Moo Ink

2006-10-13T13:23:00.000+10:00

NEW YORK KIND OF GAL - Kristy Hinze

2006-10-13T12:32:00.000+10:00

STAND outside 111 Fifth Avenue in New York City for even the briefest moment, and you’ll notice something extremely peculiar.

There, cavorting on the freckled sidewalk abutting one of the world’s most famous thoroughfares, you will find an inordinate number of very, very attractive people. You will witness beautiful men and women taking each other’s pictures with their mobile phones, hopping about like excited schoolchildren, smoking cigarettes, powdering noses and flirting.

Number 111 may be between 18th and 19th streets in Manhattan, part of the urban borough formerly known as “the photo district” for its concentration of fashion houses, camera equipment retailers and film development laboratories. But that doesn’t fully explain this gathering of curves and searing eyes and lantern jaws. This is a rash, a herd, a plague of world-class looks on a tiny apron of concrete.

What’s going on?

It all makes sense when you learn that the 9th floor of the delightfully refurbished Edwardian office block at 111 Fifth Avenue is home to the Ford Models agency. Ford. Perhaps the planet’s most prestigious crucible of beauty. Professional long-time home to Jerry Hall and Christie Brinkley. The ultimate millennial dream factory for young women and not a few young men. A glamour epicentre. Possibly the exact longitude and latitude of “cool” on Earth.

Is it any wonder, then, that all that gorgeousness should sporadically spill down to ground level and gather in a pretty pool out the front of the building?

We have come to Ford to see one of their special clients - Queensland-born model Kristy Hinze. The elevator to Ford opens to a bare foyer, the walls painted in blistering red. It is like stepping into a giant supermodel’s pout.

Behind the reception counter is the poster of a stunning male model. Approaching the desk, you realise it’s not a poster at all, but a real person (not easily distinguishable at Ford). It’s Ben, the receptionist. He, in turn, calls Charlotte, Kristy’s “booker” at the agency. And Charlotte comes out to tell us that Kristy is half an hour late. Can we wait?

One of the wonderful things about the modelling business these days is that surnames seem to be superfluous. It is all very egalitarian and informal. It’s also a bonus for people with dull, unattractive or difficult-to-spell surnames. No Smith and Jones here.

So Kristy is Kristy. And inside Ford, there are literally walls of photo cards depicting the agency’s stable of models who are just called Ajuma or Asa or Flavia or even the less exotic Pamela, Stephanie, Hollyanne or Vanessa. Who would have ever thought that plain old Vanessa would one day be the stand-alone moniker of a famous fashion model?

Ben, at reception, is politely frazzled. It’s children’s audition morning for an advertising catalogue and there are innumerable good-looking kiddies running about the agency. It has, for a while, become a crèche full of perfect human genes.

Does he get a lot of modelling “hopefuls” turning up cold at the Ford desk?

“Every day of the week,” he sighs. “I had a woman in here the other day who was performing yoga, yoga, right there in front of me, telling me her daughter, who wanted to be a model, could also do yoga.”

Ben confides he sometimes takes Polaroid snaps of drop-ins, ensuring them the picture would “get to the right people”, and slips them in the bin when the subject has left. It is understandable. Ben sits at the gateway between anonymity and unimaginable wealth and recognition.

Then Kristy arrives.

According to her official Ford thumbnail biography, Kristy Hinze is 177cms tall, wears a size 40 shoe and a size 34 dress. Chest 86 cm. Waist 61cm. Hips 89cm. She is 26 years old.

In real life, statistics aside, she is on this day tall, almost willowy in a flowing floor-length halter neck dress and sandals. She is lightly tanned. She is almost completely devoid of make-up, and her blonde hair is pinned up at the back. Large, gold hoop earrings extend from her lobes.

When Kristy smiles and introduces herself, she immediately betrays a hint of the source of her popularity, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere – she radiates a peculiar naturalness that gives you the feeling, as improbable as it sounds, that she has just come in from a stroll on a beach, a hike through a forest, a swim in the ocean. There is a sense of freedom about her, a whiff of wildness, that is even more accentuated when placed against an urbanised landscape layered with technology, infrastructure, and the pace of modern life, like New York City.

Indeed, the more you observe her, the more mercurial she becomes. Over the two days in her company, a slight change of hairstyle or outfit alters her appearance each time – she is teenager then mature woman, farm girl then cosmopolitan professional, sportswoman then art aficionado.

The former editor-in-chief of Australian Vogue magazine, Nancy Pilcher, once described Hinze: “…she has a very Australian look, a unique attitude, a sort of coltish look which doesn’t come around that often.” Other fashion editors have also detected Hinze’s chameleonic quality – with the turn of a head she can appear as if she just alighted from a horse, or come from dinner at the Waldorf Astoria.

Kristy herself later summarises her own style and appearance perfectly: “I am not the girl-next-door, but the girl you wished lived next door.”

She laughs at this. That wishful look has made her probably the most successful and recognisable Australian model since Elle McPherson, afforded her a lifestyle that to most is simply unimaginable, as we shall see, and continues to feed her glamorous peripatetic existence.

“I thought I looked like a camel when I was a teenager,” she says matter-of-factly. “Then a donkey. But I was the donkey that morphed.” She glances out the window and across the rooftops of Lower Manhattan.

“And to think, when I was younger, I wanted to be a horse chiropractor when I grew up.”

*

THE Kristy Hinze story is not exactly Pygmalion, but it’s not far off it either. (“I don’t want no gold and no diamonds. I'm a good girl, I am.” - Eliza Dolittle.)

Before Kristy “morphed”, as she puts it, into a beauty, she was most famously paternal granddaughter to the late Queensland “Minister for Everything”, Russ Hinze. She was 11 when he died of cancer, aged 72, in late June, 1991. Hinze, from a family of south coast dairy farmers, faced allegations of corruption stemming from the Fitzgerald Inquiry at the time of his death. Former deputy-premier Tom Burns described him in parliament as “an old crook”, the world’s worst singer and ‘a good bloke’.

Kristy says: “I’ve had some people come up to me who didn’t like my grandfather’s politics. All I’ve got to say to them is - I was his granddaughter, I was eleven, I had no idea about his politics. At home he was just Gramps, lying around watching movies with us and taking us to see the horses. He was wonderful. He was awesome. There was nothing he loved more than his grandkids.”

Hinze’s son and Kristy’s father, Rod, was also a dairy and cattle farmer. She has fond memories of the family farm at Beaudesert.

“I thought it was the most amazing way to grow up,” Kristy says. “I thank God that I grew up the way that I did. It gave me responsibility. I had to get up early and even before I’d started my school day I fed the horses and cows and pigs and chooks. The same thing happened when I got home.

“It taught me a lot - how to look after other things as well as myself. I think it helped me with my modelling, having that sort of background. You show up on time. You do your job. I know what it takes to get me to that job.

“Getting my hands dirty wasn’t really a problem for me. I think it definitely gave me grounding. Knowing where I came from helped me deal with the success and fame and fortune that have been afforded me in this industry.”

At 14, it was decided by her mother Vivienne that Miss Hinze would attend the Buckingham School of Modelling in Southport on the Gold Coast to smooth out some of her personal edges. (“I was a terrible tomboy.”) There were issues, it seems, with her deportment.

A scout at Buckingham informed Sandra Robbins of the Brisbane branch of Vivien’s Models (founded by agency doyenne Vivien Smith) that they had “someone special” in class, and many months later Kristy – who ummed and ahhed about it – headed to the big city for her fateful meeting.

“We saw her in the waiting room and thought – yes, thank you,” says Robbins. “She just stood out. The eyes. The hair. The way she carried herself. A Kristy Hinze doesn’t come along very often. She was 14. Living in the back of beyond. Riding horses. The farm. There was nothing pretentious about her. She just had that X-factor.”

Within weeks Kristy was on the cover of Vogue magazine.

“That sort of thing doesn’t happen much,” Kristy recalls. “I was shooting with a male model as well and I was supposed to look sexually intimate with him. I had no idea. I’d never even kissed a boy.

“There was a shot where I had to straddle this guy. It took a lot for the photographer to get me to do it. I thought - I can’t do that. My mother will kill me! What will my grandmother think? I’m going straight to hell. I got through it.”

With her first pay cheque - $2,000, and astronomical for a teenager – she made her first investment. “I bought six cows at auction. I actually did make a lot of money on them. I bred them and ended up having something like fifty cows. It was quite profitable. Those six cows, I called them Kristy 1, Kristy 2, Kristy 3, 4, 5, and 6.”

At Ford, the auditioning model children are still running amok. Kristy suggests lunch. Leaving the building, we pass through the pool of beautiful people out the front. She doesn’t seem to notice them. And they stare after her, as if they have just recognised a superior member of their species.

*

OVER on West Broadway in Soho we arrive at one of Kristy’s favourite restaurants – Downtown Cipriani – part of the exclusive chain of eateries started by the legendary Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Venice’s Harry’s Bar and inventor of the Bellini and Beef Carpaccio.

One reviewer wrote of Downtown Cipriani when it first opened: “…attracting the same sort of moneyed, international clientele as Harry’s uptown. The yellow awning bears no name, so only the privileged are in on the secret.”

“I love this place,” she says, and as she enters a volley of waiters and the maitre’d smile in concert. Cheeks are kissed in the European manner and we are ushered to a table at the front, beside the glass and wood doors.

The food is stupendous. She orders some simple asparagus and then tuna.

She talks of her first experiences of New York City: “I came here when I was 16 with my Mum and Vivien (Smith). I was over here for a month and I stayed at Eileen Ford’s (as in Ford Models) apartment in the city. It really was the big smoke. I walked around stunned the whole time. Big buildings. The car horns going off all the time. Phew. I needed to sit down. It was just like every first experience, it was crazy, incomprehensible.”

As her modelling career took off – she is only the second Australian model after Elle McPherson to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated’s famous annual swimsuit edition - she juggled her schoolwork with the demands of constant international travel. The books and lessons ended up following her around the world, and often the twain did not meet. Bundles of schoolwork in London. Kristy in Japan. Or vice versa. She was happy, however, to be removed from the milieu of Beaudesert High School.

“I wasn’t the most popular kid at school,” she recalls. “I was head of the sporting teams, the swimming. I did all that. But as far as popular girls go, I wasn’t the popular one. Then I started modelling.

“I had instances where women, girls, would have a go at me in the bathrooms. There was pushing and shoving. One day I couldn’t take it anymore and decided I wasn’t coming back. I told the principal my reasons and decided to finish school by correspondence. I didn’t have to put up with it anymore.

“I was a really good student and I really enjoyed school. I loved my ancient history classes, biology, chemistry, all of those sciences. It was a pity.”

After lunch, we meet up with some of Kristy’s “crazy” New York friends. There is artist and art dealer Peter Tunney, who is dying to show off the latest works of his client, photographer Roberto Dutesco, in a studio in Crosby Street. (“I did $60,000 business in one day in a restaurant uptown. I’m gunna go there every day, set up a cash register!” says Tunney.) There’s a short stopover at the hole in the wall café Ruby’s on Mulberry Street, owned and run by Australians. Friend and fellow expatriate, photographer James Houston, drops by for some coffee and cake. (“New York is about survival,” says Houston, “and to see Kristy go on and have so much success, well, you’ve got to be proud of her, she’s done a great job. Her look represents the essence of Australia. She’s about natural beauty.”)

“I’ve got a whole little Australian community here,” Kristy says on the way back to her apartment in Tribeca. “It’s comforting, to hang out with Aussies.” She has lived on and off in New York since she was 18.

Interestingly, her dialogue is peppered with Australianisms. She talks about being “cactus”, “stoked”, and throws in the occasional “bloody hell”. She laughs at herself when these little home aphorisms pop into her speech. Yet when talking to her agent or booker on the mobile, or in the company of New York friends, her accent shifts to a definite American twang. It doesn’t appear deliberate. Like many long-term expatriates, she seems to tune into the dialect at hand as someone might tune in a radio station.

By chance, our car passes Downtown Cipriani’s again. A man sitting outside, wearing a white singlet and with slicked back hair and dark sunglasses, sees her and waves enthusiastically. “When are you going to make it down to Mexico?” he shouts, an imploring hand suspended in the warm, late afternoon air.

“I’ll call,” she responds. ‘I’ll call.” She slumps back in the seat. “Guys,” she says, almost with self-bemusement, “this is my life.”

*

SHE lives in a comfortable, rented two-bedroom apartment with views of Lower Manhattan. In fact, if it wasn’t for the New York panorama, it could be a flat on the Gold Coast or at Noosa with its white couches, parquetry floors and bright, beach shack-style decorations and pastel touches. It has the air of a place only occasionally lived in. It is the digs of a woman on the move.

On one wall is huge painting/mural by her friend Peter Tunney. It reads: NOTHING HAPPENS UNLESS, FIRST A DREAM.

Kristy pulls a beer from the fridge, curls up on the couch with Grace Kelly, her miniature Schnauzer, and is relaxed enough to talk about love, or its lack thereof.

Is she seeing anyone at the moment?

“I’m dating a couple of people, but…” A long pause. “I’m too serious about all the other things going on in my life at the moment. I’ve realised I’ve spent a lot of time with boyfriends over the years and haven’t really focussed so much on what I needed to do for my career and for myself.”

She cringes at the list of her more public past romances – French-born model turned art dealer Mickael De La Selva, Fashion TV supremo Dan Benayer, Andrew Videto.

“They were all nice guys, well, actually no, one of them wasn’t,” she says. “He stole a lot of my money. But that’s another story. My parents have been pretty accepting of all my weird choices, and when they’re no longer around – phew, thank God. French guys. Fashion-y type men. I guess you have to try different things before you find out what you want. I’ve made mistakes. I should have listened to my friends.

“I need someone who is down to earth and can deal with the fact that I’m going to be away quite a bit and that I’m going to get a lot of attention from other males. Not someone with a hot head who’s out to fight every guy that looked at me.”

She recalls a story and laughs. “Do you know Marcus Schenkenberg, the model? His pick up line was – ‘You and I would have really beautiful children.’ I thought, that’s the worst line I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’ve heard some pretty bad ones.”

It is a rare day that Kristy gets to relax in New York. She has just returned from jobs, golf and scuba diving in Florida. On the weekend prior to our meeting she went up to a friend’s house in the Hamptons – the summer playground for the rich and famous on Long Island, east of Manhattan - in a private seaplane. She recently swam with sharks in Costa Rica. In three days time she is off to Europe again for a modelling assignment with her client, Decleor, the French skincare company, then to St Tropez to meet some friends.

According to Sandra Robbins, models in Kristy’s class are capable of making “serious” money. “Runway girls get more publicity, but it’s the girls who do the product catalogue work who earn the big dollars. Someone like Kristy can earn $A10,000 a day from a regular client, and a shoot might last three or four days. That might happen two or three times a year for the same client. Then you might have several regular clients you work for.”

Hinze has properties at Bondi Beach in Sydney and at Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. Her business investments have included a juice bar in Coolum and a chain of baby product stores throughout Queensland. She is contemplating buying property in New York.

“I have some great clients,” Kristy says. “A lot of beauty stuff. I’m still travelling around doing catalogues and editorials. It’s pretty much the same as I’ve always been done. My career has never really taken a big dip; it has maintained a level, which is wonderful. I’m very lucky.

“I have to be in St Tropez at the end of month. I have a fragrance campaign with Puffy (hip hop impresario Sean Combs) or whatever he calls himself these days, Germany again for a department store campaign. Sometimes I forget which country I’m in.

“I’ve already started thinking - how much longer can I do this? - but the truth is I can do this for another ten years, and I have no problem doing that, as long as I have other challenges. I’ve managed to set myself up with a very nice lifestyle and I’ll be able to continue that for the rest of my life.”

A few of the aforementioned challenges include finishing her high school certificate by correspondence (she abandoned it mid-Year 11), completing an acting course in New York (she has a small part in the film Perfect Stranger, starring Bruce Willis and Halle Berry, to be released next year), and bringing down her golf handicap (in the low 20s). One of her favourite things in the world, she concedes, is heading down to the nearby Chelsea Pier Golf Club and “belting the crap out of a few balls”.

She misses Australia, and says she slipped in and out of the country last May when her sister, Lauren, 25, gave birth to twin boys. (She has two other siblings – Russ, 19, and Guy, 32.)

“Nobody knew I was in town,” she says. “I’m very passionate about Australia. Extremely passionate about Queensland. I will always go back there. But I’ve got one foot firmly planted in New York, and the other firmly planted in Australia, and I kind of like my lifestyle right now.”

Her mother, Vivienne, still wonders if the family made the right choice in letting Kristy go into modelling: “It was a very hard decision we had to make. To do it again now that we’ve done it, and as a mother, I don’t know if we would do it. We miss her, and she’s a lot older and wiser in the mind than her 26 years. I think she missed out on a few things because of her career, but she’s done incredibly well. Unfortunately she has to be in the U.S. and Europe. That’s where it is.

“She has a different life. It’s not like back home on the farm. It’s a high lifestyle they lead, but Kristy has always been grounded. Kristy is Kristy. I’ve met people in her industry and 90 percent of them are wonderful, but 10 percent are sharks, and you have to keep an eye out for them.”

With so much exterior colour, glamour, celebrity, and global travel in her life, what is it, then, that nourishes Kristy Hinze’s inner life? Her private self?

“Just because modelling is so…it can be a very fake industry,” Kristy says. “People who get together on a photo shoot become friends instantly because you sort of have to, but it’s acting. Everyone’s acting on the job. Even if you really don’t like them you can’t have that vibe at a shoot.

“You get phone numbers and you never call, or you do and try to make plans and it all falls to pieces. I go back to my real friends, friends who have been there since I moved to New York, and make sure I have a really good network of people around me, that care about me as a person and not just what you I look like.

“I don’t look at myself as any different from anyone else because I’m not, I’m just a human being who happens to do something that some people can’t do, which is just like anybody.

“Then there is my family, of course. I treasure my friends. And there’s my dog.”

The next day, Kristy meets us at the Chelsea Pier Golf Club after finishing a morning audition for a major hair product company. She feels the need to unleash a few one woods.

Kristy changes into her golfing attire and takes us and her Callaway clubs up to the fourth level of the driving range. Chelsea Pier is not a real golf club at all, but an elaborate multi-level practice facility, protected by towering nets, that juts into the Hudson River.

She belts a couple of clangers – hooking and shanking left and right – then starts to find her range. “I want to hit the net at the end, on the full. Here we go.” It’s 250 metres. And she does it.

Later, she says: “I was a daydreamer as a kid. Fantasising about different things. The catwalk was the furthest thing I’d ever thought. I’d never even looked at a fashion magazine. I knew of Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell but it was not something I aspired to. I thought Elle PcPherson was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, but I just wasn’t interested in fashion.

“I probably would never have even been to New York. It’s funny to think about that. I might have been a show jumping professional in Beaudesert. A horse chiropractor. And yet here I am.”

A friend has loaned Kristy her chauffeur and car for the day. The black, polished Maybach and suited driver are waiting at the entrance to the Chelsea Pier Golf Club.

She wishes us farewell and the limousine slowly pulls out. Suddenly, the spritely head of Grace Kelly pops up and the Schnauzer watches us through the rear window of the car before it disappears into the afternoon Manhattan traffic.

Something is glinting in the back of the limousine. It is Grace Kelly. She is wearing a sparkling, diamante collar.

UNDERGROUND - A Talk with Andrew McGahan

2006-10-13T12:30:00.000+10:00

IT may say more about the taxi driver than the place itself, but when I ask to be taken to the western Melbourne suburb of Yarraville – home to expatriate Queensland novelist Andrew McGahan – my request is met with bemusement.

Yarraville? A directory is consulted, a map studied and swivelled around on the console between the two front seats. The driver scratches his head. And eventually we are heading out of the CBD and over the great, towering West Gate Bridge with its view of the city’s one-time industrial heartland.

Yarraville and neighbouring Footscray, it turns out, were settled on the old stock route into the city, and the villages once bristled with tanneries, abattoirs and places like Henderson’s Ham Curing Establishment. And sitting on the western banks of the Maribyrnong River, they quickly became Melbourne’s industrial hub in the late 19th century.

The place had high death rates from typhoid, and, according to official reports, stagnant pools of sewage under houses, alongside roadways, and waterways “unspeakably polluted”.

Today, Yarraville is a mere 15-minute drive from the city centre, and the curing works and factories have been turned into arts centres and warehouse apartments. Census reports deem Yarraville as being “under gentrification”. In contemporary parlance, the yuppies are moving in.

Embedded in this, amidst the narrow streets and refurbished worker’s cottages, the organic food stores and funky cafes, is the Dalby wheat farmer’s son, McGahan.

“There are still cobbles under the bitumen here,” says McGahan, when we finally meet, strolling the short distance from his home to the village centre. He is keen to point out, it seems, at least some vestiges of the suburb’s gritty past. “It was a wintry, foggy day when we came down here for the first time,” he says. “It was so cheap. It’s still a working class area, just enough but it’s fading. It got discovered. Now it’s a young, yuppie suburb, and kids. The endless bloody prams. Everyone’s got a pram.

“All the people I know live here now. That’s why we’d never leave the suburb. It’s like being in a little country town.”

McGahan, 40, is one of the more curious figures in Australian literature. He offers, time and again, an apparent nonchalance towards aspects of his chosen career, and yet he has blossomed, surely and steadily, into one of the finest writers of his generation.

He gives very few interviews, and yet he is well known as a writer and his books are popular for literary fiction. He has decided to cease making appearances at writer’s festivals, citing that he has “nothing to say that would be of interest to anyone else”, and yet the demand for his time and presence has never been greater. None of his friends are from the “book world”.

Furthermore, he is an Australian novelist and yet has read very little Australian writing, and almost none by his contemporaries. His work, beginning with the “grunge lit” novel Praise, winner of the Vogel prize in 1991, looked set to follow a predictable pattern charting the woes of our disenchanted youth, yet after his book 1988 he produced the superlative post-Fitzgerald Inquiry thriller Last Drinks (2000). He followed this with yet another stylistic body swerve in The White Earth, a gothic meditation on Australian race relations and land ownership. It earned him the Miles Franklin Award last year.

Indeed, McGahan’s work is broadening in scope, book by book, and yet he likes nothing more than staying at home and watching television, or cooking. The bigger his world view and narrative thematics, the smaller his playground. He likes it in this little country town of his.

“I don’t do much, really,” he says. “In fact, when I think about it, I’m surprised at how little I do. I’m a house husband. I like cooking. I make curries. I find it satisfying. Or I come up to the pub and meet friends for a drink. That’s it.”

His rare public appearance, on this occasion, is to talk about Last Drinks, which has been adapted for the stage by his good friend, the Brisbane playwright Shaun Charles, and will have its world premiere on August 17 at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre.

“Yes, Last Drinks,” McGahan says. “I’ll be going along to opening night and I’ll be keen to see it, but I don’t know who any of the cast are, and I’ll be going along to none of the rehearsals. It’s not my play, it’s Shaun’s.

“I’ve gone over some of the drafts of the adaption, and it’s been so long since I wrote that book I’ve had to be reminded who some of the characters are.”

He smiles. It’s impossible to see his eyes behind his large, dark sunglasses.

“So,” he says. “Will we go to the pub?”

*

IT sits on a table at the side of La Boite’s cavernous rehearsal space at Kelvin Grove, and for a moment resembles a black, somewhat sinister, steamer trunk from another century. In fact, it is a miniature of the set of Last Drinks.

La Boite theatre director Ian Lawson is peering down into the black maw of the tiny set. He indicates a structure that looks like a minimalist oil rig, with a human being strapped into it, crucifixion-like.

“It’s symbolic,” he says, “of what was done to Queensland during the period. And there’s the past, or blood, or wine, spilling across the stage. It could be George’s inner life.”

The George he refers to is George Verney, the former alcoholic journalist and primary protagonist of Last Drinks who, since the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption, has lived a quiet life in Highwood, a mountain village on the border between Queensland and NSW.

George has fled his past, and left behind in Brisbane a string of friends, lovers and acquaintances who became entangled in the corruption inquiry. Some were jailed. Others should have been jailed, but weren’t. Almost all of them are physical wrecks, courtesy of the booze.

As Last Drinks opens, Verney is told by the police that his one-time friend, the restaurateur Charles Monohan, has been found tortured and murdered. In a remote electrical substation. In Highwood. After a decade of self-imposed exile, Verney is drawn back through the emotional nettles and complications of a past he thought he’d left behind.

“It’s exciting,” says Lawson. “We’re at a point now, in Queensland, where we want to hear our own stories. It’s time to do that now.”

It is the first rehearsal for the cast on this day, and there is a tangible excitement in the room as the actors takes their seats and form a semi-circle in front of Lawson.

There is George (played by Peter Marshall), Kelly the Cop (Chris Baz), Brisbane’s Old Money establishment figure Sir Jeremy Phelan (Chris Betts), corrupt former Minister of the Crown Marvin McNulty (Steven Tandy), the ghost of Charlie (Damien Cassidy) and George’s former lover May (Helen Howard). Shaun Charles is sitting in the semi-circle, a pencil at the ready.

“Let’s jump straight into the read,” says Lawson.

“I shouldn’t be standing here,” says Marshall as a distraught George. ”This was all supposed to be over. Finished with. Everything ended in 1989 after the Inquiry. It’s over. It ended ten years ago…I was asleep when I got the call. It was the police.”

George is interrogated by Kelly. Then on page six of the script the inscrutable one-time National Party “Minister for Everything”, Marvin McNulty, bellows for a drink. There is laughter amongst the cast and other observers. Actor Tandy’s raucous, Queensland twang is so familiar, so frighteningly recognisable from a not-so-distant era, that it engenders not just surface humour but a deep nervous response. It’s the same with Betts’ creepy, slithery exposition of Sir Jeremy. Even during the first rehearsal, you’re taken back to a Queensland that seemed to exist so long ago, and yet, eerily, could still be just around the corner. The whole room feels it.

As George laments: “So where else but Queensland would a man like Marvin end up in government? It was bizarre. The public couldn’t get enough of him. They lapped him up. Queenslanders didn’t like sophisticated types. They liked their representatives to be awkward, and incoherent. They mistook it for honesty.”

And later, May launches a heated attack on Sir Jeremy and all he represents. In fact, she is savaging Queensland’s past. “The sight of you makes me physically ill,” she says. “You and your kind want the people of this state to be satisfied with less, be satisfied with backwardness. Worse, you want us to be proud of it. And don’t listen to those southerners, you’re tougher here in Queensland, it doesn’t matter if they laugh at you. You make me sick. The worship of ignorance is the excuse of rednecks and backwaters and corrupt governments the world over, and people believe it, they get used to it. And you and your kind just keep scooping the heart out of the place.”

Charles, 32, later discusses the difficulty in adapting the novel to the theatre. He directed a version of McGahan’s earlier play, Bait, and even starred in a second version, and has since collaborated with McGahan on sitcom and movie scripts. (They are presently at work on a horror flick with the tentative title of Bloodnight. It features two characters called Shaun Charles and Andrew McGahan.)

“I was too young when the Fitzgerald Inquiry was all happening,” Charles says. “But I’m fascinated by it. When I tell people I’m adapting Last Drinks, it fires them up. They want to tell me they’re stories.

“People like to hear their own stories, to hear on stage the streets they live in being mentioned and the places they know. Brisbane is becoming a big city and our stories are pretty good, they’re as good as anywhere else.

“Andrew has been contributing to the adaption. I think we’re up to draft 11. He emails copious notes and suggestions. I think he likes the social side of the theatre. It’s an outlet for him. He thinks it’s all drinks after the show and lots of fun. If only.”

Charles confirms that McGahan has not met the director of the play (Lawson), nor any of the actors. The vast bulk of communications about the production have been carried out via email.

“Andrew is a formidable intellect and he plays the recluse really well, but it’s also the real deal,” Charles says. “One of his favourite things is to sit down and watch TV. (He is partial to DVD boxed sets – Deadwood, The West Wing, Buffy.)I know some of his friends and not one of them are from the literary world. They’re from IT, or banking or law. He still has friends from when he worked in the public service. I would say he doesn’t take himself too seriously though he does take his work seriously.

“Naturally, he wants to get this right. And I’m a bit terrified. People love McGahan’s work. It’s been a delicate balancing act.”

Near the end of the first rehearsal, George talks to the ghost of his mate Charlie: “Anyway, it’s over. Ten years too late, but that’s Queensland for you, always ten years behind the pace.”

The reading ends. Lawson looks happy. Charles is thinking of even more cuts he might have to make to his umpteenth draft. And the little bloodied and naked figure in the set model quivers, strung up on wires. Emasculated.

*

“What’ll you have?” McGahan asks.

We have come to his local pub – The Blarney Stone – an Irish-themed watering hole in the heart of Yarraville. It might have an Irish flourish to it on the outside, but inside it bears all the characteristics of a classic working class Australian hotel.

It is early afternoon and the clients include workers grabbing a beer and a pub lunch, and elderly men reading newspapers in the dim winter light through the windows and sitting for hours on a single ale.

“They’d be factory workers, dock workers,” McGahan says, indicating a group of men across the room. He is clearly at home in this place. He has known dreary, soulless work. He has known unemployment. All of this has been chronicled through his semi-autobiographical anti-hero Gordon in his early novels and the play Bait, set in a mail sorting room.

“It’s where I left Gordon,” he says. “I wanted to look at the nature of work - is it worth working at any cost? Is it more soul destroying to do shit work for no money than not working at all, which is supposed to be ultimately soul destroying.

“I had that job in the mail sorting room. That’s where I was when I heard Praise had won the Vogel. If it hadn’t won that prize I’d probably still be there myself. It was where our life separated.

“It was a cruel way to end it. It was a black ending for Gordon. I can’t write about Gordon anymore; there’s nothing left to say about him. As much as he was me, my life’s been happy since then. There’s not an unhappy situation to put him in.”

Last Drinks, the novel, was McGahan’s fictional bridge from self-reflective writings to a more complex and imagined narrative. The White Earth, set on the Darling Downs, completed that journey. McGahan may have tilled memories of his Queensland childhood, but in it he produced a powerfully realised epic novel of place and ideas, which revealed his maturation as a writer.

He was naturally pleased to win the country’s greatest literary accolade – the Miles Franklin Award for 2005 – but not for the public attention.

“There was a sense of freedom the award gave me,” he says. “With The White Earth I believe I did as good as I could do with that sort of style. After the award it felt like I could try anything.

“I have a little bit of money in the bank now. But I have never been terrified of not having money; I’ve always had enough. As long as I had money for tobacco (he’s since given up smoking) and alcohol, everything was alright.

“And I’ve never really thought about ‘things’ before. About buying material ‘things’. My partner Liesje (a veterinary scientist) and I have been renting the same house since we moved to Melbourne six years ago. We moved here for Liesje’s study and work. There was no other reason than that, and by chance a lot of our friends from Brisbane were moving down at the same time. Yet everybody we know now is buying property. This property thing, it’s everywhere and it gets in your head.

“Should we be doing this? I don’t know.”

McGahan’s next novel – Underground – will be released in October. It will be his first book without a primary Queensland context. It is also a natural follow on from McGahan’s engagement with politics in The White Earth.

“Think Australia, some five or so years from now,” his publishers, Allen & Unwin, state in their promotion blurb. “The war on terror is dragging on and on. Canberra’s been wiped out by a nuclear bomb detonated by unknown terrorists. All citizens have been issued with identity cards. Fuelled by a gleeful, anarchic energy that takes a chainsaw to political neo-correctness, white-picket-fence thinking and Australia’s new ultra-nationalism, this book goes straight to the heart of the country’s future – and it ain’t pretty.”

Underground is, in short, McGahan’s meditation on the not-too-distant future of Australia. Moreso, it’s his way of venting his thoughts and feelings about what has happened to his country over the past decade.

“Don’t get me started on this,” he says. “What’s annoying me about the country at the moment? I don’t want to rant. It’s in the new book. I’d rather not go into talking about it. When Underground comes out I’m going to have to do this same interview over and over. There’s no point just getting mad.

“Even after ten years, the Howard Government – it’s just getting into the swing of things. Can the country get back to what it was? Can it get back?”

Does he feel, as an Australian novelist, that he has an obligation to voice his opinions? To speak out?

“I have less an obligation as an opportunity,” McGahan says. “It’s useless to sit around, get drunk and rant and rave. You’ve got to do something. What do you do? Do you join a party? I have the option of writing a book and some people might read it.

“This book – some people will love it, and some people will think it’s crap. That’ll pretty much be the political divide I think.”

It’s getting dark outside. McGahan’s phone starts ringing. Slowly, steadily, his Yarraville tribe are beginning to mobilise. Friends are on their way down. For drinks. For dinner.

He is at home here, in Yarraville. I think back to earlier in the day, picking him up at his house, and noticing an extraordinary but bleak picture that he has as his screen saver on his computer. It is a grey industrial landscape, taken by McGahan himself in the local area. (“Yes, I took it,” he says. “I’m getting into digital photography.”) It’s a long way from the wavering wheat fields of the Darling Downs. From his days in New Farm and the Gabba.

Interestingly, if you were to take a bird’s eye view of McGahan’s career, its surface randomness has a logic, a pattern to it. There was the Brisbane period of Praise and 1988. His farewell to Brisbane book, Last Drinks. The homage to childhood and the beginnings of a broader, national view in The White Earth, completed in Melbourne. And with Underground, the futuristic satire. For someone who doesn’t move about much, he manages to cover a lot of territory.

What’s next? Living outside Australia?

“Who knows?” he says. “Liesje and I are going to the UK in October. I’ve never been. But my closest friends are here. You’d be surprised at how little I get out of Yarraville. I just potter around the house. I finish a book, then I sit around. It doesn’t sound like much does it?

“But I do feel I have a job. And it’s not a bad job.”

SELF-PORTRAIT

2006-10-13T12:29:00.000+10:00

A Snapshot of Artist Hazel Dooney:

JUST five hours after our interview, artist Hazel Dooney sends an email marked URGENT to clarify matters.

“What is it they say: act in haste, repent at leisure?” she writes. “Which is not to say that it wasn't good to meet you today, or that I felt that you were anything less than complete in your questions of me. It's just that when I found myself reflecting on our conversation, I felt that some of my answers – in the attempt to keep it light and cheerful – risked giving you the wrong impression of what I really felt about some things.

“Your questions about my childhood were unexpected, and I guess I was trying to put a homey gloss on my responses. But it was anything but homey…” The email adds that she believes it important she doesn’t “pull any punches” in expressing her true feelings.

This is typical Dooney both personally and in her art. To say she pulls no punches is being polite. The 28-year-old, who spent her formative years in Brisbane, is a study in brutal self-examination. She quite literally cannibalises her inner-thoughts, her past, indeed her own body, for the sake of her work.

On the day we meet in Sydney’s northern beaches, where she currently lives and works, she is at once powerful and brittle, brash and nervous, raw and reticent.

She is anachronistic in her surrounds – a polite, petite café at posh Avalon, thick with wealthy retired ladies of a certain age, and gents who all looked like they’ve just come off a tennis court at their local country club.

Dooney, however, imposingly tall with her hair cropped short and with paint splashed on her work sneakers, sits at an outdoor table like an exotic, possibly dangerous, flower in this dull field of upper middle class suburbia. (When we’re momentarily interrupted by a car alarm, Dooney rails at the local “yuppies”.)

We have just come from her “studio” up the road – a two-bedroom converted flat in a curious, Spanish-style block of apartments – and refreshments are desperately required. Inside the flat are numerous finished and incomplete works that will constitute Dooney’s latest exhibition in Melbourne – Venus in Hell. And visiting her work space at this frenzied time is like stepping into a parallel universe of voodoo and ancient sacrificial ritual, of blood, death, self-immolation and pain.

The sketches and watercolours feature eerie, violent landscapes with naked women and children at their center. Even an untrained eye can detect a physical resemblance between the tortured women and Dooney.

It’s a relief, then – at lunch – to take a long draft of fresh water.

“It’s been easier to use myself in poses; I’m familiar with my own proportions now,” Dooney says. “I think that when you’re exploring something that you know. I’m so tired of art that doesn’t reveal or show anything, that doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. About humanity. About the deep, dark aspects of someone.

“Cannibalise is probably a really good word for most of what I do. A huge amount. Consuming, displaying, flaying, probing. It’s a way of me processing myself for the outside world.”

Dooney is arguably Australia’s most successful artist of her still young generation. She is financially independent. She abandoned the traditional system of being represented by galleries two years ago, and, to put it colloquially, runs her own show. The business persona of Dooney is blunt, organised, informed and savvy.

Yet she is self-admittedly dichotomous. She argues on behalf of “real” art and integrity in the profession, and at the same time has posed semi-naked in magazines and deliberately flirted with controversy. She says she is “conscious of walking the razor’s edge between respect and celebrity”.

As she wrote recently in her essay “Life Study”, published in the Griffith Review: “…I have stopped believing in a lot of what is thought of as art these days. It’s as if a couple of hundred dull-headed, middle-aged men and women – not just artists, but educators, curators, gallerists and critics – have come up with a set of rules to define what real art and real artists are. The rules are vague, and yet still as constricting and moralistic as anything concocted by a Reformation cleric.”

And she is a new type of artist in the respect that she has harnassed the internet to disseminate her work and ideas. The world wide web has become her gallery showroom, archive, business tool, diary and intellectual soapbox.

Yet for all her technological vision, her fresh and thrilling contemporary modus operandi, there is an age-old humanness about her. As she warned, the house of Dooney has been anything but homey.

*

DOONEY was born in Sydney and for a time the family lived in an “historic” cottage in Campbelltown, west of the city. Incredibly, the rustic dwelling had no electricity.

“I think they (her parents Tom and Anna) liked beautiful historic cottages and they were not particularly fussed on whether it had electricity or not,” she says. “I suppose it was cheap. I was only one year old. I always remember candlelight. I know we had a dog called Watson scrambling at the door. He laid by me when I crawled and stuff.”

Not long after, the Dooneys moved to Black Mountain, 10kms south of Guyra near Armidale. Tom was an experienced “powder monkey” and explosives expert. Anna was a teacher. At Black Mountain, the family led what you would call an “alternative” lifestyle.

