On Mondays, the mullet comes out to play
Father Chris Higgins is the administrator of Our Lady of the Southern Cross parish in Enmore. He is also a member of the South Sydney Rabbitohs.
I was born in Berala, Dad worked with the railways, Mum was a housewife. She was Catholic. Dad was baptised Anglican, but was happy to have us go through the Catholic school system. I have two younger brothers.
Dad used to take us along to Lidcombe Oval to watch the West Magpies, but I was a Rabbitohs fan and still am.
Mum passed away with cancer when I was 16. I dropped out of high school; it was all too much and got a job as a teller with the Commonwealth Bank for eight years and stopped going to church. Out of habit, I’d still say one Hail Mary and one Our Father, every night and that was the extent of my spiritual life at the time.
An English guy at the bank introduced me to the Sex Pistols, The Exploited, Stiff Little Fingers, and I became a punk rocker. I still have my studded army jacket from those days.
I was a punk for less than a year and then gravitated towards the fun and camaraderie of the skinheads.
I was a bovver boy for about three years before I got into the car culture and grew my mullet and wore flanno shirts, and “Westy” desert boots.
My first car was a 1974 XB Falcon V8. It was a great car. Loud. My next was an XA Falcon 351. I copped a few speeding tickets. I took it on three Bathurst trips over the years to watch the touring cars, and cheer for Dick Johnson.
I left the bank in 1988 and joined the Federal Public Service Department of Defence as a civilian clerk where I stayed until 1994 working in a big warehouse. There was no plan, I was just enjoying life and living in the moment, drinking too much VB and Tooheys.
I started partying with a guy named Eric from the warehouse depot. He suggested we take some time off and we set off on a working holiday. Once we got to Brisbane, we started hitchhiking.
We got to Proserpine and bought a Datsun 200B from a caryard where we’d found work and drove it to Weipa in the Gulf of Carpentaria. We picked up jobs putting up scaffolding for the building of the miners’ houses. We were young and fit and lived in a humpy with a sand floor. I bought a WWII German rifle from the trawlermen to protect us from crocs.
We hitched a ride on a yacht to Thursday Island and I got a job as a deckhand on the local barge. That was my Jack Sparrow days.
Later, we travelled back down to Cairns, where we bought a panel van that was on its last legs and drove it up to Mt Isa. We ended up at the famous Humpty Doo Hotel in Darwin. It was like the wild west. Eric and I found work doing steel-fixing on the new Parliament House and lived in Darwin for six months.
When we came back to Sydney, Eric moved to the Blue Mountains and became an associate of the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang. I had nothing to do with that; they are bad dudes. He did invite me to a couple of Comanchero parties… they were “colourful” nights.
In 1997, Eric and I decided to catch up for old times sake and so we headed off to visit my relatives in the Norther Rivers. We went out to a place in Surfers Paradise called Shooters Nightclub, where I had a vision of Eric as the Grim Reaper. Something said to me, “Chris, you’re looking into the eyes of the Devil.” A white light came down on me and I knew that God had intervened to save me from this situation.
Chris and I parted ways. I said, “mate, whatever you’re into, I can’t be a part of it.” The next Sunday morning I went to church for the first time in 12 years. I had to watch for when everyone stood and kneeled; I couldn’t remember what to do.
I continued to practice my faith at my home church, St Peter Chanel, where I felt the calling to become a priest. It was a moment of God’s Grace, that is difficult to put into words.
I started at the seminary at Homebush in 2001. It was challenging because I hadn’t had a routine of study for years, and I had to have a more respectable mullet. As a sign of my misspent youth, I played in the grand final of every seminary pool competition for the six years that I was there and won four times.
In 2009 I was ordained at St Mary’s Cathedral. I was posted at Rose Bay, Sutherland, then Liverpool, and Concorde West. The first church I had by myself was at Menai. After that I was at Watsons Bay—I’ll never have a more scenic presbytery—then to Enmore where I’ve been since September 2016.
Nowadays I just drive a regular 4-cylinder Kia. I’m not too fussed about it. I do like a good craft beer; I’m in the golden triangle of craft beer breweries.
I tuck my mullet in when I’m on duty at the parish, or if I’m at a Council of Priests meeting at the Cathedral. But Mondays is my day off…it’s when the mullet comes back out. I’ll never cut it off.