HE WAS a nice Baptist boy from Blackburn with an urge to do good. She was a prostitute, the first of many to enter his life. She arrived at his office in St Kilda with her face all bruised. She wanted his help as a lawyer to get her off charges she faced in court that day. The night before, anxious and unable to find a vein in her arm, she had injected heroin into her face.

He kept her out of jail, that time. Delighted, she told him, rather indelicately, precisely how many clients she would have to service in order to pay the court’s fine. She invited him to lunch to celebrate the win; her choice of venue, a local soup kitchen. There she introduced him to the assembled street people as “the best legal eagle in town”. From a distant table came the wry observation: “God, things must be bad if lawyers have to eat here.”

The Reverend Tim Costello could have had no better introduction to St Kilda’s fringe-dwellers: their courage, their humor, their openness and their brokenness. The prostitute, Julie, told him she had been raped at 15 and had decided that no man would ever do that to her again. So she made them pay. “In a tragically coherent way, Julie was taking power back over her own life,” he writes. “Who was I to judge?”

“Who was I?” is the question central to autobiography. In Costello’s new memoir, Streets of Hope, he promises an answer, describing the book as a highly personal account of his life’s journey. In fact, the chapters that follow demonstrate what a private person such a public figure can be.

Costello gives a detailed picture of his social and political development; of how he came to be a lawyer, a preacher/prophet and, briefly, a politician. We hear much about his views on the dark forces rending Australian society; it is probably for his persistent critique of economic rationalism and its effect on community that he is best known – certainly to Premier Jeff Kennett.

But Costello offers only sketchy outlines of the forces that would have shaped him most profoundly: his relationships with his mother and father, with his wife and their children, and with his famous brother, Treasurer Peter. Costello shields them as carefully as he does his own deeper self; not for him the bruising intimacy of Frank McCourt or Nuala O’Faolain. “One of the reasons the book sat on the shelf for two years was that it was autobiographical,” Costello admits. “I actually have a fear of being too self-disclosing.”

He believes this is partly related to the fact that he wrote the book at 40: “It’s very difficult to be disclosing midway through your life. There’s this sense that it’s more appropriate at the end, when you have a better sense of what it all means and who you are.

“Secondly, it involves others. You aren’t just an individual who has this right to be open and vulnerable and show your wounds. You are in relationships with people. I knew that anything I said that was too revealing of family stuff would have all these ripple effects. I kept asking myself, `Is this fair to family, to wife, to colleagues?’ By the end of your life, your parents have gone, the kids can cope.”
The book was originally written as therapy, as a private exercise in finishing unfinished business. Costello is now a minister at the Collins Street Baptist Church, with a parish that covers street kids, the Stock Exchange and the Crown Casino.

But back in 1994, he faced the closing of several doors. His single term as St Kilda’s last mayor had been cut short by the council amalgamations he had fiercely opposed. Then the Democrats offered him a safe Senate seat. He initially accepted but later refused, for the sake of family harmony.

It must have hurt. Even now, a spasm passes over his face as he remembers. “It was about my parents, who would have found it just too painful,” he says, dragging his hands over his face as if suddenly tired. “We discussed how, once under a national spotlight where, potentially, the Democrats would hold the balance of power on Peter’s budget, the strains would be so great they’d blow family relations apart.

“It was also a bit about my wife – and she was right, I think, and now I accept this – saying, `Well, you’re not just a politician. In terms of calling and vision, there’s other aspects of who you are, and once you become a politician, that’s all you are’.”

He was sorely tempted because the Democrats allow conscience votes; he would probably have been as much his own agent as he is in his church. Unlike most other denominations, the Baptists have no central hierarchy to whom spokesmen are answerable. When Costello makes public comments, he is not representing any stance other than his own.