“We were completely self-sufficient,” the artist recalls. “We had a cow called Germaine, after Germaine Greer. She was the provider of milk and my mother made yoghurt from that milk, and she made all the bread. We had ducks, chickens, all of that. It was sort of a fulltime job being self-sufficient. My mother worked in the garden and if you were hungry you’d just go out and pull a carrot from the earth.”

It sounds idyllic, but in Dooney’s corrective email she further writes: “I’d hate for you to think that I am a 'country girl', simply because of the time I spent in various rural areas as a kid.

“The country was my parents’ life for a while, not mine. It was where they retreated to when they were broke. Aren’t we all prone to try to be sentimental about the country? But the truth is, from the moment my parents dragged me there, I wanted to be in the city. I found, still find, the country to be incredibly isolating and desolate. If I was asked to name the locus of my darkest hours, it's the country.”

Following her parents’ “huge” divorce, Hazel and her younger brother, also named Tom, lived with their father outside the tiny town of Bonshaw, near Texas on the Queensland/NSW border. The hamlet’s only claim to fame was the robbing of the Bonshaw Hotel by notorious bushranger Captain Thunderbolt in May 1867.

Again, the Dooneys lived in conditions that might have belonged to another century.

“We moved into a country house that hadn’t been lived in for a couple of years, so we cleaned that out,” she says. “We ate a lot of rabbits. There was a rabbit population problem there.

“We were dirt poor. I don’t think we would have done that by choice. My dad made it into a good time, an adventure, something that was fun. But for him, as an adult and a person, would have been an incredibly stressful and horrible time. He was buying groceries on his credit card. We shot and ate a lot of rabbits and they weren’t gourmet rabbits. I don’t think it was romantic, but for us he made it into an adventure.”

Moving to Brisbane, the family settled in a Housing Commission dwelling in Kingston, near Woodridge south of Brisbane.

She remembers: “We went to Woodridge. I thought it would be wood and ridges. To me it was frightening. My father is a survivor. He made the garden beautiful. We had fresh food. He tried to make it nice for us.

“I did well (in high school) and became even more of a misfit. I spoke well. I walked tall. I was a country kid. I was acing everything as well which didn’t go down well.

“It was a good experience, but I wasn’t appreciated in any way. There were rapes. It was scary. Gangs. Cigarette burns on their Adams apples. I remember girls who liked fighting. Beating up other girls. I was palmed in the face.”

When she left school she bought a one-way ticket to London via Japan. She still had no idea what to do with her life. She fell ill and returned home to Brisbane. Before long she drifted to Melbourne. Her love of art began to surface. She began mixing with bohemians, taking drugs, garnering experience.

Back in Brisbane, she immersed herself in the city’s street culture. As she said in her email: “I always loved going to art galleries, plays, and concerts. I loved the murals, public art, and graffiti. The technique for painting the work I am best known for is a refined form of graffiti, and I also have elements of it in my most recent work, where it is, of course, much more raw.

“I hated every school I went to, and I hated every country place we lived (in). I hated school in Brisbane as well, but at least there was an urban centre, and at least there was Fortitude Valley. I lived at Bowen Hills, and when I wasn't working I hung out at night with friends who did graffiti and made lo-fi hip hop and lo-fi rock and roll. I went to industrial raves, and art performances. For a solitary, f***** up, very creative kid from a broken home, it felt like heaven.”

Dooney briefly endured art school at QUT. She quit after two terms. “What provoked me to leave art school was the sense that the art I was being ‘taught’ was so leached of technical rigour and emotion that it had been reduced to a kind of glib in-joke between teachers and students.” She was told by a teacher she would “never make it” as an artist.

Living in inner-city Paddington, a local exhibitor asked to see one of her canvases. She walked the huge artwork up La Trobe Terrace. It was bought by an interested passer-by before the exhibitor had barely seen it. The sale shocked Dooney, then 19. She decided to hold her own solo show – Hazed.

“It got a lot of coverage in street press and bit of attention in newspaper,” she says. “It was massive. The church where we held the exhibition (in Paddington) was packed out. After that, Jan Murphy Gallery called me and asked me if I wanted to go there. That was a big moment for me.”

Her work then was a bright, bold, provocative combination of traditional Pop Art styles a la Roy Lichtenstein and Japanese manga. It questioned the female image as commodity. Again, Dooney herself was the physical subject of the work.

Jan Murphy recalls: “Her work was just very different. I’d never seen anything like it. Her early pictures were meticulously painted. It’s impossible to say if she’s a potentially important painter. I think she’s a very good painter.” When asked about Dooney’s decision to eschew the galleries to represent her work, Murphy says “she does still use galleries to show her work, which is quite an interesting contradiction”.

Midway through our interview Dooney reveals she suffers from Bipolar II Disorder, which has been defined by the American Psychiatric Association as "characterized by one or more Major Depressive Episodes accompanied by at least one Hypomanic Episode." As distinct from Bipolar I, the illness general does not invoke psychotic episodes and does not disrupt the sufferer’s social interaction or ability to work.

She is matter of fact about it.

“It’s not something that comes on and off,” Dooney says. “I don’t have a period of feeling normal then suddenly not feel good. It’s far more an integrated part of my life. I know people live fairly normally and have episodes, but mine is constant. I don’t really feel I experience a medium ground.

“I take medication for it now, and I see a psychiatrist once or twice a week. I used to work 12 hours to 28 hours at a time and then have 4 to 6 hours sleep. I had been conscious from very early on I wanted to do a lot of work. I didn’t want to take it slow. I had a sense of urgency, I guess. I didn’t want to wait until I was 50 before I could make art fulltime.”

Following Hazed, Dooney held several local and international exhibitions, and her artistic cache has been steadily maturing and increasing in value. Her larger works now command up to $30,000. She reportedly estimated her annual income in excess of $200,000.

She says her decision to forgo gallery representation has been financially rewarding.

“I still work with galleries,” she says. “I will exhibit with other galleries. But I won’t do it in same sense, as an artist in their stable and having to run ideas by them for their goddam approval. I’m not going to be answerable to a gallerist.

“Not to be arrogant, I’m one of the most successful artists for my age at the moment. I’m sure there are other artists my age who have more work in collections than me, but I see that as a long- term thing. It happens over time. I’ll keep working hard and stay true to my work.”

The internet has been integral to her survival and success. She describes herself as a “virtual corporation”.

She adds: “For artists, the irony about art is there are all these rules people follow. Incredibly structured rules. I’m very unhappy following them, and I don’t think they work for artists. I approach it now in same way as an Indie band does. I use the internet. I don’t have that battle for control of someone telling me how to do it.

“I live it. It’s part of me, as well, organising and presenting my work to the world. It’s how you live. I don’t want to be a Tim Storrier or Tracey Moffatt, an artist who paints about issues and lives a suburban life the same as a doctor or a lawyer. I’m allowed to work and live the way I want to now, with the internet.”

Her close friend, the writer and photographer Creed O’Hanlon, says she may be a new breed of contemporary artist.

“She recently declared that she wouldn't be represented by a single gallery anymore, and that while she would continue to exhibit in well-known independent galleries on a one-off basis, she wanted to take more control of her professional life, and be responsible for her own sales and marketing,” says O’Hanlon. “She has a business manager (unheard of for most local artists), and a small team of web designers and programmers that she works with to keep her site and her email subscription list constantly working. In many ways, she is probably a prototype of the artist of the near future – tech' savvy, independent, and financially self-reliant.”

The internet has also been her occasional muse. A few years ago she explored the internet as a source for fetish-related pornography as research for a new series of pictures. Her abiding interest is how women are culturally represented. That she was briefly a model in her early 20s perhaps feeds this inquiry of hers and adds to her contradictory nature.

Dooney’s latest works, exhibited in July at the Melbourne Art Rooms, were described by one critic as having “ripped the surface asunder, revealing a troubled and troubling potpourri of psychological self-investigation and an obsessive fascination with arcane ritual…one feels that Dooney is treading very close to the edge in these works”.

Melbourne Art Rooms owner/director, Ms Andy Dinan, says Dooney is one of the most exciting and collectible young artists in Australia. “I think she’s a remarkable young lady and very desirable from a collector’s point of view,” says Dinan. “Her work is an amazingly good investment, and there’s a strong secondary market for Dooney paintings. Work that sold for $9,000 two years ago is now reselling at $13,000 to $15,000. What collectors love about her is the way she uses the web to give her work a context.”

O’Hanlon says: “Given the ten year span of her career to date, it's hard to accept that she's only in her late 20s. It's an impressive body of work, but I think a lot of it has been under-rated or misunderstood even by some of the galleries that have represented her. Her early work was large, glossy and accessible – a lot of critics compared it to '60s Pop Art – but if you look at the works closer, especially together, you begin to realise that there is a hell of a lot of irony and anger in it, even if, like every young artist, Hazel was eager for recognition (even if it came without real understanding).

“That said, when a few of her works were shown in some high profile group shows in New York last year, everyone there did seem to 'get' what was going on beneath the shiny surfaces, so maybe it was just another instance of our parochial perspective.”

Near the end of our meeting it appears Dooney is keen to get back to work in her studio. For weeks later, she sends several emails with further information on her life and work, friendships, and future. She is always generous and affable and shares intimate and honest thoughts in her virtual messages. It is almost as if the real Hazel Dooney exists online, in cyberspace, just beyond the computer screen.

I remember, much later, the signs of a tattoo I noticed peeking out below the line of her T-shirt, on the soft inner flesh of her upper left arm.

It reads: A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. Alis volat propriis. In front is a precipice, behind are wolves. She flies with her own wings.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

2006-10-13T12:27:00.000+10:00

The Life and Times of Tony Bonner:

EVEN across the crowded floor of Sydney’s perennially hip Tropicana Café, regular home to aspirant actors, unpublished poets, cons, models, celebrity lawyers and millionaire hairdressers, he stands out.

It’s not just that he’s thin and radiantly healthy. Nor that he has what old-time Hollywood agents might call “charisma”. Specifically, he has a face that triggers a feeling of déjà vu. You look at him and wonder – do I know you? Where have we met before?

That face belongs to actor Tony Bonner, 63, who at one time was about as famous as you can be in Australia. As star of the iconic television series Skippy in the 1960s he was, arguably, our first modern small screen pop icon.

Bonner sits in the corner of the inner-city Darlinghurst café and scores of people pay their respects, wave, nod in acknowledgement of his presence. (As a friend says, wherever Tony Bonner is, he is like an unofficial mayor, meeting and greeting everyone in his vicinity.)

On this day he welcomes you with that firm, clear, beautifully modulated voice that transcends decades. It echoes to you from The Man From Snowy River, The Anzacs, The Lighthorsemen, The Mango Tree and more than fifty other films and television shows.

“Nice to see you again, as always,” he says, standing courteously. He orders coffee and, as is his custom, the Tropicana’s “Children’s Breakfast” – a light fare of toast, a single egg, and a couple of slender bacon rashes.

Two more acquaintances say hello. Toddlers are playing happily at the adjacent table. The sun is shining outside. And Bonner appears to be his usual positive and cheery self. Which is why everything jars so abruptly when the conversation turns to suicide.

“I have lived with these thoughts since I was 15 years old,” he says. “I’ve ridden horses, driven motorcycles, sailed, done some dangerous things, and I did all of them, I think, with a suicidal tendency.

“I would never sit down with a gun, knives, pills, but I’ve certainly flirted with suicide as an escape while pursuing those physical activities. I’ve always been propelled to push everything in my life to the very outer limit. In many ways I’m lucky to be alive.

“At the moment I’m tired of the superficiality of life. The quest for material things and surface adulation. I would like to move north, to Queensland. I’ve always loved it up there. Or Los Angeles. Or who knows, maybe Turkey. I am someone looking for a safe harbour.”

He says this with the utmost honesty and sincerity. And when the little children’s breakfast arrives, and he takes up his knife and fork, you realise that he left behind Jerry King, the blond fresh-faced helicopter pilot in Skippy, a long, long time ago.

Between then and now there have been many Tony Bonners – the Manly boy who ended up acting with some of the biggest international stars of his era, the playboy, the husband and father of three daughters, the alcoholic and drug addict, the tireless charity worker and mentor, the surf fanatic. He is dichotomous. Multi-faceted. A puzzle.

Finishing his breakfast, he says: “I’m still waiting for that epiphany, that moment, that suggests to me what I’m here for, what I’m doing here.” He dabs his mouth with a serviette, and for the first time looks genuinely perplexed. “What’s it all about? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer all my life.”

*

By 1966, Tony Bonner had a modest reputation in Sydney as a stage performer and model. Only a few years earlier, he may have caught the occasional pedestrian’s eye working as a window dresser in Bebarfelds department store, opposite Sydney Town Hall.

Born in the Manly area on Sydney’s North Shore, he left school without any real crystalline career in mind. His grandfather had once been the mayor of Manly and a founding president of the suburb’s famous life saving club. And Bonner’s father, Frederick, had been a musical comedy actor in Her Majesty’s Theatre, working alongside light opera singer Gladys Moncrieff and actor/dancer Robert Helpmann.

“I knew I wanted to do something creative,” Bonner says. “I had a good eye for symmetry and balance. I worked for a company that supplied materials for window dressing, and in the early 60s was asked to dress windows at Bebarfelds. By then the theatre bug had got me.”

Bonner then began his stage career as a “dresser”, or wardrobe attendee to the stars of the evening shows at Her Majesty’s. By day he studied singing and dance. He eventually made it into the limelight, as a chorus member, in a production of Annie Get Your Gun.

During his stage apprenticeship he lived in a terrace house in Victoria Street, Potts Point, near Kings Cross – an area renowned for its bohemian lifestyle. It was here he initiated his lifelong friendship with photographer Jon (CORRECT) Waddy.

“We must have been about 18 when we first met,” Waddy recalls. “It was a wonderful time, everybody knew each other, and there were terrific restaurants like Vadim’s at the top of Challis Avenue where all the actors went for dinner after the shows. They used to serve alcohol in tea cups after 9pm because of the liquor laws. Anybody who was anybody was there.

“Tony was doing some modelling at the time. Later, I was the one who took the famous nude centrefold photograph of him for Cosmopolitan magazine. We used to drink together and go to parties. He was living a few doors up from me when Skippy started.”

Australian fashion guru Trent Nathan says he used to “hang out” with Bonner during the Skippy period. “He was a very handsome man then and I’m sure he still is,” says Nathan. “I suppose he was a bit wild back then. He hit it. But I think we all hit it. We were good friends and we went our separate ways.”

Bonner had secured a role in the landmark show which, in 1966, aired at prime time on Sunday nights. The program centred on an uncannily intelligent bush kangaroo, its owner Sonny Hammond (Garry Pankhurst) and head ranger Matt Hammond (Ed Devereaux). It was set in the fictitious Waratah National Park. Bonner played a flight ranger. By the time the first episode – “The Poachers” – had finished airing, Bonner was literally famous.

“It was enormous,” Bonner says. “In Australia in the 60s there weren’t a lot of home grown film stars. There was nothing being made. I was like a pop idol overnight. I was a young fella. There was no one else around.

“I never ran from it, Skippy. It was an important part of my past. I drank in the same bars and restaurants after the show started. Lived in the same place. The attention was pretty nice sometimes, and sometimes it wasn’t. I always treated people with the same manners and respect. Some didn’t act the same way towards me.

“Whoever I was seeing, too, we were never just ‘good friends’ in the eyes of the press. They’d beat up stories about me. When the show became an international hit, some of them (journalists) made careers off the lies they printed about me.”

These were heady times, especially for a young man who had started drinking when he was 15. Overnight fame only worsened matters.

“During that period I very rarely had to buy a drink and I think this fame helped to sustain my drinking,” Bonner reflects. “If you’re an open, agreeable person, like I was, people would buy you drinks. I’m not blaming anyone – I always had the choice to say thank you and no – but that went on for the next thirty years.”

That same year Bonner scored a minor role in the classic Australian film They’re a Weird Mob, directed by Michael Powell and starring Chips Rafferty. (It remains one of the highest grossing local films – in the context of its time – in history.)

In 1967, at the close of Skippy’s first season, Bonner asked for a pay rise and perhaps a small share in overseas sales and other residuals. The show was on its way to becoming a huge international hit, and would eventually air in more than 120 countries. Bonner’s request was rejected. (In the forty years since the show’s creation, he has “never received a penny” in residual or royalty payments.)

“I just left the country,” he says. “I hopped on a plane and went to London.”

The charismatic Bonner quickly secured work, filming You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1970), a period “soldier of fortune” piece alongside Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson in Turkey. This was followed by the now cult classic Creatures the World Forgot (1971), shot on location in Africa, and episodes of the then popular British television show The Persuaders, again starring Curtis and Roger Moore.

Bonner, by anyone’s standards, had made it. He worked and partied hard, favouring the famous Tramps nightclub in London, and lived periodically on the island of Ibitha, Spain, where he did some “sculpting and swimming”. In 1972 he dashed back to Australia to see his parents, and met model Nola Clark at a party.

“We hit it off but I had to go back to London,” he says. “I told her if she ever found herself over there she could look me up in this bar called Tramps. Some time later I was in the bar and the concierge came up to me and said this great looking girl was asking for me. I walked up the stairs and it was Nola.”

They travelled to Rome together and a romance blossomed. Nola returned to Australia, and not long after Bonner turned up unannounced at her 21st birthday party in Melbourne. They were soon married. “It was late 1972,” Bonner says. “We were married for twenty years. We have three wonderful daughters. These things happen. The tide comes in, and the tide goes out.”

In 1974 Bonner starred in an Australian thriller called Inn of the Damned. On the set he met another of his close male friends, the former surf champion and now Gold Coast-based film producer and director Phil Avalon.

“Funnily enough, when Tony left Skippy I auditioned for his role and didn’t get it,” Avalon says. “I’ve known him my entire adult life. He’s a very fine actor, and has done an incredible body of work. I believe, given the right vehicle, he could have been our biggest movie star – bigger than Mel Gibson, bigger than Russell Crowe.

“To this day he’s an extremely handsome man, and he certainly has the right voice. He’s totally dedicated to his craft. But he was probably a mite too early. And he may have had a self-destructive streak when he should have concentrated on the work. If he had been an American, I have no doubt he would have been huge, and still in huge demand for work.”

That self-destructive streak did continue to surface in Bonner’s life, and by his own admittance it nearly destroyed him. There were several incidents in bars, street brawls involving knives, and weeks on end that were just a blank.

“There was lots of stuff,” Bonner says. “I used to push the envelope, be sarcastic with people. Why, I don’t know. I could hear myself saying these words to people, awful words, and I could hear an inner voice at the same time telling me to shut my mouth. Later, I’d go and beat the crap out of myself for saying those things.

“I had so many blackouts in my life. I did a lot of stupid things. I rode my motorcycle into people’s houses. I would go to a barbecue with my wife and children and drink with the men and ignore my family and when they went home I’d stay drinking. Then I might go home a few hours later, or a day later. I’d go to sleep in London and wake up in Turkey. Go to sleep in Sydney and wake up in Perth.”

Despite this, Bonner managed to continue producing fine work in Australia and overseas. But the demon remained close by, and eventually cost him his marriage.

“I always knew the title for my autobiography,” Bonner says. “I would call it – Was I There? For years people would relay stories to me and I’d always ask – was I there?”

In the late 1980s, following years of prolonged drinking and occasional drug abuse, he suffered pleurisy and pneumonia. It was then he left his family– his wife, Nola, and children Chelsea, now 31, Skye, 30, and Hannah, 27 - and checked into a Melbourne clinic.

“We wouldn’t know where he was for days or weeks at a time,” says Chelsea. “He was absolutely outrageous. All the kids in the street loved him. He was like a cartoon character. It was fun having a character like that in your life, but for a kid it can be quite confusing.”

Daughter Skye recalls: “We weren’t taught to feel we had a sense of sanctuary at home. He’s perplexing to me to this day. But you have to love him the way he is. That’s life. You get on with it.”

Bonner emerged from the clinic sober and has remained so ever since. That was 17 years ago. He has never remarried. He still attends AA meetings. His charity work would exhaust half a dozen people. He still believes, with all his heart, in the art of acting. And he dotes on his 11-year-old granddaughter, Maddison (CORRECT), who lives in Brisbane with her mother Skye. (A former Miss Indy, Skye was briefly engaged to Madison’s father, one-time ironman champion Guy Andrews.)

“Maddison has been an incredible thing for Dad,” says Chelsea. “It’s a new little person with his genes who hasn’t seen any of the terrible things he’s done. He has made no mistakes with her. She’s a new, clean human being and he can be the ‘new’ Tony. He’s loving being a grandfather.”

Skye Bonner confirms: “The Bonner side of the family is a little bit crazy, and maybe there’s some theatrics involved, but Maddison is completely taken with Tony. She feels the softness, the little lost boy in him. I get to see Dad through her eyes.”

Yet those unceasing questions continue to haunt Bonner.

“I want to position myself where things are important, where things matter, and that’s family,” he says. “I am a bohemian in a sense, but I miss that structure of family. It’s all we’re here for. It’s the only real mark we leave on the world.”

*

BONNER’S contribution to Australian cultural life is immense, and he continues to pour his energies into his craft, often for little or no remuneration.

Whilst he is renowned for his charity work, including volunteer patrols for the Manly Lifesaving Club, and his work for the Variety Club of Australia (in particular the Queensland chapter), few are aware of his generosity towards younger generations of Australian actors. He is repeatedly acclaimed as a teacher of drama, and yet passes on his skills for a pittance, and often for free.

“Dad’s a soft touch,” says Chelsea, now a successful small businesswoman who is also based at Manly. “When it comes to giving young actors classes, he knows what it’s like to be young and starting out with no money, and he simply wouldn’t ask them for a fee. He believes what he does is an art form. How do you put a price on that? He’s one of the last purists.”

Jon Waddy says the hours Bonner puts into surf lifesaving is flabbergasting.

“In the last few years he has put in more hours than anyone at the (Manly) club, a record, and he’s 63,” says Waddy. “I’m a good member and I think I did 15 hours last year. Tony did 400 hours. If he put as many hours into his acting and teaching as he did his charity work, financially he’d be a very comfortable man.”

Bonner himself has the same professional desires he had as a teenager. He wants to continue to act in film and television, and to teach. Avalon has two films slated for this year, and hopes to enlist Bonner in both. There is a potential television series on the horizon. A smattering of theatre.

Daughter Chelsea is circumspect about her father. “His needs are very simplistic,” she says. “A roof over his head. A motorcycle. A salad roll in the fridge. He’s had all the trappings of wealth. He lived the high life. He had the yacht and the houses and the cars. Some of it made him happy and some of it didn’t.

“My father has had nine lives. It’s a Bonner family trait. He says he wants to anchor himself now, but at the same time he can’t decide where that might be, or what that means. He’s never really settled anywhere. He’s never had a settled life.”

She says it took years for both of them to resolve their differences after the family broke up.

“He’s manic, and a lot of people thought that mania would go when he stopped drinking, but in some ways the alcohol was a sedative for him,” Chelsea says. “It took the edge off his personality. To me he’s not a father in a conventional sense, but a sort of older, crazy brother. We talk to each other now about absolutely everything in our lives, and I think we have a relationship that not many children and parents would have.”

Skye says she “prays” that he finds a settled life. “He’s never really in the present moment. He’s always looking everywhere else but the present, and is never at ease. I think his inner-world is in a constant state of flux. I pray he finds what he’s looking for, that safe place. Dad’s journey can sometimes be difficult to watch. It doesn’t mean he’s unhappy. He’s a survivor.”

Waddy says it was time his friend Bonner’s “ship came in”.

“What is his purpose in life? As a hedonist, as Tony seriously was for thirty years, you don’t ask that question,” Waddy says. “You have to love him. He’s a wonderful friend and he would do anything for you, no matter what it was, no questions asked. Yes he’s complex, but he has a heart of gold. He has given so much to so many people for so many years, it’s really time something came back to him. He deserves his time, and that time will come.”

*

In the Tropicana, Bonner is gathering together his legendary satchel. It goes with him everywhere. In it he has his mobile phone, scraps of paper covered in ideas and reminders, pens, keys, perhaps the copy of a play or a script, and other accoutrements that see him through the day. Bonner has said that he could survive, and go forth, just with the clothes on his back and the satchel.

Walking up Victoria Street he sees in sidewalk cafes other friends and acquaintances, and all are given a warm greeting. Each recipient beams happily at the sight of Bonner. He is brimming with energy. His openness and friendliness is infectious.

Further down the street he stops and looks incredulously at a closed down dry cleaning shop. The doors are locked, the store empty, and already the shopfront glass is gritted with traffic exhaust. It looks like it has been shut for twenty years. “It was open just the other day,” Bonner says, almost to himself.

“When I was 16 I wrote to a yogandada-type fellowship in the United States and asked them – who am I? Why am I here?” Bonner confides. “I said to them I’m just starting out in life and I’m lost. I told them I see pain in people, which affects me. What am I to be? An actor? A teacher? A father?

“I’m still on that journey. I’m not being precious. I’d like to know these answers. I’m willing to go to some length of insanity to find out. At my age I should know, but I assure you, I don’t.”

It is impossible not to be endeared to Bonner. To his questing, his brutal personal honesty, and his search for safe harbour.

He leaves, turns, and salutes from a distance. Watching him disappear, you wonder what it is that makes Bonner so touchingly human, and you can’t help but think that the answers to some of his questions have been given to him over the many years of his colourful life.

And yet like so many of us, he just wasn’t in a position, at that moment, to hear them.

ends

Moo Ink

2006-05-12T11:36:00.000+10:00

Moo Ink

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHARRON PHILLIPS

2006-05-12T10:51:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, May 6, 2006

BOB Phillips, 65, shirtless and wearing shorts and slippers, sits at the head of his pine kitchen table not the patriarch of the house, but more the curator of a tragic museum.

From the outside his modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Riverview, East Ipswich, is all odd angles and mismatching additions, and inside it heaves with ham radio equipment, old furniture, shelves of dusty glass and ceramic bric-a-brac, and family photographs of his wife Dawn, 57, and their nine children.

And yet it has the feeling of a place that once teemed with life, and was suddenly abandoned. Four clocks in the living room are all set at different times.

Phillips runs a hand through his thatch of greying hair. “It blew the family apart, mate,” he says. “It completely erupted and the family doesn’t exist anymore. The kids couldn’t get the answers to the questions, (the answers) we couldn’t get. They didn’t know how to react and they lashed out on the closest thing for blame which, I suppose, was me.”

Exactly 20 years ago on Monday (May 8), Phillips’ daughter, Sharron, 20, vanished off the face of the earth. The case evolved into one of the most celebrated and controversial in Queensland criminal history. Police were accused of negligence. The Phillips’ took the investigation into their own hands, and constantly howled to the press that not enough was being done by local and State officials. They appealed to the then Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke, for help. Hundreds of people were interviewed, thousands of man-hours were expended, and everyone had a theory about what happened to the vivacious shop attendant whose car ran out of petrol late one Thursday night on Ipswich Road, Wacol. It was one of those rare cases that snagged the public imagination.

Two decades later Sharron Phillips is one of 136 State “cold cases”. Her file status is deemed “active pending further information”. And just as it was in early May 1986, her disappearance is still surrounded by differing versions of events and unanswered questions.

“If I’ve got to tell the truth I’ll tell the truth,“ says Bob Phillips, a retired truck owner/operator. “Dawn’s a prisoner in her own house. I’m her paid carer. She dirties herself, I have to feed her…oh god, I could go on forever. Everything was fine until Sharron disappeared. I’ve considered murder/suicide (for us), I have. I’ve thought about it a frickin’ lot.”

The youngest Phillips child, Matthew, who was six-years-old when Sharron vanished, still lives at home. But the rest of the family is estranged.

“As I said to one of them, I couldn’t be in the back seat with her (Sharron) every time she went out, I just couldn’t,” Bob says. “A lot of people who knew the family said - if you had interfered with them when they were younger and they were all living together, you picked on one you picked on the whole bloody nine, you know? But today, I’ll look after my bit of dirt and you look after yours. When they were growing up they were very close, extremely close. I don’t know what happened to them, I don’t, honestly.”

He gazes into the living area with the four unsynchronised clocks. Down the short hallway, in a room with the shades drawn, is Dawn. As Bob gets angry about the investigation into his missing daughter, as he jabs a finger at the air, fulminates, rails against the system that has wronged him, Dawn sleeps much of the day away in the darkened room.

“Sometimes,” Bob Phillips says, “I’ve lost recollections that Sharron ever existed.”

*

On the night of Thursday, May 8, 1986, young Sharron Phillips was in high spirits for several reasons. She was enjoying her independence, having moved out of the crowded Riverview family home and into her own flat at Archerfield five months earlier. She had a good job at the Peaches ‘n Cream fruit market in Kenmore. And she had a potential new beau.

Only days earlier she had met a 26-year-old Acacia Ridge man called Martin Balazs, and they had planned a dinner date at Sharron’s flat on Friday, May 9. She was excited about Balazs, although they barely knew each other. So on that Thursday evening, she and work colleague Samantha Dalzell went shopping together at Sunnybank Plaza on Mains Road. Sharron purchased some new lingerie.

Later, the pair had coffee at Sharron’s flat. Sharron left the lingerie unwrapped in the small ground-floor apartment. She then drove Dalzell home to Redland Plains. On the way, according to retired police investigator Ken Foreman, who worked on the Phillips case, she drove past Balaz’s flat and tooted the horn – an anonymous message to her new man, a tease as prelude to their date the next evening. She dropped off Dalzell, and was travelling city-bound on Ipswich Road at Wacol, up the hill from the old three-pump Shell service station (since demolished), when her canary-yellow Nissan Bluebird ran out of petrol. It was around 11pm.

Sharron’s oldest sister Donna (nee Anderson) remembers: “She’d spend $50 on a new dress but only put $10 worth of petrol in the car. I said – ‘Sharron, would you fill your car?’ I’m sure that night she would have thought of getting petrol at the garage at Goodna, but it had just become self-service where you operated it with coins.”

Sharron’s car had stopped outside the former Wacol migrant centre. Directly across busy Ipswich Road was the main entrance to the Wacol Army Barracks. She needed a telephone.

It was established later she had walked into the army camp, past the boom gates and guard booth, and been told by partying soldiers there were no telephones for her to use. (A few soldiers were later interviewed by police but discounted as suspects.) She then headed down towards the Shell garage and Wacol railway station.

The garage’s former mechanic, Bill Lace, says initial suspicion rested with the “old eccentric” who lived out the back of the Shell station. “He was there to keep an eye on the place and he always hung around out the front at night,” Lace says. “He said he was Swiss. I once saw him butchering up half a cow that’d been hit by a train, he was that eccentric.” Old “Karl” was never a serious suspect.

Telecom records subsequently revealed that Sharron had spoken to an operator from the twin phone boxes outside the snack bar in Wacol Station Road and asked for a manually-placed call to be made as she had no coins. She phoned Martin Balazs at exactly 11.18pm and asked him to pick her up from the Shell garage. She phoned again at 12.03pm, but Balazs was already on his way to the Wacol/Gailes area to find her.

Shortly after midnight Sharron had a conversation with Michael Truscott, 20, who had also used the public phone to telephone his father to pick him up at the station. She told Truscott she had run out of petrol but a friend was on his way to pick her up.

Balazs later told police he was unsure of which service station to go to. There was a large Shell roadhouse at Gailes, a few kilometres up the road from the little Wacol garage. Balazs went to Gailes, and suffered a flat tyre. With the puncture repaired, he drove down Ipswich Road towards the city and noticed Sharron’s car at the side of the road. He saw nobody in or about the vehicle, reasoning there was little he could do, and drove home. Police believe Balaz had missed Sharron and/or her abductors by a matter of minutes.

Bob Phillips says he and his wife were not in town when Sharron vanished. “People blame me, they reckon I should have been home,” he says. “I was picking one of our trucks up at Gilgandra (700kms south of Brisbane, near Dubbo in NSW). I was in Gilgandra, with Dawn. We got back about four, five o’clock on the Friday morning. I crashed and went to bed then the story came up and I started ringing everybody to find out what’s going on.”

One of the first to raise the alarm about Sharron was Bob Wilson, her boss at the Peaches ‘n Cream Fruit Market. “It’s still a sad memory,” he says today. “She was a great employee. I usually opened up around 7am and she’d start after 7.30am. She never turned up that morning and there were no phone calls. It was so unlike her. I got suspicious straight away.

“Debbie (Cox, a former employee) rang Sharron’s parents and I drove her usual route home looking for her. This was towards the afternoon to the best of my recollection. I saw her car on the side of the road and a man tampering with it. I said – “What are you doing with Sharron’s car?” It turned out it was Sharron’s father.”

Bob Phillips says “a friend” telephoned him about his daughter’s abandoned car that morning. “Somebody rang and told me Sharron’s car was up on the highway,” Bob says. “She was well known around here, so were we.” He also recalled meeting Mr Wilson: “We had a bit of a talk and I said I was quite worried because I couldn’t find any trace of her.”

In a separate incident, Sharron’s younger brother, Darren Phillips, also saw the car on Ipswich Road that Friday: “I was going into Brisbane on a job and I passed her car at Wacol because I was working at Wacol. I passed the car and it didn’t click with me and I tried ringing her flat and I couldn’t get onto her and other things take place, other things happen, and then you forget to ring again. Then I got the phone call that they couldn’t find her, that she’d gone missing.”

According to official police records, Dawn Phillips formally reported her daughter missing to Goodna police at 8pm on Friday, May 9. The records also state Bob Phillips and one of his sons went to Sharron’s Archerfield flat that evening to look for signs of her, then went to the abandoned car on Ipswich Road. That night Bob Phillips took the Nissan Bluebird back to the family home at Riverview. He says the police at the time ordered him to get it off the side of Ipswich Road. The police files have no record of this directive. Former officers involved in the case say it was a turning point in the early days of the investigation.

“The whole investigation in terms of scientific evidence, there wasn’t a lot that could assist us there because of the intervention of the family,” says former detective Geoff Orman, now a senior executive with the Queensland Rugby League. Orman was involved in the early stages of the investigation. “It was obstructive. The family’s intervention, particularly in that area (of removing the car) was a big hindrance to the investigation. It was a huge hindrance. What fresh evidence that was there at that point in time was taken away.

“The discrepancy all came about because the family shifted the vehicle. The biggest hindrance was not being able to put the car exactly in the right spot. That may have triggered some people’s memories and had them come forward.”

Retired former Queensland homicide chief Bob Dallow, who now runs a second-hand bookshop in Ashgrove, was also seconded to the Phillips investigation. He agrees with Orman. “I got along well with Bob (Phillips) but the whole problem from an investigators point of view was that Bob needed to have his finger on the pulse of everything. He took the car home and then police didn’t know where the car actually was when it broke down. The whole thing started off badly.”

There would be further consternation for the police. On that Friday, family members came and went from Sharron’s Archerfield flat despite it being a potential crime scene. Indeed, there were people in and out of the flat before Sharron was formally reported missing to police.

The press reported at the time that younger sister Lisa Phillips had found a phone number for Martin Balaz at Sharron’s flat on that Friday, which allowed Bob Phillips to telephone him and question him about Sharron’s last movements.

Donna Anderson revealed to Qweekend: “Sharron used to smoke a little pot. My brother Darren must have had a key. Jim (Donna’s husband) and Darren went over there. It wasn’t any big deal. They didn’t want Mum and Dad to get upset about that.”

However, Darren Phillips has a different recollection of the incident. “I can’t even remember,” he says. “I didn’t smoke anything back then. I don’t smoke now. It was never my scene. I never smoked pot with Sharron or anything like that. I can’t even remember going into the house. I went in with my brother Charlie (the nickname of Robert Phillips). Me and Robert went in for a look and that was it. I can’t honestly remember, I can’t honestly give you a day, sorry.

“I went in for a look with my brother. I don’t know why we were there to be honest, we just went there because I think we were told to meet somebody there or something, and the landlord or something was going to let us in or something. That was it.”

Bob Dallow says he clearly remembers an oddity about the case in its early stages. “They (Sharron and Dalzell) go over to her place (for coffee) and Sharron drops the parcel of clothes (lingerie) at the flat. The parcel’s not touched,” he says. “But when you see the police photos from inside the flat (a few days later), the items are spread out on the bed. I remember we got a call from one of the sisters later saying she took the nighties out of the packet and spread them out.

“Bob was a bit of a prude. I still believe Bobby went to the flat a few times. I think she might have had some drug gear and stuff and he’s taken it all out.”

A newspaper story by veteran Courier-Mail journalist Ken Blanch, published on May 23, 1986, says: “When her father went to the flat next day (the Friday), the lights were still on and the two coffee cups were on the table. Underclothing she had bought at Sunnybank was still in the flat.”

Bob Phillips denies daughter Lisa went to the flat, as reported in the press, and retrieved Martin Balaz’s phone number from Sharron’s address book.

“I got the number, the book was in her car,” says Bob Phillips. “It was in the car with her purse.” He says there was a “sequined purse” in the vehicle and a jacket neatly folded on the rear seat. Her black wallet and shoulder bag were missing. “I had (son) Shannon (Phillips) with me (aka Grub). It might have been Charlie (Robert). We had to break into it. And we had to break the steering lock. Four of us went down.

“They (the police) should have been to the car and fingerprinted the car before it was even moved. Everything was done wrong.”

On the Saturday the police investigation began in earnest. Sharron’s parents were interviewed at the Riverview home. Bob says: “They never actually interviewed me at all, they interviewed Dawn. They had a yarn to us on Saturday morning, but it’s only natural they looked at the parents. I was pretty well known here and in Inala so I had nothing to hide. Not a bloody thing.”

The Phillips’, in the meantime, contacted Balaz for information. Balaz was interviewed by police.

“They were good investigators,” says Bob Dallow. “They would have turned the boyfriend over if he’d done anything.” Balazs was quickly eliminated as a suspect. (Balazs, who still resides in Brisbane, refused to be interviewed for this story. His wife Linda said “the man had nothing to do with her disappearance”. She added: “I think sometimes it’s very good to have these stories to help prompt people’s memories or perhaps get some closure but I can speak very strongly on my husband’s behalf on this that he doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed or have a statement or anything.”)

