Always Say Yes: A giant of Australian social policy

By David Scott

Always Say Yes is the fascinating account of the life of one of Australia's giants of social policy.

'I was 13 when I decided what I wanted to do in life was travel and have adventures, be of some use to other people, and have a family. Life worked out pretty much as I hoped.'

Born into middle-class poverty in the 1920s, David Scott was on course for a corporate career until his uncle, Father Gerard Tucker, invited him to become part of The Brotherhood of St Laurence.

Scott went on to become the director of the Brotherhood turning it into the most significant agency for social welfare in Australia. He also formed Community Aid Abroad (now Oxfam) and played a leading role in galvanising support for the East Timorese people when Indonesia invaded.

Always Say Yes follows Scott's life and accomplishments and celebrates one of our giants of social policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pier 9
• Release date: Sep 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781743439029

Book preview

PREFACE

In essence this book is a personal account of David Scott’s own life and work. The reader will be challenged by the extraordinary range and complexity of his commitments to so many different causes and fields of endeavour. It makes for an interesting read, based as it is on his recollections and reflections written toward the end of his life. Many people will learn of events about which they have known little or nothing, just as there will be other matters that will be broadly familiar to them.

Everyone who met him will have their own recollections, but my first memory of David goes back to 1955 when he spoke to a group of students from Trinity College and Janet Clarke Hall during a work and study conference run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence. David was barely thirty years of age and was the organising secretary of the Slum Abolition Campaign based in Melbourne.

He spoke to us one night following visits to the homes of poor people in the inner city. I was struck by his shy, understated presence that could not conceal an underlying passion, resoluteness and quiet sense of authority. Someone told me afterwards that he was Father Gerard Tucker’s nephew, possibly his heir apparent, and a young man who was ‘going places’. He certainly did that, making a significant impact on countless people and situations.

In 1964 I was appointed Chaplain to the Brotherhood of St Laurence after serving at St Mary’s North Melbourne. By that time David was the director of Community Aid Abroad and associate director of the Brotherhood. Once again I was struck by his enquiring critical mind, passion for justice, wide-ranging interests and his network of influential friends. I also became aware of his well-honed writing skills and ability to communicate key messages to the community, which formed the tools for his commitment to social advocacy.

From that time I always saw Father Tucker, Archdeacon Geoff Sambell and David Scott as a Brotherhood triumvirate—three men of different ages, with different personalities, who shared common values and social commitments in matters of poverty and social disadvantage, both at home and abroad. Years later I dedicated my book Australians in Poverty to them as three great Australians who had profoundly influenced me.

On being informed of this, David’s reaction was, ‘Did you ask their permission?’

I replied, ‘That would be difficult, for as you know, Father Tucker has already gone to God, Geoffrey Sambell as archbishop is gravely ill in Perth and, in your case, I did not want to risk you saying no.’

David had a great work capacity and boundless energy, while his tenacity of purpose was something he had inherited from his uncle Gerard Kennedy Tucker. By the 1960s Father Tucker had established a second residential settlement for active older people at St Laurence Park Lara. He continued to sign himself as ‘The Superior of The B.S.L.’, partly in the hope that one day a religious Brotherhood would be re-established and partly in steadfast refusal to regard his later years as ones of retirement.

Working closely beside David at the Brotherhood, I was conscious of someone who, like his uncle, was very clear about what needed to be done to reform society. He was willing to take on new challenges, often leading the way, convinced that others would grasp the vision and come along with him. Despite his reserve, I always regarded David as an ‘outer directed’ person who enjoyed taking a pioneering role, although, like his uncle, he never let himself become preoccupied with the details of organisational management. This was a role for others.

David’s personal motto was ‘always say yes’, the title he wanted for this book. He was always up for any new challenge that captured his imagination and, once committed, he would not let it go or give up until he had done everything he could. The following narrative provides abundant evidence as to how that happened.

Through his openness to new challenges and good causes we can see how his closely connected social, political and environmental interests were formulated. Like many restless souls, life was something of a continuing adventure right to the end. This came at considerable personal cost, partly because he was a person driven by moral imperatives.

No doubt some will reflect on the source of that drive and energy and the basis of his beliefs and values. There was something of an elusive quality to David in such matters. He never allowed himself to be contained by conventional theological or ideological stereotypes. His own account of these matters is simple and somewhat matter of fact because he expressed his deepest thoughts only as much as he felt able to do so. Notwithstanding, he was shaped by the lives and beliefs of all his clerical forebears and close colleagues, like Sambell, without being able to totally share their faith in a deeply personal sense. This made it hard for him to fully embrace the panoply of orthodox Christian faith and doctrine. Being such an honest person he would have felt it hypocritical to subscribe fully to what he could not personally believe or fully understand, and he is to be respected for his frankness in such matters.

