by Sue Williams
‘I was caught short,’ says Father Bob. ‘I tried a little empty shop with a tiny kitchen and lavatory as part of it. I thought it was sad but he was becoming a hoarder by then, and could take most of his stuff in there. He wasn’t a dirty hoarder, but a neat and tidy hoarder of pretty things. But the water wasn’t on and I thought, I can’t leave him out on street, so the only place left was at the back of my bloody premises. I thought that was getting a bit close to the bone, as HQ had said he shouldn’t be there, but it cost nothing, he had a lavatory, a shower and a TV, and morally it was the only thing we could do. He was very grateful. He knew Denis [Hart] was after him, had declared a fatwa on him, and he knew that he was a pain in the arse. But he knew also that I couldn’t throw him out as he had nowhere else to go. He stayed there till I found him somewhere else.’
Yet Father Bob was still heartened by the continuing successes of the kids who had turned out well.
Chris Apostolidis’s Dance World, for example, was going gangbusters with students learning jazz, tap, classical ballet, hip-hop and musical theatre, and Father Bob loved dropping in to see how well everything was working out. He enjoyed seeing how passionate Chris was about dance, and how he managed to stir so much enthusiasm in his pupils. ‘Once he came in here and said to me that what I was doing here was just as much a temple of God as his church,’ says Chris. ‘I was determined to set up a place of equality, where your gender, your race, your colour, your ideology, your religion, was not going to get in the way, where all that was left at the door. He liked that.’
Mem River, meanwhile, had been working with Open Family to help the priest get more involved with the Middle Eastern and African communities. ‘I’d made a doco for schools about young Muslims after 9/11 for the Department of Immigration,’ says Mem. ‘There were a lot of tensions within and between communities in Melbourne and Father Bob wanted to get in touch with the Muslim community so we started working together again. He met some of the hardcore people, and created an atmosphere that made it all stop. It was pretty amazing!’
Afterwards, Mem took some time out to make another film, with Father Bob’s encouragement and a bit of financial help. For this, he travelled to Iran and the mountains of northern Iraq to tell the story of an Australian Kurdish refugee who was returning there in a bid to find the love he’d left behind when he fled. ‘If Bob didn’t hear from me for two weeks, he was to tell the authorities that an Australian citizen was missing!’ says Mem. After a long and torturous journey, along steep mountain ranges and over gorges with sheer 500-metre drops, the pair found the woman, who had since become an outlawed PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrilla fighter, dedicated to regaining lost Kurdish homelands. The film, In Search of Shilan, directed by Mem and with the music also composed by him, ended up being shown around the world. Father Bob couldn’t have been more proud.
Other kids of his were doing well, too. John Cindric had become a successful international aid worker and even Brian Rudd had managed to carve out some kind of independent life for himself. He’d moved away from Melbourne, and was shining shoes on the streets of Sydney.
Brian Rudd.
Yet with his new Father Bob Maguire Foundation, there was also an element that was far more forward-looking than just the kids he’d helped in the past. It would include, he decided, a number of scholarships for disadvantaged students at various schools and colleges in Melbourne, paying tuition fees and buying their books and uniforms. He liked the symmetry of giving less well-off kids at the start of their lives access to the best start that money could buy, and helping those at the other end who hadn’t fared too well.
‘As a priest, celibacy isn’t all bad,’ he says. ‘Instead, we’re married to the Church and to the local people for the length of our natural lives. We have our ups and downs, the same as in a marriage, but you do your best to make sure everyone starts out as well as they can, then you stick together because you’ve made a commitment and, because when it does work, it’s wonderful!’
Yet when it didn’t work, just as in a marriage, breaking up could be hard to do. He was experiencing that firsthand with Open Family. The organisation was still expanding, with twenty street outreach workers in Melbourne, six in country Victoria, five in Canberra and six or seven in Sydney, but now it seemed he was being slowly but surely manoeuvred out. That was exacerbated by his great supporter, the CEO Nathan Stirling, working part time so he could study for a law degree. It looked like he might be leaving in the near future, too.
