had a feeling for animals. People had a sense of us, usually a disparaging sense of us, as hippies, but really we were just nature-lovers and natural non-conformists. At one time we kept chicks that gave us eggs, and three goats for milk. Our beloved dog Poss had to vie for attention with a veritable travelling menagerie comprising a donkey, a pony, a litter of mice – which my mother directed in candle-lit ‘shows’ – and at a cottage we once lived at on a pineapple farm our lives were taken over by possums. A large grey bird called a brolga took up residence, too. There was a sense that we were always seeking refuge from modern life. I was deeply invested, I now see, in trying to grow into a system of thinking about the relation between people and things. Years later I would study quantum mechanics and begin to see, but then I just grappled with the world on offer, my parents’ world, though I lost myself very happily for a time in keeping my own hive of bees.
My mother and stepfather split up when I was nine. It didn’t seem so devastating at the time, but it represents, with the benefit of hindsight, the end of a relatively paradisical period in my life. As I said, there had been a Tom Sawyer feeling at the centre of my young years, a beautiful world of discovery, and the adventures of the near future would be altogether darker. Many of us see the safe environs of early childhood in a halo of light, and, for me, despite our rapid coming and going, our many houses and my hatred of school, those years were lived in a state of natural illumination. The world was fresh and the ocean was clear and the air smelled of the white gum tree. But human nature is more complicated, of course, than its physical setting, and life would not be life if it didn’t cede to dark complications. Brett had his own struggles and, eventually, my mother couldn’t cope with him any more, so we moved to a flat above a shop-front in Lismore that my mother shared with the Nomad Theatre Company. Mum often earned money as a face painter at markets, and later on my younger half-brother and I would trundle along. For a while I took up a mouth organ and played the pre-adolescent blues.
My mother and I had tried to live respectably in town, but we were about to embark on a peripatetic life largely fuelled by anxiety, drifting once more down the Mississippi. We would see a lot of Australia over the next few years – we’d seen a certain amount already – but for at least five years we felt pursued, and I suppose those years, as much as the happy years before, shaped the kind of person I was to become in the future. Our life with Brett had brought sunshine and art, music and nature, into our everyday experience. Brett’s theatre productions, the way they could be rolled out and packed up in no time at all, was good preparation for WikiLeaks, but the next part, the part involving a man called Leif Meynell, would show us what it was like to be pursued by shadowy forces. He was my first tail.
3
My mother’s people came to Australia from Scotland in 1856. The head of the clan was James Mitchell, a tenant farmer from Dumfries, who lived at the same time as the radical Scots poet Robert Burns, another farmer. Burns protested all his life against injustice and tyranny, penning a universal ‘Marseillaise’ to the human spirit, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. The poet died in poverty in Dumfries just as my kinsman Mitchell was growing up, and he would have understood the Mitchell family’s wish to emigrate. Like him, they were Protestants subject to the laws of the established Church of Scotland, and life was hard for them in the soggy fields.
Hugh Mitchell, with Anne Hamilton and five children, set himself up as a dairy farmer in New South Wales, at Bryans Gap, near Tenterfield. He was well known in the New England district, and died at the age of eighty-four, leaving an estate of £121 and a son, James, just like him, who in time took up a freehold on land at Barney Downs. James was an able horseman and he served as a volunteer in the Boer War. On 2 June 1900, he wrote a letter to his son Albert from Bulawayo in Rhodesia, telling of the hard time he was experiencing in the regiment and saying how frustrated he was not to find himself fighting at the Front. This complaint – the complaint of many a serving soldier – was answered by fate, who saw to it that eight weeks later he was part of a garrison in the Transvaal that came under a heavy Boer barrage, and James Mitchell, a squad sergeant-major, died of wounds. The man who buried him wrote a letter home. ‘It was a sad duty for us,’ he wrote, ‘the saddest I have seen in South Africa . . . This war is a sad, cruel business.’ Other ancestors of mine, on my father’s side, the Kellys and the Greers, owned the Imperial Hotel at Nundle, after coming from Ireland. My paternal great-grandfather, James Greer Kelly, had four sons who were brilliant sportsmen, well known for their prowess at cricket and football. He also had a daughter, Miriam Kelly, my grandmother, who came to Sydney and married a man called Shipton, and together they had my father.
Our early families pass on life to us, as a matter of science, but do they also pass on their ideas? I can’t claim to know them, but I can see that this Celtic journey they made for goods and gear, for plots and for gold, also brought with it the yearning for a new world. Some of them on my mother’s side suffered for their idealism, in Gallipoli and elsewhere. My great-grandfather, Alfred Hawkins, was on the Japanese prison ship, the Montevideo Maru, when it was sunk by a US submarine in 1942. It was, I believe, our family’s first known experience of friendly fire. And not just our family: 1,051 Australian soldiers and civilians went down about sixty miles off Luzon in the Philippines, and the wreck was never recovered. A few years ago, there was one surviving witness, a Japanese sailor, who recalled the terrible cries of the Australians as the ship sank. Others, he said, sang the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. History doesn’t record where my kinsman was on the ship that night, and whether Alfred Hawkins was crying or singing, but it should be noted that the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was written by that famous Scottish neighbour of ours, Robert Burns.
My own father was missing from my life, and only became part of it again when I was grown up. I’ll come to that. But it meant that Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. Brett was one of those cool 1970s people who were into guitars and everything that went with the music scene. I’ve got his name – Assange – an unusual one, which comes from Mr Sang, or ah-sang in Cantonese: his great-great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate. He ended up on Thursday Island and married a local girl and moved to Queensland. The name was Europeanised to escape the rampant discrimination against the Chinese.
When I look back to these people, I see a group of families who moved around Australia from crisis to comfort, and mother’s story, and mine, was little different. My mother divorced Brett Assange when I was nine. He had been good to me, and was good in general, but not so good to himself, and the end of their relationship represents the end of a kind of innocence in my life.
My stepfather’s place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell. My mother met him as a result of some cartooning work she was doing for Northern Rivers College of Education. I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm, which at the time I considered as proof that he was born in Australia in the early 1960s, though these inoculations might have been common elsewhere as well. From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us.
I was opposed to him from the start. Perhaps that’s normal, for a boy to resist a man like that, or any man, in fact, who appears to be usurping his father or stepfather. Leif didn’t live with us, though my mother must have been besotted with him at first. But whatever her feeling for him was, it didn’t last. She would see him off, but he had this ability to turn up and pretend it was otherwise. Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him. We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realisation that he had found us. He’d suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him,
