Passage
| Passage |
| Caroline Overington |
| Australia (2012) |
For
politics hasn't always been his life. Thirty years ago he was a young
university student without a sense of purpose or any real ambition.
Until
a chance meeting one morning with the infamous Brother Ruhamah gives
him the direction he seeks - straight into the cult of the Jesus
People...
A captivating short story of one man’s journey into a cult and out the other side by bestselling author, Caroline Overington…
Paul Bannerman is the newly elected deputy premier of Victoria, and he has a story to tell.
For politics hasn’t always been his life. Thirty years ago he was a young university student without a sense of purpose or any real ambition.
Until a chance meeting one morning with the infamous Brother Ruhamah gives him the direction he seeks - straight into the cult of the Jesus People…
Caroline Overington
It is funny how life turns out, isn’t it?
I remember very clearly being a teenage boy, doing my HSC at the local State school, in what’s now my electorate, Lalor.
I remember being called up, around August 1976, to see Mrs Hatcher, who was our careers teacher.
I remember what she wanted to discuss: my future.
I wasn’t the only one she had concerns about – there were half a dozen of us boys, in grey shorts and V-neck vests, seated in the school chairs outside Mrs Hatcher’s office.
Someone had lined the chairs up under the bag pegs. I remember having to sit with my neck bent forward, so the bags wouldn’t hit me on the head. Some of the other boys were trying to balance on one chair leg. Probably we were popping gum.
Mrs Hatcher came out. ‘Okay … Paul Bannerman? It’s your turn.’
We went into her office, where Mrs Hatcher began, ‘So, Paul. What are you thinking of doing with the rest of
your
life?’
It was a bigger question than I was able to handle at that time. ‘I don’t know,’
I said.
‘Well, I’ve got two sets of forms here, Paul,’ Mrs Hatcher said. ‘One set of dole forms, so you can get the dole after you’ve done your HSC, or else the VTAC forms, if you want to apply for a place at university. You’d have no problem getting a place at university, if that’s what you want to do.’
I remember feeling surprised by that, mainly because nobody in my family had been to university, but rather than explore the option, or even say anything sensible, I shrugged and said, ‘I dunno.’
To her credit, Mrs Hatcher tried to help. ‘Do you mean you don’t know whether you want to go to university, or you don’t know what you want to study? Because they’ve got courses – Arts courses – for kids still making up their minds. Do you know what Arts is?’
‘Is it painting?’ I said. I wasn’t being smart – I really was that clueless.
‘Arts is not painting, no. Arts – it’s literature. It’s literature, philosophy, history, languages – does any of that interest you?’
It didn’t.
‘All right, Paul,’ Mrs Hatcher said. ‘I’m going to put down Arts. If you get in, and you decide to go, and you don’t like it, you can always change it later.’
I watched her write my name and other details into white squares on the VTAC form. When she was done, Mrs Hatcher turned the forms towards me and said, ‘You’ve got to sign at the bottom.’
I signed.
‘I’ll post this off for you,’ Mrs Hatcher said. ‘If anyone asks, you’ve put Arts as your first preference.’
Nobody asked.
I sat my final exams for the HSC in November that year in a building here, in the city that I’d never seen before. I can’t recall exactly where it was, but the floorboards seemed to run forever, all in one direction, and there was a round-faced clock on the wall. There must have been 1000 desks, each with a perfect white rectangle of exam paper positioned precisely in the middle. I sat and scribbled
answers for an hour, and then, because you weren’t allowed to get up and leave, I sat and listened to the exam supervisors squeaking across the otherwise silent room in rubber-soled shoes.
Summer went by – from memory, and this won’t surprise parents of teenagers, I spent it in my room, picking zits – and then, in January, a letter came, saying I’d got a place in an Arts course at the University of Melbourne. I went along on the first day, and saw straightaway that things wouldn’t work out. Hundreds of students were surging down the corridors, radiating a sense of purpose I didn’t feel, and couldn’t seem to muster.
I thought about dropping out, but university was free back then and it was just as easy to stay enrolled and skip lectures. So that’s what I was doing – skiving, smoking cigarettes in a loading bay behind the Arts building – when I first saw Brother Ruhamah.
Now, like everyone, I’ve been reading the newspapers, and I’m familiar with the narrative that has formed around me: Victoria’s new deputy premier, Paul Bannerman, entered the cult of the Jesus People when he was seventeen years old, emerging some years later without an explanation.
