BACK IN TIME

Earth Hour is coming up; the one time in the year when Sydney and other parts of Australia turn their lights off for an hour.

The sight of skyscrapers, their normal columns of light reflecting on to the harbour vanishing in an instant, is a subject of fascination for Sydney-siders.

It’s all to save the planet; a by-product of the now rapidly declining hysteria over global warming.

He remained at Buddha’s birthplace, Lumbini in Nepal.

As the Buddha or his own head promptly answered when he did his little three bows ritual in one of the oldest temples on the site, “You have already been blessed. You just don’t know it. Have a great day.”

And that was that.

Outside a sign implored devotees to be heedful amongst the heedless, awake amongst the blind, to be like a swift horse leaving behind an old nag.

Another instructed devotees to be mindful, heedful, to guard against heedlessness.

He had been entirely heedless; but that was another story.

If those in the West so busy saving the planet by turning their lights off for one hour once a year wanted to know what life would be like without electricity all they had to do was be where he was. All you had to do to witness a way of life barely changed in thousands of years was to walk to the end of the main street of Lumbini, where you enter an entirely agrarian culture.

The power in Nepal, intermittent at best, can go off for 24 hours at a time. Within a day of the power going off people's mobile phones are starting to die and the backup batteries in guesthouses catering to foreigners begin to die.

Much of the population doesn't even have that luxury. There are few television sets because there's little point when the power is only on intermittently, often in the early hours of the morning.

The only sign of habitation in many of the houses at night is a little pin prick of light from a single burning candle. There is no such thing as a washing machine. Women wash clothes at the nearest hand operated water pump; and no such thing as a heater, with again mostly women spending their days patting together straw and cow dung for fires. There's no such thing as refrigeration either; no cold beers; no frozen meat. A goat is killed, dissected and sold all within the same day; with buckets of water used to chase away the flies crawling over the flesh in the markets. There are almost no street lights; no pumping discos, electronic versions of music; or anything else.

Very unhappy looking chooks huddle underneath the bench of one of the shops, waiting to be slaughtered. They are killed, de-feathered, gutted, and sold all within a matter of hours.

There is almost no private transport and often the only sign that the last two centuries ever happened is the rubber wheels on some of straw laden carts. 

There are no computers either.

Far from playing computer games, children spend hours playing simple games such as spinning tops in the street or hanging out with each among the goats and water buffalo in the fields.

Without the constant materialism of television many of the people on bikes or walking long distances appear not to know the joys of civilisation they are missing and have the nerve to look happy!

But would many of those advocating Earth Hour be willing to abandon their televisions, washing machines and smart phones?

Would they be happy living in a town without street lights?

A Cracking Pace

The white lilies in the man made wetlands were opening as the mist rose off the artificial wetlands. A line of 100 or more monks in their orange-brown robes walked single file along the far edge, to the gate of Buddha’s birthplace. They kept up a rhythmic beat on the drums they were carrying.

At the gates to the World Heritage site a group of Chinese devotees in grey robes proceeded to place five and ten rupee notes in each of the monk’s begging bowls.

“Make your life a garland of beautiful deeds,” read one of the small blue and white signs quoting the Buddha.

The signs were posted throughout the compound.

On either side of the dirt track stretched the Sacred Gardens; densely planted.

The public toilets stank, even here.

As the sun struck the wetlands and the half open water lilies mist rose off the water’s surface; drifting like film set smoke.

Hose down the asphalt; make everything look brighter, lighter, better than it actually was.

In the previous days he and the heir had been seemingly everywhere.

They sat for hours in companionable silence on an arced bridge over the canal which was one of the central constructions in the Buddha precinct.

Two large speed boats which looked they belonged in an old James Bond movie ferried German tourists up and back the length of the canal.

From where they sat they could see the entire wide esplanade on either side of the canal.

“Not many people,” the heir commented. The sun was setting. There was one sole person walking along the stained brick walk; a testament to greater hopes and better times.

Around the area hundreds of houses were marked with one distinctive theme: pillars of concrete with their iron support struts poking out the top.

Building had ground to an almost complete stop.

