony Barber saw that clearly. ‘From doing some work in their office, I could see it was pretty much rough and tumble,’ he says. ‘My advice to Bob was that he needed a full-time organiser in Melbourne. It was about that time that a lot of charities were doing that: having an organiser on their books instead of just different volunteers coming and going. Bob’s at his best in a hands-on role, when he’s fundraising, or begging as he calls it, with someone else keeping the records to make sure everything is shipshape.’

  He meant it quite literally too, recommending a former high-ranking naval officer, retired Commodore Jim Dickson, for the position of executive director. Jim willingly took it on, but found it a baptism of fire. ‘I had only recently come out of the military and nothing could have been a bigger contrast after a long service career than going into an organisation like that!’ he says. ‘There was very little organisation, in fact. It was more a collection of well-intentioned and very sympathetic people of diverse backgrounds who wanted to support Bob’s desire to give street kids a better chance in life. It was a wake-up call for me. But I did manage to put a degree of organisation and administrative sense into the running of the place, and try to have a reasonable spread of responsibilities between those people already there, some of whom were very strong-minded individuals, and getting them to work collectively.

  ‘I have a high regard for Bob’s compassionate heart and his genuine desire to do good for the poor and the struggling. He has a wonderful empathy with them and talks to them in a way they understand and appreciate. But while he had an understanding of the military from his time there, regrettably the military’s way of doing things by the book hadn’t rubbed off on him. I have to say, his organisation’s administrative and financial processes weren’t ones that I had a lot of respect for. I did make some changes, but didn’t achieve everything I would have like to have achieved for Open Family in my time there.’

  Jim stayed just over a year, and then Nathan moved to Melbourne. His energy, experience and organisational skills, adding to the structures Jim had started to put into a project that had previously just grown organically, were perfect foils for the way in which Father Bob worked.

  ‘The Foundation was more like a movement than an organisation, with parishioners and businesspeople and an outreach worker and lots of kids,’ says Nathan. ‘My aim was to put it on a more stable footing and to regrow the organisation. I’d always found Bob an inspiring figure. There’s something about the way he’s able to communicate around social justice issues that does connect with people.

  ‘He’s a real character. He can be quite gruff and come across as quite grumpy, and he might say “No” to some things, but then he can change his mind. He’s also a very funny guy with a dry humour, who puts interesting spins on things when you’re not expecting it. My role was to keep the work focused on core business. Bob would be inclined to consider flights of fancy – but they weren’t necessarily fanciful, they were real things, but we were always just constrained by resources.’

  There was still a need for more money but, with Nathan now on board and Father Ranger around to help, Father Bob started to relax, and to look forward to a period of sustained growth. It was then that Derryn Hinch made another potentially devastating move.

  Father Vincent Kiss, who’d become well known in South Melbourne for the masses he’d conducted when he first arrived and was still providing the Open Family Foundation, among many other charities, with funds from the ANZ Trustees, was rarely out of the news. His stature was growing nationally. He was on the board of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the Victorian State Opera and the Emergency Services Foundation, as well as being a member of the Guardianship and Administration Board and the Intellectual Disability Review Panel, and an advisor to the Victorian Minister of Housing. In 1989, he was appointed President of Philanthropy Australia, the national peak body for charity patronage. It was a real indication of the general esteem in which he was held. With its figureheads Patricia Feilman, the founding Executive Secretary of The Ian Potter Foundation, and Meriel Wilmot, Executive Officer of The Myer Foundation, it was seen as the ultimate mark of respect.

  The following year, Father Kiss grabbed world headlines after he flew to Italy to officiate at the wedding of Primrose ‘Pitty Pat’ Dunlop and airline steward Lorenzo Montesini, aka Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of St Sophia, Baron Alexandroff, in Venice’s majestic Basilica di San Pietro. When it was called off amid lurid allegations that Montesini had gone off with his best man, it was the priest who fronted the international press.

  But in 1992, Father Kiss’s meteoric rise turned into a sudden, steep fall: police charged him with stealing $1.8 million from the ANZ Bank’s charitable trust. That had been how he’d managed to fund such an opulent lifestyle, which included large donations to charity himself, buying no fewer than three homes in Melbourne in addition to a sumptuous villa in the Philippines, eating in all the best restaurants and enjoying seventeen overseas trips in five years.

  For Father Bob, and all the other charity heads who’d been duped by the priest, the revelation was a bombshell. ‘We’d obviously had no idea,’ he says. ‘We’d all been told the money was going to his charity in Vanuatu, and he’d shown us all the right papers and had all the right credentials. Vincent Kiss was a highly respected member of society, lauded by the media, and everything came on ANZ letterhead. He was involved in a number of high-profile charities, who all seemed to trust him too. We even received letters from the Vanuatu Government, thanking us for our help. But we were babes in the woods. We had no idea it would turn out to be a slush fund for himself.’

  Derryn Hinch had been harbouring suspicions for years about the society priest and his entourage of ‘ladies who lunch’ and he leapt on Father Kiss’s arrest with alacrity, saying he’d effectively been laundering money through the various charities he was supposedly supporting. Kiss would give them a large cheque, they would bank 10 per cent of it for themselves and then write him another cheque for his own charity, the Vanuatu Development Project, which turned out to be merely a private bank account operated by Father Kiss.

  Hinch then returned to the attack on Father Bob, which he’d begun with the affidavits from the former workers at his farm. He accused him of making ‘a pact with the devil’. Hinch alleged, ‘For a fee for his charity, he let Kiss use him as a money-laundering service. He should have been asking questions. If someone comes along and says, “Here is $100 000 but I want $90 000 back”, alarm bells should be ringing.’

  Father Bob was indignant. ‘The implication was either that I was a dill or, worse still, an accomplice,’ he says. ‘But I’d checked up on Kiss when he turned up in my church. My first reaction was to check this bloke out. I pestered Wagga to find out if he was in good standing, and they said, “Yes.” Then Kiss was okayed by HQ [the Melbourne Archdiocese]. The local Christians
loved him because he was nice and he was flamboyant and he smiled a lot. He had a lot to do with other charities too, including the Lions and Philanthropy Australia. He conned far cleverer people than me. But then he was arrested and the police phoned me, saying he’d funded a number of charities and they were asking for the books. So I took them all in.’

  He was undergoing his second major police investigation in just three years and, while he hoped for the best, he feared the worst.

  14

  The Murky Stuff of Human Lives

  The Vincent Kiss scandal and the allegations contained in the farm workers’ affidavits weighed heavily on Father Bob Maguire while the police fraud squad and the ANZ Bank carried out all their investigations. Publicly, he put a brave face on what was happening. Privately, he worried that his own growing profile might make him and his projects a desirable target.

  He’d always been good at winning friends, and inspiring supporters and admirers; now he started to realise he was also pretty good at making enemies.

  But then again, he rarely pulled his punches, even when he was aiming at some of the most powerful in the land. In 1990, for example, billionaire businessman Kerry Packer had suffered a heart attack while playing polo in Sydney and had been clinically dead for six minutes. In a press conference after a successful bypass operation, he said of his temporary ‘death’, ‘I’ve been to the other side and let me tell you, son, there’s fucking nothing there … there’s no-one waiting there for you, there’s no-one to judge you so you can do what you bloody well like!’

  When that was put to Father Bob, he didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘I think that says a lot more about God’s judgement on Kerry Packer,’ he said, ‘than about what really awaits us on the other side.’

  Controversy and criticism for someone as out there as Father Bob was pretty much to be expected in his line of work anyway, believes Father Hal Ranger, who stayed on at his priest friend’s presbytery until 1996. ‘Once you kind of get into the murky stuff of human lives, you are bound to get a bit of mud on you,’ he says. ‘That’s all right. That’s where the action is. What happens in many suburban parishes is pretty artificial at times, and not necessarily about engaging with the nitty gritty of life. The truth of the matter is that most people are only really open to the extraordinary faithfulness of God when everything else they’ve depended upon has fallen away.’