HUNTING THE FAMOUS: BOB HAWKE

Hunting the Famous by William John Stapleton will be available through Amazon and other major digital publishers shortly. This is is an extract.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

W.H. Auden

Former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke Courtesy NNDB Tracking the Entire World

Everyone loved Bob.

Bob Hawke, Australian Prime Minister from 1983 to 1991, enjoyed for a sustained period of time enviable approval ratings – during the 1980s the highest ever for an Australian Prime Minister. He led the Australian Labor Party to four successive election victories and to this day remains the left’s longest serving leader.

“Hawkie”, as he was often known, was the Sydney taxi driver’s politician of choice.

He wasn’t just another working class hero, many of the Australian population genuinely felt that Hawke was one of their own, an ordinary person with their interests at heart. And such a person, after a string of upper class residents, was finally living in the official residence, The Lodge.

There were celebrations across Sydney when Hawkie trumped the opposition with a lightning dash, becoming Prime Minister less than four weeks after overthrowing former Opposition leader Bill Hayden.

The Liberal leader’s attempt to exploit disarray in the Labor Party by calling a snap election backfired and the charismatic former union leader led his party to a landslide victory.

Like many a journalist I somehow thought of the taxi drivers of the city as the voice of the common man.

I wasn’t the first and certainly wouldn’t be the last reporter, lazy or pressed for time, to grab a quote from the taxi driver on the way back from a job. And then include the quote in the story so it sounded like I had just surveyed half the country and discovered the common sense voice of the working man.

Bob was clever in a nation which regarded cleverness with suspicion.

Hawkie had won a prestigious Rhodes’ Scholarship to Oxford University in England as a young man and risen rapidly through the union and political ranks, leapfrogging off his decade long tenure as President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions to become PM within three years of entering Parliament.

But often enough you would never have known Bob had any more neurons than the Average Joe.

Australia is a country where cleverness is confused with pretentiousness and Hawkie wasn’t about to let the voters know he had ever read a book or could see straight through them in a micro-flash.

Instead he adopted the camouflage of the good bloke, an Australian male of working class origins.

It was part act, part truth.

Bob Hawke smoked, drank to excess, loved a party, a brawl, a fine curvy woman, he swore like a trooper and bulldozed his way through any given situation. Like many Australian men.

And he almost always got what he wanted.

Australians loved him. That he was clever was forgiven or forgotten.

The most urbanized country in the world, Australia is essentially a land of suburbs. Hawke was famous for going to the shopping malls of the country’s outer areas and shaking hands with anyone and everyone he met. And if someone wanted to verbally attack him over some real or perceived injustice, as invariably happens when politicians expose themselves to the public in unscripted scenarios, Bob would stand his ground, promise to look into it or swear to their face he would take on board what they were saying.

Hawk’s successor Paul Keating always dismissed Bob Hawke’s “shopping mall” antics as cheap, tawdry populism. Unlike Bob, Keating also made the mistake of ridiculing the media as a bunch of low life grubs. Partly as a consequence, Keating experienced some of the lowest popularity ratings of any Australian Prime Minister on record.

Hawke’s shopping mall circuses were a vital part of how he won elections; a fact Keating never grasped.

Successive Prime Ministers would emulate Hawke. None were ever as successful.

When Bob Hawke committed troops to the first Iraq War, a controversial move in a country which had seen too many of its young men die in distant wars for the benefit of other nations, he slickly purloined what was an electoral risk into an issue of national pride.

To question the country’s commitment to Iraq was to denigrate, as the spin went, some of the world’s finest soldiers.

Having neatly survived the country’s natural anti-war sentiment post-Vietnam - and as common Australian decency would dictate -Bob Hawke went down to the docks on the day the first troops were being sent off to war, ignoring the band of protestors outside the naval yards.

Hawke lingered on the ship for hours, shaking the hands of every soldier he laid eyes on and wishing them all good luck.

After the official proceedings were over, Hawke wandered the battle ship decks, cheerfully posing with the proud families of the soldiers.

I followed the Prime Minister, his circling minders and his ever despairing security around the battle ship.

In that Arcadian world prior to the Twin Towers turning security worldwide on its head, Hawke wasn’t the type of Prime Minister to hide behind a screen of Federal Police and National Security personnel.

Follow in Hawke’s wake as a reporter and virtually all one ever found were fans. And so it proved on the day the country sent the first contingent of soldiers off to Iraq. Nobody had the common touch like Bob.

“Hawkie shook my hand, he touched me here, he kissed me on the cheek, I’m not going to shower for a week,” one of the mothers clutching children gushed.

“He asked after my grandmother, he remembered her from the teachers union, and said he was sorry to hear she had passed away,” another would throw in.

“He wanted to know the names of my children. He posed for a picture with them. When I told him one of the kids was sick, he said he knew an asthma expert, and would get one of his staff to send me the details.”

All of this and more from the devoted constituents left in his wake. Hawke didn’t win four elections in a row without a natural gift for electioneering.

Outside the heavily fortified Australian Navy docks at Woolloomooloo protestors waved placards and chanted anti-war slogans- to little affect.

Journalism dignifies the extremities of any debate, often quoting the opposition view to achieve a semblance of balance, even if that view is only held by a handful of lunatics.

Often enough the holders of extreme or minority views are quoted simply because they add color and tension to a story.

During the days when Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was still controversial rather than the city institution it is today, we would always quote the Reverend Fred Nile for example for his consistent attacks the parade.

In fact Fred Nile’s views, far from being widespread in the community, were representative of the few thousand members of the fundamentalist Christian tradition to which he belonged.

Critics like to dismiss Australia as a country of rednecks and homophobes. But most Australians couldn’t care less who was doing what to whom, as long as it’s not to them. The anti-war protestors weren’t getting a say, however, on the day the soldiers were sent off to Iraq. Despite their spirited efforts they got almost zero media coverage. Hawke had starved them of media oxygen and once again stolen the limelight.

The fact that he was sending soldiers to a dangerous and far off place where Australia had little business being was lost in a wave of engineered nationalism.

