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MAGNETIC ISLAND

For most people, childhood is a climate. In my case, it is perfectly hot and humid with nothing above us but blue sky. What I recall is a feeling on the skin and the cool nights of the tropical savannah. I was born in Townsville in North Queensland, Australia, where the trees and the bush crowded down to the sea and you looked over to Magnetic Island. In the summer the rains came and we were always ready for floods. It was beautiful, actually. Heat like that goes down into the bones and never leaves you.

The people of Townsville lived in suburban housing, many of them living the ‘Australian dream’ of a small house and car. In the late 1960s there was an army base nearby. The population was about 80,000 and the local economy dealt in wool and sugar, or in minerals and timber from the region. For some reason there were a lot of Italians, many of them working on the cane farms, and I remember the closed sense of community that existed among them. Italian was the second most spoken language. It must have been a conformist kind of place in many ways, filled with quietly industrious people growing bored in the constant sunshine. You could say it was a distant province in a country that was itself a distant province of the world. That would describe how it seemed to my mother’s generation. By 1970, she was keen to see the world, or at least to see it changed.

That year my mother bought a motorbike. She was a bright and creative girl who loved to paint, so quite soon, aged eighteen, reeling from the mediocrity of her schooldays, Christine hopped on her bike and drove the 2,000 miles to Sydney. She was a country girl, though, and she later told me Sydney was too much. But life was happening right in front of her, as it tends in all our cases to do. She was standing one day on the corner of Oxford Street and Glenmore Road in Paddington, just opposite the Victoria Army Barracks, when she saw a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration slide past her like a modern history tableau. Though she didn’t understand much about it, my mother wanted to join this great tide of feeling. As she stood there, what she remembers as a gentle voice appeared at her ear. It belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old, cultured guy with a moustache. He asked her if she was with anyone and when she said ‘no’ he took her hand.

About 60,000 Australians were involved in the war in Vietnam. It turned out to be the longest conflict they’d ever got involved in: 500 men lost their lives and 3,000 were wounded. In May 1970, around the time my parents met, the anti-war demonstrations were at their height in Australia; about 200,000 people marched in the major cities, some of them being arrested, as the law then allowed, for not having a permit to hand out leaflets. The 1970s are now routinely called ‘the decade of protest’ in Australia (Gay Pride happened in Sydney in 1973) and my parents – the bright young creative girl and the cultured demonstrator who walked into her life – were dyed-in-the-wool protestors. There was something theatrical about it, a conservative society finding its voice, and I must have taken it in with my mother’s milk, the idea that non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by. I believe I was conceived in that spirit.

Back in Townsville on 3 July 1971, my mother was taken to the Basel Hospital, and I was born around three in the afternoon. She says I was round, dark-haired, loud, with the look of an Eskimo.

It would be safe to say that Christine, my mother, has – and had then – a natural disinclination towards doing what she was told, and I soon picked it up. My grandmother remembers my sense of dreamy wonderment, and I’m not in a position to argue with her, though it seems reasonable to assume I might have been dreamily wondering at an early age what was happening at the Townsville army base. In any case, my grandmother rocked me to haunting Greek melodies recorded by Maria Farandouri and I quieted down. When I was a few months old my mother moved us to a cottage on Magnetic Island, to a house with mango and eucalyptus trees outside the windows.

Forgive me for going all Proustian, but I believe my mother bred a sensualist in me, and, somewhere in my mind’s eye, I can see the many patterned scarves she hung over the bassinette. The light would pass through them, casting shapes over my hands and legs. When I had grown just a little, my mother took me around in a sling or in a backpack that I loved and soon took to calling Peck Peck. Early childhood is so important, I think. It gives you all your capacity for wonder. My mother had a gift for love and for making life no less interesting than it was. You can’t take that for granted. Some people press their children into dullness before they’ve even opened their mouths. And there’s probably something to be said for Magnetic Island itself at that time: it was a freedom-haunted place, a beautiful Eden of about a thousand inhabitants, where people who didn’t fit in any place else came to live. It might have been a lush and forgotten hippy republic, and I can’t discount its early influence; like hoop pines or cabbage palms, a child will tend to hang as he grows, and something of Magnetic Island would 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 myself without hindrance, so I hit the girl over the head with a hammer. This caused a giant fuss, of course, and I had to leave, although the girl was fine.

