stay with me.
My first word was ‘Why?’ It was also my favourite. And though I didn’t love the play pen, I loved the books that my mother would store in there beside me. I learned to read that way, with Ladybird books, supplemented later with Tarzan and Dr Seuss and Animal Farm. From the beginning we moved around a lot, but Magnetic Island – named by James Cook, who thought it interfered with his compasses – was a place to come back to. When I was two my mother met a man called Brett Assange, a musician and travelling theatre guy who proved a good stepfather to me. A lot of my family’s energy was devoted to the life outdoors. We swam every day and later I fished with my grandfather in the Sandon River or at Shark Beach. I remember rolling down the hills with my mother on her bike, and as we sped along I would stretch out my hands and try to grasp fruit from the trees overhead. We trekked from one place to another, always, for me, with a sense of discovery, the perennial ‘Why?’ never far from my lips. My parents weren’t shy of ‘Why?’ They would lay out the possibilities and let me decide for myself.
By the time I was five I had already lived in many houses. I think we had a sense of North Queensland being a moveable feast: I carried the climate with me and just breathed curiosity. My mother wasn’t a constant activist, but she knew the power of change. Around then, living for a time in Adelaide, we went door-knocking to stop uranium mining. We banned tuna from our house because of the harm the fishing nets did to dolphins, and later, when the blockade forced a change in fishing practices, we rejoiced and felt our own efforts had played a part in producing the result. Another time, in Lismore, my mother was jailed for four days as a result of her participation in a protest to stop logging in rainforests. I’d say it was a gentle but firm education in the arts of political persuasion. We always felt change was possible.
I exhibited my share of cruelty, too. It was a Tom Sawyer kind of childhood in many ways, with long days spent outdoors, learning how to master the environment and conquer danger. I was fond of my magnifying glass and would march through the bush with it. The cruelty was a matter between me and the sugar ants, which trooped across the ground and often found themselves sizzled under my lens. The ants would climb up your trousers and bite you. Worse were the green tree ants, common in Australia among the forests and low-lying places. Not only did they bite, they sprayed a burning fluid from their abdomen onto the wound. There were so many species of ant and none was immune, so far as my infant mind was concerned, from the power of my spying glass. It seemed natural to enhance the power of the sun to punish hostility. The war between five-year-old boys and ants is legendary.
There were others sorts of hostility, too. My parents travelled with a small fold-up theatre – they did shows, little theatricals, later involving puppets – and I suppose they were bohemians. They were against the war and had demonstrated; they’d been in and out of the cities. They were worldly in a way that wasn’t always typical in Queensland, especially among the non-hippy community. My mother had modelled and acted, and together they designed sets and read books. To some people it was no kind of life to live, and I suppose that was my introduction to prejudice. We came back to Magnetic Island one time and got a house up in the hills. The atmosphere was clammy and the heat would make people lethargic; atmosphere is important in Australia, and in many places, creating not only a physical state in people but a mental state as well, and when I think of that house on the island I think of a certain constriction in people that borrows from the weather. Some of our neighbours were constricted in that way, perhaps especially in reaction to my parents’ notions of freedom.
My parents had a gun to deal with snakes. There were snakes in the bath from time to time. One day we came back up the hill to discover the house was on fire. About twenty local people were standing around as the flames licked around the veranda. No one was attempting to put out the fire and suddenly all this ammunition in the house exploded. I remember one of the neighbours laughing and saying we couldn’t stand the heat. It was all very sinister, and the fire brigade took forty minutes to come. In many ways that fire is my first, very big and complicated memory. I remember lights and colours and incidents from before, but this was something else. It involved levels of human complication that would come to fascinate me. The locals seemed to take a certain delight in the idea of pretension and daring getting their comeuppance. I noticed, probably for the first time in my life, how authority could drag its heels to make a point and how bureaucracy could make a stone of the heart. There was something demonic in the way they let ‘nature’ take its course.
So, here was municipal power. And I was moved by it. It might seem invidious to look for sources of character in your life, but it might be counted forgivable in a journalist and essential in an autobiography. Early on, I became fascinated by how things work. As soon as I could handle the tools, I began picking engines apart. I began building rafts. I loved mechanical Lego. When I was six I tried to make a crude metal detector. That was my earliest sense of the world: as of its being a place where you could work things out, show a little scientific curiosity, build something new.
At an early stage I realised there was a social element to all this. I put a gang together, the better to get things done and have fun while doing it. We used to go to this large, defunct slate quarry. There had been a mine there but everything was abandoned: the storage sheds still stood, the hauling equipment and even, inside the sheds, the logbooks and all the paraphernalia of explosive devices and such. We’d go up there frequently. I suppose we saw it as our domain, a place where we could exist independently of authority. The rocks and abandoned sheds were covered in these scurrying lizards – blue-tongued lizards and skinks – and there were sometimes wallabies up there, too. The quarry was surrounded by a bamboo forest and sometimes I would take myself off alone to explore between the thick hollow trees. I remember fighting my way to the centre of it one very hot day. I felt alone but quite powerful in the effort to get through, and, when I made it, I got out my knife and carved my name on a thick chunk of bamboo. I went back there about eight years ago and was surprised to find how easy it was to move through the forest – although it didn’t diminish the power of those memories. My childhood stands out in my mind for its bigness, the vividness of its impressions, and I think that some of my desire to uncover the world’s hidden secrets comes from those early explorations.
I went to well over thirty schools in all. It was just that kind of life, in which consistency was a matter of style and values, not of where you parked your car or how you paid your debts. Later on in my childhood, the peripatetic existence became more hysterical. We were later much more like fugitives, my mother and I. But early on, it was heavenly. And it gave me a sense of meeting new challenges all the time. With mum and Brett, it felt like we were gulping down experience without fear. During that early period, I had a happy childhood, and it was partly to do with the joy of discovery and the certainty that rules were there to be broken.
Within the little gangs I headed up we had our share of children’s wisdom and a whole stack of prejudice. At one time, I think we felt the Italians were a sort of adversary. They had this habit of paving. They’d buy a house with bougainvillea outside, this wonderful blush of colour, and would immediately clear it all and pave the garden and put up Doric columns. I’m ashamed of it now, but I took against this. It seemed important to me then to take a stand against this thing. I was probably the kind of child who was shopping for things to take a stand against. I remember one day my folks were making dinner and found they were short of tomatoes. The Italian neighbours had loads of tomatoes. My mother had asked for some and had been refused, and this got to me. So the next day I began digging a tunnel from our garden to theirs. I got some of my little gang involved, bringing shovels and candles to get the job done. It was hard work, but we got under the fence in secret and came away with two baskets of tomatoes. I handed one of them to my mother and she had this grin. We waited to see what would happen, and what happened was that two policemen quickly turned up at the door and they, too, were grinning. The policeman just stood there rocking on their heels. It was my first run-in with the law. We handed back one basket of tomatoes, and the scandal reverberated. But I was happy that I still had the second basket of tomatoes hidden.
I don’t know if I was eccentric or whatever, but I know I was single-minded. They sent me to some kind of Steiner-style school where it was all about expressing yourself. There was a scooter, I remember, and an obnoxious little girl who wouldn’t share. In accordance with the school’s philosophy, I decided to express