That Hawke may have been risking the lives of his country’s own citizens purely to support the American Alliance – at a time when much of the population actively disliked the braggarts across the pond - was lost. Opposition to the war subsided in the polls.

The manipulation of public opinion was just one of Bob Hawke’s many talents.

He had long been renowned as a heavy drinker. His academic successes at Oxford University were complemented by the setting of a world speed record for beer drinking, a feat for which he gained entry into The Guinness Book of Records.

Australians loved their Hawkie even more when he told the nation in the lead-up to the 1983 election that if he became Prime Minister he would stop drinking.

The Australia of the day lived by the motto: “Never Trust a Man Who Doesn’t Drink.”

Heavy drinking was part of the culture and part of the Australian way of life.

In what other country would a promise of abstaining from excessive consumption made by someone running for the highest office in the land be regarded with such admiration?

It was a promise Hawke would keep, much to some people’s amazement.

Australia being essentially a nation of beer drinkers, the dust stained workers perched on the bar stools after work took to commenting on how clever Hawkie was; how he had a Rhode Scholarship or something; but even so he was a decent bloke, the highest compliment one Australian male can pay another.

There was speculation that Hawke attended closed Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for high ranking government officials during his time in the nation’s capital.

True or not; his anonymity was respected. His confessions, if he ever made any, did not become the subject of common gossip.

Years after he ceased being Prime Minister, a photographer and I were sent to cover a function in Eastern Sydney for the launch of something or other, a book, a restaurant chain, a new line of doilies, an inoffensive new charity for the ladies who lunch. In the end the launches merge into one another.

It was one of those leisurely, well catered for events where someone had thrown $50,000 on the table for expenses and considered it easy money well spent.

Everyone was well dressed. Except of course for the journalists and the photographers; the city’s riff-raff.

Hawke, like many politicians, knew half of Sydney’s media pack by name, he made a point of it, and even now, years after he lost the leadership, he knew exactly how to play them.

After the launch of whatever it was, lunch was served. The media were placed at a table well away from the main guests so they wouldn’t spill anything on the neatly starched table cloths or overhear a confidence no one wanted to be read in the next day’s papers.

Bob as always was prominently situated near the podium.

As far as pulling a living legend was concerned, having Bob at your function was about as “good a get” as a society hostess could pull off.

And as always, Hawkie knew everybody and was perfectly at home in the upper echelons of Australian society.   

This was the refined, clever, upper crust Hawke the general public never saw.

This was the man the nation’s taxi drivers, builders laborers, electricians and hard-working masses didn’t vote for; because they thought they were voting for one of their own kind.

With all the charm and discretion for which the media are known, the Sydney Morning Herald photographer pulled off a string of shots of Bob drinking what looked suspiciously like alcohol.

He was no longer Prime Minister, having been replaced by the knife edged Italian suits draping Paul Keating’s elegant form, but to everyone’s knowledge he had maintained his pledge of abstinence.

Hawkie holding a glass what looked like white wine was the first public sign that The Big Dry had ended.

All of those lay-it-on-thick sympathy articles in the Women’s Weekly or wherever for his long suffering wife Hazel, who was admired more than any other Australian Prime Minister’s wife before or since, went down the tube.

The country’s women sympathised with Hazel for all those long nights alone caring for the children, waiting for her husband to come home from the office or whatever function Bob happened to be attending – including all those boozy late night Australian Labor Party dinners where drinking to excess was more or less compulsory.

And Hazel was much admired for her dignified look-the-other-way response as Hawke’s womanizing became the subject of gossip.

The story of Hazel’s quiet heroism and Bob’s self-sacrifice disappeared with the first photograph of Bob holding a glass of “piss”, as Australians so elegantly call wine.

The Sydney Morning Herald where I then worked loved the story of the end of The Big Dry.

A common place launch of nothing in particular I was hopeful I wouldn’t have to file a single word on suddenly turned into a front page story - thanks to an enterprising photographer.

Wrung out from so many other hundreds of stories, I wished the photographer had kept their lens cap on.

In a dreary afternoon under fluorescent lights I was obliged to ring everyone even remotely connected to the story and the luncheon, from experts on alcoholism to the event’s caterers.

Hawke’s press person declared that he had no idea where Bob was and that as he was no longer Prime Minister and now a private citizen his location wasn’t a reporter’s concern.

The helpful little press person promptly turned off his phone after I barraged him with calls.

Former Australian Prime Ministers receive ample benefits costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, but don’t expect them to answer any questions in return.

The pictures of Bob drinking white wine, spread across the top of the front page proofs, looked fantastic.

The problem, the editors declared, was it could possibly be non-alcoholic white wine. It seemed unlikely. It was certainly news to me that there was any such a thing.

I rang the caterers. They weren’t prepared to discuss. No, they couldn’t possibly put me on to the waiter who had been serving Hawke - they were casuals and had dispersed.

No, the head waiter could not comment and no, they couldn’t possibly pass on any of the staff’s numbers, a question of confidentiality.

The emphasis on individual privacy as a right and its progressive enshrining in legislation has become the bane of working journalist’s lives, making their jobs more difficult over time.

The restaurant delivered up the same story as the caterers:“Sorry, everybody’s gone home now. No, I don’t have anyone’s number. No, I’m so sorry, I would like to help but I just can’t. Best of luck with it.”

Non-alcoholic white wine!?

Would someone like Hawke even drink such a thing? Was it even available in Australia? And if it was, what a nightmare assignment for some marketer that must have been!

Prior to the advent of Google, there weren’t any lightning fast computer searches which would reveal every major reference to such an oddity as the sales of non-alcoholic white wine in Australia in 0.24 seconds. The only references I could find were obscure.

The principal wine merchants were all bemused. Some suggested they had heard of such a thing but had no idea where to buy it.

As day turned to night there was only one thought on my mind – “I want to go home”. Lunch was an increasingly long time ago.

Journalism might seem like an interesting line of work, but just being under the fluorescent lights of a news room and the marauding layers of Chiefs of Staff, Editors in Chief, news editors and night editors, to name a few, increases stress levels magnificently.