So at one board meeting, Father Bob took a proactive stand. He suggested that Open Family and his new Bob Maguire Foundation should merge to create a bigger, much broader organisation to look after people who were struggling for the duration of their lives, and proposed that veteran award-winning youth worker Les Twentyman, an employee of Open Family for the past six years, become the CEO of the new body. To him, it seemed the perfect fit. Les had very similar values to his own, and an enormous amount of experience in the field, having worked for over twenty-five years with kids for local government. He also had a high profile, having started the 20th Man Fund, which started a Care For Kids Program with well-known AFL footballers, a youth refuge and a back-to-school project.
The pair had known each other for years, bumping into each other from time to time as they both looked after kids on the streets, and then Les appeared on one of Father Bob’s radio shows. Les reciprocated later, inviting the priest to speak at a conference he’d arranged during a one-time tilt for a seat in the Victorian Upper House. He’s never forgotten it. ‘The place was packed out and Channel 9 had their cameras going,’ says Les. ‘Then Bob gets up. He says, “My name is Father Bob Maguire. And I know what you’re thinking: paedophile poofter …” Everyone was so shocked, there was absolute silence. They were hanging off every word. And the TV people were all shouting, “Cameras! Over here!” He certainly knows how to make an audience shut up and listen to what he has to say!
‘Bob is very engaging, very entertaining. He’s missed his vocation; he should have been an actor or a comedian. He’s very quick-witted but sometimes he does and says things that put people offside. I remember on radio, something came up once about condoms. He called them sleeping bags for white mice.’
The Open Family board, however, weren’t amused, and turned down both Father Bob’s plan to merge and also his idea to elevate Les. An alternative plan to have the then CEO of the not-for-profit Brotherhood of St Laurence, an organisation that works to prevent and alleviate poverty, take over as CEO in order to preserve, as he said, the cultural fit of the organisation was also voted down. Instead, with Nathan finally handing in his notice in July 2004 to accept a job with the Chief Justice of Victoria, the board hired a professional recruitment consultancy to find his replacement, and appointed a subcommittee of three to make the final decision on the successful candidate. Father Bob, the chairman, was not elected onto the subcommittee, and found himself having no say at all on the next CEO.
‘He wasn’t on the selection team. I don’t know why. I suppose, in hindsight, it may have been a courtesy to have put the final two candidates in front of Bob,’ says board member and later chairman, Phil Ruthven. ‘He felt miffed about that. But we decided we should have a proper selection process.’
Yet some of the staff were appalled at the way valuable funds were being spent on that procedure. Les Twentyman was a major critic. ‘Open Family was hijacked by the administration,’ he says. ‘It then went completely away from its original core values and was run along the lines of a corporate business. It was as if they’d completely abandoned what we’d been all about.’ Outreach worker Richard Tregear was also angry. ‘This was a hands-on charity that had its genesis in the street-people movement in Melbourne,’ he says. ‘Its great strength was that it didn’t play by conservative rules. But the board just didn’t understand the community in which they were working. They changed the nature of it completely.’
When Open Family finally appointed their new CEO,
they paid the successful person an annual salary that some saw as befitting the post, and others saw as quite outrageously high. Ruthven says he can’t recall the exact figure, but it was certainly over $150 000, while rumours claimed it was as high as $230 000. Ruthven, however, says they needed to pay a decent salary in order to get a good person and that salary was voluntarily reduced later when the charity ran into tough times. ‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,’ he says. ‘You might argue it was a high salary but we did go to a proper head-hunting organisation to do it and we went through a whole series of applicants. But for anyone who gets paid what a priest gets paid, it would have seemed horrendous.’
