5

you’ll never make a living as a poet

IN LATE 1972 Kell and Patricia bought a house in leafy Belrose near the Northern Beaches of Sydney, where cicadas screamed in an attractive mass drone with many intonations from the gum trees, and mirages shone like water on the streets.

There was such a sense of place there for Michael; a return to at least part of what his ‘homing’ instinct recognised. Yet he had been so remoulded by the urbanity of Hong Kong for nearly eight of his twelve years on earth that he was not prepared for what he found.

Australia is a very old continent with a comparatively small population. Aboriginal people arrived at least 65,000 years ago, the first European settlers in 1788. And despite wave after wave of various immigrants, some Australians can be quite intolerant. At that time, they also liked to make fun of the upper-crust British accent more than any other. To them it sounded snobbish and stuck-up, while Australians traditionally prided themselves on being unpretentious. And since many of their ancestors were transported to the colony as convicts by the English ruling class—often for petty theft—a powerful history of home-grown rebellion against ‘rule Britannia’ and, specifically, its upper class, was ingrained in Australia.

And sure enough, having been schooled among British subjects and their offspring all his educational life, by then twelve-year-old Michael sounded more like a well-to-do English lad than a flat-drawling Aussie.

Risky.

Anyway, he stepped off the school bus at Killarney Heights High incongruously wearing the uniform of his previous school. (It was always happening to me too, perennially wearing the wrong uniform. Oh, how I remember that ghastly first contact at each new school.)

Some kids ganged up, threw tennis balls at him, teased, harassed and heckled.

‘It was such a shock to come back [to Sydney],’ Michael would tell the South China Morning Post in 1994. (I can’t help being impressed by how he would always seem a whole different man in Hong Kong. He was visiting the city with INXS then, to play. The local papers treated—and still treat—him as a respected prodigal son; one of their own. The city celebrates his intelligence and successes as a matter of course. Perhaps they never really saw him like some Australians did, as a tall poppy that needed scything down to size.)

‘It was a sea of freckly red-haired kids and blonde kids … there was a certain amount of roughness shown to me. Australia is a very young rough place, and I’ve grown to love that, but for me, I went from a very sophisticated, modern society to cowboys. And that’s hard. Suddenly I had to learn to fight …’

Standing up to their attack at Killarney Heights High that day was easier said than done, especially when your every word sounded ‘la de dah’ to a mob of jeering Aussies. For a shy kid who’d just been forced to leave his childhood friends overseas, this was calamitous.

Fortunately for Michael, another new kid called Andrew Farriss had arrived not long before and had swiftly become mates with Paul, a useful ally.

‘He was getting bullied and was about to get into a huge fight when I stepped in with my six-foot mate to rescue him,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve always hated bullies.’

Andrew and Michael did not become instant friends then, but they gradually developed a respect for one another that grew into not only a lifelong friendship, but the song-writing backbone of INXS.

I’d have to say the atmosphere at our Belrose home was not the best. Our parents had decided to stay together for—what else—‘the boys’. Honestly, watching your parents live separate lives in the same household is torture for a child. If you think you can smile as you interact with your children while giving your spouse the silent treatment, and they won’t notice, think again. Message received loud and clear. The obvious fraudulence of an estranged couple, our parents, being ‘together’ just amplified the awkwardness. Resentment built. Michael was just four months shy of becoming a teenager and Rhett was growing fast. Mother and Kell were not fooling them anymore.

Then, only a short time after they bought the house, Kell took out a second mortgage on it so he could set up business at a factory in the city of Maitland—once again without discussing it with Mother. As it was a two-hour drive north he’d leave early Monday morning and be back in Belrose on Friday evening. With this new, demanding business and a heavily mortgaged home, a second income was imperative. Mother picked up work as a make-up artist in television.

Michael was struggling a little at this stage. Not only socially, but also as he tried to settle into the New South Wales high school curriculum.

I could relate to this too. With every move our family made, I’d fallen further behind in my studies as well. It’s one thing to move across town, but when you switch states, or in my brothers’ case, relocate overseas, there’s a lot of adjusting to do. Grade seven in Sydney is different from grade seven in Brisbane is different from grade seven in Hong Kong. Our parents never investigated the differences in educational approach or thought it necessary to wait until the end of the school year before they relocated.