Journalism is a high burnout high turnover profession and only the naturals, misfits or hardheads survive past the first three years. The rest of the annual throngs of eager young cadets soon leave for bigger offices, more respect and considerably better salaries in corporate public relations.

As night fell outside the Fairfax building – which to the amusement of the journalists working there never made it onto the SMH’s annual the list of Sydney’s Ten Ugliest buildings - and the brewery on the other side of eight lanes of traffic lit up for the night shift, the editors continued to wring their hands over the possibility of being sued if the paper went with the Bob Drinks Again story.

Hawkie might have been all bonhomie to the nation’s working journalists, a seasoned master at manipulating the media who played such a crucial role in the stratospheric popularity he enjoyed for so many years.

But in fact Bob was no lover of the Fourth Estate.

Since his retirement Hawkie had lined his pockets with more money than he ever made as Prime Minister by suing the news’ organisations which had dared to malign, slight or allegedly defame him during his time in power. 

This is my time in jail, I often thought, as I crossed the lanes of ceaseless traffic on the strip of Parramatta Road known as Broadway. Here soot covered camellias lined the edge of the highway, remnants of some optimistic council project aiming to bring beauty into an unbeautiful spot. It didn't work. The plants and their usually much admired flowers were covered with black dust and the pollution of the thousands of cars passing every day.

This Broadway had none of the lights, glamour or entertainment of its New York counterpart; and I would sometimes feel all was lost, lost, as I gazed up at that concrete building and knew I was a stranger in a strange land, that I would be lucky to make it through the day.

When I first started work at Fairfax the place resembled a self-contained factory with management on the top level, editorial in the middle, and production downstairs.

The place smelled of ink. When I arrived for work on a Sunday morning the docks were full of drifting paper left over from the hundreds of thousands of copies of The Sun Herald which had been loaded onto trucks and dispatched around the state.

When the printing machines started up the entire building shook.

Technology has changed everything, not just the nature of journalism and newspapers, but the atmosphere of the buildings themselves. The smell of ink no longer permeates newspapers offices. Printing takes place tens or even hundreds of miles away from the editorial offices.

And many a proud production career has disappeared with the evolutions in printing technology. The same was true of editorial. The librarians who once meticulously ran the daily clipping services and saw it as an honorable role to help journalists find information and fact check details all disappeared with computer technology which allowed such information to be accessed in seconds.

With instantaneous electronic communication, newspaper offices are no longer creative ferments full of people shouting ideas at each other, arguing with Chiefs of Staff and smoking furiously at their desks as deadlines approach. Now the air is free of cigarette smoke and the desks occupied by bright young things with bottles of mineral water in their gym bags.

Once upon a time no journalist would ever be seen dead with a gym bag. Wouldn’t have even known what one was.

I had already reached the allotted hour for being swamped bymy daily feeling of burnout. Other pleasures lay outside the newspaper’s precincts.

I might have been working since early morning, but my bosses weren’t about to hand this story over to the night reporter, a backstop position not always held by the most experienced of hands.

“Ring him and ask him,” I was ordered.

“I don’t know where he is,” I replied.

“Do your job,” came the frustrated response. “Ring everybody you can think of who knows him and don’t stop till you’ve got him. Because you’re not going home until you do.”

Finally I tracked the quarry down to the bar in the Duke of Stamford hotel in Double Bay. It was the Sydney’s hotel of choice for the affluent and influential wanting discretion, good taste and top of the range service.

“He’s not in his room, he’s in the bar,” I told the Chief of Staff, hoping I could wriggle out of making the phone call and knowing perfectly well Bob wasn’t going to take kindly to this sort of invasion.

“Ring the hotel and ask to be put through to Bob in the bar, it’s that sort of hotel and they’ll know exactly who you mean,” the Chief of Staff ordered.

“Ugh” I responded, grumbling as I went back to my desk.

I rang the Duke of Stamford hotel and explained to the man on the switch what I needed.

We had bonded over the previous hour of multiple calls when I dropped the hint I might “bat for the other side”.

The switch-bitch was all aflutter at the gossip that one of the reporters on the city’s Bible of the Chattering Classes aka The Sydney Morning Herald might be gay. Who knows what stream of stories might change the way conservative Australia thought about sexuality; if only he was kind enough to help out a reporter with a little show of brotherhood.

After a little prevarication the telephonist did exactly as I asked.

I could hear the muffled flurry in the expensive padding of that exclusive watering hole hidden behind the moderately less imposing public bar as the barman said quietly: “Phone call for you Bob.”

And I could almost hear Hawkie’s self-important “harrumph harrumphs” as he excused himself from the group he had been entertaining and went to take the call.

Once I had that instantly recognizable and most famous of Australian voices on the line and had apologised for interrupting him I explained to Bob that the editors were a pack of idiots with no respect for other people’s privacy, but they wanted to run a picture of him, probably in the gossip section at the back of the paper, probably not at all.

And they just wanted to know if what he was drinking in the photographs at that day’s function was actually white wine.

“Oh for Goodness sake,” Bob snapped, slamming the phone down.

The story, including his response, along with a string of prominent photographs, was strapped across the top of the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald the next morning.

Bob was never, to my knowledge, ever seen drinking in public again.

Or more precisely, he never let a news photographer catch him in the act.

Hunting the Famous The Sex Shop Era

Image from Google Search courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

Back in the sex shop, on some days, if there weren't any customers, I would sit on the steps out the front of the shop and gaze mournfully at the normal world passing by on Oxford Street; the young business executives in their flash cars, smiles plastered across their healthy, happy faces.

The grimy, dark pavement took up more and more of my field of vision.

“A nice guy in a hostile universe,” was how I thought of my predicament, the swirling thoughts barely keeping insanity at bay.

I tried to do the right thing. I tried to keep true to some creative ideal, to be a decent person. To celebrate, promote, live the ideals of social justice. But just beyond my peripheral vision was an evil drift of dark grays and malicious spirits, always ready to sweep consciousness away. The only thing that kept the voices at bay was alcohol; and lots of it.

