Ted Noffs
Minister. Heretic. Man of The Cross. A grandson recalls
Ted Noffs wasn’t human. He was some kind of divine spirit, a deity. He was also my grandfather. Short, like a hobbit, he’d lost the front patch of hair on his head when he was young but by the end of his life, Ted’s hair was unkempt like Einstein’s. There’s newsreel footage of interviews where it’s difficult to take your eyes away from the waves of hair dancing around his head.
Why am I talking about his hair? I suppose that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about him – his hair. And funnily enough, his smell. He wore Old Spice and whenever someone of his vintage passes me in the street wearing the same fragrance, I’m taken back to the 80s, when I was little kid. Ted would pull up outside our house in his bright-red Honda Prelude, a gift donated by an admirer but one I rechristened the Bat Mobile. I really believed my “Pa” was some sort of superhero. Our mission was to buy fish, chips and strawberry milkshakes, which I’d later throw up after he’d push me on the swing. I remember my dad saying “Dad! Don’t push him so high!” Ted would reply, “He’s fine.” These were the invincible days, before he suffered a major stroke which turned him into a vegetable for about eight years.
During that time, I remember thinking Pa was everything I wanted to become. I’d walk up to strangers and say: “Do you know who my grandpa is?” He was “Sydney’s crusader”, a man who set up some of the first international drug strategies, married the rich and famous, tended the down and out, stood up against dogmatic church authorities and sought justice for indigenous people.
He and Charles Perkins established the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs (later the Department of Aboriginal Affairs) in 1962, the first of its kind in the country. Ted also assisted Charlie during the famous Freedom Rides during the ’60s.
It was then that Ted started to lose his cool with society. He had started with the Methodist church two decades earlier as a young minister with a deep need to create lasting change in the lives of those who needed it most. By the ’70s, Ted had helped to establish, among other initiatives, Lifeline. He founded the Wayside Chapel, which became the cool hangout for hippies and beatniks. They called it ‘Bob Dylan’s Den’ for its narrow corridors, nooks and crannies reeking of pot. Ted had created a space where anybody, despite their beliefs or backgrounds, could come and simply be.
If you were trying to impress a girl on a Sunday night in those days, you’d take to the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross where Ted would be holding his weekly Question Time.
There Pa would stand, being heckled by a mob made up of oppressed, professionals, politicians, media moguls like the Packers and prostitutes. Ted loved them all.
By the time I came into existence in the early ’80s, Ted was in the papers every week and regularly on TV. Prince Charles called him in 1983 and asked him to set up one of his famous Life Education Centres in the UK. Ted had some years before gone to Dick Smith and asked for assistance in creating hundreds of mobile classrooms around the country, with the aim of teaching primary school kids how to look after themselves, stay away from drugs and above all, believe in themselves.
Back then there was no drug education and Ted was a pioneer of the drug prevention movement. Government wasn’t interested in assisting those with drug issues but Ted wanted to support those with dependencies. By 1986, Dire Straits were patrons of the program. If it wasn’t for Ted’s passion, we’d be in a far worse predicament today.
One morning in 1987, Ted fell to the floor. A day later he was unable to speak or move. The doctors gave him a week to live but he survived, remaining in a state of paralysis until he passed away in 1995.
Ted’s most famous philosophy is one he read at every Wayside service. “I am Protestant but I am also a Catholic. I am a Muslim but I am also a Jew. I am a Hindu but I am also a Buddhist. Because first and foremost, I am a human being and no one in the world is a stranger to me.”
His funeral was attended by all faiths and creeds, the procession guided by bikies not police. Charlie Perkins spoke about how Pa was accused of heresy three times by the church. They didn’t like his attitude, because it put people, not God, first.
This was my favourite quote of his: “Every one of us must be alert and alive to the fact that no one knows when their life is to be touched by whatever force it is that operates in the universe. I believe it is there all the time and takes hold of a man’s mind or a woman’s mind, their heart and spirit, and transforms them into something they never dreamt they were capable of being. That’s the story of history. Nobody can be pessimistic. Nobody can say it is the end. Nobody can say the world is doomed. Nobody can say this man or this woman is a write off.”
He was Mother Teresa in drag. Damn, I miss him bad.
Lifeline
1926 Ted Noffs born 14 August in Mudgee
1946 Becomes a minister
1964 Founds Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross
1967 Establishes Drug Referral Centre at Rushcutters Bay, the first of its kind.
1971 Forms Wayside Foundation for drug dependents
1987 Suffers a stroke
1988 Life Education Centre goes national reaching one million school children.
1995 Ted Noffs dies on April 6, aged 68.
2007 Matt Noffs launches The Street University in honour of one of Ted’s dreams.
