THE GOLDEN YEARS.

In the summertime when the weather is fine,
You can reach right up and you can touch the sky.....

Oh for those wonderful days of early childhood.  Where it always seemed hot and sunny, when a day seemed like a week, a week seemed like a month and the whole world was yours for the taking.


Our new house was in one of Sydney's most northerly suburbs.  Surrounded by bush and set amid the steep sandstone hills and valleys which surround much of Sydney.  Our days were filled with excitement and adventure.  We had bushland all around us, tracks to make, creeks to play and swim in, rocks to climb and caves to explore.  We made the bush our own, each year adventuring further and further.

Our house was in a short but steeply curving dead end street and set at the highest point.  My parents were sensible enough to have it built on pylons which meant that we had bushland views that stretched forever and total privacy.  Over the years my parents literally carved out a wonderful terraced garden with rockeries, fishponds, sandstone steps and wooden bridges which all led up to more bush which formed the back of our property.

Here I learned to love nature and privacy. It was also here that I formulated my contempt for hypocrisy and violence.

We were the TV generation (black and white in those days) and grew up with the Brady Bunch, Lost in Space, The Courtship of Eddies Father, Little House on the Prairie....shows where everyone was happy, parents were fair and generous and every day had a happy ending.  My parents, though always working hard to 'give us what they never had' were constantly arguing.  My father couldn't go more than two days without belting one of us, usually me, and my mother was always telling us that we were better than the rest of the families in the neighbourhood.

This was because they were either too uncouth, being Australian, or too common, coming from the wrong part of England.  My mother the house cleaner and social snob!  It was no wonder that after a few short months we as children found ourselves unwelcome in our friends houses.

But we had our garden, our pets and most of all the fabulous bush to play in.  Whether secretly meeting friends there or just spending the day alone and totally enjoying the solitude.  Swimming in the creek, playing on the Tarzan rope which was in the middle of the bush and swung out dangerously over large rocks and fallen trees, finding tadpoles, frogs and tortoises, making 'cubby houses' in the caves and at a very early age discovering our body parts.....

EARLY DAYS.

It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch
As tears go by

From an early age I found myself on the outside.   My sister's being 3 & 4 years older than me meant that my early days were spent with them reluctantly looking after me, dragging me reluctantly around with their friends and always telling my that I was too young to join in their games.

We spent our first years in Australia living in a variety of boarding houses and single rooms which were as I remember full of 'undesirables' as my mother was want to call them. One place was so awful, a single room in an old boarding house full of drunks, that  we children called it 'the ookey house'.

My dad worked a variety of jobs and my mother did house cleaning during the days.  This is where I realized how the 'other half' lived.  I can remember grand old houses in Sydney's affluent North Shore suburbs, where the children had toys a plenty and friends galore.  As the cleaner's boy I was left to watch from the outside and listen to my mum being spoken down to by her employers.

Then because my parents didn't have the spare money to send me to pre-school I was sent to the local kindergarten half way through the year and half a year behind the other children.  While the other children were given lessons I was put in a corner to play until my teacher would come over and give me individual tuition then leave me to finish my work and return to teach the class.  It was hard to make friends.

In 1st class I received my first lesson in bullying and my first realisation that somehow I was different.  This came from my teacher!  Now I do know that I was never a naughty child and tried my hardest to listen and learn.  This was from a fear of discipline that I had long learned to expect if I ever misbehaved.

My father had an uncontrollable temper which is what I most remember of him from my early childhood.  Not only would he shout and yell at the slightest provocation, but he would frequently lash out at us with his belt.  If one of us was naughty, we would all receive a belting.  Me being the boy got it hardest and more than my sisters.

I remember the exact day.  July 20th 1969.  We had all the infants school in our classroom watching the first moon landing.  At the end of the broadcast my teacher went around the room asking many children to name the 3 astronauts.  I clearly remember at least a dozen or more children being able to only name one astronaut - Neil Armstrong.  Then she asked me and I proudly stood up and named two astronauts - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.  Her reply was to yell at me and demand I name the third astronaut.  When I couldn't she went to her cupboard and returned with the cane.  In front of
all the children she caned me two times on each hand.  I was 5, tiny and absolutely gutted and of course I cried, she caned me once more on each hand because I cried.

Going home that afternoon, 3 or four older boys who had been in the class room ganged up on me calling me a cry baby and pushing me over.  One snatched my school bag and tipped it out onto the ground.  Then they took my pink spelling book and ran off laughing.  I was to scared to tell my parents about either event.

