Interview with Byran Lipmann

How did you go from being an economics major, then living in the bush for 15 years, to working with the homeless in shelters?

Well, that’s a long story! I suppose the first thing, to go back a few steps, is to say I was brought up to believe strongly in social justice principles. My father was a European. I guess I drifted into economics – I wasn’t particularly happy with it, but it’s probably a good thing I stuck it out.

I met my girlfriend, who was an artist, and we decided to go for a trip on our motorbikes from Melbourne, which is on the east coast, to Western Australia. It was a 3,500 kilometer trip, mostly dirt roads in those days. Anyhow, the bike blew up and I had no money, so Dotty had to spend her last $500 to get the bike repaired. Some of my friends reckon the only reason she’s stayed with me all these years is to get that money back!

Anyhow, we eventually got to Western Australia and got a bit of part-time work, but there wasn’t much available. We drifted into the country, where a farmer picked us up when we were hitchhiking. He took us home and we met his wife. Dotty hit it off with her, I went out into the fields to work with him, and he got us a job. One thing led to another and before we knew where we were, we abandoned our plans to return to Melbourne and spent the next 15 years wandering around Australia, going from state to state, doing various jobs. So what started out as a three-month trip became 15 years before we made it back to Melbourne.

It was absolutely fantastic. We did a variety of things but mainly did manual farm labor. We fell on hard times and for a while there – I suppose you’ll be horrified because this is a Buddhist magazine, isn’t it? I might upset your readers – I became a slaughterman. But I had to put food on the table and it was the only job I could get, and I did it for about a year. I actually became very involved in the union because there were some island people who had been brought to Australia to work in the abattoir [slaughterhouse]. They were being terribly exploited.

In the process of defending them I became involved with the union and became the union representative. It was a fascinating experience to work in the Australian bush.

Did that hard time you fell upon give you a sense of empathy for the people you work with now?

There is, at first sight, a crazy lack of pattern in my work life because, as I said, I lived in the city as an economist, went to the country and became a farmer and slaughterman, became a farmer again, then came back to the city to work with the homeless, but there is actually a very clear thread that runs through the whole lot. The whole lot is very much involved in social justice issues, initially for ourselves – we wanted to do something we wanted to do, not to do things that were expected of us. In the process we came across work that we sought out, where we were with mainly Aboriginal people as farm laborers; in the West [of Australia] this is pretty much the bottom of the pecking order. Again, working as a slaughterman and working to protect the rights of non-Australian and low-skilled Australians, this led us to sheep farming. Sheep farming is totally different from mechanized farming, where you sit on a tractor and plow – I did that, too, but the work I really love is sheep work, which, in Australia, is a huge industry.

When I came down to the city and started working in the night shelters with the homeless people – well, you wouldn’t want to say that working with sheep and working with homeless people is the same thing, but there was some thread of caring, of looking after those who are falling on hard times themselves. It’s the shepherd’s role, if you like. There are a lot of similarities.

I find the work I do now is an opportunity to live my politics. It’s like a sportsman being told he can be paid to be a professional golfer. I’m actually being paid to do what I believe in, do what I want to do. I’m not sure it’s a matter of being fortunate – this has happened because I searched for it. It hasn’t happened because somebody has offered me work. If we hadn’t exposed ourselves to the Outback by turning our backs on what would have been a very lucrative career as an economist in the city, I wouldn’t have been exposed to these various issues.

I didn’t have to work as a slaughterman, and I certainly didn’t have to stand up in front of slaughtermen and argue for the rights of Cocos Island men, the vast majority of whom other slaughtermen didn’t care less about. Eventually, when we gave up on the country and came back to the city, we had to start from scratch, and I was 36. We started without any resources all over again. So, yes, it’s worked out, but the reason it’s worked out is because we had a very clear vision of what we wanted to do all along, even if we couldn’t articulate it.

I think the economics training has been very helpful – it’s extremely rough to run non-profit businesses these days. There has been a guiding philosophy – I don’t really know what words to use – some core values that have remained all along. I think our upbringing wouldn’t have exposed us to the plight of the very disadvantaged in the country. We wouldn’t have come into contact with people like that, because if I had stayed in the city I’d probably be working as a stockbroker and wouldn’t have experienced issues of race, powerlessness, homelessness, poverty, sickness. I simply wouldn’t have been exposed to them. I think that inherent goodness is in all people, but you need to be exposed to things to experience them and understand them, for them to affect you, put their mark on you.

I certainly have a great affinity with the old guys we look after now, because a lot of them have done jobs and lived in an environment where I have. A lot of them are from the bush and have come into the city, and if they’ve lived in the city they’ve lived the type of life we lived in the bush, only they’ve lived it in the city. In other words, underskilled, low-paid work, really living from hand to mouth. Most of them have come from an environment that’s heavily male-oriented. Like most remote areas, the population in the bush is a very male culture – it’s because it’s a tough culture. You can’t really use city words to judge it – you can’t call it sexist because the demarcation of roles in the bush is just a survival strategy, really.

The guys often do create their own cultures that stand up well when they’re young and middle-aged, but it often leaves them isolated and alone when they’re old. They often come to the city when they’re old for health or work reasons, and then get marooned and die alone in the city.