Chapter Four

The hazardous bush

ON A BRIGHT spring morning in November 1969, just after 7.00am, 48-year-old Mildred Williams woke up in her musty East Bentleigh home. Her husband, Ronald — who was not usually awake at this hour — was not asleep next to her. She called out for him. Five minutes went past, and she called out again. Mildred pulled herself out of bed, still in her nightdress, and walked around the house. She must have looked in every room twice before finally deciding to venture outside. She called out when she first walked out the back door, and then again when she reached the clothesline halfway up the yard. She headed over to the garage, which was closed up, opened the side door, and found Ron with his back to her, perfectly still, hanging from a steel rafter, his feet a metre off the ground.

In 1942, my grandfather — Ronald Arthur Williams, already married and the father of two children — decided he would enrol in the army. He was signed to the 58/59th Battalion, which fought against the Japanese in New Guinea. He had never been to battle before, and had never left the country. He arrived in New Guinea in October of that year. Two years later, he had some kind of mental breakdown amid the gunfire and the mud and the rain. He was medically discharged with a diagnosis of ‘war neurosis’ in 1944.

He returned home to Melbourne, where he had six more children — my father was a twin and the second youngest — and they all lived in that cramped, grotty, dark timber-board home in East Bentleigh. Nanna Mildred was an illegal bookie; Pop made sawdust, and sold it to butchers. Dad remembers his father waking up in the middle of the night, screaming over and over that the Japanese were coming. At other times, Pop had waking nightmares where he believed he was still in the war; he would hide in closets and under the bed, as if under attack. When these waking nightmares lasted more than a week, he was put in a mental institution. He seemed to get worse as he got older.

Nobody in my family knows exactly what Pop did in that war. All the older siblings have since died — one from suicide — and so nobody is alive to tell me what he was like before he went to war. A little while ago, I started looking around for a book to read to find out more about the New Guinea war. Many have similar-sounding titles: Hell’s Battlefield by Phillip Bradley, The Hard Slog by Karl James, Bastard of a Place by Peter Brune. Eventually I settled on The Toughest Fighting in the World, a book by Australian journalist George Johnson, who was embedded with Australian troops in New Guinea throughout the war. From this book, I would learn that Pop moved from the oak-lined suburbs and often chilly winds of inner Melbourne to the terrible mountains, constant rain, mud, malaria, water snakes, crocodile-infested waters, kamikaze attacks, and sniper’s nests of the war. Men would return from mission back to main camp unshaven, with sunken cheeks. When Australians were killed, it was usually right in front of their war mates, sometimes in their arms, and sometimes gradually, after incurring mortal, slow-burn wounds in rugged, remote areas where help could not reach them. Johnson recalls the ‘whining drone of Japanese aircraft ... the whistle of bombs descending through the humid blackness of the night, the sullen thunder of high explosive falling around the waterfront’. This was a place where a walk through the jungle — while water-logged, covered in mud, and carrying a heavy backpack — would frequently attract gunfire from an unknown source; each step could be your or your mate’s last.

As a child, I knew nothing of this war. I spent hours and hours in a battle-fantasy world in the backyard with toy guns and swords. In my childlike fantasies of war, battles didn’t come to an end because you were throwing up, or you’d sprained your ankle, or because you’d started hallucinating, or you couldn’t stop crying. When things got awful in my war, it was all the more exciting. I always did something heroic to save the day. The battle scenes — as they no doubt were for many other kids playing out these epic fantasies — were movie-like, all encompassing and awesome. To my mind, war was a barrel of monkeys, which both gave me a sense of power and reinforced my idea that the world — even in chaos — flowed with moral righteousness.

Dad was sixteen when his father died. He has nothing positive to say about his upbringing. He recalls the filth of the place most of all: once, when they were cooking a roast, he discovered that a rat was cooking alongside the leg of mutton on the oven’s floor. He remembers that all the children slept in the same bed, that he had no shoes or socks, that his feet were cold in the winter. He remembers not being able to read or write at school, and how the teachers called him stupid. When Pop died, Dad still hadn’t been taught how to read or write. He had already left school, and was working in a piggery. He worked with a knife mainly. He cut deep into the skin, through tendon and muscle, with power and precision. He sometimes came home with his all-white work uniform splattered with dark-red pig blood. It smelt like off roast pork. He looked like an axe-murderer, but was as friendly — in substance and style — as Crocodile Dundee. He was muscular, tattooed, gentle, hard working, insular, and, at times, inconsolably angry at the world.

‘The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises,’ wrote the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900. He would go on to say:

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Drawing on the work of eighteenth-century German romantic philosophers, enlightenment-era science, Platonic theory, medieval thinkers, and ancient Hindu texts — and after decades of work — Freud gradually pieced together and popularised a theory that there was more to the mind and to what makes us human than that of which we are consciously aware. Freud believed that there is an unconscious part of the mind that contains our instincts, and thus many of our behaviours, thoughts, and feelings cannot be consciously controlled. Freud saw this part of the mind as also containing memories that had been forgotten but could be recalled, and a place that stored socially unacceptable wishes and desires, trauma, and pain.

