In an extraordinary life of service, Bill Warner OAM’s most extraordinary year might well be his 100th.
The three-time Springvale mayor, former police officer and leader of Freemasons, Scouts and a bevy of organisations reached his life’s century on 23 December.
“I’ve had a fascinating life. I could talk about it until water came out of your ears,” he said.
Yet just months ago, in late August, he was surrounded by a priest, family and friends on his apparent deathbed.
As a result of a fall, Warner’s deep-vein thrombosis shifted from his ankle filling up his lungs with “1000 pinhead clots”.
Eighty per cent of his lungs were riddled with blood clots.
Warner was kept painfully alive by a machine pumping him with 100 per cent oxygen, but there was no hope of recovery. Doctors had given up him.
“(The doctor said) ‘Mr Warner you are going to die. There’s no doubt about it. Either now, tomorrow or the next day – or if you put it off, until Christmas.’”
With no treatment, Warner said all he could do was try to take deep, healing breaths into his lungs while he waited for his life-support machine to be switched off at 10am that Sunday.
Within minutes of the ’deadline’, doctors did a final check-up – and declared Warner had made a miraculous recovery.
“The doctor said ‘it’s a miracle’. I don’t believe this.
“It’s a bloody miracle all right. I’m still sitting here, I said.
“It’ll take me three-to-six months to recover – it really had my chips.”
It was Warner’s will to get to 100 that might have pulled him through, his wife Eleonora Spiess says.
“We had a prayer, there was great rejoicing in the palliative care ward. Bill wanted so much to live to 100 – I think that’s why he came through.
“They didn’t treat him at all because they thought it was a lost cause.”
His brother-in-law Alfred Weiss calls Warner the “miracle man”.
“At his age, to survive that near-death … he was 15 minutes away from having his life support system being cut off. Everyone was saying their goodbyes to him.
“But he’s an incredible human being with incredible resilience.
“It’s the mental side to fight through, to overcome all the problems with his lungs. To actually recover after being within a whisker of him passing – it’s just a miracle.
Police Veterans Victoria is bestowing a rare celebration for Warner, who is listed as Victoria Police’s oldest veteran.
They were organising a 100th birthday service at the police academy in Glen Waverley on 19 December – which might be the first time that PVV has recognised a member for such a milestone.
Of his many achievements, this is the pinnacle, he says.
Born in a two-room hospital in Buckingham Avenue, Springvale, Ivan George Neil Warner has been widely known as ‘Bill’.
His storied CV is literally too long to mention, but here’s some of the higlights.
Warner served 32 years with Victoria Police, retiring with a chief commissioner’s certificate for sustained, outstanding and loyal service in 1983.
A former Senior Grand Warden, he is the only living member of Freemasons Victoria’s hall of fame. The other four inductees hailed from the 19th century.
In the Scouts, he was District Commissioner for Springvale, receiving the Silver Acorn award for Distinguished Service to the Scout Movement in 1984.
At City of Springvale, he was first elected as councillor in 1969 and mayor in 1972, 1975 and 1981.
He was the foundation president of the Springvale and District Historical Society and was awarded Citizen of the Year in 1993 for service to the history movement and the community.
Other roles include Commissioner of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, chair of Dandenong Valley Regional Library Service, member of Dandenong Valley Authority, as well as leading Keysborough and District Senior Citizens Club, Prime Timers and Russian Senior Citizens Club in Dandenong.
Warner has plenty of wild stories from his days as a cop and a councillor.
One of them was his claim that the controversial name City of Greater Dandenong was hatched in a chat by powerbrokers at a public urinal in the 1990s. The name – which was for the newly-merged entity of Springvale and Dandenong councils – drew much ire from Springvale residents and councillors.
During the 1972 federal election, Warner as the then-Springvale mayor greeted Liberal PM Billy McMahon at a rowdy public event at Springvale Town Hall – “one of the best town halls going around”, Warner says.
Protestors from Monash University and the ALP were in full voice. A federal police detail advised McMahon and his wife Sonia to escape via the back entrance.
However, the PM insisted on leaving out the front.
He and his wife were hurled with eggs and spat upon by protesters, with Warner trying his best to use his mayoral robes to shield Lady McMahon.
“I was absolutely shocked by this. They set fire to the decorations at the back of the hall – I was upset by that, I thought it was so unnecessary.”
When asked what he thought of the PM, Warner said: “I’d rather not say.”
Unbeknown to him, his future brother-in-law Alfred Weiss – with hair down to his waist – was among the baying protesters.
Alfred, now a maths-science teacher in his mid 70s, insists he was not throwing projectiles.
“There were some very nasty people operating there. Billy McMahon got splattered by eggs, Bill got sprayed but not hit directly,“ Alfred says.
“That was when I first met Bill. He was trying to protect Sonya McMahon – he was a gentleman.”
