“FREEDOM” is what Fr John Fowles loves most about flying a plane.
And he says “freedom” is what he likes most about riding a motorbike, too.
He flies or rides whenever he gets a chance.
These days, ministering in the country parish of Murgon, he spends more time on his motorbike than he does in a cockpit.
But it was flying that played a part when he first felt the nudge towards priesthood.
He went on to earn a reputation as a “flying priest” a few years back when he flew a light plane around Australia raising money for orphan children in East Timor and to help a group of young East Timorese Catholics attend World Youth Day in Sydney in 2008.
Way before then, it was a brief visit to the highlands of Papua New Guinea that sparked his interest in becoming a pilot.
That was when he was a young man getting a taste of life as a lay missionary.
But the road to the missionary field and then to priesthood began way back in the days growing up in a large Catholic family on farms in country Victoria.
Born in Gippsland “at a little place called Warragul, in the La Trobe Valley – a dairy farming region”, Fr John spent most of his younger years in Swan Hill, “a beautiful little town to grow up in”.
“… It was just a perfect time of life,” he said.
“For Australia, it was a beautiful time, a peaceful time, a very blessed time to be growing up.
“And it was just a perfect town, so we had a great life.
“Then we moved back to the farm …
“(Later) … there was a bit of a depression – the dairy industry had collapsed, and so we were a family of seven children, and I was the second-eldest so my older brother and myself used to work with my father every day, milking cows and working on the farm, just for survival.”
After leaving school early, Fr John landed a job with the Bendigo Trading Co-operative, in central Victoria.
He was a good prospect with the versatility he’d developed on the farm, “because I was used to hard work and I was capable of getting things done, and I also had a truck licence and all that type of thing”.
He then moved into marketing and buying with the co-op.
“I spent nearly five years in the markets, buying wholesale, buying out of Footscray market … and supplying the Bendigo Trading Co-operative,” he said.
“I’d get up at 1.30am, I’d drive a truck down to Melbourne, I’d spend about … – in today’s figures, it’d be at least $10,000, maybe $15,000, cash before breakfast.”
He remembers there was a lot of crime around the markets – “a lot of Mafia activity in those times … with a lot of money changing hands”.
“I was only a kid, really. I started there at 19 and I was there until I was 24,” he said.
“I worked in one of the roughest places – probably other than on a fishing boat out at sea, it’s probably one of the roughest, toughest environments you could expect to work in.
“And, yet, I got on well with a lot of the men, and learnt to understand them.
“I dealt with a lot of farming people, who I knew – because of my own farming experience – had hard lives.
“And sometimes the market collapsed and (the farmers would be) sleeping on the back of their trucks for one or two nights just trying to sell their produce.
“They’d probably been working a week to get it all picked and packed and ready for market.
“They’d bring it down there and then they couldn’t sell it, and they’d be sleeping during the day and working in the night, trying to sell their produce, and getting ripped off by the agencies.
“So I used to always offer them a fair price for their produce.
“… When the price was down I’d try to give them a just price because that was the whole idea of the co-operative – bringing justice into this marketing world.”
In the middle of those tough times, Fr John made a trip that would inevitably change the path of his life.
“I visited New Guinea when I was 21, and I was helping a priest up there,” he said.
“I was staying on a mission where he did all the piloting for Melbourne Overseas Missions at a place called Kanabea.
“(For me) it was a holiday visit there, and I spent less than a month, but in that time I got a real taste of the joy of missionary endeavour.
“I could see the Church’s grassroots works happening.
“They’d build a church, they’d build a school, the people were poor, they’d come to school once a week, they’d stay there in a boarding room.
“But they’d come barefoot with nothing other than a pair of shorts and shirt.
“And life was so simple and yet it was peaceful, and I think that’s where the seed of my vocation really took root.
“I thought to myself, ‘I want to do something for God in this way’.
“I wanted to be a missionary.
“I thought I was being called to be a pilot (too) because I have the practical skills in my farming background to do things like that.
“I could drive anything from the time I was a kid.
“We had motorbikes, we had four-wheel-drives, we had trucks, we had tractors, we had everything …, and so I knew how to operate anything.
“It didn’t faze me at all to jump in a plane and start doing things.
“So I came back (to Victoria) and did my pilot’s licence while continuing to work in the co-op, got my pilot’s licence and I applied with Melbourne Overseas Missions.
“I contacted them only to find out that their plane had had a crash and they were no longer operating their plane.
