– by his son (‘Chewie) at a packed Thanksgiving Service, Heathmont Baptist Church, 25th May 2015.

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Since as early as I can remember, my father started each day by preparing a cup of tea, and a slice of toast, and taking it to my mother in bed, to help ease her into the day. He was still doing this as recently as last year when I spent a weekend at home with them. 

As I child, I remember that he would come home at the end of the working day, lower himself to the loungeroom floor with an audible sigh, unfold the Herald newspaper on the floor in front of him, and read it from front to back. Taking a pen from his shirt pocket, he would proofread the paper making a mark in the margin whenever he found a grammatical error, a misplaced homophone, or a displeasing orphan word dangling below the rest of the paragraph. 

After dinner, he would always get up from the table and wash the dishes, and it fell to us children to dry and put away, trying to keep up with his output as we chatted. 

Dad was, in those days, a Linotype operator, and if you have never seen a Linotype machine in operation, you have missed an opportunity to be impressed. Speaking from the perspective of a child, it was vast, noisy, black and imposing. It had wheels and gears spinning, and flying belts, and a long metal arm that would swing down at apparently random intervals. Molten metal was involved, and a sloping ramp down which metal letters slid, in delayed response to Dad’s fingers flying over the huge keyboard. The end result of it all was, literally, a line of type. Back-to-front text set in strips of metal that they clamped together and put in the presses, to produce the newspaper. 

The Linotype keyboard has a very different layout to the typewriter keyboard. I was still very young when New Life started moving towards the computer age, and Dad had to learn how to use the QWERTY keyboard. I remember he would go into the city after work and attend the touch typing school, where he was the lone male in a class full of young women, all on their way from high school to the typing pool. He described sometimes the quiet humiliation of watching their fingers quickly pick up the patterns and gain speed, while his own fingers were grappling with what was effectively a second language.  He never did feel that he gained mastery of the computer keyboard, but he persisted nonetheless, and in the following decades he worked with successive generations of computers, eventually culminating in a newspaper produced entirely with desktop publishing software on a standard personal computer. 

For fair chunks of my childhood Dad was the church secretary here at Heathmont, which had a few implications. It meant that Deacons meetings were held in our loungeroom, and on those nights we were banished to our bedrooms, with the solemn instruction that if we ever overheard anything that was said, we were to forget it immediately, and never ever pass it on. I think they overestimated how interested we might be. It also meant that Dad took to the microphone each Sunday morning to make the announcements, and I clearly remember that he had Margaret Cameron in quiet stitches one morning when he told us all that some function was going to be happening on the ‘twenty wunth’ of the month. I also remember one morning watching in fascination when he was taking up the offering, passing along the big wooden bowls we used at the time. Mrs Cameron having discreetly indicated that she had nothing to put in the plate this time, he stood unmoving, and just gently jiggled the bowl, clearly suggesting that we wasn’t going anywhere until she came across with the cash! 

Mum has mentioned the sailing dinghy that Dad made, working away mysteriously in the shed after our bedtimes, and also the kayaks. We went through a lot of different kayaks in different combinations; double, single, open cockpit, enclosed deck, slalom, and so forth. For a while there during my teen years my Father and I went out many Saturday afternoons, and paddled different sections of the Yarra river, as well as making some overnight expeditions on farther-flung rivers. 

One of my happiest memories, as Lyndell and I moved through our teen years, is of countless Saturday lunches. They were gastronomically simple affairs of salad and sandwiches, but the meals were leisurely and conversation flowed. Lyndell and Mum might be heading out to play netball in the afternoon; Dad and I might be going off to canoe somewhere, but for a while there, we lingered at the table, and talked, and laughed. Karen Chapman, Anne Saunders, or Phil Coates might be there too, part of the household. I don’t think my father ever in his life told a joke of the sort that starts out “There was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman. . . “; he didn’t do jokes. He did humour. He played with words, proof-reading peoples’ sentences and picking up on misplaced terms, or exploring associations of ideas. We have a family saying that possibly dates from this period: “Stop trying to finish your story, can’t you see I’m interrupting?” 

But then we grew up and left home, and went away to various mission fields. And Mum and Dad followed us. They visited us any number of times in PNG, and the same for Lyndell in Vanuatu, and South Australia. My father regularly impressed me in situations like the following. We’d be walking down the road at Ukarumpa, perhaps, and meet a fellow missionary coming the opposite direction. I’d introduce them to Dad, and vice versa, and Dad would say, “You used to work in Alice Springs, didn’t you? Isn’t it your wife’s parents who live in Horsham? I think one of your children was sick last year.” And having confirmed the truth of all that, they would walk off, unsure whether to be flattered, or creeped out. But the fact is that Mum and Dad worked their way faithfully through the prayer diaries of a number of missionary groups, and actually prayed for the people and issues that they listed. And Dad had an amazing memory for those people. In the New Life days, a lot of the news about missionaries lives flowed through his keyboard. And he had an amazing memory for those people, as well, evidently seeing them as actual people, not just lists of names. 

Dad never fulfilled his original intention to become a missionary. He worked faithfully at New Life for forty years, earning a wage that wasn’t particularly impressive, but believing that what he did had value. But his commitment to missions never wavered, reflected in years of service on the Missionary Committee. When Mum and Dad started to clean out their house recently, preparatory for a move, the garage was littered with painted polystyrene maps, graphs and gauges; the accumulated remains of many years’ worth of May Missions Month target thermometers. 

As he approached retirement age, Dad was asked to serve as an elder here at Heathmont. He agreed reluctantly, and saw out his term faithfully, but he didn’t feel that it was a good fit, and didn’t go back for another try. “I don’t have much wisdom to offer,” he once said to me. 

Actually, what he didn’t have to offer was advice. Wisdom he had plenty of. My father’s wisdom was demonstrated and lived out, rather than verbalised and distributed. When I try to put it into words, I come up with something like this: 

– It’s not all about you.

– People are important; treat them with respect.

– Prayer is important; it changes the world.

– Words are important, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with them.

– Life itself is both good and important, but you can have fun with it, too.

– If you find something worth doing, do it. And keep doing it.

– This life is a sweet gift; be grateful. 

Galatians 5:22 says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”  When I read that list, I realise that my Father was one of the most spirit-filled people I’ve known. 

Increasingly in recent years, people have looked at photographs of me, or even seen me in person, and said, “Oh, I thought you were your father.”  You know something? That’s absolutely fine by me.

Note: There were other eulogies that day – relating to his Christian commitment, his strong relationship to his beloved wife Val, his servant-heart exhibited in his humble ministries in the church. If I can rustle up some of these I’ll post them here.

Rowland Croucher