Brother Ruhamah’s name has featured prominently in that narrative.
Many of those articles – and it’s difficult not to conclude that this wasn’t the intention of the newspapers that published them – have been presented in a way that suggests my so-called ‘Lost Years’ (a term, I might point out, I came up with myself) are something I’ve tried to hide, and that my association with Brother Ruhamah is something I’ve tried to erase from my personal history.
I’ve come here today to assure the Victorian people that this is not so. My past – meaning my time with the Jesus People – has long been the subject not only of discussion, but also – occasionally – of much mirth in my own home, with my wife, with my children and with my mother and her partner Gary (my parents are divorced).
There is nothing about those years that the Premier doesn’t know.
That said, I accept that some people may have questions: why did I join the Jesus People, and what did I do while I was there?
There is curiosity about Brother Ruhamah. I heard the reporter on
60 Minutes
on Sunday say he hasn’t been seen in public for more than twenty years and the only photograph of him is apparently the grainy one that appeared on the front of Saturday’s
Age
.
What does he look like? Moreover, what kind of cult does he have?
I am prepared to answer these and any other questions in detail, and to that end I am grateful to the staff of the Victorian College of the Arts, for making this venue available at such short notice, so that I might give this address.
The first time I saw Brother Ruhamah – and this was more than thirty years ago – he looked a bit like a puppet. The top half of his body was inside an industrial waste bin in that loading bay I’ve just mentioned, and his legs were dangling free.
At first I thought:
Uh-oh, somebody’s caught in the bin – maybe they’ve been smothered in there.
But then the legs kicked and the body dropped to the ground, and there was Brother Ruhamah, dusting his coat with one hand. In his other hand, he had two apples.
I had no idea who he was, of course, and certainly I had no sense of being in the presence of ‘greatness’. My wife, Ruth, once asked me, ‘But surely, given what
he’s been able to do – gather up all those people – there must have been something special about him? Was he tremendously charismatic, with glowing skin and gleaming eyes, or perhaps it was something he said?’
If only that were true! The truth is, he looked like nothing so much as a backpacker who’d been on the road too long. He was nut-brown, and lean and wiry, like he lived on lentils. He had heavy-soled rubber sandals on his feet, and his toes were hairy, with dirty nails. He wore a brown tunic as long as a dress and it had slits up either side. His hair was short, although not as short as that of some of the Hari Krishnas I used to see on campus. He had a long beard, with no moustache. That look is more common now – some people in our Middle Eastern communities wear their beards that way – but at Melbourne University in 1977, it was something different.
If I had to say how old he was back then, I’d have said he was ‘ancient, at least forty’ – but then everyone over the age of twenty-five seemed ancient to me.
As for his first words: he said, ‘Hello’ and I said, ‘Hi’ and then he asked me, ‘Are you hungry?’
I wasn’t hungry and especially not for the apples he was holding.
‘You think they’re rotten because they’ve come from the dumpster,’ he said, clocking my expression. ‘You’ve got no idea how much good food people throw out. It’s an insult to those who are starving.’
I’m not sure how I responded to that. Probably I was thinking about my mother, who often said something similar: ‘Eat up, Paul, there are children starving in Ethiopia, you know.’
‘Do you read the Bible?’
That was very definitely the next thing Brother Ruhamah said because I remember thinking:
Okay, he’s a bible-basher. A bible-basher who eats crap from rubbish bins. He’s going to try to convert me
.
I told him, ‘No’, which was actually true. A State-school kid from an atheist family, I’d never seen a Bible, other than a Gideon my brother had once found in a bedside drawer in a motel at Ocean Grove.
Brother Ruhamah continued. ‘Do you know what the Bible says?’
I said, ‘I’m not religious.’
‘How do you know?’ he said.
‘How do I know what?’ I asked him.
He persisted. ‘How do you know you’re not religious if you’ve never read the Bible?’
I said, ‘It’s all bullshit.’
Ignoring that, Brother Ruhamah said, ‘Haven’t you got any questions about the world? Why are you here, for example?’
‘I’m enrolled here,’ I said.
He said, ‘Not
here
, at the university. Why are you here, on this planet? What’s the point of you?’
I said, ‘I don’t know.’
He said, ‘Yes, but
I
know. Come with me, and we’ll talk about it.’
‘Why don’t you just tell me now?’ I asked him.
