John Stapleton
A certain rubbing familiarity with the public face of Australia’s leaders was just one of the byproducts of a career as a working journalist. As a single father on the morning shift, in their younger years I would often have to take the kids along on early assignments; a child care issue I tried to avoid mentioning to the news desk.
My children had met Prime Minister Paul Keating’s successor John Howard at Sydney Airport; where by then the talk of Islamic terrorists and the fall of the Twin Towers was making everyone nervous.
Uncharacteristically, Howard was more or less hiding behind a wall of security officers as he waited to play his part in the triumphant return of the Australian Cricket Team; conquering heroes.
At an official breakfast later Howard congratulated the team on a “stunning performance” and said “you’ve warmed the cockles of the hearts of those who see cricket as the greatest game that the world has ever seen, and a game at which Australia are unsurpassed as world champions”.
The kids, then about ten and 11, probably weren’t quite sure who they were meeting, but got his autograph; which they proudly took to school to show off.
But teaching, in Australia at least, is a predominantly left wing profession; and the hated Howard, who was seen as having taken an axe to funding for the public school system, was not someone the teachers wanted their students to admire.
My kids were never impressed by the fact they had a journalist as a father until some of their friends started to comment that they had seen me on the front page of the newspaper.
While not very impressed at meeting John Howard, they were very excited when they came out to the airport one morning for the arrival of the American singer Fergie of Black Eyed Peas fame.
It had all begun a very long time ago.
Later, as a general news reporter, I wrote about pyromaniac kids who set alight forests, threatening lives and homes. The flames of the bush fires, the young people’s disgrace, the public’s condemnation, I reported all these things dutifully – straight up and down.
But I always wondered about the kids, who of course weren’t about to come forward to defend their actions or reveal their motivations.
The greatest moments of my childhood had all involved conflagration, burning fields, fire jumping from palm tree to palm tree down steep valleys, endangered houses. The beltings were worth the sight of those leaping flames.
As a child The Great Books of the Western World, an impressive 54 volume set produced by the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica, lined the shelf of my tiny bedroom, looming over the narrow bed with the weight of the ages, of Homer’s rosy fingered dawns. I read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, I tried to get my head around Socrates and Plato, I ploughed through swags of the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. There was Tolstoy and Thucydides, all the greats. At age 14 I read everything I could, thought it was important to know all there was to know.
It was all a tad overwhelming. Certainly a shift from The Magic Far Away Tree or Swallows and Amazons and those classic children’s series by Enid Blyton, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven.
Outside the demonic rustling of the gum trees was fundamentally disturbing. Head buried constantly in books, anything to escape the torture of the present, I decided to adopt the sacred role of observer.
My earliest attempts to put pen to paper involved strings of apocalyptic images. I wrote lengthy poems about lines of condemned souls snaking down mythical steps and through mystical buildings, waiting to be judged by a merciless God. Despair written on their faces, the condemned just kept on coming, in their hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious emanating from those about to face their final judgment. I wrote about them all the time.
Elsewhere, Beatlemania, a kind of fervent joy, was sweeping the world. Up there where my family lived on a then fairly remote hill surrounded by the gum trees’ writhing white limbs, we were preparing for the Second Coming, for Christ to rescue us from the wickedness the long-haired Beatles represented.
That was the way I grew up, cowering in a remote, unsafe place, waiting for the tides of licentiousness that were sweeping the world to get to us, to threaten our goodness.
There were always ideas, sentences forming in the head. Nobody to know.
Rescue me, rescue me, my thoughts hammered. This is not my life. This is not where I’m meant to be. I felt wrong in my school uniform and wrong in my body and most certainly wrong in that terrible place; waiting for life to happen, waiting for an opportunity to escape. I argued with everybody.
As the awkwardness of adolescence progressed, so did my strangeness. There was a public speaking competition at the school; and the winners from the school would then go on to the regions, and then the state. The theme was hobbies.
Keen to succeed, I decided to be more ambitious than just repeating a previously successful e ort on collecting stamps and do something closer to my heart. I prepared a speech on learning shorthand and typing, and how while it could be a hobby these skills would also be incredibly useful in later life. Prior to the computer generation, it was virtually unheard of in Australia for a man to be able to type. There was a baffled, uncomprehending look on the audience’s faces, my sneering peers. The teachers marked me poorly.
My advocacy for the acquisition of shorthand and typing skills marked me even more firmly as truly weird; and I paid the price in the school yard. I stayed very quiet for months afterwards, playing games to see how many days I could go without speaking a single word. Silence became my only true friend. Then at home I would be beaten for refusing to speak, and the cycle of pain would start up once again. I didn’t want to say anything at all. My parents would grow more frantic as the days passed and I remained wordless: not a good morning, not a good night, no answer to how was your day at school, no apology, nothing.
They had beaten me into silence, and now they didn’t know what to do; so they beat me again, demanding that I speak. I didn’t speak, I swallowed the tears and retreated still further into a cathedral of my own making, full of echoes and shadows and unsuspected doings; but at least a place that was safe, a place they couldn’t get to.
