OBITUARY
Aubrey William Podlich
28.09.1946 – 28.05.2025

A man who was many things to many people and a man who could make words sing, retired Lutheran Minister, Aub Podlich, wrote his own obituary. His prose gives readers an understanding of why his newspaper columns, books, journal articles and poetry were enjoyed by the many who read them. Those who were among his parishioners in the Boonah district and in Ipswich, to name only a few of the congregations he served, are already aware of the quality of his sermons and hymns.

A story is rarely as simple as it seems.
We are all a bundle of virtues and vices, strengths and flaws, hopes and fears
(James Rebanks: The Place of Tides)

I WAS a Spring baby, my arrival coinciding with the raucous celebrations of the season’s first storm birds in the blue gums on Teviot Brook. I was the third of the four children of the 1939 marriage of Mary Harch from Byee in the South Burnett and Frank Podlich from Hoya, in the Fassifern. We four siblings were cleverly spaced three years apart, Herbert and Noela older than I, and Robert younger. Herbert died on Christmas Day 2024.

Both our parents originated from Queensland “Scrub German” and Blue Gum flats immigrant families of the 1870s and 1880s, Mary one of 12 children, and Frank with three brothers. Both farming families were conservative Lutherans. Both lost a son in infancy.

Mary gave birth to me in Boonah hospital in late September 1946. In early October Frank would normally have come in from the farm at Coulson, about five miles out, off the road to Ipswich, to drive us proudly home, but having been there and done that twice before already, he found himself more gainfully employed, waiting expectantly at home for his first tractor to be delivered, a Fordson Major monster with steel spiked wheels, which rendered the Clydesdales Barney and Prince and the rest of the team redundant.

My mother was fond of saying that I bawled every night for the next three months. That was probably because I had to spend the rest of my life explaining why the Rawleighs Man, Alf Schulz, brought us home from the hospital in his van, even though I didn’t look anything like him.

As I remember it, we were a happy family, struggling materially, but wealthy in mutual support and faith. Both our parents were hard labourers. Mary in particular gauged the contributions of people by their capacity for physical labour. I remember once in her old age when she was in hospital, telling the nurses: “O yes, all my children are hard workers, except Aubrey. He’s a pastor.”

In similar vein, and in the same place on another occasion I arrived at the hospital in time to hear her telling the staff: “O all my children are good looking, except Aubrey – he’s got a beard!” Dad was proud to have a pastor in the family. Once, travelling on the way home from our first parish in Murray Bridge, South Australia, we met up with my parents and joined them in driving up to Queensland together. Every time we stopped for fuel, dad introduced me to the service station attendant – yes, there were such people back then - with the same words, “My son, Lutheran Pastor!” The attendants were surely riveted.

I was born into a world of wonders, of beautiful and inspiring people, fascinating words and books, sacred things and places where love, holiness, beauty and inspiration spoke in many and varied tongues: trees, insects, fossil ferns embedded in bits of ironstone, smooth blue metal stone axes of the mysterious people who once lived here, and loved this land long before we did.

On grassy tracks where Ugarapul people once walked barefoot down to the Teviot, we and our cousins walked barefoot along the gravel road to Coulson school, whose grounds adjoined our farm, testing the ice edging the dam in winter, wading the Teviot’s February floods, feeding the crows our uneaten peanut paste sandwiches on the way home, scanning the roadside for brown snakes, following our schoolbags under the barbed wire fence into the school ground ahead of our cranky Jersey bull whose task it was to bring the dry cows in our paddock into calf and milk again.

We wandered and crawled through the vine-scrub remnants on our farm, chased bandicoots in the overgrown Coulson Cemetery next door, encountered the spines of the Chinese Junk larvae of the cup moths on the small Silver Leaved Ironbarks.

Swallows built their mud nests on the verandah rafters of our house. We followed the mud wasps collecting material where the windmill tank overflowed, to their nests in the garage, to examine the paralysed spiders in their cells, felt the snug zebra finch nestlings in the grass nests in the citrus trees in the fruit garden, fished with bent pins and some of mum’s cotton threads for the minnows we had seeded into the cattle trough.

My mother kept me safe from the trampling cows in a tea-chest in the cow shed during milking. She lay me on corn bags in the shade on the edge of the top scrub tethered to the bottom strand of barbed wire so I didn’t crawl off into the scrub while she went up and down the rows, stripping off the corn cobs, throwing them into heaps. Who was it who said: “The things I remember best of all were the things that didn’t happen.” Later we kids minded the cows along our roadside.

I never lost that love of nature I acquired on the farm, on the daily meandering walks to school, fishing in the Teviot, in the sermons of our pastor at church. Many years later, less than riveted by some of the pastors’ conferences I attended, I kept myself awake by looking out the windows, making lists of the birds and butterflies I saw, the native plants in the garden surrounds, and once, from the heights at Coolum, seven passing whales.

Eight years at the one-teacher Coulson State School unfurled the miracle of reading and the wonders of books, stories, and learning. Pastor Armin Bode taught our farming families for 53 years the basics of fundamentalist Lutheran living at our weekly worship services at Teviotville: no attending the public dances, only the elbow swing at the youth socials, no smoking, drinking, gambling, no female preachers.

Four years of church coeducational boarding school rules in Toowoomba reinforced the sense of evil inherent in the dangers of close proximity to members of the opposite gender: “You may greet a member of the opposite gender who is not your sister for the amount of time it takes for you to pass, each moving in the opposite direction.”

And so, with our educational and moral kit bags fully packed with the tools essential for becoming effective Lutheran pastors, (male, Latin, German, English and Greek, with Hebrew yet to come) several mates and I set off to Adelaide and five or six years at Seminary and one practical year with an experienced pastor, in my case in Melbourne. I met Victorian schoolteacher Merrilyn Gough in my final year in Adelaide at a Lutheran Youth Assembly and mistook her for a schoolgirl, a miscalculation from which she declined to enlighten me. We were married in Doncaster Church, Melbourne, a couple of years later, the happiest day of my life.

For more than 53 years Merrilyn has been the rock on which our family stood, the gift that never stopped giving. She was strong and loving, compassionate and tireless. She asked challenging questions about the nature and conduct of our Christianity that we were never encouraged to ask. I was the family’s dreamer, she the practical mother of our four: Dean, Shane, Nathan, Kirsten. She fixed the broken household gadgets, unravelled the mysteries of inserting the batteries in childrens’ toys, reminded me when the birthdays were, and remembered to feed the children.

I was a pastor in a total of 19 congregations and preaching locations in South Australia and Queensland: rural, urban, industrial and mining towns, outback western Queensland station properties. I loved the kindness of the people and their life stories, humbled by the ultimate privilege of being included in their life events, weeping with them in their tragedies, laughing with them in their celebrations, forgiving our failings, somehow being granted words, both written and spoken, to share the way with them. Some of those words became books.

Our children married and extended our family with their life partners Heather, Nicole, Viki, Michael, and our 11 grandchildren, Joshua, Emma, Zoe, Levi, Evie-May, Isabell, Jett, Kyarni, Elise, Isaac, and Lucas, such a varied group of lovely human beings, with whom we have been privileged to share the way, and who have been our teachers in so many ways. Bearing in mind the reminder in the book of Romans that God is in every wondrous thing we are given in life, working for the good of those who love him, I give thanks now for all of you, and for all that Philippians calls true, honourable, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praise-worthy.

What amazing grace this ongoing gift of life has been!

Thanks be to God.

— Aub