Probation Officer
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel, my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. For seven years, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
As a student minister I had elected to minister in the heart of the inner suburbs of North Melbourne and there, around Kensington, Flemington and Newmarket I used to visit all of the people in the little workers cottages in which they lived and in the new high rise concrete Housing Commission flats. This area was to be not only my student ministry, but the centre of my ministry for the next seven years as I became pastor to the slums.
It was a regular custom on a Monday morning after some time had passed, to go to the law courts at North Melbourne. So many of my people who lived in the slum areas of Newmarket were frequent attenders at the law courts. Many of them were there on drunk and disorderly charges after a weekend of merriment, or after some dispute over the result of a football match, or some argument in a hotel bar about some girl.
Nearly all the workmen at the abattoirs, the offal works and the boiling down works had gaol sentences behind them. In fact they used to say in those days if you had not been to Pentridge Gaol you could not get a job in the abattoirs. The young people were commonly caught for illegal use of cars, stealing motor bikes, and causing vandalism in the community.
I had been to court several times when a magistrate, a kindly gentleman with thick lensed glasses who used to look down from the bench and ask me questions about the character of certain people, called me up into his office at a lunch break. He carefully polished his glasses on his handkerchief and looked at me through thin slits of eyes under bushy eyebrows. He said “I like your concern for these people. Do you know the real problem with this court? I have to sentence far too many people to gaol who should not be going to gaol. They should be in the custody of someone like yourself. But there is only one probation officer for this whole district and he is already overloaded with work cases. Young man, if you ever thought you would give your time to working as an honorary probation officer I would be pleased myself to nominate you.”
I had never considered myself a probationary officer particularly as my early life had not been exemplary in the community and the only contact I had had with the law in my early days in Box Hill had been for the wrong reasons. However, after some time I accepted and eventually the Social Welfare Department Director General, Mr. A.R. Whatmore, sent me a letter which declared “I have the honour to inform you that you have been appointed by His Excellency the Governor in Council a Probation Officer under Section 10 of Act No.6218 for the Children’s Court in the State of Victoria, notification of which will appear in the Government Gazette.”
I did not realize what that was going to mean but over the next few years I had 104 boys on probation. They came to my oversight for one or two years. I was obliged to see each one each week and to help keep them on the straight and narrow.
I will never forget the first boy. I received a court notification asking me to go to prepare a pre court report on a boy who had been charged with manslaughter. His name was Barry Calmire. Barry worked in the slaughter yards picking up offal. He was a tall strapping lad, with a very bad acne scarred face, and huge shoulders. He wore knee high leather motor bike boots which kept his feet dry in the abattoirs. When the slaughter men slit open the stomach of a dead beast which was hanging by its heels from a continuously running overhead chain, the intestines, stomach and lungs would fall about upon the floor with the heart still pumping out blood. The slaughter men would quickly trim the offal from the carcass and move on with the task of carving up the beast. The offal boys would pick up the remainder from the floor, sort out the edible parts like heart and tongue, kidneys and liver, and take the remaining intestines and bowels to other places for treatment and cleansing. The offal boys would be covered with the blood of bulls and cows from head to foot, and the smell from the bowels and the ruptured stomachs of beasts was foul.
The men in the abattoirs started at first light and by 11 a.m. had completed their days work. They then adjourned to the bar of a local pub for six or seven hours solid drinking.
Barry Calmire used to drink with the worst of them and would drink schooner after schooner of Victoria Bitter. Late one afternoon this 14 year old boy, standing in the bar of the pub, argued with a man and in his drunken state pulled out a huge boning knife which he had stuck in the side of his boot. He plunged it deep into the man’s stomach ripped him up through the rib cage so that his intestines, lungs and heart gushed upon the floor. Barry did to that man what he saw that man do to cattle. In an instant the man was dead.
I was to go to the home of Barry Calmire and prepare a pre court report that would aid the magistrate in coming to a decision about Barry’s future.
