Ian Kiernan - Life changes after 40

THE phone rings. It's a corporate-type wanting to commit to ongoing sponsorship, while in the reception area sits a bloke waiting to talk about a new idea involving community recycling. 

Tomorrow there's a meeting with a state premier about restoring a degraded estuary; then there are the plans for a workshop in the Ukraine in Europe's north-east, about improving that country's environment.

At the Sydney office of Clean Up Australia, Ian Bruce Kiernan suddenly sweeps by, as if in full sail surfing down the face of one of the giant waves the keen sailor has encountered in the great oceans of the world.

"Riding the crest of the wave of Clean Up Australia is a bit like some of the waters in which I've sailed" says the former Australian of the Year and founder of a community environment movement that has been embraced around the globe.

At 46, Kiernan sailed around the world on a journey that was to not only change his life, but ultimately that of millions on the planet. His vision for the Clean Up movement, where individuals take responsibility for their local environment by collecting rubbish, has made him, in the words of broadcaster and writer Phillip Adams, "the greatest garbo since Greta". 

Of course he modestly claims Clean Up is owned by the participating communities across the world, and he was just the one that came up with the concept. But whether he likes it or not, the rugged-looking, Blue Cattle dog-loving, charismatic Australian has come to embody a particular no-bullshit brand of environmentalism. And with it, a certain national character - part larrikin part dreamer; a successful businessman who had a few croppers; a determined, dry-witted individualist with a sense of social justice; a man with the common touch and a healthy disrespect for convention.

Keirnan was no stereotypical greenie. As a young property developer largely responsible for revitalising inner-Sydney in the late 1960's and '70's, he was worth $20 million by the time he was 28. Indeed, the trained builder admits he threw old sheets of corrugated iron from industrial work-sites into Sydney Harbour.

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"An old builder had told me that if you threw roofing into salt water it would corrode away to nothing in a few weeks, and I was so uncaring about these things that I chose to believe him," he wrote in his autobiography, Coming Clean. Likewise, "when I was at sea I regarded it as my God-given right to throw my plastic bag of rubbish over the stern every four days."

If the revelation shocks or disgusts people nowadays, Kiernan believes this is a good thing - for it shows how much attitudes have changed. 

Kiernan, born in 1940, has always had an independent spirit. After finishing his education at the landlocked The Armidale School in northern NSW he worked initially for retailer GJ Coles, and then for his father's import/export business. But he had a sparkle for a different type of deal, and became fascinated with the construction industry that was beginning to reshape Sydney. He secured a cadetship with Concrete Industries Monier, and with them he gained experience in construction management, especially on the building of the former State Office Block in Macquarie St, Sydney, at the time a new landmark for the city. He then learnt the ropes of the property game from famed Sydney real estate agent Bill Bridges, who was making easy money buying up dilapidated terrace houses in east Sydney, giving them little more than a lick of paint, and selling them quickly for a handsome profit. 

But Kiernan wanted to be his own man, and a couple of years later sold his flat in Kings Cross and bought an old mansion in the nearby suburb of Darlinghurst, for $6,000. Like many such dwellings at the time, the building had 20-odd tenants, many subletting from a 'head tenant' who had quite a racket going. He started doing the place up, and eventually got rid of the head tenant, in the meantime borrowing against it to buy a bungalow in harbourside Mosman for $20,000 for himself and his first wife, Judy. A week after the birth of his eldest daughter Sally in 1968, he borrowed some money from his father and father-in-law and bought four terrace houses and a vacant factory in Riley Street, East Sydney, for $40,000. His restoration of the houses and conversion of the factory into office space reflected a new spirit of the inner-city.

His early deals were an astounding success, and he actively pursued more opportunities, on his own and in joint ventures. Within a few years his company IBK Constructions had expanded considerably, and there was hardly a street in Sydney's inner east that did not have at least one house or former factory that had been bought and renovated by his company. Not that he restricted himself to the land, and he managed to sail once a week on the harbour. In 1970 he was invited to crew on the 73-foot yacht Ondine in the Southern Cross Cup, one of Australia's great sailing regattas. The last leg of the regatta was Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and Ondine came second. Kiernan loved the world of competitive sailing, and his successes on the water started to reflect his property developments on land.

Then the clouds darkened. The collapse of the Sydney property market in the mid-1970's caused largely by escalating interest rates, combined with legal disputes against the Builders Labourers Federation, eventually saw Kiernan's property empire - which by this time included co-ownership of 390 terrace houses - go bust.

He left to lick his wounds, spending the next few years mainly at sea.