Further to that, Michael was a boy who’d just been forced to abandon his friends overseas. The bedevilling tensions in his household were confusing and he was affected.

As a distraction our parents bought the boys motocross bikes. Michael was immediately, ferociously hooked. It was obvious that he would own a Harley someday. If Kell couldn’t make it back for the weekend, Mother would get the boys to hitch the trailer and bikes to her white Holden Monaro instead. She’d drive them to some small country town with winding, looping hills of track that two young dirt-bike fiends could burn around together all weekend. They’d arrive back at the motel covered from head to toe in mud, take a shower and fall into bed after dinner. Michael would curl up with a book—something like S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age book The Outsiders, which he devoured around this time—and fall asleep by the second page.

After two years back in Sydney and many years of a failed (and somewhat emotionally and financially abusive) marriage, Mother couldn’t bear to keep up the facade a moment longer.

She wanted a divorce.

She asked Kell to move out. He was gone five days a week, every week, anyway, she pointed out. He wouldn’t hear of it and read her the riot act. He swore that if she wanted to leave the marriage, she could leave both the house and the boys too. Options were thin on the ground. Their family home was mortgaged to capacity and savings were nil. There was nothing to divide.

If Mother tried to take Michael and Rhett, he would come and get them, he said. Everything Kell promised her was a tug of war.

Of course he had a lot of pride. He loved the boys and believed the man should rule the roost. There would be no compromise.

Mother felt cut off at the knees. There was no love left in the marriage but she adored the boys too.

Australian law was also rather harsh in 1974 when it came to divorce. No-fault divorce was not enacted until a year later. You had to choose between a range of blameful accusations you’d have to prove in court and having a two-year separation, which Kell refused to consider.

Through her film contacts, Mother had been offered work in the USA in paramedical make-up, a new field. If she took it up, she would be working alongside physicians and plastic surgeons to improve the lives of burn survivors and others with traumatic injuries. Fleeing to America for at least a couple of years to take up this new challenge seemed like the most reasonable, sensible thing to do. She could work, live frugally and return with some savings and perhaps a new skill to start over later.

She felt confident that she could manage with easygoing Michael and, after setting up a home and routine, send for Rhett. Of her two boys, Rhett never took the easy route. He questioned authority and tended to listen to his father more. But Kell was away so much. Rhett was in with a bad mob, getting into deep troubles and defying her authority so much that she didn’t know how to handle it. In fact, she didn’t think she could.

Rhett needed more male input in his life, she was sure of it. Kell had been away so often. He needed more of his father’s attention. She knew it.

Mother took Michael for a walk one afternoon and told him her plan. She invited him to give his view. She explained that she would not go through with it if he objected. After a short discussion on the possibilities, it became their secret.

Our mother worked every job that came her way over the next three months and saved until the day came to leave.

‘When are we going, Mum?’ Michael would ask, every now and then. One day she just booked the flights. As the day grew near, Mother suffered great anxiety over the dreadful secret she and Michael were keeping. There was so much uncertainty facing her and Michael in just running. She truly thought that Rhett would be better off—that he was the lucky one. In her mind she imagined Rhett and Kell bonding. He always seemed to be craving Kell’s attention. This way he would have it all.

Nevertheless, she dreaded the day she had to sit her youngest child down and explain. She was wracked with guilt. For the rest of her life she carried a deep, unseen scar from that decision. She felt she could never make it up to him. Even when Rhett wrote to her many years later and told her he had forgiven her, she still couldn’t get over it.

The day came in late 1974. I think it was September. Michael was fourteen. After the boys went off to school, some movers came to help Mother pack extra clothing, special keepsakes such as Michael’s dogeared copies of Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Walt Morey’s Gentle Ben, and small pieces of furniture that she and Michael didn’t want to leave behind. They were going into storage.

She had no illusions that Kell would still be at our Belrose home, with Rhett, when she and Michael returned. After all, they’d moved a dozen times in the last sixteen years.

