Worldview
21
bobbrinsmead.com
About
Bob....
Copyright ©
2008 Robert D. Brinsmead
Robert Daniel Brinsmead (1933 - ) - The Story So
Far….
Biographical
Robert Daniel Brinsmead - author, horticulturist,
and local government politician - was born in the Hawthorn hospital on August 9,
1933 in Victoria, Australia. He was the youngest child in a family of six boys
and two surviving girls (one died in infancy). Bob always said that his
childhood in this large boisterous family was more fun than a barrel of
monkeys.
His parents were Cedric John and Laura Elsie Brinsmead. Both
came from families that had emigrated from England or Scotland in the nineteenth
century, although Laura’s ancestors on her father’s side were French Huguenots
who had escaped to Scotland. She consequently inherited the French maiden name
of Goulette.
Bob was born during the Great Depression. The family has
just been forced to leave their wheat and sheep property in the Wimmera district
of Victoria by the collapse of the world markets. They retreated to Dandenong
where they set up a modern little dairy farm supplying milk and home-made cakes
directly to customers in the Dandenong community. This is where Robert spent the
first seven years of his life. Riding to town on the horse and cart to deliver
milk to Dandenong with his older brothers was more exciting than going to a
circus.
Bob started school a year earlier than most children, and completed
his first two years at the public primary school in West Dandenong. He
gratefully remembers that his teacher, Miss Tipton, taught him so well that he
was set up to be a good reader and writer for the rest of his life.
When
Bob was eight years old, the family moved into the Melbourne suburb of Gardiner
for two years. This enabled two of his older brothers, Laurence and Noel, to
graduate from the renowned Burnley Horticultural College. (By this time the four
eldest children had already left home to begin careers in the teaching or
nursing professions). Now that two members of the family were trained
horticulturists, the family acquired the Devon Bulbery Tulip Farm located
at The Patch in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges. Besides cultivating flowers, the
family were potato growers, an industry so valuable to the nation during the war
years that Laurence was not called up into the armed forces like his older
brother Reg. During these years at The Patch, Bob completed his primary school
education at the nearby Kalista public school and also his first year at the
Upway High School. Mr. Bill Woodfull, the ex-captain of the Australian cricket
team, was his headmaster.
At the end of World War II, Cedric Brinsmead
heard voices saying, “Go north, young man.” Not that he was still a young man,
but with four energetic sons still at home, the family had outgrown its small
Victorian farm. This triggered a great family trek to the Tweed in northern New
South Wales. Here Cedric was able to secure a much larger parcel of land on a
rugged mountainside at Numinbah, right beneath the Queensland border. The
Numinbah property was really a neglected shambles of a farm, covered with tree
re-growth, Lantana and Crofton Weed. It appeared to have nothing going for it
except for its perceived potential to grow lots of bananas. Without the benefit
of any modern machinery, not even a tractor, and armed only with axes, brush
hooks, and of box of matches, the family cleared and transformed their abandoned
old farm into the largest banana plantation in the region.
It was during
these Numinbah years that Bob completed his education at Murwillumbah High
School - almost in-between making banana boxes and packing bananas for market,
often late into the night. He excelled in literary subjects despite the
intrusions of farm life, and in his final year secured First Class Honours in
History. Also in his final year (1949), he won the mile race and became a member
of the High School’s cricket eleven.
Soon the family had once again
outgrown the farm. In 1951 two of the brothers - Laurence and Bob - migrated to
far away North Queensland where they purchased a sugar cane farm near Innisfail.
In those days, there was no banana industry in the tropical north, and the towns
of the region had to import their bananas from northern New South Wales. The
Brinsmead brothers started growing bananas as a side-interest. It proved to be
so successful that when the news spread back to the Tweed, many Tweed banana
growers began an exodus to North Queensland where most of Australia’s bananas
are now grown.
In 1955, still retaining a stake in the land, Bob took up the
study of theology at the Avondale College near Newcastle, New South Wales. Here
he became attracted to Valorie Mann, a student teacher. The attraction proved to
be mutual, resulting in their marriage on December 29, 1958. Four children -
Judith, Paul, Sally and Daniel - were born to them over a twelve year birthing
cycle from 1960 to 1972. Bob and Val also adopted two more children (Matthew and
Wanda) and cared for a number of other young people in their home.
At the
time of his marriage to Valorie, Bob had already shown an inclination to become
a free lance writer in theology, remaining independent of any religious
institution. He began to travel widely as a guest speaker and writer. He
authored several books and at least a thousand articles and papers for various
publishing houses, many of which were translated into Spanish, French, Dutch,
German and other languages. He became editor of Verdict, a journal of theology
that had a wide circle of readers all over the world.
After spending
several years in North America with a very young family, Bob and Valorie
returned to the Tweed, taking up a property at Duranbah. This seemed to be an
ideal place for the family to settle down for the sake of the children’s
education. Judith, Paul, Sally and Daniel all passed through Robert’s old High
School at Murwillumbah, and went on to establish successful careers of their own
in law, in business administration, in food and hospitality, and in art.
The
farm that they purchased in Duranbah hosted the Tropical Fruit Research Station
for the New South Wales government before it closed down in 1967. The farm’s
track record in tropical fruit research prompted Bob to begin his own tropical
fruit research project that would go way beyond anything the government had
attempted. Soon the farm was growing more than five hundred species of rare
fruits from South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Pacific Islands and
not forgetting the Australian bush foods. The research included looking at new
ways to prepare or process rare fruit, new markets and new methods of
propagating exotic fruit under Australian conditions.