Around 1910, Freud’s student — the debonair Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung — added another layer to Freud’s theory of the mind: the idea of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the collective unconscious is not formed by experience, but inherited. This universal, human psychic structure, Jung said, is much like Freud’s notion of ‘instincts’, but it exists in a series of archetypes, symbols, and myths. These innate projections, this readiness to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols, is why, according to Jung, children fantasise so much: because they haven’t had enough experience to temper their connection to this metaphysical world. Jung believed there were certain archetypal events: marriage, initiation, birth, death, and the separation from parents. He also believed there were archetypal figures — hero, trickster, great mother, great father, child, and devil — as well as archetypal motifs such as deluge, creation, and the apocalypse.

Jung believed it was our culture, history, and personal context that shape these archetypes, thereby giving them their particular shape and form. He also described something called ‘The Shadow’, which can be both a repressed aspect of ourselves that we don’t like or can’t deal with, or, in some cases, the entirety of our unconscious mind.

Take it or leave it. Indeed, many leave it, and don’t buy into Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, although it’s an interesting lens through which to view what I am about to tell you.

‘It’s fourteen-hundred hours, the subject is inside, all men in their positions, on the ready for when I say “attack”,’ the general said over a CB radio, from inside his station wagon. He wasn’t in uniform, but he was a military man nonetheless, with a rugged face. ‘I’ll stay put, out the front. You men wait around the corner.’

The general’s troops were in cars, strategically scattered around the house of Cassie, a 19-year-old philosophy student. She lived in a wooden Belgrave Heights shack, amid giant mountain gums, and cottages with wind chimes that were — on this grey July day in 1999 — deadly still.

If you flew a helicopter low over the area, you would see Cassie’s tin roof, the general’s station wagon parked out of the front, another car across the road, two at either end of the street, two behind the property adjoining, and half-a-dozen others in various strategic exit points in the neighbourhood. They were utes, mainly. All were linked up with a radio, and some were so eager for the attack on ‘The Subject’ they were revving their cars in excitement. Some had guns for backup, though this would probably be unnecessary. These were big blokes who played football; a couple of them had military training.

‘I wanna get him now, boss,’ one said, slapping his hand on the steering wheel. ‘Can’t we just run on in there?’

‘Don’t worry,’ the general said. ‘His time will come; he will feel the pain. We just need to be patient, strategic — wait for him to fall into the trap.’

Cassie had been the one to call them in. The ‘Subject’ was her guest. The ‘Subject’ was, in fact, me. There was nothing I could do, sitting in Cassie’s lounge room amid her art-history and feminism books, on a still, grim mountain day, waiting, just waiting — knowing all the cars were building up outside.

Cassie had misinterpreted a story I had told her the night before: although I was gay, when I was six I had experimented sexually with my 7-year-old female next-door neighbour. Cassie was incredulous, explaining to me — partly through her mad-cutlery eyes, pupils swimming like furious teacups on little spinning plates — the high number of girls who were sexually assaulted in their most vulnerable years, and that men like me were the ones responsible for it.

You should have seen her face that day: with its furious expression, and her long, messy pink hair, she looked like a homicidal troll doll. Although she was having doubts about whether to go ahead with the murder — she looked unsure and guilty — in the end she concluded: ‘You have to feel the pain.’

And again: ‘You have to feel the pain.’

My God, she must have said it a dozen times over.

And then, when I picked up the phone to call my parents, she took the receiver out of my hand and said, ‘That’s not a good idea, Luke.’

I was just waiting and waiting for one of the men to burst through the door.

Kill yourself, Luke, do it. Kill yourself, it’s the only way out, I began to think.

At one stage, she disappeared into the bedroom. I was lying on a mattress in the lounge room, staring up at the layer upon layer of clouds through the windows. There was a strange haze floating in the winter afternoon as the mist set in, and I was struck with a sudden feeling of déjà vu. I felt as defenceless and uncertain as if I were in a dream, my darkest intuitions and fantasies about the world materialising.

I picked up the biggest knife from the kitchen I could find. I walked to the toilet, and locked the door. I pulled the knife across my wrist with full force. It burned, hurting more than I anticipated, like stabbing myself with twenty pins at once. I removed the knife — shit! It had left only the slightest graze. Cassie’s big cooking knife was as blunt as a broom handle, and hadn’t left a single drop of blood.

Seeing Cassie reappear, I dashed out the back door, slippery as a cat, ducking for cover between her and her housemate’s cars as I moved down the driveway. I was heading for my parents’ house, about a four-hour walk away.

I passed daffodils and oak trees, and made my way to the bottom of the driveway. The general was no longer there. WTF? Run, run.

