Monday 21/3/05. V & me r bak on th Nowa Nowa Arm of Lake Tyers (c ‘10/2/05-18/2/05’).

This time V
sed FUCK whn w got 2 th spit @ th nd of TRIDENT ARM trak az it iz kkupied x a groop so w had 2
setl 4 a kampn ‫ ٱ‬a k → sth. Leevn Melbourne he bort a pair of plstk orz 4 th dingy whch stil haznt cn
H2O & a air pump az he had left th 1 he had @ home. In Lakes Entrance w bort a fsh meel (sord fsh
4 me). V haz ↓ ej of th lake wth th rodz. Ystrdy he woz up l8 fnishn off an rdr 4 21 sramk dolz 4 sum1
in Canberra. I hav no nergy @ all az w r @ th start of nuthr famly drama & last nght I hardly slept. Im
pprhnsiv. Th mobile iz bein rcharged off th kar b@ry & I hope 2 chek th mesj bank 4 newz if therz rce-
pshn. Kant b bothrd ritin (5.55 pm) so ftr a KRAP (bhind th LOG) Im ↓ 2 c how hez doin. Tuesday 22-
/3/05. W r @ th nd of th Reedy Arm no.2 trak. Our karz r parkt @ orkwood anglz. I hope I dont hav ny
prlbmz getn out. I hav mobile rcepshn & this mornn got Hs mesj left @ 8 pm ystrdy sayin thingz wer
ndr kntrol @ home. Hav tried 2 O her @ skool but shz not takin th fone. Nuthr solid showr haz 4ced
me ← van wth th █ I woz sitn on 2 kntnue ritin nside. I had n10dd 2 komnt on all kindz of odz & ndz
from th last piece (c’10/2/05 – 18/2/05’) I put out & on thingz red & midnght thortz but I m feeln ↓ & bs-
idez itz orkwood sitn in th van angld sidewize like this while th mozzeez r DRINKN ME BLUD whch iz
prbly al hokolk koz me & Vaidas got drunk last nght. He had bort a kask of Kaizer Stuhl Soft Dry Red
2 + 2 th botl of Taylors cab sav I had got @ th botl shop in Lakes Entrance coz weed bn runin a bit s-
hort on prvious kkazionz he rkond. W stood x th fire l8 in2 th nght ftr kookn & eetn th 2 fl@hed (1 lrger
x ⅓ than ny hez kort b4) hed kort just on sunset (itz pisn ↓) boozn on & torkn ~ IN VINO VERITAS
(-FUK itz reelee pisn ↓). V haznt kort 0 & haz kum up 2 sjest w hed → Snowy River & try 4 eelz. But
1st hel hav 2 drain & dfl8 th rubr dingy (“FISH HUNTER 6 person boat HF 36011” (c ‘10/2/05 –
18/2/05’ p1)) whch now th@ w hav testd it I kan tel u wth thorty iz a 2 persn boat. U hav 2 BLOW ↑ 5
dffrnt km-prtmnts 2 nfl8 it & it woznt eezee 2 row az w had bort TH RONG KIND OF ORZ . Hez
gunna hav fun tryin 2 get it → its █ (29/3. ddnt hav 2 az th it woz kaput from th rain) but Im not goin ↓
2 c howz he m-nagin koz itz stil pisn ↓ …. W r on th wstrn bank of th Snowy. Thr iz a litl jety from whch
V kort a 4 cm long fsh then lost a hook 2 sumptn big, then hookd a huge eel whch broke th line wen I
tried 2 get a net ndr it 2 lift it out. Dont no what w kood hav dun wth it if wed kort it so Im glad w nevr.
W left our ● @ th nd of Reedy Arm no.2 trak wth sum dfkulty (V in prtklar had a prolbm getn nuf
trakshn & I pusht 4 a bit) & hedd → hghway ignorn Humbug rd & not bein temptd x Happy (itz rainn
gain) Valley trak. Drank a beer @ th pub @ Orbost. Drove ← Newmerella (rlier on th way I had shown
V th † ↑ 4 th pe-rsn I had cn ded in hiz burnt out kar wth hiz brane kuvrin hiz shldrz (c ‘ 13/2/01 –
26/2/01’ p2) like a pankake) → Corringle beech ← here. @ 5.50 (6.25 now) rang home. Ben (29/3.
goin 4 hiz ndorst lis-ens) nswrd. I 1td 2 tork 2 H b4 sh hedd off 4 her talian (H sez Eglė sed th ltho
monstry in ROMA whch rentz out cheep rooms iz staft x nunz hoo only speek kraut (26/3. th preests
in chrge r lthoz but)) klas. Thingz r betr sh sez & I told her Id b home on thurzdy. O yair, last nght wen
w wer drunk V woz sayn w shood take a plane → BLOODYVOSTOK & then † russia x vrious 4mz of
transport (but not th 2rst train) → lthol& ovr a munth or mor & I woz sayn Ill b in th@ seein az he kan
speek rus. W (29/3. tried 2 tork me in2 it gain 2day) r dventurus drunks! Th kask (5 leetr) whch stil
haz a kupl of leetrz left haz gon shapelss ftr st&n in th rain. Mght b time 4 a litl nip of soft dry red.
