When Brian Heath spoke to anybody – parishioner, counselling client, a couple wishing to get married, a friend – he was right there with you, totally engaged. When you spoke to him, you felt that you were the most important person in the world to Brian. And you were. He was fully present, in the moment. This gift helped him connect with, and serve, an enormous swathe of people of different types and backgrounds.
Storyteller, passionate preacher and ‘ideas man’, Brian created whole new perspectives upon the Gospel and how to weave it into everyday life, with fun, with feeling and with authenticity.
In private life he was fully engaged with the visual arts, being a friend of many painters; the South Australian Dieter Engler, and WA artist Shirley Winstanley, for example. Brian was very keen on photography and film and he was a friend of the late, great Australian filmmaker Paul Cox. He also loved working with his hands – he built various shacks at Bush Harmony, the adventure camp he established near Boddington – and friends, Christians and clients alike enjoyed the rustic joys. A sheet of rusting corrugated iron was the basis for multiple photographic studies, with stunning effects. He was a cool guy.
Born in 1930 and raised in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, Brian could not have envisaged the extraordinary journey his life would take. It took him both across the seas to train in theology in London, at New College, to ministry with the Congregational Church in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and later to a bounteous life in Australia with the Uniting Church. He journeyed from being an enthusiastic young man to becoming an equally enthusiastic, wise, funny and passionate elder. He journeyed together with an extraordinary number of people, touching their lives and supporting them as people, in both their personal and spiritual lives – always with a smile, often with a joke or a story.
