When Bryan Lipmann AM founded Wintringham in 1989, there were very few safe options for elderly people experiencing homelessness in Victoria. Many ended up in night shelters, in what could be a brutal environment, and were excluded from aged care services.
Today, Wintringham supports more than 3000 older people across Victoria and Tasmania, via its aged care facilities, home care, NDIS, outreach services, and in community housing.
Last year, after 40 years in the social services sector, Bryan retired from his role as Chief Executive Officer of Wintringham. He recently spoke with Parity about his time working in night shelters, the early days of setting up Wintringham, and how a sense of social justice continues to fuel him.
Tell us about Wintringham’s namesake – there’s an interesting history there.
There was a place called Gordon House, which was a boarding house in Little Bourke Street up near Spring Street. It had, like all boarding houses, the usual cohort of homeless or really vulnerable, marginalised men, but it also had a lot of thespians, because it was in the theatre district and it was privately owned.
In the early 70s, the building was going to be sold, which would have put 300 people on the streets. There was a resident there called Tiny Wintringham. He was a giant, huge. He went on a one-man march to Parliament and to the media. His brainwave was to go see Normie Gallagher from the BLF [Builders Labourers Federation].
Normie was so outraged that these guys were going to be put on the streets that he slapped a black ban on the building. He said, my members will not touch this building until everyone is housed.
So that, combined with Wintringham’s lobbying, meant the government decided to rebuild Gordon House on the banks of the Yarra. All the men, including Tiny, moved across.
Later on, in the 80s, I worked at Gordon House for about a year. Absolutely loved it. I was a social worker for 300 people – really, it’s crisis work, not social work. A really big problem was, out of that 300, maybe 100 or 150 were elderly and frail.
At that time, my parents got frail, and I had to get them into aged care. Mum and Dad got terrific care. I was really quite surprised how good it was. I kept thinking, why are they getting care and my old guys at Gordon House aren’t? The reason, simply, was poverty. You’re not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion or sex or all sorts of things, but it seems you’re allowed to discriminate on the basis of poverty.
I went out and I tried to place our fellows in aged care services, and I couldn’t make one placement. So, I said, okay, well, we should build our own service.
Eventually, with the assistance of Peter Hollingworth [executive director of Brotherhood of St Laurence at the time] and the Federal Minister for Aged Care Peter Staples, we started this organisation. Peter said to me, you’ll have to have a name. I said, let’s call it Wintringham. One homeless man standing up to City Hall and winning – I mean, how inspiring is that?
What else do you remember about Gordon House? And how did that influence you to start Wintringham?
Oh, Gordon House was wild and chaotic. There were terrible things happening. There was a community, but there were a lot of lonely guys. The guys lived and died in the night shelters for a long, long, long time, and no one did anything about it until we started.
The idea with Wintringham was to get the old people out of the night shelters and give them quality aged care, and then we moved also into quality housing. Our vision has never changed, never deviated an inch. It’s always been social justice, no religion, focused solely on people who are elderly and needing care.
One of the innovative things we did was to get governments to accept the definition of aged [among those experiencing homelessness] as 50 and above. At the time, I was only about 30 so 50 seemed very old to me, but also, more seriously, the lifestyle of homeless people ages them.
[At that time,] I used to almost live in Canberra. One bureaucrat said to me, ‘There’s a perfectly good homeless service system, your guys are homeless and aged. It’s where they should be’. My little inspiration was to say they weren’t “homeless and aged” but “aged and homeless”. That changed the whole paradigm. They’re Australians; therefore, they should be part of the aged care system.
That simple turning around has resulted in literally billions of dollars coming into homelessness.
How does Wintringham do things differently?
Homeless services primarily employ social workers, youth workers, and community development workers. Nothing wrong with that, but they’re not aged care specialists.
Wintringham has about 150 nurses and social workers. We’ve got a whole swag of social workers. I don’t know any other aged care provider that does that. And then the bulk of our workers are personal care workers.
Many of your staff seem to stay with the organisation for a long time. Why is that?
Everyone who’s been with me for 20 years and still working, I take them to Parliament for lunch. This year, I took 54. We pretty well take up the whole dining room.
People don’t stay that long for the dollars, because aged care doesn’t pay great money. They stay because they’re doing something no one else is doing. They’re looking after people who have got no family, no friends, are isolated. I’ve got a five-year award, and I’ve done 700 of them. People stay a long time.
[When I was CEO,] I ran the orientation for every new staff member. A lot of them have never worked in homelessness before, but I always say, ‘Welcome to your last job’. Often people will laugh at the thought of that … but then 20 years later they’re at Parliament House having lunch with me.
