Miriam wanted to be a pro golfer. Instead, she’s an executive on a $26,000 salary

Miriam Gluyas has been up since 4am in the Melbourne morning to make it here for our lunch, which will not trouble this masthead’s budget.

She is warm and bright in a tomato-red cardigan, fitting apparel for the Commissioner of the Salvation Army.

Not for us, a flash restaurant in Sydney’s downtown.

Gluyas, who is “65 but feels 35”, has invited me to dine as the organisation’s clients do – modestly and communally.

We are at William Booth House, a Salvos-run rehabilitation facility in Surry Hills.

It is poised on a hip patch of Sydney real estate, amid minimalist clothing boutiques and cafes where the baristas are extremely serious about coffee.

It would be worth a fortune, but like nearby Foster House, a facility for the homeless, it is badly in need of refurbishment.

“We want to give people who use our services some dignity,” Gluyas tells me. “For that we need to upgrade. So we are going to donors and the government to seek support.”

The lunchroom is a cheerful, stainless-steel kitchen, cafeteria-style affair, staffed by residents and scattered with rehab attendees, one of whom sits next to Miriam and chats easily to her.

We serve ourselves. On the menu is a Greek-style grilled chicken wrap with yoghurt sauce and salad. We drink tap water from mugs. It’s simple and delicious.

Simple and delicious food is available at the Salvos – like this Greek-style chicken wrap.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Gluyas is the Salvos’ Big Cheese – the head of an organisation with 8000 employees, about $735 million in property assets and a net income of $22.9 million, according to the December 2023 Annual Report.

But she does not have Big Cheese-energy.

She also does not get paid Big Cheese-bucks – her pay packet is about $500 a week.

Sure, she gets the use of a house and a vehicle thrown in, but I cannot think of any other boss who draws a salary of $26,000 a year.

It’s radically counter-cultural.

“I don’t like a command-and-control leadership,” Gluyas says. “I like a leadership that says, ‘Let’s come together, let’s wrestle and get to the best outcome’.”

A structural flaw of the lunch interview is the fact that the interviewee has to do almost all the talking, and doesn’t get a chance to eat.

But that’s not my problem.

I begin with asking Miriam about her own background, which she says was as obliviously happy as they come – so much so, that she says she “probably didn’t even realise that people went through difficult stuff”.

“I would call myself very blessed to have grown up in a family where you could be anything, do anything.”

She was raised in Ballarat, with loving parents and grandparents, the eldest of three siblings, in a strongly Salvation-Army household, going back generations to her Scottish forebears.

She barracked for the Geelong Cats and attended Clarendon Presbyterian Ladies College. “It didn’t work,” she quips, meaning the “Ladies” part.

Her mother May was a 10-pound Scottish migrant who ran her own small businesses, including a babywear shop and a ladies’ apparel store. Her father, Les, was a builder.

“I think my parents were ahead of their time, but I didn’t realise it,” Gluyas says. “They both worked. They always said to me, ‘Be whatever you want. Do whatever you want.’ ”

The family was close-knit but full of robust kitchen table debate, especially about politics.

Her father Les was always Gluyas’ chief sparring partner. Now aged 88, he still is. I ask what the fault lines of their discussions are.

“He would come from the very white … there’s only one side of politics for him,” Gluyas says carefully. “So we would debate about that, especially when I was working at Auburn with asylum seekers and refugees. We would probably debate about most things.”

Gluyas wanted to be a professional golfer or a sports teacher but ended up training as a Salvation Army officer, graduating aged 24 in 1983.

She has worked “all over NSW and Queensland”, but her career highlights were “planting” (starting up) a new church in Newcastle in the mid-1990s, running a church in Auburn in Sydney’s western suburbs in the 2000s, and a three-year mission in Papua New Guinea in the early 2010s.

Miriam Gluyas as a young Salvation Army cadet.

The Auburn church attracted congregants from 26 different nations, many of them refugees and asylum seekers.

