News / Obituary

Tributes to a teacher, activist, artist and friend

Brunswick Voice

Friday, May 8, 2026

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Gil Freeman, who died aged 85 on March 25 after a short illness, was a major figure in the development of progressive modern Brunswick in the 1970s through to the early 1990s.

Among other achievements, he was a founder of the Sydney Road Community School and a key driver of the establishment of CERES Environment Park in Brunswick East.

Brunswick Voice has gathered tributes from several close friends and colleagues of Gil Freeman, beginning with the following edited obituary by Chris Ennis, Business Innovation Director at CERES.

Gil was ‘a big tree’

At CERES we often speak of big trees in our community, people who over years have provided the space, the nourishment and inspiration for those around them to grow and thrive.

Gil Freeman was one of those big trees at CERES, in Brunswick and more recently South Gippsland.

Gil Freeman served as chair at CERES for its first two years.

In November last year along with his fellow founders and elders Gil told stories about CERES’ early days of “Sunday Funday” working bees where hundreds came to help clean up and rehabilitate the old tip site.

Always a big picture person, Gil reminded his audience that the purpose of CERES back then was to look ahead at the things our community would need in 10 years, to be brave and bring them to life.

So many of those ideas, experiments and programs established by this group all those years ago have become mainstream and inspired so many other groups, communities and governments to take action of their own.

Gil Freeman was always a collaborator, a co-founder and a creator of coalitions.

Son of a Methodist minister, Gil grew up in a culture based around service and collective social activism.

It was in church halls, rather than churches, where he saw action happening – where community gathered, fundraised, organised care and brought youth together.

Early on Gil Freeman discovered the power of transforming unwanted places to create belonging and change. You can see this formula again and again:

– in an unused church hall in Brunswick – Sydney Road Community School,

– in a dilapidated maternity hospital – The Compost – Intentional Community, Thornbury,

– in a polluted and inaccessible creek – Merri Creek Management Committee,

– in an old tipsite on the banks of the Merri Creek, CERES,

– in an old cordial factory in Korumburra – Grow Lightly – Small Growers Food Co-op.

The testament to his work is that so many of the organisations and projects that Gil and his collaborators began are still going decades later.

As a school principal, Gil Freeman was comfortable approaching officialdom and had a knack of bringing grassroots activists and the right people in local and state government together around a purpose.

He built coalitions of stakeholders and patiently created change in committees, building new relationships, opening up minds and spaces for practical action to follow.

“You’ve got to build up a range of people who are prepared to walk with you. If you’re by yourself, you’re really fighting against it”, he observed. 

Gil Freeman loved music, painted water colours, wrote lists, carefully filed documents, was an eloquent storyteller and gave a great speech.

He also had a deeply silly and playful side and was above all dedicated to his lifelong partner and collaborator Meredith (Mem), his three sons and their families. 

In 2023 Gil Freeman was recognised with an Order of Australia for service to conservation and the environment.

The length of his citation, which captures only part of his life’s work, says so much about his irrepressible nature and instinct to serve his community.

Gil Freeman we’ll miss you.

— Chris Ennis

A passion for social justice

About 300 people attended the Gil Freeman Gathering at Korumburra on Anzac Day. Gil had hoped that his death might create another opportunity for people to gather and share hopes and concrete ideas for the future.

Several folk reminded us of Gil’s impact in their lives. Gil’s younger brother Alan, often drafted into babysitting Gil and Meredith’s three boys found the Freeman household to be his second home. Family was an important social unit for Gil.

Jyoti Blencowe reflected on Gil’s impact on her family. Gil once again proved to be the teacher and always took the opportunity to explore his watercolour painting techniques with Jyoti’s two young daughters.

“In the last year, Gil’s influence on our family took a closer turn with the beginning of watercolour lessons for our girls,” she said.

“Again, it started as a small gesture of generosity. Gil sharing his beautiful skill with a paint brush on a cool Sunday morning in his back studio room. The influence of the painting sessions also soon rippled out. They became highly anticipated, and much-loved hours spent captivated in that room.

“From the moment we arrived at Tarnuk (Arawata), walking in the gate and being greeted by Gil waiting for us with a twinkle in his eye. Wondering what he had planned, what magic would be created — both on paper and in life philosophy.

“The girls would listen like Gil was a respected teacher, but also like he had become an extra, beloved grandfather. And they would walk out at the end of a painting session with proud, beaming smiles. Full of hope and possibility. The most precious gift, that Gil gave so selflessly and generously.”

David McRae’s reflections reminded us of the roots of Gil’s passion for social justice: Methodism.

Gil’s father was a Methodist minister, as was Meredith’s, his life-long partner’s father. 

“This explains a great deal about Gil, and not just the way he played football!

“To be a Methodist — it’s there in the word — is to do, to act, to take on. To be methodical. You do and act with ambition. Methodists also run on notions of the value of improvement as a goal. The Catholics have the big ideas, but the Methodists get on with it.

“Some people would say that freedom and choice were the hallmarks of Sydney Road Community School. Incorrect. The model, in Gil’s mind at least, was the School of Barbiana, an intentional community, not Summerhill, a bastion of freedom and licence.

“And — for some students this would have come as a bit of a shock — if you were in Gil’s classes you got taught and you stayed taught. Methodism knows and teaches the value of hard work and perseverance.

