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.