“Nice guy, pity he drinks so much,” came one of the comments cutting through, but it was too late to be saved. I knew my destiny was a sad and dangerous one. I knew no human could survive this level of stress for long. I knew that here, at the bottom of the mercury seas, life would be short and flickering, an intelligence dying long before it had a chance to flower.

There was no way out, of that I had been convinced for a very long time. They might as well have been a different species, those young happy people driving by on Oxford Street, for all the chance I had of being like them.

I sucked on a cigarette, which even then was becoming unfashionable, and cared no longer what I looked like or what happened.

All I could think of on a daily basis was how to get enough money to relieve the pain.

I continued to drown myself in the crowds each evening, seeking the click which went off in my head somewhere between two and three in the early morning bars – for I knew that from then on I would remember nothing, forget, at last, everything.

Already, in my late twenties, older than I had ever wanted or expected to be, these days I was no longer waking up in the beds of total strangers whenever I went out. No longer having a mutual laugh with whoever’s bed I was in before stumbling into the shattering light of some suburb I had never heard of.

These were the days when I found myself sitting on the outskirts watching everybody else couple in the joys of transitory love. And often enough watching the sunrise across the harbour from the roof of my favorite apartment block; watching through their kitchen windows other people getting ready for their working days, observing with curiosity their normal, well-adjusted lives and morning routines.

I still spent a lot of time on bar stools watching tides of people wash in and out. Everything I had run on for decades had stopped working. No amount of alcohol could drown the pain any more. I had no idea where to go or what to do next. Summer sadness replaced summer love, and the respect people had once shown for my writing talents fell away.

There was no way back. Time and again I dreamt of the death that awaited me in Belmore Park, where so many others of the city’s alcoholics had died, located only a short distance from the newspaper offices where I spent so many years of my working life. I dreamt of the Mission Beat man approaching with his usual cup of hot tea and a kind word for those sleeping rough, but this time round there would be no response. My spirit was already climbing up the sides of the surrounding skyscrapers, free at last, returning to juvenile dreams when I floated high above the suburbs, convinced I could fly, the world a future full of hope, excitement and yet unrealized dreams.

One day after I had been awake for ten days I decided it would be a good idea to take a couple of tabs of LSD and go out to a gay sauna.

With a towel wrapped around me, I could hear every rustle of every single rat within a five mile radius.

I could hear the sad gasps through the thin partitions as the desperate climaxed together.

Water dripped everywhere.

A thin, sad, already diseased man paraded in the communal shower, the dark blotches of Kaposi Sarcoma, one of the first and most obvious signs of AIDS, already prominent. Never say die, his sad eyes said, but die he would and soon enough.

When I got to the sex shop the next morning I was not functioning well.

I unlocked the grill and ran up the steep stairs to turn off the alarm in the requisite 30 seconds.

As I did so, I jumped in fright as a man appeared directly behind me.

He apologised for startling me and said he was just on his way to the airport to go back to his home in New Guinea and wanted a dildo, could I recommend one?

Having never used any such thing I simply had no idea and said so. I was so far gone I could barely see my way through the red gloom to the counter.

Sex shops are usually dark and shabby. The owners find if they try and renovate them the sales go down. People want to feel dirty.

The man fussed and fiddled over which dildo he wanted, finally picking some enormous black thing.

Beyond the beyond, I had to get him to help me work the card machine as he paid for it.

Charmed by my apparent dizzy incompetence he happily obliged and said he was sorry he had to rush off to the airport.

The man cheerfully waved the giant dildo in the air as he left, declaring, “I’ll think of you when I use it.”

Of course, as always, there was a schizophrenic side to the sex shop era; and in fact parts of life were actually going quite well.

One of my more regular sleeping buddies was very excited by the idea I was now working in a sex shop; and would often come around for some entertainment. He loved the risqué nature of making out between customers in the flimsy booths and labyrinths at the back of the shop.

“Very therapeutic,” was the way I always described our physical relationship.

As for the endless magazine articles I was writing at the time; well at least they kept on coming. And sooner or later, the magazines kept on paying.

It was also in the dissolving months after Martin that I took to attending and recording an event called Writers In The Park, held at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, opposite the greyhound race course.

Thus it was that I got to know, at least in a passing way, many of the era’s contemporary writers; some of them successful, many not. In Australia very few authors actually make a living wage from writing.

A particular figure on the other side of the law, the less said about him the better, thought nothing of buying me a video camera; and each week I would record the events at the Harold Park in full; from the open section where anyone could read at the beginning and end of each evening to our many special guests.

“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” went one poet one night, when the entire room burst into laughter at the sight of me having nodded off on top of the video recorder.

After a protracted dispute over who actually owned the tapes, I sold them to the NSW State Library for a reasonable sum.

I also ended up writing the Introduction for a book called Writers In The Park, which of course like any effort by a collective took months of debate, prevarication and confusion.

My friendship with David Malouf, Australia’s most second highly regarded living writer before Patrick White died, helped me to score him as one of the most prestigious guests Writers in the Park had ever had. His appearance amongst the ragbag collection of aspiring poets and obscure academic authors added to the prestige of the often struggling enterprise.

Oddly, it was while living in London that I met David.

At first he was just another in the queue of authors I was interviewing in an attempt to cobble together a living.

While I particularly loved his book An Imaginary Life, which tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid during exile, Malouf had just written a novel more in the Australian vein called Harland’s Half Acre.

Malouf had a house in Italy, and there was talk of Martin and I coming to visit, but it never happened.

Nonetheless we struck up a friendship which extended over many years.

David was ever the gentleman, the courteous, erudite scholar, as much an academic as an author. He was perfectly at home in the Great Hall of Sydney University, where as a reporter I was once sent to cover his address to that year’s graduates, all about the promise of The Great World, to quote the title of one of his books, and the bright futures the students faced, a lifetime of learning.

We shook each other’s hands affably afterwards, but by then we had known each other a long time.

He was always very supportive of my efforts to write, including the novel I churned out in London based around my experiences in Kings Cross as a young man.

