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,