Tell us a bit more about the early days of Wintringham, when you were based at Bedford Street in Collingwood.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, to be honest. We got this little office, and my wife Dot went off to Woolies and bought two cups, two saucers, a kettle, a few things like that. I stood there, thinking, okay, what do I do now?
But despite not knowing anything about welfare or how the political system worked, I didn’t get intimidated quickly, and I was able to stand up to politicians and bureaucrats. I’m not an angry person, but I’m full of righteous indignation. And anger can be a great motivating force if you’ve got it under control.
I started Wintringham in a profound sense of anger, which hasn’t diminished at all, not in the slightest. There should be no need for Wintringham. I often said to the board that one day the aged care industry might develop a social conscience, and then we won’t be needed. But, on the contrary, we just keep growing.
How have you seen things get worse, more challenging for people?
Well, it’s got worse, because clearly the housing crisis has pushed a lot of people into marginal life, and a per centage of people who are marginalised become homeless.
The other thing is that I started Wintringham for really hardened street people. But there are now increasingly many who have never experienced homelessness before. They have just fallen on hard times – their partners died or divorced, or they’re women who don’t have super.
I had a staff member a few months ago, who told me she’s 65 and she said, “I’ll become one of your residents soon, Bryan”. And I said, “Why is that?” And she said, “Well, I won’t be able to afford the rent when I retire.” Comments like that illuminate, don’t they?
The housing crisis is not caused by this government. It’s been caused by 40, 50 years of bad government. We used to have quite a significant social housing portfolio in this country.
Wintringham is a housing association, but ideally we wouldn’t exist. I’d be totally alone in the housing association movement to say that I’d rather more public housing. Wintringham manages public housing for the government, and a number of different localities. And I like that – that they own it, they’re responsible for it, they build it, but we manage it.
But I can’t see any easy way out of the housing crisis. Far too much money has gone into middle class welfare, such as homeowners’ grants and negative gearing. At the same time, the Victorian Government has almost abandoned the principle of public housing, and now looks to more partnerships with privates.
I don’t really know how it will end up, because I think, almost by any measure, income inequality is getting worse. As housing becomes more and more difficult to get, more and more people, particularly elderly people, become marginalised and live in in worsening situations, and a percentage becomes homeless. It’s inevitable.
I’ve got clients who you look at and you think, they’re not homeless, they couldn’t be – but they have been couch-surfing, living with their daughter, living with friends. But tomorrow, you may have to go. You can’t stay here any longer. I was talking with an 84-year-old woman who is sleeping in a car recently. I mean, it’s just terrible, shocking.
Absolutely. Could you tell us more about your wife Dot and how she’s supported you throughout the years, and how she fits into the Wintringham story?
Dot started volunteering at Gordon house. She showed a real interest in the oldies. We had TB there and they’d be coughing all over her. Anyway, she started volunteering at Wintringham and she visits every Saturday and has never missed for 40 years. She gets to McLean Lodge – one of our hostels – and she brings a present for everyone, even if it’s just a little lolly or just something. She loves the guys. She knows them intimately. They know her. She’s been the anchor for Wintringham. She’s very quiet, unassuming. But she’s very passionate about her work and about Wintringham. She looks after me.
And when you look back over the years, are there moments or achievements that make you particularly proud?
I could talk about huge, multimillion dollar developments, things like that. But sometimes the little things are the ones that really stand out. I have a memory of a young worker who was sitting on a bench at McLean with an illiterate client. He was dictating to her. She was recording a complaint that he had against her.
I was so proud because it said two things. Firstly, homeless, frail, elderly people do not complain. So, for him to complain shows that he felt safe, and for her to write it down and give it to someone, meant that she felt safe. She wasn’t gonna lose a job over this. Then we had a look at it. Yeah, okay, could have done a few things better. So we all learnt from it, but she felt strong enough at Wintringham that she could do that. I then started after that to talk about complaints as a badge of honour.
Like all aged care providers, we’re meant to keep a register of complaints, and most organisations are terrified of this. We, on the other hand, proudly show the complaints. How good is that?
There are a lot of things I’m very proud of. I’m proud of the fact that you can run a social justice company and be financially viable. I think that’s a pretty impressive arrangement. Wintringham was never seen to have much chance of surviving [but] we have ensured that elderly people in Victoria and Tasmania can now access the care they should be entitled to.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
This article first appeared in Parity magazine’s February 2026 edition, ‘Prioritising Prevention’. Read more about Parity here.