In truth, David was a man of the world, in the good sense of the term. He wanted the best for our planet and all its peoples and, as a matter of stewardship, felt compelled to work for a just, sustainable, participatory society, believing that every facet of life is ultimately interconnected. This explains why he sought broad solutions to the human condition that these days are described as holistic.

Is there a reason for the names we give our children? It is interesting that he was named David Horace Forde Scott, after a shepherd boy who slew a tyrant and later became a king, as a grandson of two fine Anglican priests with a passion for justice, and the son of a scarred World War I veteran. It rather illustrates what the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth meant when he wrote ‘the child is the father of the man’. The boy went on to do some remarkable things for humanity, driven as he was by a spirit of adventure and a passion for justice. He inherited a great Christian social tradition that he sought to express in his own way. David always wanted to stand up and say ‘yes’ to good causes, while also being someone who wanted to remain his own man.

Our thanks must go to those who supported him through his final years and to those who assisted in making this publication possible in order to tell the story of a significant figure in local, national and international life.

Peter Hollingworth

1

MIDDLE-CLASS POOR

On 23 January 1925, Melbourne newspaper The Argus reported Wonthaggi coalminers were seeking a pay rise of thirteen shillings a week above their present five pounds and seventeen pence, and a reduction in weekly working hours from forty-eight to forty-four. A reviewer praised Beau Geste, PC Wren’s story of the French Foreign Legion, white superiority and heroism. The Myer Store advertised corsets with four strong grip suspenders for twenty-two shillings and sixpence. This was the equivalent of what a Wonthaggi miner would earn in a day, lying on his side half a mile underground, chipping at a coalface.

The newspaper also announced the birth of David Horace Ford Scott, son of Phyllis Lavinia, 35, and Sydney Hewitt Scott, 40, of Wollongoon in Holbrook, New South Wales.

Sydney Scott was a returned serviceman. In 1915, at the age of 31, he’d enlisted and, the following year, was the only survivor of an explosion in a Flanders gun pit. Sydney somehow scrabbled out of the pit and rolled in mud, but didn’t escape severe burns to his face and hands. His mother, Laura Jane, was told he was ‘dangerously ill’.

One of his ears was almost burned off, but the sight in his bloodshot eyes was miraculously saved. He had to wear pince-nez glasses because the stump of his left ear wasn’t large enough for conventional spectacles. His hands were hard and swollen. The cracks that covered them were exposed to infection, so he wore fingerless gloves soaked in Vaseline.

Sydney’s war experience took him and Phyllis to the soldier’s settlement block of Wollongoon, outside Holbrook and just north of the Victorian border. The 640 acres was dry and rock-strewn. The home was a dilapidated shack surrounded by dead trees.

The couple had pioneering spirit but no farming experience. Like thousands of returned veterans who escaped their comrades’ ghostly fate, Syd was sold a lemon. Wollongoon was, like many other allotments in the failed government scheme, too small, too dry and as unsuited to agriculture as the injured former soldier. Drought persisted, world wool and wheat prices plummeted, and pastures were blighted with crop rust.

In what must have been a savage blow, Sydney and Phyllis walked away from their land. And kept walking. In David’s first ten years he lived in seven houses. Not because of his parents’ wanderlust, but out of necessity.

The wandering took the family to Lightwood, a small cattle-fattening property on the road to Tindaldra in rabbit-infested hills on the Upper Murray River. It is very possible the property’s owner, Clive Fairbairn, took on Sydney more out of sympathy for a badly wounded digger than the need for staff. It didn’t last long, though—the Depression bred uncertainty and Fairbairn decided to sell up. Again, Sydney was unemployed and prospects for an unskilled, wounded war veteran seemed hopeless. All the Scotts could do was return to Melbourne and live at Phyllis’s mother’s home.

‘Brockley’ was a stern, solid Victorian pile, softened somewhat at the front by heavy wisteria. Situated in leafy Armadale, it was home to Caroline Lavinia Tucker, her middle-aged son Lyde and Miss Robbins, an anxious English immigrant who was cook and housemaid.