Wednesday 23/3/05. I m ritin sitn on th bak bumpr parkt nxt 2 th Tambo rivr a few kz out of Metung.
Its 5.50 pm. Iv ritn a ntry here b4 ( “→ Tambo River (about 6ks (26/3. ktualy itz O 3) back 2wards
Swan Reach (2nd night of our hon-eymoon, rmmber?) rght on the edge of the bank over the water
about 10 ft below. Ther r small black bream feeding off the growth on the rocks along the bank
undrwater. Ill spnd the night here. Contnui-ng from Ernest Gellners ‘The Origins of Society’ :“The
sheer diversity possible in a species of this kin-d, also makes change possible, change based not on
any genetic transformation, but rather on cumu-lative development in a certain direction, consisting of
a modification of the semantic rather than gen-etic system of constraints … But this possibility of
progress, which in our culture we think of as some-how glorious, presents a problem. Initially, the
main difficulty facing societies was to restrain this exc-essive flexibility. The preservation of order is
far more important for societies than the achievement of beneficial change, which only comes later,
when conservation can be taken for granted, and when openings for genuinely beneficial change are
available. Progress is possible because change is poss-ible, because the internal constructs of men
1
allows such a wide range of conduct. But most change is not at all beneficial; most of it would disrupt
a social order without any corresponding advantage. Bef-ore we can explain how beneficial change is
possible, we must first show how too much change, with all kinds of chaotic effects, is avoided. This
is not a Conservative Party political broadcast but the po-int needs to be made. Conservation is the
initial problem for a labile population, and it appears to be solved through deeply internalized
concepts.” Thursday 19/2/04. 9.00. Ther r blackberries † the road with some ripe fruit (2 + 2 the
mango I had 4 breakfast); a boat went past heading 4 the mouth of the river (in2 Lake King. C map 84
of Vic Roads Country Directory). I learnt a new word from the Vermes book day b4 ystrdy :
ESCH@OLOGY & my writing is ESCH@ALOGICAL ie. it pertains 2 the “final pe-riod of the present
era and all other m@ers pertaining to it”. On a smaller scale I rturn 2 the m@er of knowing I hav
finishd saying the things whch wer mportant 4 me 2 say. A couple of weeks ago I rread my last 8 or so
‘pieces’ & spnt another 1 of those sleepless nights rviewing what I had said & it confir-md my
knowledg th@ I hav givn as clear a ccount as I m capabl of. I should considr myslf 4tun@ as ther r
many who would hav liked 2 giv fuller xpression 2 thmslvs but hav bn prvnted x circumstances or lack
of language. I m not 1 of thm. It would b fair 4 some1 2 ask me how do I ‘know’ in case I dont know
the meanng of the word. 2 answer I suggest u considr what is the dffrence (the str@egy of) in saying
‘I m in pain’ 2 saying ‘I know I m in pain’ & compare it 2 the dffrence in saying ‘I M SANE’ 2 ‘I KNOW I
M SANE’ & compare it 2 saying ‘I M NSANE’ 2 ‘I KNOW I M NSANE’. A clue : it concerns the balance
btween ‘knowing’ & ‘meaning’ (c ‘12/4/03 – 24/4/03’ p. 16,17). Czeslaw Milosz (27/2/04. from slavic
root ‘milo’ / love so th@ (Slobodan) Milosevic means lover. In litho : ‘miliu’ / I love, & ‘mei-lė’ / noun 4
love)(Česlovas Milašius in litho) who claims he is a polish speaking lithuanian (he has a supposedly
close rel@iv in the litho communty in Sydney who spells his name MILAŠAS) whos long life covers
the period of both wars (1st & 2nd) says th@ prior 2 the 2nd u could hav filld a libary wth bo-oks
prdicting the evnts 2 follow. Did the literry fr@rnty ‘KNOW’ or sens what was 2 come? I rather fa-ncy
an evn bigger libary could hav bn filld wth prdictions (esp in germany) of a triumphant future & the
immnnt rrival of the goldn age. Robert Musil says th@ b4 the 1st war & the dmise of the civilzation of
the Hapsburgs all points of view had their rprsent@ives & their loud PROPHETS. I c (feel it in my bo-
nes, apprhnd, fear? sens) the nd (28/3. On a hazy summer day a boy sees a thread no thicker th-
an a cobweb hanging from thin air in front of his face. Perhaps he has seen it before without
paying attention or perhaps it has always been there unnoticed. As thoughtlessly as brushing
away a fly he reaches out and tugs at the thread. He is not to know that it is hanging loose fr-
om the fabric which goes to form the universe and that he has set off a run which will unravel
it.) & prdict the dstruction of MPIRES & of CIVILZATION as we know it. Others c it dffrently & they
may wish 2 in4m me th@ my VISION is faulty. But it has never bn my ntrest (or n10tion or politic) 2
speak 4 (rprsnt) others. I only speak 4 myself. I SAY IT AS I C IT. 4 it may b th@ every moment cont-
ains in it ALL POSSIBLE FUTURES.”). Just rang home & Ben nsrwd. He sez Dan had taken th foto-
grafr & th mgzeen edtor (Rachel (26/3. met up wth her (27/3. grew up neer JERUSALEM (iz 2day th
day th stone woz rold way?) & rmmbrz Baxter) & a ftogrfr (27/3. from Warsaw (Varšuva (home town of
Dr. Zamenhofas (nvntr of ESPERANTO) b4 he set up prktice in Kaunas (c ‘Melbourne → Kaunas’
p10)) in lthol&) via canada, Flemington, & Mt Baw Baw) in Errol st 2day & Dan & me wer ftogrfd (29/3.
