Fearless advocate, compassionate leader, and rule-breaker for justice

RIC HOLLAND June 18,1947-April 7, 2025

The Reverend Fredric (Ric) Holland, who has died in Melbourne aged 77 after a long illness, did not have the career you might expect of a Uniting Church minister.

It took him from working with knife-wielding street “razor” gangs in Glasgow to running an animal hospital in Melbourne to performing the first gay church wedding in Victoria. In all of them he made sure to follow the philosophy of the man who inspired him – Methodism’s 19th-century founder, John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

It was a track he always followed, taking along his commitment to social justice, his larrikinism and his entrepreneurial spirit.

From the slums of Glasgow to the streets of Melbourne, Ric’s ministry was never confined to the pulpit. As a young Methodist minister in Glasgow in the early 1970s, he built up a community program, starting the city’s first free community legal clinic, a community newspaper, a counselling centre, play groups and social clubs.

He reckoned his most significant work was with the local street “razor” gangs. These kids lived by violence – swords, cutthroat razors and machetes – destined for an early death or prison.

But it was 1972 and gang members still had some respect for “the cloth”, he won acceptance by walking around the area late at night. “I was terrified,” he recalled. He worked to “build a relationship without threat” (with great help from his German shepherd which they loved). Asked what he did to stop them constantly breaking into the church and ransacking it, he replied, “I gave them a key, so they had a place to meet and socialise” – his only willing church volunteer helpers, a disabled young woman who controlled the weapons shelf and an elderly lady who made them scones.

Ric said his encounters with the street gangs were a fantastic learning experience. “They were disadvantaged kids, but they had some wonderful organisation and leadership skills. They could have been CEOs.”

Reverend Ric Holland.

The work in Glasgow was the first spark for Ric about using mass communications for social justice. When he became director of the Glasgow Volunteer Centre, he organised highly successful TV ads to recruit volunteers, the first of their kind.

Soon he was pioneering and running a national project for Community Service Volunteers (CSV) that he named Social Action Broadcasting. He formed partnerships with mainstream commercial radio and TV companies and with the BBC. Ric knew that partnership with media was central to the project’s success – providing expertise in areas foreign to media companies, who in turn provided production and prime airtime. His Help! series on Thames Television did the first program on AIDS in the UK, for example.

“There was a lot of pressure (on mass media) at that time to do community stuff,” Ric said. “I jumped on the bandwagon. And media managers knew that by being involved in the community they would lift their audience numbers.”

He honed his entrepreneurial skills, raising funds in the UK and Europe. Later he raised funds from governments at every level in Australia for his many social justice projects.

It was Ric’s communications expertise that led to his recruitment by the Uniting Church in Victoria in 1989. He and his young family migrated to Melbourne where he became a Uniting Church minister and headed its communications board for four years.

He is perhaps best known in Melbourne for his work at Lort Smith Animal Hospital and then at Melbourne City Mission.

Ric’s speciality had always been in meeting needs and bringing people together – people of all ages, all cultures, all religions or none, all sexual orientations, all types of relationships.

He expanded his canvas to include animals at Lort Smith when he became its CEO. Despite its many thousands of animal consultations, treatments and surgeries carried out each year, its projects would now expand into the strong bond people have with animals.

Ric set up programs such as emergency pet boarding for people who were in crisis or homeless, who could not take their pets into refuges, safe houses or hospitals. This “people perspective” on the hospital’s role led him to employ a chaplain, a world first for an animal hospital. She supported many people experiencing stress and shock due to the illness or bereavement of their beloved pets. He also secured DGR (deductible gift recipient) status for animal charities throughout Australia, which revolutionised their access to funding.

Ric’s time as Melbourne City Mission CEO was another social justice ministry. It had been set up in 1854 to help people in need. He said: “We’ve got to be innovative. We can’t keep doing the same old stuff.”

His “new stuff” included starting a school for homeless and disadvantaged young people with classrooms (each with a teacher and a social worker) in Melbourne’s inner city and in areas of disadvantage in the suburbs of Melbourne. Kids had been school refusers, disengaged and homeless with no social support up to now. Wrap-around support services – from accommodation and living skills to doctors and dentists gave them a new life. Not just an education, but hope, for students who had been disengaged, unsupported and often invisible to the wider community.

Ric moved on to become the minister of St Michael’s Uniting Church Collins Street where, like in all his church positions, congregations flourished under his leadership. He was a proud and active supporter of the “Yes” campaign for marriage equality and officiated the first same-sex marriage in a church.

Reverend Ric Holland at St Michael’s Uniting Church.

His last appointment, at Hampton Park Uniting Church, began at an age where others were retiring.

Many in the Hampton Park community are newly arrived refugees with little language or support. They are now offered a women’s crisis support program, counselling, education, free meals, playgroups, early parenting support, financial advice, assistance to engage with the local community, help with language, a lunch for carers.

Ric Holland won the hearts of the congregation and the wider community. On his retirement in 2024, local MP Gary Maas told state parliament: “His social justice work is inspired and has made a real difference to many, here and abroad. He is a giant in the social justice world.”

Through every act of kindness, every campaign, every challenge to the status quo, Ric remained driven by an unshakable faith in humanity and an unyielding belief in justice. He was often a troublemaker to the church, in the holiest sense – never content to sit quietly when action was required.

His wife Joni Tooth, a film producer, said: “Ric had a massive commitment to social justice, a risk-taker able to take personal responsibility to see it through. He had the enthusiasm and ability to inspire, enthuse and enable others.

“He had a management style of building up common vision. He was a rule breaker, a lateral thinker. Everyone loved him, from politicians and premiers to street kids and prisoners. Ric treated everyone the same.”

John Wesley would doubtless approve.

Ric is survived by wife Joni and three beautiful children Andrew, Wesley and Primrose.

Bruce Best is a former Age journalist and was a colleague of Ric Holland.