Brisbane endured heavy rainfall on the following Sunday and Monday. On the Tuesday police returned Sharron’s vehicle to the side of Ipswich Road. The Phillips’ disputed the exact location of the car. Police believe it was a further 150 metres closer to Wacol train station than the Phillips’ claimed.

On the Wednesday police found Sharron’s shoes and wallet just “metres” from where the car supposedly ran out of petrol. “I remember the afternoon they were found,” says Ken Foreman. “We were at the scene talking about the differences in location of where the car was and found them in a drain that runs under the road. It would have been handy to know exactly were the car had broken down. Things weren’t unfolding the way they should.”

Over the proceeding weeks the Phillips’ were critical of the police investigation. Within months they were petitioning the government to change the law in relation to police handling of missing persons cases.

Geoff Orman says there was a lot of pressure on investigating police. “At the start of our investigation we were told not to go near Mr Phillips.” Because he was perceived as a “troublemaker” and was partial to going to the press? “That’s right.”

Months turned into years without a single clue to Sharron’s whereabouts. Then in January 1988, at her inquest, a man called Robert John Brown, 33, of Harvey Bay, told the Brisbane Coroners Court an extraordinary story.

Brown said on Thursday, May 8, he had seen Sharron Phillips after 6pm outside a house at Riverview, shouting to someone she was going to “The Plaza” to do some shopping. Then, at 11.30pm, and by incredible coincidence, he was at a shop at Wacol when he overheard a youth mention the name “Sharron”. Brown then drove off and came across Sharron on the side of Ipswich Road. She was in distress. He then witnessed her bundled into a car by several men and taken away. The evidence of Brown, a known alcoholic, never took the investigation further.

Bob Phillips now says Brown was well known to the Phillips family as he had lived in the next street from them when they resided in Inala. He says Brown had known Sharron “since she was a girl” and that everyone in the area knew of their relationship, as did the police. He called Brown “a pervert”.

Geoff Orman says police never knew of the relationship between Brown and the Phillips’. “That was never made known to us,” he says. “In relation to Brown, he was intensely interviewed, by myself, Ralph Knust, and a number of other police. He was put through hyopnosis by a forensic psychologist. The result of that was whatever he had seen was fairly traumatic. We could never find out exactly what it was he saw, other than what he said about the vehicle.

“As far as Bob Phillips’ comments go about knowing Brown, that’s the first time I’ve heard it. When the coronial inquest was on, the family itself was very quiet when it came to the examination of witnesses.”

*

As the years passed the theories about what happened to Sharron Phillips proliferated. Psychics offered explanations. The police continued to puzzle over this strange case. Curiously, two police officers were even accused of being involved in Sharron’s murder, but the theory was dismissed as fantasy.

Bob Dallow still thinks Phillips somehow made it back to her flat that night before vanishing. “I believe she made a third phone call from the phone booth that night,” he says. “It was her trick to call the operator and pretend she had no change and get connected. I think she got back to her flat somehow before she disappeared.”

Geoff Orman says there was a lot going on within the Phillips’ family at the time of Sharron’s disappearance – the usual teenage difficulties. “It was common knowledge Bob (Phillips) had had disagreements with Sharron about her promiscuity,” says Orman.

Bob Phillips says: “The concern I had for her wasn’t that. Coming home from Brisbane late of a night and not locking the car. People would grab you at the lights. But promiscuity with other people, no.”

There has been little movement with the case in many years. As recent as two months ago, Bob Phillips says he received a letter from a woman saying Sharron’s body was buried underneath another body in a cemetery near Gatton.

Her brother Robert (Charlie) Phillips says: “Things have a way of coming around. People have got big mouths. One day someone will say the wrong thing to the wrong person. I do believe there will be justice one day.”

Sister Donna says she doesn’t want to die without “someone being charged” with the crime. “Why did she not ring home that night?” she says. “I always thought the reason was my father would have roused on her (for running out of petrol). I still don’t understand why she didn’t ring me or my husband, you know? I was always the one she came to if something was wrong. That always did concern me.”

She adds that Sharron was not to blame for the disintegration of the Phillips family. “Sharron’s got nothing to do with the family falling apart, if that’s what my father’s trying to say. Anything to do with our family goes back way before anything happened with Sharron, but you don’t need to know any of that.”

Darren also wonders about those final moments before Sharron disappeared: “Sharron, as I said, she was a little bit strong-headed and she wanted independence and she probably thought - I’ll just ring my boyfriend, you know? Going on 9.30 or 10 at night, she probably thought the old man’s in bed so I’ll ring the boyfriend.”

He still thinks of that day in May two decades ago: “It hurt me when it happened. I found it very hard to deal with in a little of ways, then the slow deterioration of family on top of it. I found my own strength and moved on. You can’t look backwards. One thing I always used to say to people, and it might be a bit cold, but it might’ve been easier to cope with if she’d been killed in a car accident, you know? “

Bob Phillips is convinced Sharron’s killers are young – in their 40s – and still out there. “These bastards whoever done it out there have got a happy, normal life going for them,” he says. “We’ve got nothing. That’s what gets to Dawn.”

He readily admits his memory is “gone” these days. Twenty years have a tendency to jilt recollections, to scramble time. He says it hurt him to think that some of his estranged children might think he was responsible for Sharron’s disappearance – as patriarch, as protector. “I couldn’t be responsible, mate, I had the wife with me, I wasn’t here.”

Only six years ago he disposed of Sharron’s rusted out Nissan Bluebird. “Dawn didn’t feel very keen with someone driving sharron’s cut so we cut it up and disposed of it. It’s buried. That’s what her brother wanted to do. We’ll cut it up and bury the bastard, so we done that….”

Both Bob Dallow and Geoff Orman say they would gladly come out of retirement just to try and solve the Phillips case – one that has nagged at them for years.

Meanwhile, the two famous blue signs that mark Sharron Phillips’ supposed place of disappearance stand on either side of Ipswich Road. In the early hours of this Tuesday morning Bob says he and Dawn will go down and strap plastic roses to the signs. Then they will get on with another year without their daughter.

It is the signs, though, that say so much about the Phillips case. Misaligned from the beginning. Out of kilter. Odd. Inexplicable. Those signs have been there for 17 years.

And on both, the victim’s christian name is misspelt.

ends

SPIT FIGHT

2006-05-12T10:48:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, April 2006

“The Southport Spit will probably become a monument to the greed, arrogance, negativity and lack of vision of those who seem incapable of rejoicing in God’s gift.”
Father Ray Smith at the funeral of State MP Doug Jennings, Monday, April 13, 1987.

FOR the mourners, the sermon struck with the ferocity of unexpected lightning.
More than 600 people had gathered at St Peter’s Anglican Church in Southport on the Gold Coast on that Monday morning of April 13, 1987, to farewell the National Party MP for Southport, Doug Jennings. At only 57, Jennings had died of a suspected massive heart attack the previous Thursday. Cleaners had discovered the fitness fanatic’s body in the sauna of the Parliamentary Annexe gymnasium in Brisbane.
Sitting at the front of the church for the funeral service was the then Queensland premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the entire State Cabinet, and National and Liberal state and federal politicians, as well as family, friends, and a wide cross-section of the Gold Coast community.
Father Raymond Smith, who conducted the service, was a good friend of his parishioner Jennings (whose electoral office was opposite St Peter’s in Nerang Street). On this day, Fr Smith unleashed a warning from the pulpit. He told the congregation that Jennings, son of Sir Albert, the founder of national construction giant A.V.Jennings, was a parliamentarian who “represented all people, not just himself and not just the arrogant and corrupt few”. The good father also celebrated Jennings’ love of nature and his vision for the need to preserve public open space, particularly the Southport Spit.
Jennings’ close friend, Ann Davies, remembers with a chill the proclamations made on that day. “You can imagine how we were feeling at the service – great sadness – and then this came at us from the pulpit,” she says. “It was so representative of Doug, of what he fought for, and it was so powerful it passed through you to the back of the pew. Father Smith was saying – if you touch what Doug tried to protect, you will have to account for yourself on Judgement Day.”
Jennings fought tooth and nail against any further development of the Southport Spit. Almost a year to the day after his death - in May 1988 – a 12-hectare piece of land at The Spit’s northern tip was dedicated to the memory of Jennings and his environmental aspirations.
But now The Spit - that narrow finger of land that constitutes the last genuine ocean-side parcel of undeveloped real estate on the Gold Coast – is at the centre of another fight. The Beattie Government’s vision for it to house a cruise ship terminal has ignited a fierce private sector battle for the potential tender, public outcry, rumours of violence, arson, and secret deals, rallies, radio talkback debate and whispers of cloak and dagger negotiations over developing multi-million dollar blocks of Crown land.
As well as the cruise ship terminal, the development plan for The Spit includes a marina precinct for super yachts and other commercial and recreational vessels, and a tourist/commercial development on land on the western foreshore south of Sea World. An Aboriginal cultural centre has also been mooted.
It is shaping up to be perhaps the last great environmental battle on the Gold Coast, the city itself an homage to untrammelled development and excess. And at the very heart of the matter is that 12-hectare rustic patch of seagrass and Casuarina trees known as Doug Jennings Park.

THE Southport Spit, for much of its history, has been a field of dreams. In 1897-98 a series of gales tore through a sliver of land called Jumpinpin and broke Stradbroke Island into two (North and South). As a result, a sand spit evolved north of Main Beach Point.
It was eyed by speculators as early as the 1950s, when a young Keith Williams, the legendary Gold Coast entrepreneur, traversed its dunes in search of suitable places to water ski on the Broadwater. Throughout the 1960s there were suggestions The Spit be turned into an airstrip, that it house an aquarium, an “amusement oasis”, a caravan park and a “mini-city”. Williams tendered for the rights to build a marine park. It became Sea World, which opened in the early 1970s. There were subsequent hair-brained schemes for giant “horizon tanks” to facilitate movie making, and a statue of a lifesaver on nearby Wavebreak Island to rival New York’s Statue of Liberty.
The first official inkling of a cruise ship terminal for the Gold Coast emerged after the collapse of a Brisbane terminal plan, instigated by former Queensland premier Rob Borbidge in 1997. The Beattie government closed down the $170-million Hamilton Quay project in May 2001, following years of legal complications and lost revenue. Premier Peter Beattie then pledged a new cruise ship terminal for Brisbane - the $350 million Hamilton facility, Portside Wharf, is due to be finished by the middle of this year - and said the government would investigate other potential sites in Cairns, Townsville, Mackay and the Whitsundays. It wasn’t until 2002 that Beattie, on a US tourism and trade promotion mission, revealed he wanted a facility on the Gold Coast to make Queensland “the cruise mecca of the South Pacific”. At the same time it was revealed the former National Party state secretary and Bjelke-Petersen government advisor Mike Evans had formed a consortium, Australian Cruise Port International, interested in a Gold Coast terminal.
Former State Development Minister Tony McGrady told the Gold Coast Bulletin in 2004 that the whole idea for the Gold Coast terminal came from Evans and his consortium. The consortium also appears to have been consistently touted as the “frontrunner” in the race for tender.
Evans concedes the idea was born out of a lunch he had in July 2001 – just two months after the demise of Hamilton Quay - with the renowned Brisbane Harbour Master and chairman of Brisbane Marine Pilots, Captain Steve Pelecanos. “Steve explained to me that the Gold Coast Seaway had enough depth in the channel (for cruise ships) and the great advantage was that it was a day closer to the South Pacific than Sydney,” Evans recalls.

With The Spit again looming as a battleground, groups such as the Main Beach Progress Association, Gecko (Gold Coast and Hinterland Environment Council), and the Friends of Federation Walk (volunteer custodians of the 91-hectare ocean-side Federation Walk Coastal Reserve that extends north from Philip Park, opposite Sea World, to the northern tip of The Spit) began to mobilise. They would eventually amalgamate under the umbrella of the Save Our Spit (SOS) Alliance.
Drama teacher, academic and surfer, Steve Gration – now acting head of SOS – became actively involved in the issue after attending a protest meeting in January last year. “I thought - we’ve got a Labor Government, they’re smart, they’re for the people. In a few months time it’ll be seen as a silly idea. But the whole thing just got heavier and heavier. The people opposed to it were being vilified in the press. Fear and lies were being peddled. I got so angry the working class boy in me said – alright, I see the game now and I’m going to do what I have to do.”

The first major public rally against the terminal was staged at Doug Jennings Park on April 3 last year. More than 2000 people attended. Surfers Paradise Liberal MP John-Paul Langbroek called for an inquiry, and local Gold Coast City Counsellor Susie Douglas demanded a referendum. “I don't think the Beattie Government has all the support they think they have on this,” she reportedly said at the time. “I believe there are deals being done . . . (that developers) have got an arrangement with the Government to access that land.”
The Beattie Government forged on, producing a study it commissioned from Star Cruises Ship Stimulation Centre in Malaysia that showed it was “highly feasible” for 300m cruise ships to navigate and dock at the Southport Spit. The suggestion for the Malaysian study came from Captain Steve Pelecanos.
On October 17 last year the terminal and associated marina and tourist developments were declared a “significant project” by the State Cordinator-General, Ross Rolfe. That month the government began the tendering process, publishing a detailed document Gold Coast Marine Development: Expressions of Interest. In the introduction it declares that the Gold Coast has “enjoyed significant interest from cruise lines” and that interest had resulted in a number of “unsolicited” proposals to the State for the development of a cruise ship terminal.
However, Qweekend understands the Government actively solicited at least two cruise terminal bidders prior to publicly releasing the tendering document.
It is believed Mike Evans was asked by the Department of State Development in December 2002, April 2004 and July 2005 to submit a proposal for the project. At least two of those requests were allegedly made by then State Development minister Tony McGrady. McGrady, who relinquished the portfolio in August last year, refused to comment.
Jeffrey Leigh-Smith, one of the Gold Coast’s leading marine industry figures whose family sold boats on The Spit in the 1970s, confirmed he also was encouraged to submit a bid. “I wasn’t going to tender with anybody up until last year. I was asked by a high-ranking public official to put the tender in. At that stage I think the government was of the tune that there might not be many tenderers out there.” Asked the name of the public official, he said: “I don’t want to go there. It was a situation that we were encouraged to get in there by government.”

By the January deadline, the Government received formal bids from nine consortiums - some of the heaviest hitters in Australian construction and development. Mike Evans’s group, retaining principal backers Leighton Constructions and Sinclair Knight Merz, but revamped and renamed the Gold Coast Cruise Port Consortium, is one of the nine; as is Leigh-Smith’s Oceana, led by Brisbane-based developer Devine Homes (former Deputy-Premier and Treasurer Terry Mackenroth is a board member of Devine Ltd). Among the others are the Macquarie Bank/Seymour Group (Seymour is headed by one of the country’s richest men Kevin Seymour); Multiplex; Raptis Group, led by coast developer Jim Raptis; and the Sunland Group, the developers behind the Q1 tower in Surfers Paradise.
When asked if it was protocol for government officials to actively encourage submissions from the private sector for a government tender like the Gold Coast cruise ship terminal, deputy Premier and State Development minister Anna Bligh’s office issued the following statement: “The Department of State Development and Coordinator (sic) General’s office has no knowledge or information in relation to this claim.”

Opponents have argued that it makes no economic sense to build a cruise terminal on the Gold Coast with the Brisbane terminal nearing completion. Would two major terminals, less than an hour apart by road or train, be fiscally viable? Indeed, research into cruise ship passengers conducted by Tourism Queensland itself in late 2004 provided a snapshot of an industry that did not seem to match the government’s hopes of annual revenue from the cruise industry of up to $80 million. “Cruise passengers (to Australia) spent an average of three days in Queensland,” the report said. “Overall, cruise ship passengers spent an average of $80 per person during their stopover in Brisbane.” Just 29 cruise ships per year currently visit Brisbane, although Bligh has predicted a Gold Coast terminal would welcome one ship every 10 days, or about 36 ships per year.
In December Bligh announced a five-person panel to oversee the Environmental Impact Study into the terminal proposal. The tender offer for the EIS closed on February 20 this year. On March 9 Bligh told State Parliament that Gutteridge Haskin Davey (GHD) had been appointed contractor for the EIS. GHD has been involved in other Queensland projects such as the Gold Coast airport and Gladstone coal terminal expansions. A decision on the winning consortium bidder will be made depending on the outcome of the EIS, which may not be completed until mid-year.

“We’ve been very upfront about this,” Bligh told Qweekend. “We’re very keen to have this happen. We’re very keen to get a slice of this (cruise ship) action. But every place we’ve identified for a possible terminal we’ve been very clear, it has to stack up economically and it has to stack up environmentally, and we are still in the process of deliberating on that. So, is this do or die against all sensible evidence? No it’s not. We’re not going to do something stupid.”
A winning consortium, in exchange for building and operating the terminal, would be granted development rights to parcels of priceless waterfront State Government land further down The Spit.
In what some critics are hailing “a return to the days of the White Shoe Brigade”, a culture of fear and rumour has emerged the closer the Government gets to a final decision. “I thought the city had moved on from those days,” says former Gold Coast deputy-mayor Alan Rickard, who vigorously objected to early Gold Coast City Council plans to turn the Broadwater into a harbour, complete with ship terminals, marinas and hotels. “But you’ve seen some of the names involved who are interested in the terminal. It goes to show that dinosaurs can come back.”
Federal Liberal MP for Moncrieff, Steve Ciobo – whose electorate encompasses much of the Gold Coast, from Southport to Burleigh Waters – believes the Beattie Government “more than 18 months ago” made its decision on the terminal and who would construct it. “The rest is a political game Peter Beattie is going through,” Ciobo says.

IT just wouldn’t be the Gold Coast if a development project as big as a multi-million dollar cruise ship terminal didn’t come with a subterranean whiff of scandal. The battle for The Spit is no exception.
For more than ten years local businessman and theatre guru, Leonard Lee, of Westend Theatre Management, had a vision for a world-class performing arts centre on the Gold Coast. He raised capital and negotiated with the State Government for a potential site near the southern end of the Southport Spit. Lee claims in April last year he received an anonymous telephone call from a man telling him to “back off” with his theatre project, and was threatened with actual violence. Lee says he reported the call to the police. He received another call around August, telling him to butt out of The Spit area as he was “dealing with the big boys”.
Prior to Christmas last year, he says he was told by a senior State Government official that his theatre plans were “off the table”, a rejection he believes was related to the cruise terminal plan. “I think it’s wrong,” he says. “The developers want everything.” Lee has since met with State Government officials and is in negotiations over another potential site for his theatre in nearby Southport.
Then there’s the case of Humphreys Boatshed, a former heritage-listed building at the western entrance to The Spit, near the Southport Yacht Club. The famous engineering and boat repair workshop, dating back to the 1940s, abuts land that houses the Naval Cadets headquarters and a facility that incorporates the Gold Coast Water Police, Queensland Transport, the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and the Department of Environment and Heritage. Both these parcels have been mooted as potential land offered to developers as part of the cruise ship terminal deal.
Throughout the first half of 2004, the Gold Coast press reported that the historic shed had fallen into disrepair and was riddled with asbestos. Former local councillor and real estate guru Max Christmas claimed in the Gold Coast Bulletin on May 6 of that year that the State Government wanted to demolish the boatshed as part of a revamp of the area. Suddenly, in late July, the boatshed was partially destroyed by fire. The then commodore of the neighbouring Southport Yacht Club, Neville Ferguson, reportedly said in the Gold Coast Bulletin it was a fire “waiting to happen”, and that the worse the building’s state of repair “the more chance of the building being demolished” to make way for developers.
Ferguson’s theory seems to have been prescient. A Department of Natural Resources spokesman told the Gold Coast Bulletin the day after the fire “the future of Humphreys Boatshed is being considered within the broader context of the future land-use planning for the entire Spit precinct”, and that a cruise ship terminal might be part of that future.
The Bulletin also reported that police were “trying to locate a man seen running from the site when fire crews arrived just after midnight”. Police investigations never ascertained arson as the cause of the fire.
Labor MP for Southport, Peter Lawlor, demanded after the fire that the heritage-listed building be demolished. “I think that western side of Seaworld Drive will eventually be developed,” he said on November 29, 2004. “All that site is good for is a bulldozer.”
Steve Ciobo adds: “There has been a whole range of things going on right back to the boatshed fire. It was a Gold Coast icon for sixty years, then suddenly the whole thing burnt down.”

Local residents and the Friends of Federation Walk also noted a disturbing pattern of fires on The Spit between 2001 and 2004. Seven major blazes burnt out segments of the Federation Walk Coastal Reserve during that three-year period, starting at the northern tip and working back towards Sea World. “If you look at the locations of the fires it does appear to be systematic – that whoever did it wanted to damage as much of the reserve as possible,” says one resident, who declined to be named. “The word is it was done to ravage the place and make it more amenable to development.” The fires were never officially investigated, although the Gold Coast City Council, local fire fighting crews, and police always believed they had been deliberately lit.
Another source says the Gold Coast Water Police have already been issued their “operational directives” to prepare for the inevitability of a cruise ship terminal at The Spit, and to adjust work timetables and staff levels accordingly, although a spokesperson for Police Minister, Judy Spence says “there have been no formal considerations or staffing briefings” on new operational procedures.
In early February this year, the Gold Coast Sun reported that John Johnstone, the deputy chairman of Sunfish Queensland, the state’s recreational anglers lobby, had received an unsigned letter “in a plain envelope” offering inducements to “see things the shipping terminal way”. One of the offers was for a cruise liner holiday. Johnstone told Qweekend that in the envelope was a photocopy of an American one dollar bill. “It said there would be plenty more where that came from. I sent it on to the CMC (Crime and Misconduct Commission) and the Premier’s Department. Since I haven’t heard anything I’m wondering if it was a practical joke.”

Shona Pinkerton, proprietor of Devocean Dive and Gold Coast spokesperson for the local diving industry, says protestors and interest groups were being offered “amenities” for a project that seemed a fait accompli.
After an SOS meeting in September last year, which was attended by Ross Rolfe and Premier Beattie’s Deputy Chief of Staff (Policy Coordination) Damien McGreevy, she said: “I was asked what my ‘wish-list from the developers’ might be in relation to diving and The Spit. It was suggested we might like some steps put in for divers off the rocks, or barbecues and showers. I said – what do you mean wish list from developers? They haven’t even conducted the EIS yet.” Steve Gration’s notes from the meeting also recorded an offer of “barbecues and other amenities”.
Rolfe says: “Nobody has any recollection of using those precise words, but certainly it’s the case that there’s been discussion with people about their ideas for enhancing the overall amenities for The Spit and including how any adverse impacts on their existing uses might be properly mitigated. That would be a normal thing to do.”
Bligh told Qweekend that steps and barbecue areas could not be considered as “inducements” to the protestors: “My understanding is that the Alliance feels very strongly about maintaining public amenities and recreation on The Spit and I would expect that government officers who are sitting listening to people would be saying – so would this make it better? I don’t think that anybody for one minute would think that a barbecue was an inducement.”

THE Gold Coast cruise ship terminal proposal has elicited opinions as diverse as they are surprising. Arguably the father of Gold Coast development, entrepreneur Keith Williams, says he is “100 per cent behind the protestors”. “To put the terminal on the end of The Spit is absolute stupidity,” he says from his home at Main Beach. “They’re going to bugger up the last piece of ocean front public land left on the Gold Coast. It should be left as public open space.”
Professional charter fishermen claim the Malaysian study into the Seaway’s feasibility for cruise liners has miscalculated the average flow of the current. The local surfers, legion in number, believe it will destroy the world-class break off South Stradbroke Island. Marine scientists say it will impact heavily on the Broadwater, a “nursery” for fish, prawns, crabs, and a huge array of sea life.
Gold Coast mayor Ron Clarke stated on the council website earlier this year that if the terminal could be built without environmental repercussions it could be “a wonderful boost to the Gold Coast economy”. Yet in an about face a few weeks later, on February 18, he declared in his weekly newspaper column in the Gold Coast Bulletin he hoped the Premier was examining “all options” during the environmental impact investigation, specifically the importance of berths for money-earning super yachts.
Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg is unequivocal: “We oppose development of The Spit, full stop.” At the Nationals State Conference in July last year, a unanimous resolution was passed condemning the Beattie Government’s plans for further development of The Spit and calling for the area to be protected from development “for future generations”.
The ALP’s Peter Lawlor, who occupies Doug Jennings’ old seat of Southport, believes the issue will ultimately have political implications. “It’s an important issue, an emotive issue,” he says. “I imagine it will impact on the (next) election, and me in particular. But the government has an obligation to promote tourism. The argument against development (of The Spit) was lost when Keith Williams put Sea World there.”
Bligh, who grew up on the Gold Coast , adds: “I guess from government’s perspective (and) as I said before, we think it would have been irresponsible to contemplate developing a cruise shipping industry and not to include the Gold Coast in our considerations. It would be great if (The Spit) was less environmentally sensitive, if people had less emotional attachment to it - that would make it a lot easier but tough decisions are tough decisions. I should say I haven’t seen the developers’ proposals. It’s also possible that what they’re proposing is unacceptable.”
She told parliament in early March a lot of “misinformation” had circulated throughout the Gold Coast in relation to the cruise ship proposal.
Bligh says only a single hectare of Doug Jennings Park would be utilised if a cruise ship terminal went ahead. This hectare would have to facilitate the terminal wharf, some form of arrivals building for officials and tourists, bus and car parks, taxi ranks and public toilets, as well as facilities for security officials and port staff, and possibly refuelling infrastructure. “That’s all that we’re making available. One hectare,” Bligh says.

At the first public protest at Doug Jennings Park last year, Ann Davies and friends decided to plant a tree in the reserve to continue the memory of the area’s namesake. Right up to his death, Jennings regularly swam across the Broadwater from Southport to The Spit and back before work in the mornings. He often started out so early it was still pitch black. “It’s a tuckeroo,” she says. “It’s a beautiful tree with the deepest green leaves and they grow really well in the sand dunes. They’re the trees you see along Narrowneck and coming into Main Beach. They’re all very windswept. It’s a coastal tree and it does very well where there’s sand and wind. It’s beautiful, the tuckeroo, and we planted it for him. It’s still standing.”

LUNCH WITH KATE

2006-05-12T10:47:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, 2005.

IT is, perhaps, the most passionate and enduring relationship of her life.

The Australian actor Kate Fitzpatrick has had a lifelong fascination with the Phalaenopsis amabilis, or Moth orchid, so named by the great 19th century German botanist Karl Ludwig Blume. Its literal translation is “lovely moth”.

Today, the Philaenopsis is one of the most common of its species, famously adaptable, and the darling of amateur orchidists around the world. There are more than 50 species in the genus.

They have fascinated Fitzpatrick since her late teens, just as they must have entranced Blume’s predecessor, Dutch East India clerk G.E.Rumphius, when he arrived in Jakarta in the mid-1600s, and began the first real scientific documentation of orchids. He was so captured by their allure he never left Jakarta.

Philaenopsis’ have accompanied Fitzpatrick through decades of peripatetic travel. She has sent them as gifts to the bereaving. She has nurtured and propagated them in innumerable temporary homes. Through a remarkable career, friendships, affairs and relationships with the rich, famous and nondescript, late motherhood, single parenthood, court cases, public spats and countless colourful personal dramas, it is the orchid that has been her constant motif.

And unsurprisingly, they are with her again, these silent and loyal friends with their flat wing-shaped petals, at the start of her new life on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

“Phalaenopsis – it’s a Greek word for butterfly,” Fitzpatrick says, unthinkingly elevating the plant’s linguistic definition and beauty. A common moth they’re not. “I’m looking at them now by the window. I love them. There’s something about them. Such beauty comes out of such unprepossessing flowers…”

Fitzpatrick, 57, one of the country’s finest actors of stage and screen (with movies such as Goodbye Paradise, The Removalists, Heaven’s Burning and The Return of Captain Invincible to her credit) has quietly settled in the nondescript suburb of Labrador with her son Joe, 15. She lives in a townhouse beside her mother, Dawn, now 83. It’s a long way from a hugely robust and frenetic life that has included sojourns in London, her beloved France, Greece, Sydney and, as of last January, Melbourne.

She has, surprisingly, a brief Queensland pedigree. The Fitzpatrick clan once resided on the Sunshine Coast when she was a child. “I’ve lived in Caloundra,” she says. “All I remember about it is eating an ice cream in the water and it was raining, that’s how hot it was…”

Meeting her in Brisbane, she is immediately recognisable from a distance wandering through the Queen Street Mall in coat and scarf. Yet she has the air of a woman lost, a moth blown off its course and dropped into unfamiliar terrain.

On the Gold Coast, too, she appears even more remote, both fascinated and appalled by the beach city’s proclivity for flash and glitz. Its strangeness is constantly arresting her attention, and her frightening eye for detail.

“I had to get the bus,” she says on the day we meet for lunch at trendy Main Beach. “I got into a conversation with a young woman at the bus stop. By the end there wasn’t a thing I didn’t know about her life, and she knew nothing about me. It has been that way with me all my life. I don’t know why.”

And in the middle of a conversation something will catch her eye. “Sorry,” she says, “I’m just distracted by the way those palm trees are coming through the roof over there.” She gestures towards two huge palms around which has been constructed a tiled shop awning. “Thank God they did that…the only thing I want to say on the subject of palm trees, which I think there should be a lot more of around here, is that they always remind me of …do you know Harbour Town (a shopping centre at Robina)? They’ve got this giant…I thought it was a sewerage vent but in fact it’s a Telecom thing, this gigantic sort of pole that goes for 400 feet, and on the top of it are seven or eight palm tree fronds. It wasn’t a bad idea but they didn’t know how to do it…a tiny tuft on the top. It’s disproportionate. Proportion is something, don’t you think?”

In Tedder Avenue, she literally stops in her tracks to watch pass by a giant amphibious tourist vehicle fashioned into a duck.

“Did you see that?” she says. “Does it go into the water as well? Do you think it goes into the water?” She stands in the duck’s wake, genuinely puzzled.

And at Shuck restaurant, where Fitzpatrick is joined by her mother, there is an almost comical theatrical exchange with the waiter over oysters.

WAITER: The Sydney Rock oysters and the Pacifics are from Port Stephens…

KATE: What does that mean?

WAITER: They call them Sydney Rocks but that’s just a name, it doesn’t mean they’re from Sydney.

KATE: Did you know that the Sydney Opera House is built on an Aboriginal oyster midden?

WAITER: The Pacifics are…

KATE: It’s interesting, isn’t it? The midden?

WAITER: We had a customer once who found a little pearl in her oyster.

KATE: Really? From a little grain of sand…now tell me, is it the Pacifics that taste ‘creamy’?

This is the way it goes with Fitzpatrick. She can simultaneously run half a dozen conversational narratives at once, lose you, draw you back in, confuse and befuddle you, before neatly tying the lines together. Her insatiable curiosity means you can be talking about human love and death one minute and the feeding habits of magpies the next.

Her autobiography, Name Dropping: An Incomplete Memoir (2004), shared the same fractured style, mirroring her taste for digression, and unfolding like the preparation of an elaborate dish, with colourful spices, herbs and fresh ingredients tossed into the pot en route. The end result is a remarkably rich and well-written bouillabaise of a life story.

The final two lines of that book are: “There are many stories in the naked city. These have been a few of them.”

Airmail: Three Women/Letters from Five Continents, her new book, continues the moveable feast. It reveals volleys of correspondence between Fitzpatrick, her sister Sally, and mother Dawn, and the letters and postcards are glued together with more personal reminiscences and stories.

After spending time with Fitzpatrick, you begin to understand that she is her innumerable stories. That they encase her like a thick coat. Perhaps even protect her. Some actors never stop acting as a personal protective device.

It is not so with Fitzpatrick. Her stories are her cocoon. And while there are little gaps between them, through which she occasionally allows you to glimpse her real self, the stories fight to deflect your attention.

“So many stories,” she says almost wistfully. “And that’s nothing. Now I keep thinking, I wish I’d put this story and that story in (her memoirs), and a lot of my father’s stories. And I remember everybody else’s stories.”

But what is she doing here - one-time lover to actors like Jeremy Irons and Sam Neill, friend to sportsmen and businessmen such as Imran Khan and Kerry Packer respectively, wooed by screen great Jack Nicholson, intellectual foil to and favourite of Nobel laureate Patrick White, and theatrical contemporary of everyone from director Jim Sharman to actor Max Cullen, - on the Gold Coast?

As she says in the new memoir: “As much as I like the weather and love the magpies who visit, singing loudly for their supper three times a day, using their beaks like chopsticks, there isn’t much to do on the Gold Coast other than write.”

What does a person like Kate Fitzpatrick do in suburban Labrador, away from the great, thriving sources of her life stories?

*

EVEN today, it’s possible to catch the vestiges of the Adelaide convent schoolgirl (St Aloysius College) that Fitzpatrick was in both her intermittent English accent and the occasional coquettish facial expression.

Born in Western Australia to her geologist father Brian and artist mother Dawn, she was the oldest of five children. The Fitzpatricks soon settled in Adelaide alongside well-established relatives..

At school Fitzpatrick showed precocious talent, particularly in art. She was particularly fond of drawing plants. She writes in Airmail of her father’s long absences mapping terrain in the Australian bush, and subsequent home life: “As soon as Dad left, and was once more safely ensconced in the middle of nowhere, our chaotic creative life would resume. The dining table and every inch of our living room floor were used as studio space.”

Dawn had a foolproof method of teaching the children how to paint and draw. If it wasn’t good enough, it was destroyed. “As a teaching aid it worked like a charm. We could draw anything.”

Fitzpatrick showed so much ability she was chosen to represent South Australia on a painting tour of Japan announced by “Phidias” (the pseudonym of the great painter Jeffrey Smart) of the ABC’s popular radio and television series, The Argonauts.

The budding artist wrote to her parents from the Palace Hotel, Tokyo: “Dear Mum and Dad, You will never guess what I am doing now – well, I am sitting on my bed leaning against the most exquisite, modern, luxury Japanese room you have ever seen (or not as the case may be) watching Dr Kildare on television speaking Japanese perfectly!”

Her father toyed with the idea of his oldest daughter becoming a psychiatrist. Too lazy for academia, she enrolled in the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney and was accepted.

The moved not only fitted her perfectly – though she may not have realised it at the time – but seemed to cast her future lifestyle. As she reveals in Airmail: “During my first years away from home I changed address a lot and never seemed to have any money.” Only last year she was quoted as saying she had never had “a brass razoo” throughout her career.

Famous for her lack of ambition, Fitzpatrick’s nonchalance may indeed have made her stand out at the nation’s holy grail of acting, aside from an effortless ability to perform. During a NIDA graduate performance of The Legend of King O’Malley by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy (which later successfully toured the country), she caught the eye of writer Patrick White, and from that moment was enveloped in the Sydney literary and theatrical intelligentsia.

She was instantly in work in theatre, film and television, from the TV series Boney to Jim Sharman’s incredibly successful Rocky Horror Picture Show to Peter Weir’s first film, Homesdale. By the late 70s Patrick White had written a play for her.(Big Toys) after she had dazzled in his other play, The Season at Sarsaparilla.

And still acting seemed to just facilitate an interesting life full of interesting people, rather than being a career focus.. She has starred in more than 40 plays and 20 films.

“It has just been easy,” she says now of the craft. “I’ve never had any ambition, really. I just like working. If you travelled like I did…it’s not like I sat around in my flat and waited for someone to ring. I’d just piss off. Usually I’d be brought back (to Australia) to do something. Acting - it’s not rocket science, as the ones with any brains will tell you. There are some things I’ve been shocking in and some I have been good in, and that’s it really.

“I’ve never really had that permanent need to perform in front of an audience, either.”

Her numerous letters and postcards from overseas, as they appear in Airmail, are tangible evidence of Fitzpatrick adhering to that old adage – she worked to live, and not vice versa. Brother Ben and sister Sally were already traversing the globe by the early 70s.

Fitzpatrick took off too, travelling to Jerusalem, Athens, London and then Moscow, where she and director Tom Cowan showed their film The Office Picnic at the Moscow Film Festival. It was the beginning of her love affair with Europe.

“I’m a bit more circumspect when I’m in Europe,” she says. “I don’t think I change, but I’m not usually taken for a foreigner. In Europe I’m most at home I think. I like a lot of things about it. I just can’t afford it. Even village life. I like village life. I’m really happy there. I like knowing all the shopkeepers and the fact that they know you. Wherever I’ve gone, until now, I’ve always had this. But I’ve moved so many times.”

Fitzpatrick was perennially touted as Australia’s next major movie star export, but it never really eventuated. She was professionally courted by the likes of Norman Mailer, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, but Hollywood eluded her.

When Name Dropping was released last year, much fuss was made over her love life and its cast of famous names from the sporting, acting and legal fraternities. (Her son Joe’s father, Jose Albertini, is a French architect). It also fanned some old fires amongst the women in her life.

A spat with actress Robyn Nevin ensued after publication, which eventually played itself out in a string of comical letters in the Sydney newspapers. There was, too, her hilarious falling out with the formidable feminist academic Germaine Greer, with whom Fitzpatrick was briefly living in England shortly before the birth of Joe.

“I came to believe that pregnancy, pregnant women and babies are not within her field of expertise – too messy, unpredictable and uncontrollable,” she writes of Greer in Airmail. “On the first night Germaine cooked a wonderful meal of chicken, vegetables and couscous. It was a very pleasant and welcoming introduction. The only cloud was introduced by her free range cats, who gave me the mother of all asthma attacks. At one moment she kissed one of them very near its bum and I remember thinking no woman who kisses a cat on the arse is going to kiss my baby.”

Fitzpatrick lasted three days, and retreated into the arms of other friends. On her admission, and to highlight her restless nature, she had “nine moves in six or seven weeks and in three countries up to eight months into the pregnancy”.

Airmail ends poignantly with the death of her father in 1995. She writes of a morsel of advice he gave her when she was a child. “Always remember that everything in the universe – meteorites, diamonds, even you – is basically carbon.” Fitzpatrick was eight years old.

