Bill Crews documentary A War of Compassion screening in Sydney on March 3
Rev Bill Crews, the outspoken warrior for all those who struggle to find a voice, explains how his life started again at the age of 72
Inner West
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For almost half a century Bill Crews has devoted his life to those living rough on the streets of Sydney, abandoned youth and anyone in need of a helping hand but it was in a refugee camp on the other side of the world that he says his life started again at the age of 72.
Rev Crews has always favoured the road less travelled as the outspoken warrior for all those who struggle to find a voice in mainstream Australia.
He quit engineering in 1971 to start his groundbreaking work at the Wayside Chapel that included creating Australia’s first 24-hour crisis centre and both our first program to reunite adoptees and birth parents and the first modern youth refuge in Australia.
In 1986 he was ordained as minister of the Ashfield Uniting Church and in 1989 he launched The Exodus Foundation to assist homeless, abandoned youth and other people in need and today it is one of Sydney’s largest frontline charities.
Now at 76 he sits in his Ashfield office dwarfed by a roof to floor bookshelf that dominates the room and tells us “some of my biggest life lessons have happened after I was 70.”
It is these six years that are the focus of a new documentary, A War of Compassion – Not for the faint-hearted by filmmaker Warwick Moss, an actor and writer who became a household name in the 1990s as host of Channel Seven’s The Extraordinary.
The moment that changed Rev Crew’s life came while working in the Calais Jungle refugee and migrant camp in Calais, France.
He saw a sign for NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meeting and even though he is not a recovering addict he walked into the meeting, that took place on a piece of carpet laid out on the snow, in attempt to reach out to some of the people in the camp.
”Sitting on the carpet was about 20 refugee men and women from all over the world all sitting in a circle telling their stories in their own language,” he said.
“I could not understand what they were saying but it was written on their faces so I did not need to understand.
“Then it gets to me and I think: ‘What am I going to say?’. I said I am Bill from Australia. Then it all poured out. I said I am Bill from Australia and I have had two stuffed marriages and it has really affected my kids.
“They all got up and came up to me and hugged me and said ‘welcome’. They gave me my life back.”
The moment had such a profound impact on Rev Crews that he came home and threw out all his clothes, vowing to only wear black to pay homage to those who gave him so much.
“When you think about those people they were refugees, they were illegal boat people, they were drug addicts,” he said. “They had nothing and they gave me my life back. I was 72 when that happened and it changed my life forever.”
Reflecting back on a life, Rev Crews said so many people are crippled by secrets, secrets that paralyse them, and his tip is to tell your “story” to your loved ones or someone you trust.
“What I have learnt is that so many people on their death bed, what they regret is all the things they have not told the people they love,” he said.
“So I look at people and say: ‘What would I not want to go to my death bed not saying’. And I say it.”
SCREENING DETAILS
WHAT: A War of Compassion – Not for the faint-hearted
WHEN: Tuesday, March 3 at 6pm
WHERE: Event Cinemas George Street Sydney
Tickets awarofcompassion. Proceeds to the Exodus Foundation