I gave it to him to read; and he made various suggestions; but with so much else going on at the time I never did rewrite the book which had taken so much effort.

I guess like most young authors, I just wanted to be told I was brilliant, the book was a masterpiece and to whistle on to the best seller lists.

While our London interview was formal enough, David told me where he lived in Sydney and although I lost the address, by dint of knocking on a couple of doors soon tracked him down.

There weren't too many authors of his stature living in Sydney’s inner-Western suburb of Chippendale.

When your own life is not going well, association with the famous gives you some sort of boost, credibility or affirmation; and our friendship certainly spanned some of these periods.

So much that had seemed like promise had turned to ashes.

People were starting to die of AIDS.

The wild lifestyles my friends and companions had lived as young men turned out, much to our surprise, to be unsustainable. The grandeur of the artistic paths we all thought we were embarked upon and the fame, money and applause that would automatically follow never eventuated.

I was now in my thirties and the relationship which had spanned the years from 24 to 33 was nothing but a memory; or sometimes a clash. I tried to run Martin over in my car one day. On another occasion I slammed the door after visiting him at a house he was sharing with a mutual friend so hard I broke a Chinese antique umbrella stand worth some thousands of dollars. Then again, a few months after we separated we ran into each other at a party; and I promptly dragged him off into a spare bedroom where we remembered the fun we had once had together.

Time cures many things. Decades later, our lives having taken very different courses, but we both remembered the times we shared together with great fondness. Part of this is no doubt euphoric recall, to which I am particularly prone, part of it the fact that while in our youth life and love seems boundless, in fact there are very few people in our lives who we truly love, who truly change the course of our thinking and our emotional life.

I took to popping by David Malouf’s house unannounced whenever I was in the Chippendale area, or after I started work in the nearby offices of the Sydney Morning Herald, sometimes more frequently.

There was something sacred about the peace of his house; something I aspired to. Partly it was the feeling that great artistic works, pure in their beauty and intensity, were being created in his study upstairs.

And as well, I suppose it was all the books that lined his bookshelves and which he appeared to have actually read. The immensely erudite essays Malouf would write for learned journals in between his books showed off his broad ranging education. And on top of all this enviable cultural air, Malouf  was one of those people who had finely developed the art of conversation.

He was entertaining company and a perfect host.

Being a journalist concerned with the daily mayhem of the suburbs and the broader world, I sometimes wondered why David’s books, as beautifully crafted as they were, had so little contemporary resonance.

One of his quotes about being a writer explained it thus: "I totally reject the idea of being representative in any way. This whole idea of role models. It's a terrible idea. I don't like the idea of being some kind of representative consciousness of the country. You do what you do, the way you do it, out of a kind of necessity. I can't see how that would be useful to anyone else.”

David Malouf certainly didn’t see it as his role to champion any causes, except for that of Australian literary and the imaginary life. He was close to some of the senior figures of the political left but largely apolitical in his public pronouncements.

Our spasmodic friendship spanned the years but eventually petered out as our lives took different courses.

“You’re very versatile,” he once commented when I climbed into bed with him one afternoon.

I was going out with a woman Cara MacDougal at the time. She was acting as my champion and supporter in getting me onto the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. At the time her support made all the difference.

By the time I did actually arrive, through a ragged series of events in the post-Martin era, on the doorsteps, or loading docks, of The Sydney Morning Herald I didn't, in my heart of hearts, actually believe my determination to live by the typewriter would succeed.

But Cara, who was working as a housing officer for people on welfare, helped fuel me up with enough social justice stories to attract attention.

At the time I was taking my own photographs, pictures of single mothers who had just been evicted from their homes, their children’s possessions strewn down the narrow concrete walks of their bleak apartment blocks.

Somehow, out of sheer persistence and the kindness of strangers, I began getting stories published in the city’s finest newspaper; and to score reporting shifts.

Although I had spent several months perfecting the art of the downward spiral, in my first approaches to the SMH I used an old and often successful line, “I’ve just got back from overseas and I’m looking for work”.

Just as in former years when an editor on the Review section of The Australian Financial Review had taken a liking to me and painstakingly taught me how to write for newspapers, so this time round one of the editors of the Saturday feature section of The Sydney Morning Herald, a reformed alcoholic, also went out of his way to help.

Something connected between us.

Whatever the reason, this man, Thomas Liddle, after giving me a string of demanding feature assignments, took it on himself to recommend me to the editors. I would never have gotten the job without him.

And thus I began to do my first casual news reporting shifts.

In those days, when you were out in the news cars, the journalist was expected to be the boss and the driver and photographer to follow your lead.

These days there is no greater offence you can commit than to refer to “my photographer”.

I still remember the first time I had to radio into the news desk.

I didn’t know which button to press on the microphone; and my inexperience was painfully obvious.

My amateurishness and embarrassment didn’t last.

It was my preparedness to work Sundays that finally threw me into the mainstream.

After all, at that stage of my life, disoriented and sad following separation, there weren’t any squabbling children or longing boyfriends at home, no picnics with friends. My arms were bruised and the flat mates barely tolerating my behaviour. I had won and lost so many times, I already felt old.

I didn’t much care how I spent the days.

Sooner or later the paper’s hierarchy noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written.

My first front page would never normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. For months, poverty stricken and attempting to stabilise my life, I had kept up the casual shifts.

In those days, prior to so much advertising drifting to the internet, there were always a lot of news pages to fill and a scrabbling desperation to get enough stories for the next day. In a city the size of Sydney, there wasn’t always that much going on.

“There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs,” the chief-of-staff said. “Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more taxpayer’s money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet.

“Anyway, we're desperate for picture stories tomorrow, see what you can get. Try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke.”

So I headed off to the meeting in inner-city Surrey Hills with Steve Christo, the most foul-mouthed of all the SMH photographers. Like an early Chef Ramsey, he found it impossible to utter a sentence without using the “f” word.

Soon enough we found ourselves sitting in the middle of a room jam packed full of often rather butch looking women; we were virtually the only men. I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. I had done women's studies at university in the seventies. I thought of myself as a SNAG, a sensitive, new age guy, at the cutting edge of gender transformation.

