Читать книгу Julian Assange - Julian Assange - Страница 10

3

FLIGHT

My mother’s people came to Australia from Scotland in 1856. The head of the clan was James Mitchell, a tenant farmer from Dumfries, who lived at the same time as the radical Scots poet Robert Burns, another farmer. Burns protested all his life against injustice and tyranny, penning a universal ‘Marseillaise’ to the human spirit, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. The poet died in poverty in Dumfries just as my kinsman Mitchell was growing up, and he would have understood the Mitchell family’s wish to emigrate. Like him, they were Protestants subject to the laws of the established Church of Scotland, and life was hard for them in the soggy fields.

Hugh Mitchell, with Anne Hamilton and five children, set himself up as a dairy farmer in New South Wales, at Bryans Gap, near Tenterfield. He was well known in the New England district, and died at the age of eighty-four, leaving an estate of £121 and a son, James, just like him, who in time took up a freehold on land at Barney Downs. James was an able horseman and he served as a volunteer in the Boer War. On 2 June 1900, he wrote a letter to his son Albert from Bulawayo in Rhodesia, telling of the hard time he was experiencing in the regiment and saying how frustrated he was not to find himself fighting at the Front. This complaint – the complaint of many a serving soldier – was answered by fate, who saw to it that eight weeks later he was part of a garrison in the Transvaal that came under a heavy Boer barrage, and James Mitchell, a squad sergeant-major, died of wounds. The man who buried him wrote a letter home. ‘It was a sad duty for us,’ he wrote, ‘the saddest I have seen in South Africa . . . This war is a sad, cruel business.’ Other ancestors of mine, on my father’s side, the Kellys and the Greers, owned the Imperial Hotel at Nundle, after coming from Ireland. My paternal great-grandfather, James Greer Kelly, had four sons who were brilliant sportsmen, well known for their prowess at cricket and football. He also had a daughter, Miriam Kelly, my grandmother, who came to Sydney and married a man called Shipton, and together they had my father.

Our early families pass on life to us, as a matter of science, but do they also pass on their ideas? I can’t claim to know them, but I can see that this Celtic journey they made for goods and gear, for plots and for gold, also brought with it the yearning for a new world. Some of them on my mother’s side suffered for their idealism, in Gallipoli and elsewhere. My great-grandfather, Alfred Hawkins, was on the Japanese prison ship, the Montevideo Maru, when it was sunk by a US submarine in 1942. It was, I believe, our family’s first known experience of friendly fire. And not just our family: 1,051 Australian soldiers and civilians went down about sixty miles off Luzon in the Philippines, and the wreck was never recovered. A few years ago, there was one surviving witness, a Japanese sailor, who recalled the terrible cries of the Australians as the ship sank. Others, he said, sang the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. History doesn’t record where my kinsman was on the ship that night, and whether Alfred Hawkins was crying or singing, but it should be noted that the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was written by that famous Scottish neighbour of ours, Robert Burns.

My own father was missing from my life, and only became part of it again when I was grown up. I’ll come to that. But it meant that Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. Brett was one of those cool 1970s people who were into guitars and everything that went with the music scene. I’ve got his name – Assange – an unusual one, which comes from Mr Sang, or ah-sang in Cantonese: his great-great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate. He ended up on Thursday Island and married a local girl and moved to Queensland. The name was Europeanised to escape the rampant discrimination against the Chinese.

When I look back to these people, I see a group of families who moved around Australia from crisis to comfort, and mother’s story, and mine, was little different. My mother divorced Brett Assange when I was nine. He had been good to me, and was good in general, but not so good to himself, and the end of their relationship represents the end of a kind of innocence in my life.

My stepfather’s place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell. My mother met him as a result of some cartooning work she was doing for Northern Rivers College of Education. I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm, which at the time I considered as proof that he was born in Australia in the early 1960s, though these inoculations might have been common elsewhere as well. From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us.

I was opposed to him from the start. Perhaps that’s normal, for a boy to resist a man like that, or any man, in fact, who appears to be usurping his father or stepfather. Leif didn’t live with us, though my mother must have been besotted with him at first. But whatever her feeling for him was, it didn’t last. She would see him off, but he had this ability to turn up and pretend it was otherwise. Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him. We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realisation that he had found us. He’d suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn’t about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.

