Origin Story

   

After all, I was an aspiring  journalist. I used it as a tool to travel and see the world, to understand and get inside some questions that puzzled me from my earliest days. I became a freelancer. It felt better that way, challenged me in unexpected ways and took me to unexpected places. 

I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in East Melbourne, Australia. World War Two was drawing to a close and my  first faint memory is my mother holding me in her arms the day she left. And there’s a black and white picture of me and my baby brother in matching woolen overcoats, sitting huddled on my grandparent’s front stairs looking straight back into the lens of my father’s Leica camera. He was documenting the departure. It was many years before I saw my mother again. And then it went blank.

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Her name was Miss Moon and she had a kind face and curling white hair and her voice was soft. She  lived on top of a mountain, the highest point in the Dandenong Ranges overlooking Melbourne in the distant southern haze. Dandenong is an Aborigine word meaning lofty ranges; temperate rainforest breathing dripping wet and thick with the scent of eucalyptus and  giant tree fern gullies filled with whip birds, kookaburra, murders of crows, lyre birds, and sometimes the thump of  wallaby thrashing through the undergrowth snapping the dry twigs.

Miss May Moon lived right on top of this lofty range overlooking the Silvan Dam which was nestled in the valley below, silvern because it glistened and changed with the colors of the sky. Her house had a stone chimney which she built herself and on cold nights she lit a fire there. Out back, under the trees was a simple wooden shed we called a sleep-out, with wire screens to welcome the cool forest breeze. I slept there sometimes for my afternoon nap and remember rows of sea shells on the timber frame and the birds and the hiss of the forest.

Miss Moon ran a kindergarten. At night, by the fire, she encouraged me to draw. I was deeply depressed and there are reports of chronic sadness and crying spells I don’t remember. But I think its important to try to understand one’s beginnings. Some look to the stars and some to prayer and others  to wisps of smoke and broken sticks to tell them the way. 

The other woman was my Aunt Linda. Her blue eyes crinkled and smiled and she called me “Love”. She was not a relation by blood. She was English and settled in Australia after the war. Portraits of her and my Uncle in his Australian Air Force uniform, show a fair English maiden with film star good looks standing with her new husband.  They took me into their family of three rambunctious kids and treated me as their own. I was fortunate to experience the unconditional love of two women early in my life but soon my brother and I were introduced  to my father’s beautiful new young bride, our step-mother, and a period of discipline and loneliness ensued.

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My father took a picture of Eleanor. She was an equestrian and he photographed her in riding jompers and boots, jacket and peaked cap. She held the reins and a riding crop with authority and looked down from her horse imperiously like in a Hollywood movie.

One humid evening at our childhood home at Portsea by the sea as a thunderstorm gathered, Eleanor sent me to my room and as lightening cracked and thundered she entered with a riding crop and whipped me across my thighs and I screamed in pain, fear and hatred as the stinging thwack flashed white hot and the thunder roared. A constant dark memory that took years to forget and forgive. This is where Sigmund Freud should enter but I don’t have the time for that. But I did forgive. At least I think I did. 

I began school in a sandstone one room school house set amongst pine trees and olive drab Australian Tee tree. The teacher’s name was Mr. Wilson and his breath smelt bad. Soon afterwards we moved to Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs and to a Church of England Boys grammar school.

Boarding school is about time tables, peas and queues. And its about labels, sowing them on socks and underwear and everything else or else.  You sleep in cots in rows down the wall, an arm’s length apart. Each dorm has a captain with the authority to thrash your exposed buttocks with a heavy-soled Dunlop tennis shoe. It leaves blue welts printed clearly in  flesh for all to see in the shower room next morning. 

School was out at three-thirty and by four we’d be togged up and usually on the track. Dinner was at six-thirty. We lined up outside the dining room in our gray school uniforms, short pants, suspenders and long socks, v-neck sweater, formal white shirt and navy blue and white striped tie  waiting for the open the door and then we filed in and stood behind our chairs and awaited the House Master’s signal for prayerful grace: 

“Thank you for the food we are about to receive 

May the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.” 

And the chairs scrapped on the worn wood floor and a buzz of conversation filled the room. 

The masters sat at their own table formally attired in flowing black gowns. Table captains kept a loose kind of order. Sometimes we were put “on silence” or made to stand on our chair for long periods, or worse, sent to the corner and told to report to the House master with possibility of corporal punishment. A thick leather strap, doubled. 

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My parents kept an apartment in Melbourne where they ran a home construction business specializing in farm homes with wide shady verandahs and ten-thousand gallon water tanks and slow combustion wood stoves for cooking. A duo of wiry carpenters with a caravan, a tent and tools and tucker, their food, lived on site for three months and built the house from the ground up with muscle and blood and sweat and bone with hand tools. This was the Australian bush on the edge of the Outback. 