Like most of the men who worked on the chains in the slaughter yards and abattoirs, Barry suffered from deprivation and felt trapped in the slum area in a cycle of despair.
I walked past his house several times in Racecourse Road before I found his door. There was only a door in between shops facing the street. Just that one door opened into a long stairway which went up above the shops. There was his home. I knocked on the door and introduced myself to Mr. Calmire. I was never so shocked to see a man so different from that of his son. Barry was big framed, with scarred skin, long unkempt hair, tight pants and knee high leather boots. His father was carefully manicured, hair parted in the centre with every hair Brylcreamed into place, wearing a velvet smoking jacket and soft leather slip-on slippers. He spoke in the most effeminate voice and minced his way up the stairs in front of me. Sitting in their lounge I could not comprehend that this over neat precise house with its lace on the back of the couch cushions was the home of Barry Calmire. His father talked nonstop and smoked a cigarette through a long holder. He explained to me that he was an artiste in a chocolate factory.
He was responsible for making exotic hand crafted chocolates. Upon each chocolate he made a different twirl or swirl to distinguish that hand crafted sweet from every other. He spoke at great length about his profession and all the time I was recognising that his big, tough son who picked up offal in the slaughter yards had fallen far below his father’s ambition for him. Barry was sunk in self deprecation. He had in no way measured up to his father’s ambitions for him. Everything his father stood for was just as far from Barry as was humanly possible. I realized that father and son living together in that environment could have no abiding relationship. They were as if they came from opposite extremes of the human experience.
The one thing about Barry that really appealed to me was that he, in a sober state, was overwhelmed with remorse and guilt. The magistrate who heard the charge of manslaughter, in an amazing show of absolute trust, entrusted Barry to my care as his probation officer for the next 150 weeks. He gave me the task of seeing if we could keep Barry out of prison for the rest of his life.
I took the responsibility seriously and every week met with Barry. We talked about guilt and forgiveness. About God’s plan for our lives and for making a new start. Barry listened intently. We became close friends. He began to ask me questions about all matters of life, human relationships, work, the future, employment, sexuality and of what life was all about. This huge teenager who was so physically tough yet so immature gradually began to change.
I introduced him to the youth group that we were running much to the despair of some of the parents who did not want their children mixing with a young man convicted of manslaughter. I carefully sought to mould Barry’s life week after week. Sometimes he let us down terribly. Before his sentence was up my fiancee, Beverley, and I were married and Barry became a regular visitor into our first home. He often had meals with us and every week we talked through the issues of life together.
The day came when Barry was elected vice president of the youth group. He made his commitment to Jesus Christ in an evening service when I was preaching and some weeks later, after further training, I baptised him into Christ. He was now a new person in Christ.
In every way he became a new person. The 156 weeks of probation had ended. Barry had a different job, a new future, a sense of self esteem and of worth. He was a committed Christian and was helping in the leadership of a youth club. The magistrate’s decision to release him on probation had been extraordinarily successful. I had had many other boys on probation at that time but Barry was the first. Although lacking adequate education he accepted a job with the Victorian Railways and settled in, taking a number of exams and receiving passes. He then began to go with Donna and after a few years they became engaged. It was my privilege to marry them. Shortly after he was appointed a station master. Donna and he had two children and were respected people in the outer suburb where they built their new home.
I never had much contact with his father over the years but I will never forget that young man who came out of the abattoirs to kill a man and then find new life in Christ.
I will never forget what the magistrate said that first morning when he had asked me into his rooms when, looking at me through his bushy eyebrows while he polished his glasses, he said “Once you lock one of these young kids up you have lost him forever. But if I can get someone to show an interest in them then I believe you have got a chance of reforming the boy.”
More than a hundred boys would come into my care over the next years but none gave me a greater satisfaction nor at times heartache, than the slowly changing character of Big Barry. But I must admit I wondered what on earth I could do with him in my first experience as a probation officer when I visited him that night in his father’s flat with his father sitting there with the long cigarette holder and velvet smoking jacket, and as I walked down the stairs and out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES