Stephen Seymour
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
One of the areas I looked forward to working in when I came to Wesley Mission was working with some disabled people. I had started in a small way during my suburban minister days in Cheltenham setting up a special class within the Sunday School for children who suffered severe physical and mental deficiencies. One of our boys, David, was in a wheelchair. He could neither speak nor see properly and he had no limbs that would function. However with the purchase of a then revolutionary Golf Ball typewriter for him in his Sunday Schools class we were able to attach a long wooden peg to a band that fitted on his head and by using his head he would hit the point of the pointer onto the letter and spell out on the typewriter his answers to questions. That very preliminary work with David, which led us to putting in ramps to the church and places where his wheelchair could be at home with plenty of room for his grandmother to sit beside him, started me on an intense programme of caring for the disabled. When we came to Wesley Mission we operated a centre called ‘Pinaroo’. It was a large hostel for about 45 severely disabled people. The trouble with this hostel was its very strength. Its strength lay in caring staff who made beds, cleaned floors, cooked meals and took disabled people out and helped them have an enjoyable life to the full. But I soon saw that in caring for people in a lodge like this and by doing so much for them we were further disabling them. What we really needed to do was help enable them to do whatever they could do for themselves. I remember in 1980 and 1981 having meetings with their parents explaining that we wanted to deinstitutionalise these severely disabled young people and have them live in house groups of four to as house with one carer. Instead of us doing their banking and money for them we would teach them to handle their own money. Instead of taking them for rides in our disabled persons bus, we would go with them until they learnt to travel by bus and train and to be independent. Instead of spending all the time in the presence of carers we would encourage them to go to sheltered workshops and earn some money of their own.
Noble though these ideas were we were met with total resistance from parents. Parents had gone through the big break of having their child leave home now to live in someone else’s care and they didn’t want us to make them independent. Many of the parents were quite elderly and their children now adults and they wanted to spend the rest of their lives knowing that their disabled adult children were in total care for the rest of their lives. They would never have to worry about them ever being out in the community, travelling by train, or going into a supermarket to buy food. The parents without realising it wanted their disabled adult child to be so cocooned with safety that they would never develop what capacities they had.
Our view was just the opposite. I wanted to make those young people as independent as possible and to help them develop whatever skills they had to their maximum use. I wanted them to undertake courses in cooking, to go to a TAFE course to learn how to handle money on their own and how to cook and buy food for their own kitchen. It was inevitable that we would have conflict with some of those parents and I was always glad of the support of my colleague Rev. Colin Wood who helped me negotiate very prickly meetings with very tense parents. We succeeded eventually with opening about 25 houses into which we placed a staff person plus three or four disabled people. The story of that enterprise throughout the 1980’s and 90’s was one of great success. Almost every one developed within their capabilities. Some became so independent that they took courses at TAFE, learned to cook learned to travel on public transport and got jobs away from Sheltered employment. A number of them eventually became the leaseholder on their own house property. Many of them learned to travel independently and to save their money, to travel overseas and go to Disneyland or wherever their chosen destination was. Several got married and we have today still a close contact with a number of those people who have been married and set up their own homes. We are extraordinarily proud of how those disabled people developed their skills and abilities. That first step was followed by many others to help the disabled. Wesley Mission is today the largest provider of services to disabled people within NSW. We have many different types of services and we look after hundreds of disabled babies, children, young adults and aged disabled people.
Many of those disabled have become firm friends. I was very moved recently at Mother’s Day when Robert Bates a 55 year old profoundly disabled man who helps us every Sunday night by handing out Hymn sheets to everybody who comes to worship, purchased a Mother’s Day card and a gift to give my wife. He regards Beverley as his mother.