It did. Father Bob complained, he criticised the organisation publicly in the press and he was pushed further to the outer. ‘They decided to go all businesslike and pay a new CEO an amazing sum of money,’ he says. ‘The theory being that if you have a flash CEO, that will be a recommendation to the business world that you’re taking things seriously. So that’s the option they chose, and they were sick of me anyway.’
They’d certainly been paying close attention to Father Bob’s rows with the Catholic Church over his management of money. Just as some in the parish said that Father Bob spent too much money on his flock, and didn’t keep it carefully enough accounted for, some members of Open Family echoed similar concerns.
Ruthven says the priest was having big problems with the Catholic hierarchy over his use of money. ‘Bob was dangerous with a cheque book,’ he says. ‘It’s almost ironic that he would criticise the folly of paying a new CEO when you saw the wastage that went on with him. He was ropeable that they’d taken the chequebook off him.’
But Nathan Stirling says to suggest Father Bob was wasteful or careless with money is to do him a grave disservice. ‘That’s rubbish!’ he says bluntly. ‘He’s not a terrible money person. He’s actually very astute with money; he’s very good. He gets money in and then that money would go out. He didn’t believe in building up surpluses or reserves. He would spend the money on things consistent with charitable purposes, which is a valid position to take. It’s not necessarily orthodox, but it’s valid.’ Yet the new corporate regime at Open Family didn’t seem much better with money. When Nathan left, the annual report financials show well over $1 million in the bank, an endowment fund with $500 000 and thirty-plus outreach workers. Three years later, records show the organisation had a deficit of $125 000.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, however, Father Bob was soon no longer chairman. Whether he jumped or was pushed is still a matter of some dispute. Phil Ruthven says the priest resigned; Father Bob says he was ‘bumped’. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But there’s little doubt that Father Bob, although still on the board, was left angry, hurt and not a little bitter.
Even though the priest was still trying to find somewhere else for Costas to live, times back at the church seemed almost tranquil by comparison, and there were a few high points. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie made an unannounced visit on Palm Sunday and was reported to have been immensely impressed by Father Bob’s service and his charity work. She even wrote to him afterwards, thanking him and expressing concern about a woman who’d passed out during the service, asking how she was. ‘She survived,’ Father Bob replied. ‘That holy water always does the trick.’ Cherie then donated some clothes to be recycled for those who needed them.
In 2004, the 150th anniversary of the founding of the parish, there was also a special mass followed by a barbecue and a supper dance at South Melbourne Town Hall. A plaque was placed in the garden honouring the Aboriginal ancestors, as well as the convict and free-settler forebears.
Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart dropped in on St Peter and Paul’s too, and attended the Wednesday breakfast barbecue out the back of the presbytery, cheered on Henry Nissen’s football team, celebrated midday mass and visited a couple of parishioners.
There would be times in the future when Father Bob could barely believe they had once been so civil to each other.
18
Battle of the Gonzos
John Safran was a young man on a fast upward trajectory. The journalism student dropout turned advertising copywriter first found fame as one of the most controversial candidates ever on Australian TV’s ‘Race Around the World’, where he streaked naked through the city of Jerusalem – except for his footy scarf and beanie – was baptised in Africa, put a voodoo curse on his ex-girlfriend and placed plaques in Disneyland about Walt Disney’s alleged links with Nazism.
He then filmed a show for the ABC in which he notoriously rifled through TV current affairs star Ray Martin’s bin, and later tried to tempt cricketer Shane Warne to smoke a cigarette to break his advertising agreement with a nicotine gum maker. In 2002, aged thirty-two, he debuted his award-winning documentary series ‘John Safran’s Music Jamboree’ on SBS TV, complete with his, by now, trademark outrageously comedic stunts.
By 2004, John had become renowned as the enfant terrible of Australian TV. It was then that both a lawyer with whom he was having a meeting, and his manager’s mum, said there was a man about town they really thought he should meet: Father Bob Maguire. The priest was still regularly appearing on radio, in newspapers and in the Catholic Kairos newspaper with his column, and increasingly being courted by the media for his opinions on everything from the footy and the weather to the meaning of Christmas. John was intrigued.
