I was granted bail on the 14th only to be told that the Swedish authorities had appealed against the decision and that I would have to be sent back to Wandsworth. It was hard to take, having to leave my friends and supporters behind once again, having to leave the talking to my lawyers, having to sit inside the prison van once more as it crawled through the media scrum. It was hard to enter my cell once more and hear the door shut behind me. But as I had told my mother before the hearing, my convictions were unfaltering and my ideals were not shaken by my circumstances.
After two more nights in jail I was back in court, the High Court this time, on 16 December. Those two days in court became about technical requirements. I have nothing profound to say about the judge, except to suggest that he behaved throughout as if there was a correspondent from the Times perched on his shoulder. It was hard otherwise to see why he reckoned my bail should be so high and my tagging so severe. In his mind I was some kind of shadowy, movie-style kingpin, likely to disappear at any minute in a puff of smoke, a souped-up helicopter, or a hail of laser-fire. In fact, my circumstances were more ordinary than he could have known. I had no home and no car, I had hardly any possessions, and a bag of phones. He just didn’t get it, and meted out punishment as though it might be pre-emptive. I had no charge against me and was wanted for questioning in a country whose motives I presently had no reason politically to trust. That was it.
Finally, the money raised for bail by my supporters came through, and the Swedish appeal was rejected. I was about to be free. How long that freedom would last was questionable. I was to be kept under a kind of house arrest at the home of a supporter in Norfolk pending the extradition hearing in February. But at the High Court the moment was for jubilation. In a private way, I felt the time in jail had been traumatic, emboldening and instructive; I finally saw the size and the scale of what WikiLeaks was doing. The experience sent me reeling back into my own past, and it confirmed the future. We were now officially up against the power of the old order, up against its assumptions, up against its power to silence people, up against its fears.
I appeared on the steps of the court just before 6 p.m. This would be good for the live feed to the evening news. My lawyers beside me, I immediately heard the cheers and saw a mob of photographers and journalists. It was dark but the whole scene was bright with camera flashes. Such a lot of people, and you couldn’t see beyond about ten feet because of the dark and because of the snow that was falling heavily. I stood there, and everything eventually quieted down, and I thought of what to say. I had a lot of people to thank and, in a way, while it was a time for celebration I was also thinking of those men and women around the world still in jail, still in solitary confinement, ignored by the media, with no one to put up bail money and with no prospect of release.
Doesn’t snow have a way of softening things, of calming the rush of life and muffling the sound? I definitely thought so as I stood there and clarity came. The snow was backlit with hundreds of cameras flashing. I just looked into it for a few seconds and it occurred to me on the steps of the court that I had travelled a very long way to see such snow.
2
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