"It all went in one fell swoop," he recalls with a chuckle. "So I went away sailing for 12 months and came back with very much changed values. A little while later I did a single-handed trans-Tasman race from New Plymouth (in New Zealand) to Mooloolaba (on Queensland's Sunshine Coast) and a hurricane re-developed in the Coral Sea and came down to the Tasman. Because of that hurricane I was able to win the race - and that win became a major factor in how I came to do the Round the World race."

He had no idea then how much that next adventure would forever change the direction of his life.

Kiernan had been invited by radio magnate Rod Muir, owner of city's then most popular radio station, Triple M, to sail Muir's boat Spirit of Sydney in the second BOC Round the World Yacht Race. It was 1982, five years after Kiernan's property business was placed in liquidation. While in the Sagasso Sea north of Brazil, a part of the Atlantic Ocean made famous in sea mythology, Kiernan was struck by the amount of floating man-made garbage and resolved to do something about it.

"I can't overstate the depth of my disgust when I sailed into this pristine place of smoky blue water, dotted by semi-submerged golden weed so vital to the marine food chain, this sea of magic and myth...and found it littered with rubbish."

His mind went back to Hawaii, seven years before, when a group of locals organised to clean up the port of Ala Wai, at Waikiki. Kiernan and others from the seafaring community based there turned up with buckets and helped, and while rain the next day filled the canal with more mess just as fast, he felt satisfaction in doing something positive. He also thought about how much garbage he no longer hurled into the sea since an American sailor Mark Schrader first suggested storing it on board instead, as part of a promotion by the US Center for Marine Conservation during the first BOC round the World race.

Kiernan said the revelation helped put into perspective a number of issues he had been thinking about, and he returned home with changed values. He approached the BOC race publicist Kim McKay about the idea for a cleanup of Sydney harbour; certainly, Kiernan's profile from the race - including a staged re-enactment on Spirit for a Toohey's beer TV commercial - would have helped. But a letter to the then NSW Minister for Ports Laurie Brereton suggesting a harbour clean up was met with condescension and an attempt at political mileage that convinced Kiernan the event should always be above politics.

Despite the setback, Kiernan found support from the local council of his harbourside suburb of Mosman. Together he and McKay garnered the support of many of their mates, including Alan Morris and John Henderson from advertising agency Mojo; fellow ad-man John Singleton, and Rod Jones from Mosman Council.

"We originally were just going to do the beaches of Mosman and then we said 'bugger it, let's do the whole lot', and then we discovered there were 200-km of foreshore around Sydney harbour and we realised what a big thing we had taken on," he recalls.

The advertising gurus made sure the event got publicity all over Sydney, but it still needed money. Singleton secured the sponsorship of McDonalds then CEO Peter Ritchie, who stumped up $25,000.

That first Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day, on January 8, 1989, was bigger than Kiernan had imagined. Instead of a few thousand Sydneysiders collecting a predicted 2,000 tonnes of rubbish, more than 40,000 of the city's residents removed more than 50,000 tonnes of rubbish. The event almost became a victim of its own success, with several logistical close shaves.

A big timber barge filled with the event's official rubbish bags started to sink under the Harbour Bridge, and was towed to safety just in time to stop the rubbish bags - emblazoned with the official sponsor's names - from floating over to the Opera House and into PR disaster. 

Elsewhere, a build-up of collected rubbish in the suburbs of Drummoyne and Haberfield was only removed when Kiernan and his builders did a garbo run through the night, throwing the bags into the back of truck of a bloke from Silverwater, who had rung the operations room offering to help.

"People had collected so much rubbish from all over the harbour, and there we were running around all over the place as the tide was coming in and sometimes they hadn't put the bags well above the high tide mark. We were able to fix them in the end, but if any of these things had gone bad we would have got a negative story rather than a positive story," he says.

"The amazing success of that first clean up really made me realise that it was all about convincing the public that one person can make a difference."

The 'Clean Up' phenomenon was instantly contagious, and within two days officials from Hobart in the south, to Darwin in the north, rang up seeking advice.

"Without really trying we had gone full-time into the cleanup consultancy business, and I was only too happy to give people the formula. But it was obvious the management of the committee needed restructuring, particularly to go national."

Several big companies led by Westpac kicked in substantial sponsorship, and by the first national Clean Up Australia Day on January 1990, 300,000 thousand Australians in 211 cities and towns around Australia had turned the event into an important and influential community-based environmental group. Donned with gloves and garbage bags, collectors - especially kids - willingly followed the call of Kiernan, who was portrayed as Captain Yukky Poo, the Pied-Piper of rubbish.

The following year Kiernan accepted the Australia Day Event of the Year award for the concept, and was invited by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) director-general Dr Mostafa Tolba to work out how to apply the principles of Clean Up Australia to the international stage - in Kiernan's words, "more or less like franchising it, without being paid".