The next day when we had to write our our spelling words my teacher saw that I didn't have my book with me.  She caned me again.

This time due to the sever bruising on my hands I couldn't hide it from my parents.  Expecting a belting for doing the wrong thing I was surprised that my father got angry with the teacher.  The next day he left work early, arriving at school at lunch time demanding to see my teacher.  I will never forget her words or his reaction. 'I don't like your son'.  My father slapped her so hard across the face that she fell over the desk and onto the floor.  From that moment on she totally ignored me in class.

A few months later my parents bought a house a few suburbs away.  I went to a new school, had a wonderful teacher Mrs Hawke and began to make friends.  The golden years were about to begin.....

ROOTS (part 2)

My mother had an entirely different childhood.  Born a year earlier than my father and one of two identical twin girls.

Living in a beautiful seaside town on the north coast of Cornwall, England her childhood was marked by happiness, family love and the added bonus of being one of 'the twinnies' as the townsfolk called them.  Her father was the head waiter at the poshest hotel in town and during the war he worked in the catering corps at the nearby RAF base.

They shared their school with evacuees so only went in the mornings.  The rest of the day was theirs to play in the fields or watch the fishing boats in the harbor or swim and play on the miles of golden sandy beaches their town was famous for.

Holidays were spent with her grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and cousins in our ancestral village in the south of the county.  The war was only an occasional reality.  Watching dog fights during the battle of Britain, the occasional of bombing from the Luftwaffe who would sometimes, when damaged, aim their planes for the RAF base, sometimes strafing gunfire along the way before they crashed, usually into the ocean.

Her father's family lived in Plymouth which was England's most heavily bombed city during the war.  On one single air raid 17 of her relatives were killed when the 'gerries' hit the gasworks setting off a series of explosions along the gas pipes for several miles.

She left school at 13 and held various shop jobs eventually working in a photographic shop.  It was here in the early 1950's that she met a handsome young man whose had been born and raised in India during the last days of the British Raj.

Their relationship lasted for over two years and she was madly in love with his charming, gentle and exotic manners.  One night he planned a special night out at an expensive restaurant.  Mum was sure he was going to ask her to marry him.  Instead he 'came out' to her and said he loved her dearly as a friend but had been using their relationship as a mask to hide his true nature from his family.  He was a homosexual and couldn't bear to keep pretending to her.  Heartbroken she took a taxi home while he got on his motorbike and drove at high speed into a tree, dying instantly.

Heartbroken my mother decided to emigrate to Australia where she had a cousin living who promised that he and his wife would take her in and look after her.

They lived outside of Cairns in Far North Queensland and ran a sugar cane plantation.  Her new life turned into a nightmare.  Her cousins, far from looking after her, treated her as unpaid labour  and the culture shock of arriving in 1950's rural Australia, where it was all beer drinking, swearing and constant reminders that she was 'another of those pommie bastards' was too much for her to take.

 
These two events would greatly affect her future views on both men and Australians.

She moved to Brisbane where one of her cabin friends from the ship she arrived on took her in and got her a job as a waitress.  It was here that she met my father who was on a two month transfer working as a chef.  His charming continental manners swept her off her feet and when he returned to Sydney and wrote to her asking her to marry him she jumped at the offer.

They had a simple wedding and honeymooned at the Berowra Waters Inn, an area which would later play a big part in our lives.  A year later my oldest sister was born and a year after that they returned to England where my other sister was born.  3 years later I was born.

Sadly as much as my mother loved living back in Cornwall with her family close by, my father hated it.  Not only did my grandparents resent him for being foreign , but even more so because he was Catholic and my mother had changed her religion to marry him.  He worked in my grandfathers restaurant under much resentment and isolation from the rest of the family, until 1965 when he demanded we return to Australia.  And that's really where my story begins.......

ROOTS (part 1).


It's one life and there's no return and no deposit
One life so it's time to open up your closet
Life's not worth a damn till you can shout out
I am what I am.....

What is it that makes us who we are?  Is it genetically pre-ordained, our upbringing, our environment, our peers, the people we meet, the choices we make, societies expectations....?

I believe that for me all of the above apply. As for most of us my childhood was largely dominated by my parents, so I think it is important to give a brief background on them and show how their own childhood's impacted upon them and in their future dealings with life.