We just kept moving. Lismore, about 130 miles from Brisbane, is the place I associate more with my schooldays. You could say Lismore was the centre of the counter-culture in Australia, and it later became a Mecca for backpackers, a place where people seeking an alternative lifestyle came to roost. The second Aquarius Festival, the Aussie Woodstock, was held around Nimbin in 1973, and many people stayed on and set up co-operatives. My parents ran a puppet theatre. Over those years, there was a sense of fight-back against corporate agencies. Dairy farming was under threat from the big company Norco, and the Australian rainforest, famous at one time as the ‘Big Scrub’, was completely cleared in a way that left a scar on the land. My people cared about these things and I, in turn, came to care, too. School was at the local village of Goolmangar. I liked the idea of people, especially men, who could stand up for themselves and I was nurtured in this by a very excellent teacher called Mr King. In my view, even then, a lot of teachers were prissy, but this guy was strong in a way that seems important. He was this very competent individual and I felt safe with him. I think so much of my personality comes from what you might call congenital temperament, but experience plays its part, and I clung to the idea of manly competence as represented by this one good teacher. But, generally, I found school to be an agony of boredom. I wasn’t the brightest person ever, but I was hungry for learning and facts, and the system just moved so slowly. I remember praying to God to make things move more quickly. I said, ‘I don’t think there’s a God, but, if there is, I’ll trade you two of my little fingers just to make this whole school thing go faster.’

At the same time I had this interest in generating children’s lore, the kind of information, the kind of opinion, that passes for wisdom among the very young. I suppose I was good at it, creating believable factoids that worked their magic on my peers. I loved passing on my discoveries to them, like the time I maintained, quite convincingly, that rolling in the dirt was the perfect way to stop bleeding. I had this view that adults were the gods on earth, my mother the Supreme Being, but naturally I began to see that adults were fallible. Real life kind of begins at that point, when you see how adults in responsible positions are merely powerful and not necessarily in the right. It’s the big lesson. I was able to see failures in compassion and sometimes I saw brutality. Australia was still quite provincial then, before the Internet, before cheap air travel, and you would be caned at school for misdemeanours. Going to so many schools, I was always trying to establish myself in a new pecking order. And at the same time I was trying to abolish the pecking order altogether. Brutality crept in, and so did injustice and prejudice: at times I was a font of transgression, and that was a difficult thing to be in rural Australia back then. In one of my schools, I was dragged up to the Principal’s office on an unknown charge and was beaten with a cane for some mysterious ‘indiscretion’. It later transpired that there had been a theft and my peers had pinned it on me.

I was drawn to books. Books and magnets. My grand-father remembers me coming to summer school with a bag of books, one of them a giant biography of Albert Einstein. That could’ve got me hated, I suppose, but if you’re not in the habit of thinking like that, you never will. There was just this lovely confluence, for me, between the physical world and the life of the mind, and I dived into both at that age. And you could say it has coloured everything I’ve done since then. Everything. My sense of computers and my sense of justice and my view of authority. It was all there during this period in Goolmangar and I felt the force of my own personality coming out.

I had these ethical adventures in my childhood and they made me bigger. One time there was an anti-war rally and my parents had commissioned themselves to create a piece of live street theatre especially for it. Mum made a Styrofoam M16 rifle, painted black with a shoulder strap. My stepfather was dressed in fatigues from the army surplus place, and we went to the butcher and ordered two pints of blood. I remember the strange looks we got. We drenched my stepfather in the blood and later that day he got arrested because of the fake gun. Later, my mother helped this guy who was engaged in guerrilla scientific studies of the nuclear test site at Maralinga in the Australian desert, where, with the agreement of the Australians, the British had conducted both ‘major’ and ‘minor’ tests of nuclear weapons between 1952 and 1963. The ‘minor’ tests, in which nuclear bombs were set alight, or blown up in amongst conventional explosives, or placed on aeroplanes that were deliberately crashed, were actually far worse than had been publically acknowledged, scattering radiation over a wide area. The British and the Australian governments, however, denied that there had been, or was, any danger to servicemen or to the Aboriginals that lived in the area. This turned out to be a lie, although they would only admit it years later. So this friend of my mother was searching for the truth, and I remember, one night, we had just come from there and were driving along a highway with this guy at about two in the morning. The guy noticed we were being followed, so we quickly dropped him off, then, further down the road, my mum and I were pulled over by the federal police. The policeman told her she might be described as an unfit mother, out with a child at 2 a.m. He told her she should stay out of politics. And she did after that. But I didn’t.

