Ch
11: Bishop
Delbridge to the Rescue
Talk
about all dressed up and nowhere to go! I had completed three years
at Moore College, just gained (I hoped) a Th.L. which was the basic
academic qualification for being an Anglican priest in
Australia, and there seemed
no prospect of being ordained in my
home city of Sydney.
This
time both Uncle Norm and Bishop Kerle
went to see the archbishop on my behalf. Archbishop
Loane agreed to talk to me.
It was a cordial interview and he said straight out that from the
way Bishop Kerle and Norm
Gelding recommended me
he thought that I
should be ordained. But, and this was the big 'but', no one had been
ordained in Sydney Diocese in the past twenty years except on the say
so of the principal of Moore College, and he could not break this
tradition. He wished me well however and said he hoped I would find a
diocese which would ordain me.
So
I started writing application letters to neighbouring dioceses. They
all replied along the lines of “thanks, but no thanks”.
Suzie
was, and is, more bold than
me in her prayers. She said:
“OK God, we'll go to the diocese that rings us
and says: 'Suzie and Dave, come to our diocese'.”
Three
days later I was across the other side of town where the results of
the Th.L. Exams were put up on a noticeboard. Sue was home with our
six month old baby. The phone rang. The voice on the other end said:
“Hello, I'm Graham Delbridge!”. Sue was about to say “We don't
know anyone by that name” and hang up, but the voice got in another
shot first: “You know, the bishop of Gippsland. I believe your
husband is looking for a job.”
That
came
as quite a surprise. Gippsland
had not been one of the dioceses I had sent begging letters to. I had
never heard of it. We had to
get out an atlas to find just where “Gippsland” was.
Gippsland
diocese as it turned out comprised about thirty parishes mostly on
the coastal strip several hours drive north east of Melbourne.
Suzie
now saw that her flippant remark to God cut two ways. Yes he had
indeed got a bishop to ring us and say “come to my diocese”. But
the said diocese was nearly
a thousand kilometres from our families in Sydney
so that
it would mean being virtually cut off from them.
But the flip side of what we
had said to God meant that
if a diocese rang and asked then we would go!
Bishop
Delbridge and his wife were at that time holidaying at Bundanoon,
about two hours drive south
of Sydney. So, having been given amazingly precise directions by Mrs
Delbridge we set off for an interview. The Delbridges were, like the
Kerle's and the Gelding's, an amazingly spiritually dynamic couple.
So of course we anded up saying we would love to come to Gippsland.
The mystery of the 'phone
call was solved when Bishop Delbridge said that he had been talking
to his old friend Archbishop Loane during a visit
to Sydney.
Our
next step was to go down to Sale once the Delbridge's had returned
from holidays and stay for a few days with them at Bishops-court.
Tere we
met the various people whom the bishop wanted to check us out. That
was great fun, we learned a lot about them, and of course they used
the opportunity
to see us in interacting in various situations.
So
it was eventually all settled.
I
was to be curate in the town of Morwell, about an hour's drive south
of Sale and two hours north
east
of Melbourne. The parish
didn't have a house for a curate, and wasn't prepared to pay rent in
addition to a curate's meagre salary, but the Bishop assured us that
housing was cheap. “You'll rent a nice house for practically
nothing” he assured us.
Then
everything came unstuck.
The
rector
of the parish at Morwell drove us all round, showing us the church,
the town and the surrounding district and was quite happy for me to
come as his curate. But there was a problem the bishop had not
foreseen.
Morwell
was in the
middle of the Gippsland coal field.
Only the poorer quality
“brown” coal, but near
the surface and easily extracted
in huge open-cut mines. This was the heart of Victoria's electricity
generation with the mines feeding straight into huge power stations.
Just north
of Morwell construction of a
new even bigger power station had just begun.
True, rents had been cheap in Morwell, but not since construction of
the Loy Yang power station began. With worker pouring in to the area
there was now nothing
to rent at any price.
Disaster.
However
Canon Lowe, the rector
had his contacts with people high up in the electricity authority. He
pulled all the strings he could and came up with an ingenious
stop-gap.
Just
south of Morwell the was an unusual town called Yallourn.
It was unusual for two reasons. The first was that it had been built
just after World War II by the electricity authority to house its
workers based on an English 'model town' and was even in our time a
very quaint and beautiful town. The second was that the electricity
authority now wanted to mine the coal under it and
so it was in the process of being de-populated and demolished.
We
could have, at a ridiculously low rent, one of the recently vacated
houses, but
only
until its turn for demolition came.
Well,
we were sure God wanted us to go to Gippsland so we said “yes”,
and trusted God for what would happen when we had to move from that
house.
So
with all our worldly belongings, we moved to
Yallourn. It
was an idyllic town, small, neatly laid out and quintessentially
“English”. We had the
cutest little two
storey cottage to live in
temporarily. The
mental image that has stuck with me all these years was of
the surrounding hills
covered with plantation pines which gave it a Nordic feel and the
friendly, ever present hum of the power station whose cooling towers
one could just see peeping over a hill.
Sue,
still being blunt with
God said: “OK God, you are moving us away from our families: I want
you to provide substitute grandparents for all our children!” Of
course we only had one child at that stage, but Sue had grown up
living next-door to one set of grandparents and really treasured that
experience and so was upset at having to move away from our
children's natural grandparents.
I
was ordained “deacon” at St Paul's Cathedral in Sale February
1979 and started work at St.
Mary's Morwell. It was all new, all exciting. Canon
Lowe was a really good mentor, the parishioners were lovely and
I felt that at last I was out in useful ministry.
Sue,
being a Medical Practitioner, found part-time work in Morwell easily
and the senior doctor there was a devout Christian who was a great
support to her. Soon after this a lady rang up one day and said: “I
was talking to someone and they said you were looking for a baby
sitter”. It turned out she was an engineer who was taking time off
work to look after her own toddler and thought that an extra child
during the day wouldn't be much harder. This turned out fabulously
well the whole time we were in Morwell. Not strictly “grandparent”
I know, but a really good answer to that prayer just the same. You
will have to wait a few more posts to find out how God continued to
honour our request for substitute grandparents I the children's
day-to-day lives.
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