Revered for his work helping people at their lowest, The Rev Bill Crews does not shy from sharing his own darkest moments - and those that have transformed his remarkable life.
The Reverend Bill Crews is always dressed in black. He wears it at his Bill Crews Foundation on Liverpool Road, Ashfield, where trucks roar past on the minute and the guests - the homeless and other disadvantaged people who come to the Foundation for food, medical and dental care, counselling and comradeship - shout greetings each time they spot him, like he's a rock star.
He wears it on the weekend walking in Manly, when he's in a black hat and black sunglasses to boot, and people come up - "most people know who I am" - and ask why, and he tells them the story.
It's an incredible story. It was one of the two moments in Bill Crews' life that he says changed him forever.
In 2015, Crews, then in his early 70s, was in Calais in France at the notorious, now razed refugee camp known as The Jungle, a launching point for refugees desperate to get to the UK.
The Foundation does a lot of 12-step work in Ashfield - Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous. Though not an addict himself, Crews is a big fan of such programs and when he saw a sign for an NA meeting in Calais, he thought, "I'll go to that".
"It was basically a carpet on the snow with wood and plastic and canvas and just a makeshift area - the whole refugee camp is on a flood plain which is an old asbestos dump - and I'm sitting in a circle there with 10 or 12 people, men and women of all different nationalities - lots of Palestinians, Kurdish people, African people, all escaping oppression and wanting to get to freedom somewhere - and in the NA tradition they all tell their story, and I couldn't understand a word because they were speaking their own languages and it was being translated into French.
"But it was all written on their faces, you didn't need language you could see it. and it got to me. And I thought, 'what am I going to say?'. I said, 'I am Bill from Australia', and then it all poured out - I have had two stuffed marriages and my kids have suffered because of all that, and I am feeling really down ... and they all got up and held me, the whole lot of them, and they gave me my life back. These people who had nothing, they gave me everything.
"I had to honour this, so I went back to England and I threw out all my clothes and I just wear black, because they changed me and I need to acknowledge that that's what you get from people who have got nothing. You get everything.
"I can sit with you and tell you story after story over my 40 years, where I have been given back far more than I have given."
Love in the time of COVID
Getting in to see Bill Crews at the Foundation, its centrepiece the sandstone and brick Uniting Church building that dates to the 1840s, is its own multi-step process. We must show vaccination certificates, and a security guard with a walkie-talkie checks in that we're expected before the gate is opened and we are let through to the inner sanctum.
This COVID security, Crews says, is not for him. It's for everyone. Beyond the manned gates lies the medical clinic, and a hangar-like "hangout hall" where guests can access computers, set up by the Foundation to compensate for the closure through the pandemic of libraries that were popular hangout spots for the homeless.
Most of the people who come and eat at the Foundation - in the Loaves and Fishes restaurant which serves three meals a day in the church's former Sunday School hall - have on average three chronic illnesses, Crews says. "It is like a nursing home so there is no halfway measure. I am triple vaxxed, I am not so worried about me; but so many people here, if they get it they'd die, and I love them too much to let them die."
He describes a sense of gratitude that none of the Foundation's guests have succumbed to COVID, "and that is because we have really, really made sure everybody stays safe. From the moment things started to get iffy, we got masks, and then we got vaccines, and then we got rapid antigen tests."
Most of us have a life of secrets, all these secrets that paralyse us. But they are just stories.
- Rev Bill Crews
Since the pandemic began, the Foundation has served more than 1.1 million meals, up 149 per cent on pre-COVID levels, and distributed 23,325 food parcels - a 504 per cent increase. It's opened two new restaurants for the needy, added an additional food van to its fleet and increased its locations for mobile food distribution from three to 11.
There has been negligible help from government, Crews says - the best he can say is that they haven't got in the way. Individuals, on the other hand, have been "amazing".
"The sad part is that, overlooked people are just overlooked, and the pandemic has brought this out - the struggle to get them vaccinated, because they are not on government or business agendas, and a lot of them would never read notices or signs because nothing is ever for them.
"The left out are left out - and it is almost deliberate, so that is the sad point.
"But while that might be the government and corporate response, the lovely point is that individual responses have been amazing, so that people are coming in all the time with gifts, and asking how they can help ... individuals have realised we are all in this life together, so we had better help one another."