I snuck around Cassie’s car and popped my head over the bonnet to catch a glimpse. Where were they?

I ran up a little-known mud footpath that went between two properties. But they must have somehow realised that I was leaving, because when I got around the corner, there were two utes parked on the street. I tried to make my way through the most deceiving, most rarely used, residential street. But somehow they knew I was going that way. I noticed a panel van parked outside a house. There were more of them. More parked down the next street, and then a few driving down an adjoining road.

My God, I thought, there must be dozens of them.

It was their military training; they had every corner covered. They had brought together every person who hated me, and every person who would hate me if they knew me.

I decided to walk and stay in public until I reached my parents’ house. I couldn’t think of anybody to call except for the ladies in the local general store. They loved me; we would always have a chat. If I could get in there and ask them if I could hide in there, they could call the police.

The store was on a main road; it was something between a milk bar and a supermarket, dusky and poorly lit, with just three aisles. I went straight to the counter, but there was nobody there, so I hid behind the biscuit display at the end of aisle two.

I waited another five minutes. Where were they? I banged on the back door: ‘Please help me, please — they’re trying to kill me.’ There was no answer. Were these women dead? I had never known that shop to be unattended, let alone for this long. Perhaps they’d also turned on me. Then a panel van turned up out the front, and there was no place to hide. I ran for it.

I ran for five minutes until I reached a house, the last house before the highway, and still a good 15-kilometre walk to my parent’s house. It was a highway full of mysterious rolling hills, rickety, dry, rough bushland, kangaroo road-kill, Victoria’s second-biggest reservoir (which was fenced off by barbed wire and surrounded by pine trees), and empty farms. It was a highway that usually roared with yobbos and rednecks, and was, on that day, filled with hundreds of cars from the military-trained gang.

I banged on the door, screaming for them to help me, screaming that I needed to call the police. There was no answer, and this was, I concluded, because they were dead. By now, word had spread around the region, and thousands of men were excited by the prospect of my slow, violent, well-deserved death, and they all wanted to join in. Every car along the highway was part of the gang, and even though none had stopped, they were driving past because they were gathering around the next corner. One would eventually stop, I was sure, and drag me in.

At first the road was straight and narrow, and then I turned left onto a road that wound through desolate hills. I walked to the rhythm of stones crunching under my foot, waiting to meet the void and the masters of the void. One kilometre … two kilometres … three … I could feel the impervious rhythm of nature … four kilometres, and I was like the antelope chased by lions, or the witch burned at the stake. The mob continued to drive past, thundering past at 120 kilometres per hour with little restraint. They were driving straight from the heart; they were doing the right thing; I had to feel the pain. This was a finite road with a finite destination. I started wheezing. Five kilometres now, and what’s three hours when soon there will be no time left at all?

By now it had become a dark winter’s night. I was walking past the reservoir when a car pulled up behind me.

They have been tormenting me all this time, I thought.

A girl’s voice came from the car.

‘Hey Luke, wanna lift?’

It was a girl from high school.

I got in the car: ‘Jesus Christ, Claire, fucking help me. Thank God. Drive. Look out — bullets.’

‘Um, Luke, are you on drugs?’

‘Yes, I had some speed last night, but that’s not important. Just drive, drive.’

She drove me to my parents’ house. I was screaming at them that people were trying to kill me.

‘Cars!’ I said. ‘All the cars down Wellington Road, they’re all part of the gang.’

‘But how do you know they weren’t just cars on the road?’ Mum asked, leaning into me with a meaningful look

Oh.

Oh my.

Right.

I then went on to talk about the ‘speed’ I had taken the night before.

Oh dear. Revelation — I shouldn’t have done that either.

I’d had some kind of episode. And now my parents knew I took drugs, and that I had had a psychotic episode and, fuck, how embarrassing.

I rang Cassie, who was extremely upset. ‘How could you have just walked out on me like that, after everything we talked about—’

‘What did we talk about?’ I asked.

‘I was telling you for hours about how sensitive I am to rejection,’ she said. ‘You just sat there, and then repeated the same question over and over again.’

‘What question was that?’

‘Is the door green? You wouldn’t stop asking me whether the door was green.’

I asked my mum to ring a doctor so I could take some Valium, but she said, ‘I think you’ve taken enough drugs for one night, don’t you?’

The next day she took me to a drug counsellor, who said the experience was probably the result of smoking cannabis and using amphetamines. She called the psych ward, who told her they didn’t need to come. I told her she was young, stupid, and unhelpful, and left after five minutes.

When I got home, I rang Beck, who immediately passed me to the perfect counsel — her new jailbird boyfriend, Nick, who had a minor history of drug-induced psychosis himself.

I told him the story.

‘Brother, there’s one thing I’ve always noticed about you. You watch way too-fucking-many movies’ he said, before ascending into a deep, wheezy laugh. ‘Even your nut-job fantasies are as unimaginative as some bad Hollywood thriller.’