One day they visited the old Hindu temple where Buddha’s father used to pray – more than 2600 years ago.

A fig tree had grown over the tiny temple; its roots intertwining with the old bricks.

Inside was dark, reverence for something he could not see.

Among the elephant statues set outside its front were two statues of some demonic hell dog, or mythical creature of old, pushing themselves into present from the dark.

They had just been to the local museum, a rundown affair which cost foreigners about 10 cents to enter.

He stared at bowls and fragments from the 2^nd to the 8^th Century BC, all of which had been found from excavations in the local area. Outside a group of men lounged around, doing apparently nothing. They certainly weren’t taking care of the grounds, which were rundown and over-run. Scattered through the museum compound were little structures housing remnants from the nearby palace where Buddha grew up. Some of them had been broken open, most of them were still intact, their locks rusting.

If Buddha had been an untouchable rather than of noble birth would anyone have followed him?

There are flocks of sheep and goats being herded along dusty tracks. More than a third of Nepal’s population is under the age of 15. He’d given up protesting when they called him grandfather. He had given up protesting about the moniker. While he came from a family whose members often lived to be a 100, here he had already reached what they saw as an impossibly ancient age. Old man, old man. Drunk in a small café, the heir leaned over and kissed the cheek of a villager who, although clearly used to such attention, promptly roused on him for the public display. He laughed. The sun was rising into the sky; and all was well again.

Nepalese Peace Pagoda 

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

A play on the book title The Places In Between, how clever of you darling, he thought wryly as he sat in the Chinese run guesthouse where each morning he took advantage of the their efficiency and their internet to get some work done.

Now, as so often, he was waiting for the electricity to come on. No computer Sir. No power. Low backup.

Sometimes he sat in a half built café on the opposite side of Buddha Park. It was being guarded by the heir and other unexplained relatives. He watched sheep being herded down the dusty road; and asked where they were going. Muslims, came the response.

Here everything was about Buddha. Buddha Laundry. Buddha Phones. Buddha Air. Buddha Digitial Photo Edit Shop.

Back at his own guesthouse, a quarter of the price but without the facilities, a group of 40 Nepali pilgrims had arrived previous evening, turning the place into a crowded venue.

The electricity was off, as usual, but there was a dilapidated bus parked in the forecourt, and people everywhere. Some of them were preparing to sleep on the roof of the bus. The heir held him by the arm outside the gates and said, clasping his other hand over his heart: “I love you but I have another.”

“I know,” he responded, smiling.

Lines from other stories kept breaking through; an “Aek Aek” amongst the cry of the crows as they rose through the startled trees.

Here in Nepal, close to the Indian border, old women still smoked, their wrinkled faces peering out at the world through the sheaves of their traditional costumes.

Always, always, there was another way out.

“I deceive very much.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

But old stories worming through head were just that, old, and while some things might need to be worked through and resolved in his ancient brain; there was much about the passage of time to distort the harshest of memories.

“Their assets should be stripped as the proceeds of crime, Scumbags in Black Mercs. Good name for a band, Scumbags In Black Mercs. Lowlife.”

Lines like these went crawling through his brain, through the enveloping heat.

Every time he looked back he just shuddered.

The tasteless, cruel, vindictive, ruthless, genuinely unpleasant people he had left back in Bangkok were no doubt going about their own sunny days; ripping off more sucker tourists, preparing for an evening of fun and intrigue.

The cruelest hoax, the most damaging lies. They hadn’t cared how low they stooped; as long as they got him. But they were playing to the wrong audience. They were playing to each other.

Manipulating public opinion is easy, ask any propagandist.

Particularly when that public is uneducated, untraveled and willing to believe the worst about the foreigners they despise.

Here, in Buddha’s birthplace, there hadn’t been time for the hatred to develop. Children still beamed at him in the street, greeting him with a cheeky “Namaste, how are you?”

Outside the white building slung over the stone marking the spot where Buddha was born and the ruins of an old temple which surrounded it, in the Sacred Gardens, a sign quoted the Buddha. Hatred cannot be healed with hatred. It can only be healed with love.

By the time he and the heir reached the Nepali Peace Pagoda the pink water lilies in the outlying pond had already closed up their flowers for the night.