The final piece of family correspondence reproduced in the book is from Kate and Joe in Fiji in 2001. “This really is a big piece of Paradise,” she writes.

After that postcard, there is nothing.

*

Back at Shuck restaurant on the Gold Coast, Fitzpatrick is engaged in a long, circuitous argument with her mother just as the entrees have been completed. Fitzpatrick is still going on the oysters, and has regaled the table with so many anecdotes she has forgotten there’s still a single Sydney Rock nestling in its shell.

“She reads everything in Morse Code,” Fitzpatrick says of her mother, Dawn, seated across the table. “It’s something she learned in the war. She joined the RSL here recently and talks to blokes there completely in Morse. It’s like she’s a savant. Mum, what’s Shuck in Morse?”

“Dee dee dee dah dah….” Dawn responds instantly.

“Can you understand what I’m saying now, Ma, in Morse?”

Dawn smiles and shakes her head. “You wouldn’t have made it (in the war). You wouldn’t have passed the Morse exam. You’d have ended up in the kitchen.”

Dawn, an accomplished and respected patchwork quilt artist, studies the proof copy of Airmail at the table. The cover features a montage of photographs of her and her two daughters.

FITPATRICK: Have you read all the letters from me and Sally?

DAWN: I’ve read some of the letters.

FITZPATRICK: But have you read any of the links between the letters?

DAWN: No, I haven’t read the links.

FITZPATRICK: You’re going to be shocked.

DAWN: Am I going to be shocked?

FITZPATRICK: What I don’t understand about Morse Code is whether the dee’s and dah’s suggest the word in your mind first, or the actual words suggest the dee’s and the dah’s.

DAWN: You would never have passed. You don’t understand it at all.

FITZPATRICK: No, I think it’s a fair question. What I want to know is…”

Their verbal play proceeds this way for some time, and it’s not hard to picture the big family home in Adelaide, or later on the harbour at McMahon’s Point in Sydney, filled with these curious dialogues between these tirelessly curious people.

Fitzpatrick refuses to be interviewed or photographed at home in Labrador. There is a hint of embarrassment, perhaps not over the actual physical homes themselves, but the overarching reality that she is living in a place she had not expected to be living in. A place that she has yet to fit into.

Sister Sally says from her home in San Diego, California, that she is thrilled about Airmail, but concerned for Kate on the Gold Coast.

“I don’t know that she will survive there,” Sally says. “Kate’s great love are the big cities – Sydney or Melbourne. She’s there on the Gold Coast out of necessity really. She had no work in Melbourne and it was difficult to survive. It’s not a matter of being there to look after Mum at this stage in her life I don’t think. Kate has always looked after Mum.

“Kate is dying in Labrador. She needs the stimulus of a big city. She says she’s possibly looking to Brisbane. I hope it works out for her.”

There is, too, the question of her sister Kate’s skin, as delicate as an orchid petal. Fitzpatrick’s face was once described as that of “a fallen angel”.

Sally laughs at the thought of her sister in the fierce Queensland sun. “It’s why she has always looked so good – she’s hardly ever been out in the sun. I remember she used to say she’ll be buried looking as good as she was when she was 16. Whatever it takes. She probably will.”

As for Fitzpatrick’s personal life, the topic of such interest and debate last year, she is not expansive on the subject. She writes in the penultimate paragraph of Airmail: “As for me, I still love cricket. I’m still going to live in Paris – or New York. I’ve never married and have fallen in and out of love only once since Jose – probably for the last time.”

Does she mean this? For the last time?

“I can’t imagine it ever happening - I never meet anyone,” she says. “I was asked to marry many times for very odd reasons, I thought. That marriage would fix up a situation. It made me kind of feel trapped, to be honest. The idea of it made me feel claustrophobic.

“And then I read about people who lived in adjoining flats or houses and I thought maybe that would work. As long as I had my own bathroom. My own bedroom perhaps. Also, being such a free agent, I’ve realised over the last 15 years (raising Joe) that it’s enough to look after one person let alone lots of other people. I say in Name Dropping that I was proposed to eight times, but it really was, I suppose, ten.

“I once had an asthma attack on Victoria Street (in Sydney) when I was proposed to. I seem to attract control freaks. There’s something about me. And jealousy. I have never done the dirty on anyone. I’ve always been absolutely monogamous, even if it was just for a week (She laughs.) But there have been some terrible jealousies. I just find that so bad. But not now, I don’t expect people to be interested in me.”

She laughs at the attempts of friends to “set her up with a man”.

“I think that some people are needy, that they find me interesting, and others sniff that I’m a bolter,” she says. “It drives them mad. They just want to reign me in. But I can look at a man across the table, get engaged in my mind, married, have kids, then divorced, all in the space of half and hour, and it’s all over.”

As for permanent life on the Gold Coast, she remains uncommitted.

“I hope, I feel, it could be the beginning of something in that I think it’s turning me into a writer, do you know what I mean?” she says. “There isn’t any or much (acting) work. If you do want to get what’s around you don’t come to live on the Gold Coast because there ain’t any here.

“But I’m an old bird, you know what I mean?”

She does, at least, have her Phalaenopsis amabilis. Interestingly, the more you study Fitzpatrick, and the story of her life thus far, she and the Moth orchid share startling metaphorical similarities.

The orchid has been a symbol of luxury and beauty for many centuries. The Greeks considered them a symbol of virility, and they have been used as aphrodisiacs. They are fought over by collectors.

Their survival, too, has been assured by their phenomenal ability to adapt to their environment and attract a huge range of pollinators, from bees to frogs and snails.

Back home in Labrador, Fitzpatrick reports that the plants she relocated from Melbourne are doing remarkably well in their new Queensland environment.

“The gardenias are twice the size they’ve ever been,” she says happily. “And the orchids are blooming beautifully.”

* Airmail: Three Women/Letters from Five Continents by Kate Fitzpatrick is published in October by Wiley Australia, $29.95.

HERE & NOW

2006-04-04T16:41:00.000+10:00

AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER CAREY
Published in Qweekend Magazine, Saturday, April 1, 2006

“THERE are a couple of things I’ve been looking at lately and I want you to see them.” Novelist Peter Carey has telephoned my hotel room on this bitterly cold Sunday in New York, and he sounds somewhat conspiratorial, almost cryptic.

“At the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) – that’s at Fifth Avenue and 81st - there’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines. Walk up another eight blocks or so to the Guggenheim (Museum). The David Smith sculptures. They’re really lovely. They’re a good enough reason for living. And while you’re there, check out the Rothko and the de Kooning in the first room on the right. I was there this morning. I’m urging you to get out of your room, despite the jetlag, and see them.”

I’m unsure if this is an order, a generous cultural gesture from a long-time Australian New Yorker to a fellow Australian, or a test. Carey’s latest novel – Theft: A Love Story – whirls around modern art, the world of painters and dealers, critics and buyers, forgers and fraudsters – and I become convinced our most esteemed living novelist is offering me a trail of breadcrumbs not just into his new book but, perhaps, into his strange and pyrotechnic psyche.

So I do as he bids and walk from West 57th Street, past the waiting rows of carriages and horses - their heads veiled in steam - at Central Park South, through the sub-zero shadows of skyscrapers and blocks of pale light, to the warmth of the Guggenheim and Carey’s possible clues.

In the Guggenheim, that remarkable egg-like Frank Lloyd Wright-designed masterpiece that opened in 1959, New Yorkers are thawing out with that querulous, almost stunned look that all amateur Sunday afternoon art gallery browsers adopt across the world.

What has Carey seen here? The David Smith exhibition begins with tiny figures of steel and coral fragments from the 1930s, and as you ease through and up the spiral of the white museum – like ants in a conch shell – you can literally trace the development of the American artist over thirty years of welding and riveting. There are birds and roosters, houses and wombs, flowers and faces.

The next day the The New Yorker magazine would write, in a way that would set the teeth of Carey’s garrulous artist-hero in Theft, Butcher Bones, grinding: “Distance and a milky radiance flatten the latter works into lyrical ciphers, completing the great helix like musical notes on a spooling staff.”

Looking down into the museum from the top ramp, I wonder – what is Carey, the boy from rural Bacchus Marsh in western Victoria, telling me? What am I searching for here inside the mysterious cosy head of the Guggenheim?

*

Jerry’s Restaurant and Bar in Prince Street, down in southern Manhattan’s funky SoHo district, has been called “a diner with a college education”. It carries arty black and white photographs on the walls, has a long sleek bar, and red banquets.

It is one of Carey’s favourites for breakfast, and he arrives punctually at around 9am dressed in a melange of greys and blacks. As he removes his coat at the front of the restaurant, his height surprises you. He is over six feet, and gangly as a teenager. His hair is grey and unruly, but not quite as unkempt as that of one of the characters in Theft, whose hair “looked like cattle had been eating it”. (Carey has written of himself: “I never look right. I am messy. Also, I don’t know how people get their hair so tidy…”)

He orders coffee, bacon and eggs. His accent is still powerfully Australian, glinting only rarely with the hard chrome of American twang. (Is it always this way, or chameleon-like, tuning into familiar timbres and resonances in the vicinity of another Australian voice?) His eyes, bespectacled, are rheumy with the cold. He has a sniffle.

“Did you know, this is the longest I’ve lived in any city in my life?” he says. “Who was that mayor you had in Brisbane, the one who was a priest?” Jim Soorley. “Years ago he offered me the top floor of the Powerhouse (Museum). ‘Peter, we want you to live in Brisbane,’ he said. ‘How can we make this happen? What about the Powerhouse?’ If I were to live back in Australia it would be in Brisbane. I could have a nice house on stumps, and weather that was agreeable most of the year.” (Soorley confirms the offer and says if he were still mayor the invitation would remain open to Carey: “How could you withdraw an offer like that to a world class writer like Peter?”)

Carey clasps his warm coffee and talks about his years as a young writer living an “alternative lifestyle” in Yandina on the Sunshine Coast, and Bellingen in northern NSW, and the early 80s in Sydney when he started up an advertising agency – McSpedden Carey – with friend Bani McSpedden. (Some of the advertising works of Carey and his former cohorts included ads for Tic Tac mints, John West canned fish and Lindeman’s wine.)

There is a residue of nostalgia about Carey, 62, at this moment, and he speaks of his Australian past with such affection it could almost be a lucky rabbit’s foot he carries around in his pocket at all times, there to be clasped for solace.

Or it could be part of the afterglow of writing Theft, a fiercely Australian comic work that explores the landscapes of his past that he has never fully visited in his fiction. He would later admit to the thrills this afforded him: “It’s a huge pleasure to realise I could visit Australian place and landscape in a way I never have before. You know you spend all your life writing, but I’ve never done this. I’ve lifted it straight from a place, straight from my life. And of course there is a tendency, for certain journalists, to read all this autobiographically, which it’s not. But I know these places intimately, and they all came back to me in extraordinary detail.”

He finishes breakfast although his plate of curly bacon rashes is only half-eaten. “Offer my commiserations to the pig,” he tells the waiter as the plate is taken away.

“Now,” Carey says, “let me walk you through a few streets and places that appear in the novel.”

Theft: A Love Story, Carey’s ninth novel, is the tale of heavy-drinking Australian artist and former meat worker Butcher Bones, who had “once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard”. After an acrimonious divorce, which involves losing his eight-year-old son and most of his worldly assets, he is jailed for trying to retrieve his best paintings from the former marital home.

On his release from Sydney’s Long Bay Prison – his reputation in tatters, his stocks as an artist severely diminished, his fame obliterated – he repairs to the Bellingen property of his biggest collector, Jean Paul Milan, along with his 220lb idiot-savant brother Hugh to rebuild his life, and his talent.

Just weeks into this new existence, the mysterious American art expert, Marlene, pulls her car into the driveway. She is looking for Butcher’s neighbour, Dozy Boylan, who, it transpires, is in possession of an original masterpiece by the feted European painter Jacques Leibovitz. Marlene is there to authenticate the work. Butcher deems her the “enemy” from the commercial side of the art world.

Then Butcher and Marlene begin a romance, the Leibovitz mysteriously disappears, the police investigate, and Carey’s novel becomes a flywheel of comic misadventures, deceit, double-dealing and illusion that spills from the streets of Sydney to Tokyo to SoHo, one of the art meccas of the world.

“There’s Fanelli’s,” Carey says as we stroll a short distance from Jerry’s to the corner of Mercer Street. We stand momentarily in front of the bar and café, a former speakeasy that served homemade distilled bathtub gin during Prohibition. The Fanelli’s sign is blood-red neon. “That’s where Butcher has a drink when they first get to New York.”

Further down cobbled Mercer Street, Carey stops and stares up at an old apartment building with majestically tall windows. “I think this is where the loft is where Marlene and Butcher stay in New York,” he says. “Or this is where I imagined it to be, in the book. Look at those windows. I love those windows. You’d pay a lot for windows like that in New York.”

Carey knows this turf. When he first moved to the city in late 1989, he and his then wife, theatre director Alison Summers, purchased a duplex in Bedford Street, Greenwich Village. (Summers and Carey, who separated in 2003, are now divorced. They have two sons - Charley, 15, and Sam, 19.)

“I think my (ex-) wife believes she came here for me, but maybe not,” Carey says. “My version of the story is she wanted to come and direct theatre in New York. There was no reason for me to come here from a career point of view. I’d just won the Booker Prize. I had a very good publisher and a very good agent. Probably, in the end, if you want to talk about those things, it hasn’t hurt me. You follow your life, you choose the thing that energises you at the time. I was rather frightened of New York when I first came here, quite frightened of it, and now I love this city. As a city, I love it more than any other city on earth.” (This, despite the fact that Summers was shopping in one of the Twin Towers when terrorists struck on the morning of September 11, 2001, prompting Carey to famously write in the aftermath: “There is no God for me.”)

Friend and colleague, the Irish writer Colum McCann, says Carey is very much the New Yorker. “Peter is pure New York. He's comfortable here. Like a lot of people who are away from home - myself included - he holds onto aspects of where he came from. New York is a city that's never really interested in your past. It's your present tense that matters. So Peter has kept himself in a present tense, I suppose, both as a New Yorker and an Australian. It's a good mix. It also manages to keep him humble. I'm always surprised by his humility.”

We walk swiftly to the subway. Carey’s leaking nose is wreaking havoc. We take the green line #4 train to Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, up near Lexington Avenue and the East 60s.

It is at Hunter, as professor of literature and the college’s creative writing program director, that another Peter Carey exists– the teacher, the “academic”, the mentor. It is an unexamined side to his life.

As the subway train rumbles along beneath the city streets, it feels we have crossed an invisible border – from the Downtown Carey, the semi-reclusive writer, to the public Professor Carey of the Upper East Side.

*

“He has a way of humiliating you and your work, and afterwards you think he’s the greatest guy on earth. I don’t know how that happens.” David Rogers, 32, and a publishing assistant, is one of Carey’s writing students at Hunter College. He and three fellow second-year students are puzzling over the curious powers of Peter Carey, the teacher, in an Italian wine bar not far from the college.

“And he’s not a gentle person,” says Emily Stone, 37, a yoga teacher. “He has a strong personality. He uses his powers for good, not evil.” David continues: “If he rips you to shreds he’ll come up to you later and say – ‘I hope that wasn’t too harsh’.”

Jeff Rotter, 37, a television writer, and Concetta Ceriello, 26, who by day works in her family’s Italian butcher shop, concur that having a two-time Booker prize winner for a teacher can be daunting. “He’s very interested in our work, which is insane because he’s Peter Carey,” says Jeff. “I think we were all a little starstruck.”

David adds: “We’re all pretty blown away by his writing, particularly when he rewrites your sentences in class. He always has his eye on the bigger picture.” Concetta says he fits in sartorially because “he always wears black”. And Emily gives him the ultimate accolade: “He’s fast and sarcastic, like a New Yorker.”

It is difficult to see Carey as an academic in the strictest sense, especially in light of his view of them in an interview several years ago: “When I was very young and my books were first noticed by academics, I used to get very superior about how stupid they were.” He has previously taught at New York University, Columbia, Princeton and other campuses.

To observe him at Hunter, though, is to witness a writer enervated by the creative process, seriously engaged in his students’ work and welfare, and determined to give back to his craft and change young people’s lives.

He operates out of a tiny office. It redefines spartan, containing a small desk, an Apple computer, a mounted bookshelf and a guest’s chair. There is one small picture on the wall, and only a handful of his own works on the bookshelf. Carey’s name is not on the door. Just a number.

He is assessing the writings of potential students for the forthcoming semester. “Here, look at this and tell me what you think,” he says, calling up a student’s short story on the computer.

Later, he and a colleague debate one particular application. The candidate, a male in his 30s who still lives with his mother, has sent in a sample of his fiction. It features a very unusual horse. Carey is intrigued.

“I don’t know whether this guy is a complete nut or a genius,” the colleague says, worried. “I think he might be interesting,” says Carey, leaning back in his chair. “I’ll get him in here. I guarantee you he’s a nice guy.” The colleague smiles uneasily.

McCann, a celebrated novelist in his own right, who teaches with Carey at Hunter, says: “I think Peter knows that nothing exciting is ever achieved through predictability. As a novelist he knows this, of course - every page testifies to that. But as a person operating in an academic environment, as distinct from a pure academic, which he's not, he knows it intuitively. He has single-handedly turned the Hunter Creative Writing Program into the one of the very best in the country. It has become a place that many of the bigger creative writing programs are scared of.”

Guest speakers and teachers to the program, under Carey’s watch, have included Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Richard Price and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

“I don't think the program is his heart and soul, but it is extremely important to him,” says McCann. “ In fact I don't think it would be a good thing if the program was his sole focus - we'd lose out on the books and in the end it will be his books that matter.”

Carey’s teaching officially occupies him one day a week, although there are obvious extracurricular demands. He insists he has to have a job “because I’ve got two teenage boys living in New York”.

Carey says Hunter’s huge multicultural mix is what excites him the most. “I had students from India, British Guiana, people from all over,” he adds. “They were really surprised that I understood a great deal about colonialism. And that I understood a great deal about writing in your own language and not compromising yourself, about telling your own stories. You want to write about British Guiana? I can help you. You don’t know anybody better than me in this whole city to help you. What I discovered was that being an Australian in the United States, I was really vitally connected to them.”

*

Theft: A Love Story is a riotous, freewheeling romp of a book, reminiscent of the effervescent Illywhacker, full of cheek and gags and even a murder mystery, yet underpinned by profound questions on the nature of culture and who defines it. You can’t help feeling Carey had a lot of fun in Theft’s creation.

“If the book is successful then it should feel like you’ve had a lot of fun writing it, even if the reality is different,” he says. “Looking at ballet dancers and the amazing things they do on stage, you don’t know if their muscles are aching or their bones are breaking, you don’t see the pain at all. You just see grace and ease.”

The novel again explores his interest in fakery, forgery, and the inexhaustible range of human duplicity. “I was thinking - every country has its artistic hoaxes,” he says. “Why are they such a big deal for us (Australians)? I began to think that it was about our relationship to the metropolitan centers. We were (and maybe still are) asking overseas experts, as they used to be called, to judge our cultural achievements. We are the periphery. They are the centre. They have the power. Theft is about the center and the periphery. Butcher is a wonderful painter, if an imperfect human being. His work cannot be seen in the clouded fashion-conscious eyes of the centre. Part of the story is about his revenge, the triumph of the man from iron bark.”

Carey thrillingly skewers the entire construct of the art world, its critics, promoters, dealers, and the whole array of personnel that exist in its murky wake. As Bones declares, of art and life, at the end of the book: “How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?”

More interestingly, through the voice of Hugh, the loveable dullard, Carey pins down the quirkiness of an Australian idiom on the brink of extinction. A magpie with words, and brutally sarcastic to boot, Hugh gave Carey a chance to “create a really new voice”.

Hugh’s exhortations are recorded in the novel in capital letters, so someone, for example, can be a NERVOUS NELLY, a FARTING HORSE NEVER TIRES, drunk people are STONKERED, and an erection can be THROBBING LIKE A SOCK FULL OF GRASSHOPPERS. This can be excruciatingly funny, but it also serves to resuscitate words and phrases from another era to the point where they strike the reader as “new”.

For Hugh’s voice, Carey drew heavily on his memories of growing up in Bacchus Marsh, where the family had the General Motors dealership. “We were not rich in any conceivable way,” says Carey. “My parents worked their butts off. It was all work, work, work, work, work. There weren’t any luxuries. They’d go to the butcher’s and get a T-bone steak. We thought we were having good food. No one was hungry. My father used to say – ‘You’d go all over the world and you wouldn’t get a better feed than this’.”

Carey himself was shipped off to boarding school in Geelong when he was a boy (“It’s why there are so many orphans in my books.”), before studying for a science degree at Monash University. He drifted into advertising where he met other writers like Barry Oakley.

In Theft, Butcher describes Marlene’s journey from a narrow rural life to the wider world: “…she quietly, triumphantly, entered a completely unmapped ocean, and was gob-smacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less.” It takes no imaginative leap to see this as a description of a young Carey discovering the complicated riches of life beyond Bacchus Marsh, or even Australia.

Composer Peter Best worked with Carey in advertising in the early years. “I think his relationship with advertising, like mine, was driven by a sense of fun, a sort of joy we got from playing games with pictures, words and music,” Best says. “It was like doing puzzles and cheering when you got them out. He also enjoyed the combative relationship he had as a creative person with the people we all called ‘suits’. They tended to regard people like Peter as dangerous anarchists who had to be watched carefully, and he liked to provoke them, especially if he didn't like them, and there were plenty he didn't like.”

Carey had written four unpublished novels before his short story collection, The Fat Man in History, was released by University of Queensland Press in 1974. In 1985 the epic Illywhacker brought him international attention, then Oscar and Lucinda (1988) cemented his reputation, winning him his first Booker Prize. He won again for his masterpiece True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001, prompting critic Peter Craven to suggest it was “possible” Carey might one day carry off the Nobel Prize in Literature.

At our final meeting – lunch at another of his local eateries, the Savoy, again in SoHo - he says he does not think about his previous work, or the accolades. He concedes his life could have taken a very different turn.

“I would never have left Bacchus Marsh if there’d been room for me in the family car business,” he says matter-of-factly. Is he serious? No writing? No New York? “Yes. My family is still in Bacchus Marsh. These people have rich, complicated, rewarding, interesting lives. So, I think I would probably - if one had a chance to look - prefer the life I have now than a life in the car business. But not everyone is being a writer or an artist and if you somehow thought that you were doing something that was deeply superior, what could you ever write? Do you know what I’m saying?”

Carey is embedded in a new novel, set in Yandina, and chuckles at the writer’s lot: “I’ve been thinking about this bird, a pitta bird, also known as the jewelled thrush, and of course, it’s stupid of me to say anything to anybody, it’s so uninteresting, but I’m so happy to have been where I’ve been in my head all morning. It’s a very strange way to live and of course it’s not normal but if that’s what you do ever day, how blessed can that be?”

He is reticent to talk of his private life, and has heard whispers that a particular Sydney journalist and publication wish to do a “job” on him over his divorce to Alison Summers. He is incredulous that this is of any interest to the public.

“How about we just say this,” Carey says. “I’ve been through a divorce. Divorces - and half of your readers will have been through them – are horrible. They’re horrible for everybody. There’s no such thing as a good divorce. Everybody’s going to be injured, shattered. The children, adults, and so on.

“It isn’t like this (Theft) is a ‘divorce book’, the last four books have been divorce books. It’s been going on forever. The thing is, after all this, I met someone, and suddenly rather than think my life was over, my life began again. And yes, I am happy. I’m not saying I’m living a life without any pain or turmoil, but I’m happy, and if that shows in my work, good.”

He then leans towards my tape recorder. “That’s ON the record,” he says into it, almost Hugh-like, and sits back with a smile.

*

There was a clue in the Guggenheim after all, but I had missed it, and it wasn’t until my last meeting with Carey that it was revealed.

I had seen the marvellous works of David Smith, the de Kooning and the Rothko, and stood giddily at the top of the museum, looking down through its white spiral to the ground floor, busy with art lovers.

Days later, Carey handed me the key to what I was looking at: “I feel I’m starting to get sort of better (as a writer). I’m starting to feel I can do things I couldn’t do before. I’m doing things with sentences that I wouldn’t have even thought about before.

“I don’t know, one would like to make something that has never existed in the world before, and you would like it to grow out of your own soil and you’d like to have a sort of confidence of being able to handle the material in such a way you could slap it around and do anything with it with some sense of control. A lot of the painters I’ve told you about had it, and sculptors. Mastery is what you’d aim for. The way I’m talking is ahead of what I’m doing.

“But to produce tensions which push the language into somewhere new, you’re stretching all the time for the thing that’s true and broken and strange. Like de Kooning and Rothko….”

It is warm and stimulating inside the great white head of the Guggenheim, a crucible of mastery. Smith’s art depicts a whole world. At that moment, in an apartment in Downtown Manhattan, Peter Carey is putting together the words and sentences of a new book – his whole new world - as a Noisy Pitta bird skitters through his imagination.

As for the rest of us, we huddle around the warmth of great art, of literature, just as people have been attracted, forever, to the warmth and light of a fire. It is what Carey has tried to show me. The heat generated by great art. The friction that comes out of the struggle for mastery.

Outside, freezing winds tear down Fifth Avenue.

* Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey is published by Knopf ($45). Carey will be appearing at the Ithaca Auditorium, Brisbane City Hall, on Friday, April 7, at 6pm.

ends

AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE GREGAN

2006-01-04T15:19:00.000+10:00

IT is clear from the outset that this is to be a game of numbers.

We have come to interview the captain of the Australian Wallabies, George Gregan (scrumhalf, number 9), at the Sunshine Coast’s resplendent Hyatt Regency, in the shadow of Mount Coolum (208m, or 681 feet).

At precisely 9.57am the Hyatt receptionist, following a brief in-house phone call, relays the message.

“Could you please meet Mr Gregan at ten past ten in the Ambassador’s Lounge.”

Gregan happens to be staying at the Hyatt with his family to celebrate and enjoy the centenary Australian Professional Golfers Aassociation Championship (later won by Robert Allenby, 18-under), and on this stormy day there are innumerable portents of serious mathematics – the player’s scoreboard, tee off times and caddies with cards and pencils.

It’s a short three-minute cart ride to the Ambassador’s Lounge – a small breakfast room with pool and outdoor furniture at the rear of the Hyatt complex – and when we arrive it is empty of guests. Two staff members are clearing away canisters of muesli and depleted plates of sliced cheese.

Everyone, it seems, has eaten early and gravitated towards the golf tournament on this opening day. Even Gregan was out there the day before, playing a celebrity pro-am with the likes of Australian golf champion Peter Lonard and rocker Jimmy Barnes. (Gregan has chiselled his handicap down from 7 to 6. As he says later: “You’ve never got it beaten. That’s what I love about golf and why it’s a great game.”)

The thing about the magnificent Hyatt Regency course, designed by American golf architect Robert Trent Jones Jr, is that you cannot escape the nearby imposing volcanic plug of Mount Coolum.

Waiting in the breakfast room for Captain Gregan, or the Guv (for governor) as he is referred to within the Wallabies team, it would be interesting to know if he is aware of the Aboriginal myth of the rounded, peak-free mountain, having played a round of golf at its base.

With the national press, former Wallabies, commentators and the public calling for Gregan’s head as national captain following the team’s recent lacklustre European tour and his own lukewarm form, it seems all the more pertinent.

Maroochy, as Aboriginal legend has it, was a beautiful young woman who was stolen from her fiancé Coolum by the feared Ninderry. Coolum showed great courage and rescued his bride to be, but was pursued by Ninderry who threw a boomerang and decapitated his rival.

The head rolled into the sea, and became Mudjimba Island. The torso is represented by Mount Coolum. Poor Maroochy retreated inland and cried so much her tears became the Maroochy River.

The mount, then – a spectacular backdrop to the Hyatt Regency and its designer course – is a headless corpse.

At 10.18am, Gregan arrives in the Ambassador’s Lounge so swiftly and quietly it’s difficult to recall which entrance he came in from.

He apologises for being late, checks his watch, and says: “We have thirty minutes. I have to pick up the kids from child-minding. You know, be a good father.”

This would give us until 10.48am. He soon revises our interview time to 11am.

The numbers reveal that Gregan, 32, is exactly 1.73m tall and weighs 76 kilograms, and is the most capped (118) international rugby player in the sport’s history.

What strikes you in the Ambassador’s Lounge is that he is, as you’d expect, a supremely fit athlete. It is the sort of highly tuned physical condition that radiates off his person, and makes him appear bigger than he actually is. He is attired in a pair of black designer thongs, long shorts and an immaculate white T-shirt that fits him as the rubber skin of a balloon fits helium.

It has been pouring rain outside, but there doesn’t appear to be a drop on him.

His shaved head is whiskered, and the scars of battle, both long and short, are etched across his pate. It occurs to you later that his face seen from directly in front is almost perfectly symmetrical and it’s this, and his direct gaze, that give him an unnerving air.

It is the visage we have all seen on television, at the beginning of a major Test match, when the cameras pan across the faces of the players during the singing of Advance Australia Fair. It is a look of supreme concentration. Or indifference to the public spotlight. Or possibly both.

To give Gregan his due, he has in recent times been a professional sportsman under siege. (He cannot know that in just over 24 hours his long-time ally and Wallabies coach Eddie Jones will be sacked.) But there is an intangible feeling about him, in person, that Gregan likes to keep his distance. He is reportedly known, also, as The Iceman.

With his photographic portrait taken (in six minutes), he pulls up a wooden chair in the breakfast room and orders a cup of green tea, then turns to face you.

It is 10.31am, and the clock is ticking.

*

IN the opening pages of John Updike’s masterpiece novel Rabbit, Run – a meditation on suburban life, affairs of the heart, and a former athlete’s slide into early middle age – the hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, stumbles across a group of teenagers playing outdoor basketball.

The game rekindles in Harry his glory days as a junior basketball champion, and he invites himself to play. He is only 26, but the distance between himself and the era of his B-league county records may as well be a lifetime.

“You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out…You’re out and you sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town…They’ve not forgotten him; worse, they never heard of him.”

Rabbit Angstrom is the archetype crier’s bell for all amateur and professional sportspeople at the end of their careers. If the press and public opinion are to be believed, it is a bell tolling for George Gregan.

A readers’ poll recently published in the Sydney Daily Telegraph revealed that 79 percent of those polled wanted him sacked, and 21 percent agreed to “spare him”.

The accompanying letters were as vicious as the statistics.

“Gregan should finally assume the position he’s (sic) always coveted by becoming a referee and then he can be justifiably paid for loitering around the scrum, ruck or maul doin’ nuthin’ but flappin’ his lips,” wrote Stompa. “Get off the bus, Gregan. You’re taking someone else’s seat.”

And from A.H. & B.A. Nesbit: “Go! We are disgusted with George…He gives the impression he’s only staying there for the cash, not for Australia.”

Helen Rogers was similarly emphatic. “He is WAY past his use-by date – and his arrogance is such that he refuses to admit he can’t play rugby any more and there are much younger players so much better than he.”

Rugby writers and commentators have been equally ruthless. They have seized on the Wallabies’ woeful recent statistics – eight Tests lost in the last nine outings – and looked for answers. The removal of Gregan, despite his record 118 Test caps, is one of them.

Gregan himself says Australian sports fans are quick to judge.

“With professional sport it’s based on results,” he says. “Look at the Aussie cricket team. They lost one series, the Ashes, and everyone had to go, you know, from Ricky Ponting to (coach) John Buchanan, they all had to go.

“It’s irrational, especially in the world of professional sport today. On any given day there’s one bad call, one poor decision, one not converted opportunity, and you lose the game narrowly. That’s the difference.”

He believes the criticism of himself and the Wallabies is symptomatic of the Australian sporting public’s attitude. Are we too hard on our sports men and women? Are we too addicted to winning?

“It’s the Australian way,” he says. “It always has been. I’ve grown up watching Australian sport and… In saying that, you get an amazing amount of support. We’ve got wonderful supporters, even through the bad times. If that was the attitude of all Australians then nobody would turn up and watch the Wallabies when we play our home Test matches.

“They want to support the team. I don’t know how many people have come up to me and said – we’re right behind you, don’t worry you guys, we can see you’re playing with a lot of vigour and passion that that sort of stuff and you’re just missing out…but don’t worry, it’s going to turn around. Hang in there type thing.”

He also quietly adds: “I always felt my best game is my next game or in the future, and I still feel that way.”

As any professional rugby player also knows, a Wallaby jersey, let alone the grail of the captaincy, would not be an easy thing to relinquish. By any measure, the financial rewards are extremely lucrative, the kudos invaluable, and the public and media attention incessant.

A Wallaby captaincy is, too, a form of financial investment in the future. In short, it continues to earn off the field. Gregan currently earns $450,000 per annum as captain of the Wallabies, and commercial endorsements would easily tip him into the million dollar yearly salary.

He and his wife Erica also run a string of successful cafes in Sydney called GG Espresso (The Perfect Cup of Coffee Everytime).

Andrew Slack, former Wallabies captain and now Brisbane sports journalist, says the demands of professional sport, the capacity to earn an enormous income, and the public expectations have changed the nature of the game.

What never changes is the age-old question that ultimately has to be asked by every accomplished athlete – when to go?

“It’s all about numbers these days,” Slack says. “Eddie Jones was one of the biggest numbers men of all time. If you’re not winning enough you’re going to go.

“As for the captaincy, it can sometimes camouflage deep down what you know (about yourself). You want to keep it surpressed. If George is saying his best football is ahead of him, that’s a big statement to make. Boy oh boy. You just have to look at the actual play. It would be an enormous statement to make based on his form.”

Gregan has been a Wallaby for 11 years. And it seems only yesterday that he stamped himself into Australian sporting folklore in 1994 with THAT try-saving, match-winning tackle on All Black Jeff Wilson in the Bledisloe Cup.

It was the perfect tackle, caught perfectly by the television cameras. It made Gregan a star, and propelled him towards becoming a household name.

Before that, he was a Canberra sporting identity. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, on April 19, 1973, his parents John and Jenny settled in the nation’s capital when George was almost two.

He attended St Edmunds College, and was a sports all-rounder, playing representative cricket and rugby. He still plays for the ACT Brumbies.

“Growing up in Canberra was great for me,” he recalls. “Great facilities for sports.

“I certainly wasn’t the most talented (academically) in the family. Looking back I probably could have applied myself a bit better. I took on three unit math and I think I learnt pretty quickly I needed to put a bit more time into learning equations and formulas rather than hitting a ball in the nets or kicking an extra football.”

Has he used those problematic equations since?

“No I haven’t. I found myself knowing the formula but not knowing how to apply it properly, and I’d make a stupid mistake and had the answer the complete opposite to what it should have been – a lot of negative answers when it should have been positive. There was a lot of that happening.”

He later completed a Bachelor of Secondary Education (Phys Ed) at the University of Canberra.

Gregan played rugby for Australia in the Under 19s and Under 21s before making his Test debut for the Wallabies against Italy at Brisbane’s Ballymore in 1994. He was elevated to the team’s vice-captaincy in 1997 and was appointed captain on September 10, 2001.

Was he born to be captain of the Wallabies?

“I was always the vice-captain (before the Wallabies) in cricket and local rugby,” he says. “It’s great. What I like about it is you can have a really positive role and effect on a group of men and what we do. It’s not just on the field but off the field as well.

“You see guys come into the team a bit overawed, they can’t talk, they’re afraid to back their skills and instincts that got them there in the first place. You coerce and make them realise they should be here. And it’s not always just football. They might be feeling a bit homesick. You walk and talk them through that situation and see them grow and develop. That’s a pleasing aspect.”

He followed the affable John Eales in the national captaincy. And Gregan’s perceived aloofness, personal rigidity and machine-like efficiency have garnered a few detractors over the years.

Former Wallaby, sports commentator and author, Peter FitzSimons, says: “Eddie Jones is one of the most intense characters I’ve ever met, and I wonder if part of the empathy between Jones and George Gregan isn’t because they have the same level of intensity.

“In my days with the Wallabies, in the (Nick) Farr-Jones and Bob Dwyer era, Farr-Jones was a laugh a minute, first man in the casino, last man out. A colourful guy. So many stories, so little time.

“John Eales also is more of a sober character but prone to a good belly laugh. With George Gregan the dichotomy with him is his public persona. I don’t know him well, I think few people do, but his public persona is as prickly as any rugby bloke I’ve ever come across.

“He seems a very defensive man around the media. It’s been his long time enemy, or so it seems. It’s a pity with Gregan. I’d be very surprised if he runs out with the Wallabies again. Mind you, I’ve been wrong about Gregan before.

“But anybody with half a rugby brain can look at the George Gregan situation and say – it ain’t working.”

Andrew Slack concurs: “I’m sure the guys in the team like and respect Gregan, but to his detriment he’s made it like the team versus the world.

“It’s part of the campaign against him. Obviously he’s not playing terribly well, but it would all be less aggressive if he was a more affable guy.”

Gregan himself is both wary and matter-of-fact about the press. It is only by about 10.45am or fifteen or so minutes into our interview that he partially begins to relax.

He says of the latest calls for his sporting scalp: “There’s nonsense (in the press) all the time. I’ve had nonsense right from the start of my career. There’s always been nonsense.

“It just intensifies a bit more when you’re captain of the national team. And the team is not performing, result-wise. You learn to have a thick skin and focus on what’s important.

“Something doesn’t sell papers if it’s not sensational. Some people, some tabloid papers love that. They love a big story and they love going to the usual suspects to get the same sort of medicine. They just go to them every time, in good or bad.

“In the good times you never hear from them. It’s only in the times when a person or a team is down that they come in and put their perspective on things.”

It would be difficult to ignore. Since Jones’ axing the calls for Gregan’s removal have become a cacophony. Some of the press reports are already referring to him in the past tense – “At his peak, Gregan was one of the best halfbacks in the world…”

His manager Robert Joske told reporters after Jones’ axing: “He’s (Gregan) got no comment to make, not today, not tomorrow, not next week. He’s not due back until January 3 when he will assemble with the Brumbies for the start of the Super 14 season.”

