It had all begun a very long time ago

Extract From the Upcoming book Hunting The Famous

Sydney cameramen on the job at the airport

It had all begun a very long time ago.

Later, as a general news reporter, I wrote about pyromaniac kids who set alight forests, threatening lives and homes. The flames of the bushfires, the young people’s disgrace, the community's hatred and the broader public’s condemnation, I reported all these things dutifully: straight up and down.

But I always wondered about the kids, who of course weren’t about to come forward to defend their actions or reveal their motivations.

The greatest moments of my childhood had all involved conflagration, burning fields, fire jumping from palm tree to palm tree down steep valleys, endangered houses. The beatings were worth the sight of those leaping flames.

The Great Books, having in later years supplemented Gone With The Wind, lined the shelf of my tiny bedroom, looming over my narrow bed with the weight of the ages, of Homer’s rosy fingered dawns.

Outside the demonic rustling of the gum trees was fundamentally disturbing.  I decided early on I wanted to write. Head buried constantly in books, anything to escape the torture of the present, it came to me as the only thing I could ever be, a seeker after knowledge, struggling to understand the world: to adopt the sacred role of the observer.

My earliest attempts to put pen to paper involved strings of apocalyptic images. I wrote lengthy poems about lines of condemned souls snaking down mythical steps and through mystical buildings, waiting to be judged by a merciless God. The condemned just kept on coming, in their hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses.

I wrote about them all the time. Elsewhere, Beatlemania was sweeping the world. Up there where my family lived on that then fairly remote hill surrounded by the rustling of the giant gums and the writhing white of their limbs, we were preparing for the second coming, for Christ to rescue us from the wickedness the Beatles represented.

There were always ideas, sentences forming in my head. That was the way I grew up, cowering in this remote, unsafe place, waiting for the tides of licentiousness that were sweeping the world to get to us, to threaten our goodness.

I withdrew further and further behind multiple screens, my face constantly buried in a book. As a child I had swallowed every single Famous Five and Secret Seven book, every last one of them on the local library shelf. I had read and reread Swallows and Amazons as if it was the Bible, happy kids playing on the edge of a lake far away, happy kids with decent families. They weren't being beaten black and blue, they weren't sitting on park benches, having swallowed so many pills they were waiting to die.

As the awkwardness of adolescence progressed, so did my strangeness. If I wanted to be a writer, knowing shorthand and typing were pre-requisites. There was a public speaking competition at the school; and the winners from the school would then go on to the regions, and then the state. The theme was hobbies.

Keen to succeed, I decided to be more ambitious than just repeating a previously successful effort on collecting stamps and do something closer to my heart. I decided to do a speech on learning shorthand and typing, and how while it could be a hobby these skills would also be incredibly useful in later life.

Prior to the computer generation, it was virtually unheard of in Australia for a man to be able to type. But to me it was all part of becoming the person I wanted to be. I stood up in front of the class and delivered the much prepared speech. It went down like a lead balloon. There was a baffled, uncomprehending look on the audience's face, my sneering peers. Even the teachers were unappreciative, marking me poorly.

My advocacy for the acquisition of shorthand and typing skills marked me even more firmly as truly weird; and I paid the price in the school yard once again. I stayed very quiet for months afterwards, playing games to see how many days I could go without speaking a single word. Silence became my only true friend.

Then I would be beaten for refusing to speak, and the cycle of pain would start up once again. I didn't want to say anything at all. My parents would grow more frantic as the days passed and I remained wordless: not a good morning, not a good night, no answer to how was your day at school, no apology, nothing.

They had beaten me into silence, and now they didn't know what to do; as they beat me again, demanding that I speak. I didn't speak, I swallowed the tears and retreated still further into a cathedral of my own making, full of echoes and shadows and unsuspected doings; but at least a place that was safe, a place they couldn't get to, despite all their battering.

The first stir, if you could call it that, I created with anything I wrote was when we were asked to do a short story for English in High School. I wrote about a young man who changed out of his school uniform after school on Fridays and didn’t come back until Mondays, being dropped back home by older men in cars after a weekend of strange and wild parties where the protagonist was the youngest person there.

It may or may not have been a flowering of early talent, but the Deputy Principal promptly called me into his office; wanted to know if there was anything I would like to talk about, No, I told him. The Deputy sternly stated that the story was very disturbing indeed and if I ever wrote anything like it again I would be caned.

At 14 I was trying to systematically read all the Great Books. There was Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the Greeks, Aristophanes, all the greats. I read everything, thought it was important to know all there was to know.

After considerable disturbances to other people after my father put a private detective on to me, I walked off down the road at the first legal age possible. I left behind volumes of juvenilia in boxes in the basement of my father’s double story work shed. They were thrown out with the rubbish.

Sydney’s red light district is known as King’s Cross. Having grown up in an apocalyptic religion, it really did feel as if we were living at the end of days. Everything was coming to a close. With a certain theatricality, I thought I was literally sacrificing myself on the Cross.

The bar at the centre of the group of miscreants and wild young men I hung around with was called The Bottoms Up Bar.

Anyone who entered here had already travelled far. They had already left the normal world, bourgeois society, decent suburban lives and the meat and potatoes working class.