The bush and the forest were changing colour, the sun already below the horizon, the cries of the monkeys starting up. Time for a bedtime story. Once upon a time there had been a thing called hope…

Once upon a time he hadn’t cared what happened, as in, shoot me now. Suicide by police. It was a phrase familiar to every Western officer; it was part of their training. In Thailand they were too stupid, too set on their own vendettas, to know or care.

Now, almost two months later, he was the one who cared. After circumnavigating the giant pagoda three times he returned to where the heir was waiting beside the lily pond.

Now he cared. He watched a flock of crows rising through the trees.

The heir pointed out a golden carp.

Now he cared.

But he would never forget.

In The Days To Come

Picture of farmland surrounding Lumbini courtesy of the Silken Road Group

Imagine life without electricity.

Well that was exactly what it was like.

Thrown back 500 years.

No running water. No electricity.

Cheap passions forsaken.

“I loved you so much,” he thought, looking out of the unlit café into a dark street.

There were no street lights.

No mechanical sound.

Even the phrase, “I loved you so much”, was delivered at no one in particular.

Or at everyone he had ever known.

His present company, heir to an estate no one was prepared to give up, hid his good looks behind ugly dark rimmed glasses.

Whenever they sat opposite each other in an unlit café he would reach over and take them off, declaring: “You are more handsome without them.”

It wasn’t long before the currently poverty stricken heir was taking them off each time they entered one of the tiny, mud brick houses where tea and cigarettes were sold.

And while the heir spoke English, he mumbled, as if he didn’t want anybody to understand what he was saying, exactly as he himself did.

And so he couldn’t help but relate.

And desire.

In Nepali society everybody did, nobody talked.

The rapid rhythm of the thwack thwack thwack he heard every morning, in the “darkest hour before the dawn”, was testament to that.

“There must be teenagers in the house,” he thought when he first heard it.

And sure enough, he caught sight of a shy young woman and a slightly less shy young man the next day. They were clearly happy, clearly delighted with life, with their physical forms; energy seeping from them.

“If I could turn back time,” Cher had sung.

But there wasn’t any way to grow younger by the day.

When he protested at being called grandfather at the local café, they backed down and started calling him “big father”, same same “grandfather”.

“Father”, he insisted, laughing as he departed.

He came from a family with longevity in its genes. If they didn’t live to be 100 they died young.

Outside Buddha’s birthplace there were a number of 20 baht notes in the collection box, confirming what the heir had said, that a number of Thai tourists came here.

But for him the last of Thailand seeped away.

He opened a jar of balm he had bought at a “Seven” in Bangkok, treating a repetitive strain injury from typing and writing too much which had been the source of interminable pain for years.

And he mistakenly tried to pay for something with a one baht coin which had lodged in the bottom of a pocket.

And occasionally, as he looked across the beatific scenes of an agrarian culture, scenes cast from the hyper-capitalism of Bangkok would flicker behind his skull.

But the pain persisted wherever he went, even here. Getting the newspaper he worked for to pay for the treatment of his injury had been a feat, particularly considering that much of his writing had been for other more voluntary pursuits; but once again that particular exercise opened up unlit worlds.

The head of the occupational health and safety unit, no doubt on a better income than a mere newspaper reporter, had been virtually invisible.

What she actually did for her money was a mystery to everyone.

Virtually the only time she would come in on his case was at 4.30 pm on a Friday afternoon, when she would ring to say she would be in her office for the next half hour if he wanted to talk.

With early deadlines for the Saturday edition, most journalists would rather shoot someone than talk to them at that particular time.

Crazy is as crazy does.

He and the heir had already made plans to drive a thousand kilometers into a remote part of East Nepal.

Crazy is as crazy does. Should have died sooner.

But he wasn’t going to die in a motor cycle accident touring Nepal.

His dream of termination, of flying through a car windscreen, had been repeated so often it had taken on the form of destiny.

He wasn’t going to die in a place where his instant friend told him he would be stared at because they had never seen foreigners before; and where, perhaps, another adventure he could not relate to anyone awaited them both. Where the landscape was lyrical beyond the capacity of words. And where, perhaps, he would find salvation of a different kind. Whatever the case, it wasn’t over yet.

