It ought to have been obvious by the middle of high school that the world was a place I would forever be required to solve or reckon with, always having to try just that little bit harder to make sense of it.
Mum had taken me to a shopping centre with a new cinema chain called Readings, so I could see a movie, but the name had thrown both of us into a manic spiral of confusion. Her theory, and increasingly mine as I adopted her concern, went like so: Was this entire chain a series of movie theatres with subtitles for the hearing-impaired? The problem was born in the hollow left by our innate sense that subtitles were for weird families and would ruin the cinematic experience, in this case a viewing of the noted classic Scary Movie 2. As neither of us could work out what the name meant, Mum asked the poor attendant.
‘It says it’s a Readings cinema. Is that with words?’ she asked.
‘Um, yeah, it has words,’ the attendant said.
‘So it has the words that come up under the pictures?’
There was a long and fertile silence, during which several acres of shame could be tilled somewhere in my body.
‘It’s just a normal cinema called Readings. That’s the brand name,’ the attendant said.
And there it was, the simplest of answers, which had never crossed our minds.
As it turned out, the cinema had a policy of not allowing those under fifteen to see MA15+ movies without an adult present, even if those adults had given their permission. Mum began an extended argument over her rights as a parent, which got us nowhere. We ended up going and eating a KFC lunch together instead, which is when part of the chain caught fire. ‘Oh God Rick, they’re going to think it was that crazy woman,’ she said.
All our lives are like this, of course. We are filled with countless little moments that test the borders of our personal universe. Some of us are exposed to them gradually throughout the course of our childhood and adult years, while others are thrust into swarms of them in quick succession.
When it came to her kids, Mum was determined to show us as much as she could. Occasionally, her mother Mary would dip into her own savings to fund a school trip. Which is how, the year after the Readings incident, I ended up in Germany for a month with my language class. When finally shown to my room with my host family, I went in search of a plug with which I could charge my camera, though naturally none of them fitted my Australian appliance. This is effectively a horror movie to a fifteen-year-old nerd.
Several pre-planning evenings held by the teachers at my school had covered off almost every conceivable aspect of the trip and what we would need to do to prepare. But this—buying an adaptor—was considered so basic as to be assumed knowledge. Imagine my surprise when I learned that different continents used entirely distinct power points. It was like waking up to the realisation I had been living in a super-low-key version of The Truman Show.
A few years earlier my family accidentally stumbled onto the idea of vegetarianism in practice, at a barbecue hosted by one of the nurses who had treated my brother for weeks on the burns ward in Brisbane. If we’d had our way we might have learned about it under more comfortable circumstances—perhaps with easy access to a steak. I knew something was wrong when I saw the look of fear in Mum’s eyes, the same look she used to get when we discovered snakes had died and decomposed in our rainwater tanks. Mum separated me from our hosts and shepherded me into a deserted hallway where she leaned in and whispered: ‘They’re vegetarians!’
It was the same tone my father would have used if he’d accidentally wandered into a gay bar. We’d never met any vegetarians before and we were scared. At the age of eight, I wasn’t even entirely sure what one was.
‘What does that mean,’ I asked, conjuring images of a cult from which we would have trouble escaping.
‘There’s no meat! They don’t eat meat!’
The idea that you could be invited to a barbecue without any kind of animal on it was anathema to my family. Springing vegetables-only on the guests was, to our minds, a betrayal. A barbecue that is lying about being a barbecue. You’d be better off covering yourself in lettuce and having a cry in the bath. Mum was surprised, I think, to see so many side dishes and only found out the truth when she innocently inquired: ‘Where’s the meat?’
Alive, apparently.
On the drive home Mum apologised profusely. ‘They said it was a barbecue Rick, a barbecue! How was I supposed to know there wouldn’t be any meat?’
Escaping your parental umwelt is like blasting into space aboard a sputtering rocket ship. It’s an almighty task but one that renders any return trip in new light. You see your old habitat through the prism of everything else, out there. And it’s oh so small.
Your parents prescribe a set of dimensions in which you are to live. They govern the most trivial things and are the foundation for the most meaningful. And one day your parents are gone, superseded by this strange new world in which they are fallible, utterly human creatures. You have seen how the magic trick works.
This book emerged in part because of a silly fight over the meaning of the word ‘elite’, which has become one of those catch-all terms used by reactionaries as a means of cajoling the lower classes into a culture war. This strategy works because there is resentment out there—I’ve felt it most of my life—but not for the reasons those who wield it would have us believe.