At Granny Tucker’s house, David became a ‘verandah child’. Broadcaster Phillip Adams believes verandah children, of whom he was also one, have some special quality, perhaps partly due to having to overcome fear and loneliness. Sydney and Phyllis would always go out to tuck him in and kiss and hug David goodnight, but it was a cold and frightening place. On windy nights, the canvas blinds rattled and crashed. At any moment, a creature—David imagined a bunyip—might come over the end of the bed and in between the sheets. Sometimes, he felt alone and frightened, but he was the son of a man living with the pain of having been badly injured at war—he’d learned from example not to complain.

After being unemployed for a few months, Sydney found a lowly paid job as a bookkeeper at the Trustees and Executors Agency Company in the city. His appearance, with scarred face and hands and flaking skin, probably denied him a more senior position of trust officer since that would have involved meeting clients.

Granny Tucker was born in Monaro on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in 1851, the daughter of William Adams Brodribb Jnr and his wife Eliza. Her grandfather, William Adams Brodribb, came to Australia as a convict in 1818. In Gloucestershire he’d been a solicitor, married to Prudence and had four young children. In 1816 Brodribb was mistakenly caught up in a poaching operation that ended in a man being shot and the solicitor making the conspirators swear they would not betray one another. Subsequently the poachers were rounded up; one was hanged and the rest sent to Australia. In the course of the trial Brodribb’s involvement was revealed, and he was convicted of ‘falsely swearing’, sentenced to penal servitude in Australia, sent straight to the hulks and, some months later, set sail. Thankfully, on the ship was Lieutenant Governor William Sorrell, who asked Brodribb to take over the duties of the ship steward when he became ill. Sorrell then requested that Brodribb accompany his party to Tasmania. From there, his family was sent for and Brodribb was conditionally pardoned soon after they arrived in 1818. He practised law in Hobart and the couple had four more children.

One of the sons, William Adams Brodribb Jnr, decided to seek his fortune and, over the course of his adult life, became an explorer and pioneer. He travelled throughout New South Wales and Victoria, trading livestock, managing properties and settling on land that others thought barren and useless. In 1836, he over-landed stock to Melbourne, along the way establishing the first road. He then formed a company and chartered a ship to Corner Inlet with the intention of finding a harbour that would service Gippsland, although bureaucracy saw that adventure come to nothing. William Jnr married and had three daughters—another two daughters died of diphtheria as children—although he seemed to spend little time with them. Eventually he settled his small family in Melbourne, although he continued to seek his fortune. In his seventies, on moving to Sydney for health reasons, he turned his attention to politics, and was offered a seat on the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1881, five years before his death. (In 2002, David heard author Tom Keneally speaking on radio about his latest novel Bettany’s Book. The writer had been inspired by the diaries of William Brodribb Jnr, which he’d found while researching The Great Shame.)

Although he lived in her home, David barely knew his grandmother and certainly never heard anything of her father’s pioneering spirit until much later in his life. To the small boy who had lived in the bush until the age of four, Granny Tucker was a shadowy figure, then in her seventies, who knitted by the fire. She resembled a china doll with fine features, peachy soft skin and grey wispy hair. She wore a black dress with a high collar and a pearl brooch. A rather grand old lady, she was the widow of respected Anglican vicar Horace Finn Tucker. Long after Horace had died, she maintained the rituals of middle-class vicarage life—starchy tablecloths, silver cruet and napkin rings, and strict table manners. But the silver salver on the table inside the front door looked lonely; few of Granny Tucker’s friends remained alive to leave their calling cards.

Phyllis and Miss Robbins cooked, polished furniture and silver, and did the laundry in a time before household conveniences. David’s job was placing the napkins in the correct places, brushing the crumbs from the table into a brass tray after meals and stacking the dishes. Occasionally he accompanied his grandmother as she strode slowly and deliberately down Moorhouse Street to the busy High Street shops, where the shopkeepers and merchants greeted her as if she was royalty.

The environment at Brockley was sedate and middle-class. Despite being surrounded by five adults, David was often lonely. He would have loved a friend his own age, and often sensed the tensions at play in the household. After he’d been tucked into bed, his parents’ voices would waft to where he was trying to sleep—many times they would be arguing over money and how to make the few pounds they had stretch out.

Despite appearances, Brockley was beyond Granny Tucker’s means, even with Sydney’s small income to help out. It was decided that the home would be rented and Granny and Lyde would take a small apartment in Malvern. And so the Scotts moved again. At first, they lived in a small flat above Granny’s new home, but the rent was raised and they had to move again, this time to a cheaply built duplex in Maitland Avenue. With its flimsy walls, every noise from next door—even a flushing toilet—was audible.