The Birthplace of Buddha

Sunset at Lumbini courtesy of Blogspot site Up The Thoughts

THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BUDDHA

There were a thousand reasons to be here; and none at all. He had come to the birthplace of the Buddha on impulse; having listened to a fellow Australian talking about how interesting it was.

They had been sitting by Pokhara Lake as the heat of the day shimmered across the calm, often majestic pond. A few hundred meters to his left the Indian pilgrims continued to queue for the boat ride to the temple in the center of the lake. Time passed.

Within weeks, entirely due to that random conversation, he was sitting in the dusty streets of Lumbini watching a bullock drawn cart laden with straw pass by; the only indication that the last two centuries had occurred being the rubber tyres.

A monkey scampered across the road.

The signage on the café opposite declared: “Rahul Cyber Café: A plateform for Communication.”

They could spell “communication” but not “platform”. Go figure.

Needless to say, he had never seen the Cyber Café open.

The idea that there was actually Wi-Fi there was probably a myth; as mythical as the hot water most Nepalese hotels claimed to have when you were booking in; only to proffer a bevy of excuses as to why just on this one day the hot water could not be found. They had already got your business. They didn’t care.

The most common phrase was: “What can I do?”

As in, “It is a fixed price sir, what can I do?”

Beyond the little cluster of guesthouses, restaurants and shops, at the end of the street in fact, you entered an almost entirely agrarian culture. Boys shepherded little herds of goats. Water buffalo were herded past; the calves clinging close to their mothers. Little mud huts, the housing of the poor, were tidy and well maintained. While in the gutter opposite, they just threw their rubbish.

The children frequently greeted his passing with “Namaste”, hello, as if they didn’t see many tourists walking the streets back here. They probably didn’t. He namaste’d straight back. He knew from hanging around with them for the past six weeks that they took great offence if you didn’t say a simple hello back. They didn’t realise you were besieged; sick of people trying to claw money out of you.    

There wasn’t much hurry to do anything. At the café opposite the Lumbini Village Lodge he had expressed a desire for breakfast but no one had bothered to take his order. The heat of the day was only just beginning to build.

He was yet to see Buddha’s birthplace. He was yet to change hotels from the first one he had dumped in after a long bus ride. After clambering off the bus he followed the first, well the only, tout who greeted him to a nearby hotel. It probably wasn’t the best deal in town; but after an entire day in crowded local buses it would have to do.

He had thought, earlier in the day, that after travelling downhill for so long, that they must be at a low altitude.

Then they started passing through clouds.

The mountain landscapes were spectacular; and he drank them in; having always preferred the mountains to the sea; a reaction to his beachside upbringing perhaps.

But now he was on the hot, dusty plains of India; enlightened souls in the fabric of things; having passed beyond.

It took a day or two to work out the layout of Lumbini.

He had assumed Buddha’s birthplace would be some remote but beautiful village with views of snow capped peaks and spectacular valleys.

Instead it was a small, hot, dusty town on the plains of the subcontinent.

The Indian border was only10 or so kilometers away.

There were local police, army and border police.

Whoever designed the police and military uniforms, artful in their patterned blue, black, and shades of grey, deserved a Nobel Prize for beautification of the planet.

Nepalese men wear their uniforms well.

Outside the compound, if you could call it that, surrounding Buddha’s birthplace was a sign detailing the main proscriptions: do not lie, steal or indulge intoxicants or sexual misconduct.

What could one say?

Money seemed to have dried up almost entirely.

With his instant new friend, just add rupees, they had spent most of the day wandering through the villages surrounding Limbini.

Many of the vistas harked back to a pre-industrial age; or 16^th Century England perhaps.

He watched a farmer make an improvised but nonetheless masterful chillum out of mango leaves.

Opposite a woman crouched on the side of the dirt road patting together cow dung and straw in an age old ritual to provide material for burning.

She patted them together expertly for hours.

Later he watched as a man herded his water buffalo down a narrow track; followed by a line of Buddhist monks in deep burgundy robes.

All was not lost; nor ever would be again.