“And it was (a trend) right across the missions at that time in the early ’80s.
“Commercial aviation was taking over from private mission aviation like we had, so I was really despondent about that.”
It was a double-blow for young John.
“I used to play senior Aussie Rules football in Bendigo, and I had a bad knee injury,” Fr John said.
“That’s why I went to New Guinea, actually … because I had the knee injury and I couldn’t play footy so I decided to take a holiday.
“I was a bit depressed, and I had come back with this new endeavour to undertake flying training at the end of that trip.
“That was my intention, to work as a missionary pilot.
“Once they’d crashed the plane, … I was so sad at the fact that I couldn’t do this and that that door had closed in my face.”
His response was to hire a plane and persuade someone else to join him flying “a little 172 Cessna” around Australia.
“And the two of us flew around Australia, and it was the same old story,” he said.
“Wherever I went I found that there was an emptiness … material wealth, the ‘good life’ …, but with spirituality there was a vacancy in the sense where it comes to God in people’s lives.
“And I’d experienced that in the markets.
“That’s why I always wanted to work in the missions because I used to work with the ‘God-less’ all of the time – money, greed, avarice and crime was a daily occurrence, and I felt that I loved my job but it was affecting me that there was so much God-lessness, and I couldn’t do much about it.
“… I thought missionary work was my path … but then not really.
“I’d talked to a couple of priests (and) one of them told me that I had a vocation to the priesthood and directed me to a seminary …
“… It had been suggested over the years by others, too, ‘Johnny, you’ve got a vocation … When are you going to become a priest?’
“I couldn’t see that in myself at all; I was a bit of a lout.
“… So initially, any time that anyone said ‘priesthood’ to me, I thought, ‘I couldn’t be a priest …’, ‘I couldn’t sit still long enough to do the studies …’ I wasn’t much good at school … I was a failure there, how could I get through seminary life?
“But wherever I went God kept knocking on the door. I couldn’t get away from it, quite honestly.
“… I didn’t think I was running away; I couldn’t see me being a priest. Full stop.”
Fr John eventually came to priesthood through a religious congregation that prized practical, manual work as well as ministry.
“When we weren’t studying and doing our prayer and retreats and whatever, we were working on buildings and so that gave us practical skills,” he said.
That proved vital when he moved into diocesan ministry in Wagga Wagga diocese in NSW because his first appointment as parish priest was to a new parish where there was a lot of building to be done.
“I was fortunate to be appointed the parish priest of this new parish at Thurgoona (near Albury),” Fr John said.
“The year I was ordained I went straight into the parish in 1996; I’d only been a priest for a few months.
“I was appointed parish priest of a block of Australian bush, not even one building on it, not even a fence.
“It never fazed me … It was just a challenge.
“… We had no money; we had been given a block of land; we ended up paying for that too; and we’ve built a beautiful church complex there today – Immaculate Heart of Mary, Thurgoona, which is rammed-earth, and it’s unique, it’s contemporary …”
Now a thriving parish, Immaculate Heart of Mary serves one of the fastest-growing regional housing developments in NSW.
While he was there, Fr John and his parish were in the media spotlight firstly for a fundraising campaign to raise money to help build the church, and then for another national campaign to raise funds to support orphan children in East Timor and to allow a group of young East Timorese Catholics attend the 2008 World Youth Day in Sydney.
In the first fundraiser – Highway to Heaven – the parish raffled two prime movers to bring in $500,000 towards building its church, and the second – Fly Away to Heaven – involved Fr John leading a flyathon of 12 planes around Australia to help the East Timorese.
More recently Fr John’s adventures as a priest have led him to Brisbane archdiocese where he’s returned to country ministry as administrator in Murgon parish.
That takes him to little towns like Goomeri, Proston, Wondai and Cherbourg, as well as Gayndah, outside the parish.
While that hasn’t involved flying – yet – he’s been getting around on his motorbike.
“I go everywhere on the bike … well, nearly … when the weather’s right,” he said.
“Basically I use the bike because it’s good on the rough roads, very rough roads … (and) you can dodge all the potholes – they’re pretty bad in a lot of the places.
“People like to see me turning up in my bike.
“And I like it because I’m a farm kid; I grew up on a motorbike, rounding up the cows and the stock, and all sorts of things. That was normal.
“So, you see, God has a sense of humour; he takes you right back to where you started,” he laughs at that thought.
And what about being a priest?
“The most beautiful thing about being a priest is that you’re helping people on the road to heaven,” Fr John said.