When Rhett arrived home from school she sat him down and calmly told him her plan. Of course he erupted into tears and begged her to take him too. She promised she would send for him shortly and asked him to be good for his father. She assured him she loved him and would miss him and it wouldn’t be long before she could send for him.

Michael arrived home and calmly changed, put the last of his toiletries in his bag and laid his uniform out on his bed. By this stage he had changed schools to Davidson High. Our Aunt Maureen, Mother’s sister, arrived to drive them to the airport. It was a quiet ride. Rhett was naturally distressed.

When it came time to depart through customs, Michael said his goodbyes and told his brother he would see him soon.

‘I promise I’ll be good if you take me,’ Rhett cried out to Mother.

‘Be good for Dad, and it will only be a couple of months before I send for you.’ She looked at her youngest son’s face and wanted to turn back but it was too late. Her heart was breaking as she realised what she was about to do.

Michael was the only one not crying now. He hugged Maureen, then Rhett again, telling his brother he’d see him in Los Angeles, and walked through the gates. He stopped and turned around.

‘Come on, Mum,’ he said, waving her on, ‘if we’re going, let’s go.’ Mother gave her sister and Rhett one last, tearful hug each and followed Michael out of sight.

I’d taken a great gamble going to California in December 1970 to pursue a career in make-up artistry. I’d married and had a son, Brent.

I was fast asleep when I was jarred awake by the phone ringing so loudly on my nightstand it jumped and so did I. Before I could say hello I heard an extremely emotional, inebriated Kell sobbing loudly in my ear.

‘She’s left me and taken my Michael, is he there?’

I tried to calm him down. Surely he was confused. I could hear a glass clink in the background.

‘Dad? What? What are you talking about? Why would Mother and Michael be with me? Dad, I’m in California.’

I guess it was understandable for Kell to feel convinced Mother would have confided to me such a major plan as leaving him and taking Michael overseas, especially if she were coming to California. She told me later that she wanted to spare me from the worry. I’m glad she did. But I don’t think Kell believed me at first when I said I didn’t know a thing.

Though incoherent through much of the conversation, he was able to give me the basics of what had gone down. I asked about Rhett, urging Kell to take care of him. I would let him know the moment I heard from Michael and Mother, I assured him.

I will never forget Kell’s words. Not just ‘Michael’, but ‘my Michael’. Perhaps my stepfather might, I meditated sadly, now trade some of that angst for a long overdue, more intimate relationship with our younger brother.

Personally, I was still smarting myself from discovering Kell hadn’t really adopted me, when he’d told me he had, and after promising Mother he would. He’d understood it was a condition of their marriage. He’d only ‘changed’ my name in that inscription on the locket he gave me when I was eleven. Nowhere else. He hadn’t even changed it via deed poll. When the boys and I were about to move with our mother to Hong Kong for the first time, after Kell had moved there first and sent for us, the surname anomaly caused absolute havoc with my identity for passports and visas until Mother gave a teary performance worthy of Bette Davis and someone just buckled, looked the other way and applied the required rubber stamps to certify me as a Hutchence.

I was devastated by that. My trust in my stepfather’s word and his authenticity, my sure sense of being worth the ‘bother’ of adoption—they all took a terrible beating.

As I put the phone down on this sobbing man, having done what I could to comfort him, I realised that it had been over six months since I’d seen any of my family.

The previous May, I’d returned to Australia. I’d brought my two-year-old son Brent to stay at the family home in Belrose, keen to introduce him to the Australian wing of his family.

Mid-afternoon Michael had burst through the front door, hurling his backpack across the floor. I ran over and threw my arms around his neck. He’d grown considerably. Gone was the controlled short-back- and-sides; his curls fell over one eye. Waiting at the open door was a very shy Andrew Farriss.

‘What’re you doing standing there? Come in, she won’t bite. Andy, this is my sister Tina from America.’ I stepped over to Andrew, who was about a head shorter than Michael, and he greeted me politely. Brent came running up behind me and wrapped himself around my legs. Michael knelt down and smiled at him.