The family’s saving grace, for a time, was The Hut—one room with a verandah on an acre of land bought with a small payment from the Wollongoon farm his parents had been forced to leave. It was at Montrose, 30 kilometres out of Melbourne and two kilometres along a bush track. It gave the adults a place of their own on the weekends and David a place to explore, build secret cubbies and test how far he could wander without becoming afraid or lost. But the retreat was expensive and difficult to get to, and no doubt Phyllis and Sydney needed the money, so they eventually sold it.

Home number six was again in Malvern—Adelaide Street—a shabby double-fronted Victorian, but the best house the Scotts had ever lived in. The backyard was a child’s adventure-land with fruit trees to climb and a big shed to explore. But when it was sold for 600 pounds they could not afford to buy it. Off they went again—to a tiny, unlovely house behind the back gate of Brockley, where Granny Tucker had once again taken up residence with Lyde.

In better times, Phyllis was a complex, attractive, independent, loving woman. Fading sepia holiday snaps taken at the beach and fancy dress balls at the Alfred Hospital show she had many friends. She managed to make her small wardrobe look more glamorous than it was, smart in summer coats or winter tweeds. Hats were de rigueur—often altered or embellished to smarten them up.

She also had a naughty streak. She was a smoker and had a lifelong addiction to a flutter on the horses, an escape from the drudgery of never having enough money to indulge other interests. The study of the form guide began midweek and by Saturday morning there were lengthy telephone conversations with friends before she called the starting price bookmaker to make a two-shilling bet each way.

But with that complex nature came a tendency to moodiness, depression and, at times, anger; anger about the war, Sydney’s suffering, that the Depression meant unemployment was rife, and that her family was always short of money.

The dead and the living also haunted Phyllis. Like George Johnston’s mother in My Brother Jack, she regularly visited the Caulfield Repatriation Hospital. Lines of men—twisted of body and demented of mind—lay on crisp cotton sheets in long, neat wooden wards under corrugated roofs. There was one man in particular who David remembered: Trav Paterson, with his smiling face and twinkling blue eyes. The young boy always felt nervous about being lifted onto Trav’s bed when he visited the hospital with his mother. He was scared of hurting the soldier’s legs. Trav, however, was paralysed from the neck down.

While Phyllis accepted that her two sisters, now in comfortable circumstances, could afford nice homes, modern amenities and motorcars, she resented her own circumstances and the causes of them: the Great War and the Great Depression. Perhaps this sense of injustice was inherited from her father’s strong sense of social justice and responsibility. Horace Tucker founded a school, established a church in then working-class Prahran, and in the earlier 1890s Depression founded the Tucker Village Settlements to provide opportunities for unemployed families to acquire their own holdings and attempt self-sufficiency. He was the vicar of Christ Church for a remarkable twenty-eight years. His book, The New Arcadia, revealed him to be a closet Christian socialist.

Horace Tucker’s socialist views were in stark contrast to his social standing. In the bluestone vicarage in prosperous South Yarra, Horace and his family—Caroline and he had six children (three boys and three girls)—were looked upon with almost regal awe. ‘The Tuckers do like being the Tuckers,’ remarked Lavina Kelly, who married Cecil, one of Phyllis’s brothers.

Still, Phyllis seemed to inherit her father’s nobler qualities and sense of social obligation. In an act of rebellion, she studied nursing at a time when it was an unusual career for girls from middle-class families, and tended patients throughout the devastating influenza epidemic of 1919. Unlike most of her family and friends, she voted Labor, admired Ben Chifley and John Curtin and disliked Bob Menzies’ pomposity. She resented, perhaps unfairly, his failure to enlist in the First World War. Maude McNicol, one of her closest nursing friends at the Alfred Hospital, was a member of the Communist Party.

But when David was a child, the strict social codes of the time meant Phyllis was not nursing. She was bored, depressed and short of money.

Sydney, on the other hand, was stoic. He and Phyllis never slept in the same room—he groaned and he snored and he cried out, waking throughout the night to scratch his itching hands. By day, his pain was endured without a word of complaint, for Syd was a man of his times. ‘Not too bad,’ was his reply when someone inquired after his health. Stoicism was a quality expected in men of his generation. Emotions were contained. David never remembered his father ever speaking about the army, his time in France, the accident, his long stay in hospital, his pain or his feelings. For that generation and for many in the next, there was no release in the telling of the story and no counselling to ease the pain.

An amiable person, interested in others and full of warmth, Sydney’s