Ian Kiernan was the inspiration behind Clean Up Australia Day
Australia has lost a champion in Ian Kiernan who inspired respect of the environment and the effort to keep it clear of garbage.
As a young man, Ian “Bicky” Kiernan didn’t give two hoots about the environment. Like most sailors in the 1960s, he treated Sydney Harbour and the ocean offshore as a dump. No one bothered to bring rubbish off a yacht — it was just dropped over the side to join all the other refuse, from raw sewage to dead dogs, that washed up on the once beautiful harbour beaches.
The young Kiernan was a pretty typical middle-class hoon from Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs. A successful builder from a young age, he inhabited smart restaurants and trendy pubs, drove fast cars and motorcycles, played knockabout subdistrict rugby, sailed anything he could get aboard, chased dozens of girls and didn’t give a bugger about the environmental future of the planet.
Had anyone told the 25-year-old Kiernan that he would one day be appointed Australian of the Year, be awarded numerous honours and found an environmental movement that saw the general public don gumboots and gloves to first clean up Sydney Harbour, then Australia and, finally, scores of countries around the world, he would have poured a beer over them and laughed his head off.
Kiernan was born on October 4, 1940 and raised at Vaucluse, overlooking Sydney Harbour. In his early years he was alone with his mother, Leslie, as his father, George, had been taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Java and spent the next 3½ years in Changi POW camp and on the Burma Railway. George had been a senior executive with Coles before the war and rejoined the company on his return. He took delight in meeting his son and immediately started teaching him to swim at nearby Nielsen Park. Ian was enrolled at Scots College but, dogged by childhood illness, he was unhappy there. His parents thought his health might improve in the country, and in 1951 he was enrolled as a boarder at The Armidale School in northern NSW.
For Kiernan, TAS was a delight. Despite the draughty dormitories, the cold showers and a few cane-happy masters, he loved the school and made a group of friends he kept to the end of his life. He also learned to love the quiet of the endless bush he explored on his classmates’ properties during holidays. At home during his Christmas holidays, Kiernan divided his time between the “new” sport of surfboard riding and sailing and, at 15, with his father’s financial assistance, bought his first yacht, a VJ skiff. As his sailing skills improved, Kiernan found himself being invited to crew on ever larger yachts in races around the harbour.
Kiernan scraped through the Leaving Certificate exam in 1958 and started in a series of jobs, first making concrete pipes for Monier and eventually in a junior management role with that company at the construction of the State Office Block. Monier gave Kiernan a taste for the building industry and when he met developer and real estate agent Billy Bridges in the Royal Oak Hotel in Double Bay, he couldn’t help but be impressed with Bridges’ building ideas and accepted an offer of a job.
Bridges’ methods were simple. He walked the streets of Paddington, then still a slum suburb, looking for terrace houses he could buy cheaply. He would then give them a coat of whitewash, repair the dangerous wiring, rip 100 years of old carpet and lino off the floors — and sell them to the young “trendies” who were revitalising the suburb. In his biography, Kiernan recounted how Bridges would buy a terrace house for “as little as $1500 and send me in with a team to ‘do a mocker’ on them. Mostly this consisted of a coat of paint and the replacement of anything broken beyond repair.”
Kiernan worked for Bridges long enough to see how much could be made by “flipping” terrace houses, so he went to work for himself — but with a bit more flair. Even today if you walk around parts of Paddington and Darlinghurst, it is possible to pick out terraces that copped the Kiernan treatment — exposed sandstock brick walls, paved backyards, cast iron verandas and bright colours on the doors and windows. Kiernan eventually owned a stock of almost 400 terraces houses that made him one of the youngest millionaires in Sydney and possibly the biggest private landowner in the city. But then the 1970s recession hit and interest rates went through the roof.
In 1971 Kiernan had bought the beautiful Tasman Seabird yacht Maris, which had been built for famous sailor and marine artist Jack Earl, and had made various voyages to Lord Howe Island and New Zealand aboard her over the following couple of years. In 1974, as the financial vultures circled his crumbling building empire, Kiernan climbed aboard Maris and quietly slipped out of the harbour bound for somewhere in the vast Pacific.
Within hours of his leaving, the waterfront was awash with amazing scuttlebutt about Kiernan’s voyage. The “good oil” was that he had drilled a couple of hundred pounds of lead out of Maris’s keel and replaced it with ingots of solid gold. It was a yarn that was to follow Kiernan to the grave.
Twelve months after he left, Kiernan sailed back into Sydney, having spent the year crisscrossing the Pacific. His lasting memory was of a massive clean-up one Sunday morning of the rubbish in the Ala Wai yacht basin next to Waikiki by the dozens of drifters who were living aboard yachts moored there. As he rebuilt his building company, Kiernan was also building his reputation as a sailor. He crewed on various visiting maxi yachts and was aboard Syd Fischer’s Ragamuffin when it was picked to represent Australia in the 1977 Admiral’s Cup in Britain. The following year he sailed Maris in the single-handed trans-Tasman race from New Plymouth to Mooloolaba and won his division.