Touché, Nicholas, touché.

There are two things I know now that nobody told me at the time. First, I had experienced a drug-induced psychosis. Second, I hadn’t actually taken ‘speed’ — I had been taking meth instead.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, from around 1996, drug cooks — and soon many others — discovered that they could make much stronger gear using pseudoephedrine from cold-and-flu tablets; they had runners working for them, who would go from chemist to chemist to buy multiple packets. By adding pseudoephedrine to the process, these cooks were making powdered methamphetamine, and not amphetamine sulphate. While there is no evidence that any crystal meth was being made here (unlike in the US) Rebecca McKetin from ANU has told me that, ‘By 1999, in most states, over 95 per cent of amphetamine powder seized when people were arrested for possession and trafficking was actually meth.’

Bit by bit, meth — coming in from China, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines via the post, hidden in footbaths and kids toys — was superseding heroin. Bikies here were upping the ante, and making stronger formulas. This all means that when I first starting taking ‘speed’ in 1998, it is highly likely that I was among the first few thousand people in Australia to take meth. This is probably because after high school I gravitated toward a group of intravenous drug users, who are usually the first in the chain to get the latest drugs.

So it’s fair to say — for whatever reason — that my dream of becoming a reclusive, intellectual psychologist hadn’t come to fruition by the time I was nineteen. In fact, perhaps it never was my destiny to be a therapist — I mean, I can’t imagine too many people wanting to discuss their problems with somebody whose only advice is ‘Please tell the general to go easy on me’.

Dreams still fascinate me, however, and there are three that I have had over and over since I was a teenager.

The first is the feeling of first looking at something, then being curious about it, and then being stuck inside it (like, say, watching a television and then being trapped in it). I find I am in an extremely confined space, and I know that I am going to be stuck there — in terrifyingly cramped contortions — until I die. A psychiatrist told me this likely represented birth trauma; my mum did tell me that she had an extremely long, difficult birth, and that I wasn’t too happy about having to face the world.

The second recurring dream is that I am on some kind of building structure that seems to move around and change. When I look around, I realise I am on the top of something and at risk of falling off. I try to hang on, but the structure keeps changing shape. I eventually get exhausted trying to hang on, and decide to let myself fall. I enjoy the exhilaration of falling, though I know I will die when I hit the ground, and I always wake up just before I do.

The third and most common recurring dream is one where I am back in the Emerald house I lived in as a teenager, and I am trying to work out what has happened to all the bush in our backyard, and trying to work out ways to replace it, or let it grow back.

Let me provide a bit of context here: while we were living in a small timber house in a neighbouring town, my dad took over managing the piggery he had worked in most of his adult life. The amount of money coming into our household grew exponentially, and so we moved to a big house, twice the size of the old one, on four acres. It was 30 square metres, and looked even bigger because it was thin and long. It had a white roof, colonial windows, three living areas, and four bedrooms. There were floral curtains in nearly every room. The place was heavily alarmed, and every room had movement sensors in it The house sat half-way up a big hill; for Dad, it was also an entire world away from his childhood of roasted rats, empty stomachs, beatings, grime, and the disempowering shame that went along with those things. Dad used to be so ashamed of his origins that, one day, when one of Mum’s friends was coming over with her husband, who worked in a bank, Dad wanted to leave the house. He was worried the man would think he was stupid because he worked in an abattoir. He had eventually taught himself how to read, and Mum had taught him how to write. Now he was managing director of his own business — they’d turned the business around, and now made millions of dollars in revenue.

The new house was surrounded by a ratty collection of grasses, ferns, banksias, and little bush-plants that grew white flowers. It certainly wasn’t the lush, wet rainforest. From a distance it was a mess, but when I walked Daisy through it, it was surprisingly diverse, with lots of interesting nooks and crannies. It was so dense you couldn’t see far ahead of you, and it gave the impression that the yard went on forever when we sat down among it.

Scared by how close the Ash Wednesday bushfires had come to our first house, Mum and Dad went quickly to work, and got the local fire brigade to burn off all the undergrowth on the property. Mum also regarded the undergrowth as ‘untidy’. I didn’t want my parents to burn down the scrub, though. I knew — for instance — that it was full of lizards, and 13-year-old me felt particularly sad that they would all fry to death just before Christmas.

I have since had hundreds of dreams about attempting to replant this space. In some dreams, even the remaining eucalypts were gone and replaced by pine trees, with barren ground; in others, everything had been levelled by modest and monotonous portable classrooms. Something had been destroyed and not allowed to grow back; other things weren’t allowed to grow at all, or looked unnatural in that setting. In my dreams, I had all sorts of ideas — and subsequent regrets — about setting it all right again. Other times I have that dream, the entire house has been overgrown by the bush, but I am no longer living there. The people inside look at me with confused horror; I am wondering why I never left.