After the years of surveillance in S.E. Asia and back home; he still suffered occasional waves of paranoia.

Could they really have followed him here? How could they have known he would be sitting under this particular group of flowering mango trees, on this particular isolated farm 10 kilometers from the Indian border?

It was impossible.

He deliberately tuned out the garble in the middle distance.

The heat shimmered across the neat fields of barley.

After the frenzied economic activity of modern Thailand, here there seemed to be almost no money in circulation.

They had to try several different small shops in the villages they passed through before finding someone who could change a 500 rupee note; less than 10 dollars.

Everything seemed cast out of a story book.

Children and adults alike greet him with “Namaste”; in a manner which insisted on a response.

There was always that phrase, “local talent”, to get him over the hump of who and what had gone before.

Small mud huts, with their thatched roofs, was the principal form of housing.

If people had been living in these conditions in the suburbs of Sydney there would have been an outcry.

Here it was just life; the children playing in groups under the trees, the cattle browsing in the fields, the much prized goats staked out in various allotments.

He could have longed for something else, but that was not going to be. No fulfillment coming your way.

The beginning of the sign at the back of Buddha’s birthplace began “Be Vigilant”.

After Thailand, he assumed it would be a warning against pickpockets.

Then he read the sign in full: “Be vigilant. Guard Your Mind Against Negative Thoughts.”

The sun turned to an orange ball as it set below the neighbouring fields.

Some of the pilgrims barely glanced at the stone said to mark the very spot of Buddha’s sudden birth.

Other pilgrims went into an instant rapture at the site of what they had traveled so far to see; pressing their heads in some sort of meditative daze against the gold coated bricks adjacent to the spot.

The queue behind them would grow impatient, pressing up against their rapture.

There was a pocket in the stone said to be his first footstep into the world.

Some of the remnants of old bricks and walls from early temples, similar to those he had seen in so many other places, were 2300 years old.

What amazed him was that the individual born here, the Buddha who had founded one of the world’s great religions, or beliefs, had within a few hundred years of his death been influential enough to have had temples built on the site of his birth.

Unlike those who barely glanced at what they had come to see – what he and the mother of his children had called the Delphi Syndrome after they had travelled one day all the way to the Greek ruins of Delphi; only for her to want to turn around and go straight back to Athens.

While he stood in the old auditoriums and listened to the sounds of applause and laughter from the long dead crowds she had sat, heavily pregnant and pouting, in one of the local cafes near where the buses collected their passengers.

He would always linger in strange places.

Outside the “Buddha Park”, the compound inside which lay not just the World Heritage listed site of his birth, encased in a large white building to protect it against the elements, but numerous temples and then monasteries being built by numerous countries. The Korean monastery was unfinished; and its grey concrete walls were almost materialistic.

The Nepalese had decorated theirs with the all seeing eye.

The German monastery did not look German at all, looked like it didn’t know what it wanted to be. While the substantial Austrian complex, where devotees were able to stay in the rooms and dormitories, looked very Austrian but was actually built by the Swiss.

He had been around the site three times; standing over the birthplace of someone who had changed the planet.

While it was high season in Nepal’s trekking zone, here it was low season.

On the second time round he found himself the only tourist in the building, talking to a green eyed, helpful young soldier who seemed keen to practice his English.

The soldier explained not just the history of what he was looking at; but his own delight at being able to work in a place like this.

It was wrong to have lustful thoughts in a place like this; so instead his admiration for the genius of the designer of the Nepalese military and para-military uniforms deepened.

On his way out of the park monkeys screeched and called to each other in the near dark forest; some sort of primitive bedtime story from our ancestors; "Are you there, are you still there?"

It had all begun a very long time ago

Extract From the Upcoming book Hunting The Famous

Sydney cameramen on the job at the airport

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 bushfires, the young people’s disgrace, the community's hatred and the broader 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 beatings were worth the sight of those leaping flames.

The Great Books, having in later years supplemented Gone With The Wind, lined the shelf of my tiny bedroom, looming over my narrow bed with the weight of the ages, of Homer’s rosy fingered dawns.

