Meet down-sized ex-premier Lynn Arnold

LYNN Arnold is on a journey of physical and professional transformation and isn't sure where it's heading.

LYNN Arnold is on a journey of physical and professional transformation and isn't sure where it's heading. The physical side has been relatively straightforward.

Since his days in the spotlight as the Labor premier who inherited the poisoned chalice of office after the $970 million State Bank collapse, Mr Arnold, 64, has cut a large figure, which he freely admits.

"I'd always believed very strongly in my mental self, and my social self and my spiritual self, but I never really believed I had the capacity to be fit," he says.

"I don't believe I believed I could. I don't know why and I don't understand that now looking back on it."

In August 2011, weighing 114kg, he decided to try. He modified his diet and the weight started falling off. He reached his first target of 107kg without effort, then 100kg. A friend asked if he had ever climbed Mt Lofty, the demanding 8km hike from Waterfall Gully to the obelisk and back.

"I remember it was mid-January last year and I stopped eight times at least. He (the friend) had me take my pulse regularly. I thought `I'm not going to make this'," Mr Arnold recalled.

Arnold has since lost 22kg and is in serious training for a fundraising walk next month on the Kokoda Track.

On his Mt Lofty ascent, which he does three times a week, he regularly carries a backpack containing more than the weight he lost.

"I would not have thought I would even be able to consider doing this," he says.

"Last Saturday I went without weights and I felt like breaking into a trot so I jogged down part of Mt Lofty. And I'm not a jogger."

His new-found strength is being put to a good cause - raising money for the Little Heroes charity on their Anzac Day Kokoda Track climb.

"I'm passionate about them because one of our grandchildren (Caitlyn) is a little hero," he said.

"She was diagnosed with leukaemia aged 20 months.

"She's now seven and she's a feisty survivor so I'm doing it for her."

But Mr Arnold's professional pathway is less clear. In early 2012 he left his job as chief executive of Anglicare because he felt the call to the next phase of his life.

He enrolled in theological studies without really knowing why and is half way through a graduate diploma. It could lead to becoming a deacon - a kind of roving Anglican evangelist - or, with further study, to the more focused responsibility of ministering to an Anglican congregation.

"I am waiting for God's calling," Mr Arnold said. "It might be a deacon, it might be to be a minister, it might end up being none of the above. I have to wait and listen.

"I really do not know but I am comfortable with that."

This mysterious process of discerning God's will has worked for him in the past and almost 20 years ago brought his political career to a close.

After Labor's rout in the 1993 post-State Bank election, Mr Arnold said his party's plan was for him to stay on as Opposition Leader then lead the party to almost certain defeat at the next election.

"We knew that would happen, that was realism, and I would then be replaced after that election," he said.

"I had no problem with that. That was a valid proposition for my party to put. And I was quite prepared to go with that."

A few months later he participated in an intense religious ritual, Greek Orthodox Lent, a rigorous cycle of dietary restrictions, prayer and three-hour nightly services.

At the end of that, he decided to go, making way in the seat of Ramsay for future Premier Mike Rann.

"That intense period of religious reflection was critical at that time in my life," Mr Arnold said.

"It really helped clarify the fact I wasn't serving the community well any longer, I wasn't serving the party well and I wasn't serving me well."

He thought he was burnt out but looking back he thinks he was just ready for the next phase. He took his family to Spain for two years, a country he has loved since moving there with his mother and sister in his late teens.

 His father was on academic sabbatical in Sweden, which proved too expensive for the whole family, so with young Lynn at the helm they moved to Spain for six months, living as a family of three on $5 a day.

"It was the most amazing experience, going around to pensions (budget hotels) to find the cheapest ones that were reasonable quality, booking third class on trains and buses," he says.

"The graciousness of the Spanish people to this bizarre little group, travelling around, who knew no Spanish at the time, was at such a depth I fell in love with the country."

After returning home he became chief executive of World Vision Australia, based in Melbourne, and travelled with them to the Asia-Pacific before returning in 2007 and heading Anglicare.

Four years later, he began thinking about what was next. In early 2012 he again embarked on the Greek Orthodox Lent, dieting and praying and undergoing a personal pilgrimage that proved a journey of valleys and peaks.

"At this stage I was on Facebook so each night I would put up a prayer that I had come across during the day," he says. "I look back on that now and I realise there were some really strong points in that journey and some really weak points, some real valleys."

At the end, once again, he felt it was time to leave and he resigned eight months before his contract with Anglicare was complete. Now 64, he is at ease not knowing his future.

"If you decide `I am doing this to become a parish minister', you close off the option that God might be calling you to something else, and vice versa," he says. "There may be a community out there that He is saying `no, I actually want you to go there'."

He is that rare thing, a former premier not defined by once having the peak political job. His party membership quietly lapsed at World Vision and he has no involvement with politics other than a life-long interest and several close political friends. It is for others to take up the battle, he says.

"I have been known to say of my time in politics that a third was good, a third was bad and a third was terrible," he says. "So it could have been worse. And it was a pretty rare privilege. It would be churlish of me to say `you gave me a tough time'.

"I didn't have to accept it and I appreciate the chance that I had."

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