“When Methodism began it was a working class religion. As well as energetic it had a strong focus on the practical. It might not have been doctrine, but it was in the vibe that you could learn and probably should know how to fix your lawn mower, yours and other people’s; you could and possibly should learn to weld. That type of thing.

“And that was partly because you could count on someone else to give you a hand. You couldn’t build tennis courts or a church on your own. But you and your mates probably could. It was always communitarian. Socialist. Sometimes capitalised, but with a small ‘s’ always. You did things together, en masse. Methodism always understood the significance, the value and the power of community. Gil Freeman”.

— Graham and Glenyys Romanes

Boundless creative energy

We first got to know Gil and Meredith in 1974 when we returned to Melbourne after teaching in Zambia for two years.

When our children were very young, six families gathered every Friday night at one of our homes to share fruit and vegetables purchased at the Vic Market that day and our home-cooked food for dinner.  We spent the evening talking about education (we were mostly teachers), how to achieve a fairer society and parenting challenges. 

Gil’s hobbies at the time were breeding rabbits for their food and fur and playing the zither. During that period, Gil had moved from teaching at Moreland High School to establishing Sydney Road Community School. True to principle, the Freeman boys also attended Sydney Road Community School for their secondary education.

The Freeman home in Thornbury was on a corner and a centre of activity, The Compost , where friends purchased adjacent homes and developed intensive vegetable gardens according to permaculture principles.  Followers of Bill Mollison, Freemans were among the first to become involved in permaculture in Australia.  The interest in sustainable gardening practice was a cornerstone of their later farming at Arawata, near Korumburra.

At Thornbury we established a food co-operative of dry foods where we all paid a monthly levy and took what your family needed, no weighing out the kilos.  Friends adopted this model and Shared Shed was born in North Carlton, moved to our place in Brunswick and is now in Moonee Ponds – still serving the needs of 12 inner city families 50 years later.

Like the Freemans, we had three young boys and our family were included in many holidays and adventures led by Gil and his family.  We spent weekends at Beremboke where Gil had built a magnificent stone house in the Brisbane Ranges, enjoyed trips to the Flinders Ranges, Cape Barren Island, Flinders Island and Stanley in Tasmania where Bill Mollison was forming a permaculture community.

In later years, Gil and Meredith joined a group of Brunswick bike-riding friends riding many of Victoria’s rail trails and enjoying supported rides across the Gibb River Road (north-west WA), the Gunbarrel Highway (Central Australia) and the Nullarbor, riding from Adelaide to Perth.

What was special about Gil on these trips was his creative energy.  At every stop for a cuppa or rest, he would jump out of the bus with his sketch book and capture beautiful moments and places in watercolour and pen. On the ride from Kalgoorlie to Alice Springs, there were six other travellers inspired by Gil to follow suit.  So more than half the tour group spent every stop drawing and painting together.

Gil continued his painting and drawing of plants at Tarnuk and local places around Korumburra. He has published small books of his illustrations of journeys around Australia.

Gil was a longstanding member of the Australian Labor Party.  In South Gippsland, in the middle of National Party country, Gil would always support the Labor candidate’s campaign and spend many hours on his local booth handing out how-to-vote cards. 

— Graham and Glenyys Romanes

Gil Freeman, VISE, and reform of Victoria’s Higher School Certificate

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gil Freeman played a significant role in the processes that led up to the review and redevelopment of Victoria’s senior secondary curriculum and assessment arrangements, and to changes in the ways in which students gain access to post-school education.

Gil’s belief in the need to make education more inclusive, and in the importance of expanding pathways from school to universities and other post-school education and work options was fundamental. An Act of the Victorian Parliament established the Victorian Institute of Secondary Education (VISE) to oversee the then Victorian senior school certificate (the HSC) during the period 1976-1986, as arrangements for a more widespread review and redevelopment of the senior certificate were put in place.

Under Gil’s leadership of Sydney Road Community School, the SRCS staff negotiated directly with Victorian universities and other post-secondary institutions about selection and entry arrangements for SRCS students. Using this experience, Gil played a leading role in the development and implementation of a new Schools Year 12 and Tertiary Entrance Certificate (referred to as the STC) that came to be a formal strand of the HSC.

Along with Roger Holdsworth and others leading the swag of ‘alternative schools’ that came into existence in Victoria in the 1970s, as well as a small handful of government secondary schools, Gil was involved in the development of course accreditation processes for the STC group.

That accreditation process saw meetings among teachers of the different subject areas in the schools involved discussing the courses they had drafted for implementation in their schools. The teachers reviewed each other’s courses, proposed changes to improve them in several ways to make sure they fitted guidelines and were sufficiently rigorous, and granted accreditation as part of the formal offering under the VISE umbrella.

As a teacher union delegate to the VISE Council, Gil worked for some years towards achievement of these goals, and he was a relentless ambassador as he reported back to his teacher constituency, including the Council of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association (the VSTA) and the STC group, gave progress reports to successive Annual General Meetings of the VSTA and constantly looked for mechanisms through which he could increase the input of teachers to the developing government policy and practice in these areas.

Gil’s dedication to the development of policy and practice in the school-to-work and school -to-further-education areas was inspiring. He constantly sought means of bringing people into the tent and encouraging them on this policy journey. He was significant in laying the groundwork for and fighting for teacher involvement in the VCE reform of the 80s that was subsequently implemented under the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board (VCAB), the successor organisation to VISE, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

— Ross Turner

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