This charitable life

With so many arguments about what might happen to the dollar you're thinking about giving to charity, it's probably best, if you're in that doubtful frame of mind, to simply forget all about it - or to start a charity of your own - like I did.

Sitting in the Melbourne television newsroom of the ABC for so many years, I was in an ideal position to scan the deteriorating plight of humanity at large each day, and in particular, the efforts of those who sought to respond and those who just didn't bother. In a way, I began crossing the line ... alerting this agency or that to a crisis or a calamity before it became breaking news. Is it enough for we journalists to remain only as witnesses to history? I think not.

My first venture into the charity area saw me quitting my job as an ABC newsman at the time Ethiopia was being ravaged by that dreadful famine about 20 years ago when Geldof launched LiveAid. I had my eye on a line of C130 military transport planes, Hercules, at Laverton in Victoria, which the federal government had tried in vain for years to sell.

Winning the job as chief of Action Aid Australia, a small aid agency based atop a shoe store in Melbourne's suburban Dandenong, I gave birth to the so-called “Hercules for Africa” project, which was to result in the government donating two Hercules, refurbishing them and assigning them to food transport relief in Ethiopia. I'd had pilots from all over Australia volunteer to fly them for free, but the powers that be insisted on hiring commercial pilots who only had eyes for the money. I wasn't even invited to wave the planes goodbye when they left Nowra under the eye of Bob Hawke.

Later, back at the ABC, I resumed feeding to agencies critical information on the various nightmares burgeoning around the world.

As one grateful recipient once said, "Brian, until you drew our attention to the unfolding horror of Rwanda how many of us even knew where that country was, and now, who doesn't?"

There was a risk in this, however, given that the various charities tend to fight each other cat and dog, especially if one thinks another has got a bigger chunk of whatever bone is flung by the government of the day.

A spectacular example of this arose when the then federal government decided to spend millions of dollars to bring out some of Cambodia's art treasures to Australia. At that time, the Americans had gone into Somalia to battle its murderous warlords. I suggested to Care Australia that it should say publicly that if Canberra had money to spare it would be better spent on saving the living treasures of Somalia … its terrified children … rather than some “dead” art treasures from Asia.

Care Australia took up the suggestion and all hell broke loose as rival agencies spat the dummy, suggesting the government had been sufficiently generous. But it worked, and more vitally needed monies were channelled to Somalia.

It was in the mid-1980s, while I was still at the ABC as the Melbourne television chief of staff, that I found myself in a media ringside seat witnessing what's since been described as the darkest page in Australia's HIV history - the public hounding of the New South Wales pre-schooler, Eve van Grafhorst, the first Australian child to be HIV infected via a blood transfusion. Born prematurely, she needed 11 blood transfusions. The last one that saved her life then ultimately killed her as an 11-year-old. It was contaminated with HIV. She and her family were virtually hounded out of Australia by the dreadful mix of stigma and discrimination. New Zealand took them in.

Having been bombed in my Merseyside home as a boy in World War II, I'd admired the brave diarist Anne Frank as a special heroine, hidden away in a suspicious and frightened community. Fifty years on here was another young girl, hunted, despised and pursued.

As there was no outfit to join, I had to start my own. Watching Eve as a young kid battling the media and her antagonists with her constant smile, selling her hugs at 50 cents apiece for the cause, I set up my own charity, The Australian AIDS Fund Incorporated, and embarked on the ride of my life, leading a double life, journo by day, AIDS carer and accommodation provider by night and in-between.

I was kept constantly busy telling fibs to real estate agents, as I rented houses all over inner Melbourne to house and care for a stream of young men infected with HIV. As they were ill and unemployed, they never would have survived the interviews. I became a beggar, appealing to all and sundry, for the money to pay for it all.

Before the movie Philadelphia was shot, I'd given that name to the various houses because it signified brotherly love.

After one of our inner Melbourne houses was deliberately set on fire and virtually burned out on one night, I was quizzed by the fire brigade about this rented house that had so many single beds in it. "They'll think you were running a brothel," giggled one of my helpers - a nun!