There is a palpable sensation that the elites, conservative commentators included, are sniggering at us behind our backs while we suffer degradations of health, education and economic policy. I say we, but by any standard I am now a middle-class man in the body of a poor boy, with a mind in both homes. The mendacity of the reactionaries is in the simple truth that this is all a performance, for them.
The right-leaning big-talkers are as well read and fed and housed as the most liberal academics in the universities. Largely, their concerns about the working class and, when it suits, the poor are proportionate to the leverage they can pry from these people in a theatre of debate that will never include its subjects. The hard left does it too, and my friends from either side of the political spectrum are frequently guilty of seeing those beneath them as scarcely human but useful rhetorical devices. They are the great uncounted who can be marshalled by any speaker clever enough to suddenly, and en masse, provide ballast for an idea.
All the while I see my mother Deb, who fits precisely into no single set of party values. If left alone in a room with a Greens voter, Labor one, moderate and conservative Liberal voter, she would spend a great deal of time figuring out how to escape. It’s not because she doesn’t care about politics. It’s because her trust has been abused by all of the aforementioned at one stage or another.
At the 2016 federal election, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party scored the second-place vote in almost every booth in my mum’s electorate of Wright. One Nation beat the Labor Party in Boonah, Aratula, Peak Crossing, Harrisville and Kalbar. The neighbouring federal electorate of Lockyer recorded the highest One Nation vote in the country and, in the 2017 Queensland election, more than one-third of voters in the state seat of the same name opted for Hanson’s candidate. The party picked up a mid-north Queensland seat on preference flows.
So what?
The Hanson political machine has risen and fallen before, in almost identical circumstances to those it finds itself in today. A persecution complex meets an ideological pyramid scheme, and voters are grist for the mill. Hanson, like those other great reactionary grifters, has assumed the mantle of outsider even though it fits loosely. Her policies fit the flock she claims to represent even less perfectly. But in those moments when I can inhabit the lives of those in my childhood, I understand the compulsion to try another option. The role of outsider is coveted political ground because that is how the country as a modern democracy began, hidden in the backwaters of the globe.
When Captain Arthur Phillip arrived on the First Fleet in 1788, he carried among the ships a collection of prickly pear cuttings, taken from Brazil, in the hopes of setting up a dye industry to rival that of the Spanish. The Aztecs and Mayan people had discovered that drying out and crushing cochineal insects, which feed on the cactus pads, turned them into the greatest colour red the world had ever seen. The dye was crucial to the British Empire because its emissaries’ coats were very, very red and Australia, where officers had been sent to guard a criminal class, was very, very far from home.
The island continent was nothing like the Mother Land at all. This was largely owing to the fact it had been occupied for at least 65 000 years by Aboriginal people and not, say, the British. The animals were weird and at least one of them, the platypus, appeared to be a fake. For the longest time, as the historian and author Robert Hughes noted in his great work The Fatal Shore, colonial watercolourists just couldn’t draw eucalyptus trees properly. No matter how hard they tried, the gums kept looking like oaks and elms. Indeed, this new place could do with a little sprucing up. And who better to do that than the redcoats?
Despite continued efforts to import the familiarity of home, there was still something about this fledgling colonial outpost that bothered the interlopers: How, if at all, could you tell a gentleman from a working-class man? This society, like the one from which the colonists came, needed the practical distinction of class about as much as it needed the rabbit, or tuberculosis. Nevertheless, a version of class is what they got.
In the modern sense, class is something people worry about when they have the time and resources to do so. Australia’s Aboriginal people, who were the first to move onto the continent via land bridges and island hopping in the many tens of millennia before the land saw so much as a bracing cup of tea, had no such class hierarchy. Indigenous tribes were still highly ordered and regulated, but this occurred through the use of complex family structures. Elders passed on knowledge and culture to those who were younger, and extended families were woven together through routine and custom. Each had their place, though possessions never entered into the equation. It made for an efficient survival mechanism—theirs is the oldest continuing culture alive today.
If history has done its job, we should know by now that it sometimes takes an outsider to do what the group never considered possible. The great novels of fiction and records of antiquity are filled with outsiders who crashed through and plenty who never quite did but lived all the same. Dostoyevsky created one of the first modern outsiders in Notes from the Underground. Sartre and Camus perfected the very notion. JD Salinger wrote one of the great literary outsiders in seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield, who railed against the ‘phony’ institutions that kept him in check.
Author Neil Griffiths says that to be an outsider is ‘to feel disconnected from life, from other people. The sight lines of communication always just slightly skewed. Outsiders can be perceptive readers of inmost thoughts, but they slip off surfaces and are awkward on firm ground. It is their unfortunate role to stand against life.’