I have often had people who come to church of a night wonder what kind of church this is when they see a profoundly disabled man sitting at the front doors of Wesley Theatre wearing a solid helmet on his head to save his very tender bones when he falls accidentally handing out the hymn sheets. Many people find it difficult to confront a disabled person but allowing Robert to share in the taking up of the offering and in the handing out of the hymn sheets that all of God’s children are welcome and everyone of them has a place where they can exercise their gifts of service. Sometimes our friendship with disabled people has brought us great sorrow and great rejoicing. I can never think about the sorrow that has been brought upon us by some serious disabled person without thinking of Trevor Young or Steven Seymour. Trevor Young was only in his early twenties. He used to sleep rough in the back alleys around the streets of the Central Business District. I found him huddled in a doorway one night in an alley that ran between a café and picture theatre in Pitt Street. I asked him where he was sleeping and in halting speech was told that he just slept up the alley. I told him that we had beds where he could sleep and showers and breakfast in the morning a hot breakfast that would help set him up for the day and that what he needed to do was to go to our Edward Eager Lodge. It was a damp night and rain was beginning to fall. In those days without a mobile telephone I went back to my office telephoned Edward Eager Lodge and told them I’d sent the young man up to the Lodge to get a bed for the night. The night manager told me they were already full but he would do what he could to find him a comfortable and a dry place.
The next morning I heard a dreadful story about Trevor as soon as I arrived at work. The Lodge was overcrowded with people and we have a strict rule that we will not allow mattresses on the floor in fire escapes in case of an emergency evacuation. The night was raining and there were many people – more than 500 who were sleeping out in the parks and in the alleyways and backdoor ways of the city. Trevor told the night manager not to worry, that he would come back in the morning and then book in for a bed the next night. I don’t know what happened then but apparently Trevor went round the back of Edward Eager Lodge. The rain started to come down very heavily and looking for a dry spot this young, mentally disabled man lifted the lid on one of our large dump bins, he recognised it was out of the rain and he would be warm there. He crawled in among the garbage and made himself comfortable. Apparently he fell into a deep sleep. He awoke the next morning to violent movement. In the early hours of the morning the garbage truck came and picked up the big metal garbage container and lifted it over the cabin where the driver sat and emptied the contents including Trevor into the back of the garbage truck. Without realising what he was doing, the garbage man replaced the big steel bin and pressed the level, which compacted the garbage in the back of his truck, and Trevor was compressed to death. No disabled young person should be homeless on their own sleeping in the trash bins.
I am sad every time I think of Trevor and I think of him every time I see a trash dump bin being emptied into a garbage truck.
Or when I think of Steven Seymour. Tears well up in my eyes as I think of Steven. Every morning since 1987 for the next 7 years Steven met with me for a cup of coffee or tea. In 1987 when our head office was in temporary accommodation in George Street while we were building our large new Wesley Centre in Pitt Street, Steven Seymour would appear at the door of Wesley Centre waiting for me to arrive. In those days he used to come in and have an early cup of tea with the Lifeline counsellors who had been on duty all night. Then he learnt that he could come in to Wesley Centre and meet with the early arriving members of our restaurant staff. Every day they would give him a free breakfast and a cup of coffee.
By the time I had arrived he was full of good food and tea and coffee. He would wait just where I park my car and then accompany me to my office. Steven would spend the entire day with us and would find out where I might be going during the day. Steven was of medium height with dark hair and a scraggily beard. He always carried over one shoulder, a bag containing all of his possessions. He had several teeth missing and the rest were a mixture of green and black and white. He had lived for 16 years in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital and then in a lodge at Leichhardt.
Steven was addicted to the streets. No one could get him away from the streets and whenever we found him a better place of accommodation he would only stay a night or two before he would come back to sleep somewhere around the streets.
Steven was a gentle man. He was very clean in his personal habits but very timid and fearful that people would bash him at night.
He had the conflict of being afraid of being on the streets at night, and desiring deeply to sleep out under what he called the “Starlight Hotel” rather than indoors. Several times while he has sleeping on the street or in a back alley or in a doorway he was robed of his few possessions. Many times he was bashed up by young hoodlums who found him a very easy target because he could not strike back.
In the seven years that I knew him Steven never drank alcohol, he never smoked and he never took any illegal drugs.
He was just a gentle child of a man.
