When Ted Kennedy, the priest of Redfern in Sydney, died, in 2005, I wrote his obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, expecting to hear no more about it. Writers are used to such occasional pieces sinking into a sea of silence, as if they had never been or no one had read them. Ted’s obituary, however, proved to be an exception. People telephoned me about it; they stopped me in the street, sent messages and wrote letters; it went on to websites and was reprinted in magazines and bulletins. Then someone (who? I don’t remember, alas) suggested that I should expand the obituary into a biography. Which took care of the next three years.

Ted’s biography proved to be the most taxing book I’ve written. In part this was a consequence of my own frailty: an old man now, I lack the energy of youth; and my health has gone up and down in recent years. Halfway there, I threw in the towel. Marnie Kennedy RSCJ, Ted’s sister, was understanding and absolving; when I got my nerve back, she renewed her support of the project. Without her it would have been impossible.

But difficulties remained. A major one came from Ted himself. At his funeral we had placed a telephone on the coffin – a sign that much of his ministry was effected on the phone. Now, telephone calls go unrecorded. He did not write personal letters nor did he keep a diary. Successful biographies – think of Jill Roe’s Miles Franklin, Brenda Niall’s Martin Boyd, or the Manning Clark biographies – have a trove of paper, piles and piles of it, to quarry: their danger is too much material. The biographer of Ted Kennedy would have no such treasures, he must travel in undocumented territory without benefit of maps.

Well, not quite. Ted’s minstrel friend, Peter Kearney, gathered five volumes of his speeches, sermons, essays, book drafts and public letters to church officials; before leaving to live in Ireland he gave them to Marnie, who made them available. Invaluable: without them, no book. Still, a diary or stacks of private letters would have helped.

What about his friends – couldn’t they tell his story? Yes, they could; but there were difficulties here too. Many of them were dead. Ted once wrote about his Aboriginal friends, ‘Hundreds of them are now dead and I have buried them all.’ Holding interviews with whites had difficulties too. Many of them were cautious of what they were saying, as if trying to guess what sort of biography this would be – favourable or unfavourable? Many were content to heap praise on a hero priest, with few facts. Those for whom he wasn’t a hero gave very guarded answers to questions, thinking his biographer, like a sundial, would tell only the sunny hours.

Priesthood itself created another difficulty since a priest’s work is largely hidden, his ministry beyond the ken of an historian. The Welsh poet R S Thomas (died 2000) has written that his brother priests left no books, ‘rather they wrote/ on men’s hearts and in the minds/ of young children sublime words/ too soon forgotten’. The deepest levels of a priest’s life are closed to public scrutiny, although echoes may be picked up here and there. And what can one know of his prayer life, apart from the liturgy?

Then there is the question of church authority. Tom Boland in his great life of Archbishop Duhig wrote, ‘No bishop is a hero to his priests.’ I found that when people knew I was writing about Ted, they expected to get a titillating tale of brutish power attempting to crush or silence a brave, clear-eyed underling, the way the media often do their stuff. Not here. I hoped to show good people on both sides of a question, reading from different scriptures perhaps but neither all-bright not all-dark; and readers could make their own judgments without me jogging their elbows.

Ted Kennedy? What is his place in the Australian Catholic story? The crowds who turned up to his funeral and went on talking about him are a testimony to his worth. The conversation about him continues. I hope this book will be an honest contribution to that continuing conversation.

Ted Kennedy, Priest of Redfern is published by David Lovell, Melbourne. RRP $24.95

Edmund Campion