I was born in Lismore Base Hospital which is only 3 kms away from where I live. There’s some stats about people dying within that many kms from where they are born., more than 90%.
We blew in here 5 generations ago. I’m not great at family history stuff but I’ll try. E.W. Mackay was the first of us that came to Lismore and he was a Haberdasher. Mackay Axtens are still the same business in England to this day. My grandfather Alan Axtens was a Solicitor in Lismore, Page and Axtens. His understudy was Doug Page who played cricket till he was in his 80’s. He was hilarious because he had to hitch his trousers up to run. He loved tennis and was a part of the East Lismore Tennis Club. Earl Page was Doug’s father founded the country party and he was Prime Minister for a while when the Liberal Party people were out of town. In the 1920s – the Bruce Page administration. I’m a fellow traveller with the other side.
Alan had 2 sons, my father Jon and Peter. Peter went off to be a Pitt St Lawyer.
Dad was a Legal Clerk with Page and Axtens and one of the founding members of Tuntable Falls Community and a massive letter to the editor writer. We were quite strongly affected by the 1973 Nimbin and the counter cultural revolution and Jon did the swap over of the title where Terania Falls is now and helped promote the community. I used to think Jon wrote the constitution but Terry McGee assured me he did. I think my father wanted to live there but my Mum wouldn’t go. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life making coffee for hippies.
Mum (Val) came from Penshurst and always felt like she was an outsider. I lost her this year. She made it to 92 and did amazing things. She was Arts Citizen of the Year in 2022 and she had previously been the actual Citizen of the Year 20 years earlier. She gave her life over to the Eisteddfod and spent 45 years as Secretary. She loved it.
We were living in Eltham when I was born so that’s where I spent my early years. My family ran the Post Office at that stage. They used to close all the mail bags with lead clips. What happens with lead is, it gets a white coating called sugar of lead when it oxidises. Because it’s sweet and as a child I chewed quite a lot of it. I got lead poisoning and lost all my hair. Lead settles into your bones and also gives you severe colic. Lead is taken up in place of a number of things, particularly Calcium and Magnesium in the bowel. You absorb the Lead but not the good things. I also got Pansinusitus (Glue Ear) on top of that. All of my sinuses were hard with mucus and I couldn’t hear half of what I should. When I was 7 they realised my learning was very slow so I had a huge operation to remove all the mucus from my head. The world went from very quiet to jarringly loud and it was horrible. I was screaming in pain from the noise after I came out of the operation. My memory is not what I wish it was and it’s always been that way. I have amazing days and then I stumble.
After that I was sent off to special school in Tuncester to get my primary learning skills up to scratch. I’ve always struggled with spelling of simple words and yet my comprehension of complex stuff is good. I have a berserk spoken vocabulary and I was fortunate that along came the computer era and spelling was not such a problem. My intellect was quite decent. Consequently I became a Doctor. I would not have become a Doctor of Osteopathy without computers augmenting me. The first time I went to Uni I had some scathing reviews because it was all hand written essays. Those lecturers would just crush me.
In primary and high school I loved sport, didn’t care about school, I only went on sports days and I’d be sick the rest of the time whether I was sick or not. I played rep Rugby League when I was 12, Rep Baseball and Hockey as well. Then I remember everyone else grew up and turned into adults and I remained a kid till I was about 18. I just didn’t grow and I had very late development. I remember though at 12 we played against the Hockeyroos because that was how they taught back then. We were the best team in the state wide competition, the North Coast team and they played us to show us what not to do which was hilarious. They screamed at the Ref, one of their players got sent off and sat on top of the goal, they had a great time doing everything wrong. And they almost took my head off as well .. I was a goal keeper. I was Junior Club Champ for Easts Hockey Club and then gave up hockey which was typical behaviour for me. Self sabotaging. The moment they said I was good at something I would quit because I hated being the centre of attention. It disturbed me. I was Junior Club Champ in Baseball to then quit. The sport I loved the most was Cricket. I never managed to be the club champ at that but I played 1st Grade in Lismore when I was 18 before I went to Uni in Armidale.
I studied Arts, Philosophy, Australian History and Sociology which was weird. My kinetic intelligence was pretty high but my analytic intelligence was shocking so I kind of demanded that of myself – thus the scathing reports (laughs).
I used to hang out at the bistro with the actors, I did some lighting and that drew me into the next part of my life which was in Canberra with a Fringe theatre company called Splinters. I had met a guy at Uni called Rod Rogers and I just went along to do lighting with him but ended up performing, writing, doing puppet work, it was super eclectic theatre.
In the midst of that I live in a community in Bredbo.
