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Still Inspiring: November - Father Brian Morrison

I'm parish priest of East Perth. I never stop to think about what I do. I'd probably fall down and faint if I did. I have a team of sixteen and some of them have been with me twenty years. We're all volunteers. It's a family. An unbelievable family.

We provide food for several hundred families every week, we have a huge winter appeal (as of yesterday we'd distributed thirteen thousand brand new blankets to families across the state), we have counselling services and I still travel to international disasters. I've been to twenty seven of them now: the worst disasters, the worst countries, the worst war zones…

When you first go into these places, you don't know what you're going to do. You have to be able to sum up the situation and decide the limits. And if you stick within those limits, you can do a lot of good things. But you must know when you can do things and when you can't. That's the secret of the whole business.

I'm better at it now than I was. The first disaster I ever went to was Darwin. I'm a Qantas flight chaplain and I remember standing at the airport one Christmas having a drink with the manager and a message came through that Darwin had been destroyed. I flew out on a special jet that night and got home two and a half months later.

I'm seventy-two and I'm probably working as hard as I ever have. I do get tired but if you know what you're doing, you can work without too much pressure. Mostly, not always. My last visit for International Relief was to Romania where it's very, very sad. President Ceausescu had instituted a vaccination programme for every child but they used one needle on fifteen or twenty children. So there are two hundred orphanages there now and they have masses and masses, thousands and thousands of children with AIDS. And then there is Chernobyl, really one of the great tragedies of this world. I've visited there four times and seen so many children die of the worst cancers. We take them to die peacefully, four hundred kilometres east of the capital. We have nice little comfortable bungalows for the parents to live in while the child is dying and they can visit the hospital section everyday. I go from bungalow to bungalow to visit the families and have a cup of tea or a meal. If I can, I want to do one more trip because they are extraordinary people.

It never gets easier. If it got easier then I wouldn't be doing a good job. You have to live with the things you've seen. I visited Croatia three times during the Bosnian war and did enormous amounts of work. But I witnessed something the third time that stopped me in my tracks. The most terrible atrocity. I packed my bags: took a flight to Frankfurt, took a flight to Paris, London and finally home. I just walked out. I had to.

The experiences I've had stay with you. You live with them. But when you come back to Perth, to this beautiful city, it has its own calming effect. And the beaches too. I have a very favourite spot at North Cottesloe. It's beautiful there in the summer, even in the winter. I swim there almost every day of my life. I paddle about a bit, nothing extra big and then meet up with friends at the café. I have dozens of friends around the area: we've been meeting up for many years. We sit around and laugh our heads off. They're all the blue rinse set but they're lovely people. I hob nob it and they help me a lot. They're very good to me.

I'm not thinking about retirement at this stage. If I became unwell, then I would have to let Robert come in and take over. He is a young man who is twenty-eight now and I have been training him since he was eight years old. Last year he was elevated to co-director of the Father Brian Crisis Care Centre. He has the full right of succession with all the authority that comes with that and he will take over from me. And he says he can't wait to straighten up the mess!!

There are some younger people too who will go on to work with Robert in the years to come. The senior kids from a lot of the local schools here come to us and they learn critical crisis care. Some of them come right through the year and they get taught an enormous amount about what goes on in the community. It's been going on for a number of years and so many of them now are doctors and solicitors and policemen and they're all doing something from what they learned here. Some of them came to me at eleven or twelve years of age. And they keep coming back.

That's the important thing to do now, to hand it on so that the work will continue. And the young people are magnificent, I have no fears about that. They have tremendous visions.