The turning point in Kiernan’s life came in 1985 when he was picked by radio millionaire Rod Muir to skipper a purpose-built yacht, Spirit of Sydney, in the coming BOC Challenge, a single-handed round-the-world race. Kiernan had attempted to enter the first BOC Challenge a couple of years before but had failed to raise the needed backing. Muir had recently taken to sailing and was buying boats from around the world and then decided that the BOC Challenge was the way to go — whatever the cost. Muir was rumoured to have spent more than $2 million on his yachts in 1985. He bought the famous wooden maxi yacht Windward Passage for $480,000 and then spent more than $800,000 building Spirit of Sydney.
Famed Tasmanian yachtsman Charles Blundell, known everywhere as “Chas from Tas”, was his first pick as skipper, but eventually Muir settled on Kiernan — although the two men didn’t really get on too well. Muir dismissed Kiernan as “just the driver” and was sure his boat could win with anyone at the helm.
The race started in Newport, Rhode Island, and Kiernan reached the first stop, Cape Town, in 51 days — not terrific but not last in his class. Muir was unimpressed. He announced he was pulling the yacht out of the race and flying over some of his crew from Windward Passage for an attempt at the Cape Town to Sydney sailing record.
Muir was talked into letting Spirit of Sydney continue in the race but he withdrew almost all his sponsorship, leaving it up to Kiernan to raise the money needed to repair the boat and get it ready for the Southern Ocean leg to Sydney. Kiernan put the arm on all his old Sydney mates and in a week raised the needed $30,000. When the race restarted, Kiernan found that Spirit was better suited to the boisterous conditions in the Southern Ocean than it had been in the Atlantic and was far more competitive with the leading French yachts. When Kiernan reached Sydney, Muir again picked up the sponsorship of the yacht.
Sailing on the last leg from Rio back to Newport, Kiernan had to cross the Sargasso Sea, the patch of floating weed that marks the doldrums. Looking over the side of Spirit he was disgusted by what he saw — a vast expanse of floating rubbish, old thongs, toothpaste tubes, plastic bags, foam cups. All the junk of a throwaway society. In a spare berth below he had, stored in plastic garbage bags, all the rubbish he had generated on his globe-circling voyage. He had promised a friend from the Centre for Marine Conservation he would not throw anything away during the voyage.
Kiernan noted in his diary that if he could collect his garbage, so too could millions of recreational sailors around the world. A few months after his return to Sydney — he came sixth — he explained his concerns about the sad state of Sydney Harbour and his thoughts while crossing the Sargasso Sea to Kim McKay, the young publicist who had helped him deal with the media during the BOC race.
McKay immediately sent off a letter suggesting a harbour clean-up to then ports minister Laurie Brereton. Not surprisingly, Brereton gave McKay and Kiernan the brush-off, so they approached Mosman mayor Barry O’Keefe and suggested a clean-up of the municipality’s 17 harbourside beaches. O’Keefe offered his support, so Kiernan rounded up a few old mates, including adman John Singleton, Mojo co-founder Alan Morris, Mosman alderman Rod Jones and John Henderson of Mojo, and formed a committee.
Morris suggested extending beyond Mosman and cleaning the whole harbour — and the first Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day was set for January 8, 1989. Singleton convinced McDonald’s boss Peter Ritchie to toss in $25,000 to fund the publicity blitz and Morris wrote the Yukky Yukky Poo jingle that encouraged children to drag the parents down to the nearest beach on the given Sunday morning.
Kiernan predicted the public would collect between 100 and 200 tonnes of rubbish. In the end it was estimated that 40,000 people took part and they collected more than 5000 tonnes of rubbish.
Such was the reaction from across the country that Kiernan and McKay started working on a Clean Up Australia Day and by September 1989 they were able to announce that 211 cities and towns across the country were planning to take part. It is estimated that 300,000 people took part in the first Clean Up Australia Day in 1990. The idea spread worldwide and Kiernan eventually had to abandon building and become a full-time environmentalist.
Kiernan was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1991 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1995. In late 1993, broadcaster Phillip Adams, who was chairman of the Australia Day Council, rang Kiernan to tell him that on January 26, 1994 he would be named Australian of the Year for his clean-up work. At the official ceremony, Adams introduced Kiernan as “the Robin Hood of refuse, the Gandhi of garbage and the only garbo in the world more famous than Greta”.
Later that afternoon, Kiernan was one of the official guests at Darling Harbour where Prince Charles was handing out various gongs. Suddenly a young man broke from the crowd and a gunshot rang out. As Prince Charles looked on startled, Kiernan and NSW premier John Fahey jumped on the “assassin” and wrestled him to the ground. Kiernan, a devoted republican, spent years explaining to his mates that his reaction was simply a result of all the rugby training in his youth — not an attempt to curry favour with a future king.
Kiernan is survived by his wife Judy and daughters Sally and Philippa.