Vale Bernhard “Bernie” Gerlinger

Normally we do not celebrate the lives of non-mariners on these pages, so Bernie Gerlinger, who died last week, and was certainly not a sailor, is a special case. Bernie was in fact a banker and financier and a very good one at that.

The reason I have saluted him and celebrated his life here is that he was very important to Baird Publications for nearly thirty years from 1985. He was a good man and a good friend.

I first met Bernie in 1985 when he was general manager of the venture capital company BLE Capital, which was a subsidiary of the Westpac Bank.  Bernie took a punt on us and BLE Capital invested some very welcome funds in our company.

Rather amazingly, Bernie returned to us many years later, after he finally retired from his “real” jobs, and became our consulting credit controller. During that time I had many delightful chats with him about politics, investment, and business, among many other subjects. Despite my distractions, he also successfully kept our debtors under control.

As well as having faith in Baird Publications, Bernie introduced us to his wife Marjorie when we were looking for an accountant. Marjorie soon joined us and we also enjoyed and greatly valued a thirty-year relationship with her, initially as our accountant and, later, as our very successful production manager and technical troubleshooter. Marjorie’s introduction was an unexpected bonus that came from knowing Bernie.

Bernie, with his parents and younger sister, emigrated to Melbourne from Germany in 1957, when he was twelve. He obviously adapted well to a new country, language, and lifestyle as he progressed successfully through secondary school and university to gain a commerce/accounting degree. That led him to banking and his first job with the National Australia Bank. He then had a number of years at International Harvester Australia as Group Treasurer, which was where he met Marjorie, a recent immigrant from New Zealand.

He then developed through the merchant banking and corporate finance areas until joining BLE as general manager while at the same time holding a director’s role with an Industry Technology Company.

All the while he gained a reputation for sensible, reliable, and practical advice and decisions. He was direct and very honest, a very “straight shooter”.

Following the near demise of Westpac in 1993, Bernie moved on and found his true calling as CEO of Circle Credit Union doing what he called “real banking”. He remained in that role for 18 years, later returning as a non-executive director for a further eight years. There he was able to help thousands of people with their finances. That consumer market was a big change from the high-powered world of corporate finance that he was used to.

Simultaneously, he managed to create two excellent sons who have produced five much loved grandchildren between them. He and Marjorie were very enthusiastic and valued Rotarians for thirty years and, between them, held almost every imaginable role in that organisation. Among those were the welcoming, hosting, and assisting of Rotary scholarship teenagers from all over the world – not always an easy job. He also found time to be a model railway obsessive, global traveller, and lover of fine red wine. As he always said: “Life’s too short to drink bad wine”.

In 2019 Marjorie and Bernie moved north from Melbourne to the Queensland Gold Coast. They had not long settled in when Bernie, unfortunately, was struck by the cancer that eventually killed him.

Bernie’s funeral which we, like many people from Australia, Germany and beyond, attended virtually, thanks to Covid, was a fitting reminder of Bernie’s influence on and importance to so many people. He was an exceptionally good man who will be very sadly missed by all who knew him.