A paint roller and a purpose

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 25th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER,HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: cleaning up.

Many people who see garbage or graffiti in their local communities just walk by, wondering why the city’s not doing its job.

MAST: But one man in Australia never stopped to wonder why. He just picked up a bucket and a brush. WORLD Correspondent Amy Lewis recently tagged along on one of his walks.

AMY LEWIS: Gary Robertson—who goes by Robbo—stands under a bridge, plunging a roller into a tray of steely gray paint. In front of him is a bright red message scrawled by someone named Scotty T.

ROBBO: “I love you with all my heart. Scotty T.” Sorry, Scotty. [sound of roller] Send her a letter [sound of roller]… It’s fine that you love somebody. That’s great. But do it the right way….

Robbo is something of a local paint store celebrity.

ROBBO: They call me the graffiti guy. I wish they called me the anti-graffiti guy. So, yeah. So I've taken down between six and 8,000 acts in the last five, six years…

Today, Robbo’s life is defined by service. But he wasn’t always so supportive of his local community.

Growing up, Robbo was the short, smart kid. He lived in a Geelong, Australia, neighborhood where most of the kids came from other countries. He and his red hair stood out. The other Anglo kids picked on him.

ROBBO: So I was angry and frustrated. So I had to be bigger, stronger, tougher than everybody else. And that was how the crime started.

At age 11, he regularly carried a knife and broke into cars and stole things to prove he was tough. He gave a stolen walkie talkie to a mate who gave it to another mate who told the police where he got it.

ROBBO: The coppers interviewed me down at the station and they turned around to mum and dad. ‘We won’t see him again.’

The police thought talking to him would be enough. But Robbo’s mother spoke up at his court case to make sure he got the punishment he deserved.

ROBBO: Because she knew if I got away with it again, with doing the wrong thing, I was gonna keep on doing it. Anyway, the judge told me that I didn’t appreciate the family I’ve got.

Robbo says getting caught was the best thing that ever happened to him.

ROBBO: And then Mr. Darcy, my probation officer taught me some more stuff…

Like how stealing stuff hurts people.

ROBBO: And yeah, I’ve never gone back.

After high school, he became a local businessman. He joined an Australia-rules footy club. He and his wife fostered dozens of hard case kids. He raised thousands of dollars for Christmas gifts and donated food for hungry families. He mentored criminals, whom he calls “crims.”

ROBBO: I was a crim, and I went and helped the crims not be crims.

But he was also working 70 hours a week. His family and health suffered. His doctor gave him the blunt truth.

ROBBO: I told him everything I was doing. He goes, ‘You can’t do that, mate.’ He goes, ‘You’ll be dead in a year.’

So Robbo gave up almost everything—except his footy club—and instead started taking daily walks by the Barwon River with his dog.

That’s when he started noticing the graffiti.

Today the Breakwater Bridge looks like a monochromatic Piet Mondrian painting with blocks of various gray-toned rectangles covering old graffiti. Robbo obviously visits just as often as the kids with their cans of spray paint.

It took him a while to figure out the best way to cover the unwanted artwork.

ROBBO: So when I first started this, because I was a novice, I didn’t know what colors they were using.

Now he knows the color to use is called Philosophical Gray.

ROBBO: I don’t like leaving any color, if I can. I don’t want them to get any satisfaction out of it whatsoever, because when they tell their friends at school, well, come and have a look at this, they get up here and they become very disappointed.

With one dip of his roller, he paints a tidy swath of Philosophical Gray over one tag.

ROBBO: It takes them longer to put it up than me to take it down.

Then another and another.

ROBBO: If I left this up…they’ll tag near it because, ‘Hang on. This is staying up, so mine will stay up.’

Once he got the graffiti under control on his regular five walking routes, he says he got bored. He saw someone picking up rubbish in another part of town. So now he brings a trash grabber tool and a 2-gallon collapsible container he calls a crush bucket on his routes.

ROBBO: From Moorabool Street Bridge to the Breakwater, 26 or 27 crush buckets before it was clean. Took me months to do it all.

Now he rarely fills a bucket and a half in 3 miles. He turns in bottles and cans for a refund to help pay for his paint.

Robbo says he enjoys walking around and NOT seeing the rubbish. Most people don’t even know he’s been there.

ROBBO: That’s the joy. They walk past where the graffiti was, and they don't even see my patch…

His simple acts make others want to do the same.

ROBBO: A young beautiful couple came up behind me and said, ‘You’ve inspired us.’ And I said, ‘What?’ They said, ‘We’ve been behind you, watching you pick up. We’re going to pick up a grabber and a bucket, both of us, and we’re gonna pick up rubbish while we go...’

Three weeks later, there they were, using their own grabbers to pick up rubbish on their side of the river.

ROBBO: So you get some volunteer in that area that loves his city, and he looks after that part. And then the next guy looks after that part. Next guy looks after that part…It’s as simple as that.

Robbo says anyone can do it.

ROBBO: You can’t save the world, but you can save a part of your little world. So if you see some rubbish on the road, just pick it up.

ROBBO: Once a week or something somebody says, ‘Thank you for doing what you’re doing,’ or whatever it is. But you don’t do it for that.

He likes not seeing trash and graffiti on his walks. But more importantly, he enjoys helping restore the streets and repair the walls.

ROBBO: What makes you big? Not the amount of money you have in your pocket, the ability to change, you know, the opportunity, the grace, the lovingness to have that opportunity to, to help people.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis in Geelong, Australia.

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