The Wallabies are not due to play their next Test until June next year against England, followed by the Tri-Nations in July. And in 2007, of course, is the rugby World Cup in France.
Gregan's coach at the ACT Brumbies, Laurie Fisher, recently told the press he believed his scrumhalf was good enough to play in the World Cup.
“Attacking George seems to be an annual event and I don't think his form this year warranted the criticism he has received," Fisher said. “I think sometimes they expect too much of him, they expect him to do it all. He is still playing very well and I would expect that to continue to the World Cup."
Gregan may be a media recluse at the moment, but he has his own voluble and expansive theories on what has been going wrong within the Wallabies’ engine room.

He says: “The reality of the team at the moment is that we’ve had about 15 new caps this year and we had a ridiculous injury toll even before the season started and throughout the season. On this last trip we had a lot of new faces.

“That’s the reality of it - players coming through. We’ve had world-class experienced players retire over the last four or five years, but that always happens.

“I think we take for granted how good Australia is in bringing up new players. The only way to get experience is by playing. We’re playing and losing Test matches narrowly but it’s all good experience for the guys long term and they’ll be better players for it.

“You don’t want to have a losing streak, which we’ve had, but in the long run it’s an investment. There’s going to be some positive pay in the next couple of years because of it.”

Interestingly, as the interview approaches 10.50am, his analysis does not address his own current playing form or role in the Wallabies. In many ways he speaks as if he is an observer of the team, and not an integral part of it.

*

It is 10.55am and there is war in the skies above the Ambassador’s Lounge. Rain is sweeping the Hyatt Regency golf course and thunder clouds are rolling through to the Pacific Ocean.

It could be Coolum battling Ninderry for the virtue of his bride-to-be, Maroochy. Or it could be just an early summer storm.

Gregan has discussed matters closer to his heart – his children Max, 4, Charlie, 3, and Jazz, 17-months. Max, who suffers from epilepsy, inspired his father to become heavily involved in charity work and to step forward as a public voice for the condition. Gregan’s resultant fundraising on behalf of the George Gregan Foundation will see the opening of an outdoor playground at Sydney’s Westmead children’s hospital in April next year.

A similar facility is planned for Brisbane.
Gregan is also an ambassador for the National Epilepsy Awareness Campaign 2005.

He says of being a father: “It’s great. I think it’s the best thing in your life, really. Having children and being a father and seeing another part of you and how their personalities develop, seeing their own personalities coming through and wondering – where did that come from? That whole thing, it’s priceless. We’re very lucky to have three very healthy children.”

A minder seated nearby starts making the wind-up gesture with his index finger. Gregan glances over and sees the gesture.

What can he say, finally, about the anecdote going around that he was set to retire before he was officially dumped from the Wallabies?

“Which anecdote was that?” he asks.

The one about retiring.

“Ohh that one, yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that one,” he says.

Gregan once said he would only retire when he was no longer enjoying the game. He is under contract with the Australian Rugby Union, be it as a player for the Brumbies, or the Wallabies, or both, through 2007. Ultimately, the selectors will decide of George Gregan will ever wear the green and gold jersey again.

So, to put it politely and in a roundabout way, is he still enjoying his game?

“What I’m enjoying – and I’ve said this to the guys on the tour as well – is the pure part of going out on the field, still competing, against my opponent, preparing for that particular competition and that exercise, that scrimmage that is Test match football,” he says. “I still love it, and I still want to put myself under pressure and make decisions, wrong or right, do you know what I mean? Win or lose, I’m still enjoying that, the competitive mode.

“I remember (rugby league international) Brad Fittler saying last year that his best football was behind him. Like, he couldn’t see himself playing better. I remembered that. If you think that, then you’re not going to enjoy doing the training and making all the sacrifices to get yourself right.

“But I’m not at that stage yet.”

The interview is over. George Gregan stands. “That’s good,” he says, shaking hands. His wife Erica fleetingly appears, then the Gregan party is gone as quietly and surreptitiously as it arrived.

You check your watch. It is precisely 11am. To the second.

THE INIMITABLE FARCQHUARSON

2006-01-04T15:17:00.000+10:00

“A great deal of unnecessarily bad golf is played in this world.” – Harry Vardon, English golfer (1870-1937).

SUMMER, to me, means not acres of freckled beach flesh, the stupefying spectacle of Test cricket, or the sorry sight of leftover Yuletide glace fruits sweating it out in their tray, but my annual game of golf with my friend Farcquarson.

I love playing golf with Farcquarson. Not just because he has never beaten me, but that in the space of 18-holes he can produce golf of such spectacular, eye-popping awfulness that the stories can be dined out on for years.

There was the time when Farcquarson required an urgent lavatory stop mid-round on Ladies’ Day… but that’s another story.

Then there’s his golfing apparel. When the American columnist Roger Simon wrote, “The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be caught dead in otherwise,” he had Farcquarson in mind. My golf buddy is one of those men you see occasionally in university corridors or on quiz shows who is partial to an obscenely bright bow tie when the mood suits.

That Farcquarson once sported a genuine handlebar moustache that he shaped and sharpened with imported Clubman Pinaud wax probably tells you all you need to know about him. (Walking with him once in a city street, a child stopped in front of him, pointed at the abominable facial growth, and loudly exclaimed: “Stick!”)

It is not unusual, then, to see him turn up at a golf course rigged out in pantaloon-style plus fours with polka dot socks and a silk shirt that would not look out of place on the back of a jockey.

My mother has described Farcquarson as a Human Christmas Cracker. If you pulled at him from both ends, you never know what surprise might explode from within. I have never had a desire to pull at both ends of Farcquarson, or any end for that matter, but I know what she means.

What I do know is that Farcquarson is a dedicated recreational golfer, or hacker, as I am, and that he brings his enormous passion for life to our annual game. It is why we meet religiously each summer. And besides, it’s strangely enjoyable saying “Farcquarson” for a whole day.

We were once regular golfers when we both lived in Sydney, and as golfers we had many things in common. We had both started playing the game in our early teens, experienced a long, golf-less void in the middle, and returned to it more than a quarter of a century later with blissful ignorance and calcified skills. Golf is not a game you just pick up when you feel inclined.

That great golf writer P.G.Wodehouse also knew this, as he wrote in his novel A Mixed Threesome: “Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious. “

In Brisbane in the 1960s and early 70s, our family lived in a then newish suburb curiously called The Gap.

We lived off Payne Road. This seemed appropriate at the time, for a doctor lived at the top of it, and there was a golf course at the bottom. This was the Ashgrove Golf Club, a hilly, heavily treed and beautiful little course that spread like a rash across the toe of one of the hills that formed one half of The Gap.

Some of my earliest memories are of my father returning from the club on a Friday night, or after a round on Saturday, his neck pink after a sunny eighteen holes, and bringing back golf-related stories just as he brought back grass-stained golf balls and wooden tees in his royal blue imitation leather golf bag.

From our front veranda you could see - down the hill, through the crowns of gum trees and stands of whiskery bamboo - a few of the early holes of that golf course. I remember watching groups of players, small as coloured ants, inching over that manicured landscape, and always wondering – is that Dad?

What he brought home after a round, in those early years, were countless golfing yarns, and anecdotes about human nature, that have stayed with me all my life and were, in a way, as powerful as nursery rhymes.

Golf is a cradle of suburban myths and legends, and to this day I can still see clearly in my mind, as my father had told me, the old man that dropped dead on the 17th or 18th green at Ashgrove, and one of the members’ vehicles left in the nearby car park without its handbrake on one Friday evening which plunged into the course’s little creek, and the tale of an enraged wife who, tired of the number of hours her husband clocked up at the club, set fire to his golf bag on their front lawn.

I have always had a lifelong tradition, too, of inheriting my father’s old clubs whenever he moved on to a new set.

Now, I would never consider buying a new set of golf clubs for myself, for it would break a custom that I cherish. Being bestowed my father’s old clubs connects me to him in essential and poignant ways. I can pull a club from the bag with its worn rubber grip and know that my father’s hands have been responsible for the wear and tear. I can study the little chips and scratches on the club heads and wonder what trouble he had found himself in, and how he had gotten out of it.

Often, in the bag, I can find pencil nubs and forgotten tees, and all of it is a part of a small map of my father.

Farcquarson, on the other hand, is not a difficult map to read. With him, what you see is what you get, and taking into account the lucky dip that is Farcquarson, it could be anything from a moustache that belonged beneath the nose of Lord Kitchener to a shirt covered in lime green hibiscus as big as trumpets.

That easy-going quality is, however, imperative for an enjoyable game of golf, and is the Araldite between us as golfers, even though we are older now and live in different States and lead different lives.

What a game it is, to offer this platform to two friends. A game so riddled with history and lore, as is life. Everyone who plays it is somehow loosely connected to the great, sprawling family tree of golf that has its roots on the east coast of Scotland where it all began more than five centuries ago.

And how romantic and sentimental golf can make you.

I have only recently learned that in the 15th Century golf was often pronounced “gowf”. I must tell Farcquarson when he arrives this year because, funnily, it’s exactly the way we both pronounce the word after several beers at the 19th hole.

A game of gowf with Farcquarson. Breaking 100 strokes for the round. An ale on the club verandah and instantly mythologizing the game just played.

Now that’s a Queensland summer.

THE KNIFE MEETS THE WHETSTONE

2005-11-25T11:30:00.000+10:00

Published in the Griffith Review, Spring 2004.

THE KNIFE MEETS THE WHETSTONE
15 Months with Peter Foster

IT HAS been said that Queensland's Gold Coast is the perfect place for an annual nervous breakdown.

The place is a strange amalgam of say, the Costa del Sol and Las Vegas, all strips of sand and garish electric light, of pot-bellied tourists and spectacular cosmetically-altered locals.

In the trendy suburb of Main Beach, for example, there is a 24-hour convenience store on one corner, and a plastic surgeon on the other. Even the local mobile phone transmitter tower has been fashioned into a fake palm tree.

The writer Frank Moorhouse said he visited Surfers Paradise to have his yearly breakdown. He would close the curtains and the view to the beach, and watch religious services on television until his anxieties were expunged. Then he'd fly back to Sydney, a new man.

It was in this landscape that notorious businessman Peter Foster suddenly reemerged in January 2003. He flew into his old home town like a disoriented bird fleeing the European winter, trailing television cameras and suntanned hacks with notebooks.

Exile is a curious thing. Sometimes you are condemned to reenter your own past. And here was Foster, back in his old stomping ground, dressed very much for a catwalk unknown in these parts, the suede shirts and jeans almost suicidal at the height of an Australian summer.

This was, of course, just after the so-called "Cheriegate" scandal. He had been forced to leave behind not only his thongs and shorts, but his lover Carole Caplin.

If it had been anyone but Foster, this may have been a terrifically tragic love story. The couple torn asunder, forced apart by unknown political forces. The anguished phone calls and declarations of fidelity across 10,000kms of ocean.

The locals naturally loved it. Their infamous son had returned. It was here he went to school. Was an entrepreneur before most of his contemporaries were old enough to drive. Ran nightclubs and squired exotic women. Had money to burn. They called him the Kid Tycoon.

In that first week of his exile, he dined at a respectable seafood and steak restaurant in Main Beach called Shuck, occupying daily the same table in the front section of the house, under white winged sail roofing and the shade of poinciana trees.

He never finished a meal uninterrupted. The locals sought his autograph, leaning over the railing of the restaurant with business cards and slips of paper for him to sign. They slapped him on the back and welcomed him home. "Good on you," they said. "We're behind you." A time-honored Australian compliment - namely, that he was sticking it up the "Poms".

I had gone to school with Foster at nearby Aquinas College in Southport in the late 1970s. He was, I recall, intelligent and affable, yet intrinsically shy. That shyness seemed to translate into a sort of world-weariness, way out of synchronicity with his actual age, so he occupied that middle ground amongst his peers. Not overly popular, but not ignored.

It was difficult to ignore him. At about 15 he arrived at class with assorted briefcases that contained watches and shark-tooth and pig-tusk necklaces for sale. It was rumored (and later proven correct) that he leased a string of pinball machines to high-rise apartment buildings in Surfers Paradise. The pocket money of kids his age ended up, well, in his pocket.

So post-Cheriegate, I contacted him and we met. I had seen him once in the 25 years since he had left school during the middle of his second last year to pursue his business interests. It was a brief encounter, by a pool in Fiji, a place where he may have settled for life if he had not dabbled in local politics, and been asked to leave.

Inviting me to luncheon at his favourite table at Shuck, we reminisced about old school colleagues. He is a man attached to his past, and at times sentimentally so, and has an almost photographic memory for times, faces and places.

During that first luncheon I admired his shirt and said so. It was pale blue, long-sleeved, and of quality material and cut. He found the compliment amusing. He said it was one of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cast offs. An item chosen for Blair by Foster's girlfriend, Carole Caplin, and later rejected by the PM.

I thought he was joking. But he said it was true, poked a foot out the side of the table, and pointed to a foot shod with a very fashionable pair of brown loafers. Also the PM's leftovers.

It seemed bizarre to be enjoying grilled barramundi opposite someone attired in summerwear destined for one of the most powerful men in the world. But nothing about Foster and his entanglement with the British establishment, or indeed his life, proved surprising over the next 15 months. Especially on the Gold Coast, where you could enjoy an annual nervous breakdown one minute, and swim with a dolphin at Sea World the next.

In those early months we met weekly. Sometimes we'd go to Tooley's bar at Main Beach. Ten minutes after ordering a beer, his mobile would ring. "It's Carole," he'd say, raising his eyes. Then he'd be gone. For five minutes. Or two hours. Sometimes in the quiet alley behind the bar. Or you'd see him pacing the street, the phone to his ear.

On some evenings Caplin would ring ten, fifteen, twenty times. He would always politely excuse himself, and return elated, or depressed, or riddled with anxiety. Carole doesn't want me to drink. Carole wants to know who I'm having dinner with. Carole this. Carole that.

On two occasions I had to verify to her on the phone that I was, indeed, a male, and that there were no females present in our party, and that no, Peter had not drunk too much. She phoned from London as if she were living around the corner.

"Women," he'd say, exasperated.

It made for interesting conversation, especially when he was wearing ex-Blair attire. It was peculiar and thrilling to hear him relay Caplin's latest anxieties about herself, about Cherie, about Tony.

In his initial exile, whilst bitter about being booted out of the UK and separated from his beloved, it was Caplin that kept him even of temperament and even hopeful about a future.

He almost seemed to enjoy her incessant calls, inquiring about whether he'd done his washing, or was eating healthily, or was getting enough sleep. The whole bizarre arrangement kept him buoyant. And out of mischief. The more he was pinned to his mobile, and Caplin, and the façade of a relationship with all its minutiae conducted halfway around the world, the less he thought about the Blairs. He often expressed incredulity at how he'd got involved with the whole "nutty" crew, and the thought ended there, with raised hands and the fading of a laugh.

Throughout the year he attempted a fitness regime. He employed a personal trainer and spent agonising hours on the beach shedding his European winter physique. He went for long walks on the sand. Strangers would say gidday and shake his hand. Good to have you back. Good on you, Peter.

Invariably he would end up lunching or dining in the evening at Shuck, or "the office" as he called it. There his favourite table became something of a tiny stage for locals and visiting celebrities, kept open for him by restaurant owner Scott Budgen. The patronage swelled. They waited for Peter Foster.

At another of our fine meals he lamented the timing of his expulsion from the UK. He was set to spend a weekend at Chequers when it all began to go sour. For a boy born in the sugar cane town of Innisfail in Northern Queensland, it must have seemed like arriving at the gates of some Xanadu.

He had experienced a few personal Xanadus before. Extreme wealth in his early twenties and later in his thirties. Private helicopters. Race horses. Mansions.

Yet you get a feeling about him that it's not the personal possessions he craves, but what they give you. They give you power. Or the appearance of power. And he is, self-admittedly, a person with a total addiction to power.

He said this often. He liked it, and he liked being around it. He admitted he made the deal to help Cherie Blair purchase two flats because he wanted to impress Carole Caplin. He wanted to impress the Blairs with his business prowess. But his past intruded, as it has for much of his adult life. We would joke about this past, as if it were a battered and very unfashionable caravan that he towed around with him through life.

And he would vanish from a bar, or a restaurant table, because Carole was on the phone. Once, they hatched a plan for a secret holiday in Tahiti. The negotiations went on for days.

On another occasion she was coming out to Australia. There was great debate about how she could slip into the country unnoticed by the press.

At home, in the borrowed apartment of a friend at first, and later in a resplendent house on a canal at Paradise Waters, he would constantly trawl the internet for news of Caplin and of the Blairs, and often would not sleep all night, as if his body still operated on a London clock.

He had other interests, of course. He remained fascinated with American politics, like his mother Louise Foster-Poletti, and had the latest biographies and works of political analysis air freighted to his door by Amazon.com.

When Louise returned to the Gold Coast also, along with sister Jill and niece Arabella, he did what he has always done as the male in this close-knit, part-Italian family - he set up home for all of them. It was simply what the Foster clan did. They lived together. They moved around the world together.

One day recently, sitting on the back balcony overlooking the canal, Louis told me of her fascinating family history - a colorful melange of migrants and cane fields, business deals and Hollywood starlets - and physically winced at the thought of her son's incarceration over slimming products and fraudulent business practices.

"I introduced him to that tea, when we were in Los Angeles," she said with obvious regret. Again, the tatty caravan.

After a few months of being back in Australia, the calls from Caplin became even more frenzied. At "the office", a woman had recognised Foster's face from the television, and a brief affair ensued. It ended acrimoniously, having been exposed on the front page of a local paper.

There was a confrontation at "the office", when it was revealed the woman was not who she made herself out to be - indeed, that she may have been someone of ill-repute - and the locals ogled. It was real-life soap.

Within hours of the break-up she tried to sell her story to a British tabloid. It was something he seemed wearily familiar with.

For a man of such obvious intelligence, it was fascinating to watch him in the presence of women. They could intoxicate him, and sometimes befuddle him. Such was Caplin's powerful and peculiar hold. They gave him an almost boyish delight, and would animate his whole being. He was completely charming, and made them the centre of the universe. They were, quite simply, more interesting to him than men.

And yet the deception of the Italian model who recognised him on television, who later turned out to be a local stripper of Romanian descent, had completely passed him by. He later watered down the faux pas. "I've been done like a kipper by a stripper," he quipped.

And still Caplin's calls would make him fret and turn to rueful self-examination.

Then, at some point here, the vial cracked.

He would tell of Caplin's obsession with Blair. Of photographs of the PM on her bedroom walls and one, framed, on her bedside table. He said I had to understand that Cherie was, in essence, the smart but daggy kid in the class, someone who had always yearned after the attentions of the attractive and cool girls. Caplin was the groovy girlfriend she could never have when she wasn't the PM's wife.

He spoke of talking to Blair on several occasions - something the PM has denied - and of the chummy relationship he struck up with Cherie Blair.

He recounted peculiar hand gestures of the Prime Minister, and an astounding example of childish language when it came to matters of personal hygiene, either passed onto him by Caplin or on one occasion witnessed first hand. These were great stories over a bottle of wine, and he is a great raconteur.

And he howled with amusement when he read that Caplin had been employed as a lifestyle columnist for a British newspaper, and the slow but steady rise of her own celebrity status.

It was partially a resentment, I gathered, from being shut out of the playpen. He had been deported and cut off swiftly from his life in London and Dublin. Caplin had peppered him with loving calls for months, giving him an illusion of a life still lived. And then it went cold.

At his table in Shuck he began talking about writing his own version of events. He was getting depressed. He had an expensive exercise bike at home in Paradise Waters that he had not even plugged in. He was tired of doing nothing.

One day Daily Mail journalist Richard Shears arrived at the table in "the office". He was affable and interesting and Foster indicated to me in confidence that Shears was writing his biography.

Foster himself had already written extensively about his own life. Firstly, in a huge manuscript penned whilst he was on remand in a Brisbane correctional facility, titled Seduction and Sales: Stratagems of a Conman. I had read it. It was a sales manual filled with nuggets of autobiography. And another - Eat Your Peas, Peter: A Memoir, a slender though nicely written 91-pages of autobiography.

Shears was with Foster, periodically, for months. He even lived with Foster for several weeks as they went through a storage unit full of personal papers, records, photographs and other effluvia from a dramatic life. I never throw anything away, Foster told me. Just in case.

And still he would reemerge at night, for a few glasses of white wine, or a quick meal, to ease the tension of the work. Or you'd see him driving through town in his black Nissan Z convertible.

Sometimes he would ring, and offer his analysis on Blair's decision to go to war in Iraq, or on the Hutton inquiry. He rarely, if ever, mentioned Caplin in the past few months.

One thing that gained more prominence in our weekly conversations, surprisingly, was his growing faith. He regularly attended mass at his local Catholic Church. Sometimes on a daily basis. He said he looked for good second-hand books for me at the church jumble sales.

He permanently wore a cross on a chain around his neck - a gift from a nun during his time incarcerated in Brisbane.

In exile you can also stumble across characters from your past, and there were several occasions that he had to walk across the other side of the Village Green that is the Gold Coast.

As the work on his life drew to a close he quietly expressed concerns about his and his family's safety. Yet he still chose to meet at his very public table at Shuck. And savor the crab lasagne, a specialty of the house.

"What are we doing here?" he often asked.

He missed Europe. Especially Paris. But it seemed to me a much broader malaise. For he is one of those people who is convinced that life is always going on elsewhere. When he arrived at where he thought life was, it had always inexplicably slipped out of town the night before, and was now somewhere else.

He cared enormously about his reputation, and we discussed it often. In a pure sense, he has extraordinary business, managerial and sales abilities. Yet how to apply it now, with the caboose of the reputation always not far behind?

He agonised over this. As if, after turning 40, there was a chance for him to do something "meaningful" with his life. To come out the other side of 40, and start afresh will all the knowledge he had accumulated, and the mistakes he had made. He had spoken with modesty about his acts of philanthropy that have remain unreported. He proved, often, to have a generous nature with no expectations of reciprocated thanks or favour.

As recent as last week, however, he remained depressed by various turns of events, especially the contract over his life story and the uncertainty of it ever surfacing in public.

In a way, the telling of the life seemed to have exhausted him, and yet had become the only thing in his actual life.

When he gave an interview to an Australian newspaper last week about the alleged relationship between Blair and Caplin - a story that detonated around the world - it seemed a natural culmination of the past few months of Foster's life. As if the autobiography he had set in train with Shears had a natural destiny. Having built up such momentum, it was going to crash through any barricades, contractual or otherwise, and be told.

Now that it's out there, he seems more energized. In some strange way, the repercussions, the drama, the accusations and slurs, have given him definition again. Just as he started to fade from view in the heat mirage that is the Gold Coast, all this has brought him back into focus. Certainly for the British public. But more interestingly, for Foster himself.

The knife had again met the whetstone.

"If they find my body in the canal," he told me,"tell them, as a friend, that I was never interested in night snorkeling."

© Matt Condon 2004

PETER BEATTIE: The Atherton Years

2005-11-25T11:25:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, November 19, 2005

IT was 1959 and Annie Esbensen, as always, took her place each weekday outside McAuliffe’s Menswear Store in the main street of Atherton.

Annie, in her early 60s, retrieved her table and chair - kept in safekeeping overnight inside Jim McAuliffe’s shop - and sat there for much of the day selling charity raffle tickets for crippled children.

Annie was a large bespectacled woman who relied on the use of a wooden cane. She was also the town gossip.

From her perch in Main Street, she was the central cog of a great wheel of whispered affairs, rumoured theft, and talk of illnesses and financial hardships that encompassed this small north Queensland rural community and a whole patchwork of surrounding farms.

It was said that she assiduously recorded the exact dates of local marriages on a wall calendar, and just as carefully checked the corresponding dates of the births of children stemming from those unions.

Be it a fierce summer on the tablelands, or a dour winter, Annie Esbensen remained a fixture in Main Street. A religious woman, it may have rankled her at times that her pious work was done across the road from the public bar of the Barron Valley Hotel.
She had recently moved into town from a small farm to begin her retirement with her second husband, Harry. He was a tall, willowy man who possessed little conversation.
They lived in a modest house in Robert Street, around the corner from Main Street and within site of the town silos. The house was shared with a lodger – Sid – whose rent may have offset the couple’s meagre pensions.

There were chickens out the back, and a Hillman Minx down the side of the house.
Two years earlier, in faraway Sydney, Annie’s daughter, Edna, had died unexpectedly of heart problems at only 38. She left behind her husband, Arthur, and six children. Arthur didn’t drink or smoke, but he had a love of the racetrack, and he found single fatherhood difficult.

Then, in 1959, Annie and Harry’s routine, and plans of a quiet retirement, were disrupted. It was decided that Annie would take the responsibility for the upbringing of one of her late daughter’s children.

So it was that a seven-year-old boy was put on a train at Sydney’s Central Station and sent north to the rural haven of Atherton (pop. 3,500), 90kms south-west of Cairns, with its sugarcane fields and rainforests and country values.

He travelled alone to his new life with fresh memories of his father waving him off at the station platform. They had told him his mother had “gone away”, and he couldn’t comprehend why she would suddenly leave him. Now he was going to “Nana’s” house to live.

*

FOR most of us, childhood becomes more idyllic the further we move away from it. We garnish it with fondness. Our recollections become gilt-edged.

Peter Beattie is no exception. In his latest memoir, Making A Difference, published earlier this year, he wrote of his impressions of Atherton: “Atherton was a conservative, small country town, one based on primary industries. It was a good community, it felt strong; I liked life there. Atherton was a place I came to love. Having arrived there because my family had been broken up, I still count myself lucky to have ended up in such a positive environment.”

In both Making A Difference, and his earlier autobiography In The Arena (1990), Beattie provides only the briefest thumbnail sketches of his early childhood and school years. He presents that time in his life as enjoyable and character-building, despite financial hardship.

The reality, however, was far from rosy for the young Peter Beattie, and infinitely more complicated.

He wrote that going to live with Nana and Harry “held no special fears as I recall” and “a novelty”.

In 1959 young Beattie, in fact, entered a world that was closer to Edwardian Australia than the eve of the swinging 60s. A devout Anglican and rigidly conservative (she was a great fan of former Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies), Annie Esbensen quickly ensured that Beattie lived by her strict doctrines.

The small, three-bedroom house in Robert Street, near the corner of Lloyd (the house has since been demolished), was variously described by locals as “a dump” and “awful”. There was little room even for seven-year-old Beattie. His living quarters for several years was “the laundry room downstairs, with the concrete tubs”.

Nana’s house was directly opposite the Atherton State (Primary) School, which Beattie attended. In his first few years he occupied the small wooden classroom closest to a huge stand of pine trees in the school grounds.

He immediately struck up a friendship with a boy who lived nearby – Glen Graham. (Graham is one of the only friends from Beattie’s Atherton years named in Making A Difference.)

“One of my earliest memories of poor Peter was seeing this kid dressed in heavy gabardine trousers and braces and a long-sleeved shirt pulling weeds out the front of his grandmother’s house,” Mr Graham said. “Old Harry was standing over him with his walking stick, nudging him with it if he didn’t work hard enough.

“He copped a bit of criticism from the other kids. He didn’t have a school uniform, just pants below his knees and braces, and he was a thick-set sort of guy. He had a few fights.

“In Atherton, if someone picked you, you had to turn up in the recreation ground after school and fight. He handled himself.”

Mick Nasser, who now runs the Barron Valley Hotel, said Beattie immediately stood out when he arrived in Atherton.

“He went to the State school and I was in the Catholic school, and I recall he was always very loud and a bit of a smart arse,” Mr Nasser said. “I remember giving him cheek when he walked past the school. We gave him lip and he was cheeky, he gave it back. We used to thrown stones at him. We called him pumpkin head.”

Beattie also participated in what came to be known amongst local children as “the gully wars” – a series of periodic stoushes between local Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics and children like Graham and others in a wooded gully not far from Nana’s house.

“We used to get influenced by the movies,” Mr Graham said. “We’d make marble guns with firecrackers we bought from Fong Ons (a store in Main Street). One kid got shot in the head and it broke his skull. The police had to sort that one out.”

Beattie’s difficult home life became known throughout the town and several people offered him small gestures of support.

“My mum used to feel so sorry for Peter,” Mr Graham recalled. “He was the kid that never had toys. He lived on that cold wet slab down in the laundry. The boarder, Sid, was there for years and died in the house in 1966, I think, which allowed Peter to move into his room. I think it was the first time in his life he had his own bedroom.”

A relative, Gwen Lunn (whose uncle Harry married Annie Esbensen), said Beattie was “brought up very tough”.

“They didn’t have much money and I think Peter was a burden,” she said. “He had an awful life. That woman (Annie) never bought him a damn thing. He’d come to swimming and he didn’t even have proper swimming trunks.

“We all tried to help him out. He was a boy that wanted people to like him. He would do anything for people to like him.”

Annie Esbensen received financial assistance from the then State Children Department to help bring up young Beattie. It is believed one of Beattie’s older brothers, working in Papua New Guinea, also sent regular cheques. Each year the boy suffered the embarrassment of picking up his second-hand schoolbooks from the principal’s office.

Meanwhile, Beattie threw himself into every conceivable activity that was on offer in Atherton. He joined the cubs and scouts, attended the swimming club, played hockey and football, went to judo class, and participated in everything from athletics to local drama productions. Several people who knew Beattie as a child and teenager concluded his almost manic desire for activities and action was so “he could get out of that house”.

The lack of money was no impediment. He was helped on several occasions by individuals and the community at large, and relied on his own resources.

One local, in her 80s, who declined to be named, said she was accosted by Annie Esbensen in Main Street one day after Beattie had returned from a hockey trip to Townsville.

“Annie was cranky,” she said. “Do you know what Peter’s done? she said to me. He stole my charity money to go on that trip to Townsville. He took the money from the crippled children’s tin. Everybody knew about it. Old Jim McAuliffe used to top up the money that went missing. Peter, he was a bit of a devil.”

Despite this, Nana maintained a strict religious grip on the boy. He was required to regularly attended Sunday service at the nearby St Mary the Virgin Anglican Church, and for a time was an altar boy.

Alan McFarland, now retired, was church rector at St Mary’s from 1960-67, and remembered young Beattie. “I knew he lived with his grandmother. She did a lot of caring for other people,” he said. “He was a lively boy. Like all boys, some are hard to settle down.”

Beattie entered Atherton State High School in 1966. Like many country schools, its sporting oval was its epicentre, just as it is today. The school sits on a ridge in Maunds Road, overlooking town.

The school motto is Alis Aquilae – on wings of an eagle – and the crest features an open-winged eagle and a blank book.

The school magazine – the Barrinean – for 1966, revealed Beattie showed a talent for athletics and long distance running, but did not shine academically. He was in class 8A, and a brief end-of-year report states: “Moving to the more silent and studious side of the room we have the class giant and athlete Peter B. and beside him that silent child Clifford who never says more than 6,000 words a day.”

In athletics, Beattie was “Under 14 Boys Champion of the Day” with 19 points.

The following year, however, was a watershed one for Beattie. He met his future wife – Heather Scott-Halliday - at school. And it heralded the arrival of two men who would greatly influence his remaining school years – the Principal, Morrie Harnell, and a new young teacher, Denis Penshorn.

Beattie has described the late Mr Harnell as “my mentor”.

Both Harnell and Penshorn took Beattie under their wing – Harnell in the classroom, and Penshorn on the sporting field.

“Peter was in a good group of kids in 1967 and he certainly had stand-out qualities,” said Mr Penshorn, now retired, who still lives in Atherton. “I had a bit to do with him in sport. I coached him in hockey and football. He was a bright and lively personality.

“I won’t say anything against the man. He didn’t come from a rich family. Other people in those circumstances would think the world owed them a living, but not Peter. I believe his social conscience came from within himself.”

Heather Scott-Halliday, the daughter of an Anglican minister, was in a class a year below Beattie. He wrote in Making A Difference: “She was intelligent…she was kind, considerate, warm, compassionate, and not only was she all those things but we felt an affinity for one another.”

When Heather’s family left Atherton after a couple of years, he kept in touch. Beattie also had an “intellectual” friendship with a girl called Pam Davis.

In Year 9, Beattie began to make minor academic headway. The Barrinean recorded that he was a “Merit Student” and won a general award for “Diligence”. In late July of 1967 he also began his school acting career.

The school’s first ever Drama Night featured three plays. Beattie gained an honorary mention. “The first play of the night, The Crimson Coconut, was well received. Peter Beattie played Robert the waiter…”

The year was also significant in that it saw the start of Beattie’s keen rivalry with another student – Sam Elmas. Beattie writes in his latest memoir: “One of my best mates was a young fellow named Simon Elmas, better known as Sam. Sam is a lovely guy with whom I’ve remained friends.”

Both boys would tell their contemporaries at an early age that they would be Prime Minister of Australia. Both had notions of pursuing law at university. In school photos you can almost feel the tension between them.

“Sam was Beattie’s great rival,” said a former classmate. “Sam was better looking and brighter, and he was Beattie’s greatest competition. It was a rivalry that went right through high school.”

There were other bright students to contend with – Jenny Whebell, Kevin Hawke and Gary “Radar” Richter. Yet for what Beattie struggled with in the classroom, he tried to make up for on the sporting field and in front of the footlights.

In Grade 10 he came third in cross-country, was a member of the Open cricket team (“a slow medium bowler and excellent short leg fieldsman”) and played inside right in the hockey team (“Peter Beattie was another prominent goal scorer and his speedy attacking play was a credit to the team”).

He also won Best Actor of 1968 for his role in The Bones in My Toe.

Glen Graham recalled a study method Beattie employed during that time. He would record relevant information and then play the tape as he drifted off to sleep. Graham said he often went to bed at night in those years ‘with Peter’s voice playing on the tape”. Beattie was also obsessed with the PM programme on ABC radio, and newspapers.

Beattie targeted the humanitarian stream in his final two years in school. One classmate recalled: “He used to say to me – why are you studying those subjects? He would only study what would get him the best results. Peter Beattie was always for Peter Beattie. He always did everything so he looked the best. He wasn’t very popular. We always thought he was up himself.

“He was a crawler that’s for sure, and he always knew who to influence and who to make friends with.”

Another classmate said Beattie was almost addicted to trophies and tangible symbols of achievement.

“In the scouts he had so many badges on his sleeves they were actually curling underneath the sleeve hem,” he said. “In his bedroom at the house in Robert Street you couldn’t see the walls for all the ribbons and pennants he’d put up. There was everything there on display; even those little minor ribbons you wouldn’t think twice about, going right back to primary school. He loved to surround himself with symbols of success.”

Another student recalled a young myth-maker already at work: “He used to say he was related to (Otto von) Bismarck (founder of the German Empire), or had some German aristocratic background. It was ridiculous. He’d make up the most fantastic stories.”

Former Atherton High School teacher and officer in charge of the school cadets, Ken Gorton, said Beattie showed natural leadership. “He had a pretty good idea where he was going,” Mr Gorton said. “I remember he wanted to do law and go into politics. He was very, very enthusiastic in his work with the cadets.”

He brought the same enthusiasm to the scouts. As Glen Graham recalled: “We went on a trip to Mount Bartle Frere (Queensland’s highest peak at 5,325 feet) and planned to ascend the western side. It was a terrible day. When we got there a lot of people started changing their mind about the climb. The jungle was thick and there were leeches.

“Peter was striding ahead. No, he said, we’re going to get to the top. He made us go to the very peak. By then it was late and we had to camp there. It was freezing all night and we were covered in leeches. But we made it.”

Beattie at this stage was still intensely active in school and sporting activities, but there were also some lively moments outside school hours. One recurring issue was his Nana’s car and Beattie’s proclivity for joy rides.

In his latest book, Beattie tells of the car incidents in a single paragraph. In an ABC radio interview in July, he was equally as cryptic: “When I was a bit older I did do a few things that weren’t terribly nice and got a good box around the ears for my trouble.”

Beattie often took Glen Graham on his late night joy riding excursions.

“One night we took it (the Hillman Minx) down to Cairns,” Graham said. “I went along for the ride and I was still in my pyjamas. We got it onto the Kuranda range and the engine overheated. I walked half a kilometre onto the range and filled old bottles with spring water and poured it into the radiator. We didn’t get home until it was broad daylight.

“Peter was always out for an adventure, and these stories amount to about one hundredth of what we got up to.”

In 1970 – his final year of high school - two issues involving Beattie left a sour note amongst his fellow students, and are still heatedly debated amongst them today.

The first was a question of loyalty.

Peter Beattie was school captain, and his female counterpart was Jenny Whebell. In the middle of that year a young boy was ordered by a prefect to pick up some papers he had dropped in the schoolyard. He refused. The boy was the son of principal Morrie Harnell.

When the matter was brought to Mr Harnell’s attention, the prefect was stripped of her badge. Jenny Whebell and the other prefects felt the principal’s actions were unjust. They all resigned their positions until a meeting of the school council could be held.

The only one not to turn in his badge was Peter Beattie.

“Peter wouldn’t hand his badge in,” one source said. “Being a small town, the whole thing hit the fan over the weekend. He had his gold medal and he wouldn’t let it go. He lost a lot of face over that. The rest of them were prepared to put everything on the line, but not Peter Beattie.”

Jenny Whebell, now Jenny Butler, confirmed the incident but declined to comment. Another contemporary of Beattie also said the story was accurate. She added: “I never had much to do with him. I didn’t associate with him outside of school. I do know he was interested in himself. That will stick in my brain forever.”

The second issue was the awarding of School Dux to Peter Beattie. His name is painted in gold on the wooden honour board at Atherton State High School today. Some contemporaries still believe the award was granted to Beattie “by default”.

The 1970 Barrinean records that the only academic awards Beattie was granted in that final year were for English and Geography. As is custom, Beattie’s final year results as Dux were published in the following year’s school magazine. He achieved a single 7, three 6’s, one 4 and one 3.

In the senior exam at the end of the year, several former students claimed Beattie was only third or possibly fourth in the class. The School Dux honour was awarded by Principal Harnell, as was tradition, prior to the final senior exam.