Just before we moved into this house, my parents sent me to a (relatively cheap) private Christian high school, instead of to the local public school in Emerald. I was always getting into trouble there, mainly for not doing any work and for yelling at the teachers. I failed every single subject except phys. ed. in Year 8. We had some strict, old-fashioned teachers at that school — one in particular never let us utter a single word in class. One day, with a water balloon in hand, I walked into a class he was teaching, threw it into the fan, and then ran down the hall, giggling ecstatically. Another day I stood up and told our keyboarding teacher she was a ‘stupid fucking bitch’. I was eventually expelled in Year 9 after — on the way to a school camp, and in the middle of nowhere — I stole a bunch of chocolate Big Ms and threw them at a house. A teacher saw me, and as I was already on my last legs there, I was expelled. I was then sent to the local public school.

During my time at the private school, I had tried to climb the social ladder and break in with the popular boys. They were at first a bit iffy with me, and I didn’t always get invited to parties. At one party I went to, though, I got really drunk — I was soon able to outdrink most people — and did all sorts of silly things, such as putting baked-beans tins in the fire, and squirting people with tomato-sauce bottles. From then on, I was in.

I am not sure why I was such a little shit when I was that age. I really just wanted to entertain myself and make people laugh. My school counsellor said it was a combination of ‘boredom and low self-esteem’. My mum said I ‘lacked self-control’. Indeed, the ‘self’ was all-important to my family back then — my parents thrived in the new capitalism. Appearance was reality back then, and reality was composed of what we imagined others might be thinking of us.

Mum said she remembers going for drives, away from her alcoholic, abusive household in housing-commission East Malvern, to the big houses around Chadstone Shopping Centre, and daydreaming about how elegant, proper, and peaceful life must have been inside them. She loved the new house; when we moved in, she didn’t really need to work. She never really cooked, and we had a cleaner. She spent ten to sixteen hours a day on the computer, playing solitaire. We had no family get-togethers, no traditions, not even a bookshelf; we each had our lounge area, and we never ate dinner together. I no longer had neighbours to run around with. But I did get an expensive tutor who my parents spent thousands of dollars on and many hours driving me into the inner suburb of Camberwell to see each week. This woman — Gillian — was a massive help, without a doubt, and introduced me to books and ideas and writing. She was a psychologist, too, just like I wanted to be.

Mum was often very upset by the things I did. For example, one day she asked me to make her coffee after I got home from school and I said no, because she hadn’t been doing anything all day. The next day she told me that I was a horrible person and that this made her cry; she looked at me as if I had thrown her out on the street with no money and nowhere to go. She cried a lot back then. She cried when she and Dad went through months without speaking. She cried for months on end when we found Daisy on the back porch, her jaw in an awkward position, having died of old age when we weren’t home.

After the bushes were burnt down, I could see the portable classrooms of my new school from the back fence. From my lounge room, I could see my classmates waiting for home group in the morning. They were hard to miss — they all had bright-red windcheaters on, which we had to wear with blue trousers and Blundstone boots.

This was the school that was preparing tomorrow’s labourers, tradies, and small-time crims — ‘access to excellence’ was its motto.

My ‘friends’ were always quick to acknowledge my presence once I got over the fence.

‘Luke the disgusting faggot is here.’

‘Poofter, poofter, cock-sucker,’ and so on.

Every morning for three years.

This was the dawn of a new era in my life — I would know now what it was like to be the lowest-ranking male. To use the metaphor of a diseased tree, the problem was that I was blossoming into an adult that some considered to be threatening to the population; an adult that needed to be cut down, turned into sawdust, and buried in a hole to ensure it didn’t spread weakness, perversion, and infection. I am, in fact, talking here about the life of a gay teenager in post-AIDS 1990s country Australia.

Mind you, I didn’t even see myself as being gay at the time. The trouble had its origins in grade five, before anybody knew what gay was. I had earned a reputation for being able to make guys ejaculate using my hands. Every second guy in my grade was shown this magic trick. Years later, when we all figured what this meant, not a single person came and patted my back in the gym change-rooms and said, ‘You gave good hand jobs for one so young, do you want to come to a party on Saturday night?’ Rather, it was seen as transgressive and abject — an act of faggotry — and suddenly, like magic, I had no friends: a dangerous proposition at a working-class bush school, where boys liked to start wars.

