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They told me that the church was my mother. I learned that in school and in seminary. “Holy Mother Church,” they said. But I soon found out she was a bitch.
This was one of the first things Father Bob Maguire once said to me in a background interview I did with him in 1990 as part of my research for a television documentary about youth homelessness.
I laughed, and I could tell by the sparkle in his eyes that he knew he’d dragged me into his comical, satirical, profoundly serious view of the world—and that I was listening intently.
What he always had to say, as I would learn, often after an opening line like this, was in his actions as well as his wonderful puns.
He may have been comically scathing for the institutional church, but there was another church he truly believed in: the community of people working together for the well-being, dignity, and just treatment of the underprivileged, the homeless, the addicted, and the forgotten. to improve.
Everyone was welcome in this church. Appropriately, the charitable foundation Father Bob founded in 1979 was called the Open Family Foundation.
In 1990 I was a junior television producer who had found my way into film making after several years as a youth worker. Dad Bob had built a profile as an advocate for “street kids” through his work at Open Family, so he seemed like a good place to start my research into homelessness.
Meeting him was like walking through a portal. Father Bob and his team of field workers took me to run-down squats, seedy back alleys, soup kitchens, and dumpsters.
One of our interviewees took us on a tour of Fitzroy’s backstreets and the dumpsters he slept in on cold nights. He even had a rating system for them.
Then there was the trans sex worker who made her living in and around Darlinghurst’s infamous beat, “The Wall”. In a dingy night bar around the corner, she told me her poignant, funny story. At first she wanted to blur her face for the camera, but after five minutes she changed her mind and became quite expansive.
When the camera was there with the blessing of Father Bob or his team, people felt safe.
To be trusted in this way with a television camera – which for many we met was normally a symbol of intrusive voyeurism – was an incredible privilege. I went through that interview maybe 100 times while editing the program, looking for the right moments. I remember crying when I did, at the raw honesty and the pain.
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‘They are one of us’
A key member of Father Bob’s team was Henry Nissen, an ex-boxer whose concern for the underprivileged had led him to join Open Family.
“The most Christian person I’ve ever met is a Jewish boxer,” Father Bob said of his protege.
Nissen would be paid by Open Family when the organization could afford it, but paying or not, he spent many nights a week scouring the inner city streets of Melbourne trying to connect with itinerant young people.
He knew all the haunted houses, drug dens and camps under the bridge. A figure would emerge from the shadows and in the softest of voices Henry would call out, “Is that you X….”, and they would step out into a beam of moonlight or streetlight.
At some distance I saw and heard Nissen encouraging, advising and sometimes admonishing or pleading. Perhaps he offered a ride to a hostel or access to a rehab center or one of the many emergency services Father Bob had set up.
Around the same time, I was also researching another project on the newly emerging scandal of the Stolen Generations. My research led me to a humble wooden house in Preston, where a young native man gave me three hours and five cups of tea as he told me his story of losing and finding his family.
His name was Archie Roach and he had just recorded an album of songs inspired by these experiences. Charcoal Lane came out a few months later and became a huge hit.
One of the songs, Down City Streets, was written by Roach’s partner, Ruby Hunter, about her experiences as a street child. As I sat in the editing room, reviewing all the material we had collected with Father Bob over many months, that song seemed to encapsulate the many stories I was trying to weave together.
Roach kindly gave us permission to use this song in the program and eventually as the title of the documentary. Through the streets of the city was broadcast on the Seven Network in 1991.
Father Bob made a telling remark in the program, which we covered with a reverberation effect: “It doesn’t matter who a person is, what he has done, what has happened to him (…) they are one of us.”
That reverberation continues 30 years later.
Read more: Archie Roach: the great singer, tender and humble, who gave our people a voice