“He was very ordinary, academically,” one former student said. “We always felt he was Dux by default. If you look at his academic record at school it’s unusual to go from what he did to School Dux. I’m not sure if Mr Harnell was giving him some extra tuition or something like that was arranged for him. ‘Radar’ Richter was by far the smartest kid in school, and Kev Hawke wasn’t far behind.”

Kevin Hawke, now a teacher in Townsville, said: “I don’t want to go into that. I really didn’t have a lot to do with Peter. He wasn’t stupid and he was no slouch, but I do think ‘Radar’ Richter should have been named Dux.

“But that was 35 years ago. To go on about it now would look like sour grapes.”

Gary “Radar” Richter, a quietly spoken computer software designer who now lives in Melbourne, said he was never really friends with Beattie and had never pondered the School Dux issue.

“I was this scrawny kid who didn’t mix too much with the rest of the crowd,” he said. “I was into radios and electronics, things like that, and Peter was good at sport. My mum and I used to pick him up at his grandmother’s and drive him to school for a while there.

“As for the Dux thing, I don’t know how it was calculated back then. I was in my own little world. I never thought of who was to get Dux. It was not something I was after. I suspect Peter may have been interested in that.”

Said another former student, still rankled by Beattie’s Dux honour: “You only have to look at the academic records to see this was a curious situation. He would shamelessly attach himself to anything that would benefit him. He would do anything – sell you down the river – to get where he wanted to get.”

Beattie had ended his school years in Atherton the college Dux, the school sports champion, and an award-winning public speaker. He was granted a Commonwealth scholarship at the conclusion of his senior year, along with Gary ‘Radar’ Richter, Kevin Hawke, and Jenny Whebell.

“You would think with all that he’d be one of the most popular blokes in town,” said one local. “He wasn’t. I don’t recall him having any really close friends at all.”

Peter Beattie was set to leave Atherton as he had arrived 11 years earlier – virtually alone.

*

Old Annie Esbensen and her husband Harry regained their retirement years by the end of 1970, when Beattie headed off to the University of Queensland to study arts/law.

By the middle of the following year Harry Esbensen was dead. As Beattie wrote: “They only had six months of peace together.”

Annie herself died in 1980. She is buried in the corner of the Atherton general cemetery, her gravestone covered in lichen. It is adorned with a small oval picture of her bespectacled face.

She left nothing to Peter Beattie in her will. He was stung by the rebuff, as he wrote in In The Arena, and believed her rejection had its source in his political beliefs. “Over the years I have paid a heavy price for my political commitments, but none have affected me more deeply than Nana’s last will and testament. She made sure I was left nothing. It wasn’t the financial aspect that saddened me. She didn’t have much to leave…the symbolism rather than the substance of the act hurt me.”

Annie Esbensen’s house no longer exists. The site is now home to a stock feed outlet. Beattie’s primary school also no longer operates as an educational facility. His old classroom is now a meeting place for the Atherton pipe band.

Beattie’s great rival Sam Elmas did go on to study law, but his career trajectory was disrupted by a personal tragedy and he had to return to the Atherton area to help run the family farm. He now lives quietly a few kilometres outside town.

There is virtually nothing in Atherton to indicate that it was a crucial place in the passage of Peter Beattie’s rise to the Queensland premiership. Just his name in gold lettering on the School Dux honour board.

“I was always told to never forget my roots,” one contemporary of Beattie’s said. “He forgot his. The town did a lot for him. Then he wiped Atherton.”

By 1971 Peter Beattie was embroiled in politics and student life in Brisbane. Atherton had been a lily pad.

He was now on the road to power.

ends

A ROGUE'S PROGRESS

2005-10-03T10:40:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, Saturday, october 1, 2005.

AS you fly into Nadi International Airport, on the western side of Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu, you invariably sweep over a rugged volcanic mountain range the locals have colloquially called the Sleeping Giant.

It is not possible to witness the dimensions of the giant from the air. Only from ground level and from a certain side of the range does it come into sharp relief. Only then can you visualise its length, girth, and strange facial features. The Sleeping Giant rests flat on its back, has a huge belly, and its profile is not unlike a heavily quiffed Elvis Presley. Its mouth is agape.

It’s nice to think that the giant emits long, sonorous sounds that can be heard across the country’s 332 islands and is responsible for what is known as “Fiji time” – a euphemism for a way of life that is not dictated by the hourly strictures of Greenwich. That the giant’s snores disrupt time, mischievously play with the hands of clocks and watches, and act as an inner-call to an older, slower and more civilised mode of living.

Peter Foster, 43, the notorious Queensland-born weight loss entrepreneur, raconteur, one-time global playboy and occasional political time bomb, has heard the call of the giant.

As we enter the main hall of Nadi airport he is there to greet us. For a moment you have to look twice to make sure it’s him, out of the context, as he is, of world famous hotels, the French Riviera, the esplanade at Surfers Paradise.

His picture has dominated British tabloids and Australian newspapers for more than two decades. He has been seen in tuxedo and tie beside his one-time lover and former pop star Samantha Fox. He has been pictured in the bright orange jumpsuits of the American prison system. More recently, he has been snapped in Bond Street’s finest threads in London with Carole Caplin, former confidante and personal advisor to Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.

But here, leading us to his old plum-coloured SUV in the airport car park, he is resplendently louche in rubber thongs, crumpled khaki shorts and an old red T-shirt. There is whiskery growth on his face. His hair is ungroomed.

After four years of government-imposed exile, Peter Foster is back in the country he has loved since childhood, and is deep inside “Fiji time”. He has returned to set in train a lifelong dream – to build a home on one of Fiji’s most remote islands. He may also develop an “exclusive gated residence” for world celebrities like Elton John or Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.

It only becomes apparent later that he is here for many reasons, some of them personal and complex. But in the car park he is gregarious, revelling in his dishevelled self. He could be a native of the islands, if it wasn’t for his pale, wintry complexion.

“Bula!” he says, lifting our luggage into the car. “How about a drink?”

*

The drive to Foster’s villa at the Sheraton Fiji in Denarau takes us away from the Sleeping Giant and through Nadi town. He navigates the SUV with seasoned agility, the roads at peak hour clogged with trucks, bicycles, heavily-laden buses and even the occasional livestock.

“It’s been strange to come back,” he says. “It’s been four years. I’ve had people come up to me and say – Peter, Peter, good to see you. You’ve gotten so fat, Peter. Is Mr Foster inside there somewhere, Peter? I wasn’t sure if they’d ever let me in (to the country) again. I could be the only person in the world who has to carry a letter from the Fijian Immigration Department to let me through customs.”

He may be right. The letter in question, issued on April 26 this year and titled Uplifting of Prohibition Notice, is signed by Mr E. Tudia, Acting Director of Immigration. It advises that the department minister has “agreed to the uplifting” of Foster’s prohibited status.

The ban stemmed from Foster’s involvement in the 2001 Fiji elections. After a politically dormant life, he made a snap decision to get behind Fiji’s New Labor Unity Party headed by former Fiji deputy Prime Minister Dr Tupeni Baba.

Foster became proxy campaign manager for Dr Baba, put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind hisbid for prime ministership, and introduced never before seen American-style political spruiking to the Fijian political landscape.

Dr Baba said from his new home in Auckland, New Zealand: “As a person genuinely interested in Fiji where he (Foster) was making some investments at the time and obviously like other citizens who loved and believed in Fiji, he appeared interested to see it had a Government that could bring about peace and stability following the Coup of 2000.
“He offered to assist and paid for whatever he organised in terms of advertisements and campaigns .This was not different from any others in Fiji who offered help. He did not break any law in Fiji as his actions were all within the law.”

Dr Baba was defeated. And Foster was ejected from the country as a “political activist”, which contravened his visa conditions.

“I prefer to have seen myself as a freedom fighter,” he says now in the SUV, heading towards the tree-lined boulevard into the Sheraton. “I still believe Dr Baba was and is the Nelson Mandela of the Pacific. I believe he’s a good man. As for the ban, I fully accept what happened and that in their view I contravened the conditions of my visa at the time.”

Foster parks the car and is greeted by concierges and bell hops. They refer to him as Mr Foster, and warmly grasp his hand.

Foster’s rented villa is the same one he was living in when the Fijians threw him out of the country. It is a resplendent white and timber-shuttered two-storey terrace house facing the ocean.

“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” he says, sipping a white wine and squinting into the amber light streaming into the villa. “I always feel at home when I’m back in Fiji.”

His love of the country, he says, can be sourced to a succession of Fijian nannies that helped bring him up from when he was about four years old. He recalls one – Kata – who “would kick a football with me”.

“She was mother, father, nursemaid all rolled into one, and she would have made a great front row forward,” he says.

Foster’s mother, Louise Foster-Poletti, 73, says she started visiting Fiji in the early 1960s and had an instant affiliation with the it. “Peter has always loved the place,” she says. “I do think he will end up there, a recluse, sooner rather than later. Every time he tries to do something in Australia he’s knocked down for it. He’s tired of all that. In Fiji he can be himself.”

But what, precisely, is that self?

Foster is an intriguing dichotomy. He has been perennially branded the archtypal “conman” – a phrase he loathes – since the days of the Bai Lin slimming tea scandal in the 1980s and 90s. He has been jailed for fraud and various misdemeanours on three continents. He very nearly brought Downing Street to its knees in early 2003 when, via Caplin, he helped Cherie Blair with the purchase of two investment flats.

The British tabloids ate him, and to some extent the Blairs, alive. Resultantly, Foster was hounded out of the UK and returned to the place he knew best – Queensland’s Gold Coast – where he had been brought up and schooled.

Simultaneously, Foster is urbane and well-read, is a practising Christian, and has committed innumerable philanthropic acts outside the media gaze. In person he is ineffably charming, and has the often unnerving ability, in conversation, to make you feel you are the centre of the universe at that moment in time.

It is a skill, one can only presume, that has worked both for and against him. For, in that he secures people’s attention and trust almost instantly. Against, in that in some of his past business ventures – which he freely admits were “big mistakes” – it was that very ability, learned or otherwise, that got him into a lot of trouble.

I went through part of high school with Peter Foster. We were not strangers to each other, nor were we friends, and I saw nothing of him from when he left Aquinas College in Southport in 1978, until the eve of the Fiji election in 2001, when we bumped into each other by chance.

At school he possessed an odd, exotic quality. He was far older than his actual years, and had experienced life in ways the rest of us could only imagine. By year 11 he was gone, bobbing up soon after as a boxing promoter and already labelled the “Kid Tycoon”. He has always been a man who has attracted labels.

As I once wrote of him in his school years: “It was difficult to ignore him. At about 15 he arrived at class with assorted briefcases that contained watches and shark-tooth and pig-tusk necklaces for sale. It was rumoured (and later proven correct) that he leased a string of pinball machines to highrise apartment buildings in Surfers Paradise. The pocket money of kids his age ended up, well, in his pocket.”

And in Fiji four years ago around the Sheraton pool, he had maintained that alluring frisson. He had an air about him that anything could happen. Not exactly one of danger, but of mischief and disruption. Indeed, the Cheriegate scandal was ahead of him.

He has proved, time and again, that he is one of those people who draws succour from life’s dramas. When matters are on edge and sparks are flying, he is alive. This can become an addiction. It can wear you down.

Here, enjoying a wine in the Sheraton villa, Foster appears, momentarily, to have lost his taste for elements of his own past behaviour and, more precisely, his past. “When I’m here in Fiji,” he says, “I don’t feel I have anyone looking over my shoulder. I don’t feel I’m being judged on the man I used to be. I’m sick of it, to be honest with you. Back home (in Australia) I’m always Peter Foster the conman. I can’t actually do anything because I’m the conman.

“I want to be in a part of the world where I don’t have to fear authority or perception, to be viewed as I am today. I made a lot of mistakes when I was younger. I went to jail for that. I want a chance to start over.

“My family spent our holidays here every year for as long as I can remember. When I was a young man, in my teens, I brought mates and girlfriends here. I have always loved it. Then in my early 20s I went to Europe and Fiji wasn’t part of my life for about 14 years. Now I’ve come back.

“This may sound funny to you, but this is just about the only place left where I actually feel free.”

There is something both hopeful and sad about his stark assessment. I suggest to him that he has taken a full loop by returning to a place that made him happiest as a child.

Foster looks away and contemplates the proposition. “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Yes. That may be right. Perhaps I’ve returned to my memories.”

*

Two days later, Foster is back at Nadi airport. A charter plane has been arranged for a 45-minute flight to the island of Yasawa-I-Rara, the northernmost island in the Yasawa chain, north-west of Viti Levu.

Earlier this year, Foster secured a 99-year-lease over 45-hecatares of the island, including the stunning Liku Beach, known also as Champagne Beach (after a nearby bubbling freshwater spring).

Liku has been described for years as possibly the finest stretch of beach in the South Pacific. Foster’s attainment of the lease involved protracted discussions with the local Matanqali or tribe. At one point he flew senior tribal members to the Gold Coast for in-depth discussions.

Having visited the island before, Foster was acquainted with the local village and its characters. He knew the then chief, and old man Tiki, and the fisherman One-armed Moses, and Moses’ cousin Ben.

He had so enamoured himself with the village – through gifts, medical care, and vital food supplies - that Ben named one of his children after Foster. The boy is known throughout the region as Small Peter.

Waiting for the seaplane Foster is showing some trepidation. He has not visited the island in four years. He sits in the waiting lounge surrounded by gifts he has bought – the traditional kava, two dozens pints of long life milk, loaves of bread, and countless bags of lollies for the children.

“For years I’ve thought that if I ever got the lease I’d develop it, build an exclusive club like Turtle Island but even moreso,” he says. “Just a few bures, and a bar, Pete’s Bar. I guess it’s every man’s fantasy, isn’t it – like (the TV show) Cheers, to own a bar where everybody knows your name.

“But now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I’ll just build a house for myself. Stuff them. Stuff everybody. This is not about money. I’ve done the profit margins on this development. It could be enormous.

“Now I’m thinking I might stick it up everybody, build a house for myself, thumb my nose at all of them and become an eccentric, a recluse. What do you think?”

The seaplane is finally ready after several delays. We are told it will be set to go in 20 minutes, then five minutes, then 30, then 10. We’re embroiled in Fiji time. At last the food and gifts are secured in the hold. The Canadian pilot, Gary, is particularly unaffable, even brusk.

“I’ve been here 18 months, working non-stop, and this is my last flight,” he says grimly. As Gary adjusts the controls and kicks the propeller to life, there is a gloom in the small cabin of the plane, and possibly thoughts of a fatal crash. It would fit well in a newspaper story – “The pilot of the doomed plane, Gary, was on his last flight…”

With the plane airborne, Foster adjusts his sunglasses and stares through the windshield at the chain of islands unfolding before him.

*

OF Fiji’s 332 islands, about two-thirds remain uninhabited, according to the Fiji government. Following successive coups, from Colonel Rambuka in 1987 to George Speight in 2000, the country’s desirability to tourism investors has waxed and waned.

Post-September 11, however, the world is again catching up with Fiji as one of the few remaining locations for a holiday free of terrorist threats and geo-political upheaval. Pundits suggest Fiji is on the brink of a tourist boom the likes of which it has never experienced.

As for Yasawa-I-Rara, it has remained largely untouched despite day trips from cruise ships, and visits from bible society representatives and supply boats. The Fiji government stated in June this year that the Yasawa-I-Rara region had been untapped “for too long now”. It added: “It’s now time for this pristine island region to come into limelight and join the mainstream tourism and to share the many benefits that the industry has to offer to the nation.”

The village at the island’s northern tip has a population of about 200. Foster’s friend Ben, one of the few villagers to speak fluent English, says his family has “always” lived in the village.

“My father is of the village,” Ben says. “And his father is of the village. And his father is of the village.”

Approaching the island, Foster asks the pilot if he can land on Liku Beach. Gary the Canadian has not heard of it. But he has heard of the Anglicised name – Champagne. The plane begins to drop altitude and Foster’s dream comes into view – it is stunning in its perfection, a half-moon arc of white sand fringed with palms, submerged basalt and aquamarine water.

Foster jumps off one of the plane’s floats close to shore. As Gary parks the aircraft in the adjacent bay, Foster’s conversation becomes effusive. He recounts snippets of the island’s history, comments on a recent fire that has razed the rear hills, and strides along the water’s edge to his proposed house site.

It sits just inside the beach’s northern hook – a clearing behind the palms – and Foster works his way through the imaginary house, outlining the kitchen and dining rooms, drawing with his hands the building’s dimensions.

Group chairman of Foster’s island development company and interior designer, Paul Jason Einsiedel, has already completed several draft plans for the home of the future hermit Foster.

“My observation is that Peter and his mother are native at heart,” he says. “He’s had a love affair with Fiji all his life. What a lot of people don’t understand is that whenever he builds anything his greatest enjoyment is giving people associated with that project a better living, a better lifestyle. There’s a side of him that has to give.”

Foster climbs the steep hillock behind the house site and stares down at his spine of beach.

“This is it,” he says.. “You swim in the morning. In the afternoons you take a nap in the house. At night the boys from the village have caught fresh lobsters for you for dinner. It’s perfect.”

Later, he visits the village, weighed down with his bags of gifts. He is recognised immediately despite his long absence. “Peter!” they shout. “Foster! Foster!”

As is tradition, the tribal elders gather on the veranda of their recently completed community hall. The new chief, Roco, sits with his legs crossed. He is wearing a Wests-Tigers rugby league jersey and aviator sunglasses.

The other elders form a circle and Foster’s cartons of long life milk are placed in the middle. There is clapping and greetings mumbled in Fijian and hands shaken all around. Within minutes of the ceremony, someone at the back of the village can be heard rhythmically crushing the kava root.

Small Peter, now a lively four-year-old, hovers around his namesake.

“Is he a good boy or a naughty boy?” Foster asks the villagers. Good, they assure him. Small Peter is a good boy. Foster seems momentarily relieved.

The women and children of the village swarm on the bags of sweets. They shout after him: “Foster! We love you Foster!” He is clearly delighted at the chaos his visit has created. “I don’t really contribute to the environment when I visit,” he says. “By tonight there’ll be 5,000 lolly papers strewn across the island.”

He warmly greets old man Tiki, and they wander off for private discussions about the lease on a small stretch of sand south of Champagne, owned forever by Tiki’s family. The old man indicates he’d like to get things formalised sooner rather than later.

Waiting for the seaplane on the beach, and surrounded by the villagers, Foster says: “Tiki is about 80 now. I’m 43. Hopefully, one day, people will look at a black and white picture of the two of us on a wall and they’ll say – these two men started all this. These two men became friends.”

*

Back on the mainland, Foster is tired.

He has arranged to meet a group of people in the Sheraton Bar but doesn’t materialise. When telephoned in the villa, he says: “I’m not up for it. I’ve hit the wall.”

One of his good Fijian friends – local music star Laisa Vulakoro – has turned up to meet him for a drink. She sits on one of the bar lounges and watches the band.

“He does this all the time,” she says, smiling. “Before I even knew Peter, I had people calling me from here and overseas to warn me – watch out, he’s a conman. The Fijians know. It’s a small place. Everyone knows about you, even when you don’t think they do. Even in the most remote village, they know of Peter Foster.

“But he was very good to me, Peter. During the campaign for Dr Baba, he gave me work when it was a very bad situation in Fiji after the coup in 2000. I heard a lot of bad things about Peter. I was told my reputation would go down if I associated with him.

“But he was like a saviour who came down from heaven for me. And now that I know everything, I wouldn’t abandon him. He’s a friend. I helped to get his visa restored. I appealed to them that there were many, many things this man had done, good things, that had to be taken into account. That they needed to look at his humanitarian side.

“It’s best to try and concentrate on the good things in people, I think. Life is short.”

Laisa, unable to resist the lure of the stage, later gets up and sings a version of Bob Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

The next day the Fiji Times reports that the Australian government has issued warnings to its citizens working or holidaying in Fiji to be “mindful” of the country’s political climate. The travel advisory warning relates to the controversial Reconciliation, Tolerance and Unity Bill being debated across the country.

Foster takes us to the airport and as he parks the car points out film star Mel Gibson’s private jet on the tarmac. Gibson is in town to look over his own private island – Mago – which he recently purchased. (“I was talking to his local vet, whom I know,” Foster confides. “He’s organising Gibson’s cattle for him.”)

Courteous to the end, he sits drinking coffee, waiting for our boarding call. Looking at him, you can’t rule out future surprises in the colourful life of Peter Foster. Unpredictability has, in the past, been his stock in trade.

Around the Sheraton, the staff jokingly refer to him as Ratu, or King. Many years ago, his mother dubbed him Ratu Galoot. King Fool.

As the plane ascends over the Sleeping Giant, you look down at the receding cane fields and clusters of tin house rooves and know he is driving the plum SUV around the feet of the giant and towards what?

The weight of middle age? Personal reevaluation? Or is Peter Foster journeying towards some sort of redemption, on the most remote beach of the most remote Fijian island, at the bottom of the world?

ends

SILENT WITNESS: The Story of Melissa Pierce

2005-10-03T10:36:00.000+10:00

Published in Qweekend Magazine, Saturday, October 1, 2005

SHE sits alone in the corner of the darkened lounge room of the Pierce family home in Tranquility Drive, accompanied by the rhythmic sigh of her ventilator.

It is just after 3pm, and Melissa Pierce, 33, is awaiting the return from school and kindergarten of her two sons - Callum, 5, and Braydon, 3. Soon the cavernous new house in suburban Rothwell, north of Redcliffe, will contain the chaos of excited children.

But for the moment it is just the hiss and gasp of the ventilator, the music that now underscores much of Melissa Pierce’s life. She is motionless in the chair. Her head is held in a brace. She is covered up to her chin with a blanket of quaint hand-stitched flowers and pots.

Through the sliding glass doors behind her you can see in the backyard the detritus of childhood – swings, a small blackboard, a plastic table and chairs set, a bicycle with trainer wheels. On the family refrigerator, too, that magnetised map of young family life – photographs, reminder notes, shopping lists and emergency telephone numbers.

One fridge magnet grabs your attention – Meningitis: Know the Symptoms.

All this is, at first glance, a familiar tableau, replicated in housing estates up and down Queensland, until you view the room at the left rear of the house in Tranquility Drive. It is, in essence, a private hospital room, as if grafted from some health facility and attached to the back of a suburban home.

At the rear of the room is a large, blank blue wall. There are two hospital-style beds, a mass of machinery and tubes, a huge larder filled with medical and hygiene goods.

It is here that Melissa Pierce, the former Redcliffe police senior constable, spends much of her life now. She is a tetraplegic – paralysed from the neck down – and blind in her left eye. She cannot speak, and can only mouth her words.

Just after 3.15pm her husband Jason, 35, arrives home with the boys. They file in from the garage. Jason lifts each boy in turn to kiss their mother.

She silently mouths “I love you” to the children. They scamper off to play. She follows them with her eyes.

It quietens again in the dim corner of the lounge. Once more the sound of Melissa’s ventilator begins to dominate the room. In the Pierce house - which has seen so much unexpected tragedy, joy, sorrow, love, and uncertainty – the machine that keeps her alive sounds for a moment like a giant beating heart.

Occasionally you can catch the boys’ giggling from a distant part of the house. They cannot know or understand their mother’s story yet. They cannot know how many times she has arrived at the border of death.

It was not always this way. Just over two years ago Melissa Pierce (nee Cree) was a vibrant young mother, a fitness fanatic, and a diligent and valued member of the Queensland Police Force.

She was known by her childhood nickname – Bis – and had a reputation for tenacity, enjoying a good time with her girlfriends, and being a devotee of the daily television soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. She simply referred to it as “The Bold”.

In addition, Melissa and Jason, himself a police detective, owned a property in the Redcliffe area, had fulfilled their wish for children, and had started an exciting new chapter in their lives in Longreach, western Queensland. They were embracing country life. The locals knew them by sight. The kids were in a pony club.

Until one weekend in August 2003, when something so inexplicable happened that their existence was turned upside down.

*

BRIAN and Diane Cree moved to the Redcliffe peninsula in the mid-70s to start a fresh life. As a butcher in Moree in north-western NSW and with two young children - Melissa and Troy - Brian had notions of new beginnings. Perhaps a change of profession. Probably a better life for his wife and kids.

“I butchered here for a while, then I bought a fish and chip shop,” he said. “Melissa was about four when we had the fish shop at Scarborough. It was take-aways and stuff like that.

“Melissa was a good little kid, you know? She was always good. Whatever you asked Melissa to do she’d always do. I remember one night I got in and she came up whinging – Dad, Tina’s pushed me into the sand. I said, Melissa, I’m sick of hearing you whinge, go and push Tina into the sand yourself. The next minute I hear this screaming kid. It was Tina. Melissa was always tiny, but she had this bigger girl’s head in the sand and wouldn’t let her up.”

Since anyone could remember, she was called “Bis”. It was a simple mispronunciation of Melissa by her younger brother, but the name stuck.

Educated at nearby Frawley College, she worked hard for her results and was heavily involved in sports.

“She was very athletic, she really looked after herself,” said her mother, Diane. “She was in touch football, beach volleyball, went to the gym and walked every day. She didn’t really know what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.”

On graduation, she worked for a local law firm before being transferred to their Brisbane office. Unbeknown to her family, she applied for a position in the Queensland Police force.

“One day I came home from work and a letter had come in the mail from the Queensland police,” Brian recalled. “I thought what’s this? She must have got a speeding fine.

“I rang her up and she said open it, open it. I couldn’t understand why she was so excited. It said in the letter she was accepted to join the police force. I couldn’t believe it.

“Then again, I don’t think she was going to sit in an office for the rest of her life. She was too outgoing.”

As it transpired, Melissa Pierce was born to be a police officer. She underwent the usual transfer to various Brisbane and local stations, including Boondall, Albany Creek, Deception Bay and Sandgate, before manning the Help Desk at Redcliffe Police Station and District HQ in Redcliffe Parade.

In the middle of this, she met the love of her life.

“She was travelling in a bus heading down to Thredbo and the snow for a holiday,” Brian said. “You jump on a bus in Brisbane and pick up people on the way south, you know? From what I know of it this fellow got on the bus in Toowoomba and sat beside her. And he was a big tall sort of a bloke. He said to Melissa - what do you do for work? She told him she worked for the government. She didn’t want anyone to know she was a cop.

“As the bus trip rolled on he said – I think you might be a police officer. She said no, I work for the Department of Housing. He said he had a feeling she was a copper. She found out a little bit later that he was a police officer too.”

That fellow was Jason Pierce, an officer from Toowoomba who was so young when he entered the academy he became known as “Junior” Pierce. (He was 16). He had already substantially tasted police life, having served a stint in Barcaldine, central western Queensland.

Melissa and Jason parted ways at the end of that holiday. She returned to Redcliffe. Incredibly, he too was transferred to the district shortly after. As Brian Cree agreed, if two people were ever destined to be together, it was Melissa and Jason.

They married on October 3, 1999.

“His (Jason’s) speech at their wedding was very good,” said his mother, Annette Pierce. “He was going on about how he was on this crusade looking for the woman in his life, how he went here and there looking, and all the time she was right under his nose in Redcliffe.”

In keeping with Melissa’s hopes of having children before she turned 30, she soon gave birth to Callum and then Braydon 18 months later. She shared her pregnancies with other mothers-to-be at the Redcliffe station.

“We were all going to be Mums together,” said colleague Sharon Herd, an Intelligence Officer at the station. “She was thrilled with motherhood. It brought us all together. She doted on her boys.”

Then Jason received a transfer to Longreach in April 2003. He already had an old mate out there – policeman Dave Perry of the Stock Squad – whom he knew from his days in Barcaldine.

“Before they moved to Longreach Melissa bought all these books to help with the boy’s education, just in case they missed out on something in the bush,” her father Brian said. “The idea was to give the kids a bit of a country lifestyle.”

Diane Cree said when they first arrived in the country town their future seemed limitless. “I had never seen a couple so much in love. When Jason came home from work they’d chase each other around, tickling and cuddling.”

Around the middle of the day on Saturday, August 2, 2003, Melissa complained of a nagging earache. She had suffered occasional migraines in the past, but this was like nothing she had ever experienced.

In less than 48 hours, she would be fighting for her life.

*

Exactly what happened to Melissa “Bis” Pierce on that first weekend in August is still a mystery.

After continuing to complain of a persistent earache on that Saturday, Jason took her to the local Longreach Base Hospital late that night as a precaution. There seemed nothing suspicious and she took aspirin.

Jason added: “By 2am Sunday she woke up and told me it was the worst pain she had ever experienced, so I took her back again to the Longreach hospital.”

Jason’s parents were staying at the house at the time. Melissa was due to drive to Rockhampton with Dave Perry on Monday morning to partake in a police course, and Annette and Tom were there to babysit the children for the week.

“I remember they (Jason and Melissa) were going to take the kids to the pony club on the Sunday morning but Melissa wasn’t feeling well and said she’d sleep in,” Annette said. “We took the kids with Jason to the pony club and when we got back she said she felt a lot better.

“After lunch she went for a walk and played with the kids and she sort of felt she was okay. She’d packed to go away and everything.”

Melissa had gone for her usual power walk, and had played cricket and totem tennis in the backyard with the children that Sunday afternoon. Everyone retired for the evening.

Then Jason’s father, Tom, said he was awoken in the early hours of Monday morning by a “commotion”.

“She seemed to be quite okay when we went to bed that Sunday night,” he said. “I heard of a bit of commotion during the night. I could hear her groaning, for want to of a better word.”

At 2am that Monday Jason woke to find his wife was not in bed.

“I went to look for her and she’d thrown up in the kitchen sink,” he said. “It wasn’t like her. Later she was back in the toilet and she’d puked on the floor. The last thing she said to me was – don’t look in here.”

By 5am she was “shaking and not responsive”, according to Jason. She couldn’t speak or hear what he was saying to her. Jason ran into his parents’ room.

“He was very distressed. I took one look at her and she wasn’t conscious,” Tom said. “We couldn’t wake her. I said we better get the ambulance.”

The ambulance arrived within minutes. Shortly after, Dave Perry pulled up at the house to pick up Melissa for their trip to Rockhampton.

“I arrived and the ambulance was there,” he said. “She was laying on a mattress on the floor. She was not conscious of what was going on around her. She was sort of rocking and obviously in some distress.”

Tom added: “The ambulance bloke said we’ve got to get this temperature down, we’ve got to get her to hospital. I expected her to be sitting up in bed by midday that day. It was quite a shock to me when Jason phoned from the hospital.”

He had called, in tears, to tell his parents Melissa was in intensive care, had suspected meningitis, and had to be rushed to Brisbane. Her life was in grave danger.

Melissa would be transferred to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in a Royal Flying Doctor aircraft. Because Jason could not physically fit onto the plane with the paramedics and equipment and his ailing wife, the Queensland Police provided a jet to get him to Brisbane.

“The worst part of it was when we went to the airport,” said Annette. “Both these planes were out on the tarmac. Jason went over to her plane to make sure she was in and everything and he’s balling, tears streaming down his face. He came back over to us to say goodbye.

“Just seeing these planes, you know? The Flying Doctor took off and the other one took off behind it. It was just so sad.”

*

THE average tenure for patients in the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is of short duration. It could be up to five days. Melissa Pierce was a resident there for more than 20 months.

Intensive care specialist, Dr Neil Widdicombe, remembered when he first saw Melissa in the unit.

“She was unconscious when I first saw her, on a ventilator with an inter-cranial pressure monitor,” he said. “We were aware of some of the difficulties establishing a diagnosis and the severity of her problem.

“She had an earache, she had temperature, she had symptoms that were consistent with a viral problem. She was seen by a local doctor who wondered if there had been a bacterial infection and subscribed an antibiotic. Unfortunately she went home and deteriorated.”

Brian Cree said he couldn’t believe that his daughter was fighting for her life after an innocuous earache.

“Jason rang me that Monday morning and said Melissa was very sick… and he broke down,” Brian said. “I said - what do you mean? He said she’d gone into a coma. I said - from what? He didn’t know. She just had an earache. Nobody knows what happened. I still don’t think they know.”

When her Redcliffe police colleagues found out about her plight, they gathered at the hospital on and off throughout the week. At times there were up to 70 police in the waiting rooms.

“I still remember going up to the hospital that first time,” said Redcliffe colleague Barbara Shield. “I had never seen a person look that colour. She was a purple colour, and slipping in and out of a coma. I was a blubbering mess.”

Dr Widdicombe said Melissa was given a variety of anti-viral, -bacterial and –inflammatory treatments. No diagnosis was forthcoming.

“Whatever the process was, it was probably an inflammatory process,” he said. “We don’t know what the cause is and I can’t postulate whether the earache was definitely viral or bacterial. We’ve never been able to confirm or refute that.

“I don’t think it was something peculiar to Longreach. We’ve not had another case from Longreach. We’ve not had a similar case. We’ve not seen a case like this before.”

Something caused severe inflammation to Melissa’s lower brain stem. The resultant pressure in the area, and the body’s attempt to relieve that pressure via the spinal cord, resulted in damage that rendered her a tetraplegic. Tetraplegia, by definition, is the impairment or loss of motor and/or sensory function in the cervical segments of the spinal cord as a result of damage to neural elements within the spinal canal. It is unknown if her paralysis will be permanent.

“It’s frustrating,” Dr Widdicombe added. “People want an answer as to why. In Melissa’s case we can say how, we can demonstrate what the insult (to her brain) has been, but we can’t say why.

“I think in today’s society we want surety and precision, and we are uncomfortable with issues of chance. We’ve not seen a similar case before. It is unfortunately an issue of chance.”

Her father Brian remained nonplussed. “Why did she deserve it?” he asked. “She was one person who didn’t deserve it. If it happened to me, I’ve done enough things to warrant it, but I don’t think she ever has.”

And her future? “What would be Melissa’s lifespan?” Brian asked himself. “That’s in the lap of the gods. What’s your lifespan? What’s my lifespan?”

Her mother, Diane Cree, said she had repeatedly asked God why this had happened to her daughter. Why Melissa?

“A doctor told me it was like the September 11 attacks and the terrorists striking the Twin Towers in New York,” she said. “Those terrorists knew where to strike to cause the most damage. Whatever attacked Melissa, it was like the terrorists. It knew exactly where to strike to cause maximum damage.”

*

In Tranquility Drive, Callum and Braydon are happily drawing and colouring in at the dining room table. Their mother observes silently.

That Melissa is home with her family is another story of remarkable generosity and spirit, and the work of Dr Widdicombe and his team at Royal Brisbane’s ICU.

The house – with its single flame tree out the front and a doorbell that plays Oh Suzannah - was constructed with the money and labour of the entire Queensland police community, the people of Longreach and the Redcliffe peninsula, family, friends, and the goodness of strangers. A specially-fitted vehicle, a forthcoming wheelchair and money for the children’s education has similarly materialised from numerous sources, including innumerable charity auctions and golf tournaments.

“I’ve never been a person for police myself, but they’ve been astronomical,” Brian Cree said. “If anyone could bag them after this…If it’s a community thing, they are the community.”

The impact of that weekend in August 2003 has had monstrous reverberations. Diane Cree, separated from Brian, has permanently moved into a house nearby, having abandoned her retirement on the Gold Coast. Jason continues to work as a detective in the Redcliffe area. Many lives have been touched.

“It’s the terrifying thing,” said Barbara Shield. “If it can happen to Bis just like that, then it can happen to anybody.”

Melissa, despite the unfathomable turmoil she has experienced over the past two years, remains upbeat and positive.

In the early months of her illness she feared for her relationship. “She expressed to me that perhaps she could no longer be the wife and mother she needed to be, and that Jason might leave her,” said Diane.

The opposite has transpired. In December 2003 they renewed their wedding vows in a ceremony at the RBWH. (They signed the marriage certificate with the use of an official police finger-printing kit.)

Jason’s mother Annette said: “He told me - I don’t care what happens, Mum, I don’t want her to die. So far he’s got his wish.”

Jason has, in a way, become “both mother and father to the children”, said Diane. “He’s an angel sent from heaven, I think.”

It is approaching 4pm at the house in Rothwell and it’s almost time for The Bold and the Beautiful. Melissa smiles at her husband and children. Her face is highly expressive. It registers laughter and confusion and a mother’s watchful interest in her children’s activities.

“The amazing thing,” said Barbara Shield, “is that all her memories and faculties are still there.”

It’s still Bis, the girl who pushed Tina’s face in the sand and punished her body to lose weight for the police academy, the woman who fell in love with another police officer on a bus heading south, the mother who was filled with excitement at the thought of watching her boys grow up.

But something, somehow, crept in like a thief and stole the old Melissa Pierce away.

As you leave, she looks up and mouths silently but clearly – “Nice to meet you” – as the ventilator hisses and sighs.

For a moment, you can almost hear her.

ends

LOOKING FOR DR DEATH

2005-09-26T19:32:00.000+10:00

Published in The Courier-Mail, April 2005.

ONCE you leave behind the patchwork fields of cane and blood red soil the road into southern Bundaberg gives way to auto wreckers and car yards and a huge concrete water tower on the edge of the town cemetery.

In another time the cemetery would have marked the outer reach of Bundaberg. But now, with progress, it sits there on busy Takalvan Street like an island of the dead, surrounded by shopping malls and electrical warehouses and strips of plastic bunting.

Through the entrance to the Bundaberg General Cemetery is a pretty archway of old trees, and on either side winged stone angels and marble headstones. Past the Italian crypts and the graves of returned servicemen, though, beyond a line of gums, are the new graves.

These low, gleaming headstones in the western corner form a perfectly neat grid, row after symmetrical row, the most recently deceased exposed and at the front line. These graves face the wind and an empty paddock.

About two-thirds of the way along that line is the grey marble headstone of Barry John Johnson – born 8th September 1946, died 1st October 2003, aged 57 years. The inscription reads: Forever in Our Hearts. Etched into the marble is a green-stemmed red rose.

Barry Johnson shouldn’t be here. He rests at peace beside Ruby Emery, 82, and Stanley Frawley, 76. He’s too young. There was a mistake. It wasn’t Barry Johnson’s time to take his place in the shadow of the water tower.