In religious terms, he says, “The Democrats have the prophetic role; that is, they’re not the priestly caste who governs and makes the laws. The prophets are always the ratbags who come from the margins and shake up the system …”
After the decision was made, there was still more emotional housekeeping to be done. Costello had already told the St Kilda community that he was leaving, and he stuck to this despite his grief at the prospect. His wife, Merridie, suggested he write it out of his system. The result is Streets of Hope, which he offered to Allen and Unwin two years later when they approached him to write a book.

He says he wants the book to answer the question he is most often asked: “Why do you see the world so differently to your brother, even though you’ve grown up with the same family and the same religious training and world view?”

The book provides a glimpse of one possible answer. He writes, “I remember my father often saying to me and my brother, `I do not care who is right or wrong; I am going to punish you both.’ As a parent, I now fully understand that it was borne of the weariness involved in adjudicating endless sibling disputes. But back then, that always struck me as flagrantly unfair.”

He thinks that this is what propelled him into law. But perhaps it also propelled both of them into struggling to differentiate themselves from each other, to be recognised in their separateness.

COSTELLO’S own answer to the question is that the family years are not the only formative ones, and that as a young man he was exposed to different people and ideas to Peter.

He writes of studying theology in Switzerland and discovering from his fellow seminarians that there are many perspectives: “The Italian students were always attuned to the revolutionary nuances and preferred Jesus in Che Geuvara garb. A Balinese student opened up the … possibilities of `the rocks crying out’, which resonated with an animistic world … The Africans never failed to observe the unmistakable struggle against imperialism in Jesus, a Jew, being executed by imperial Rome.”

It would have been an eye-opener for the boy from Blackburn. A minister who once lived in a Baptist community believes that Costello would have been exposed to rather a smug, narrow view of religion when growing up: “Blackburn Baptist is an enormous, wealthy community. Their theology is on the triumphalist side; because they are wealthy, they see that as a sign of God blessing them.”
If he needed any more to trigger a reaction against bourgeois complacency, he could not have picked a better place than St Kilda. He found himself passionately defending streetwalkers and abusing johns. He used his own car as an ambulance for locals having psychotic episodes, explained to his young children about the condoms and syringes littering the local park, and pacified residents when mentally ill parishioners ran naked down the street or urinated in letterboxes. His working life could not seem more removed from the power-suited world of his brother’s.

But some who know Tim Costello see him, too, as a very political character. A woman who worked in welfare at St Kilda at the same time he did says: “I’ve worked in social justice for years and in the main it’s made up of men like him, who are there because it provides them with a platform of sorts and fits in with their view of the world.

“It suits them to think there are forces of darkness and forces of good, and that the world is divided into people who care intensely about their fellow man and selfish bastards who don’t give a shit; it validates them because it puts them on the side of the angels.” Mind you, she admits, “He usually is on the side of the angels.”

And he does it with such style. Costello was recently up on the Gold Coast speaking to a gathering of 10,000 pentecostal and evangelical Christians. He’d caused a furore beforehand by telling the local paper that Hansonism was a form of paganism.

“There’s hysteria as I’m pulling up,” he says. “Churches have been pulling out; the organisers are upset and beg me not to say anything about Hansonism.

“Well, I preached a very evangelistic sermon. I said that in olden times, if we were Jews, we would take a goat here and we would ask the mayor to place all the sins of the Gold Coast on that goat, and then send the goat out into the wilderness. That was a scapegoat; that’s where the word comes from. And I said, `But we’re not Jews, and we’re not living in that period of time. We actually believe as Christians that Jesus is our scapegoat, that he bears our infidelities and lies and abuse of kids and drug abuse and crime; that he took them upon himself. And that, therefore, to scapegoat anyone, particularly the indigenous, Asians or single mothers, is actually to undermine the work of Christ.’

“And I saw these conservative people looking at each other, wondering, `Has he mentioned Hansonism or not?”‘

The preacher, the lawyer and the politician grin in mischievous solidarity.

Streets of Hope is published by Allen & Unwin at $19.95.

First published in The Age.