We opened Australia's first house for women and children infected or affected by HIV, Rosehaven in Melbourne, which provided sterling service for some years until political activists within the gay community made it impossible to continue. They'd struggled for years to stop us getting government funding, and indeed we had gone 10 years before we received a government cent.

By now I was fully engaged, having retired from the ABC.

Those were the years when AIDS was regarded as the flavour of the month as far as community support was concerned. But most who were interested in the finances of the situation were more concerned with lining their own pockets than helping us pay the bills. I learned too that human nature is such that many contributors want to "see" their money in terms of a piece of furniture with their metal name tag on it, rather than the money going out on a gas or power bill, with "nothing" to show for it.

I also learned the real power of letters to the editor. A woman in Queensland wanted to build a unit on her property to house some children with AIDS. She had the tradesmen all lined up, but just needed $14,000 to buy the bricks. I penned a letter for her to The Australian which duly ran it. Well! A couple of small donations dribbled in and then the head of a major transport company rang to see how we were going. He gave us a cheque for the whole sum.

But that wasn't all. Keen eyes at the Sydney Morning Herald  had also spotted the letter. They sent out a journo and a cameraman and stuck the story on its front page. On the day the paper hit the streets a woman in Sydney had got up early and picked her copy off her driveway. Returning to the bedroom, she shook awake the television personality “Angry” Anderson who was about to embark on a reality TV series, Challenge. I believe it became the first in the series and it moved people across the country as they saw the unit being built and landscaped before their eyes.

When political activism stifled our efforts in Melbourne about three years ago, forcing the closure of our two housing facilities, we turned our eyes abroad. And that was a real eye-opener. I discovered the real, desperate need on our doorstep in Papua New Guinea, and also the daily struggle for survival in far-off Malawi, in Africa.

Whereas once, in Camberwell, I'd rented a rambling home in the swanky Toorak Road from a generous religious order, I found overseas others were forced to live under houses or in chicken sheds, discarded by their families and left for dead. I remembered how one of my Toorak Road clients had complained at having had a meal of chicken twice in the one week, and here were people almost in tears after receiving a handful of grain. I had the Melbourne furniture sent to PNG where it’s furnishing that country's first HIV-AIDS hospice, just outside Port Moresby.

Now I'm nudging 70, but I'm handling a dream that's about to be finalised in Malawi. Desperate villagers in a remote area of that country had gone to an email cafe in Blantyre asking me for help as they sought to care for dozens of AIDS orphans. We bought them a house that's presently sheltering 32 and a strip of farmland as a food source, once the drought breaks. But the centrepiece is a brick school to cater for 300 children to save them wandering barefoot and hungry to the nearest school that's miles away.

It was begun about three months ago and is nearly finished. I just need to find around $10,000 to furnish and equip it with seats, desks, blackboards, textbooks for the 300 children and their teachers, and some play gear and uniforms that'll cost less than $5 each.

The villagers, through their pastor, told me that as we were building the school, we could also give it a name. That took some thinking about. The Brian Sydney Haill Memorial Trust School For All Comers had a nice ring to it, but I finally settled on The Australian School and that's what they're going to call it.

The worst hiccup came when the local education authorities went out to check on the building progress, and dropped their bombshell. Rural schools in poverty-stricken Malawi had to make do with outdoor toilets that consisted of makeshift affairs of tree foliage and branches that not infrequently dropped their users into the proverbial. Now, we were told, the toilets had to be built with bricks and cement, with doors and secure iron roofing. I never thought I'd find myself rhapsodising over toilets, but having cast about and found the money to build them, and seen the photos, I feel like a hen with a clutch of fluffy chicks.

We get no government funding, and we've had no paid staff for the past three years now, but we've found that little apples are sweet. The little that we struggle to bring in is producing what some people elsewhere regard as miracles from heaven. Who are we to say otherwise, given that we don't have the money to even advertise.

If you want to see the pictures and read more, you're invited to visit our website.