Pubdate: Fri, 25 Aug 2000
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2000 David Syme & Co Ltd
Contact:  250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia
Website: http://www.theage.com.au/
Author: Carolyn Webb

DO UNTO OTHERS

Les Twentyman is the oldest of five children, but the only one baptised. He 
says perhaps because his father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant 
- - "mixed" marriages being taboo 50 years ago - religion was not central to 
his growing up.

But "doing unto others" was always instilled in the Twentyman brood. 
Twentyman, now Melbourne's best-known social worker, remembers how on 
Saturday afternoons his father, also named Les, would hand out free produce 
from his fruit shop to underprivileged families. When the father of a local 
boy walked out on his family, leaving the mother with six children, 
Twentyman senior took the boy in and treated him as part of the family. "He 
was a good-hearted guy," Twentyman says of his father.

Twentyman's maternal grandmother, Elsie Flett, showed him the value of 
community through her deep involvement with the Williamstown Football Club. 
As a child during the 1950s, he would spend each weekend with grandma, 
attending games and club social events, while his parents worked in the 
fruit shop. Twentyman reckons it kept him from joining one of the gangs 
that stole from gas meters and started fights in the rough streets of his 
home suburb, Braybrook.

In his new autobiography, The Les Twentyman Story: 25 Years of Life on the 
Streets, Twentyman laments the loss of our sense of family and community 
and of the duty that those who are fortunate help those less fortunate.

"As a child I was never lonely," he writes. "I never experienced that 
heart-wrenching feeling of isolation that so many kids I have worked with 
go through. And I like to think that appreciating my own good fortune helps 
me understand what they are missing."

During our interview, Twentyman mentions that social workers at Open Family 
saw two street kids die from heroin overdoses on the street the night before.

It is to another street kid, Liz Shaw, that his book is dedicated. Shaw was 
in and out of institutions after her parents died when she was very young. 
She was a prostitute on the streets of St Kilda, spent time in Winlaton 
girls' home and turned to heroin before she died a lonely death, aged 18, 
in 1986. She is buried in an unmarked grave at the Bulla cemetery.

The second person to whom the book is dedicated is the late Jack Morris, 
former human resources manager at Smorgon Consolidated Industries, who in 
1992 formed an association with Twentyman that led to a $20,000 donation 
for school books and food for underprivileged children and the staging of a 
$1000-a-head corporate dinner that raised $374,000 for the Open Family 
charity that employs Twentyman. "Jack taught me to never give up and to get 
on the front foot," Twentyman says.

Morris also taught Twentyman the value of nurturing the captains of 
industry as a means of funding under-resourced youth programs in the inner 
and western suburbs.

Twentyman says many of the rich are not aware that children are dying of 
overdoses in laneways behind their inner-city apartments, or that teenage 
girls are selling themselves to pay for food for their families. He sees 
education as part of his role. For example, he wants at some stage to guide 
100 members of the Young Presidents, a group of high-flying executives, 
through Footscray streets.

Twentyman says the gap between rich and poor is getting ever wider. He 
believes the heroin problem - and our leaders' inability to do anything to 
stem it - constitutes a national crisis because of the rate at which it is 
killing young people.

Twentyman says that when he first started counselling street kids 25years 
ago, only 5per cent had hard drug habits, whereas 95per cent do now, "and 
the other 5per cent must be closely connected".

But he insists he is not without hope, even while condemning the Liberals' 
rejection of injecting rooms as a decision made by people who are out of 
touch with the tragedy of drug-related deaths and the social problems that 
lead to them.

Twentyman cites as a positive example a South Carolina police program in 
which juvenile car thieves and vandals are assigned specific areas of a 
city where they are responsible for collecting litter and reporting smashed 
windows. They are paid $30 a week. Twentyman believes in such forms of work 
for the dole, but is also wary of the possibility that the Federal 
Government's "mutual obligation" welfare report, if implemented, could be 
an excuse for employers to use cheap labor instead of offering "real" jobs. 
Without support to tackle underlying problems, and assignments tailored to 
individuals, many people will find conforming too hard and simply opt out 
of the welfare system and turn to crime or drug dealing to survive.

These are very different times to Twentyman's own youth. Young Les left 
school at 15 and got a job as a railway clerk. He reflects that today 
someone with his level of education would have little chance of getting a job.

At 23, Twentyman found work as a gym instructor, which he felt better 
suited him. He later bought half the business, but describes going bankrupt 
in 1972 as a shattering experience, giving him his first taste of the 
indignity of unemployment.

THE Catholic Church came to the rescue in the form of physical education 
teacher jobs over the next decade, first at St Paul's boys' school in 
Altona, then at Mount St Joseph's girls' school in Altona West, which he 
describes as a happy time in his life.

A second failed gym enterprise, and more unemployment, followed. Then, in 
1981, although he had no formal qualifications, Twentyman won the job of 
counsellor at a hostel for difficult female adolescents in Carlton. Despite 
being attacked with a kitchen knife, chased by girls' irate boyfriends, cut 
by a pimp and hearing harrowing tales of abuse, he writes that this period 
"brought me to appreciate the fighting spirit and sheer courage of many of 
those whom society considers not worth worrying about".

He realised he wanted to work with troubled kids. "I seemed to be able to 
relate to them, and I felt I could make a difference to their lives."

Still, while working as a council youth worker from 1984 to 1997, Twentyman 
was shocked by the "grinding, destructive poverty". He met neighbors waging 
full-scale wars; caravan park owners who forced female tenants to have sex 
instead of pay rent; and children left alone at home while their mothers 
worked in brothels.

Called out to violent domestic disputes in the days before mobile phones, 
Twentyman would tell reception: "If I'm not back in a couple of hours, send 
someone out to find me."

In 1997 Twentyman gladly ditched government bureaucracy to work for Open 
Family, where he still has daily contact with street kids, as well as 
wielding considerable public influence on the issues of drugs, unemployment 
and homelessness.

A journalist friend persuaded him to write the book by saying it would help 
the more privileged of Victoria understand "what's really happening in 
society"; that some people are born into "war zones" rather than families. 
"I just thought people should know that not everyone is born into families 
that are caring and loving and sharing," Twentyman says. "Some of these 
kids are actually far safer sleeping on the streets than they are sleeping 
in their own house."

Twentyman's idol as a boy was John Landy; Landy's selflessness in turning 
back during a mile race to check on a fallen Ron Clarke at the 1956 
Australian athletics championships personified for him what life should be 
about. "Before New Year, I was asked by the ABC to make comments about the 
millennium," Twentyman says. "I used the example that if we're going to 
move forward as a nation, then we should become a nation of John Landys, 
where you can stop and help someone up, and still be a winner.

"Thatcher believed that (the underprivileged) are only going to bring you 
down, saying if you sleep with dogs, you will get up with fleas. I don't 
believe in that attitude at all.

"I think one of the things that we should pride ourselves on is that 
Australia is a country that extended a hand to others who are less fortunate."

John Landy will launch Twentyman's book at the Whitten Oval, Footscray, on 
September 6. The Les Twentyman Story: 25 Years of Life on the Streets, 
published by Hardie Grant Books, will be available for $29.95 in bookshops 
from September 4.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart