ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND

Last week, Stephen Kidner died in Box Hill Hospital after several months of declining health and several strokes. He was a close friend of mine for over 50 years.




I’ll never forget my first sight of Stephen Kidner. He looked like the man in the iron mask, his face and nose swathed in plaster and bandages. When I got to know him better, he explained that he had walked into a door in the dark, while living with his parents at St. Hilda’s Training College, which was then in Albert Street [now the headquarters of the Victorian Police Association ]

We began our friendship at University in 1955, meeting occasionally at gatherings of the Evangelical Union . My strong recollection of Stephen in those years is of a sensitive, friendly young man who had a gift for fervent intercession and thanksgiving in our early morning prayer meetings upstairs in the Union building.

Stephen left University before me and went off to teach at Caulfield Grammar. I completed my training and then applied for a position at Carey Baptist Grammar School. As I launched out into my first real job, I approached my first staff meeting with a fair degree of nervousness and apprehension. Great was my delight when I encountered Stephen, also beginning a new appointment. Instinctively we teamed up, with adjoining lockers, with similar allotments as Year 8 Form Masters, and with a shared Christian commitment.

In later years we often recalled our relief at the end of Term One when we completed our first set of reports with their red ink line graph joining all the subject ratings, and which had to be signed by S.L.Hickman, a man of high expectations. As we sealed those last envelopes at the same time at the same desk in the Staff Room we experienced an enormous surge of relief that we had made it.

Stephen was not a very confident driver and in that first term vacation he invited me to help prepare him for his licence test by sitting with him while he drove around the Richmond part of the Boulevard for hours on end. We both persevered and Stephen got his licence.

Many were the experiences we shared at Carey over those next twelve years;
innumerable lunchtime chats, sharing our concerns about difficult students, his experiences of living in east Africa, the task of discipleship,
shared encounters with the duplicating machine, called the Fordigraph, particularly the year we did a 16 page Year 9 Geography exam and then, in the process of duplicating the machine did a ball bearing,
afternoons and Saturdays at Bullen,
frantic Fridays signing Year 8 report books,
and more

When I married Margaret at the end of 1965, it was Stephen and Dawn who organized a party to celebrate with close colleagues. It was also Stephen who wrote a poem for the occasion, for Stephen had both a great love of language and also a great gift for writing and expressing ideas in felicitous language.

In 1971 I moved to a new workplace in the inner city [Church of All Nations, Carlton] and our contact was much reduced although we did keep in touch from time to time by telephone and occasional letters.

Stephen retired about 1991 at a time when I had begun working in the Uniting Church in a pastoral role with clergy and in the last sixteen years we have renewed closer links, meeting from time to time for a meal and speaking frequently and at length on the phone.

We have shared deeply our journeys of faith. Stephen has graciously listened to my rather more radical theology and we have been able to see that our different understandings have been an enriching element in our friendship. We grew closer because we took the risk of disagreeing I will always be grateful for those many long conversations which ranged over the whole spectrum of human experience, often returning to our shared love of language and literature , our desire for social justice, our interest in African literature and our lifelong journeys of relating our theology to our experience.


I honour Stephen as a good man and as a loyal and generous friend. I will miss him very much indeed.
Mac Nicoll
January, 2008

There follows a poem written by Stephen Kidner and published in STUDIO about six years ago. It speaks powerfully of Stephen’s passion .



MAMUSHA

Child of the dust, Mamusha,
Hunger has tucked your skin
Tightly about your bones,
Since your mother's milk has failed
In the long journey south.

They wrap you gently in a crib of rags
And lay you in the thorn tree's jagged shade.
The filtered sun, lighting the swirling dust,
Haloes your head in gold.

You stir.
Your wrinkled mouth
Twitches and gapes,
Sucking and feeding on the empty air.

You raise one arm,
Twin sticks encased in skin,
And, with a vision stronger than your strength,
You beckon to the heedless of the world.

Silence those booming voices in the shopping malls,
Promoting more bargains to those who are well fed.
Silence the vapid chatter on the phones.
Silence the gossip in the coffee shops.
Silence the roaring voices in the pubs.
Silence the torrent of the evening news,
Where stranded whales stir greater pity
Than a starving child.
Loosen our tightly huddled fellowship:
Alert our hearing to a distant cry.
What is that voice
That calls across the world?
Silence and listen!
Mamusha speaks.

Smallest ambassador for the world's oppressed,
You speak for multitudes you never knew,
From hunger-stunted children of Brazil,
To those who crawl among Manila's rubbish heaps,
Searching on cut and grimy feet across the stench,
While in ten thousand villages and shanty towns,
Above a child's open grave,
You cry in a resounding whisper,
This is the centre of the world!



Stephen Kidner