He was taken to Bundaberg Base Hospital in September of 2003 with pancreatic cancer. And it was there that he came into contact with Dr Jayant Patel. The Indian-born surgeon put off Barry Johnson’s operation for a fortnight, and later performed a bypass rather than removing the cancer.

After four days in the Intensive Care Unit the doctor pronounced that there was nothing that could be done for Barry Johnson. Within 90 minutes of that verdict, the patient was dead.

Barry Johnson shouldn’t be there, between Ruby and Stanley. He couldn’t have known, though, that fate would bring him into the care of a man they now call Dr Death.

*

Across town, on the Coral Coast, is the seaside village of Bargara. Fifteen kilometres from Bundaberg city, you pass through tall setts of sugar cane and vegetable fields before you arrive at the esplanade and the sea.

Bargara, like most coastal Queensland villages, is in a state of transformation. Its main street is full of trendy cafes and restaurants. Construction cranes tower over the waterfront pine trees. There are resorts called Raffles and Manta. Literally sandwiched between these new resorts are old, flaking wooden Queenslanders.

This, too, is the home of Bundaberg’s “elites”, as the locals call them - the doctors and lawyers and professionals of the provincial city.

It was here that Dr Patel had his subsidised residence, in a two-bedroom complex called Bargara Blue. The surgeon, purportedly on a $200,000 annual salary with a car, had an apartment in the rear five-storey tower of the two tower resort.

He kept his apartment spotless, and in turn was a favoured tenant amongst the cleaners. He was known around the building as “Jay”, an Americanised affectation of his real name. Everyone knew Bundaberg’s top surgeon had come from the United States. He talked repeatedly about New York.

Jay Patel was often seen enjoying a drink and a meal down at the nearby Bargara Beach Hotel. He popped in now and then to the 5 Star Handimart for bread and milk. Every day he bought the national newspapers and his treasured packs of Holiday 4 milligram 50s.

In his time off work, which was limited, he liked nothing more than to hire classic videos, like Casablanca. And sometimes he could be seen down on the basalt rocks in front of Bargara Blue, or at nearby Kellys Beach, executing delicate crayon seascapes in a sketch pad.

It is likely he occasionally bumped into his neighbours, such as Bundaberg Base Hospital district manager Peter Leck, or the local Member for Burnett, Rob Messenger, who has his office near the newsagent where Dr Patel purchased his cigarettes and hired his videos.

But the doctor spent little time at home. He was a workaholic, turning up at the hospital even on weekends when he wasn’t formally required. It wasn’t unusual for him to work through to the early hours of the morning, and resume another shift in the afternoon.

Since arriving in Bundaberg in 2003, his rigid routine precluded him from socialising with the city’s other highly-paid professionals. He was never seen at the local clubs like Across the Waves, nor did he dine at Bundaberg’s better restaurants. (At his prior residence in Sapphire on Miller, also at Bargara, he was often seen sitting alone in his apartment and chain-smoking.)

Indeed, his life soon formed a triangular pattern – he either worked, rested and watched videos in his apartment, or ate at his favourite restaurant, the Indian Curry Bazaar, beneath the concrete water tower and near the cemetery.

It was there, in the darkly curtained upstairs dining room, that he held court. He would often eat alone. Or he would invite doctors, interns and nurses from the hospital to join him. At least twice a week he stopped by for takeaway.

At the Curry Bazaar he was respected. He felt at home amongst Bundaberg’s small and yet disparate Indian community. He was a success. Dr Patel earned roughly seven times the average annual income of the residents of Bundaberg, but he never left a tip.

He was, in essence, a classic loner. He never embedded himself in the community. As far as Bundaberg – this small, trusting sugar town of 46,000 people – was concerned, he may as well not have existed. That is, if he hadn’t skewered the very heart of what is important to a provincial city like this. The hospital. Health. Care.

Bundaberg Base Hospital, backing onto the Burnett River and close to the CBD, is and always has been, one of the primary focal points of the town. It was here that Dr Patel established absolute rule. He was rude, dictatorial and totally convinced of his own genius as a surgeon.

Once, after a spell in the operating theatre, he returned to the doctor’s change rooms to find his immaculate Gucci shoes missing. The next day a padlock was secured to the change room doors.

His total self-confidence, his monstrous egotism, was, however, strangely at odds with the friendless loner outside the precinct of the hospital. It was as if he only truly lived when he wore a medical smock and had a scalpel in his hand.

Even as questions were increasingly raised about his competency, and there were suspicions that his handiwork may have even resulted in death, he showed no signs of alarm. It was, in fact, the opposite. The queries only galvanised his belief in himself.

Meanwhile, he was tearing a community apart.

*

One of his former patients, Beryl Crosby, who Dr Patel had wrongly diagnosed with cancer, said: “We’re still asking that one question – how could this have happened to us? This is a community that sticks together in the hard times. Now nobody’s trusting anything anymore. We believe more than 1,000 people, patients, were involved with Dr Patel. It’s difficult to comprehend.”

The degrees of separation between the people of Bundaberg and the victims of Dr Patel are almost non-existent. Almost every second person in the town knows of a victim.

Even in Bargara, where Dr Patel strolled the streets and made his crayon sketches, the people who served him over shop counters knew or were related to victims of his handiwork. A woman in the bakery said last week a friend’s brother-in-law had suffered under Patel. A local clothes store owner said her mother and father-in-law, both deceased, had been patients of the doctor.

Mayor Kay McDuff said the city was in a state of shock.

“Bundaberg has drawn quite a lot of sympathy from other areas in the State,” she said. “I’m appalled that our community has been the one to suffer at his hands. The community mourns for his victims. But we’ve got a lot of get up and go in Bundaberg, and we can move on.”

That shock and subsequent grief, however, is beginning to transform into anger. Despite the government announcing a Royal Commission, the locals are taking matters into their own hands.

With a tragedy of this magnitude, time becomes more urgent and compressed, particularly for the victims. They want a fast track to understanding, to healing.

At the centre of this is Beryl Crosby. Less than two weeks ago she put her head above the crowd and demanded answers. Since then, she has inadvertently become a figurehead for victims. The central beam of support, still standing amidst the wreckage.

In the last ten days she has been patiently compiling the List – the names of bone fide victims of Dr Patel. As of last Thursday, when she held yet another victim support meeting in the John Giovannoni Bar at the Across the Waves sports complex, the List had exceeded 100 people.

It is this, Crosby’s List, that may be the most stark, brutal and accurate document in existence of Dr Patel’s crimes.

“This whole thing is going to get bigger – it’s turning into something monstrous,” she said. “The List. Everyone’s after it. I will not let it go. I don’t want to make these people victims again.”

At Thursday night’s meeting, one women refused to enter the bar because of the presence of the media, and specifically declined to be photographed. It revealed a sensitivity now to the next stage of this drama which is the fight for fiscal compensation. In such a small community, where everybody knows each other, the question of money and legitimate compensation is bound to be the subject of whispers. Who deserves what? Should X be getting more or less money than Y?

Already legal wheels are in motion. Carter Capner have been retained by the people on Crosby’s List. Both Shine Roche McGowan and Slater & Gordon have a handful of potential clients. The word last week was that law firms from both north and south of Bundaberg had arrived in town.

As for Dr Patel, he has vanished. When he left his apartment in Bargara Blue he did so with minimum fuss and in his usual fastidious way. He had few possessions to worry about – two boxes, and a suitcase.

A week before flying out of Australia at Easter, following allegations made in State Parliament by his neighbour, Rob Messenger, he held a farewell upstairs at the Indian Curry Bazaar, with its illuminated picture of the Taj Mahal in the front window.

What started as a modest gathering of about 14 people soon swelled to 31. Some of his colleagues from the hospital were there. Toasts were made. Dr Patel gave a speech, and handed out gifts of bottles of wine. He took photographs of the happy occasion with his camera.

It was revealed, later, that Dr Patel’s guests had no idea it was a “farewell” dinner.

As Dr Patel said his final goodbyes that evening, he would have gone out to his car to make that final drive to his apartment over at Bargara. At the back of the car park beside the restaurant, he may have glanced up at the giant illuminated water tower.

It’s unlikely it crossed his mind that only a few hundred metres away, in the dark, was the cold marble headstone of Barry John Johnson.

THE TROUT OPERA: A Preview

2005-09-26T15:17:00.000+10:00

1

THE sheep on the hills froze and stared in the direction of the car, and for a moment the distant passage of the white sedan reflected across the watery films of their eyes like a parasite.

It was early spring, and snow clung to the mountains, and the snow was still deep inside the winds that came down into the valley. The winds flowed from the stands of snow gums higher up and through the blue eucalypts and then over blankets of buttercups and billy buttons until it poured across the treeless Monaro where it ruffled the long fleece of the sheep.

Sheep carpeted the valley and the lower terraces of the hills above the white car. They twitched and ticked and tore at the yellow grass to the dull music of blowfly and grasshopper and cicada, and the gunshot cracking of the giant lichen-bloomed boulders. Sheep like all sheep throughout the High Country, dulled and sleepy and unthinking until those startling eruptions of life - fox fang to underbelly, thunder or fire across the ranges, a car crackling its way up a dirt road through the middle of a valley.

They stood motionless now on the tiers of this amphitheatre, mouths locked and holding clods, pink tongues soiled and wet and twinkling with quartz. They trembled slightly. Some urinated. The car crept past, and by the time the sheep had bowed their heads again to graze, they had forgotten what had happened.

The two men in the car had read the name - Lampe – painted on a piece of tin on the gate down by the main road, and driven cautiously into the valley, through sudden carousels of grasshopper.

"This has to be it," said the driver, his right foot tentative on the accelerator, his city shoes at sea in the country.

His passenger looked out to the swarms of sheep easing up the foothills. They were the same russet brown as the grass, and for a moment it seemed the earth itself was alive and moving.

Grasshoppers clung to the bonnet and windshield and rear vision mirrors and the driver slowed down and still more of them attached themselves to the car, hundreds of them slow and drunk in the pale light, spined legs awkward and wings half unsheathed. Some wings and legs were already cooking on the radiator grille.

"Plague," the passenger said.

"Hmm," the driver sounded.

"Thought it was supposed to be quiet, the bush. This is like George Street at peak hour."

"Yeah."

"Like a bloody horror movie. The boys are going to be real happy back at the garage."

They had left Sydney just before dawn in the government-issue car and had breakfast of bacon and eggs in a roadhouse halfway to Canberra. At the large plastic-topped table in the diner they had studied the files again and compared notes.

They possessed a single photograph of Wilfred Lampe taken in the 1940s. He was dressed in workshirt and trousers and braces and boots and wore a battered hat. In the picture he was sitting on the running board of a car with his chin in his hands, and he was as dirty as the soil.

"We can get there two ways," said the driver, finishing his coffee. His uncapped pen was poised over a photocopied map. "Via Jindabyne. Or the back way, out of Cooma."

"You decide," the passenger said.

"You could show some interest."

The passenger mopped up egg yolk off his plate with a piece of toast and looked out to their car. Two identical grey suit coats rested on hangars in the back seat.

"Of course I'm interested. What is it, another three hours drive? Maybe an hour there, do what we have to do, and four or five hours back."

"About that."

"That's a half day's overtime," he said, dabbing his mouth with a serviette.

The driver stared at him across the table. Adjusted his tie. Returned to the maps and the paperwork.

"We've got to get this right," the driver said.

"And I've got to get back for dinner by eight tonight. Rockpool. You ever been? There’s a week’s pay right there, but what can you do?"

The coats rocked gently on their hangers as the car rounded Lake George. The driver turned the radio off as they entered Canberra. They passed through the capitol, down towards the skeletal flagpole of Parliament House, then south-west, to the Monaro Highway and Cooma.

The driver decided they would take the back road into Dalgety. An element of surprise, he thought. He did not share his strategy with his passenger.

The driver had been instilled with a sense of mission, despite the indifference of his colleague, as they drove through the order and alignment of Canberra. That feeling did not leave him all the way to Cooma. But it began to fall away when he turned the car onto the arterial road towards Jindabyne.

It was the thousands of ancient boulders scattered across the hills and fields, the remnants of some violent volcanic eruption. The driver could not connect with the randomness of it all, and how the weird configurations of granite blocks bore the vague shapes of things he knew and yet didn't know.

He saw the reclining bodies of goddesses and dinosaurs and Etruscan columns and temples, galleons and bridges and lighthouses and batallions of warriors. There were clusters of office blocks and container ships and pyres of wrecked cars. Then there were the silhouetted faces he may have recognised, and those of great figures in history - pioneers, bushrangers, leaders - and kilometer after kilometer of misshapen breasts and cracked heads and other dismembered body parts. In the rocks he saw everything and nothing, and it disturbed a distant part of him. The driver felt pangs of nausea, and attributed it to the settling of the diner eggs.

“Werid, eh,” was all the passenger said.

The sheep were omnipresent. Thousands of them. Eating and shitting around the monuments, their tiny minds unendingly registering the shift from shadow to sunlit grass.

It felt cold in the cabin of the vehicle on the drive to Dalgety. The men could hear the feint grinding of the coat hangers in the back seat.

They arrived at the village of Dalgety before they realised they were in it. The car had rounded a stand of pines when the road narrowed suddenly andthey were there, passing an abandoned garage and fuel pump, an empty tourist park that backed onto the Snowy River, a closed community hall. The driver stopped outside the Buckley's Crossing Hotel.

They stepped out of the car, relieved by the solid forms of the scattered town. The bricks and faded timbers. Glass and lacework. Even the geometrics of an abandoned tennis court down by the community hall, its old clay surface bearded with spring weed shoots.

The passenger stretched, looked down to the span bridge across the river, the sports oval and stockyards that reared onto the riverbank. A few bluestone and weatherboard houses hunkered behind trees on the low rise at the back of the hotel.

"This is it?" he said.

"This is it," the driver said.

The driver went into the pub and bought pies and sausage rolls…. and the two men went down to the river's edge and ate their lunch. They studied the river, silted with algae that collected in rust-coloured skirts at both banks. Further down, beyond the bridge, it forked around deposits of sand and pebble and disappeared into a tangle of blackberry bushes at the first bend. The tea-hued water did not appear to move. Its surface, from where they sat, was covered in paisley plates of rainbowed oil.

The passenger, his mouth half-full of pastry, said, "You're telling me this is the Snowy River?"

The driver chewed methodically and stared straight ahead. "The one and only," he finally said.

They both thought of poems and pictures from distant schoolbooks and of rearing horses dark with mountain rain and a cavalcade of other images and sounds and words learned in another part of the country where great rivers did not exist. It was what made the Snowy River so important to them as children, just to know they had one, a great river, flowing, roaring, somewhere. Everyone had to have a great river. One that coarsed and carved continually through their stories and imaginings. A great river gave strength to a country.

The driver went to speak, then couldn't.

"It's dead," the passenger said.

They sat by the river for another quarter of an hour, locked in the same confused silence, their imagined picture of the river not matching this strangled stretch of water in front of them. The passenger in particular felt he had been tricked, made a fool of by a long line of conspirators stretching back into his boyhood. He was momentarily angry at being fooled. Not at the sad state of the river. He had no concept of permanence.

The publican at the Buckley's Crossing, Jim Mitchell, observed them through the front windows of the hotel. In Dalgety they were used to public servants passing through. It'd been happening since - when? - the early 1900's, when the town was inspected and surveyed as the nation's potential capital. So much for that.

They regularly rolled through again during the construction of the hydro-electric scheme. Now, ironically, they'd blow in once a year to meet with the Snowy River protest groups who wanted them to give back the water they took away for the scheme. The world, he often said, was arse-up.

The driver down by the river, though. It was the first time Jim Mitchell had seen an official Sydney Olympics tie. The little coloured worm of the logo. It reminded him of a Dingo trout fly.

He mentioned the tie to Larry Brindlemere who popped into the pub for a six-pack of beer. Larry dropped by the general store for some fuse wire, and told Bill and Meredith Haskell that the logo apparently looked exactly like a Dingo fly. When Mrs Peat telephoned the store about refreshments for the weekend's performance of Sleeping Beauty in the community hall, she was told of the two men beside the river below the bridge, the tie, and the Olympics logo. By the time Larry had delivered the warming beers to his fence workers, farmers and their wives from Berridale to Paupong knew of the visitors.

Back in the car, the driver studied another smaller, hand-drawn map, and they drove out of town, across the wood slat bridge, towards the ranges.

A few kilometers later they found the gate.

"You know what sort of shape he's in?" the passenger asked.

"They didn't say."

"Does he know we're coming?"

"Why the questions all of a sudden?"

"I'm interested. I'm showing interest."

The driver drummed on the wheel with his fingers. "Not that I'm aware of. This is a get-to-know-you visit, that's all."

"Don't want the old boy to have a heart attack or something."

"Wilfred Lampe has a heart attack," the driver said, "and we're out of a job."

They drove for five minutes through Lampe's valley before they broached a rise and saw the house. The car idled and dropped air-conditioning fluid onto the dirt road. A smudge of smoke issued from the chimney at the side of the shack.

For several moments they looked down at Lampe's home. It was a ramshackle affair, the core of the house lost behind decades of additions, of verandahs and sheet tin lean-to's and tacked on wash-houses and storage rooms of differing materials, all this furred and spiked with stands of cut timber, pipes, guttering, old insulation bats and clutches of home-made fishing rods leaning higgledy-piggledy against the sprawling structure.

Scattered out from the dwelling were piles of bluestone riddled with weeds and rotting tyres and concrete laundry tubs and abandoned machinery. They could hear in the closed cabin of the car the tongue-click of a nearby generator in a shed, from which extended a low loop of black wire to a corner of the house.

The shells of several old cars were parked beneath a huge pepper tree thirty metres from the house, models that stretched back to the 1920s. A tomato bush flowered up through the flooring and around the steering wheel of a Plymouth. The roof of a black, tyreless Humber Vogue was tickled by the furthest overhang of the pepper tree.

Pale smoke continued to rise out of the chimney.

"He lives here?" the passenger said.

"He was born here."

"His whole life he's lived here?"

"He left twice," said the driver. "Once to Sydney, in the 1930s, to find his missing sister. The second, to Darwin, near the end of the war."

The passenger shook his head. "And that's it? Twice? In a lifetime?"

"That's it."

"Ever married?"

"No."

"Brothers? Sisters?"

"All dead," said the driver.

"There's nobody? No next of kin?"

"One. A great-great-niece by the name of Amber Day. Twenty-six years old. I doubt he even knows she exists. We can't find her anyway."

The driver edged the car down the rise towards the house.

It had been less than two months since the committee appointed the two men to find the perfect candidate. Both thought the job would take little more than a week. But they had travelled to every capital city in Australia, to Fremantle and the Dandenongs and Eden and Wauchope and Emerald, visited dozens of nursing homes, hospitals and rural homesteads, one-bedroom flats overlooking the ocean, caravans on patches of scrub, and come up with nothing.

They had investigated personal connections, family and friends, and when that was exhausted, punted on elderly neighbourhoods, eyed old men and women in supermarkets, took notes in the bars of lawn bowling and bridge clubs.

Then someone found Lampe. An old clipping, yellowed, from a rural newspaper, cut out by the aunt of a staff member, sent in the post. Lampe, only five hours drive from the office, down in sheep country, snow and ice country, trout stream country.

They stopped the car near the house.

"And nobody's spoken to him," said the passenger, straightening his tie.

"Correct."

"He might be out."

"Ninety-six year old men don't get out that much."

They sat in silence in the car for a few moments, looking out at the grand disorder, and both wondered if this is how life unraveled itself ; if old man Lampe and all men were like the house ; the original little homestead of clean lines and fresh timbers obscured, slowly, by decades of accretion, until it disappeared.

They wondered if their search had come to an end, here, in a low valley on the Monaro. If the months of expeditions into the country of the elderly - the wafer-thin skin of hands, the open mouths of the sleeping, the perfume of sour antiseptic and through it death, that shape beyond the veil - was over.

It was Lampe, now, that they feared. He was their future.

"Let's get this over with," the driver said.

"Okay."

They stepped out of the white car. They opened the rear passenger doors, removed the identical coats from their steel hangers, put on the coats, and reached inside for their briefcases.

Both men perfunctorily adjusted their Sydney Olympics ties with their free hand.

The driver, out of habit, activated the car alarm, and its quick double beep sent grasshoppers wheeling.

•

"Mr Lampe?"

They stood on the cluttered verandah of the house, peering through the gauze of the flyscreen. The driver tapped on the wood-frame of the door.

"Hello?"

Beyond the flywire they could see the outline of a wooden table and a single chair. And the black curves of a kettle on the grate in the fireplace.

They opened the door and took a few steps inside. The room was rank with woodsmoke and food smells and they could hear a permanent buzzing somewhere in the gloom. Flies, or bees, or the muffled static of a radio.

Their eyes adjusted to the lack of light and suddenly the room appeared to them. There was a small gas camp cooker on a wooden bench to the left, and a tin sink filled with dishes and cutlery. Beside the sink an old fashioned meat safe. The four panes of the small window above the sink were sealed with sheets of newspaper.

To the right was a wooden sideboard with leadlight in the doors. In the centre of the leadlight were two frosted diamonds. Inside the cabinet, behind the diamonds, was the statuettes of a ballerina, a butter dish, and faceted rose glass salt and pepper shakers. Above the sideboard was a photograph of a faded steer freckled with fly spots.

At the end of the room stood the fireplace. Its sooted mantel was decorated on each side with hand-carved chickens. On top of the mantelpiece was a squat twin-key clock. From the far end of the room it resembled a judge's wig.

Slivers of light appeared between the wide slabs of hardwood that constituted the walls.

The buzzing got louder. It was stuffy inside the house, and the fire licked around the base of the old kettle. The passenger and the driver both felt the hand around their briefcase handles begin to sweat.

"Jesus," the passenger whispered.

On the kitchen table, like objects in a museum, was a single cream-coloured plate, and on the plate three slices of corned beef, bleeding beetroot, lettuce and a mound of chutney. A knife and fork rested on the food. Neatly placed to the right of the plate was a small teapot. Steam eased from the spout. Just beyond the teapot was an open jar of sugar, a tin of jam with the lid pulled back and serrated around the edge, and a bread plate.

The driver flicked his head slightly and they moved through the living room to the bedroom doorway.

Sheets of newspaper were laid out on the bare wooden floor around the bed. They could see the shape of a human being in the old mattress, and the indentation of a head on the single pillow. Behind the steel bedhead, looking out into the room, was the framed photograph of a woman. Her hair pinned in a bun, her eyes large and dark and almost without whites, her mouth a line of pale pencil. The pink of the lips had faded away.

It was the eyes that held the two men at the doorway to the room. They were the eyes of a plain woman looking coldly into a future of hard labour and occasional tragedy. They were eyes that would be unsoftened by firelight, that followed the crazed stitching of sheep tracks in dew all the way to the distant mountains, and could detect the onset of snow. Eyes that were prepared for everything, out there, in the world, beyond the slab house in the valley.

The stench the room held was almost unbearable.

"Let's try out the back."

The buzzing had entered their heads and they could feel flies or bees brushing their suit jackets or the hair of their wrists and their skin crept at the touch. They passed down a narrow hall to a washroom at the back of the house then re-entered the blinding sunlight of mid-morning.

'He's not here," the passenger said, breathing deeply. "Let's go."

"But the fire. The tea."

They stood together on the back staircase and when their eyes adjusted again they looked over a waist-high field of weeds and grasses. The sunlight illuminated dozens of tiny dandelion globes.

From the stairs the driver could see the end of the valley, a pinched cul-de-sac of boulders and dead timber and what appeared to be the charred remains of a hut, its long-fallen roof struts and slab walls fallen around a corrugated iron chimney.

This place, the driver thought. It was too lived in. As with people, places too had a finite life. Lampe's valley, the soil, the car bodies and the trees, were at the end of a long cycle. The driver could feel it, and smell it in the air. A decay that attached itself to the fine fibres of his suit.

"He's not here," the passenger repeated.

But neither of them could escape the fact of the meal on the kitchen table. And the steam. The life of the steam.

"I'll check in the shed," the passenger said.

He disappeared around the side of the house. The driver didn't move. He could feel cold metallic sweat collecting under his arms. Up on the hill to the east, he could see a handful of sheep looking down at him. A sudden breeze rattled the dandelions, and he could feel the cold working its way inside his suit, and then he heard a human moan.

"Lampe?" he said, almost to himself.

He stepped down into the yard. The weeds reached up to his black leather belt.

"Mr Lampe"

He waded through the weeds. Spore clung to his trousers and unseen nettles bit his socks and cuffs. The weed stalks hissed with his movement.

A flash of colour. He saw it. Red. Thirty feet away. He walked faster, towards the patch of red.

The driver was less then ten feet away when he saw the old man, laying on his side, a spotted hand clutching at vivid green weed stalks and grass. His eyes were open and milky at the rims. His white hair dishevelled and flecked with seeds and spore. One of his braces had slipped from his shoulder. His red checked shirt, buttoned at the neck, pulled tightly at his throat.

A dark line of beetroot juice stained a deep wrinkle that ran down the left side of the old man's mouth.

"Christ." The driver dropped his briefcase and knelt down beside Wilfred Lampe. He put a hand on Lampe's arm, and brushed the hair off his forehead. Then, without understanding, he nursed the old man's head.

"Get a fucking ambulance," the driver shouted into the valley.

They were two men from different ends of the century, inside a womb of weeds, both of them held in a halo of insects.

•

When the helicopter lifted from the earth and hovered above his property and then moved out across the Monaro Wilfred Lampe knew two things ; that he was dead, finally, and that he had at last solved the greatest riddle of his life.

That death, and the solving of the riddle, should coincide, registered no surprise within him. They were a single occurrence. It was as it should be.

He was, at last, inside the mind of his beloved trout. A place he had tried to enter for almost ninety years. With this, the rising from the earth, he was seeing with their eyes.

Lampe could see patches of blue sky and could feel a strong vibration running through his body but could hear nothing. He suddenly felt very cold. He was rising. Rising. Seeing, as he knew trout did, through the surface of the water to the outside world. And seeing, simultaneously, the river stones, the reeds, the submerged logs, even a clear picture of himself, reflected back off the underside mirror of the river.

Shadowy figures hovered over him, blocking and unblocking the sky, and he knew immediately these were little puffs of cloud crossing the sun, or pieces of timber rushing down the river with the snow melt, or maybe the odd specimen of human detritus that occasionally found its way into the Snowy. He had, as a boy, seen a steamer trunk sail past under the Dalgety Bridge.

He could see himself interrupting his lunch of cornerd beef and beetroot. Remembering an old washing machine motor out by the back fence, he had risen with the aid of his cane and set out to find it. Might yield a part or two, he thought, to fix that dodgy generator. He caught a toe in some undergrowth, and had gone down into a bed of weeds.

I feel no pain, he thought, looking up into the luminescent cathedral roof of arced stalks. They always said the Lampe's were made of wire, didn't they? But he was so tired, as wire, too, gets tired, and funnily, as he lay there in the soft grass, he thought of his tea getting cold on the table. The sweet hot tea cooling inside the teapot, and then the metal of the pot cooling down, and the fire in the grate sputtering to nothing, then the coals cooling, and the big black kettle becoming cold as the granite in the fields at night.

Wilfred Lampe could see all this as his body vibrated and he rose higher.

He was happy, now, to be dead, having solved the riddle. For ten years he had gone to bed each night no knowing if he would wake up. He was comfortable with that. In the room he had been born in, with his mother looking over him.

How they had pushed him to go into the nursing home at Berridale. Wilfred Lampe had not been to Berridale since 1927, when his grandfather had died, and they had gone to bury him, and sell the orchard, and remove his giant hive of Italian bees. They told him he had a friend in the nursing home in Berridale. Cecil Sweetwater. Do you remember Cecil? You were quite a duo. But he didn't remember Cecil Sweetwater. Only lying on his back in the orchard, his belly filled with raspberries and plumbs, looking up into the heavily laden fruit trees, the colours like fireworks.

I'll die at home, he told them. I don't want to die sitting in an armchair with Cecil Sweetwater in my ear. Who's Cecil Sweetwater?

They came out to the valley to check on him. In 1983 the area constable restricted his license to a 20-kilometer radius from Dalgety. They reduced it to ten kilometers in 1993. That just got him from the front gate into town, to the General Store or the Buckley's Crossing Hotel, or Our Lady Star of the Sea on the hill. They had joked with him. If Haskell's store was a bit further up the main street, Wilfred Lampe would starve to death. He hadn't driven the Humber Vogue in a year.

He caught glimpses of the sky. And could see everything reflected back to him.

Dorothea's face appeared. You said you'd come back. You promised. When I ran along the platform at Cooma, and you pressed the bunch of wildflowers I gave you against the glass carriage window, you mouthed - I promise. I waited, though. More than sixty years. I waited. And now I can see you clearly. Now you're with me again.

The rising. Wilfred Lampe was rising to the surface.

The old man's body vibrated as the helicopter peeled away from Lampe's property, threw wave after wave of warm air at the earth, sending grasshoppers into violent and unfamiliar patterns of flight, scattering the attendant sheep, shaking the ramshackle house, the china ballerina trembling in its cabinet, rusted nails aching in the roof, the smoke from the dying fire dissipating in a dance of madness. The pepper tree was lashing itself, cutting itself up, and the smell of pepper infused the air. The whole valley beat like a heart.

Across the rise Tom and John Crisp were the first to hear and then see the helicopter arrive and then leave. They had no thoughts on it, because they could not comprehend it.

Larry Brindlemere and his fence workers were sitting on bales of wire, finishing their beers, when they heard the thud of the rotors. They stared silently in the direction of the sound, unmoving.

Mrs Peat heard it also, taking a tray of golden scones from her Kooka. She was pleased with the hue, and could already see them neatly arranged in their wicker baskets during interval at the performance of Sleeping Beauty. She placed the hot tray on a bench and cocked an ear. She didn't remove her hen-faced mittens.

Jim Mitchell was halfway through fitting a new keg when he heard the helicopter. He stepped out onto the verandah of the hotel, leant on the railing and checked the sky. He saw nothing but clouds as thin and ordered as fish bones.

Down on the river, a few kilometers from Dalgety Bridge, Bill Hourigan had just found a nice spot on the river bank where the Snowy fluted into a narrow pool. He had fished the river all his life, had never seen it so anguished. It was harder to find the pools. The whole river was being squeezed out, to the sea.

He knew on this day he would catch nothing. He hadn't landed a decent trout in several years. But he loved working the rod and line, he loved the rhythm of it, now that he was alone and getting old and the children had moved away.

Bill Hourigan checked the flies he had made at the kitchen table that morning and had just begun casting, his shoulders and arms and wrists aching, not yet used to the action, when he heard the helicopter and, looking over his right shoulder, saw it lift into the air above what must be the old Lampe place.

He stopped casting, let the fly drift on the water's surface, and watched as the helicopter banked and headed towards the south of the town and right over him, over the sole fisherman beside the pool. The shadow of the helicopter darted over the silt and pebble and pool and the fists of blackberry bushes and then it was gone.

They would all know, soon enough, that Wilfred Lampe broken through the surface, been hauled up and into the sky, and disappeared.

•

The old man woke up in a white bed with white sheets tucked up across his chest in a small white room.

It was night and the room was dark. There was one window on the right wall of the room.

He knew he was dead. That it was all over. That this was death, this feeling of being half asleep, and half awake. He could smell citrus.

A pale, milky light was reflected through the window and onto the white wall in front of him. Sometimes, long ripples of sharper light moved down off the ceiling and across the white wall.

He recognised them. They were ribbons of sunlight through the water of the river. He was in the cool waters of the river, and he could see everything and everyone reflected back on the silver plate of the surface.

Wilfred Lampe closed his eyes.

•

DVD ADDICTION: The Perils of The Waltons

2005-09-26T10:25:00.000+10:00

ONE recent sunny afternoon I stood motionless in the middle of Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall staring perplexed at a DVD box set of The Waltons: The Complete First Season in my hand.

How had it gotten there, this box, with its warm sepia cover photograph of John-Boy and Jim-Bob and Grandpa Zeb somewhere deep in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia? What was it doing in my hand, this endless compendium of cornball, sugar-dusted, moral-riven Depression-era schlock about innumerable people with hyphens in their Christian names and the backsides out of their overalls?

Unbelievably, I had purchased it. I had, once again, entered the Bermuda triangle of a DVD store, and come out the other side with – of all things - The Waltons. Instinctively, I understood even as I took it to the cash register that I would never watch it – twelve or more hours of the complex family architecture of Mary-Ellen-Bob and Grandma Olivia-Bob and Erin-Bob and Ben-Bob.

It was then I knew I was a full blown DVD addict or, in the case of The Waltons, an Addict-Bob.

Addiction is complex. One definition declares it is “a state of being dependent on a certain substance which is harmful or dangerous for the physical or mental health of a person, for his social well-being and economical functioning”.

The storylines alone in The Waltons’ first season could surely be categorised as “harmful or dangerous for the physical or mental health”. For example, in An Easter Story: “Olivia contracts polio but vows to walk by Easter morning.” Or The Calf: “The youngest Walton children grow attached to a bull calf that John is determined to sell.”

Even just reading the synopses, I’m already rooting for the bull calf, hoping it somehow gets off Walton’s Mountain and away from these despicable people who take several hours to say goodnight to each other each evening before blowing out their paraffin lamps and homemade candles. By the time the wizened Grandma Olivia gets around to bidding everyone a good evening the cocks are crowing at dawn and the whole wretched cycle starts again.

Any self-respecting psychologist might say I am “transferring” the self-loathing of my addiction to a gaggle of fictional television characters. It is not the Waltons’ fault. I have no right to grit my teeth at John-Boy’s enormous facial mole, nor the gap in do-gooder Pappy Walton’s teeth which, to my ears, issues a C-sharp each time he reads Bible passages to his all-American apple pie clan.

Is it their fault that I have several unwrapped DVD’s in my collection, untouched and unviewed? What does Walton Mountain have to do with my excitement at finding Zorba the Greek (Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates, 1964) on DVD, rushing home and realising I had already bought a copy months earlier? It’s enough to make you choke on Grandpa Zeb’s corn pipe.

No, the addiction is mine alone. Not just single movies on DVD, Collector’s Editions, Gold Editions or Director’s Cut Editions, but the Box Sets. The Box Sets (hence The Waltons) send me into a peculiar delirium. The thought of advertisement-free television, hours of it, tickles my cathode ray tube.

I’m not the only one. There are websites for active and recovering DVD addicts. A recent chatroom in the US posed the question – You know you are a DVD addict when…. One fellow sufferer confessed: “…at Easter, instead of hunting for eggs, you hunt for all the DVD’s you’ve hidden in fear of your significant other finding out how much you’ve spent.” And another: “…you are watching a movie in a theatre and catch yourself trying to pause it.”

It is too early to gauge the social impact of DVD addiction. It’s a relatively recent illness. The first DVD players were sold in Tokyo in late 1996, and only launched in Western Europe in May 1998. Last year, almost half of Hollywood’s revenue came from the home entertainment market, and primarily the DVD.

It was estimated that in 2004 there were 42,500 DVD titles available in the US. A conservative calculation revealed it would cost well over $A1 million to purchase a single copy of each. Like any decent addiction, it can be expensive.

But how to stop? The Waltons: the Complete First Season will now sit in my collection beside the complete first seasons of Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space. These jostle for shelf room with five Carry On collections and the first and second seasons of Kung Fu (“Ah, glasshopper!).

Is it a clinging, in part, to the innocence of childhood television viewing? Or to films that as a child seemed so shocking, profound and memorable? What else could explain my greedy purchase of Soylent Green (Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, 1973), that seemed so spectacular at the time?

Revisiting it, how could this sensationally tacky narrative set in 2022 New York where the masses are hungry and the government turns old people in edible little square biscuits possibly be appealing to the grown me? (Although the thought of some acquaintances coming back in another life as a Cheese Shape or Iced Vo Vo does have its perverse attraction.) This is one huge downside to DVD addiction – the pleasures of distant memory being head butted by contemporary reality.

Yet the collection continues to grow.

My therapist has recommended a mantra, said each night before beddy bye time. Goodbye Box Sets, I have to say. Goodbye Complete First, Second and Third Seasons. Goodbye Director’s Cut. Goodnight John-Boy.
Oh-boy. This is not going to be easy.

HIROSHIMA: 60 Years On

2005-09-23T14:30:00.000+10:00

OF THE BOMB

PUBLISHED in the Griffith Review # 9: Up North, edited by Julianne Schultz, August 2005.

HE was a small old man and he sat alone in the trolley car.

It was late July and very warm and the tram was making its way through the southern suburbs of Hiroshima to the ferry terminal for the sacred island of Miyajima.

The old man wore a large, floppy brimmed canvas hat and a beige safari suit. His brown lace-up shoes were neatly placed side by side. He cradled, in his lap, a little carry bag.

He had been watching me since I boarded the tram near the A-Bomb dome and sat on a bench opposite him. As the trolley car emptied, stop by stop along route 2, he continued staring through his pair of enormous, thick-lensed spectacles.

On occasion I glanced at his kind, worn face, and realized there was something not quite right with it. It was not something immediately obvious, but it was curiously out of alignment. His left eye was smaller than the right, the difference exacerbated by the thick spectacle lenses.

The cheekbone, too, below the pinched eye, was flat, in defiance of the other across the bridge of his nose, which was round and full. It looked, to me, like a face that had suffered an accident a long time ago, and the imperfections were a far away, on the horizon of a long life.

At one point, it was just me and the old man in the trolley car, and this was when he rose slowly and sat beside me.

“Where are you from?” he asked. His voice was thin and his English heaviloy accented but clear.

“Australia,” I said, turning to him.

He stared down at the carry bag in his hands.

“Are you a soldier?” he asked.

I laughed at the unusual question. “No,” I said.

“I remember the Australian soldiers in 1945,” he said, “with the hats.” He folded up one side of his canvas brim, making an impromptu slouch hat. “Very nice,” he said, smiling.

Australian soldiers had taught him to speak English at a school in Hiroshima, he said, after the war. He was born in 1928, and had been a “ship man” when he was younger. He gripped an imaginary ship’s wheel with his old hands and motioned to steer from left to right.

Then he said, unexpectedly: “I am of the atom bomb.”