We had moved again, in about 1980, to this house on a nice stretch of the northern coast of New South Wales, about fourteen miles inland. It was an avocado and banana plantation gone to seed and we rented this property. I remember tying my kite to one of the fence-posts and watching the green light coming through the banana leaves. It was all a bit like a gothic novel set in the tropics, and Leif, I suppose, was Heathcliff in shorts and thongs, coming back like some dark force. My mother became pregnant by him and, seeing the possible impact of my opposition, he tried at first to be reasonable, pointing out that he was now the father of my brother and that my mother wanted him around. ‘But if you ever don’t want me around,’ he said, ‘then I’ll leave immediately.’ He wanted to stay with us, and did, for a time, but I was conscious of wanting to look after my mother and the baby. She had mastitis, and I nursed her through a fever. I nursed her with orange juice. It was very dark around that house at night, with the moon lighting the way, and there was this tremendous feeling of stillness and isolation.

My mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn’t my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother’s father and everything. But a time came, at that plantation house, when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn’t known adults could lie. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened.

Nomadism suits some people; it suits some people’s situations. We just kept moving because that’s what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find a house there. Simple as that. Except that the moving in these years, because of Leif, had a degree of hysteria attached, and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear. It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called ‘The Family’. On reflection, I can now see that his obsessional nature derived from that, as well as his egocentricity and his dark sense of control.

The Family was founded by Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the mid-1960s. It started in the mountains north of Melbourne, where they meditated, had meetings and sessions where they used LSD. The basic notion was that Anne happened to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but with elements of Eastern philosophy thrown in, such that her followers beheld a karmic deity obsessed with cleansing their souls. Anne prophesied the end of the world, arguing, quite comically, though not to her, that only the people in the Dandenong Ranges of mountains east of Melbourne would survive. Anne and her husband got rich on the collections that were taken at Thursday meetings. Although the sect was never very large, they doted on her blue aura (she had a lighting system installed to keep her ever-blue), and many of them were middle-class doctors who had grown dependent. The principal power of the sect was based on a network of influence among its members. They were masonic in this way and could call on favours from high places, which explained, to us, why Leif was always able to track us down.

Leif’s real surname was Hamilton. He was one of those who had been ‘adopted’ by The Family. Eventually, Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her husband would be convicted of falsifying adoption papers but at their height they were able to brainwash the authorities. The use of LSD meant that many of the sect members felt they had enjoyed revelations, so were happy to act as ‘aunties’ when it came to Hamilton-Byrne’s child-acquiring mania. At one point, The Family had acquired as many as twenty-eight children. There were little altars to Anne Hamilton-Byrne all over the house and each child was given a personal photograph of her, as if she was Mao. The cult was obsessed with sex and with cleanliness. Anne herself had, it seems, an insane kind of vanity. She hated ugly or fat people and had recourse to cosmetic surgery.

Leif Meynell was part of that cult. And everything he did relating to us was informed by his association with The Family. At one point, running from him, we were living in the Adelaide Hills and we had to move again, this time to Perth in Western Australia. We went to Freemantle, which is now a cool suburb, but then it was mainly an industrial dockyard area. We had a neighbour who knew all about our situation, and, one day, she came back from the milk bar to tell us that Leif Meynell had been in the street. We had to flee. We ended up that time at a house in the Patch, outside Melbourne, on a long narrow plot that slumped down towards a creek at the bottom of the hill. Once I found a dead sheep in this creek, stinking and bloated. I walked backwards and forwards across the creek, using its back as a kind of bridge. It was a time, perhaps, when all sorts of extraordinary things could come to seem pretty normal. It was a cold winter, the puddles freezing over, and my footprints in the mud would be overlain by a layer of ice. They appeared like the steps of a man on the moon preserved under glass. I had to chop wood and stoke a fire every morning to heat the water that passed through coils in the chimney. My main recreation then was bees that I kept outside the house. Every morning I attended to them and quietly watched as they went about their business.

Bees have a way of dealing with predators. They keep moving and they always die away from the hive. I’m sure the isolation I mentioned before, the sense you get in some parts of Australia that civilisation is elsewhere, caused these cults to thrive. In that farming community, they had a strange attitude towards animals, and there was a satanic vibe thereabouts. I even remember a satanic-ritual shop run by a figure called Kerry Calkin. In those parts, it was all fairly pedestrian, but frightening nonetheless. The atmosphere was like Lord of the Flies, and our lives at the time were filled with a combination of paranoia and guilt.

It was becoming so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. We got some intelligence that Leif was drawing close; they told us he was back near us in the hills outside Melbourne. My brother and I showed a lot of resistance that final time: we just couldn’t bear the idea of grabbing our things again and dashing for the door. As a bribe, my mother and I told my little brother he could take his prized rooster, a Rhode Island Red, a very tall, proud, strong-looking bird, and also an extremely loud one. To match that, I insisted on taking my two-storey beehive. Picture the scene: a by-now hysterical mother and her two children, along with the pride of their menagerie, stuffed into a regular station wagon and heading up the dirt track.

