Today is a very special day for me. On this day, 20th December, in 1969, 50 years ago exactly, my dad collapsed on the kitchen floor and passed away from a massive heart attack. He was just 59 years old. This is not to say that there hadn’t been a warning; dad had another huge heart attack in 1959 from which he had fully recovered.
Despite the passage of time I remember so much about dad (I was just 20 when he passed away) and so much of what he said, what he taught me and his famous collection of sayings stays with me 50 years later.
Dad was born in Sydney but raised in the Hunter Valley of NSW mostly on a property just out of Muswelbrook called St Helliers. The grand station house is still there, preserved and still being used and, some years ago I had the privilege of being allowed by its owners to tour the house and to soak in some of its history. Dad was born in 1911 and was only a teenager when the drought and the depression that followed pretty much wiped out the massive holdings that the family had owned since the 1830’s. While, as he said, people with university degrees were walking past the property gate looking for a handout during those dark days of the 1930’s, dad was working on his uncle’s farm earning 15 shillings a week and keep harvesting prickly pears and feeding them to the starving stock, hoping to keep them alive till the good times returned.
In his early 20’s dad left the land and moved to Sydney to get a “proper” job. He worked in a furniture store, living it up and enjoying the life of a big, cosmopolitan city. He drank, smoked and did all the things that a young bloke from the country did when he moves to the city. He lived in a flat in Coogee with his elder brother, Robert Wynn (who for reasons I have never discovered, was nicknamed Peter) and his younger sister, Sheila. Neither ever married and my memory of them is that they were very old, though, of course, they weren’t.
Uncle Pete, of whom I have tremendously fond memories, was a born-again Christian and very active in Christian work in Sydney. He particularly associated himself with an interdenominational organisation called Open Air Campaigners who ran open air meetings in the city’s parks, workplaces, beaches and places of leisure. Despite his brother’s involvement, dad remained uninterested, preferring the city lifestyle that the Sydney of the day offered.
So it was quite a surprise to Uncle Peter that dad agreed one night to go to church with him to hear the visiting Irish evangelist W P Nicholson. Nicholson was loud, brash and delighted in what he called “dangling sinners over the jaws of hell.” And, as he spoke that night, that’s exactly what he did. Dad was at various times horrified, terrified and mortified as he began to realise that the life that he had been living wasn’t the life that God intended him to live. At the end of the service dad determined that his old life had passed and that a new life on service had begun. And he proved it almost immediately. Joining up with Peter and the other OAC personnel, dad began an in-depth internship in what Christian service meant. As he grew and learned he began to become more actively involved in the work and many at the time saw great potential there.
Dad had seen the worst of what dissolution could offer having worked as an orderly at the big field hospital at the Sydney Showground during WWII. It was his determination that, with all the will that he had, he would try and prevent the wastage of life that he had seen there.
By the late 1940’s dad had been asked to join the staff of OAC (the picture above shows him in his staff uniform, as grey, military-style uniform that distinguished the staff members.) Here he is below along with my mum on the day of their wedding, early 1948.
We (my brother and I) came along mid-1949 and my earliest memories were of a pretty seedy flat in Strathfield. By now dad was actively involved in itinerant evangelism as well as directing the OAC branch in Newcastle. In 1956 dad was asked to take the directorship of the work in South Australia, a big move for our family. Among the many innovations dad introduced was the use of a 35mm camera to document the work that he and the team were doing, a practice that spread rapidly across the organisation.
Three years into his tenure in Adelaide, dad had his first heart attack. He spent six weeks flat on his back in Adelaide hospital hanging on between life and death with the very basic understanding that medicos had of his condition (compared to today). His doctor was an Indian gentleman. When first dad woke up he asked Dr Sindu what could he do. “Nothing,” was the reply. But then the wise doctor noticed dad’s Bible on the bedside table and he added, “Except you can read some of that each day.”
When he was sufficiently recovered to travel, we were repatriated to Sydney and lived for several years in a little fibro house in Caringbah. Dad took his recuperation very seriously, radically altering his diet, exercising and taking copious amounts of Vitamin E which was thought to be the hot set up at the time. Defying the predictions of the medical profession, he went back to work within a year, preaching in the open air at various locations around Sydney, all without the aid of any amplification. But it was all too taxing and dad left OAC in 1961 and took up a position with the Presbyterian Church, being appointed as Home Missionary to the parish of Cardiff, Glendale and Boolaroo in the outer suburbs of Newcastle.
The change in focus that was required to alter his “style” from a fiery open-air preacher, taking on all and sundry in the parks around Sydney’s CBD to the more “refined” demands of a pastoral ministry was enormous, but dad accomplished it seamlessly and brilliantly. For four years he ministered in the Newcastle parish before being moved on to the Illawarra, as pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Warilla, just south of the lake. Three years was the designated turn-over for a Home Missionary and, at the end of 1968 dad was appointed to the country parish of Coolah, Dunedoo and Cassilis.
Barely had he had time to settle into his new position when his heart problems returned and he spent much of 1969 in and out of Mudgee Hospital. Once he was well enough to travel, the church moved him to Port Kembla where he was expected to take over as minister in the parish once his health had improved sufficiently. It didn’t eventuate and 4 days before Christmas in 1969 he passed away. His heart, strong as a horse’s, so the doctors said, could not cope with occluded arteries. Were they to have had by-pass surgery in the day, I am certain that he would have lived to a ripe old age.
Dad was one of the best preachers I have ever listened to (and believe me I have heard hundreds of them) despite having absolutely no theological college training at all. His sermons were solid, packed with teaching and challenge and liberally sprinkled with illustrations and stories from real life that added weight to the content. He could have you holding you sides with laughter one minute and being filled with grief the next. But he wasn’t a showman. Not for him to indulge in cheap theatrics; his total focus while in the pulpit or on the platform was to expose his listeners to the truth of the Scriptures and to challenge them to decide what they would do with what they had learned. I count it a privilege to have sat under his ministry and I still encounter people who remember dad and the impact his preaching had upon them.
But dad was more than that because, away from the demands of his ministry he was the most wonderful father. He taught my brother and I most of Banjo Paterson’s poems and we learned them off by heart and could recite them at will by the time we were six years old. Dad understood our passion for cars and taught us to identify all the different types of cars we saw on the road while we were travelling. We were pretty adept at this before we even went to school. His work schedule was punishing but there was always time for his family; he was soft and mellow, a far cry from the persona that he sometimes presented in the pulpit.
When we were very young, dad taught us the Paterson poem, “On Kiley’s Run” It tells of how the station family are devastated by drought and bad times and have to eventually leave the beloved family farm. I always remember dad being particularly affected by this poem, it was his favourite. It was only much later, with the benefit of maturity, that I realised that the poem was a story of his own father’s life. Unsurprisingly, it is one of my favourites as well.
They say time heals all wounds and there is a sense in which it is true, but some are harder to heal than others and my hope today, on this the 50th anniversary of his death, is that I can one day be remembered as a good a father as I remember him being. I won’t say rest in peace because I know he is.
Richard Graves Hall 4-8-1911 to 20-12-1969