Celebrating the launch of Beyond Borders: The Life and Times of Kevin G. Hein, His Family and Their Ancestors, the Mount Gambier local spoke candidly to The Border Watch about his career, a lifetime of adventures at home and abroad and his outstanding contribution to the local arts community. This is the second and final instalment in a two part series.
AFTER seven years abroad, Kevin Hein had decided to return home and begin the next chapter of his life in Mount Gambier, though not before he finally explored Europe.
True to his character, he intended to do so in unique style.
Not content to see the landscape pass by in a blur from a train or car window, he purchased a bicycle and proceeded to pedal his way from the Netherlands to Naples on a 2000 mile tour across the continent.
“I was in my mid-30s and I decided ‘what better way to see Europe?’” Kevin mused.
“I sent all of my belongings home ahead of me and packed only the bare necessities and cycled the first leg of my journey home to Australia.”
Kevin affectionately dubbed the 82-day journey across Europe’s north-south axis the Road Trip of ‘66.
When he arrived in Mount Gambier during the winter of the same year, Kevin discovered the city’s burgeoning arts community had expanded.
He was welcomed into a number of arts groups, continued to work as a freelance decorator and display artist and was appointed as president of the South East Arts Society in 1969.
For the next three years he would lead the group in an impassioned, yet ultimately futile campaign to save the old hospital from demolition.
“There was no such thing as a heritage register at the time,” Kevin said.
“It is one of the city’s great tragedies that we allowed the old hospital to be destroyed.”
As deputy chairman of the Old Hospital Restoration Society, Kevin and his fellow members developed a proposal to transform the 100-year-old building into a museum and art gallery.
Built by pioneers and opened in 1869, the old hospital was destroyed in 1971.
“One of the windows downstairs is from the old hospital and all of the plaster pieces in this house are from old Mount Gambier,” Kevin said.
“They are pieces we should have restored or kept – so I gathered them up.”
Kevin lived in the Jens Hotel annex for 10 years, before he purchased a four bedroom cottage on Crouch Street.
Tower windows from the old hospital, cornice decor and plaster panels from the Odeon theatre are among a number of fittings that were given new life when he extended and renovated his home.
Over the next two decades, Kevin continued to build on his enduring legacy in Mount Gambier’s arts community.
He was a founding vice president of Backstage Incorporated and assisted the organisation to conduct Mount Gambier’s inaugural Eisteddfod.
He volunteered in all aspects of theatre production, acted as chief of the Caledonian Society from 1981 to ‘83 and was elected national president of the Association of Eisteddfod Societies of Australia.
Kevin was recognised for his outstanding contribution to the community when he was presented with a Citizen of the Year award at Mount Gambier’s Australia Day ceremony in 1996.
His remarkable life story has now been immortalised in print.
Beyond Borders was launched at the Mount Gambier library in early March.
Written by Stuart Hill, the book not only celebrates Kevin’s life and his decades of community service, it traces his ancestry and offers a comprehensive history of the Blue Lake city.
“I was always going to write a book, but then I found I couldn’t write a book, so I talked Stuart into writing it,” Kevin said.
“He’s done a magnificent job and I think he’s excelled in making it factual but an interesting story.
“It took him five years to complete it and I’m thrilled with the way it has come together.”
Kevin said he was reading the book from start to finish for the first time and felt somewhat removed from many of the events in the story.
“I could be reading about anyone – it doesn’t feel like it’s about me at all,” he said.
“Someone put it very well the other day when they said they walk down the street and look in the shop windows and see a figure in the window that’s an old man and they don’t recognise themselves.
“I don’t see myself as old – at least not as old as I appear in pictures.”
At 85, Kevin said the secret to his good health was his unwavering optimism.
“I believe it’s all attitude, you’ve got to remain positive,” Kevin said.
“I am awfully slow now, but that’s alright – it gives me time to stop and think.”