There was, in that crowded room in the mid-1980s, nowhere to sit. The air was full of the self-righteous anger of 300 or more women crammed into a tiny space. Eventually they cleared a spot for us, we were after all The Sydney Morning Herald, and we sat cross-legged on the floor; completely surrounded.

We were late, as the SMH of those days almost invariably was, a sense of the urgency of news yet to overtake the venerable institution, and a woman was up the front pounding on about the injustice of the government's failure to continue to fund their directory of women in un-orthodox jobs. This was being portrayed as not just a slight against all working women, but yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep the sisters in the kitchen.

The 1980s was the peak of male-bashing feminism, of serious debate about whether all men were rapists and bashers, whether lipstick was self-repression, of women's collectives, power suits and committed separatists, of whether true feminist liberation could be achieved without the elimination of all men from women’s lives.

"There's no f’n picture here," Steve whispered, loud enough for a dozen of the sisterhood to overhear. "Just look at them. None of them make a f’n picture mate. I'm out of here. I'm going to find something else.”"I've got to stay and listen," I whispered back.

"Well I don't, I'm f’n gone," Steve said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd of hostile women.

I sat there, very uncomfortably, knowing full well the women around me had heard every last word Steve had said.

As representatives of The Sydney Morning Herald we were one of their few chances to put any pressure at all on the government and to thereby save their project. They had to bide their tongues.

On and on the speakers went. In those days, before my head had cleared, I took copious notes on everything, the colour of the walls, everything that was said, spontaneous thoughts on the atmosphere. I was always afraid I would forget something important. Hadn't black spots begun to spread in the brain?

By the time I got back to the office that day I had interviewed a woman carpenter, plumber and electrician as well as the organisers. I wrote up the story on the antiquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that the story would never get a run.

It might have been important to the people involved, but a directory of women in unorthodox jobs wasn't earth shattering. Journalists are always being targeted by groups whose funding has run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story.

It was the picture that did it. I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging a story onto the front; or higher in the "book" as the sections are known. In fact this is a principle that applies well to The Sydney Morning Herald; but not to The Australian, where the story is seen as all important and the photograph as secondary.

But that day a large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop dead gorgeous young woman, maybe 23, adorned the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald.

She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background, her white overalls stained delicately with paint. The upper flaps of her overalls were just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city. “Can I help you carry that?” a hundred thousand voices asked as their minds licked off the delicate traces of labor, the glorious smell of sweat.

I never got a thank you from the organisers of the Women in Unorthodox Jobs Directory. But later that same day the Chief of Staff leant across the desk and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said.“You've got the job.”

I was a full time journalist on the best paper in the country, not just someone doing casual shifts. It was the proudest day of my life.

And how celebrated The Sydney Morning Herald was in those days!

In its power, status and tight hold on the city's imagination, the paper was a revered institution without peer. Just getting a letter onto the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald was a major feat.

It’s hard to imagine now, when newspapers are no longer admired as bastions of truth representing the highest ideals of the community, just how admired the SMH was.

Sydney back then was in world terms a tiny city of little more than two million people in a far off place, in a country of barely 15 million people. At the top end of the market Sydney was basically a one newspaper town – and now I worked for it.

LINGERING IN BANGKOK

Bangkok's Sky Train courtesy of Wikipedia

It didn’t feel like he lived here anymore; although he had tried hard enough in a number of different locations to make it work. He was just lingering in Bangkok; trying to sort out his next moves. “You’re lost, aren’t you?” another Australian asked, and he nodded, yes. A few hours later yet another Australian made exactly the same observation. And once again he agreed.

His mind was in overdrive thinking of ways to make a substantial amount of cash in a hurry.

The best option, which he had no idea whether he could pull off, would involve about three months on one of Australia’s most luxurious properties, pulling in he hoped more than enough to clear up lingering annoyances while writing the biography of the scion of one of Australia’s richest families.

It was just the sort of assignment he needed in just the right location to clear his head and get back on his feet after being thrown for a sixer by his own stupidity; not just falling for the easy lies of love Thai style, but going on an outrageous bender subsequently.

For the first time in many years he had been off the stabilizing medication that killed cravings and had kept him functioning as a more or less normal person throughout the first decade of the millennium, and being turned into a public fool was a brutally hurtful outcome for what he had been naively convinced by another falang, a foreigner, was a genuine relationship and to abandon his reservations. “You would be a fool not to take this chance for happiness.”

Huh. The money he had wasted building what he had been convinced was the foundations of a life together still irked. Stupidly scarred and stupidly drunk, “the beast in me”, to quote the Johnny Cash song, had been seen out on the town, all over town. Everyone to know.

He had been one of the only people if not the only person in the country on the highest dose possible of the stabilizing medication he came off the day he left Australia; and it had in the end been for many many years been the only thing that had really helped. Meetings, endless meetings, worked to a certain degree. He swallowed the gospel as much as he could and enjoyed some of the people he met. But there had never been an off switch. Being a workaholic, the responsibility of having children to care for, a demanding high profile job, a community radio program to run and various other interests had boxed him into a respectable enough corner.

Nobody ever saw him at his worst.

“People like you normally die,” Pat the Rat, one of Sydney’s most infamous drug and alcohol counselors, had declared 30 years before when he had been referred to her as a difficult and persistent relapse.

“Every now and then things get so bad they develop a desire to stop. But usually they’re dead before they get there. They know they should want to stop. But they don’t.”

He was a little miffed at the time. Wasn’t it supposed to be her job to fix him?

But as strange as that day he had spent with the renowned pioneer of twelve step programs into Australian detox centres had been – he tagged along while Pat the Rat dealt with a parade of hard cases and shivering wrecks of street alcoholics – can you believe they won’t do medicated detoxes here? She asked in reference to one particularly messy patient. At the end of their two or three hours together it didn't seem like she had interviewed him at all. But her astute summing up, transmitted to him later by his group counselor, who had arranged the whole thing, remained with him forever.

