This charitable life

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.