I had become something of an expert on beekeeping. Also an expert on how to transport them from one place to another. You have to overlay the entrance to the hive with sheets of newspaper. The bees will eventually eat their way through the paper, but, if you judge it right, they won’t get through until you’ve reached your destination. We’re driving from Melbourne to Brisbane and the kids are sleeping in the car and the bees are quietly buzzing in their hive. The sun begins to come up and the rooster wants to alert the world, but I’ve got it by the throat, and I feel this tremble, this spirit of ‘Good morning’, and all the while I can hear the bees beginning to get angry as they munch through the paper. ‘Come on!’ I’m saying to my mother, and the entire scene is a nightmare. ‘These bees are going to get through the paper and they’re vindictive!’

Eventually, we’re desperately trying to find a grassy field to let the bees out for a breather and the rooster out for a shit. And the bees are buzzing more and more and the smell of honey and wax is starting to fill the car and the rooster is crowing and we stop the car by a huge church. The rooster jumps out and dashes off, and I open the back of the station wagon and tell everybody to stand back as I prepare to rip off the tape to the entrance of the hive and let them out. The bees are raging. They need to blame something, hopefully something fluffy and brown. Obviously, they attack the rooster, and I’m secretly quite pleased. The thing is running across the field with a swarm of bees attacking its nether regions. And this goes on every day and every night until finally we reach Brisbane. There’s no God, and no sense of universal justice, either, but there is nature’s own sweet irony. Not long after we set up in Brisbane, I came out one day to see a row of cane toads, about six or seven of them, big and fat, venomous, repulsive, with bloated poison sacks on their backs, and they were sitting right there eating my bees as they came out of the hive. The Aboriginals are known to dry those poison sacks and smoke them to get high. But there was no pleasure in them for me. I had learned my final lesson in how to survive Australia: build your hives a good few feet off the ground as you travel north.

On the run, we learned a little bushcraft. We learned how to get by on very little money and not enough normality. Being unsettled was our normality and we became good at it. There was an Australian traveller called Nat Buchanan (‘Old Bluey’), who travelled light and had a gift for exploring Australia and making something of his independence. A book written by his great-granddaughter Bobbie Buchanan, In the Tracks of Old Bluey, reveals a man who knew Queensland, a man who knew how to co-exist with animals and humans, a man whose temperament led him to show courage when faced with life’s obstacles. Buchanan was a nomad of Irish stock, just like us, and, also like us, he passed his habits on to his children. Difference is, I suppose, that while Old Bluey was chasing nature and finding himself, we were being chased by a force of nature we could barely contend with, and getting lost. Nat was a pioneer, the first man, as Bobbie wrote, ‘to cross the Barkly Tablelands from east to west and first to take a large herd of breeding cattle from Queensland to the Top End of the Northern Territory’. Nat died in 1901, more than eighty years before my mother, my brother and I were driving as fugitives past the Tanami Desert. ‘Nat was a colourful, if enigmatic character,’ his relative’s book says, ‘whose story is quite remarkable and needs no exaggeration.’

My mother changed her name. We worked out that Leif must have had contacts within the social security administration – that was how The Family is thought to have worked – so it seemed best to change the names that would be held inside the government computer system. But he was quite a gifted talker and would get friends to supply him with information about our whereabouts and he would always catch up. It was a private investigator who eventually came and told us about his close relationship with the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult. We were living in Fern Tree Gully, and I was now sixteen years old. We’d come to the end of the road. Also, I was feeling almost a man myself and was ready to front-up to him. Masculinity and its discontents could be addressed here, but let’s just say I knew I could waste him and he appeared to know it, too. He was lurking round the bounds of the house and I walked over and told him to fuck off. It was the first and the last time, and something in the way I said it ensured that we would never see him again. He would push, for a time, for access to my brother, but his history spoke against him and he was gone.

Truth be told, my mind was in other places for much of the time Leif was chasing us back and forth across Australia. I had always liked taking machines and pulling them apart and rebuilding them. It was, I suppose, a technical instinct, and I was keen not just to push appliances around or switch them on but to understand them. After the departure of Brett the first period of my life was over and I was ready for some heady advancement. I noticed, in a shop in Lismore, a fascinating new machine that instantly spoke to me of something new. It stood in the window: the Commodore 64 computer.