‘You must be Brent—hi mate.’ He held out his hand to his young nephew. Brent continued to bury his face into my legs.

‘He’s a bit overwhelmed,’ I told Michael, ‘but once he gets going, you’ll be sorry!’

Big smile from ‘Uncle’ Michael then.

‘Ahh that’s all right, mate, we’ve got plenty of time to make friends.’

Andrew and Michael grabbed a snack and disappeared into Michael’s room. When I checked on them later they had their heads in a book and were deep in conversation with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew playing in the background.

It was obvious at the time that there was tension between our parents. It seems that they were really working each other’s nerves. They always had. One source of friction was symptomatic. Our mother had worked on and off her whole life; there were many times when we would not have survived without the money she brought in. Despite this, Kell would trivialise her work effort and professionalism by saying she was working on sets ‘for fun’.

I felt sad for them all, especially my two young brothers. I couldn’t help thinking that it didn’t have to be this way. Clearly there should have been a way to compromise, but for a traditionalist like Kell, who had come of age in an era that believed men made the decisions in a household, that was not going to happen.

After Kell’s disturbing distress call I could not get back to sleep. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. My own marriage was breaking down. So far, I had kept it from my family.

Within a few hours I heard from Mother, who had landed in Los Angeles with Michael. I don’t think she had really thought through the logistics of her plan too much. She just knew she had to get out of her marriage to Kell. But she had thought it through enough to book their flights to San Francisco, just north of where I was living in San Jose. Soon we would be reunited.

As he came towards me for a hug at the airport, I noticed Michael hadn’t changed much since I last saw him. His teenage skin was flaring up though, and he was self-conscious about it, hiding behind his tumbling forelock as he grinned. The first thing we did was find a rental apartment for Mother and Michael nearby. He was enrolled in a local high school, Leigh High, where I remember him being relaxed and happy. Mother bought him a yellow dirt bike which he spent many hours maintaining. He was a pretty good rider too, coming second in a local motocross competition.

But that was still to come. Late one night, soon after they had arrived, just as things were ‘normalising’, I received a frantic call from Michael. No doubt brought on by all the complexities and stresses of leaving her husband and youngest son and fleeing with the other to a foreign country, Mother was having what we would now recognise as a panic attack. The doctor I called had advised she should breathe into a paper bag to counter hyperventilation, and that’s what she was doing when I arrived. She’d calmed down somewhat by then but Michael was pale with fright. He was so relieved to see me. It was only then that I really began to understand all of the pain and the fearful, covert worrying that had been going on for the past three months.

Soon Mother departed for Los Angeles to see about the job offer and find some housing, leaving Michael in my care. She needed to stick to her plan. She could be steely when it came to getting something accomplished; she was never one to go off track. It didn’t take her long before she was settled and sent for Michael.

We decided to join forces to support each other through these testing changes, so a month later I followed with my little son, Brent, joining her and Michael in a small, 1940s California Ranch-style house in Studio City. I found it comforting to have family so close after living on a separate continent for almost five years. And when Mother was offered make-up work for a movie, she didn’t have to worry about who’d look after Michael: I’d be there. Certainly neither of us was dating back then and it was an opportunity for us to connect and make up for lost time. Michael had his little nephew to bond with too, and vice versa.

Studio City is in Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley. CBS Studio Centre is situated there. When we rented there in the mid-1970s, it was a nice neighbourhood with many pockets of wealth. A lot of actors, writers and technicians in the motion-picture and television industry lived in the area, but luckily it wasn’t out of our range.

The house we rented was small: only two bedrooms, a decent-sized living area and a separate dining room with French doors at both ends. The bonus was one set of these led directly to the pool. Michael was thrilled to make this dining room his bedroom. If he rose early enough he could swim before breakfast—a great incentive to get a teenager out of bed. From Michael’s door it was no more than a metre to the edge of the pool, so I was understandably nervous about Brent, who stuck to Michael like a tiny shadow. I’m not a strong swimmer at all, so dear Michael took it upon himself to teach his toddler nephew the basics. He really was great with kids. Soon Brent could at least dog paddle to the side if he fell in.