There is an education in that stand, however. We come with certain skill sets acquired through necessity and the military college that is struggle. Privilege is the absence of contest, which is no doubt comfortable, but it does not create good citizens. It is a social lethargy that promotes, quite silently, the ignorance of any minority experience.
The writer Rebecca Solnit says ‘obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation’ because it makes others ‘unreal’, only to leave the privileged in a wasteland of a world with just themselves in it. In a piece on Donald Trump, she writes: ‘The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.’
Consequence. In our lives, there was always so much consequence. Every day could make or shatter a future. Several decisions could do it on particularly stressful days.
I’ve no desire to romanticise our lives, or those of people who have it even worse. For many there is no time for the pride of consequence in their existence. Every day the battlefield is reset. Many do not make it clear of the struggle to see, from a distance, what they might have gained from it.
And what they might have gained from it is this. Meaning.
Even the smallest success means more because it was made in effort. Solnit talks about privilege as if it were a choose-your-own-adventure book where the reader gets to flick ahead and find the option that works best for the story. There are no dead-ends or obstacles, just the smooth world of choices rendered meaningless by circumstance. Taken in this way, the story means little.
The romantic poets struggled with the concept of the sublime. Emily Dickinson saw it as a place where the ‘soul should stand in awe’ and William Blake called it a ‘fearful mystery’. It is a difficult concept to pin down but the poets viewed the sublime as a combination of natural awe and terror, something so grand that it underscored the pointlessness of human endeavour in a messy and dangerous universe.
These natural forces weren’t conceived as extending to the systems created by men, but they ought to have been. What is anyone to do when up against the forces of inequality and class, family breakdown and the erosion of love as a unifying force? Now there is awe and terror. In this way, the easier pleasures of existence mean less and the difficult ones are more worthy. It is of little consolation to my mum, who has never freed herself from this involuntary parade of difficulty, but in those desperate hours I have tried to remind her what this sacrifice has created.
‘The stories we have, people just wouldn’t believe them,’ she has told me throughout the years. ‘They don’t believe that there are people out there like the Mortons, people who can do what they did to their own family.’ There is a tendency in this country to spurn hard-luck stories. My friend Michael has reduced this to a pithy one-liner: yeah, we’ve all got stuff going on, mate. It is a humorous veneer across the surface of a deeper thought crime: to meditate at length on the forces that keep any of us in place. And yet to do otherwise is to give succour to those same forces, animated from above by the ruling classes.
Taken in isolation, any one of these forces may seem insignificant, like a tumbleweed. The barren plains of my childhood home are filled with tumbleweeds. They’re actually several species of plant with one thing in common: at maturity they die off and detach from the root system and go on a cross-country adventure. The weeds grow in almost perfect balls and are so light and brittle they can be carried vast distances by the wind, all the while bouncing seeds out onto the ground as they go. A single tumbleweed does nothing but spin and move.
Collectively, however, tumbleweeds gather together in spindly stretches as long as the horizon and can bring down fences as if they had never even been there. This is the power of the singular and weak and a handy reminder of what those small indentations can do to minds and bodies over time.
The Australian author Steve Toltz calls the past ‘an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present’. I’ve long struggled with the fatalism that lives in that statement. There can be no doubt about its fundamental truth—if only because time’s arrow runs in one direction and we build the past to get where it is pointing—but it doesn’t have to be terminal.
It has been more than two decades since my immediate family imploded. So much of the intervening years, personally, has been a curious mix of joy and the overwhelming isolation of having survived something that cannot be put into words. The joy, the joy is easy. Every step towards independence and capacity has knocked down one of the walls I put up to protect myself.
In Year 12, because I was in search of something different, me and three friends opened a computer store in Boonah. By the time I’d told Mum what we were doing I’d paid the first month’s rent ($550) on a shopfront, while in my school uniform, and established a relationship with several wholesalers and a courier company. Mum flipped her lid, and with good reason. I mean, it was a remarkably stupid idea. There were already two other computer stores in town run by actual businesspeople. Only one of us had a licence so he became our call-out computer technician. Another member of the laughably loose ‘partnership’ was a 23-year-old stoner who had a penchant for not turning up on time to open the store during school hours.
We mostly used the store as an excuse to play networked computer games late at night. I lived a five-minute walk down the road and would occasionally enlist the help of a mate to lug my desktop computer and screen to the store and back when we didn’t have enough computers to play. Late one night, while we were struggling home with the computer equipment, the local cops pulled over and asked if we were up to anything in particular. I imagine our response was incredibly disappointing.