To modern eyes that computer looks laughably primitive, a chunky, boxy mass of grey plastic that ran on disks more than twice the size of the phone in my pocket with less than one-hundred-thousandth of the capacity. You could look at it now and say that it resembled a cast-off from a Star Trek set, a childish impression of what the future might look like. But the thing is, to someone like me in a small town in Australia, this really was the future, and I wanted to understand it.

By the time I was sixteen, the computer had become my consciousness. It was the beginning of a new life. Not that the old life didn’t have sway – it did, and still does – but in some way it was the computer I spoke with, or spoke through, reaching past all local concerns to an infinity point where selfhood dissolves into history. Later on, the question of selfhood, or my selfhood, would come to obsess many sections of the press. Was I arrogant or crazy, careless or manipulative, touchy or thin-skinned or tyrannical? But the self they were talking about was in their heads. It was part of their fantasy. I was trying to do my work under pressure and wasn’t much aware of myself at all, not in the sense they mean. People nowadays love the play of selfhood: they think everything is a soap opera. But I mean what I say when I say my ‘self’ lies somewhere behind me: with a computer, and a lifetime’s project, you no longer find yourself chasing from pillar to post the small business of yourself. You disappear into something larger and you serve it as best you can.

Maybe it was a generational thing. And some don’t get it. They want to stuff you into their old fictional categories: of being Billy the Kid or Dr No, of being Robin Hood or Dr Strangelove. But I believe a generation came of age in the late 1980s that didn’t think like that. We were weaned on computers, and we didn’t reckon on ‘selfhood’: we reckoned on ‘us’, and, if at all possible, ‘us and them’. When it comes to computers, the cliché was of a geek in a bedroom who was disconnected. In fact, it was the kids watching TV that were disconnected, passive, solitary. We might have been up all night, but the best of us were busy making what we were watching.

To know what your thoughts really are – to grow beyond them, into the thoughts of others, a very sweet oblivion – is about placing a large part of your mind into the space of your computer. Without being grandiose about it, I would say this constituted not only a new way of being in the world, but a new way of being in your own skin. People would always have trouble with it, wishing us, even now, to fulfil the old remits of the ego. But we learned at a young age how commitment works in the computer age: it works by transfusing your lifeblood to an intelligence system dependent on you, and on whom you are dependent. It used to be science fiction, but now it is everyday reality, and I guess I will always seem alien to many people, because I was part of a generation that dug down into our machines, asking them to help us fight for justice in ways that would fox the old guard, even the protest element of the old guard, such as my parents, who didn’t know how to break the patterns of power and corruption that kept the world unfair.

Computers provided a positive space in a negative field: they showed us we could start again, against ‘selfhood’, against ‘society’, building something less flawed and less corrupt in these fresh pastures of code. One day we knew they would change the world, and they did. The old guard would come with its name-calling and its media, its embedded sense of ‘national interests’ and patriotism, its accusations of betrayal, but we always knew the world was more modern than they realised. Cairo was waiting. Tunisia was waiting. We were all waiting for the day when our technology would allow an increasing universality of freedom. In the future, power would not come from the barrel of a gun but from communications, and people would know themselves not by the imprimatur of a small and powerful coterie, but by the way they could disappear into a social network with huge political potential.

That was me at the age of sixteen. I was giving myself to my computer. I was testing my sense of the natural world I’d grown up in, all that bright sunlight and leafy shade, all those stars and bees. The years of mystery and human complication went into the computer, too: in some ways I would always be answering the parables of my childhood, from Vietnam protests to cultish surveillance, and that’s as close as I can get to the truth. You have to have a self in order to lose it – or use it – and I’m sure the work I have done at WikiLeaks bears the ghostly imprint of my younger years. I say ghostly, because that is how it appears. The work is haunted with first principles and early experiences and that is how it goes.

This is the story of a person who came in time to do a piece of work. The work made a difference in the world. But the story did not begin with the work: the work began with the story. This is why I have taken you back to the wilderness of early childhood, for we both – the work and I – began in those perfect glades of unknowing. At the age of sixteen, I sat at my computer and began to leave everything behind. There were desks, old socks, piles of computer disks and half-eaten sandwiches. The computer and I were one: into the night we went in search of newness. The next phase of life, the phase that included code-breaking and hacking, would indeed prove to be the link that made possible the future we had hoped for. Soon I was wandering inside the computer, inside the inner circle of a network in which hundreds of thousands of computers lived in sync with one another, and there I was, trying to train myself to think in the computers’ own language. New life was burning within me, and within the others I met as I walked. I’m sure my face glowed blue in the bedroom of our final house, in the middle of the trees, as the lure of a brand new discovery went far into the night. It seemed as if justice itself might live on the other side of a flashing cursor.