As for furnishings, we didn’t even have a couch. We started with mattresses in the bedrooms and settled on throw pillows and a television set for the living room. Since we no longer had a dining room, we didn’t need a table. The boys were happy, there was plenty of food, we had job prospects and things were looking up.

With Brent at preschool and Michael now at North Hollywood High, both Mother and I could work. Mother, daughter, son and grandson. Like so many others before us, we went to southern California and formed a new family constellation.

We bought a ten-speed bicycle for Michael to get to school. If I was going to be late collecting Brent from his preschool, my brother would swing by and collect him instead on his way home.

Compared to the straitlaced, English style of education and the perfectly turned-out uniforms he’d been expected to wear before, the laidback approach of North Hollywood High was a breeze for Michael. Getting to wear whatever he liked to school was fun and he was fitting in well. It was strange at first, he thought, how when the teacher asked a question, the kids wouldn’t put their hands up. They’d just call out the answer or casually raise a pencil. The difference was the accent on individuality and the high value put on free thinking, I guess.

Michael often watched the African-American kids dancing and working out routines in the quad at lunch time. He was fascinated and often bought the steps home to show us. Toddler Brent would be right there trying to copy his teenage uncle.

By now Michael was listening to music constantly. Elton John, Iggy Pop, AC/DC, War, David Bowie and the Eagles were his favourites back then. He was also hit by the unpredictable winds of inspiration, absent-mindedly jotting down lines here and there. As Percy Bysshe Shelley (Michael would later play him in the movie Frankenstein Unbound) wrote in A Defence of Poetry, in 1840, ‘Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.’ It was this ability to cast a spell he was feeling for, experimentally, I suspected.

Despite Michael’s enthusiasm for North Hollywood High, his grades were still lacklustre. One day some work arrived home marked by his English Lit teacher. One particular comment I will never forget.

‘You’ll never make a living as a poet.’

In early 1976, after eighteen months in California, Michael returned to Sydney with Mother and they were reunited with Rhett, moving into a house Kell had rented in Belrose. He himself was working overseas in Manila then, which was just as well considering our parents’ past. Mother was hired by the Reg Grundy organisation to work on the TV soapie The Young Doctors. Rhett and Michael were pleased to be together again; and of course he and Mother had a lot to catch up on too. A kind of healing began.

Michael, who was just sixteen, began seeing a lot of Andrew Farriss once more. He was very excited because Andrew had put together a band called Doctor Dolphin he was fronting with a couple of Davidson High boys, Kent Kerny and Neil Sanders, and a Forest High boy, Garry Beers. Michael was allowed to stand on the sidelines and work a tambourine. Then one day when they were trying out a new drummer, Andrew in an offhand manner handed the microphone to Michael and asked him to sing while he concentrated on the musical side. It sounded pretty good, so Andrew decided he’d promote this loose wheel from tambourine player—a basically insecure role—to lead vocalist.

While Doctor Dolphin experimented in the Farriss family’s garage with Michael practising his mike technique and Andrew mainly on keyboards, the elder Farriss brother, guitarist Tim, nineteen, was forging ahead with his singer/songwriter/guitarist/sax playing friend Kirk Pengilly in their own band, Guinness. Named after their bass player’s dog, Guinness had been playing for around six years with different line-ups, even checking out Tim’s little brother Jon Farriss on drums at an early stage. He was pretty good for a nine-year-old back then but not quite there yet. The young impresario Tim was showing a talent for booking by scoring some local wedding and party gigs. One day he checked out Doctor Dolphin (who would never get out of the garage) rehearsing. He was knocked out by Andrew’s keyboard chops, Garry’s funky grunt on bass and Michael’s voice and developing grasp on becoming a frontman. At sixteen, Jon was finally old enough to join too. The fateful merger was on.

The Farriss Brothers first appeared in public at Tim’s rip-roaring twentieth birthday, 16 August 1977, at his house party in Whale Beach, northern Sydney. Tim, Andrew, Michael, Jon, Kirk and Garry agreed this was it. There would be no plan B. No turning back.