Bredbo had a Down to Earth ConFest there; that’s why I went there. Down to Earth was a festival that emerged after Whitlam was sacked. Jim Cairns his deputy had an affair with Junie Morosi. It was that free love period where Jim was saying it’s ok to have an affair with your secretary and Australia is beyond all that ownership stuff….Which Australia wasn’t (laughs). That was where the Down to Earth Movement started. They bought a very large piece of land that was completely destroyed by sheep grazing between Cooma and Canberra. Bredbo was really dry, -12 degrees sometimes and up to 45 degrees other times, like Australia’s death valley. I went and stayed there in a community called Mount Oak after the 2nd ConFest was on. I stayed for 2 years, building gardens and sheds. Every time it was freezing I would come back to the North Coast. A funny Lismore connection is Terra Sword … she grew up there but she and her mum and sister left before I got there. Small world.
I sort of wish I’d kept the Cricket up but life got in the way. II was playing first Grade, I’d already scored my first hundred at uni, I’d got my first hat trick. When I came back a dozen years later I ended up playing reserve grade and second grade. I only finished playing competition cricket last year so I made it to 57 but my golden years were spent in a tree platform or building a shed.
I had a very short relationship and a pregnancy occurred. I had very little to do with my daughter Lily before she was 19 but I did pay maintenance. Lily came and helped clean up after the flood and we’ve developed a nice relationship now. She’s amazing.
There is this constant pattern in my life where I have the inability to accept success. I have this profound self sabotaging mindset and I found that with all my relationships as well. I was a serial Monogamist and I would last about 18 months in every relationship and I would be traumatised by each and every one of them. That became something of real significance to me and I couldn’t allow it to continue. I saw Psychologists and eventually I was drawn to Meditation. I went and did a course with groups which left quite an impact on me. I found that the self torture stopped when I reached that oceanic state. I certainly don’t meditate now like I should. My blood pressure would be lower, my life would be much more productive if I did. I was drawn into Ayurvedic Medicine. I had already studied Remedial Massage and then studied Ayurvedic Medicine.
There’s another 5 years of University at Southern Cross after that. I didn’t graduate till I was 49. It was a double degree and a Masters in Osteopathic Medicine. Massage and Ayurvedic medicine all helped. There were other threads in my life, I was an Actor, a Sportsperson, I was a Writer, so the harp had lots of strings. By the time I finished my Masters and had my registration and qualification, it consumed everything else. There was no energy for me to act. I’ve done a few pieces but learning lines is a drain so it fell by the wayside along with sport. For a time I tried to keep all the strings working but it became too much. I still write once a month in the Nimbin Good Times which is fun. So from Lead poisoning to becoming a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine has been a journey.
The catastrophes came along hot and strong in the 2020s. The whole Covid thing, then the big flood came to here (I’m looking up to the ceiling in the second story of Laurie’s home) Val sat up on the desk on a chair and we got saved at dawn out the window by Ned. 5 metres of flood water came through here like a river. We were rescued before it came to the ceiling. There was an Uluru down the end of the street where we had thrown everything we owned. We had 12 truck loads take all our stuff away, then the insurance company came and did a make safe and they tore out all the walls, all the ceilings and all the tiles and they left us a gutted mess. A friend Mick Holm came and said, Laurie you don’t have to ask, the answer is yes!. We spent a year working together to rebuild. We had 12 trees milled because there were all these logs that ran into the house and that was used to make all the skirting boards, picture trails and cornices. The local mill lost 700 pieces of timber in the flood and some of those were smashed into my house. I had some mates come and mill it all for me.
By the time we could come back Val went down hill pretty quick. I also look after my brother who has severe Epilepsy. I am glad I was with her when she passed but I found it so harrowing and if I had my chance again I wouldn’t have her at home. That was too hard for me. Probably a good thing for me though in the long term, a lot of really bad things we just avoid because we can but it was real, a very real thing for me to do. It’s just so awful but that’s the end of life isn’t it? In fact so much of our lives can be awful, teething, pain, relationships breakdowns, awful, like some animal horse hoof crushing onto your chest. Hopefully it encourages us to get the most out of it. We should do our best to do something productive or creative, kind. Val was very, very kind, amazing really and I think that was her response to some pretty severe suffering. She lost a child. He died in her arms while she was taking him to hospital. He was 18 months old and his name was Andrew. We didn’t have ambulance cover and there wasn’t any public health at that stage. I have 3 surviving siblings, Christopher, Peter and Bruce. I have found the loss of Mum pretty hard going.
My girlfriend Virginia is not a catastrophic relationship. We’ve been together for 8 years. We have a good and healthy relationship which is mutually beneficial. good is about, everyday doing the right thing, good is consistent and reliable and that’s a big challenge in a way and that makes it unique.
Of course I still like holding house concerts too so I’ll keep doing that.”