‘Hi, Luke’ wasn’t something I heard very much in those formative years: the years in which it’s generally considered healthy and necessary for a person to have a peer group, which is the first step in a natural and incremental flight from the nest. But I did hear plenty of other things, in high-pitched whiny voices from the grotty little shits at our nondescript public school filled with eucalypts, portable classrooms, and the petty criminals of tomorrow. Every lunchtime and recess I heard myself called a ‘cock-licker’, a ‘poo-pusher’, a ‘girly-boy’, and a ‘faggot’ because I ran on my toes. For the sake of variety, a group of boys would often call ‘poof-poof-poof’ to emulate the sound of a chicken as I walked — quite ingenious, really, and quite remarkable the extent of cruelty’s entertainment value. Perhaps more amazing was how many derogatory words there were for a boy who liked boys — and how just one of these words could leave the target feeling utterly isolated and defenceless

Here are some of the other highlights:

One morning in Year 9, I found my two best friends amid the sea of red jumpers and the rotten, salty scent of cheap canteen noodles. I had known Leigh and Todd for six years by this stage. They had come to every one of my birthdays, and me theirs. They were an old reliable pair — smart and sensible without being stuffy, low maintenance, and generally pretty easy company. On this morning, they were both sitting in silence, staring ahead, when I put my pencil case down next to one of Leigh’s. Without raising his eyes to look at me, Leigh knocked my case to the floor. When I went to put the pencil case back on the table, he picked it up and threw it across the room. A few snickers echoed around the room — though, for the most part, nobody really seemed to be paying attention.

‘Don’t sit next to us, poofter,’ Todd said. When I picked up my pencil case and placed it next to a group of boys down the other end, they said, ‘Yeah, don’t sit next to us either’, and my pencil case once again made its way to the floor.

Once the ‘populars’ deserted me, the middle-ranking males joined, then the lower-ranking boys, and finally even the lower-ranking girls joined in, on occasion, with choice impersonations of my voice taken straight out of 1980s Hollywood depictions of limp-wristed, constantly horny gays.

One day, I was standing in line during phys. ed. when I felt a thud on my back. I turned around to see the offending basketball bouncing away, and a kid with muscular dystrophy explaining, ‘I fucking hate faggots’. I stood there confused, shocked, and horrified as I saw the boy, barely able to stand up from his neurological condition, looking at me as if I was the biggest turd nature had ever produced.

There was one particular group of no less than 15 strapping young lads who lived on farms in the backend district who loved to torment me, and at least half-a-dozen smaller packs who joined in. I was not only without allies — I was a late bloomer, one of the smallest in my year level by height and frame. Defence was futile, attack was unthinkable, and dobbing them in would have just made it worse.

Seeking even greater thrills, their attacks became more theatrical. Sneak attacks were the favourite. One day, I was standing outside a classroom when I felt a strong push in the back, and ‘thud’ — I went straight into a metal pole upholding the corrugated-iron roof. I turned around to see a little bully henchman with spiky, light-brown hair and a small neck, his glowing grin slowly becoming a light cackle.

‘Look at how red his face gets! Fuck, I could do this every day, just to see how red your faggot face gets,’ the henchman said.

Funny indeed. The fact that I had red hair, glasses, braces, and acne — the fact that I was one ugly little bastard — probably just added to the comedic display. Unsurprisingly, those watching laughed raucously; others not privy to the group tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help cracking a smile. These were human kids tormenting a disgusting little insect caught in a jar, fascinated by the reactions to their own cruelty. Had it not been me getting thrown into metal poles, perhaps even I would have quietly cracked a smile about how ridiculous it all looked; helpless creatures can react in quite spectacularly pathetic ways when they are attacked.

Teachers often loved the spectacle as well. I never got along well with teachers — though I was often scared to say ‘boo’ at the new school, when I did act up, I made sure it hit its mark, and the teachers responded with even greater force. One day, I was taken into an office where three middle-aged male teachers took turns in telling me what an awful student I was. I had accused one teacher of being negligent, and refused another when she told me to stop scratching my nuts in class. One told me I would be better off leaving school ‘because your work is so crap’, and another said, ‘I would say most of the staff room hates you, and if I was ask three-quarters of the people in your level, they would say the same thing. Yet you sit here, high and mighty and sanctimonious, like you never do anything wrong.’ This went on for about half an hour until tears fell down my cheeks, and the three sat around me, glowing with self-satisfaction at how, despite my ‘big mouth’, I now didn’t ‘have anything to say’. About six months after this, I’d left my school bag in a classroom and when I went back to retrieve it, the male teacher whispered under his breath, and then said very sarcastically, ‘Sorry, I’m homophobic’, at which a group of students broke out in hearty laughter. The same teacher had taught me English in Year 9, and announced halfway through the term, ‘It doesn’t matter how your good work is, I am not giving you an A.’

There comes a point when you must draw on your reserves to get through things.

Remembering what a war-hungry little shit I was, I decided that I could wage war without any close allies. Why not? I had nothing to lose.

Then came my idea. I listed the seven people who had picked on me the most, and asked people to sign a petition that said, ‘If you don’t like X, Y, and Z, please sign here and give your reason.’ The petition was my attempt to not only enlist a few allies, but to also shame the perpetrators. I had managed to collect dirt on all seven of them over the years — girls who had rejected them, abusive fathers, physical deformities, etc. — all of which were stated on the petition. I collected 80 signatures, and I put copies all over the school. When three of them saw me with a couple of surveys, they snatched them out of my hand. The no-neck henchman said, ‘We’ve got the muscle-power and the evidence — you’re fucked.’ The second he finished his sentence, I punched him straight in the face. The other two joined in to help him, and kept throwing punches. After about thirty seconds, a teacher came over and broke it up.