Outside the demonic rustling of the gum trees was fundamentally disturbing.  I decided early on I wanted to write. Head buried constantly in books, anything to escape the torture of the present, it came to me as the only thing I could ever be, a seeker after knowledge, struggling to understand the world: to adopt the sacred role of the 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. The condemned just kept on coming, in their hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses.

I wrote about them all the time. Elsewhere, Beatlemania was sweeping the world. Up there where my family lived on that then fairly remote hill surrounded by the rustling of the giant gums and the writhing white of their limbs, we were preparing for the second coming, for Christ to rescue us from the wickedness the Beatles represented.

There were always ideas, sentences forming in my head. That was the way I grew up, cowering in this remote, unsafe place, waiting for the tides of licentiousness that were sweeping the world to get to us, to threaten our goodness.

I withdrew further and further behind multiple screens, my face constantly buried in a book. As a child I had swallowed every single Famous Five and Secret Seven book, every last one of them on the local library shelf. I had read and reread Swallows and Amazons as if it was the Bible, happy kids playing on the edge of a lake far away, happy kids with decent families. They weren't being beaten black and blue, they weren't sitting on park benches, having swallowed so many pills they were waiting to die.

As the awkwardness of adolescence progressed, so did my strangeness. If I wanted to be a writer, knowing shorthand and typing were pre-requisites. 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 effort on collecting stamps and do something closer to my heart. I decided to do 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. But to me it was all part of becoming the person I wanted to be. I stood up in front of the class and delivered the much prepared speech. It went down like a lead balloon. There was a baffled, uncomprehending look on the audience's face, my sneering peers. Even the teachers were unappreciative, marking 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 once again. 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 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; as 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, despite all their battering.

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. I wrote 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; wanted 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.

At 14 I was trying to systematically read all the Great Books. There was Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the Greeks, Aristophanes, all the greats. I read everything, thought it was important to know all there was to know.

After considerable disturbances to other people after 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.

Anyone who entered here had already travelled far. They had already left the normal world, bourgeois society, decent suburban lives and the meat and potatoes working class.

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 shrieked in the face of normal convention, had defied all community standards, had entered into bestiality, abnormality, eternal corruption, eternal 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.

And I drank and I drank, sitting in the corner and watching the passing parade, the little rag tag group of rent boys. Entirely unprofessional, I was particularly successful in terms of cars and apartments. Juliana the bar manager and bar mistress kept a stern eye on all of us. Her tolerance was the only reason we were allowed into this citadel of all that was different, almost literally the only gay bar in town. We were all under age. We were bait.

The Rex Hotel is no longer there. In its place are modern apartments and offices; but still next to it lies the El Alemain fountain. The 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 bi-product of the corruption leaking from the pores of the drinkers.

It was a cruel and negligent evil, made up of the gloating stares of ancient queens, of old hands on young flesh, of stale sheets and stale flesh, and most of all, of lost hope.

In later years in various therapeutic settings I heard other men speak of how much they had suffered in that bar as young teenagers, how truly malignant they regarded it as being, how much they were used, how badly they were abused, how selling their young bodies had destroyed their hearts.

They spoke of the years it had taken them to recover, of the depths they had sunk to, of the drunkenness that had been their only salvation.

But for me it was none of that. I sat there speeding on the cheap high grade amphetamines readily available under the counter from a pharmacist just down the road, drinking the many beers proffered. And laughed as the old gay men queued to buy ever more drinks.

It was my philosophy, if you can drink me under the table I’m yours. As long as the money's right and there’s a bottle of Scotch in the hotel room. The drinks were just foreplay. You had to buy an awful lot of alcohol to counteract the pharmaceutical grade amphetamine of the day.

I drank enough for the bar to slowly make sense, the lowering walls, the cackled laughter, the diseased tendrils that spread everywhere. As the night turned into blackout and I sank into the oblivion I so desperately sought, then the tendrils turned into human hands pleading for attention, longing for love. I worshipped at the knees of corrupt saints, and knew darkness. Later the bar became the centre of a science fiction novel; the hundreds of pages stuck all over the walls of a particular house as I struggled to formulate the meandering plot.

There are 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 attend their meetings with great eagerness.