On these trips my parents stoped at country pubs in faraway places to have a counter lunch; sausages, steak and fresh lamb chops, listen and laugh well into the night. And sometimes we’d go too, my two brothers and I. The distances were vast and the road stretched out and kagaroos and emus  and great flocks of cockatoos rose in white clouds from the eucalyptus  trees. 

Once monthly came border’s weekend And when they rolled around we were ready for Portsea. Portsea was our home. A place of warmth, sea and sunlight in the long summer and in the gray winter days, the smell of the fire at night. When the wind blew and it stormed and I lay in my bed I could hear the surf and it must have been a mile away. 

Portsea was located at the bottom of the Australian continent. It has a wild desolate coastline beaten by the great southern ocean and howling winds that twist the sinewy tee tree with long slivers of gray and silver peeling bark into scraggly, humanoid shapes. At the end of a peninsula, there are two beaches. The leeward side quiet and serene, sandy, yellow and sandstone cliffs like the coastline of Greece.

On the other side of the peninsula is the Ocean Beach where you can see ships arriving and departing the heads of Port Philip Bay. In summer the crowds came to enjoy the magnificent rocky coastline, wide beaches and rolling surf.

In the 1920’s Portsea was a retreat far from Melbourne and the weathy built magnificent sand stone homes on spacious estates with flag poles. Because it was so far from the city and the automobile was not yet popular, few people ventured there and so until the 1960’s it was a quiet seaside village. My father bought property here in those early days. He drove to Portsea in the roaring twenties and roared as loud as anyone with wine, women and song. 

My step mother was younger than my father by almost twenty years and they enjoyed a busy and well lubricated social life. She trained as an architect, blond, tall, svelte and smart. She was tough and could drink most men under the table and drive home three hundred miles in her Alfa Romeo to serve breakfast if necessary.

One day at school my younger brother and I were called to the headmaster’s study. Our father had been killed in a car accident. I was sixteen. That was the end of boarding school and now Eleanor showed her mettle. She held things together, ran the business and now attended to three boys until graduation. 

After school days and some sporting success I grew restless with the mediocrity and aimlessness of my life. I did not attend university but struck out into the world.

By now my step mother had taken up with an Adman - he owned his own small agency, drove a British racing green Bristol two door and he told me to forget journalism and get into the ad business - more money, more fun.  

And so when I left school I entered the working world knocking on the doors of Melbourne advertising agencies. I cold-called many, usually received an audience and sometimes helpful advice and support. There was something creative, hip and edgy about advertising in those days. David Ogivly’s book On Advertising introduced a moral core and fresh new vision to the business.  It was required reading for young students like me.

My first two years were spent training at a small reputable agency run by a former British RAF pilot. He dressed in tweeds, sported a lush mustache and with his pipe clenched in his teeth, drove a stately Humber sedan and parked it carefully in the back lot each day beside my mini-cooper. The office was located on the edge of East Melbourne in an eighteenth century, four-story terrace house converted to offices. 

I worked my way through the agency from the print and production department where we handled the art work and dispatched it to typesetters, photography studios, printers. There were lots of files, old advertising tear sheets and pictures and blocks, mats and stereos, the nuts and bolts of printing in those days.

We worked hard under deadline pressures with the artists and the account executives who delivered the jobs and instructions. They were an amiable lot, émigré artists from England, smart and funny and supportive, we worked as a team and Robert Hughes and Associates got me off to a good start in the business.

At lunch time it was usual to go to a nearby city pub for a counter lunch, steak, fish, lamb with a couple of beers and then back to work. And on Friday nights there would be a regular session at the pub where you could rub shoulders with the senior guys at the office and usually drink too much.

My father told me when I was young to doubt unless I experienced it first hand and so I was a skeptic from an early age which I think serves well for a wannabe journalist. I was destined to act out many of my dreams, fantasies and desires in my life. Fools walk in where angels fear to tread and my healing witch told me I lived a mytho-poetic life.

One of my early mentors was a rotund, urbane West Indian photographer and he told me you stopped being an amateur the day you got your first check.

Well I got that first check from the BBC – I took my Bolex camera to cover a tribal war; bows, arrows and spears and burning grass huts in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. I sent 100 feet of 16-millimeter film in a package with written script, air express, to the BBC, London and they ran it. 

And they sent me a check.  The dye was cast. I realized that I could subsidize my life with the tools of journalism. 

Looking back, the common theme seems to be one of exploring the evil that men do that lives after them while the good is oft entered in their bones. I have tried to understand history by speaking as closely as I could to the source, the eye-witness. I was not a war correspondent nor hired-gun, I was a

reporter.