And all those years later he came back to Thailand; and thought everything would be fine; even though he was abandoning all the struts which kept his life in place: the psychiatrist who had been so helpful. He had told her things he had never told another living soul. And the medication one of Australia’s leading addiction experts had placed him on and which had worked so well in killing the cravings which had previously played such havoc; and the work, the kids, the friends, everything which he had used to transform himself into a respectable and affectionately regarded if perhaps somewhat eccentric reporter.

Nobody expected journalists to be normal anyway; it was part of the old mystique of the profession before it became just another technical “skill set”.  

And for a while everything in Bangkok was fine.

He went to meetings. He stayed sober. He met people from all different parts of the world. Which was a pleasant change from some of the relentlessly boring bastards he encountered back home.

At first he was enthralled by the beauty of Bangkok - which had been little more than a sprawling shanty town when he first encountered it as a young man and was now one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

And after having been a single parent for so long; and not having re-partnered, as all the studies indicated was the best way forward for personal happiness; not having to sleep alone proved a delight, even if an expensive one.

He had virtually never slept alone from the time he discovered you didn’t have to until the horror of heading towards 50 enveloped him, and while he knew - as some people commented = an astonishing number of people around Sydney, in those final years, when he went to bed he slept alone.

His sputtering affair with a woman down the road went nowhere; and for a while every time he looked at a woman all he could see was the word “TROUBLE”.

As for men; 50 was 500 in gay years.

That he had been manipulated by a foreigner and his Thai boyfriend into believing that age didn’t matter in Thailand, that they thought about these things differently, remained a resentment he should have dispensed with long ago.

And years later, after a string of odd encounters, after being pursued from place to place, after being made a fool of and having made a fool of himself, what had once been affection for Bangkok had become more of a wistful stare; a gaze across the crowded food courts, an affection for the final days of Pat Pong, Bangkok’s first red light district and soon; no doubt, to join the sprawling shopping malls and glistening condominiums which were transforming the city. The dilapidated air of Super Pussy and other fading go go bars, including Electric Blue where his Australian mates always seemed to meet someone who made them happy, would soon be a thing of the past; of that there was little doubt. His desire to photograph the fading tackiness before it vanished was yet to be realized.

Gold Porsches, black Mercedes, cars worth small fortunes were everywhere; as the Bangkok streets became increasingly crowded. Cars were status symbols. Walking was for peasants.

The traffic was slowing at a kilometer a year; and was already seemingly at a standstill in many different locations. But if they didn’t have to, people wouldn’t take a half hour walk.

Neon pink and blue, occasionally yellow and green taxies also cluttered the streets. As a result of the “mai dee riotic” – bad traffic, during his time here he had become a great fan of the “moto cie”, the motor cycle drivers who could weave you through the traffic like maestros performing a particularly complex dance; and who rarely tried to overcharge you unless they picked you up in a tourist zone such as Nana on Sukhumvit.

And so he looked at things as if he was looking at them for the last time; the towers, the cranes, the street stalls, the beggars and colourful touts, the bars and the restaurants and the crowded atmosphere of Asia,; the excellent food, the incommunicative stares of any major public transport system, except the Bangkok Sky Train was a state of the art engineering marvel moving massive numbers of people in an astounding efficient and non-confrontational way.

He had only ever witnessed one robbery.

He had never seen a fight despite the thousands of people cramming onto the trains at peak hour.

And whether he stayed or he went, there was much Australia could learn from Thailand – in particular that over-regulation kills not just creativity but commercial enterprise. A good deal, probably more than 90 per cent of the street life that makes Bangkok such an interesting place and provides a living for so many of its population, would be illegal in Australia. 

So much of antipodean life has been killed off by the local, state and federal governments who cannot help but keep on passing law after law after law. And killing all the freedom of which we had once been so proud. The raw beauty of capitalism; that if you sell bad food then nobody’s going to buy it; or you’re flogging something that nobody wants then you’re not going to be standing on the street corner for very long; means that soon enough you’ll go out of business or provide what the public wants. And that includes; in the myriads of stalls that fill Bangkok’s streets, some of the world’s best food; cheap clothes; reading glasses and sun glasses; toys; art works; wooden carvings; as well, of course, as those insane flickering laser lights only a tourist would be mad enough to buy. And the infamous clutter of restaurants, karaoke bars, massage parlours; and hectare after hectare of some of the most up-market and superbly designed shopping precincts the world has ever seen.  

SAME SAME

Francis Bacon

The same loneliness that had gripped him when the children were growing up, when he had spent night after sleepless night working, pacing, thinking, sometimes communicating on the internet with other night owls or people in other time zones. He couldn’t cruise the late night bars because they lived in a dangerous part of town and he was the only adult caring for them. And now, essentially, the feeling was the same. There was no one there; or no one close or sympathetic. Not that he could expect any such thing anymore, no longer being a physical beauty or endowed with sufficient billions to provide the illusion of power or attractiveness.

Now the sounds of derision echoed through every street, haunting, and he wanted out, any way, anywhere. These were the times he had known as a child. These were the times he had known buried beneath the lead aquarium that became his waking consciousness during the lengthy middle years of a life that had passed too quickly, and these were the times that had descended on what passed for old age, 60 years.

He hadn’t meant to get here.

And as corny as it sounded, he felt jealous of the 20 somethings frolicking around him, so obviously enjoying their lives, enjoying a drink and each other’s company, flirtations and outrage and gossip, none of which he was a part. It was a wonderful time to be young; the freedom, the music, the color of everything. His wasn’t a stony silence, it was a gap partly from the language he still struggled to surmount; and the fact that he just wasn’t like them. You’re suffering from terminal uniqueness, some old soul would say; but there weren’t that many of the old souls left anyway.

Everything was a trap.

He had forgotten how to enjoy himself in a normal way.

Pursued for so long, many of his possessions had disappeared until he was honed down to a simple bag and a simple life. But at least now he had a computer back, and could do some of the things he liked to do.