School was a problem, though. Even Mr King, who taught me all sorts of things and was a masculine role model, couldn’t make up for this lingering sense of waste that attached itself to school in my eyes. Perhaps I was just bred to hate the system and this was the system. I started wearing my hair long in spite of injunctions not to. Weirdly, I’ve always been ridiculed or judged on account of my hair, and it started early. My parents advised me to cut my blond mop, just to make it easier for me, but I wouldn’t do it and I thrived on a kind of defiance. Before long I was refusing to tie my shoelaces in the normal way. I devised this elaborate system of wrapping the laces round the ankle and tying with a knot rather than a bow, and I began teaching this method to the other kids. Then I decided to dispense with shoes altogether and the teachers considered this to be a crime. I was often the new boy in school. So many times: the new boy. And I’d make my mark with these acts of defiance. We had no TV at home. There was hardly any money. We went to markets sometimes to scavenge for cabbages. I was happy with all this; it was part of the colour of life; it was part of doing things your own way. Only during one period of being a teenager was I ever status-conscious. I didn’t want my mother dropping me outside school in an old crap car. But that was an aberration and it didn’t last.

We had a feeling for animals. People had a sense of us, usually a disparaging sense of us, as hippies, but really we were just nature-lovers and natural non-conformists. At one time we kept chicks that gave us eggs, and three goats for milk. Our beloved dog Poss had to vie for attention with a veritable travelling menagerie comprising a donkey, a pony, a litter of mice – which my mother directed in candle-lit ‘shows’ – and at a cottage we once lived at on a pineapple farm our lives were taken over by possums. A large grey bird called a brolga took up residence, too. There was a sense that we were always seeking refuge from modern life. I was deeply invested, I now see, in trying to grow into a system of thinking about the relation between people and things. Years later I would study quantum mechanics and begin to see, but then I just grappled with the world on offer, my parents’ world, though I lost myself very happily for a time in keeping my own hive of bees.

My mother and stepfather split up when I was nine. It didn’t seem so devastating at the time, but it represents, with the benefit of hindsight, the end of a relatively paradisical period in my life. As I said, there had been a Tom Sawyer feeling at the centre of my young years, a beautiful world of discovery, and the adventures of the near future would be altogether darker. Many of us see the safe environs of early childhood in a halo of light, and, for me, despite our rapid coming and going, our many houses and my hatred of school, those years were lived in a state of natural illumination. The world was fresh and the ocean was clear and the air smelled of the white gum tree. But human nature is more complicated, of course, than its physical setting, and life would not be life if it didn’t cede to dark complications. Brett had his own struggles and, eventually, my mother couldn’t cope with him any more, so we moved to a flat above a shop-front in Lismore that my mother shared with the Nomad Theatre Company. Mum often earned money as a face painter at markets, and later on my younger half-brother and I would trundle along. For a while I took up a mouth organ and played the pre-adolescent blues.

My mother and I had tried to live respectably in town, but we were about to embark on a peripatetic life largely fuelled by anxiety, drifting once more down the Mississippi. We would see a lot of Australia over the next few years – we’d seen a certain amount already – but for at least five years we felt pursued, and I suppose those years, as much as the happy years before, shaped the kind of person I was to become in the future. Our life with Brett had brought sunshine and art, music and nature, into our everyday experience. Brett’s theatre productions, the way they could be rolled out and packed up in no time at all, was good preparation for WikiLeaks, but the next part, the part involving a man called Leif Meynell, would show us what it was like to be pursued by shadowy forces. He was my first tail.