The CLUB20 network are a group of businesses who are committed to providing opportunities and support to at-risk young people. Join us today and help us provide the future that every young person deserves. Donate Now. He's been helping the homeless and at-risk youth in Melbourne for three decades, along with a team of youth workers that make up the Les Twentyman Foundation. People shout out "G'day Les" as he shuffles along the street. Two men stop to tell me he's a local hero, then seconds later a driver screams obscenities at him out the window.
Les used to work at a Carlton hostel run by the Melbourne City Mission. It's when he talks about one girl, Libby, that his tough veneer drops ever so slightly. Libby had been a ward of the state since she was 13 and a sex worker by the time she reached Libby was the first child Les took home for Christmas, because she had nowhere to go.
She would kill you just for a word out of place," he says. I had to identify her body. Years later, he tried to find her grave, but couldn't.
Libby had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave — "thrown in like a rag doll" according to Les. They can bury up to five kids in the one grave. I just think that is appalling," he says. And that is tough. Les Twentyman is now recovering at home after an induced three-week coma. Credit: Rebecca Hallas.
When he stared into the cameras and spoke grimly about homeless children and the violence of life on the street, it was easy to believe that the high-profile youth worker himself had been stabbed twice, suffered a shotgun being shoved into his face and dodged a petrol bomb. But ready to fight on. But here he is now on the couch, upstairs in his Maribyrnong home, looking stunned and still.
At his throat is a padded dressing, where the tracheotomy is closing over. On his abdomen are a series of dressings where only a week ago tubes were still draining the poisons that put him in a coma three months ago. His voice is slow and he almost shrinks when his wife, Cherie Coon, suggests we move him downstairs, into a wheelchair and out into the sunshine. On February 25, Twentyman underwent lap-band surgery at The Alfred hospital.
Known for a big heart, a generous belly had also accumulated from a love of food and red wine. But when the surgeons opened him up, they found two hernias that had pushed his stomach up into his chest cavity. Close to two decades on, Ms Cafaro has never missed one of his foundation's Christmas parties, this year bringing her year-old daughter Madison along too. The annual Les Twentyman Foundation Christmas gathering looked very different this year; no sweeping hall filled with hot meals or gifts for the more than people who usually attend.
Instead, 50 families from the western suburbs gathered outdoors at Cravin Crepes in Edgewater to reflect on one of their toughest years yet. Mr Twentyman said that in late June when parts of Melbourne's west were put into lockdown weeks before other parts of the city, it divided many already disadvantaged communities. He said he hoped Christmas would prove a time for reconnecting and to celebrate making it through such a challenging year.
It was very divisive," Mr Twentyman said. And to know help is sometimes just a phone call away.
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