John Falzon might have a busy professional life – he’s a poet, teacher, sociologist, administrator and social justice campaigner, among other things – but he is driven by the simplest of motivations, writes Will Brodie.
“I just want to be socially useful to the movement,” Falzon says.
He means the union movement, which he says is “at heart, a social movement that is able to create incredible social change”.
“Unthinkable things are made possible, not because you have benevolent or wise leaders, but because you have a social movement. It’s always social movements that create social change.”
In pursuit of being useful, Falzon has published books, studied for degrees in literature, theology, philosophy, politics and social analysis. He also led St Vincent de Paul for 12 years. Now, he’s a senior fellow in inequality and social justice at think tank Per Capita and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance.
Due to his inspiring and fierce yet gentle and down-to-earth campaigning, he is in demand as a keynote speaker and teacher of liberation sociology to unionists all over Australia.
Education is central to everything he does, but it was far from a foregone conclusion for Falzon himself, given his upbringing.
Falzon’s parents left Malta, then England, in search of greater economic opportunities. Though Falzon’s father was a voracious reader who was keen to learn, he was also poor. He worked as a tailor, then a bus conductor in London, then in Australia, he was a quarry labourer testing road materials.
Falzon’s mother was also keen to learn, but as a teenager she was pulled out of school to work as a waitress in her family’s café, taking orders because she was her family’s best English speaker.
When the Falzon family landed in Australia, they lived in a relative’s garage in Sydney’s west. Though Falzon says he was a “nerd” and “bookworm” from the outset, a precocious reader even at age two, a multi-degree future was far from a given growing up in Blacktown, in Sydney’s west.
Importantly, Falzon’s parents encouraged him to follow his passions. “And, you know, I’ve never forgotten that,” he says. “That was a time when a lot of migrant working-class kids like me, sometimes pressure was placed on the kids, because the parents wanted them to get a well-paying job.
“And my dad always stuck by me. I just thought it was beautiful the way he used to say to me, completely counter-culturally, ‘If you decide you want to be a street sweeper because that would bring you joy and give you a sense of fulfilment, I will be proud of you, and I will be happy in exactly the same degree as if you get a law degree and earn good money’.”
Falzon took the “incredible liberation” of this support to heart – he took books to family gatherings as a child, and his first PhD thesis was a cycle of poems.
The parental support he received taught him “a very radical vision of the value of people and the value of people’s work”, which dismisses the notion that how much someone earns indicates their social or personal value.
Libraries: Temples of learning
Libraries were Falzon’s “temples of learning” and education staff his greatest benefactors.
“I’ve got some fond memories of school librarians who took pity on me,” he says. “They saw I was interested in all sorts of things, and they would come and ask how I’m going, and tell me something about the book they saw I had.”
Lacking the internet, Falzon spent hours “just hanging around the library”.
“It wasn’t a discipline, it was an out-of-control passion,” he says.
Falzon says libraries were the “great repository of possibilities” that opened up his world. The books, writers, and thinkers he found in them were his greatest mentors.
As a young man, Falzon began to read philosophy, politics, and critical theory as much as literature, which broadened his mind enormously. His eyes were opened by a “tatty little cheap paperback” by jailed American social activist Angela Davis.
“And that had a huge impact on me, just knowing that there were people in the world who were struggling for justice; this was something that just totally enthralled me. The idea that there are people, that there are movements who wish to create the possibility of a different kind of society. This just captured my imagination in the same way as poetry. In fact, I would be very loath to separate those two strands in my education.”
Falzon has never disentangled those strands, his sociology course containing epigrams from poets, and his poetry references to the struggle for equality.
“For me with poetry or for any writer, if their writing is true to their life, then it has that resonance that speaks to the heart. For me it’s never just an intellectual or an aesthetic exercise.”