Both my parents were born in the mid 1930's and grew up in war torn Europe.

The little I know of my father's background is what I remember my mother telling me, he never spoke of his childhood himself.

My father was born to a peasant family in a small farming village, nestled in the foothills of the White Carpathian Mts in Czechoslovakia.  shortly after the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 the entire village was forced marched over 100 kms and resettled in a small town near the Austrian border.  Here they were given farmland to work and life continued fairly normally.

They farmed, went to school and enjoyed a life relatively untouched by the troubles affecting most of Europe at the time.  However one of his Uncles secretly printed anti Nazi pamphlets which my father used to deliver throughout the area on his bicycle after school.  Eventually his Uncle was caught and interned in Theriesienstadt Concentration Camp.  From there he escaped and somehow managed to travel across the Eastern Front eventually ending up in Vladivostok after the war.  When he returned they say he looked 40 years older and his hair had turned completely grey.

In the early months of 1946 when thousands of displaced persons were trying to make their way back to their former homes, or escape the Russian occupation my grandmother allowed an exhausted and starving German women and her children (Deutschevolk) to take some fallen apples from the ground in her garden.  This was reported by a neighbour to the Russian officials and a few days later my father's family were rounded up by the Russians and interned. 

My father only escaped capture as he was late home from school, but saw his family being herded at gun point into the army trucks.  All alone at 11 years old he hid for days in a haystack before deciding to try and escape across the Austrian border.  Traveling at night and sleeping during the day he eventually arrived at a safe crossing point from where, across the Danube River he could see an American military camp.

As he began swimming towards the Austrian shore he was spotted by a Russian patrol who opened fire on him.  He was hit several times in the arm and leg by bullets.  An American GI jumped in and rescued him.  He was treated, but to this day still has fragments of bullet in his hand which were never removed.  From there he ended up in a refugee camp in France where he stayed for nearly a year before being selected for immigration to Australia.  He was one of the first boatloads of the Arthur Caldwell 'populate or perish' migration scheme.

He was not to see his family again until the fall of the Communist regime in the early 1990's.  His early life in Australia was one of deprivation and hard labour, being sent to various outback farms where he was forced to work long hours and given no further schooling.  At 16 he ran away to Sydney and was taken in by the very small Czech community where he was given work and lodgings at a restaurant and trained to be a chef.

Years later we found out that his family had been interned by the Russians for two years.  During that time the entire family were tortured, my father's sisters raped, his brothers beaten and had cigarettes stubbed out in their eyes.  After their release they returned to their original village.  My paternal grandparents lived only a few years after that, both dying in their early 40's.

 WHERE DO I BEGIN?


'Funny when I feel afraid, I think of what a mess I've made of my life, crying over my mistakes, forgetting all the breaks I've had in my life.

This is my life.  We all have a story to tell and as I enter the second half century of my life I feel a pressing need to record my story.  From an ordinary, strict and spartan childhood growing up in the outer suburbs of Sydney, a loner and misfit from my earliest days. 

 A childhood filled with simple pleasures, outcast by choice and circumstance, victim of sexual abuse and schoolyard bullying.  Through my angst teenage years, desperately trying to fit in and finding solace in my own company, my surroundings and amongst the wrong sort of kids.  Rebellious, outrageous and lacking any clear direction.

A teenage runaway, street kid, prostitute, drag performer, prodigal son and back to prostitution, a life of partying, sex, drugs and music.

Battered boyfriend, madam, convicted criminal to reformed adult trying to correct my mistakes.

I've been a victim of attempted murder, beaten cancer, watched my partner waste away from HIV and witnessed and participated in things most people only see on television.

This story is about me and for me.  An attempt to put on record all the memories and experiences for which I now have very little to show for.  It is also a reminder to my peers of the life that many of us experienced, if only a part of, and a chance for younger readers to understand what our lives were like.

It will be both a chronological time-line and a fast forward of related themes.  Mostly it will be the about the experiences of a gay man desperately trying to find his place in life. Starting from the bushland suburbs of Sydney, to the seedy backstreets of Kings Cross, to amazing countries and travels and ending up where I am now in an exotic but impoverished country.

I will try and keep each post concise and as correct as I can remember.  I will use first names only and in some cases aliases to protect individuals.  Whether I write daily, weekly or somewhere in between remains to be seen.  But I promise you an adventure filled with highs and lows, memories of times past, and maybe even a few lessons along the way.......