After spending
about ten years in this horticultural development, the Brinsmeads opened the
farm as a tourist attraction in 1983. It soon became - and still remains – the
Number 1 tourist attraction in the Tweed region. It is now well-known nationally
and internationally as Tropical Fruit World.
Bob generally gets an itch
for making some radical change about every ten years. Instead of changing his
marriage partner as some restless spirits do, Bob would re-invent himself with
new ideas and activities. True to form, in 1991 Robert handed over the
management of Tropical Fruit World to his eldest daughter Judith who was already
a successful business executive in a large construction company. Bob, now 58,
needed a break in order to get on top of a threatening health condition. Not
content to sit down and watch life passing by, however, Robert launched himself
into a career in local politics. He had been frustrated to see the Tweed
languish as an economic backwater when it was just as endowed with natural
assets and wealth creating advantages as its neighbouring Gold Coast. He was
elected to the Tweed Shire Council in 1991 on a platform of fostering change
through economic development. During his first eight years in local politics,
the Council continued to be ruled by a faction that resisted change, fearing
that economic development would harm the Tweed environment.
In 1999, a
group of like-minded Councillors that included Bob secured a Council majority,
and they immediately acted to open the Tweed for business. Believing that no
area can acquire quality amenities and infrastructure apart from getting
business on board, Robert helped to attract some of the most creative developers
in Australia to invest in quality projects along the Tweed Coast. This accord
between an investment-friendly Council and a new breed of movers and shakers in
the development industry gave birth to the giant Casuarina and Salt projects and
other exciting projects that together created “the new Tweed Coast.” Despite the
ill-founded fears to the contrary, it is now becoming clearer every day that
these quality projects have enhanced rather than harmed the environment. Bob is
immensely proud of playing a significant role in the development of “the new
Tweed Coast.”
The old guard who had kept the Tweed in the dark ages were
not happy. They fostered resentment against achievement and a politics of envy.
They played on people’s inherent fear of change, fear of developers corrupting
the Council and fear of short-changing the community. Bob says that falsehood
will always travel seven times around the world before the truth can get its
boots on. It seems that before the truth of what the new Council had
accomplished could get its boots on, the Council was sacked by an intervening
government pandering to voices that Bob jokingly calls the BANANA party (Build
Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody).
”In politics,” says Bob
philosophically, “your side can’t always expect to win anymore than your
sporting team can always be expected to win. But we managed to switch on a light
that can never be put out.” True to his worldview, Bob remains an incurable
optimist. “The story of the human race”, he says, “is the story of the human’s
spirit’s quest for constant improvement. In this journey of the human race,
setbacks are only temporary because the trajectory is set in the direction of an
ever improving human condition.”
A Summary of Robert’s
Achievements
Bob would always say that partnering wife Valorie to
raise a loving and happy family transcends every other achievement. If the
children are gold, then the grandchildren, all eleven of them so far, are Bob’s
diamonds.
Bob’s three main career achievements are
(1) Robert D.
Brinsmead’s theological interest has inspired most of his books and papers. Bob
will tell you that being a theologian doesn’t mean that one can pretend to have
an extensive knowledge of God. After a lifetime of thinking in this field, he
readily admits, “All that I know about God could be written on a postage stamp
with a large piece of chalk.” He concurs with Alexander Pope’s poetic line,
“Cease from God to scan / the proper study of mankind is man.” So Bob says that
good theology is thinking about the mystery of human consciousness, the mystery
of love, the nature of the human spirit, the ground of being, the quest for
meaning, and the great story of the human exodus to freedom, to an ever
improving human condition and a human potential that in the words of Freeman
Dyson “is infinite in all directions.” His scholarly interest has covered
history, apocalyptic, myth, and literary criticism in the age of science. He
describes his thought as being spiritual rather than religious. Unlike some
ideologues who start out with a paradigm (system of thought or worldview) and
then spend the rest of their lives defending it like a patch of turf, Bob’s
ideas have always been evolving and developing. He is more like a man on a
journey who doesn’t have to defend any patch of turf.
(2) As a
horticulturist, Robert has acquired a wealth of hands on experience in rare
fruits and their potential either in the market place or the home garden. The
tourist attraction he founded at Duranbah is a scenic jewel that continues to
attract thousands of national and international visitors to the region every
year. Bob jokes that the man who calls a spade a spade deserves to use one.
Whilst Bob is a man who has spent much of his life in the world of ideas, he has
always kept his feet on the ground and his hands in the soil.
(3)
As a local politician, Bob has thought through the reasons why he should support
the economic development of his beloved Tweed. He doesn’t agree with the
pessimists whose mantra is about economic activity and human technology being
bad for the environment. “Imagine discarding our advanced transport and
communications networks and returning to the horse and buggy culture,” he
laughs. “It would require enough horses to bury our cities in horse dung and
enough horse pasture to replace most of our forests. Then you would have a real
environmental problem. They actually had this problem in New York and other big
cities before the internal combustion engine was invented to replace horses.”
Bob will point out that the most prosperous countries of the world have the
purest air, the cleanest water and the best conditions for cultural development,
whilst the poorest societies suffer from the most polluted environments. He
thinks that ignorance, poverty and lack of development are the greatest evils
that stalk the planet.
Bob has always been controversial without being
quarrelsome, spiritual rather than religious, an optimist instead of a
pessimist. He likes to live as he plays tennis, and that is to win, even when
the odds are stacked against him. “Everyone who pursues a dream is a winner in
the end, no matter what.”
At the Tweed Business Excellence Awards on June
30, 2006, Bob Brinsmead was honored by being inducted into the region’s Hall of
Fame for Business Excellence.
