When Father Bob Maguire began working with Melbourne’s Sudanese community, he learned a new word – ubuntu. It means I am because you are.
When he translated for me, his eyes smiled.
The time I spent with Father Bob still makes me smile. We met in 2021 to discuss football and its impact on communities. Before me, this beacon of humanity sat proudly in his chair, black and white Collingwood scarf draped around his neck, with a Magpies jumper strategically placed against the wall, just over his left shoulder.
Father Bob loved footy.
Six months after he emerged from the seminary, he was posted to Heidelberg – firmly entrenched in the Magpies’ recruiting zone. After brief dalliances with Richmond and Essendon, Father Bob found his team.
“I had a spiritual awakening when I went there and became a Collingwood supporter,” he said.
The Pies’ ethos of “side-by-side” can be traced back to the 1920s when most of its supporters were working-class Catholics and Irish – united by the exclusion and discrimination they faced.
“Football clubs have always been a shrine to which people worship. I loved going down to Lulie Street, Collingwood, sitting in the members’ stand, and seeing people’s passion for their team,” Father Bob said.
“There was a woman who used to come running down the aisles until she reached the players’ race. She’d come running down, waving her bloody umbrella everywhere, until she got close enough to spit on the opposition. That was her gesture of tribalism.”
In addition to becoming a favourite personal pastime, Father Bob quickly saw the value of football as a vehicle for inclusiveness and acceptance. Renowned as a champion of the marginalised, he regularly provided young people with access to footy and cricket matches as a form of social connection.
According to his longtime media collaborator and friend John Safran, his parochial kindness knew no bounds. Earlier this week, Safran tweeted: “When an elderly congregant couldn’t catch the Collingwood matches, he organised tapes from Channel Seven that he would slip to her, along with the Eucharist wafer during communion.”
After returning from national service in 1973, Father Bob arrived as the parish priest at Sts Peter and Paul’s church, South Melbourne, which he described as a shambles. The parish he inherited became home to several housing commission projects and had undergone a significant cultural change.
“They pulled all the factories down along the Yarra bank, so the locals had nowhere to go to work. Therefore, they were scattered in their heads and in their hearts.”
Happiness dwells in the soul. For the people of South Melbourne, their joy was intrinsically linked to their football team. They forged a collective strength through adversity, with the Lake Oval providing a comforting haven – until plans to relocate to Sydney surfaced in 1981.
At the time, Father Bob linked the club’s survival to the likelihood of hope for the town’s future. “This football side is, for them, a tribal memory. It reminds them of the glorious past, it reminds them of the desperate past, and it’s a continuing link to their own past,” he said.
“I want the South Melbourne team to stay because the football club is the place that lots of the local citizens can go, and even if it’s going through the same process as they are – the process of defeat – they feel as though they’ve got a little bit of colour in their lives.”
Father Bob joined the movement to keep the Swans where they’d always been. A staunch unionist, he saw an opportunity to preserve the locals’ sense of identity by coordinating protests and speaking on behalf of those who cared most.
“The mob was tough,” he said. “They’d go down to the wharves at Port Melbourne and hope someone would pick them out of the line just to give them a job. It was blood, toil, tears and sweat in those days, and that’s what I was thinking about when I became respectfully agitated on behalf of the local community.”
He described the aftermath of his community losing their team and tribal heroes as agony. Reminiscing about Collingwood at Victoria Park? Well, they were the good old days.
Father Bob’s famous “cobberwealth” concept encapsulates his belief that no one should be left behind. The former Magpies president Eddie McGuire spoke this week of Father Bob’s continued support of the club’s community programs. The mere mention of his Collingwood connection precipitated an impromptu, rousing rendition of John Williamson’s True Blue.
“We’re all in this together. Football helps drive the elan vital – the life force – within communities. It’s the thing that keeps communities going, certainly, and individuals going too,” he said.
He spent a lifetime creating a gameplan for “the unloved and the unlovely” to share the field with “the elites”. His methods were visionary, though that’s hardly a surprise. He told me: “Imagination feeds the intellect. If you haven’t got imagination, comrade, you’ve got a dead faculty.”
Father Bob Maguire was a national treasure whose reach stretched far beyond football. His impact will be celebrated on Tuesday when Collingwood plays its biggest match of the season against Essendon on Anzac Day. And, in two weeks, the Magpies host the Swans at the MCG, and what better place for the sport and two communities so close to his heart to pay homage to one of its most beloved patrons?
He might not be in the Ponsford Stand, but he’ll be watching.
