“I was born in 1966 at Crown St Hospital in Darlinghurst which was demolished years ago. It was the year decimal currency came in and the last time England won the World Cup in football. I lived in Sydney all through my childhood mainly in a suburb called Little Bay, where we thought curb and guttering was exciting and at the time if we are in a competition for the most suburban suburb in Australia, we would have won comfortably. Back in the 60s as we were moving to Little Bay Christo the Belgian Sculptor and his wife Jeanne-Claude Eileen did one of their textile wrapping projects on the headland and it literally put Little Bay on the map.
We could walk to the northern head of Botany Bay and one of the good things Bob Carr did, of whom I was not a massive fan, was preserve a lot of the land around our way as National Park. You can walk along the coastline there for hours and you wouldn’t know you were in Sydney. It was though, a curious choice in a place to raise a family because we were walking distance to an infectious diseases hospital, a cemetery, an oil refinery and a long walk to Long Bay Jail.
I went to La Perouse Primary School where the famous Rugby players, the Ella brothers went to school. I played football with the primary school team with the younger Ella brothers, Tim and Richard. Put it this way. I was very much just making up the numbers, barely touched the ball and scored one try in two seasons, which was an intercept. No-one would pass me the ball because it wasn’t really in the team’s interest(laughs). I actually had to leave La Perouse Primary School to learn how to lose a game of football because we never lost.
Three of us were plucked out of this suburban obscurity of La Perouse Primary, after I might say, my introduction to musical theatre. One of the teachers, Mr Code wrote a little gold rush themed show called Gold and Silver. I played a character called the Wild Colonial Boy and I was put in prison and slammed against the back wall of the assembly in a very dodgy set and I could hit a note or two. That was my introduction to that kind of thing which was a hell of a lot of fun.
The three of us were taken to Woollahra Dem like kids were from all around Sydney. If you could basically do your times tables and complete a sentence, you had a chance of going to a Demonstration school. We were taught by two women who were living together. It was the mid 70s and my parents were shocked when Dr Davis turned up to the parent teacher meeting in bare feet, a kaftan with wooden beads around his neck and a massive long beard, looking like Allen Ginsberg.
I was astonished that some of the girls had things like capsicum and cucumber and lettuce for lunch and I was a pie boy. I have lifelong friends from those schools. I then went to Sydney Boys High and could talk about that for the rest of the week. I was the son of a school teacher and a reluctant student till the end of school when I applied myself. I was surprised that I came from the middle of the pack to the top of it and was the Dux of Sydney High and won all these public speaking awards. I then went to Sydney Uni where I had a pretty straight first year then went wild.
I guess I found my crew in Sydney Uni Drama Society with people like Julia Zamero, Robyn Butler and Andrew Upton who ended up marrying Cate Blanchett. Andrew and I debated against each other at school. So many fabulous people from that time, Andrew Bell who’s the Chief Justice of NSW is one of the people I debated against regularly.
It’s an interesting thing, especially living in the Northern Rivers where there are oodles of hard working people, but there is an inclination in the culture to avoid work and also in some dark alleys of the community there is a suspicion of formal learning and application to knowledge. When you know people and when you’ve applied yourself a bit but you know people who have REALLY applied themselves then you acquire, I certainly have, a respect for knowledge. Among many people in the broad, wide, ugly world, there is a lack of respect for knowledge which troubles me greatly and I think it’s there all through our politics too.
So out in the world I worked as a Criminologist for a few years. I wrote an essay that was published in the Institute of Criminology Journal before I graduated and I turned the thinking behind that into a research project which paved my way in the world for three years. It was the AIDS era and I wrote a deliberately controversial essay about the interaction between the harm minimisation campaign to try to control the spread of HIV and the interaction between public health policy, especially among men who didn’t identify as Gay but had sex with men. The NSW Police in those days were still going around entrapping and arresting blokes at Beats, humiliating and sometimes having them convicted. Friends of mine who were working at ACON as peer educators were telling me that the cops were interfering with the work that they did because there were so many men who don’t identify as Gay having sex with men. It’s in every culture. All across Africa with the transmission of HIV, was all about men who had sex with each other but didn’t see themselves as Gay. The denial in our culture, still, about the prevalence of that was interesting to me.
I couldn’t see why, at the time as a young idiot, that people would choose sexuality itself as the basis of an identity. I would take people on about it in those days. There are so many aspects and dimensions to a human being, why focus purely on sexuality. This led to some fantastic conversations and put downs of me in public spaces. It was an exciting time for me to go toe to toe with people on these things. It was a very intellectually and politically interesting time. Paul O’Grady who was the first openly Gay member of parliament in Australia was a close friend of mine and his boyfriend was an old mate of mine from school who was a classic scholar and quite brilliant. Paul was a brilliant human being all round. He would say…. I’m a poof from Parramatta and I’m here to do whatever i can to improve this f#*king world. He’s no longer with us and he lived with HIV for decades.
So I worked as a young fellow in a privileged way that I did not appreciate at the time.”