By Paul Dobbyn
ONE of the first phone calls Susan Rix received when she arrived as a new parishioner in Hendra last year carried a familiar request.
“It was from Father, now Rockhampton’s bishop, Michael McCarthy asking me to join the parish’s finance council,” the accountant and partner in BDO Australia’s Brisbane office said.
She was already on various finance committees, not only in the Catholic Church but also further afield, including government bodies and an ongoing 20-year association with the Cerebral Palsy League.
“Of course I said yes, what else could I say?” she said.
Susan had spent most of her working years saying a generous “yes” to many such requests.
“It started when I became treasurer to Noah’s Ark Toy Library Club for Children after a request from a friend,” she said.
“I’d just arrived in Brisbane in 1982 as an accounting graduate from Armidale’s University of New England.”
Susan could not know that this toy library role would be the first of many such roles, both paid and unpaid, which would see her appointed to government boards including the Port of Brisbane Corporation and Queensland Rail.
Within the Brisbane archdiocese too she would become active, taking up voluntary work on committees including the Catholic Education Council, the Catholic Foundation and the Mary MacKillop Foundation.
These roles continue to this day.
Susan’s unable to say how many committees she’s on.
“It’s a strange thing for an accountant who deals with figures day in and day out to say, but I honestly don’t know,” she said.
She laughs at the suggestion that the figure might scare her if she ever did stop to work it out.
This unstinting generosity saw Susan awarded a Member of the Order of Australia Medal in June in recognition of her outstanding achievement, service and support to many not-for-profit organisations in Queensland.
Her busy life finally permitted her to step up and receive the medal from Queensland Governor Paul de Jersey at Government House in September.
“I managed to work in the investiture in the Order of Australia on September 10 after a holiday in Canada from which I’d returned on September 8,” she said.
Looking back to her youth in her home town of Lismore, NSW, Susan said her parents had influenced her faith and community-mindedness.
“My father had always been involved in the Church and the Rotary Club,” Susan said.
“My mother was also very involved in the Church and is still actively involved in fundraising.”
Susan’s Catholic influences were wide and deep, following her to all sorts of unexpected places.
As a Rotary exchange student, she attended school in Germany for a year.
“Interestingly, the town where I was sent as an exchange student was 90 per cent Catholic – certainly unusual for Germany,” she said.
“The vicar general in the town was also a Rotarian and I was taught by nuns at the school there.”
Rotary is another influence which has continued.
“At Armidale, I lived in a Catholic college run by Dominican Fathers … the list of Catholic influences in my life goes on and on,” Susan said.
She also identified another powerful influence – her Scottish grandmother.
“Nanna, a staunch Catholic, lived with us until her death at 96,” she said.
“Her practise of the faith was always an outstanding example.”
A sense of wanting to give back to the community, especially from her education with Lismore’s Presentation Sisters, was also a theme in Susan’s reflections on her youthful influences.
“From when I was a young girl, the nuns told me I could follow whatever career I set my mind to,” she said.
“It wasn’t till I started work, I started to hear things like: ‘I don’t know whether we’ll have a woman do that’ and so on … I felt like saying: ‘Well, stuff you, I’m going to do it; I’m able to do it’.”
Out of all her advisory roles, Susan has found her work with the Cerebral Palsy League amongst the most satisfying and inspirational.
“It’s about the people I have met there,” she said.
“These are people I know the organisation has supported through all their challenges.
“For example, Michael Pini, now assistant commissioner of Australian Tax Office Counsel Network, is one of most inspiring people I have ever met.
“He was the first disabled boarder at Nudgee College and is a great advocate for what happens when someone with cerebral palsy gets a good education.
“Michael appears highly disabled and he is, but he’s able to work in a full-time, full-on job where he often has to appear in court and so on.
“If I’m having a bad day I start thinking, what sort of day are people like Michael having.”
Succession planning, looking at how businesses effectively hand over responsibility to succeeding generations, is one of Susan’s many areas of expertise.
She’s applying this knowledge to her advisory roles with various Catholic Church bodies.
“If you think of some of our older established organisations, for example the religious orders, they have a lot of assets,” she said.
“What’s going to happen to these assets?
“That’s where I think I can definitely add some value to, say, the Catholic Education Council.
“There are a lot of assets schools are responsible for, then there are teachers to pay and so on.
“Questions include ‘Should the Church sell assets and what should it invest in’?
“What are growth expectations of schools into the future?
“What are the funding requirements, and what if funding changes?”
Answers to these questions are exercising her mind and will continue to do so.
Susan, through her generosity, is playing a vital role in the future of the Church and the wider community.
It’s her decisions and those like her, which provide that all-important financial glue, holding together organisations essential to society’s wellbeing.