After securing international sponsorship in the depths of recession, the first Clean Up the World (CUW) was held in September 1993, directly involving as many people as almost a quarter of the population, as was the case of Korea. For his inspiration, Kiernan was awarded UNEP's top environmental prize, the Global 500 Laurete, in Beijing on World Environment Day, June 5 1993. By September that year, 30 million people in 80 countries were on board, from the Congo and Senegal to China.

The following January, Keirnan was announced as the 1994 Australian of the Year - and at the official ceremony in Darling Harbour, made the news as much for his headlock of a young assailant who had let off a starting pistol and rushed at the guest of honour, Prince Charles.

Fittingly for something that started so organically, Clean Up has evolved from not just an annual clean up held on the first Sunday in March, to something that began agitating about how waste could be minimised in the first place. Kiernan established an Environment Advisory Committee, to keep Clean Up briefed on new environmental initiatives, and developed alliances with waste technology companies to fix problems. The first, was a new waste management system for Taronga Park Zoo, which saw excrement recycled for fertiliser and filthy water treated and used on gardens and for cleaning out cages, instead of running into the adjacent Sydney Harbour.

There was the documentary made with the ABC, Global Heroes, which saluted ordinary people solving environmental problems in six countries, such as a Catholic priest in the Philippines who was trying to turn a massive rubbish heap of a billion cubic metres into a recycling plant, and a woman from the Solomon Islands who was establishing alternative employment schemes for villages that had been dependent on logging.

More recently, there's been the realignment and restoration of Moonee Ponds Creek with the Port Melbourne Corporation.

But if Clean Up has evolved, so too has Ian Kiernan, who admits he was quite naive about environmental issues when the project started.

"My understanding and knowledge of the environment and environmental matters has been through a very steep learning curve. One of the things that became blindingly obvious is that a clean environment is the basis of all things. In a poor district in India or Africa, for example, they are not cleaning up for the reasons of tourism like in the West, they may be having a clean up to improve the quality of their water supply so they can reduce the incidence of cholera or other diseases."

He notes it is often women's' groups that come forward with a project because they are the ones that bear the children, nurse them when they are sick, and are often the providers for the family, so they will do anything to try and offer their offspring a better life span. 

"They don't often really want to have 12 or 14 children, but they are forced to in the hope that some of them may survive and look after them in their dotage. So the environment is the basis of all things, if you've got environmental problems, it's going to deliver to you not only environmental problems, its going to deliver to you health problems, social problems, financial problems, even security problems."

It may be 13 years since the first Clean Up, but Kiernan shows no sign of restlessness or boredom by his creation.

"The thing about it is that it's apolitical, its not-for profit, its only got one agenda and that is clean up fix up, so its very wholesome. We're also non-confrontational - and the fact is that the clean up came from the people and belongs to the people, we simply manage it. When I go and see the work that communities are doing to fix up there bit of the world, there's no possibility that my enthusiasm is going to dim."

Not that Kiernan shies away from criticising a government if it needs it.

"That's why we're not on a pipeline of money from government," he says. 

Instead, it is usually more beneficial to get all stakeholders and government representatives together to work as a team, such as a recent project at Lake Macquarie near Newcastle which attracted $40 million in funding. Kiernan may claim he is just a figurehead, but his extensive list of personal contacts undoubtedly helps.

Clean Up may have been founded by Ian when in his forties, but he says the decision to pursue a dream had more to do with his personality than his age.

"I once said to my (second) wife Judy, 'all these friends of mine are having mid-life crises, but I've never had one.' And she looked at me and said, "you've been having one all your life'." 

She is probably right. Ever since he first owned a boat - while a boarder at The Armidale School in northern NSW, ironically 300 kilometres inland - Kiernan has escaped to the oceans to find the level of his life. For him, 'seachange' has a much deeper meaning than moving from the city rat-race to a simpler existence by the coast. The challenges it threw to him on the water, helped him rise to meet challenges on land. It was where he relaxed away from his building empire when things were booming, and it was to her he escaped to sort out his life when it all went under. And ultimately, it's power and beauty convinced him that cleaning up the world was more important than going back and trying to make his fortune all over again.

Like the true sea captain, Kiernan has for 25 years kept a log book - but one not about charting the waters, but his life. 

"Once a year I think about my aims and objectives for the next year and write them down. I know that one year I achieved 27 of the 35 I had written down. The discipline of writing them helps keep you focussed, and you go back and revisit and take stock on how it all tallied up."

For those who want to make a difference - to themselves, or the world - life is not going to be smooth sailing, Kiernan says.

"I've been through tough times as well as good times, but I've always had the attitude that you can achieve anything that you want, if you set your mind to it," he says.

"And if you don't achieve it in the end, then you didn't really need it, you didn't really want it enough."