By this stage, I was growing into my body, and doing athletics training nearly every day. I became enraged, yelling that they had ‘shit for brains’, and that it would take ‘less than an hour to get another 80 signatures’ and that they ‘should just mind their own fucking business from now on’. The bullies were incredulous; they rang me at home threatening to stab me, and lined up along my fence. I shouted, ‘There’s fuck-all you can do about it — I have 80 people backing me up now.’

A week after everything died down, thanks to some stern words from the school headmaster, I got another phone call: ‘I’m one of those guys you’ve been writing all that shit about. You’re not going to get away with this. You better watch your back; you won’t get away with this. One day, one day, maybe years and years after school, there’ll be a massive gang of us, and we’ll get you and your family, too,’ he said.

But I had gotten away with it. Despite this victory, I left school, and finished it by correspondence. Academic and sporting achievements followed. I had my first real group of friends in a long while. I officially came out as gay.

Although my parents responded reasonably well to my coming out — both said they didn’t really mind — my relationship with them was becoming increasingly difficult. They told me they didn’t want to think about me having sex. Dad said he thought it was just a phase. I had only ever heard him mention gay people twice; both times were to say that they ‘made him sick’. When I caught crabs, Mum yelled at me about having a responsible sex life. Dad wanted me to move out. My sister had already moved out, and was estranged from the family after a bad fight with Mum.

Mum had particular difficulties with the fact that I now dressed in op-shop clothes and had friends. She would call me when I was at a friend’s house, crying and demanding I come home. When I came home, I had to take off my op-shop clothes and dress myself in the surf clothes I used to wear when I was fourteen. Eventually, she said I wasn’t allowed to dress in the clothes I’d bought for myself in the house, and I had to keep them at a friend’s place.

One terrible fight led to my mum throwing me out of the house. I hadn’t finished Year 12 at the time. I had nowhere to stay and no money. I begged a friend to let me stay with him, and I stole all my food. Determined to survive with flair, I dressed up as a ‘person with a disability’ — complete with neck brace and op shop clothes — stole a raffle book, and went door-knocking, asking for money for the ‘U/21 disabled hockey team to compete in the upcoming national championships in Canberra’.

By this stage, while I was selling stolen raffle tickets in order to eat, my parents had taken advantage of a new tax-incentive scheme called negative gearing, and now owned three properties. Then I got a call from my tutor who told me, ‘Your mother is not well at the moment. She needs to go the doctor and get herself put on medication. You probably need to stay away until she gets better.’

After a couple of weeks, my mum rang and apologised, and I moved back home. I kept going with Year 12, but then halfway through — out of nowhere — things started to change. I felt tired, unmotivated, and sulky. I didn’t want to leave the house. I felt a strange sense of dread and disaster every time I did go out. I had started spending time with a group of gay guys who lived in Prahran, but over time I found them more and more confident, good-looking, and intimidating, and eventually I cut my ties with them. Once I got my marks halfway through the year, I realised they would be enough to get me into an Arts degree at La Trobe University, and after that I did the bare minimum, including during exams, where I walked out after the minimum one-hour time.

Often, the onset for serious mental illness — such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia — occurs at about the age of seventeen or eighteen. Until then, the individual might be weird, or misbehaved, or withdrawn, or normal. My uncle Gary didn’t develop schizophrenia until he experienced acute work stress at the age of thirty-five. But when he was seventeen, he spent a period of about two years hardly speaking, not socialising, and just sitting in his room. It was possible I had caught the family disease. I had certainly caught one sort of family disease — an obsession with appearances. Every time I saw myself in the mirror, I saw nothing but the world’s ugliest person, and assumed that everybody saw the same — and then they saw a faggot.

By the time I finished high school, I had trouble leaving my room under any circumstances. When I did, high-pitched alarms went off inside my head, and a prickly little echidna spun around slowly in my stomach. I was at the point of having to drum up the courage even to go my local shopping centre. Once I walked through the bushland next to my house to the bus stop across the road. I took a deep breath that soon turned into rushed panting, and walked back through the bushland and into my house, where I didn’t leave my room for another couple of weeks. I was spooked by the slightest noise. I watched TV all day, and smoked in my room. I read Smash Hits magazine, and spent hours with my headphones on, imagining I was a pop star — as if I were thirteen again.

A few months later, I started my philosophy degree at La Trobe, in Melbourne’s outer-northern suburbs. I missed the first two weeks of the course because of ‘my friend, the echidna’. When I finally made it to campus, I left a lecture to hide in the toilets for a good hour, before catching the bus and going back home. My room became both a refuge and a scene of minor carnage. I shaved uneven patches out of my hair and dyed it green. I started cutting myself with a kitchen knife, and, at one stage, I had three piercings under my lip.