The old Sydney writer Dal Stivens, an unusual looking 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 in the same parts of Sydney I was fascinated by and which 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 copyboy at the Daily Telegraph, which was then under a different ownership and located in Park Street in the centre of the city’s business district.

In those days the stories from abroad spewed constantly from the teletype machines. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace while listening to their clatter through the long nights.

You 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 the sack 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 twists of incident in Sydney, 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; 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.

HUNTING THE FAMOUS PAUL KEATING

Hunting the Famous will be available on Amazon and at all other major online retailers shortly.
This is an extract.

Paul Keating

Hawke’s successor Paul Keating was an entirely different kettle of fish to Bob.

After a prolonged battle for the leadership the two Labor leaders rarely spoke for a number of years.

Keating, who came to power in 1991, could never see why a lower form of life like Bob Hawke should be top dog when clearly the position belonged to him.

Keating was one of those people where all the mastery is in the fight. They don’t know what to do when they get there.

He was famous for sneering lines like: “You’re nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”

There might be Keating Square and Keating whatever else out in the working class western Sydney seat of Blaxland from whence he came but Keating himself, preening around in two thousand dollar Italian suits, couldn’t wait to get out of  there.

A disciple of multiculturalism partly perhaps because migrants tend to vote Labor en masse, at the very first opportunity Keating escaped from Blaxland to the wealthy white Sydney enclaves of the Eastern suburbs, where his slim form and scathing wit were much admired.

And he could listen to his beloved Mahler without being called a wanker.

While Keating himself never completed High School, leaving at age 16, he had a masterful gift of the gab and held the country’s academics enthralled for years.

At press conferences which should have been preserved for the press some of these said academics would pipe up in squeaky voices with lines like: “Mr Keating, Mr Keating, I’m an academic at Sydney University and I just wanted to say how much I adore everything you do.”

Give us a break.

The rest of us are working.

Idiotically, Keating would go out of his way to insult the Fourth Estate during his speeches and press conferences.

He never worked out that the media were the conduit to the general public and he would be applauded or hung by them; but never ignored.

Keating might have had a wife and four children but we always thought he was gay, and were happy to believe the rumors.

Particularly after his divorce.

Would an ordinary Australian male rip out the floor of a bathroom because the tiles were a quarter of an inch off?

What other Australian male had such well-manicured hands?

We knew a lot about Keating’s private life because we all loved his gracious, charming wife Anita and had spent many long days staked outside her house in the heart of up-market Woollahra when the divorce was announced.

On one such day, feeling sorry for us as we stood shivering in the relentless rain just before Christmas, Anita invited us all in.

She knew perfectly well that at least in my case I already knew the house well. During the long and exacting renovation to its original glory we had often talked our way past the carpenter, plumber, electrician, tiler or whoever to get a shot of progress. A lot of them were naïve enough to let us.

Asking the mother of Keating’s four children about her errant husband and his various alleged bedroom escapades or the reason for the divorce was not something any of us wanted to do. And Anita was not the sort of person to kiss and tell, or take out her grievances in public.

Hard of heart but even harder of hearing, there were days when we just ignored the news desks repeated requests to go and door knock her; huddling miserably inside the company cars as it poured rain day after endless day.

A lot of the photographers were either close to Anita, held her in high esteem or in some cases had even worked with her on various projects after she started going to Arts College.

None of us wanted to hurt her.

A lot of us were happy to hurt Keating, the artful dodger, the great pretender.

But the paper always refused to take a picture of Keating and his alleged boyfriend, although we believed we knew exactly how to do it.

That’s an invasion of someone’s private life, the News Desk protested. We couldn’t do that!

Sure.

These high moral standards are cloaks of convenience which last for just as long as it suits whoever holds the editorial reigns of the day.

Everyone knew how prickly and litigious Keating was; and how much a picture of him and his purported lover would have driven him to attack.

And Keating, who admittedly brought some color and movement to public life, giving some stirring speeches while cutting a stylish figure across the political stage, remained a hero to some people for years after he left office; and thus a protected species.

He wasn’t a hero to the many journalists he had abused, bullied and attempted to intimidate.