There was also a cohort of methadone users. Gluyas learnt that years of drug abuse can ruin teeth, which in turn can result in self-esteem issues and social rejection. So the Salvos offered dental care.

“Beautifully, one of the dentists out there said, ‘Everything would change if they could get their teeth back’,” Gluyas recounts. “So he would redo their teeth and to see them come back and say ‘Finally, I am game enough to smile and get a job!’”

One of Gluyas’ most memorable clients at the Auburn centre was a young girl from Sierra Leone.

“She had been in two refugee camps where she was not sure if she would survive,” Miriam says. “When she arrived in Australia, she was placed in Year 10, but she was years behind in her schooling.”

With support and tuition from the Salvation Army, she finished the HSC, went on to university and is now a registered nurse.

“I remember sitting at a table with someone once and people were saying, ‘Those people should have to learn English before they come here’, and I remember reacting and saying, ‘How dare you say that? You don’t know their stories’,” Gluyas says. “But then I had to stop and think, ‘I didn’t know their stories before either.’ If you don’t know, you don’t know.”

Gluyas speaking to some of the staff at the Salvation Army kitchen in Surry Hills, where people in need of food can have a meal. Credit: Michael Quelch

Gluyas has managed a few nibbles of her lunch before I hit her with a big question – I ask her what the voice of God sounds like to her. She answers by telling me about her mother.

When Gluyas was working in Papua New Guinea, her mother, who suffered from dementia towards the end of her life, used to phone and beg her daughter to come home.

Gluyas was in knots about what to do, until one night as she was jogging around the Salvos’ compound, God spoke to her.

“He said, ‘I never want you to worry about a title or a position any more. Go home and look after your mum.’ ”

Gluyas did what she was told, and got another seven years with her mother, but when her mum died in 2021 during lockdown, it was “incredibly sad” and Gluyas had “a little argument with God”.

“I said, ‘You could have waited because I would really have liked to be there with my dad at her funeral,’ ” she says. “But then I thought, ‘It is what it is, and many other people have been through the same thing.’ ”

Gluyas is too nice, too clever and too unassuming to bite on any questions about politics.

But she says the impact of the cost of living crisis is “huge”, and is forcing people to make impossible choices between paying power bills and buying food. “It’s just becoming overwhelming, like a blanket over people, they think, ‘How will I do this?’”

Last week, the Salvation Army put out a press release saying it expected this Christmas to be the hardest in its 140-year history in terms of the volume and widespread nature of need across the country.

Gluyas says the Salvos are seeing “people who have never come before and are actually embarrassed to come”.

Having seen the effects of gambling addiction, she supports cashless gambling cards and banning gambling advertisements. “It’s all right to say at the end of the Footy Tab ad, ‘You are likely to lose’ or whatever, but I think, ‘Why bother?’”

While some faith groups want to retain exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, the Salvation Army has a formal “Commitment to Inclusion” which encompasses “people of all cultures, languages, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and intersex status”.

“I think there is a massive degree of loneliness,” Gluyas says of the Salvos’ mission. “A lot of people come into our centres because they’re lonely, and they’re after real community.”

By now I have polished off my chicken wrap and Gluyas has barely touched hers, and I do start to feel bad about it. Gluyas is so thoroughly equable and kind that it is starting to rub off on me. I tell her I worry she will be hungry later. “That’s fine!” she says. “It’s totally fine.”

She takes a few more bites before we make her work again, this time to pose for the photographer.

Ghoulishly desperate to discover Gluyas’ dark side, I ask her if she ever feels despondent. “Look, I am a pretty positive, upbeat person,” she says.

She pauses for a moment to reflect, and then says that the only thing she gets despondent about is “attitudes”.

Characteristically, she refrains from mentioning the people whose attitudes sadden her. “You have to hear the story behind the person, and then you’ll start to think differently,” she says. “Why is someone lying in the doorway? What is their story? How did they end up getting there? You will usually find a pretty powerful story there.”

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.