Eventually, I met the town’s hippies with their makeshift homes, their tepees, and was introduced to their magic herbs, tea-tree cleaning products, and all-night Shamanic shindigs in the bush. I adored their healthy eating, near-asexuality, and earthy liberalism. A few of the women invited me along to my first-ever rave. These events, held deep in the forest, were a wonderful mixture of counter-culture, individualism, and archetypal tribalism — I felt as if I had found my tribe. I do wonder now if I would have liked it so much were it not for the drugs — at my first rave, I tried my first ecstasy. So while I salvaged the year and managed to get out of my room, there was a caveat on my newfound freedom: I couldn’t go out without first taking so much ecstasy that I lost sense of who I was and where I was going.

I tried ‘speed’ one night in mid-1998, when we couldn’t get any E. I didn’t get as ‘off chops’ on the white powder, but I rather liked the fact that it gave me confidence without turning me into a blubbering mess. Many of my friends used syringes, which seemed exciting and edgy. I was very curious, but the hippie women were reluctant to show me how to do it because they said I had ‘addictive tendencies’. However, after a few months of my nagging, they gave me my first intravenous shot of amphetamines in a glittery station wagon — which the owner called her ‘unicorn’ — outside a converted mansion nightclub in St Kilda.

So I guess it went like this: the amphetamines gave me confidence and, even more than that, a window into an idealised, transcendental reality — which, for all I thought at the time, was actually a mystical parallel reality. At the start of 1999, just before my nineteenth birthday, I popped the ecstasy pill to end all ecstasy pills at an outdoor bush doof at a place inappropriately named Mount Disappointment. The world took on a wonderfully cartoonish flavour as I thought, This is how I always wanted life to be. This led me on a voyage to rediscover that high, and when other ecstasy pills didn’t do the trick, I turned again to needles. I claimed study allowance from Centrelink — even though I never went to uni — and with the proceeds I pumped my veins full of ‘speed’: monthly, then weekly, then during the week. I eventually stopped going out to raves and dance parties, and just stayed home and took drugs instead. This went on for a good twelve months; I was a ‘pleasure glutton’, besotted by the broom that swept all the dread away. It was like alchemy, like magic — who wouldn’t want that?

According to Jung, one of the most universal and universally misunderstood archetypes is Mercurius — aka the Roman god, Mercury — known for his speed and mobility. In the ancient art of alchemy, the Earth’s three principle substances were mercury, sulphur, and salt — in fact, the Sanskrit word for alchemy is Rasavātam, which means ‘the way of mercury’. Jung saw Mercurius as the essence of the unconscious. He also believed that Mercurius was the ‘trickster’ archetype — a shape-shifter who could change gender and meanings, who was ambiguous, paradoxical, and duplicitous. A destroyer, Mercurius is also volatile, meaningful, and difficult to contain. According to Jung, it is only through Mercurius that we can see the fullness of our psyche, including evil.

The more I injected ‘speed’, the more the meanings of things started to change and to take on a sinister turn. I would be having a rapid-fire conversation with someone, and everything they said would sound as if it had a deliberate, sly, tricky, persecutory double meaning. Language, at times, totally disintegrated. I would take odd words out of somebody’s sentences when they were talking, and I would think they were directed at me. Somebody might mention ‘underwear’, and I would think they had caught me masturbating. Or somebody would be talking about a guy they hated called ‘Pete’, and I would think they were passive-aggressively telling me in code what they hated about me. Most of the time I would be able to find my way in the conversation and realise I was being paranoid. But then came a day, after a year or more of building up, when I couldn’t snap out of it at Cassie’s — where it felt as if the apocalypse had come. Mercurius was, perhaps, riding around with me that day. In doing so, it revealed a painful, dark shadow.

After my psychotic breakdown, the clouds seemed to clear — it was as if a cyst had been burst open, and I could start to live again. The anxiety eased. I went back to uni. The shadow had come into light. The psychosis had proved a creative starting point. Things were starting to change — both for me, and in another part of the world ...

In the rugged, remote, wildlife-rich mountains covering a corner of Burma (now Myanmar), Laos, and Thailand, the monsoon rains hadn’t come for three years. Amid the hills was an area that was more or less controlled by a renegade ethnic gathering called the United Wa State Army. The military wing of a fringe Burmese political group formed after the collapse of the Burmese Communist Party in 1989, the army took control of the land bordering Thailand, as well as the region’s opium poppy fields. In 1997, South-East Asia still accounted for well over half of the world’s opium production. As the new millennium came, the drought was broken, and was followed by abnormal flooding and frost in Burma.

It would prove to be the drought before the storm in more ways that one. Drugs were the main source of the army’s income, and they began searching for alternatives.