He said, ‘It’s not a simple story. It’s going to take a while.’
It’s important at this point, I think, to say that Brother Ruhamah had a dog with him. It was an old dog, patched like a quilt, with rough hair and twelve long
teats. I remember thinking:
Whatever this bloke is about, if he’s got a dog, surely it’s benign.
‘What’s your name?’ Brother Ruhamah said, after he’d introduced himself. I told him.
‘It’s good to meet you, Paul.’
We walked from the university to the City Square, wheeling Brother Ruhamah’s bicycle between us. We’re talking 1977, so it was when the Square had concrete benches and a fountain of some sort – and it was there, I suppose, that the active recruitment of me began.
I cannot remember all of Brother Ruhamah’s words. My strongest memory is of the way he spoke – in low, comforting tones that made what he said sound so reasonable, so appealing. I was lost and needed direction; life was confusing, unless of course you knew the answers, which he did. He read from the Bible, which, as many who turn to that book already know, contains wisdom to soothe and inspire. He did not sit but squatted with his feet flat on the floor and his knees under his chin.
The talking went on for most of the night and at some point I felt myself getting sleepy. It’s perhaps a measure of how comforted I felt that I was able to lie back on one of the concrete benches and have Brother Ruhamah fold a jumper beneath my head. I crossed my arms over my chest. I could see the rain falling like in a slow-motion movie through sheets of light from the Victorian street lamps. I drifted off to sleep, and didn’t wake up until the first trams geared up on the tracks in Spencer Street.
There might have been a moment the next morning when, my bones aching from spending the night in the rain on a concrete bench in the City Square, I thought:
Well, Paul, you’d better find ten cents and a phone box and explain yourself to your Mum.
But I hadn’t showered or shaved or eaten that much and Brother Ruhamah said, ‘Don’t go home.’ Sometime in the night he had located, and now produced, another bicycle.
‘Borrow this. I will take you to where I live. You’ll like it there.’
I mounted up and started to ride, and I’ll admit that it felt good to be gliding along on a gearless bicycle, lectures abandoned, once again carefree as the boy I’d been before divorce intruded upon my childhood. We made our way through the city, onto the Hume Highway, out through the suburbs and then onward, into the Victorian countryside.
At some point, I’m sure, I thought:
Whoa, where are we going, and how much longer?
It was getting hot and I was pretty tired and there were plenty of flies but they seemed to bother only me. We stopped around noon for something to eat – sandwiches, if I remember, from Brother Ruhamah’s canvas satchel (it’s remarkable how unfussy you become about eating from bins when you’re genuinely hungry) – before mounting up and hitting the road again.
Eventually, we left the highway and started pushing the bikes through a paddock of volcanic rock.
‘Where are we going?’ I said, and Brother Ruhamah said, ‘You’re almost home.’
We pushed our bicycles along a cattle track, coming finally to a farm-style fence made of wood palings and wire. In the distance, I could see a collection of what
looked like old demountable school classrooms – and I’d soon discover that’s just what they were – arranged around a central courtyard.
‘Is that where you live?’ I said. ‘Do you have showers?’ We’d been cycling for seven hours. But Brother Ruhamah wasn’t listening. He had thrown a leg over the bike and was up and out of his seat, pedalling towards this little village as fast as those nut-brown legs could carry him. I was much slower – too many cigarettes – and so I soon lost him, finding only his bike resting against a gum tree.
There had been no sign of people before we reached the commune but now they were everywhere. Men in brown tunics and beards with no moustaches were streaming towards a building I’d soon come to know as the Longhouse. I later learned that the Jesus People took that name from longhouses in villages in Papua New Guinea, but while it might sound exotic, it was, in fact, a rectangular shed with a stage at one end and an upright piano at the other, and it was filling fast.
There were no chairs or benches in the Longhouse. The men were sitting cross-legged on the floor. I looked around for Brother Ruhamah but couldn’t see him anywhere. The crowd had its eyes closed, and was praying. The noise was like cicadas. I’d never prayed in my life, but I closed my eyes and chanted along as best I could.
At some point, a door towards the back of the building opened. I opened my eyes and saw women holding hands, wearing dusty aprons with bonnets over their hair. Their faces were scrubbed clean of make-up, and yet – I’m being as straightforward and honest as my memory allows, here – they were pink with joy. Some had children with them – boys with shaved heads, like their fathers, and girls in modest clothes, miniatures of their mothers.
