physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.
We had moved again, in about 1980, to this house on a nice stretch of the northern coast of New South Wales, about fourteen miles inland. It was an avocado and banana plantation gone to seed and we rented this property. I remember tying my kite to one of the fence-posts and watching the green light coming through the banana leaves. It was all a bit like a gothic novel set in the tropics, and Leif, I suppose, was Heathcliff in shorts and thongs, coming back like some dark force. My mother became pregnant by him and, seeing the possible impact of my opposition, he tried at first to be reasonable, pointing out that he was now the father of my brother and that my mother wanted him around. ‘But if you ever don’t want me around,’ he said, ‘then I’ll leave immediately.’ He wanted to stay with us, and did, for a time, but I was conscious of wanting to look after my mother and the baby. She had mastitis, and I nursed her through a fever. I nursed her with orange juice. It was very dark around that house at night, with the moon lighting the way, and there was this tremendous feeling of stillness and isolation.
My mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn’t my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother’s father and everything. But a time came, at that plantation house, when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn’t known adults could lie. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened.
Nomadism suits some people; it suits some people’s situations. We just kept moving because that’s what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find a house there. Simple as that. Except that the moving in these years, because of Leif, had a degree of hysteria attached, and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear. It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called ‘The Family’. On reflection, I can now see that his obsessional nature derived from that, as well as his egocentricity and his dark sense of control.
The Family was founded by Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the mid-1960s. It started in the mountains north of Melbourne, where they meditated, had meetings and sessions where they used LSD. The basic notion was that Anne happened to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but with elements of Eastern philosophy thrown in, such that her followers beheld a karmic deity obsessed with cleansing their souls. Anne prophesied the end of the world, arguing, quite comically, though not to her, that only the people in the Dandenong Ranges of mountains east of Melbourne would survive. Anne and her husband got rich on the collections that were taken at Thursday meetings. Although the sect was never very large, they doted on her blue aura (she had a lighting system installed to keep her ever-blue), and many of them were middle-class doctors who had grown dependent. The principal power of the sect was based on a network of influence among its members. They were masonic in this way and could call on favours from high places, which explained, to us, why Leif was always able to track us down.
Leif’s real surname was Hamilton. He was one of those who had been ‘adopted’ by The Family. Eventually, Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her husband would be convicted of falsifying adoption papers but at their height they were able to brainwash the authorities. The use of LSD meant that many of the sect members felt they had enjoyed revelations, so were happy to act as ‘aunties’ when it came to Hamilton-Byrne’s child-acquiring mania. At one point, The Family had acquired as many as twenty-eight children. There were little altars to Anne Hamilton-Byrne all over the house and each child was given a personal photograph of her, as if she was Mao. The cult was obsessed with sex and with cleanliness. Anne herself had, it seems, an insane kind of vanity. She hated ugly or fat people and had recourse to cosmetic surgery.
Leif Meynell was part of that cult. And everything he did relating to us was informed by his association with The Family. At one point, running from him, we were living in the Adelaide Hills and we had to move again, this time to Perth in Western Australia. We went to Freemantle, which is now a cool suburb, but then it was mainly an industrial dockyard area. We had a neighbour who knew all about our situation, and, one day, she came back from the milk bar to tell us that Leif Meynell had been in the street. We had to flee. We ended up that time at a house in the Patch, outside Melbourne, on a long narrow plot that slumped down towards a creek at the bottom of the hill. Once I found a dead sheep in this creek, stinking and bloated. I walked backwards and forwards across the creek, using its back as a kind of bridge. It was a time, perhaps, when all sorts of extraordinary things could come to seem pretty normal. It was a cold winter, the puddles freezing over, and my footprints in the mud would be overlain by a layer of ice. They appeared like the steps of a man on the moon preserved under glass. I had to chop wood and stoke a fire every morning to heat the water that passed through coils in the chimney. My main recreation then was bees that I kept outside the house. Every morning I attended to them and quietly watched as they went about their business.
Bees have a way of dealing with predators. They keep moving and they always die away from the hive. I’m sure the isolation I mentioned before, the sense you get in some parts of Australia that civilisation is elsewhere, caused these cults to thrive. In that farming community, they had a strange attitude towards animals, and there was a satanic vibe thereabouts. I even remember a satanic-ritual shop run by a figure called Kerry Calkin. In those parts, it was all fairly pedestrian, but frightening nonetheless. The atmosphere was like Lord of the Flies, and our lives at the time were filled with a combination of paranoia and guilt.
It was becoming so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. We got some intelligence that Leif was drawing close; they told us he was back near us in the hills outside Melbourne. My brother and I showed a lot of resistance that final time: we just couldn’t bear the idea of grabbing our things again and dashing for the door. As a bribe, my mother and I told my little brother he could take his prized rooster, a Rhode Island Red, a very tall, proud, strong-looking bird, and also an extremely loud one. To match that, I insisted on taking my two-storey beehive. Picture the scene: a by-now hysterical mother and her two children, along with the pride of their menagerie, stuffed into a regular station wagon and heading up the dirt track.
I had become something of an expert on beekeeping. Also an expert on how to transport them from one place to another. You have to overlay the entrance to the hive with sheets of newspaper. The bees will eventually eat their way through the paper, but, if you judge it right, they won’t get through until you’ve reached your destination. We’re driving from Melbourne to Brisbane and the kids are sleeping in the car and the bees are quietly buzzing in their hive. The sun begins to come up and the rooster wants to alert the world, but I’ve got it by the throat, and I feel this tremble, this spirit of ‘Good morning’, and all the while I can hear the bees beginning to get angry as they munch through the paper. ‘Come on!’ I’m saying to my mother, and the entire scene is a nightmare. ‘These bees are going to get through the paper and they’re vindictive!’
Eventually, we’re desperately trying to find a grassy field to let the bees out for a breather and the rooster out for a shit. And the bees are buzzing more and more and the smell of honey and wax is starting to fill the car and the rooster is crowing and we stop the car by a huge church. The rooster jumps out and dashes off, and I open the back of the station wagon and tell everybody to stand back as I prepare to rip off the tape to the entrance of the hive and let them out. The bees are raging. They need to blame something, hopefully something fluffy and brown. Obviously, they attack the rooster, and I’m secretly quite pleased. The thing is running across the field with a swarm of bees attacking its nether regions. And this goes on every day and every night until finally we reach Brisbane. There’s no God, and no sense of universal justice, either, but there is nature’s own sweet irony. Not long after we set up in Brisbane, I came out one day to see a row of cane toads, about six or seven of them, big