‘It’s unusual that you get two completely separate recommendations at the same time, so I thought I’d go to see this priest,’ says John. ‘So I snuck into one of his midday masses. I tried to sit in the background, but he spotted me and he started doing this shtick. He was very funny, and really warm, and he was interested in the kind of things I’m interested in. I thought, Here’s someone I could work with.’
Father Bob also remembers that day well. ‘I looked across the dance room [the church pews], and saw Safran. I recognised him from the TV. I thought, Why is he skulking around in the back of the bloody church? I don’t like seeing strange people appear. He was obviously lurking with intent and I thought we might get robbed. Or I’d known he was running around Jerusalem without any clothes on and I was afraid he might start running around naked in the bloody church. I thought I should call security – if I had any!’
When Father Bob was asked to review Mel Gibson’s religious blockbuster The Passion of The Christ (‘self-indulgent’ but ‘a celebration of humanity’), the pair went together, John presenting the priest with flowers and chocolates ready for their ‘date’. Father Bob was horrified. ‘We’re going to see Jesus being crucified, and you’re giving me flowers and chocolates!’ he complained. ‘God Almighty!’
At the time, John was filming a new eight-part series for SBS, ‘John Safran vs God’, in which he scours the world looking for God, or talking to the people who say they’ve found Him. He decided to ask Father Bob onto an episode in which, despite being Jewish, he applies to join the Ku Klux Klan in California, holds a competition for Australian-Palestinians to win Israeli citizenship and road-tests Catholicism under the guidance of Father Bob.
The show launched on 30 August 2004, with Father Bob’s episode airing the day before his seventieth birthday. In the show, the priest gives his host a crash course on the Bible, on lighting candles as an altar boy and on kneeling: ‘All Catholics learn to kneel,’ the priest instructs. Their trip to the cinema was also shown, with Father Bob complaining that Mel Gibson would have done better spending all that money on the real work of Jesus, ‘in Bangladesh, Baghdad or Redfern’. John tests the fledgling relationship too when he does the reading at mass, and quotes from a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon in one of Morris West’s novels, much to the shock of parishioners. The series, which also included a fatwa placed on TV star Rove McManus, the trial of a hallucinogenic plant and a disturbing exorcism by a fundamentalist preacher, caused a storm of controversy, but was also an immediate hit, and garnered a range of plaudits.
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sp; Father Bob’s star turn, however, turned out to be the highest rating of all the segments, with hundreds of emails and phone calls all congratulating the priest on his appearance. ‘Bob was terrific in the show,’ John says. ‘Being a priest, he’s got this authority about him, but that means the comedy is even funnier. He’s also so smart. I can’t believe how simultaneously smart he is, but then also worried about things he doesn’t know. He relates to young people so well too. He’s got a real thing that he thinks youth have all the answers and that does means he comes over really well to a young audience.’
At the conclusion of the series, John then asked Father Bob if he’d be his co-star on another TV project set to air the next year, called ‘Speaking in Tongues’, in which the pair would discuss a range of subjects. Father Bob readily agreed. ‘I like that Safran’s honest. He’s an honest performer. And an activist, and I like activists. I thought it was about time I started doing something different too. I’ve always liked the media, and I thought that might be a good way to get my message out. We’re not good at that in the Church, we tend to keep it all in-house and if we keep on doing that, we’ll be buggered. A lot of his audience are younger too, and they’re the demographic we have to reach for the future.’
Things were looking up, at least in one area of the priest’s life. As he contemplated how quickly things could change, he received a call to say he’d won the 2005 Australian of the Year, Local Hero, Metro Award for Victoria. ‘Father Bob is one of the unheralded and truly Australian heroes,’ said the valedictory with the award, presented in November 2004 by the deputy premier of Victoria, John Thwaites. ‘Father Bob is a strong, inspirational leader to both his congregation and the wider Australian community.’