It was the era of the grand queen, before clones and masculinity, t-shirts and muscles and moustaches, came into fashion. This was a time when anyone who declared themselves gay, or undecided, had already shrieked in the face of normal convention, had defied all community standards, had entered into bestiality, abnormality, eternal corruption, eternal damnation.

At times their own self-loathing decorated everything they did. “Not well, dear,” was a standard greeting as they flapped their wrists and died inside.

And I drank and I drank, sitting in the corner and watching the passing parade, the little rag tag group of rent boys. Entirely unprofessional, I was particularly successful in terms of cars and apartments. Juliana the bar manager and bar mistress kept a stern eye on all of us. Her tolerance was the only reason we were allowed into this citadel of all that was different, almost literally the only gay bar in town. We were all under age. We were bait.

The Rex Hotel is no longer there. In its place are modern apartments and offices; but still next to it lies the El Alemain fountain. The park has been paved and planted with palms. There are no longer shadowy corners suggesting criminal intent, lurking and mischief.

In my dreams slime coated the bar’s walls and filtered into my writing, into my soul. Tendrils of an evil, alien lichen hung down from the ceiling. The stained walls reeked of some sort of dysfunctional evil, the bi-product of the corruption leaking from the pores of the drinkers.

It was a cruel and negligent evil, made up of the gloating stares of ancient queens, of old hands on young flesh, of stale sheets and stale flesh, and most of all, of lost hope.

In later years in various therapeutic settings I heard other men speak of how much they had suffered in that bar as young teenagers, how truly malignant they regarded it as being, how much they were used, how badly they were abused, how selling their young bodies had destroyed their hearts.

They spoke of the years it had taken them to recover, of the depths they had sunk to, of the drunkenness that had been their only salvation.

But for me it was none of that. I sat there speeding on the cheap high grade amphetamines readily available under the counter from a pharmacist just down the road, drinking the many beers proffered. And laughed as the old gay men queued to buy ever more drinks.

It was my philosophy, if you can drink me under the table I’m yours. As long as the money's right and there’s a bottle of Scotch in the hotel room. The drinks were just foreplay. You had to buy an awful lot of alcohol to counteract the pharmaceutical grade amphetamine of the day.

I drank enough for the bar to slowly make sense, the lowering walls, the cackled laughter, the diseased tendrils that spread everywhere. As the night turned into blackout and I sank into the oblivion I so desperately sought, then the tendrils turned into human hands pleading for attention, longing for love. I worshipped at the knees of corrupt saints, and knew darkness. Later the bar became the centre of a science fiction novel; the hundreds of pages stuck all over the walls of a particular house as I struggled to formulate the meandering plot.

There are always two sides to every story; and this was equally true of mine.

While I often drank heavily during long nights when I forgot to sleep; there was a second person who rented a cheap room and studied earnestly by correspondence in an attempt to finish high school.

I was furiously completing essay assignments, reading all the course material, liaising with invisible teachers. But there was no classroom. There were no classmates. There was much more work involved than if I had just been a normal student, another teenager at home. Instead I was on my own, in a tiny room the private hotel’s manager rented cheaply because it was next to the incinerator.

Precocious enough, at 16, I was the youngest member of the Australian Society of Authors and would attend their meetings with great eagerness.

The old Sydney writer Dal Stivens, an unusual looking man who had written about some of the same parts of the city I wanted to write about, took a liking to me. Sometimes I would see him standing alone in the same parts of Sydney I was fascinated by and which he had described in some of his books. We would stand and talk and watch the scene together.

At 16 I also got a job as a copyboy at the Daily Telegraph, which was then under a different ownership and located in Park Street in the centre of the city’s business district.

In those days the stories from abroad spewed constantly from the teletype machines. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace while listening to their clatter through the long nights.

You had to be on good terms with the cleaning staff, because if they didn’t like you and you fell asleep, they would leave you there to be found by the day staff. And you would end up getting the sack for sleeping on the job.

Copy boys, as was made pretty clear, were at the bottom of the pecking order.

David McNicholl, a big walrus of a man, was then the Daily Telegraph’s Deputy Editor.

I was thoroughly frightened of him. Each evening I had to take the tear offs of the overseas stories into him in batches. Later, in those twists of incident in Sydney, his son, also called David McNicholl but better known as DD, would become a colleague on the country's national newspaper The Australian.

The first time I encountered DD Junior was after a plane, which had been on a flight to Norfolk Island, crash landed in Sydney’s Botany Bay.

While there were no casualties, the incident was unusual enough to attract the attention of the city’s media.

The fact that The Australian, then the opposition, had a reporter on the flight was not lost on the rest of the media. As the major story of the day, it was a stroke of journalistic good fortune. But then the McNicholls had seen quite a lot of good fortune courtesy of the media, DD Senior being close to Frank Packer, then the Telegraph’s owner and one of Australia’s richest men.

DD Junior, having grown up in a journalistic dynasty, was accustomed to the demands of the media and generously gave the gathered pack all the blow by blow quotes we needed. As he talked, he posed cheerfully, draped in a blanket, in front of the ditched; making for perfect pictures.

I couldn’t believe how almost identical DD was in appearance to the father I had been so terrified of as a copy kid all those years before.