Why he should feel so bleak in such a fascinating city he had no idea; except that he didn’t trust anybody anymore; and therefore didn’t feel many close friendships. Those he had known in his country of origin had fled and in turn he had fled the country. Disease had killed so many of them; but so had the excessive lifestyles they had once thought were such pioneering adventures. So was the ridicule. The Kai Jow Aeks were back, as if he had never understood him either. Which of course was why he had been so amply indulged. Because he had long stopped thinking anyone would love him just for him.

But the Kow Jai was a simple insult they felt entitled to make. The news that he had to wait several more days for his passport had been the last thing he had wanted to hear. He had no plan to fill the interminable days. He had lost his love of what had seemed one of the most fascinating places on earth. And knew, instinctively, the only way to ever get it back was to leave, and come back a new person, with a fresh approach, a fresh determination. If that is what he chose to do.

The lack of a computer since he had been driven from the 31^st floor of his small condo in the ITF Tower on the corner of Silom meant that rather than living in Bangkok, he had simply been lingering, wandering from one cheap set of accommodation to the next.

And Phuket had proved much the same, staying with friends in the middle of the island, far from the action, even far from the beach. The last time he had felt so strongly he was in the wrong place at the wrong time had been not long before the birth of his daughter, when, on the island of Crete, where his partner had thought it would be nice to bear their second offspring amongst the child loving Greeks, and everything had gone wrong.

It had been on their first night on the island, in a giant hotel curving around the small harbor. It being the off season they were the only residents. And the freezing wind whipped off the Mediterranean and through what should have been picturesque white washed street. They found an open restaurant; but once you’ve travelled with someone for a while breakfast, lunch and dinner can prove to be a conversational strain. When they got back to the hotel their son, who had barely turned one and just begun walking, threw mussaka and milk all over the double bed. At exactly the same time as a particularly strong gust of wind blew in the entire curved window of the room, shattering glass all over them.

The next morning he had been up at the Greek Orthodox Church going, Dear God, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Help me. Help my partner. Help our unborn child. Help our son.

And as things turned out so God, or fate, did exactly that.

What fate held now he had no idea.

Driven to distraction and driven out of a country that had once fascinated him; yes he could admit his own faults in the whole scenario, not that it mattered now, he was unsure which way to step. All he knew was that plenty of work lay ahead. And fortunately for him, he enjoyed work, if not a lot else some days.

THE BIGGER STORY:

UP to one million Australians are expected to leave behind the rat race of city life to live and work by the sea or in the country in the next three years.

Research by Online lifestyle adviser Sea Change Success shows more than 200,000 city dwellers will radically change their lifestyle with a seachange, while more than 700,000 will move to a regional area.

It reveals 350,000 people contemplate making a seachange each year, but only 20 per cent of those who consider moving make it happen.

However, 80 per cent of those are glad they did it and wish they had made the change sooner.

National Seachange Taskforce executive director Alan Stokes said most people contemplating a move out of the city did so while holidaying in a coastal area.

"It would start out with people imagining what it would be like living in the community rather than just going there for holidays," he said. "The big attraction is the environment, the beach, the idea of bringing up your kids in a more natural, attractive environment.

"People acquaint living in the city with high levels of daily stress."

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/a-million-aussies-to-leave-city-behind/story-fneszs56-1226547833537#ixzz2H3wk3muv

Boy Show Boy Show Massage Massage

He hadn't meant to settle here, or anywhere in particular, at this peculiarly dislocated period of his life, chased from one location to another. I don't understand the program, an official looking man sitting next to him said; and it was true enough, after almost three years of pursuit and harassment it had become pointless, sick, and tasteless. Not that they still didnt manage to get their laughs. But he was tired, and tired of it, and tired of the mentalities behind it, to the point where he had become wordless in his estrangement. And just to help things along; he had lost his phone in a taxi, thereby severing every good and bad connection he had managed to build, leaving only whoever it was he ran into on the day.

The guest house he was staying in was at least for the present far more cheerful and pleasant than almost anywhere he had stayed in Thailand. Music belted out; but then he had had teenage children who wanted move the dial ff 96.9, in fact had programmed every dial on the car radio to the one station, so he could put up with anything. Nostalgia was for other moments.

Boy show, Boy show, the sound of the touts would drift up through the aging tenaments, an atmosphere he would normally enjoy, although he had never bothered to see the show for reasons he didn't have to reveal to the world. There were just too many echoes here, that the was his main reason for his recent longing to be somewhere else. And to sit and get some work done. Money follows work follows money, always had, and he was lucky he enjoyed working. But the grander schemes of things needed more thinking out, more professional input, as the technology changed. It wasn't enough just to be a whizz with words anymore, and he watched some pretty desperate attempts to make money out of the new "communication" technologies. But if everyone is doing the communicating, who is doing the listening?

It was High Season, just after Christmas, and the young men once hungry weren't hungry any more, sporting money in their pockets and partying wildly into the New Year. How cruel these days were, when he made the mistake of visiting people who thought could be his friends, might have been his friends in different circumstances, but were nothing but treacherous cheap double crossing little bitches, dogs they called him in his country. And where he came from, most dogs got put down, if not on the first occasion, sooner or later, because you couldn't survive in a rough and tumble world on the dark side and be a treacherous little prick. But here they did it because you were a falang, a foreigner, and they could get away with it with the howling of the masses to support them.

So let them. No bitterness. Let it go.

He was happy for the first time in a long time; for no particular reason.

And the sounds of Boy Show Boy Show Massage Massage just added to the atmosphere that was a million miles from the quiet tree lined suburb where he came from.

The dread of the silence wasn't here.

The only fear was man made.

And to be avoided.

Let them be.

Let Him Go. Let Him Go. The boy translated into his Google phone in a restaurant while he waited for his new computer at a restaurant near busy Pantip Plaza in Bangkok.

It seemed an appropriate enough epitaph.

Let Him Go. Let Him Go.

He had a go at the translator.

Thailand is a very interesting country, he said into the machine. But I wish peple would leave me alone. Leave me alone.

Let Him Go. Leave Him Alone. Massage Boy Massage Boy. Boy Show Boy Show. The echoes rose into the warm heart of the Bangkok Night.