When he was born, he was born with an intellectual disability and he was born into a dysfunctional family. I found out later that his sister had left home at 15. A brother had left home in his early teenage years and the life between his mother and father was one of alcohol abuse and physical violence. Steven somewhere slipped through the cracks and as a boy ended up in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital. Upon de-institutionalisation, which occurred after the Richmond report, Steven was one of those people sent out into the community into a house where he would be looked after. The fact was the boarding house proprietor took the money but did not look after Steven and after a while Steven was on the street and I suspect the boarding house proprietor was still receiving money to care for him. When we moved into our new building in Pitt Street Steven moved with us. Every morning, early while it was still dark Steven would be waiting for the first person to arrive, which was usually one of our cooks or chefs from Wesley Restaurant to open the doors. Our staff would let him in because he was no trouble and because they liked to give him a cup of tea and some breakfast. On Tuesdays, Steven knew I would go to Rotary and he would be there waiting for me to come down in the lift from my office and there he would be waiting with his bag with all his possessions hooked over one shoulder and he would walk with me down to the Rotary Club of Sydney meeting in the Hotel Windsor. He would lope along beside me skipping from foot to foot and saying over and over again “You’re my friend aren’t you Gordon? You’re my friend.” I kept reassuring Steven I was his friend. When I got to the Hotel Windsor I would say that I had to go to my meeting and Steven would quite naturally peel off and lope over to Wynyard Park where he would sit in the sun until an hour and a quarter later he’d be waiting at the front doors of the Hotel Menzies for me to exit. Then he would lope along beside me and we would talk all the way with Stephen saying over and over again “You’re my friend Gordon aren’t you? You’re my friend” I always assured Steven that I was his friend and we always made sure he had a few dollars in his pocket and that he was able to get some lunch. One time in 1994 Steven’s Birthday came around and the staff at Wesley Centre gave him a birthday party complete with cake and candles and gave him the gift of a wristwatch. It was not a fine delicate gold watch, that wasn’t Steven; it was a large ostentatious brightly coloured plastic watch with a real battery and hands. He was so proud of his big watch and wore it constantly; the watch had cost us less than $20.
No one ever accepted responsibility for Steven but in 1992 through the miracle of the radio station when I told something of Steven’s life, his sister who had long lost contact with him recognised I was talking about her brother and she made contact with me, I reunited brother and sister after twenty years. That’s when Steven found out that both his mother and father had died some years earlier. However I would love to tell you that his sister took and extra responsibility for Steven, but the fact was that having made contact with him she no longer wished to be in contact.
In 1994 I was rung early one Saturday morning. The constable from the Surry Hills police station told me that Steven had been attacked in the early hours of the morning and had been robbed of his watch. He had run away from his assailant who was seen to chase him and eventually catch him and then savagely kick him to death. They told me it was hard to recognise his face. The only way the police were able to find someone to identify him was that when they went through his bag of possessions they found several photographs of me cut from our Wesley Mission magazine. The police rang and asked if I could come and identify him. Beverley and I quickly dressed and went to where the body of Steven was. It was hard to recognise him owing to the swollen and beaten nature of his face. There was no doubt about it, it was Steven and he had been robbed and kicked to death for the sake of a watch worth less than $20.
Over the road several stories up two cleaners were completing their tasks when they saw the assault. They came down and gave a very good description to the police of the assailant. I met with the police on a continuous basis over a period of several months but no one has ever been arrested and charged with his murder.
I told Steven’s story the following Sunday night on this programme and indicated I wanted to hold a service in Wesley Church in his memory and I wanted people to say to the community that we cared for a disabled homeless man like Steven. I was overwhelmed. Flowers arrived from all over the state and more than 300 people attended an incredible service of tribute and praise to one of God’s very special frail children.
But there are other very disabled people whose stories mean a great deal to us who bring us joy. At the same time as I first got to know Robert Bates I also got to know Angie Brute. Angie was a well-known female who moved from bar to bar in the Kings Cross area. She had been a prostitute for many years in earlier life but when I cam to know her she was just an older woman who was dirty diseased and very alcoholic. She couldn’t exist without cheap wine. Her clothing was dirty, her body was smelly and her bloodshot eyes and raucous voice put fear into any one. She used to go from hotel to hotel and would frequently slump on the floor at the bar and beg men to buy her drinks. Years of smoking had scarified her throat and her loud raucous harsh voice made her the most unladylike women you could ever find. I didn’t know much about her in those days but some time in 1980 she arrived at a service at Wesley Mission’s Edward Eager Lodge. In those days there were very few homeless women on the streets but Angie was one of them. After taking a Sunday morning church service I had a cup of tea with her and while we were drinking the tea asked her why she had come to Edward Eager Lodge. She told me she had resisted the thought of going to any of the homeless person centres run by the Welfare agencies. She laughed with a harsh crackling voice “You’d never catch me in one of those places” I said to her, “Well why have you ended up here?” and she replied quite simply “One night two men rolled me in a lane behind a pub. They pushed me on the ground and went through my clothes looking for money. They wouldn’t touch me ‘cause they thought they’d get the scab. They took what money I had, but I didn’t have much maybe 15 cents. One of the men stood over me, undid his fly and pissed all over me.” She let the enormity of that sink on me. Then she continued, “While I was laying in the lane and he was pissing on my face I thought “I’m gonna go up the Lodge and see Noreen.”
