FDS Insight Magazine Aug - Oct 2022

43 Don’s Review Twelve Rules for Living a Better Life The Rev Bill Crews with Roger Joyce (Harper Collins, Sydney Australia) Rev Bill Crews is of course one of our living legends although I doubt very much he’d like to have been seen as vying with, say, the late departed Archie Roach for such a spot. Too modest a man, our Bill. Just a bloke who tries to help others. To some extent a man of enigmatic resources: witness his much-publicised attacks on pokies yet his acceptances from the gee gee crowd for funding his soup kitchens. The blurb suggests the book offers “bottled wisdom”. A kind of Genie’s magic bottle, so simple and obvious in its offerings yet as profound as a human can be. I found the first chapter confronting and in fact far too close to the bone. Bill appears to have had a father very much like my own, both of us (Bill and I) war babies, and although we are able to look back now with something approaching an understanding, and of the damaging effects that cruel war must have had on men and women, and of the aftermath as they tried to return to the “normal” lives they had promised each other prior to Herr Hitler’s attempts to ruin mankind, we had a lot of unhappy experiences which cannot be just swept away. We were kids , after all. We didn’t deserve what happened to us at the hands of our damaged parents. And so Bill has come to a point where LOVE is ALL that matters (page 22). The Beatles said that didn’t they? Our age. The experience of a Liverpool at war. Of hatred. Of getting even. Everyone from the Prime Minister up. And our own PM working to keep the country committed and remain as its own entity. Bill didn’t get it as easy as the kids of today might imagine we all had it. Financially, perhaps, to some extent, opportunities existed, but for some, things went from bad to worse and Crews’ detailed descriptions of the nights at the Wayside Chapel, nights where bashed Vietnam protesters would turn up bashed to bits for daring to cry for their fellow man. The references to the Wayside “hymn book” are amazing: songs of Paul Simon, the Beatles of course, Dylan (also of course – surely With God on Our Side was there?) and the great Folkie Pete Seeger. Who would imagine it? I recall my English Hymnal’s dirge “ Oh Come Oh Come Emanuel ” which we begged our priest to burn … later I did come to realise it is quite beautiful … but to think that with a decade there was the Wayside Chapel’s hymn book! It defies imagination. But when we get to drugs, the dark clouds roll over, especially in Sydney