The joy was trying sushi for the first time on my maiden trip to Sydney when my well-travelled friend Joe Corrigan and I got into a screaming match because I didn’t want to put the raw salmon in my mouth and he wouldn’t rest until I did. It was amazing.
In many ways I think I needed to become a journalist because I knew reporting would teach me about the world I’d been denied as a kid. I might have made more money in law but it would have afforded me precious little in the way of excuses to become involved.
The single best day I’ve had in my job was in late 2015 when I flew into Griffith and drove three hours west to spend a day with the Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan people, just as Mawonga Station was about to be handed back to them. We climbed to the top of a ridge in the open countryside, through the beech trees and dogwood plants, and peered in on ancient rock art and old millstone sites where Aboriginal people ground local seeds to use as aphrodisiacs. The elders told me stories about how they used to take fruit from local farmers, watermelons and all, and throw them into the river so they could walk past the landholders with empty hands, then they’d collect the fruit downstream.
The peculiar ripples of anxiety for an outsider are salved somewhat by days like that. Anxiety that I haven’t done enough, read enough, heard enough. Trauma, like a comet, has a long tail and I have spent my life running to keep in front of it.
It never occurred to me that people, like the self-styled prophets of the everyman in the commentariat, could elect to become an outsider. To be so closed off from the world is not to come close to power and be rebuffed by it. It is a feeling, dragged with you from childhood, that drips through the body like phlegm. This state of otherness is to be trapped in a perspex box in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare. You can see the people milling about, attending to their lives in a thousand different ways, but you cannot reach them. Observation is key but belonging is not an option.
You might be forgiven for thinking this is all about money. That’s what poverty means, right? And it’s true. For all the patronising axioms about money never buying happiness, it does allow for other things that help. It buys time to spend with families, mobility, the uniquely preservative state of having a home to sleep in and knowing that you always will. It can pay for one, two or even nine attempts at drug rehab for your brother if that is what it takes.
That’s why class warfare is such an odious term. It invokes the myth of equality to enlist those who might benefit from a clinical discussion into a pseudo-fight for their place on the ladder. The danger always comes from below and there are always those poorer and more hopelessly resourced underfoot who might constitute a threat. And beneath them? More. It’s turtles all the way down. The trick is in the distraction.
But there is a poverty of culture and access, too. A surplus of the kind of stress that devours from within and eventually damages rationality for good. And there is a poverty of love.
The writer Mary Gaitskill makes a living exploring the ‘chambers of the heart’ that few of us ever gain access to. A revealing profile of the author in The New York Times Magazine by Paul Sehgal shows us her monsters are not the classics of horror but the ones that come from within. ‘Gaitskill’s fiction unfolds in these psychological spaces; she knows that we, unlike plants, don’t always grow toward the light, that sometimes we cannot even be coaxed toward it,’ Sehgal writes.
Part of my diminished childhood was on account of one person who ought to have been able to love me and my brother and sister the way he wanted to, but was, for reasons to do with his own beginnings, entirely unable to. Our father, at least for us, could not be coaxed towards the light.
He stopped writing birthday cards to Lauryn when she turned four. Dad had known her for all of three weeks when he pushed the ejector button. He didn’t see her again until she reached her twenties, and since then scarcely at all. As for Toby and I, for a while we visited him every other school holiday. For that reason, I will never again get on a McCafferty’s bus so long as I am alive, an ambition helped along by the fact they merged with Greyhound in 2004. The trip, depending on what station Dad was managing at the time, could take in excess of twenty hours. I took packets of Chico babies for sustenance and a little pillow you could blow air into. The best roadhouse for food was always at Augathella in Queensland’s far west.
My brother and I were both still in primary school when we made one trip to Tranby Station, via Winton in the state’s central-west. Mum and I had agreed on a code phrase before we left. If I was unhappy or something had gone wrong, I just had to tell her ‘the horses are pretty lovely’ over the phone. I’m not sure what would have happened next. Those plans are for adults and Mum was doing her best to shield me from having to be an adult.
One night during that break, Dad drove us over to a neighbour’s house where he drank himself into a stupor. Toby drove us home along a stretch of highway past road trains while Dad vomited out the passenger window. I thought it was hilarious. Mum did not.
Because the bus trips were unbearable, at the next holidays Dad suggested we fly out because it would be easier, but then he refused to pay for the $800 return fares. Mum asked her own mother for a loan and paid instead, so that we might have more time to spend with Dad.
I haven’t spoken with Dad in almost a decade now. We are Facebook friends though, for what it’s worth. He messaged ‘happy bday Rick’ on two occasions and once, curiously, liked a post I had written about how the agrarian revolution was a mistake that mankind, if it knew what it was getting itself into, would never have made willingly. We are like rocks skipping across a body of water we call time. Each of us carries the energy of the past into the next generation. The slightest perturbations in the throw are magnified and become harder to correct in each subsequent jump. Yet we go on. We work at it.
In the lead-up to Christmas in 2017 I spent eleven days driving through outback Queensland from Longreach through Winton, Barcaldine, Tambo, Windorah and on to Birdsville. It is quite bizarre to return to a part of the country where everybody knows a piece of the Morton story. Every other person knows my father—had cattle on agistment with him, worked with him—and everyone knew my grandfather George. But there was only one character that counted, to my eyes, and that was the emptiness itself.
Australian film often makes the outback the leading actor and you have to breathe it in yourself to understand why. It’s what the poets meant when they talked about the sublime. And it is mine. I might not belong with the people there any more than I belong to the ones in the city, but the red earth is mine. If you stop on the side of the road between two far-flung towns at night and turn off the lights, the evening sky rushes in at you. Light pollution scars the view in the city but out there the access is unfettered. A single man becomes an elite; the sky is his, too.
I remember once sleeping out under the same stars on Mount Howitt Station, on a trampoline, nestled into the crook of my father’s arm. We traced the Southern Cross and I completely failed to see the Big Dipper. Memory is such a cocktail and I have no way of knowing the truth of this, but that felt like the happiest night of my life for so long.
I collected imitations of that love for years, and bundled friends and mentors and great affections into that particular void for decades. Our poverty, in the end, was one I don’t have an answer for. Of course, I still love Dad, but I don’t know why. It is cruel to think that shall remain while the work at loving myself and rebuilding my own confidence continues. The surest thing about my life has always been Mum, the woman who held the earth together like those great cap-rock ranges outside Winton. She is the hero of this piece and she looms in my mind as large and unchanging as the monumental vistas out west.
‘I didn’t do anything, you got yourself out,’ she told me on the phone while I was writing this book. She, this woman of faith, is an atheist when it comes to her own work. She sees wonder and splendour and hope and no hand of the maker involved. But of course it was Mum who steadied me and then set my life in motion. What feels like eons have passed now and I wonder if she could have known the outcome of her alien mythology: boy enters world, mother sees boy as special, tells him he was sent here from that big night sky by beings unknown to report back on what he sees. She invented the aliens because she couldn’t see herself as the protagonist. She outsourced the explanation for her own success as a mother to the aliens out there. And here we are—I’m ready to reveal my findings.
It was her. It was always Deb.
What could have been different? Everything and nothing. What should have been different? Not us. We did the best we could with what we had. There is beauty in that, the way you can find beauty in imperfection. I could never have predicted this life for myself. The dreams get bigger, the joy more profound, the reminders of the past less potent.
From the age of eight I promised Mum that one day I would build a granny flat for her to live in. Recently, I told her I should quite like to live in New York one day.
‘Oh, you’re not going to live in a loft are you?’ she asked.
‘You can have the apartment next door,’ I told her.
I don’t know precisely how I’m going to do this but, on balance, I’ve never known how I was going to do anything. Luck feels like the wrong word. Stochasticity seems better. All I know is that I feel governed by time, perhaps no more or less than the average person, but keenly nonetheless. There is a sense of urgency to make up for my years in the wilderness.
There is always time for wonder.
In a large escarpment outside of Birdsville there are some dingo caves where a person can stand, as I have, and survey the empire of dirt first established by my great-grandfather Celsus Morton. Facing in one direction, everything that fits into my field of vision is still in the hands of my extended family. It is an impossible amount of space coated like rust by gibber rocks. Imagine a burnt-red mirror laid across the 10 625 square kilometres that made up the old Roseberth Station (before it was cleaved in two) and then see it shatter into billions of pieces over the landscape. That’s the gibber rocks. They seem to change colour as the sun moves across the sky. The direct light of midday gives the rocks a deep purple hue but as the sun’s rays become angular in the late afternoon, the rust colour really begins to pop. From this vantage point, as far as the eye can see, the property seems like the surface of Mars. You can almost picture the scientists roaming across the surface and pointing out the telltale signs of where water once flowed but hasn’t for millennia.
It is easy, under such conditions, to find yourself wondering how anything at all can grow out here. Though of course you know that things do.