The first stir, if you could call it that, I created with anything I wrote was when we were asked to do a short story for English in High School. The piece was about a young man who changed out of his school uniform after school on Fridays and didn’t come back until Mondays, being dropped back home by older men in cars after a weekend of strange and wild parties where the protagonist was the youngest person there.
It may or may not have been a flowering of early talent, but the Deputy Principal promptly called me into his office, wanting to know if there was anything I would like to talk about. “No,” I told him. The Deputy sternly stated that the story was very disturbing indeed and if I ever wrote anything like it again I would be caned.
After considerable disturbances to other people when my father put a private detective on to me, I walked off down the road at the first legal age possible. I left behind volumes of juvenilia in boxes in the basement of my father’s double story work shed. They were thrown out with the rubbish.
Sydney’s red light district is known as King’s Cross. Having grown up in an apocalyptic religion, it really did feel as if we were living at the end of days. Everything was coming to a close. With a certain theatricality, I thought I was literally sacrificing myself on the Cross.
The bar at the centre of the group of miscreants and wild young men I hung around with was called The Bottoms Up Bar, part of the Rex Hotel.
Anyone who entered there had already travelled far. They had left normal bourgeois society, decent suburban lives and the meat and potatoes of working life.
It was the era of the grand queen, before clones and masculinity, t-shirts and muscles and moustaches, came into fashion. This was a time when anyone who declared themselves gay, or undecided, had already shouted in the face of convention, defied all community standards, entered into bestiality, abnormality, eternal corruption, damnation.
At times their own self-loathing decorated everything they did. “Not well, dear,” was a standard greeting as they flapped their wrists and died inside.
I drank and I drank, sitting in corners watching the passing parade. The Rex Hotel is no longer there. In its place are modern apartments and offices. The adjacent park has been paved and planted with palms. There are no longer shadowy corners suggesting criminal intent, lurking and mischief.
In my dreams slime coated the bar’s walls and filtered into my writing, into my soul. Tendrils of an evil, alien lichen hung down from the ceiling. The stained walls reeked of some sort of dysfunctional evil, the byproduct of the corruption leaking from the pores of the drinkers.
I drank enough for the bar to slowly make sense, the lowering walls, the cackled laughter, the disease that spread everywhere. As the nights turned to blackout and I sank into the oblivion I so desperately sought, then the tendrils turned into human hands pleading for attention. I worshipped at the knees of corrupt saints. Later the bar became the centre of a science fiction novel; the hundreds of pages stuck all over the walls of an inner-city terrace as I struggled to formulate the meandering plot.
There were always two sides to every story; and this was equally true of mine.
While I often drank heavily during long nights when I forgot to sleep; there was a second person who rented a cheap room and studied earnestly by correspondence in an attempt to finish high school.
I was furiously completing essay assignments, reading all the course material, liaising with invisible teachers. But there was no classroom. There were no classmates. There was much more work involved than if I had just been a normal student, another teenager at home. Instead I was on my own, in a tiny room the private hotel’s manager rented cheaply because it was next to the incinerator.
Precocious enough, at 16, I was the youngest member of the Australian Society of Authors and would eagerly attend their meetings.
The then already old Sydney writer Dal Stivens, a small, curious man who had written about some of the same parts of the city I wanted to write about, took a liking to me. Sometimes I would see him standing alone near the giant Coca Cola sign in Kings Cross, an area he had described in some of his books. We would stand and talk and watch the scene together.
At 16 I also got a job as a copy boy at The Daily Telegraph, on the midnight to dawn shift.
Digital was yet to arrive. The stories from abroad spewed constantly on long streams of paper from the teletype machines. I read or struggled to make sense of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and James Joyce’s Ulysses while listening to their clatter through the long nights.
We had to be on good terms with the cleaning staff, because if they didn’t like you and you fell asleep, they would leave you there to be found by the day staff. And you would end up getting sacked for sleeping on the job.
Copy boys, as was made pretty clear, were at the bottom of the pecking order.
David McNicholl, a big walrus of a man, was then The Daily Telegraph’s Deputy Editor.
I was thoroughly frightened of him. Each evening I had to take the tear offs of the overseas stories into him in batches. Later, in those Sydney twists of incident, his son, also called David McNicholl but better known as DD, would become a colleague on the country’s national newspaper The Australian.
The first time I encountered DD Junior was after a plane, which had been on a flight to Norfolk Island, crash landed in Sydney’s Botany Bay.
While there were no casualties, the incident was unusual enough to attract the attention of the city’s media.
The fact that The Australian, then the opposition, had a reporter on the flight was not lost on the rest of the media. As the major story of the day, it was a stroke of journalistic good fortune. But then the McNicholls had seen quite a lot of good fortune courtesy of the media, DD Senior being close to Frank Packer, then the Telegraph’s owner and one of Australia’s richest men.
DD Junior, having grown up in a journalistic dynasty, was accustomed to the demands of the media and generously gave the gathered pack all the blow by blow quotes we needed. As he talked, he posed cheerfully, draped in a blanket, in front of the ditched plane; making for perfect pictures.
I couldn’t believe how almost identical DD was in appearance to the father I had been so terrified of as a copy kid all those years before.