A 'voice' that changed everything
The other moment that changed Bill Crews' life happened when he was a 27-year-old microelectronics research engineer, studying the properties of silicon for Amalgamated Wireless Australasia. A volunteer by night working with homeless and runaway youth at Ted Noffs' Wayside Chapel at Kings Cross, he had just walked up the stairs to the on-site coffee shop when "something happened".
"It was probably a millisecond but it felt eternal; it was like a voice, but it wasn't a voice, it was a knowing. And it said, leave your job, you've got to come and work here, you've got to work with the poorest of the poor; the work will be long and hard and exacting, but don't worry about that I'll be there, you will get well-known but don't worry about that, that's ok, and by the way your personal life won't be that happy."
Fifteen years later, in 1986, he became Minister of the Uniting Church at Ashfield, and threw its doors open to the needy. Homeless kids came and slept on the pews at night. Ten stalwarts of the congregation, women who wore hats to church and called each other 'Miss', became "my aunts and my everything" as the Foundation grew. The last 'aunt' died in 2019, all of them living until almost 100. He still misses them every day.
"When I came here there was nothing," he gestures as he shows me around the compound. "That was an old tennis court, and this was just a run-down backyard ... so we built it all slowly." We pass by a van that is being kitted out as a mobile medical service that will go into remote NSW communities; a dental van is planned as well.
A few days before Inner West Review visited, Crews had taken part in a rally outside State Parliament calling for the release of Kurdish leader Abdullah calan , held prisoner by the Turkish Government for 23 years. Crews believes in freedom - "there's always some bugger, and some country, who wants to take away your freedom" - not the anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theory brand of freedom, mind. In the grounds of his church are sculptures that commemorate the Korean Comfort Women of World War II, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China, the latter a replica of the Goddess of Democracy that demonstrators fashioned in the Square in 1989, before the government slayed thousands of them.
So that is the type of freedom - "the crying for freedom" - that Crews is concerned with. "What I am saying is that a lot of things that go on in this world are wrong, and we should stand up to it," he says. "I believe we should be able to live a life where we are free. We should live the life that causes the least damage to others."
Never standing still
The Foundation's services include a free hospitality training program run in partnership with TAFE NSW. Trainees get practical experience at the Crews Café just up the road, where menu items include Bills Burger and Crews BLT.
A key priority for 2022 is the establishment of a counselling service for kids who have been through significant trauma. A trauma-trained therapist has been employed, and "we are learning how to do it properly here, and then we will extend to Blacktown and Liverpool areas, and then the Northern Territory, and then Thailand, so we are not standing still.
What I have learned is, great tragedy can either break you, or break you open
- Rev Bill Crews
"Because I have learned that kids who have undergone significant trauma, are held back all their lives, unless it is dealt with - and it has to be dealt with in a specific way, and then they can take off."
He's already seen the power of literacy to transform people's lives, through the results of the children's literacy program the Foundation has run since the 1990s.
"Often I can't go into a shopping centre without a mother coming up, with tears in her eyes and saying, because we taught her daughter to read, she is now school captain, or has a masters degree in psychology, or something ..."
The power of a good shrink
The Rev Bill Crews, AM and National Living Treasure, among myriad other tributes, is two years away from his 80th. He watches his diet and fitness because he wants to do the job as long as he can. He meditates, and does a lot of psychotherapy. He believes everyone should have a good shrink.
It has helped him rebuild relationships with his four children, and come to terms with his relationship with his father, a troubled one made worse by the death in a car accident of the 'favourite' son - Bill's brother, Bob.
"What I have learned is, great tragedy can either break you, or break you open ... people either get small and miserable and blame everything, or open themselves up, and the people who are broken open change the world," Crews says.
"As a child, my father was a very strong directed man, and I was a dreamer, and as a child he used to say, 'Bill don't be this, be that' and so in lots of ways I had to hide who I was, and so many people suffer from that."
To this day, Crews says he is shy, something he believes would surprise people. "I still get very nervous before I have to speak or anything."
But he has learned the power of turning secrets into stories, not least with the publication last year of his memoir, Twelve Rules for Living a Better Life.
"One of the things I have learned through all of this is that most of us have a life of secrets, all these secrets that paralyse us. But they are just stories, and when your secrets become a story they lose their power over you.
"Kids and adults will come in here crippled by all these secrets and as they realise they're stories, the whole world opens up to them. And that's what keeps me going."