When Karyn Walsh arrived in South Brisbane in the 1980s, she remembers the city’s homeless sleeping on the steps of St Mary’s Catholic Church, in the car park, and behind the presbytery.
Pregnant with her second child and fresh from running a youth refuge in Kalinga on the city’s northside, Walsh and her husband temporarily moved into the church with their young family.
The relationship with that community would eventually lead to the founding of Micah Projects, a grassroots social justice organisation whose name has become synonymous with support for homeless people in inner-city Brisbane.
After 18 months living in the presbytery, the family moved to a permanent home in West End. Back then, it was possible to buy a house for $50,000.
Forty years on, the median price in the gentrifying suburb is well over a million. The homeless community still congregates around the St Mary’s church building on Merivale Street, neighboured by Emmanuel City Mission, but rough sleepers often spend their nights in Musgrave Park and along the river.
Speaking to this masthead a few weeks after retiring from Micah, Walsh reflects on the divide between poverty and prosperity that many see growing in Brisbane.
“Poverty is an underlying cause of homelessness, but what creates homelessness is often prosperity because it displaces people,” she says from a rotunda in West End’s Orleigh Park on a windswept Friday afternoon.
“Our economic circumstances change. They’re not in favour of everybody in the community.”
Homelessness was a key issue for Brisbane when Micah launched in 1995. Decades on, the city’s housing and homelessness crisis persists.
It’s just one reason that the news of Walsh’s retirement felt particularly winding. She is adamant she’s leaving the organisation in capable hands, with many “dedicated and great staff” to continue her legacy.
But recent developments trouble many workers and activists in the sector. Since taking power in 2024, the Crisafulli government has cut social housing targets and introduced punitive policies for public housing tenants. Meanwhile, Brisbane City Council cracked down on rough sleepers in public parks last year.
Terry Fitzpatrick, a former priest at St Mary’s who has known Walsh since the 1970s, says her ability to navigate governments was a strength that will be missed.
“There’s just so many areas that she’s been able to influence, both directly in terms of acting and responding to need, but also advocacy, and changing some of the ways the government approaches people,” he says.
Asked whether working with the LNP after a decade of Labor leadership has been particularly challenging, Walsh says: “your relationship with government is always something that’s fragile”.
“You’ve got to learn how to navigate it, and how to educate people about what you’re experiencing and dealing with every day.
“Over the years I’ve worked with both governments, I can say it’s a really slow, hard slog. We tend to go to inquiries and lawyers to get the answers, whereas they’re not necessarily the people who can give us the answers.
“The people who do give us the answers are the people that live it every day.”
Common Ground Queensland chief executive Sue Pope, who’s worked closely with Walsh on supportive housing initiatives, describes her as “an incredible straight shooter”, who has never lost focus “on improving people’s lives”.
“She’s built this huge following of big Karyn fans that just love how she calls a spade a spade,” Pope says.
“That can be pretty confronting, but it’s also incredibly useful in terms of cutting straight through to the key issue at hand and trying to make changes to systems and services to make people’s lives better.”
Walsh’s aptitude for community advocacy was shaped by childhood experience. Born in Ipswich, she moved with her family to Mackay in North Queensland aged nine.
That year, her mother died suddenly. She and her sister went to live in a Catholic boarding school while her father worked in mining.
“Karyn knew what it was like as a child to be … relying on the good nature and generosity of random people,” Fitzpatrick says.
Peter Kennedy, another renegade priest exiled from St Mary’s for his progressive interpretation of Catholicism, added that Walsh extended the care and compassion she was shown as a child to others throughout her career.
After school, Walsh settled in Rockhampton to study nursing, where she was confronted by the increasing demand for youth services driven by the closure of orphanages in the region.
“It was the beginning of how youth homelessness emerged,” she explains. “Prior to that, homelessness was really middle-aged, alcoholic men.”
Walsh helped to open the central Queensland city’s first women’s shelter, amid the cultural shift that came as divorce laws changed and women were empowered to leave relationships.
Women still faced stigma, she says, but they “had no trouble with the shelter being full”.
Fitzpatrick remembers meeting Walsh when he travelled to Rockhampton in the late ’70s to meet with young people from one of the region’s orphanages. Kennedy became close with Walsh and her husband, Peter, while they were running Kedron Lodge, the youth refuge.
St Mary’s grew a reputation for social justice throughout the ’80s. When the church created a role for a person to co-ordinate support and investigate local issues, Walsh was a natural fit.
Alongside homelessness, Walsh remembers being called on to help break the silence on institutional abuse, working closely with a movement of survivors who became known as the Forgotten Australians.
“We [Micah] were one of the first, among a network of people across Australia, who were trying to activate this discussion,” she explains.
Four years after Micah was established, the organisation supported survivors to submit to the Forde Inquiry into the abuse of children in Queensland institutions.
“People really put their lives on the line to tell their stories,” Walsh says.
“That’s been one of the greatest privileges, to work with people in making that become a reality because they had for years been banging their heads against brick walls.”
Walsh says that work was further validated by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, established in 2013.
Queensland Council of Social Services (QCOSS) chief executive Aimee McVeigh was a pregnant young lawyer, who had just been made redundant, when she met Walsh during this period.
“She got me doing work related to the child abuse royal commission,” McVeigh remembers.
“Not many people would give a pregnant person work, but Karyn didn’t think twice about it.
“She’s a pioneer in Queensland. I don’t think there’s anyone else like her.”
Walsh says while the Catholic Church has influenced her work, her approach to community service is connected to humanitarian principles rather than any institution.
“There are plenty of things in all religions that resonate and plenty of things that don’t,” she says.
“I think it’s really about our common humanity and that we do treat people with dignity and equality and respect.”
Those who know Walsh say she’s never lost sight of those qualities.
“I think we’ll be missing a North Star without her in the social services sector,” McVeigh says.
“She’s been at the coalface of making enormous changes for the good for so many people,” Fitzpatrick says.
“There’s just so many people who have been benefited from the many areas that she’s been involved in, from housing to healthcare to safety to social justice … to just connecting people to community.”
Walsh says she is “not going to retire from advocating”, but feels “the need to reflect a bit more on how we advocate”.
“The data keeps churning out how bad [homelessness and housing] is. We need to start making sure we churn out what we can do to stop it,” she says.
“There are things we’ve done that have made a huge difference to people’s lives … but we’ve got to have a much bolder and courageous attitude to how you build a system to solve a problem, not manage it.”
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