So that was how Angie came to Edward Eager Lodge and to Rev. Noreen Towers who has worked among Sydney’s homeless in such a wonderful way for so many years.
As we finished our cup of tea I said to her “Do you like it here Angie?” She replied, “It’s beautiful and I never want to leave.” I replied to her, “Well I hope you do leave but no to go back to the streets. I want you to leave here and come into a new place we’re just starting. It’s out at Horsley Park and it’s called Serenity Farm. It’s a lovely place set in farm lands with cows and chooks and a couple of dogs and a cat and a few other people we’re helping get their lives straight. Would you like to go out to the farm Angie?”
Angie said “Not on your life. I’ve never been out of the city and I’m not going to any farm.”
I got to know Angie well as she lived in Edward Eager Lodge over the next couple of years. We saw some improvement in her lifestyle, she was cleaner she became more docile and she began to get her drinking under some sort of control but still she wasn’t willing to make any effort to really overcome her alcoholism.
One day Rev. Noreen Towers said to me “ When you go out to the farm, you’re going to get a surprise. I’ve got someone out there who will be the last person you expect to see.”
Just as Noreen had predicted, when I arrived at Serenity Farm at Horsley Park those three houses we had on about 14 acres of rolling green hills, there in the centre house was one woman, the first woman to some into our alcohol recovery programme, it was Angie Brut. When I walked into the kitchen there she was with her hands in washing up water looking out over the café style curtains at the animals grazing on the paddock behind the house. I gave her a big hug and welcomed her. Sitting in the lounge were four men who were her housemates during their recovery from alcoholism. I decided I should have a talk with them. And said “fella’s, this is a bit of a risk for us. This is the first time we’ve ever had a woman living in one of our houses with men. I want you men to treat her like a lady because if you treat Angie like a lady then she will grow to become one. I want you to open the door and let her go first. I want you to help her with the jobs around the place and when she comes into the room get out of the chair and allow her to sit down. And I want you to listen to this very clearly – I don’t want one of you men ever trying to get into her bedroom at night!”
From behind the kitchen door came a raucous voice, “They’d better not try to get into my bedroom or they’ll loose what they’ve always been proud of!”
Nothing more needed to be said. Angie stayed with us in the alcoholic recovery programme. She was now dry, sober and her general health improved immensely. After about two years I was told there was a lady waiting to see me outside my office. I asked my secretary to bring her in. Standing before me was a lady who bore some resemblance to someone I had once met but that was all until she burst out laughing and the harsh crackly voice came through.” Angie what have you done. I didn’t recognise you! Angie laughed again “You blokes get fooled because a girl changes her hair colour. And I’ve got a new set of choppers, it makes all the difference to your face if you’ got a mouth full of choppers. I haven’t had teeth for years.” Angie got down to the business of telling me why she had come she was well dressed, well presented with a blue rinse and new teeth. Now she said to me “Mr Moyes I’ve cleaned my life up and I wanna get a job. I’m wondering if I can work in your restaurant.”
In our restaurant? I was trying to present people with an image of a reasonably priced high quality service restaurant. It didn’t seem as if Angie would fit there at all. But I knew if I said no it would probably dispirit her greatly. I told her I’d take her on for a trial for a month. Angie that day donned and apron and started to clear away dirty dishes from a table of people who came into Wesley Restaurant. At the end of the month she’s been earning her wages, was reliable and apart from a few occasions when we had to teach her how to keep her thumb out of the soup and not to laugh so loudly, she was a perfect waitress. Angie Brut fell in love with one of our recovered alcoholics and my colleague Rev. Peter Davis married them. A short while afterwards they shifted from their rented premises to a home they owned in Queensland. They became associated with a local church and became regular attendees in a home Bible Study group they corresponded with me regularly until Angie and the Charlie her husband died not long ago.
When you’re working with the disabled and the homeless there are treasures, treasures you will never forget like Robert Bates and Trevor and Steven and Angie and Charlie.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.