He rummaged in his carry bag and I noticed that the texture of the skin on left hand was very smooth, an oddity consistent with his eye, and his cheekbone. He was an old man divided into two sides.

Eventually he produced a thick blue booklet, the size of a passport. I had read of these books, carried by A-bomb survivors. They were medical record books.

“I am going to the hospital,” he said, holding up the book. “Every week I go to the hospital.”

He tapped his knee with the book before returning it to his bag.

“I was visiting Hiroshima on that day,” he said, recalling August 6, 1945. “The atom bomb. Wooosh.” He raised a bunched fist and flicked his hand open to indicate the explosion.

He looked at me with that crooked face and smiled again.

“I am of the atom bomb,” he said.

*

I had come to Japan to retrace the steps of the legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett.

As a young reporter I had known of Burchett for a singular achievement – he was the first Western journalist into Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb.

In the 60 years since Burchett filed his famous report, The Atomic Plague, for the London Daily Express, it has probably remained the greatest individual newspaper “scoop” of the 20th Century, and into the millennium.

It’s impossible to know now to what degree Burchett was writing for history, but you get the feeling, from the opening line, that the young reporter from Victoria had an eye to posterity. “I write this as a warning to the world.”

Burchett was almost 34 years old when he made his incredible solo journey from Tokyo to Hiroshima to bring the facts of the bomb’s devastation to the world, as he put it.

At tremendous risk to his personal safety, he took the long train journey south in defiance of United States orders that Hiroshima be off limits to the press. He travelled in that delicate period between the dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and Japan’s official surrender.

It struck me, as a journalist and a novelist, that this act was the stuff of dramatic fiction, and that one day I would write a novel about this incredible chapter in Burchett’s life.

The story had everything – war, flight, danger, heroism, and at the centre of it all one of the defining moments in human history. I made some cursory notes.

Years later, I was browsing through a second-hand bookshop at a Gold Coast flea market when I came across an extremely battered copy of one of the prolific Burchett’s polemic books – This Monstrous War. The book dealt with the Korean conflict.

By now I knew more about Burchett’s life, his evolution into a “radical” journalist, and his ability to polarise readers, colleagues, even governments. He was accused of being a Communist spy, a traitor, a fabricator. His own country, for a time, refused to grant him a passport and entry into Australia. Since Hiroshima, his reputation had wobbled and stumbled.

I developed a theory, too, that the impact of what Burchett saw in Hiroshima, and the scoop itself, changed something inside of him. That the dropping of the A-bomb was a schismic moment for mankind, and also for the psychology of Burchett.

The theory had no basis in fact. It was the fancy of the novelist, trying to find a way into the head of an undeveloped character.

Then, when the Iraq conflict broke out post-September 11, and the world witnessed the manipulation of the media by the superpower that is America, and truth, as they say, became a casualty itself as the war rolled on for months, and then years, I kept thinking of Burchett and Hiroshima.

In that instance, his entire purpose was the pursuit of truth. It was a dangerous, renegade act (often the prerequisite for defining moments) for which he was later vilified. It went to the very definition of reporting.

In the context of the contemporary world, I thought of Burchett and that warm September in 1945 when he walked through the ruins of Hiroshima with his notebook, and felt that something had been lost. That we’d mislaid something very important about, or within, ourselves.

After I’d purchased This Monstrous War for a single dollar, I didn’t realise until I got home that the book had been personally inscribed by the author himself. His best wishes and signature were scratched onto the title page in blue ink some time in the 1950s.

When you begin a writing project you accept, beyond logic or reason, all manner of superstitions, totems, coincidences and signs. I liked the idea that Burchett had autographed his book to a stranger. And that maybe that stranger was me, albeit half a century later.

It was time, I thought, to pick up Burchett’s trail in Japan.

*

BURCHETT first heard of the dropping of the atomic bomb as he waited for lunch in a US military cookhouse on Okinawa.

As he wrote in his autobiography, At the Barricades: “On August 6, 1945, I was shuffling along in the chow line for lunch with fifty or so weary US marines…The radio was crackling away with no one paying much attention to it – as usual. A note of excitement in the announcer’s voice as the cook’s aide dumped a hamburger and mash on my tray prompted me to ask what was new.”

He was told a “big new bomb” had been dropped on the Japanese. Burchett strained to listen to the voice on the radio and learned of the A-bomb. “I made a mental note that Hiroshima would be my priority objective should I ever get to Japan,” he wrote.

Within a fortnight he was on board the USS Millett which landed at the Yokosuka naval base. Accompanied by US correspondent Bill McGaffin, he immediately caught the first train into Tokyo. He was already contemplating how to get down to Hiroshima.

They learned that some journalistic colleagues were staying in the Imperial Hotel. Burchett and McGaffin tried to get a room at the Dai Ichi – the “only other nearby hotel still standing”.

The 600-strong press corps was focussed on covering the surrender ceremony on board the Missouri on September 2. But Burchett was looking in the opposite direction – to Hiroshima.

He wrote in his autobiography: “With the aid of my (Japanese) phrase book I was able to get to the Japanese official news agency (Domei in those days) and found that a train still went to where Hiroshima used to be.

“This was a great surprise because journalists had been briefed for months that the Japanese railway system had been brought to a halt….The journey would be long, difficult to say how long. Nobody, I was warned, went to Hiroshima.”

On the night before he left the Yokosuka base for Tokyo and then Hiroshima, fellow Australian newsman Henry Keys gave Burchett his .45 pistol.

By 6am on the day of formal surrender, Burchett was journeying south. In the early hours of September 3, he stepped off the train at the shell that was Hiroshima railway station, and into history.

*

LEGENDARY foreign correspondent Murray Sayle, who spent much of his life in Japan, did his best to prepare me for my Burchett trip. I had been put in touch with Sayle courtesy of that other great Australian expatriate journalist, Phillip Knightley.

What I learned, on arrival in mid-July last year, was that you cannot really prepare yourself for Japan.

Flying in at dawn, the sight through the aircraft porthole of Mount Fuji dusted with pink light only accentuated a feeling of remoteness. It didn’t look real.

It was not the fault of Mount Fuji, perhaps the curse of modern travel in an age of ceaseless images and advertising, of icon bombardment and the cultural hijacking of the world’s most beautiful and recognized features. Framed in the perspex window, it could have been a cardboard postcard.

I arrived in Tokyo at morning rush hour, and eventually made my way to my small, neat lodgings not far from the Imperial Palace on Sayle’s recommendation, the Tokyo Family Hotel.

The foyer was, strangely, reminiscent of something you might find by the English seaside, all dark woods and lace drapes and a cluttered front desk. The room was not unlike a narrow ship’s cabin, and yet contained everything you’d expect of more expansive hotel accommodation, just in miniature. I was in a very big city in a very small room.

On that first morning I walked to the Imperial Hotel, not the original which opened in 1890, nor the second incarnation made of volcanic rock and terracotta designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1920s, but the third, a mélange of 70s and 80s highrise towers.

A few blocks away stood the Dai Ichi, but again nothing Burchett would have recognized.

“The manager, gazing at us as if we had dropped from the moon, explained that the hotel was full and ‘uncomfortable’,” Burchett reminisced of 1945.

The Dai Ichi, like the Imperial, was now ultra-modern and reached into the sky. With some difficulty I asked the manager if he possessed any published history of the hotel, and after much effort he handed me a contemporary brochure highlighting the hotel’s many fine facilities.

At the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan, I was granted a Guest Card for the period of one month and was offered use of the library facilities. There, journalists from around the world sat and read newspapers in that half-leisurely, half-alert manner that most journalists read newspapers.

It wasn’t possible, again in a modern highrise, to imagine the street-level world of Burchett and his colleagues at the end of the war, with most of Tokyo leveled to the ground courtesy of General Curtis Le May’s B-29 bombing raids on the city.

Nor the bonhomie at the bar in the Imperial, or the meals they shared in the remaining hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the city’s central hub.

I returned to the ship’s cabin, drained by jet lag and the fierce summer heat, and was woken in a daze around 5pm by the woman in the Tokyo Family Hotel who delivered fresh tea to the rooms at the same time each day.

I had lost all sense of time and place, and felt that sensation many times in Tokyo. It was so huge I was incapable of settling a mental map of its dimensions in my head.

Yet simultaneously it was intimate – the cabin-like room, the hundreds of simple courtesies extended by its citizens both out in the streets and within the Family Hotel, the effortless efficiency of everything that promoted the illusion you were in a city a tenth of its actual size.

It was only at night, with the crowds and the lights and unremitting energy, that the illusion evaporated, and you knew you were somewhere that was like nothing else on earth.

A week later I took a seat in carriage 15 of the Shinkasen Nozomi Super Express bullet train bound for Hiroshima. The trip was scheduled to take just on four hours.

In early September of 1945, Burchett estimated the same journey would take him between 20 and 24 hours.

*

BURCHETT was not unused to rough conditions.

During the Depression he “took to the road” with a swag in search of work. He found himself near Mildura, where he lived for six months “under an outsize gum tree at Bruce’s Bend, a big curve in the Murray River”.

He wrote: “I lived by catching fish, exchanging the surplus from my own consumer needs for flour and salt from a nearby shop, eating grilled Murray cod and catfish and damper…”

Burchett reported that the train he boarded that morning in Tokyo at 6am was carrying members of the Japanese Imperial Army, many having just been demobilized. He shared cigarettes with them and they reciprocated with pieces of dried fish and sake. The seated officers in the compartment had swords on their belts.

One of his fellow passengers was an American priest. The priest’s job was to instruct American troops on how to behave in Japan at this delicate time of surrender so as to avoid offending the locals.

The priest warned Burchett “that the situation in our compartment was very tense and that a false move might cost our lives. The officers were furious and humiliated at their defeat. Above all, I must not smile as this would be taken as gloating over what was happening aboard the Missouri.

“Watching those glowering officers toying with the hilts of their swords and the long samurai daggers that many of them wore, I felt no inclination to smile, especially since the train was in complete darkness when we passed through what seemed like endless tunnels.”

What exactly was going through Burchett’s mind on that interminable journey? His own personal safety? How he could ultimately file his story out of Hiroshima, if at all? The atom bomb itself?

Murray Sayle presented me with a theory: “At the time the simple fact of going there was the big scoop for…Burchett of the Daily Express and showed courage and initiative - he just bought a ticket, got on the train and went.

“Sort of thing a later generation of war reporters did all the time and not nearly as risky as his later exploits in Korea and SE Asia. WW2 was officially over, you will recall and Burchett had a US Navy accreditation which kept him outside the purview of the US Army censors.

“Tokyo was in fact far worse damaged, with at least three times the civilian casualities. Look at photos of the time. The atom bomb was the latest wonder of military science, so Wilf just followed a normal reporter's nose for news.”

Burchett arrive in Hiroshima at 2am on September 3. He was held in a “flimsy shelter” by two black-uniformed guards who were unsure of the foreigner’s motives. He explained he was a shimbun kisha, or journalist, and even presented his Hermes portable typewriter as proof. He was only released after they read a letter he carried with him to Domei’s Hiroshima correspondent, Mr Nakamura, who himself greeted Burchett shortly after.

Together they followed a tramline “towards buildings a mile or two distant”.

“There was devastation and desolation and nothing else,” Burchett wrote. “Lead grey clouds hung low over the city, vapors drifted up from fissures in the ground, and there was an acrid sulfurous smell.”

He would soon encounter the bomb survivors suffering from an illness that nobody had yet put a name to. He would write in his momentous report that “thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague”.

Somewhere, in that devastated city, was a 17-year-old boy recovering from injuries to the left side of his body.

*

THE distance from Tokyo to Hiroshima is roughly the equivalent of Brisbane to Sydney. That’s where the similarity ends.

The train line follows the southern and south-western heel of Honshu island. Once through the vast conurbation of Tokyo itself towards Yokohama, the land was flat and heavily utilized. Around Nagoya fields and rice paddies and vegetable gardens crept to the edge of the line.

At 300km/h, the view through the wide window of carriage 15 was by necessity cursory and piecemeal. Inside the carriage, the passengers were like any in the world on this Friday – businessmen returning home from Tokyo, students visiting parents and friends for the weekend.

The cabin was thick with cigarette smoke.

It’s hard to know if Burchett’s consideration, at this point in his journey, leant itself to the fields and villages he was passing through, the men in straw hats working the paddies, the pencil-thin smoke from small fires at the edge of the fields. The view, quite possibly, had altered very little since his flight to Hiroshima.

On the train I re-read John Hersey’s classic account of the bomb and its aftermath, Hiroshima, and Hiroshima Notes by the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe.

“As I arrive in Hiroshima in the summer of 1963,” Oe wrote, “day has just dawned. No local citizens have appeared on the streets yet; only travelers here and there near the railroad station. On this same morning in the summer of 1945, many travelers had probably just come to Hiroshima. People who had departed from Hiroshima eighteen years ago today or tomorrow would survive; but those who had not left Hiroshima by the day after tomorrow in August 1945 would experience the most merciless human doom of the twentieth century.”

This was exactly how the first-time visitor thought of the city before arrival – calculating dates and times, trying to make sense of the logistics of fate and circumstance, because the actual concrete reality of the detonation of the bomb was so hard to comprehend.

The train sped on quietly. Tongues of heavily-wooded forest nosed the edge of the rail line, and beyond Kyoto and Okayama the landscape began to change. Here the hills were suddenly rugged and dramatic, one after another in tight folds. So began the “endless” tunnels that Burchett described.

I counted 19 tunnels before the train emerged into the low dish that was Hiroshima city. Even in the bullet train, some of them took up to two minutes to traverse.

As the American priest had left Burchett’s train at Kyoto, the reporter remained the only Westerner on board and, coupled with the sequence of tunnels, it was understandable he described his predicament as “bleaker than ever”.

Those tunnels were also, in some way, a hellish passage that delivered him to a hellish place. He could not have imagined the impact of an atomic bomb on a city. Nobody in history had ever seen it. It was beyond human imagination.

It was early afternoon by the time I stepped off the bullet train and into Hiroshima’s modern train station. I took a ten-minute taxi ride to my hotel, the Hiroshima Green in the centre of town, and I could have been in any moderate-sized city of 1.1 million people in the world.

The physical and mental constraints of a city as dense as Tokyo were gone. Hiroshima had wide boulevards lined with trees, a pretty network of rivers and bridges, and a central or downtown focus around which everything hinged.

What it had, though, that no other city can lay claim to, was the A-Bomb Dome, sitting there by the river across from the Peace Memorial Park. It was implacable and haunting and so deeply embedded in the consciousness that it would take a long time of sitting beside it, staring at it and photographing it before it even took form as the ruins of an actual building.

I checked into the Hiroshima Green and immediately made my way back to the Dome, drawn to it, as millions of other visitors have been over the past 60 years. I sat on a wall near the back of the Dome and looked at it for an hour.

Returning to the hotel I sought out the hypo-centre of the bomb, not far from the Dome. It was only a few streets away, marked by a small plaque. Behind the plaque was a multi-storey car park, and next to it, the Hiroshima Green Hotel.

*

BURCHETT must have been exhausted by the time he followed those buckled tram lines into the heart of a devastated Hiroshima.

What he saw around him he described flatly and with little embellishment. Not only was it Burchett’s writing style, but he must have had no alternative faced with incomprehension at the immensity of what he witnessed with his own eyes.

He sketched simply, piece by piece. He didn’t need to do anything else. Everything he saw that day was new.

As he recalled in his memoir: “From the third floor of the Fukuoka department store, as I looked in every direction, there was nothing to be seen but flat acres of ground, a few young trees, and some factory chimneys. Among the few gutted buildings still standing near the former department store was a church which, closer inspection revealed, had jumped into the air to return, practically intact, but crazily athwart its foundations.

“Low-level concrete bridges had also jumped off their piles, some spans landing back again, others dropping into the river…There were no remnants of broken walls, no large chunks of rubble or blocks of stone and concrete, no craters, as one usually finds in a bombed city. It was destruction by pulverization followed by fire.

“The reason that some buildings were still standing in the centre, according to police, was that they were in the epicenter of the explosion, directly under the bomb as it parachuted down and thus in a relative safety zone as the explosive force expanded outward from the epicenter.”

Even at this point, Burchett had not reached the epicenter of his own world scoop, the horrifying heart of the story and the reason his work had such a global impact.

He found it soon enough, visiting the Communications Hospital on the outskirts of the city. There, a month after the bomb, he saw people “in various stages of physical disintegration”.

“In ward after ward it was the same,” Burchett recalled. “Patients were terribly emaciated and gave off a nauseating odour which almost halted me at the first door. Some had purplish burns on the face and body; others had bunched, blue-black, blistery marks on the neck.”

Doctors pleaded with Burchett to arranged scientists familiar with this “sickness” to come to the city and help.

“I could only explain that as a journalist I would faithfully report what I had seen, and that although not American, but attached to the Allied forces, I would do my best to get scientists who ‘knew’ to be sent to Hiroshima as soon as possible.”

He wasted no time with his report. He returned to the city centre, sat on a concrete block with his Hermes typewriter before him, and wrote his story.

How his report made it out of Hiroshima, to Tokyo, and then the wider world – to be published on September 6, 1945, in the Daily Express, was in itself a dramatic story.

It was his Hiroshima colleague, Mr Nakamura, who sent every word via a hand-operated Morse code set to the Domei office in Tokyo. General MacArthur had placed Tokyo “out of bounds”, but lifted the restrictions again shortly after.

As Sayle reported in his piece “Did the Bomb End the War?”, published in the New Yorker in 1995, MacArthur reimposed censorship on the Japanese press on September 18. The press code banned anything that might “directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility”, or convey “false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers”.

Burchett’s report had slipped through the net. There would be nothing out of Hiroshima for a long time afterwards.

On his return to Tokyo, he attended a press conference at the Imperial Hotel where a military scientist explained there was no possible way the reported sickness of Hiroshima survivors was related to atomic radiation.

Burchett asked the officer if he had been to Hiroshima. It was Burchett’s trump card – this need to see things first hand. The officer had not. After a brief exchange Burchett was told he had “fallen victim to Japanese propaganda”.

Burchett was later informed that MacArthur was expelling him from the country for having breached the bounds of ‘his’ military occupation.

The order was withdrawn. Burchett returned to London.

Australian troops were ordered into Hiroshima post-bomb. Some of them taught the locals English.

A year later American writer John Hersey visited Hiroshima and returned with a story of Hiroshima and survivors and radiation sickness. It was published in full in the New Yorker, and reverberated around the world.

It’s contents, too, were largely denied by officials.

*

DESPITE Hiroshima city’s physical appeal, its young population, its vigor, there is a weight that hovers around it. After a week there I began to feel that weight, wandering repeatedly through the Peace Park, visiting and revisiting the Peace Museum, circling but never really leaving the gravitational pull of the A-Bomb Dome.

Part of the experience, too, was visceral. To visit Hiroshima close to August, to feel the pressing and relentless humidity and see those clear, pale blue skies was to connect, however remotely, to that morning of August 6. The world can change, but weather and quality of light can put you outside of time.

This was how hot it must have felt for them too, the civilians of Hiroshima, prior to 8.15am that day. This was how the light must have looked as schoolchildren left home for the day and men and women went to work in those packed trolley cars.

There are, too, opposing forces at work in Hiroshima. It has become, naturally, a symbol of tragedy, of the potential evil forces of technology, of the depths of humanity. At the same time, it carries the baggage of the future, of peace and a nuclear-free world.

This is what happened to us, the city says. Don’t let it happen again, ever.

This year, on the 60th anniversary of Little Boy, as the bomb was dubbed, dropping out of the hatch of the Enola Gay, tens of thousands of Japanese will make the pilgrimage to Hiroshima. Doves will be released. Lanterns will be floated down the city’s many rivers. Folded paper cranes in their millions, made by children all over the world, will festoon Peace Park.

On my last day in Hiroshima I returned again and again to the A-Bomb Dome. I photographer it at dawn, mid-morning, midday, throughout the afternoon and at dusk. I was hoping, I guess, that the camera might understand what I was looking at, rather than trying any longer myself.

As I prepared to make for Tokyo and home, the New Yorker was reporting on how Americans were bringing home their dead from Iraq.

On that last night the air conditioning in my room in the Hiroshima Green Hotel was chugging inconsistently, and I sweltered until morning. When I woke, the pillow was drenched, and inexplicably covered in the brown and black tidemarks of my sweat.

I spent my last hour in the city trying repeatedly to wash the ugly stains from the pillowslip in the bathroom sink, but they wouldn’t disappear.

*

WILFRED Burchett died in 1983.

To this day his career, writing and actions still cause fierce debate and argument, particularly his reporting from Vietnam in the 1960s.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in him and his work. To mark the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, Melbourne University Press will publish the full, previously unseen version of Burchett’s memoir, At the Barricades.

Publisher and editor Nick Shimmin worked with Burchett’s son, Sydney artist George Burchett, on the huge manuscript.

Shimmin’s introduction to the book reads in part: “Wilfred Burchett was the greatest journalist Australia has ever produced, and one of the best foreign correspondents the world has ever seen. Merely to make such a claim will arouse the ire of those who have sustained decades-long, vitriolic attacks on him and his legacy, but this volume goes some considerable way to justify the claim and refute the calumny which has been piled upon Burchett over the last 50 years.

“The pages that follow were written by Wilfred around 1980, shortly before he died. Less than half of what he wrote in this memoir was published in 1982 as At the Barricades, but the publishers on that occasion saw fit to remove much of what was most interesting in the text.

“The idea of publishing the book arose two years ago. I had met Wilfred’s son, George, 15 years ago when I joined him working for Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).

“Years of discussions about the state of the world became increasingly dismayed as we observed the behaviour of governments after 9/11, until on one occasion George mentioned that much of what was happening now reminded him a great deal of what his father had described, particularly during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And the seed was sown.

“Considering the sad role played by the media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the blatant lies and deceptions of the “coalition of the willing” and its spin doctors, it is a good time to revisit a previous generation of “dissident” journalists who challenged the official line and, in Wilfred’s case, paid a heavy price.

“Many of those who vilified him in the later part of his career are still writing, still locked into the ideological blinkers of the Cold War. For them, despite the evidence of this book and so much more, Burchett will always be a name which provokes irrational hatred. But anyone with a more open mind, tolerant sympathies and a desire for the truth will read this book with fascination and admiration.”

Phillip Knightley recalled the first time he met Burchett: “In the early 1970s I was working in London on a book about war correspondents (eventually published as "The First Casualty"). I had reached the Pacific theatre in World War 2 and had a long list of war correspondents I would need to interview. Wilfred Burchett was at the top of the list.

“But how to find him? Some said he was living in Paris; others said Sofia- or Moscow or Beijing. After all he covered many countries. Then I went one night to a party in Battersea and there he was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, drink in hand, holding forth on the state of the world while a group of young admirers sat on the floor entranced.”

Alex Mitchell, former foreign correspondent and State Political Editor for Sydney’s Sun-Herald newspaper, was initially enamored with the legendary Burchett.
”I met him for the last time in 1978 at a bar in Paris to discover what he knew about the 1940 assassination of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International,” Mitchell said. “I have nothing but admiration for his journalistic skills (when he was practising the craft in its purest sense as he did when covering Hiroshima) and for his tenacity to "get the story" and "be on the spot" where it was happening.

“Many of his books and writings remain extraordinarily valuable for historical research, but much of his work was unadultered propagandising for the Stalinist bureaucracies of Moscow and Peking.

“I believe you can admire the man but remain hostile to his political beliefs. My chief contempt is for today's press parasites who sit in judgment on Burchett. None of them have been anywhere or done anything. They are intellectual midgets by comparison.”

Burchett’s son, George, told me his father never spoke of the Hiroshima experience at home.

“Not because he avoided the subject, but because conversation around the table was usually about current events,” he said. “When he told stories from the past, they were usually stories about him growing up in rural Australia or entertaining anecdotes from the past. Wilfred was great fun to be with, and as he was away a lot, there was usually a lot of catching up to do before he “hit the road again”.

“Hiroshima was, without doubt, the defining moment in Burchett’s journalistic career. For Wilfred, Hiroshima marked several fundamental shifts. It was the end of the “good war” – World War II – and a preview of what WW III would be like. That he ‘de-embedded’ himself from the press pack to follow his instincts and make his way to Hiroshima is a measure of his impeccable professional instincts. That he grasped the significance of the event and wrote the prophetic lines “I write this as a warning to the word” is a measure of his ability to grasp the significance of events, not merely report them. That, despite carrying fragments of Japanese shrapnel in his leg for the rest of his life, he wrote with compassion about the victims of the bomb, is a measure of his humanity.

“Is Wilfred Burchett relevant today? You bet! Just think of Iraq, all the lies that got us there and the role of a complacent press in peddling the official line.”

*

THE old Japanese man in the floppy-brimmed hat rose slowly from his seat in the tram as it approached his stop near the hospital that day in Hiroshima.

“Very good to meet you,” he said, and he shook my hand.

I held that old hand perhaps longer than courtesy expects. He smiled and clutched his carry bag and stepped onto the platform.

As the doors to the trolley car closed I watched him take a few steps and turn to face the window of my carriage. I looked at his right hand folded over the small bag. I had shaken that hand. I had shaken the hand of an atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima. I thought, perhaps romantically, that I had touched history.

I looked at him through the glass window and it made me think of reporting and history and even life. Only on rare occasions do we see something not through a pane of glass. Mount Fuji through the plane window. The Japanese countryside through the bullet train window. Hiroshima through the tram window.

How do we truly see? How do we presuppose to see anything as it really is, without the filter of the glass – not just landscapes and city vistas, but how people are thinking? How they really are?

The tram started to move off. Just before he disappeared from view, the old man of the atomic bomb raised his left arm, opened his palm and held it there.

It was a kind of salute, from one stranger to another. A gesture which suggested that, in the end, we are all just human beings together.

ends

LATHAM AS LITERARY DIARIST

2005-09-23T11:44:00.000+10:00

PUBLISHED in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, Wednesday, September 21, 2005:

THE LATHAM DIARIES: A Book Review.
Matthew Condon

SO how does The Latham Diaries stack up as literature?

Has a writer and diarist the calibre of Samuel Pepys or Anne Frank avoided the radar of the international publishing world in the form of Mark Latham, and suddenly come into bloom?

The published diary is a perilous form. You either have an astonishing story to tell (Frank), or you possess a genius to portray yourself and your age with scrupulous detail and honesty (Pepys).

If those two prerequisites are absent, you must at least be very, very famous.

Firstly, the story Latham has to tell is not particularly astonishing. The tale of a former city council honcho from western Sydney and his struggle to overthrow the leader of the day, and failing, is about as enticing as quick-drying cement. That he never even manages to secure the ultimate crown would be considered, by any reasonable publisher or editor, a plot flaw.

Secondly, Latham’s prose style is so completely devoid of colour, and details of place, and psychological observations beyond the orbit of his own cranium, that he may have invented a new genre. It is breathtaking to read a diary that claims, in its introduction, to be a “fly-on-the-wall” record, when its only anchor to time and place is a sequence of calendar dates. No fly, just blank wall.

Latham states, in his Author’s Note, that the diaries “were not originally written for publication”. There is a whiff of mischief in this declaration.

The diaries open with young Latham’s elevation to Federal politics via the Sydney seat of Werriwa. Latham claims the idea of keeping an occasional diary came to him by observing another diarist, Senator Stephen Loosley.

The years 1994 to 1997 are covered in 68 pages. The year 2004 occupies 145 pages. It can be argued that Latham’s attachment to his diary grew the more historically significant he thought himself to be. It is curious, though, that the busier he became in Australian political life, the more time he had to devote to his diaries.

More importantly, around the year 2000, Latham’s prose style undergoes a subtle shift. The years prior to this are largely quick jottings in present tense. Post-2000, however, the prose leans heavily towards past tense. This shift in the diary’s tenses is a coda to some sort of post-event hindsight, a signpost to some form of revisionism rather than the immediate present-tense snapshots of earlier years.

This stylistic fissure suggests that Latham either became more ponderous and reflective in the way he approached his diaries, or he refashioned his journal at a later time. The shift in tenses suggests the latter.

The suspicion that Latham fleshed out his diaries in retirement is supported by the text’s sudden turnaround of authorial voice. In the lean, early years, Latham’s voice is naïve and seemingly reactionary to the day’s events.

In the final years, this changes profoundly. Somewhere the text crosses an invisible line, and Latham begins addressing not himself – as a diary by definition should – but some sort of nebulous reader.

He says, for example, of ABC journalist Liz Jackson. “You know the type: upper-class background, thinks she’s an expert on poverty…” But who is the ‘you’ he’s addressing?

In another example, he talks of the “filthy” rumours about him and writes: “Should I tell Janine (his wife), or just ignore it?” To whom is he asking this question? An omniscient reader of this diaries originally written not for publication?

The diaries, too, are striking for their sheer volume of childish and adolescent references to defecation and other bodily functions. Everything is shit and crap to Latham, and he even uses an unsourced quote from Mao Zedung about farts. Not even this throws colour at his lifeless prose.

There is too, repeated evidence of Latham’s immature psychological make-up. He is constantly querying why people aren’t coming to his defence, or are leaving him “stranded”, and questioning his “survival”. “Somebody save me…” he writes tellingly.

One of the book’s primary themes, too, is something that echoes from 1950s Australia. He constantly badgers on about working class people up against the snobs, the elites, the well-heeled from the “upper” class. This simplistic attitude informs much of Latham’s behaviour.

Curiously, the diaries feature many quotes from or allusions to great and menacing figures in history, both factual and fictional. He quotes Ulysses S. Grant (in relation to Kim Beazley’s interest in the American Civil War): “The best man for the job does not go after the job. He waits to be called.”

But could he possibly mean the actual Grant quote, which reads: “"It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may expect the most efficient service." That Latham feels at liberty to lazily paraphrase a former US President and historical heavyweight says something about his self-image.

At one point, too, Latham is unhappy with a press photograph of himself which he claims makes him look like Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the Marlon Brando figure in the film Apocalypse Now. He also asks, at one point, if he is a “prophet”.

As a read, the only thing giving Latham’s diaries any real interest are their timely associations with current recognisable names in the Australian political and media landscape. It is, then, the perfect book for our times – titillating, gossipy, bitter, hollow and totally of the moment.

It is not difficult to imagine tattered copies of The Latham Diaries filling shelves in second-hand bookshops in five years’ time, when the bulk of those names in the book’s index have been forgotten.

It is similarly likely that in a decade from now, someone will pull a copy of this book out of a discount bin and ask – who was Mark Latham?

ends

MULLIGAN: The Prologue

2005-09-23T10:55:00.000+10:00

(First chapter of a new non-fiction work based on a year in the life of three golf hacks.)

The Tears of Maroochy

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I thought we would play golf together even when we were old men, until that early Spring at Coolum when it all fell apart.

At the start of that final round at the resplendent Hyatt Regency course, fashioned by that terrible poet but wonderful golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Junior, we were, unwittingly, three Gatsby’s standing at the first tee. We couldn’t know that by the 18th hole, our regular golfing days as a trio of hackers were over. That all the years of it - the pleasures, agonies and intimacies – would be snatched away from us like a sudden and inexplicable death from, say, the Grippe.

We did not know, as Nick Carraway had known of Gatsby, that “it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”[1]

By the time Farquarson had pulled up his mismatched socks, gone through his annoying pre-drive preamble, and invariably shanked his sparkling new K-Mart Slazenger B51 ball [2] off the first tee and into the bushes, he was already being borne ceaselessly into the past.[3]

The same too with The Dude, all six foot three of him, shirt collar turned up, shorts creaseless, and each club in his bag happily wearing its own individual woollen hat, except for that of his Big Bertha (or Dog, as he called it) which, on that morning, he unleashed on that opening fairway with his usual gusto. This was the way of The Dude. He murdered language by simply exhausting it with the pace of his speech. He murdered alcohol with his unceasing velocity. He murdered car tyres, speedboat motors, go-kart tracks. The Dude was permanent motion, and all of life, including us, hung off the tail of his comet. That early morning at the Hyatt, he cracked his Precept and it launched from the tee as a bullet would spin out of the muzzle of a Glock, and issued his traditional first-hole mantra, made famous at the US Masters by Freddy Couples. “Oh yeahhhhh, baby,” said The Dude, lovingly caressing the words.

I, too, had no inkling that this was the end of something. I took the tattered grip of my three iron (having been frightened off the drivers more than two years earlier, and still unable to return to them, as a jilted lover may never be able to go back to the restaurants, bars and park benches – the plain geography – of his shattered romance), and teed off happily.

Nothing seemed amiss. Farquarson was his jaunty, diminutive self, pulling his cart and raggedy tartan golf bag up the manicured first fairway. He was as he always was, Farquarson, at the beginning of a round. He fizzed like a child-shaken soft drink bottle with the notion that this would be his day, the day of a personal best, and even the shank could not dampen his ebullient spirit. I liked that about Farqhuarson; with each round, he was a born-again golfer, fresh from the egg.

The Dude was The Dude, striding ahead to his beautifully positioned Precept, as if Farquarson and me did not exist. That we were there, simply, to witness his golfing prowess, and to verify remarkable shot play that would become a personal narrative, later. (“Tell him, Farquarson. You saw that second to the green on the par five, didn’t you? Tell him.”) We were The Dude’s Boswells.

But this day at Coolum, on the course which its father Mr Jones described as “not designed to punish champions, just to find out who they are”, it may have served us well to brush up on the history of the imposing Mount Coolum, at the base of which nestled Mr Jones’ cosy fairways and greens.

It would watch over us, intermittently, throughout the entire round, peering over stands of paperbark trees, or peeking at us around eucalypt forests, its bald, pitted, volcanic hulk, or parts of it thereof, always in sight.

Here in the Maroochy Shire, Maroochy, it turned out, was in Aboriginal legend a beautiful young woman who was stolen from her fiancé Coolum by one Ninderry. Coolum showed great courage and rescued his bride to be, but was pursued by Ninderry who threw a boomerang and decapitated his rival.

The head rolled into the sea, and became Mudjimba Island. The torso is represented by Mount Coolum. Poor Maroochy retreated inland and cried so much her tears became the Maroochy River.

So there was blood in the soil, and death, and great sorrow, beneath Mr Jones’ architecture. There was nothing that might provide us refuge. Not even Mr Jones’ spectacularly puerile epic ballads. (My particular favourite is a stanza from his 146-line poem Thanksgiving, which goes: “Our mother sang us so deep / We loved each other to sleep / U la u la la / Oh oh oh ah ahaaa.”)

On that first fairway, the entire round was set from our tee shots, just as in life we contain our patterns of DNA. The Dude opened beautifully, his game yet to be infected with yips, thoughts of greatness, and the notion that he could hit the longest drive in recorded history. This would come later. If the Coolum course was designed to derail anybody, it was The Dude, trying as Mr Jones attested to tickle the champion out of him. The Champion in The Dude was always almost there, like the tingling you feel before a sneeze.

Farqhuarson was already tail-up in an undergrowth of elephant ears, on his way to his traditional self-combustion on or around the 11th hole. He had not had time, thus far, to initiate his innumerable mulligans[4], the mulligans we never saw or would see. We always gave him at least two, but knew there were many of what we liked to call Farqhuarson’s “mulligan’s that dare not speak their name”. Namely, the invisible strokes that he masterfully embedded in his round. He was a mulligan magician.

I was rusty, but agreeably so, and always on the catch-up without the length of the woods of which I had grown fearful. (For a while, during my divorce from the The Woods, it was The Dude’s running joke that I could complete any round of hours with just a three iron and a putter. He was right, of course, but you never let The Dude know he was right. If you let The Dude know he was right, it released something within him, a flood of self-satisfaction. Funnily, it had a sound to me – the popping of a boy’s swollen finger from a dyke.)

But on that day, a second shot with my beloved three-iron came off the blade with that lovely, deep reverberation that happens so rarely when the club kisses the ball’s sweet spot, and flew towards the green.

“Shottttttt, Matty,” said The Dude, which was as good as a handshake from the Pope, and The Dude proceeded to lob his ball on the green with grace and ease.

“Shotttttt, Dude.”

Farqhuarson continued to forage like a bush turkey. “Fark, fark, fark,” said he, scratching amongst those lush green ears.

It was as it had always been. But Maroochy was weeping, and on that last day we simply did not hear her.

*

[1] Firstly, a footnote on the footnotes. They are the “mulligans” of literature, the opportunity for a free swing, a second chance, so they shall be employed forthwith. Secondly, having read The Great Gatsby more than two dozen times, it has only occurred to me now that by citing those rolling “dark fields of the republic”, Carraway may have been referring here to a golf course.
[2] It is perennially exciting – well, sort of - to witness what Farqhuarson pulls out of his ball bag. He is, by definition, a “scrounger”, a by-product of his substantial Scottish genes. He will happily delay play to wade into an artificial lake in search of a ball. Thus, his ball bag is a lucky dip of other hackers’ discards complete with company logos and personal flourishes. He once pulled out a 1940s Dunlop Federal, studied it with the care of a jeweller, breathed good luck on it, and teed away.
[3] Interestingly, in The Great Gatsby, Carraway’s love interest, Jordan Baker, is a professional golfer. In one scene in the film starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, Jordan Baker, played by the wonderful Lois Chiles, dislodges a ball half-buried in a sand trap. In the novel, she has a reputation for cheating: “At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken.” Jordan Baker, although sartorially more elegant, bears many similarities with Farqhuarson, as we shall soon see.
[4] Our poet, Jones Jr, was once quoted in an interview as saying: ``Both Bush (George W.) and his father like to play a fast round. Clinton likes his mulligans.'' It makes sense that Clinton would like “his mulligans”., just as he has liked cigars and women, for he is a man who loves life, and as the three of us often said – there’s life, and then there’s golf. I have always found it impossible to liken Clinton with Farqhuarson, another mulligan lover. The only genuinely amusing and self-admitted presidential hacker has been Gerald Ford, who once said: “I would like to deny all allegations by Bob Hope that during my last game of golf, I hit an eagle, a birdie, an elk and a moose.” Not side-splitting, but it beats the poetry of Robert Trent Jones Jr for brevity and pith.