My last encounter was pretty much par for the course.

Keating was giving a lecture on governance in one of the conference rooms at Sydney University to an assembly of local government mayors from around the state.

He preened on about how a $90,000 a year salary just wasn’t enough for a local council worker to stand up to the temptations of a developer waving millions.

And he would be happy to talk to anyone who had questions afterwards. He would talk to the media last, he said, because that’s what he thought of us, as beneath contempt.

The rest of the state’s mayors were on a cosy little junket to Sydney; the media had multiple jobs and tight deadlines to deal with. Not that Keating cared.

A little bit like Prince Charles, Keating was often given the opportunity to go on about one of his favourite hobby horses, urban architecture and in his case the glories of Paris and the ugliness of Australian cities.

It was, in a sense, a return to form.

His speech included lines like: “Developers are just brigands who build things”.

I wrote a piece which began with the observation that Keating had lost none of his bile.

The paper compounded my sins by running an editorial expanding on the theme that Keating needed to move on with his life, develop some humility and stop throwing barbs at everyone he regarded as his intellectual inferior, which was just about everybody.

We all thought it pretty funny that Paul Keating would wake up each morning with only one thought in his head: the man he hated most in the world, conservative leader John Howard, was running the country, the job that Keating regarded as rightfully his.

Keating could not understand why the mauling masses had failed to appreciate his brilliance.

He was incensed both by my story and the editorial.

Several days after their publication he rang at about five pm.

Anyone who knows anything about journalism and newspapers knows you do not ring a reporter at five pm.

At that time, every working journalist is on a deadline for the next day’s paper. Yesterday’s story might as well be a lifetime away.

Production takes precedent over all other considerations.

We were told to file by six or the paper would take wire copy or spike the story; didn’t matter what it was or how much time, money and effort had gone into procuring it.

With a national newspaper like The Australian, published at multiple points across a vast country, every minute over the production schedule cost tens of thousands of dollars.

A soft, sibilant, whispery voice came down the line.

“Paul Keating here,” he said.

“Oh Paul, hi,” I answered, surprised, my head immersed in an entirely different place.

“Why did you write such a terrible story about me?”

“It wasn’t a terrible story,” I replied. “It was just a straight news story.”

“It wasn’t a straight story. There were many things incorrect. Let me take you through the points…”

“Paul, you’re notorious for abusing journalists,” I cut in on what sounded like was building to a 20 minute diatribe. “I don’t have time and I don’t have to put up with it. I’m not paid enough.”

I slammed the phone down and went on about my work.

My then micro-managing Chief of Staff, all of two meters away, looked at me quizzically and asked: “Who was that?”

“Paul Keating, he’s always abusing somebody,” I shrugged and then deliberately ignored my boss as well.

I had outlived a number of Chiefs of Staff; some good, some bad, some utterly indifferent. This particular one was at the lower end of the scale. I did my best to destroy his sanity. He did not oblige.

After some frustrations he had given up trying to run the minutiae of my working life, but he wasn’t used to journalists slamming the phone down on former Prime Ministers.

Keating, even more incensed now and with time on his hands, besieged the news desk for days to come, demanding to speak to the Editor in Chief.

Every editor in the country knew what Keating was like; and this one had no desire to deal with him.

The Australian’s Editor in Chief Chris Mitchell dodged Keating for several days before his secretary finally admitted he was actually in his office and put Keating through.

To mollify him, the boss gave Keating the opportunity to say what he wanted in a piece on the Opinion pages.

Everyone who read it had the same reaction: “What?”

The point Keating most wanted to make was that he hadn’t said the council system in Australia was corrupt; what he had said was that it was closely based on the corrupt borough system of the United Kingdom and as a result had many of the same flaws.

The opinion piece began, in classic Keating style, with a high handed insult.

The man who simply could not understand why he was no longer Prime Minister suggested that the only mistake he had made in attending the conference at Sydney University was not to have prepared a press release in advance, so that even the most simple minded of journalists could understand what he was saying.

OK Paul you’ve made your point. What was it you wanted to say exactly?

“You’re nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”

Hold the world in contempt and it will hold you in contempt straight back.