he woz uzin a Rollei kamra whch woz much oldr than him as it woz made in th erly 50s but iz stil his
most rliabl kamra he sed) in th lane bhind th old town hall & then w had a drink in ltho haus)) from ki-
wil& hoom hez showin O → KEdSaMnIiNuAsS studio. H woznt home so Ill O l8r. I partd wth V @ Kal-
imna pub. Hez → Melbourne. Erlier w 8 sordfsh gain @ Lakes Entrance ← Orbost (whr w wer breth-
lized) ← Snowy rivr (eest bank neer Marlo whr he ddnt get a singl bite; I woz reedn ‘Borges’ x Edwin
Williamson (hoo haz had 0 of th xpriences whch wood llow him nsight in2 Borgesz ritin) Viking © 20-
04) ← Snowy rivr (Corringle or wst bank whr ftr I rote th ntry ystrdee V puld out a sizebl conger eel
(●d) whch he saltd & iz takin home. W ddnt drink 2 much last nght & only a kupl of glasz (just heetd
up sum soop) @ mdday 2day so wen w went w left th shapelss kask on th pknk tabl wth O a litr of
soft dry red stil in it 4 th nxt fshrmn. Az I sed I had n10dd 2 nklood all kindz of rumin8nz in this piece
of ritin but I m stil lackin nergy & may leev thm out or I may kntnue wen I rtern → Melbourne. It wood
2
giv me th xuse 2 ntrojuice u 2 th 3rd main prtagnist from ‘IN TRANSIT’. I m rfern 2 th ‘I’ persona, klose
relo of Jim Brown & Mallacoota Man (u kan work out 4 yorslf whch iz th ID, GO, & SPRGO) hooz xpl-
oits r knfined 2 th inr sity ‫ٱ‬s of Melbourne & Sydney. (“Let’s progress to some real sex. My defacto,
and its about time I started calling her my wife, tells me that her cunt is getting old. But as my cock
has only one eye it hasn’t noticed the difference. I havent told you yet that she is pregnant. If we have
a son I want him to be called Jonas rather than Jonah. Jonah (according to the Women’s Weekly)
means, peace, but Jonas means a dove. And though my wife looks like a whale, when she lies joined
to me in bed I can feel inside her belly the fluttering of a dove. I could at last be associated with a rel-
atively normal birth but not if the local women’s support group have their way. At her last meeting they
advised her to get an abortion because of our non-existant financial situation and because it would be
a negative input into the current stage of her personal growth. Besides Im a rapist. They are right too,
but really it has nothing to do with me, its her body to do with as she wishes.¶ Getting back to my gui-
ded tour of Balmain, I have to say in my own defence that I wasn’t your typical tourist. My guide was
a yuppy cousin of mine and we ‘did’ Balmain on foot. At least where wheels are concerned I did not
sc-ore any demerits. I realize now too that some of the Balmain experiences I earlier ascribed to Jim
may have been mine rather than his. As I explained, there is a blurring of the line between author and
character in our case because of the common bond we share in that we both had abnormal births.
There is also a possibility that Jim is attempting to appropriate some of my experiences in an effort to
gain a separate existence. Could it be that even a character in a book aspires to live in his own right?
¶ These events happened long ago when my sperm count was two or three times greater than it is
now and I was still a teenager. Up until then I had lived at home with my parents in Coburg. My rel-
ationship with my father, which had always been lousy, had finally culminated in a confrontation which
was even more awful than the normal ones I was used to. It was the first time that he actually made a
full frontal physical attack on me throwing punches like a windmill. If it hadnt been for my mother scr-
eaming out the name of the Holy Virgin Mary at the top of her voice and then falling down on the kit-
chen floor and banging her head on it till it looked as if she might knock it off I could have got killed.
The shock of seeing her thrashing about like that brought us to our senses but only temporarily. The
argument continued on in the TV room and though no more punches were thrown the emotional vio-
lence we did to each other reached a new and intolerable intensity. In the end, goaded on by the old
man, I left home in the middle of the night intending never to return. My parents did not budge from
their positions in front of the TV set while I went into their bedroom and took out $150 from a drawer
where I knew the old man kept his money. I would have taken more but that was all that was there. I
had been in the habit of knocking off small amounts from there before because the old boy was too
stingy to give me a decent allowance. Then without so much as a goodbye I left the home of my birth
closing the door quietly behind me. There is no point recounting the argument blow by blow. The fuse
as always was some trivial domestic practice which according to my father I had failed to observe.
The real causes of our conflict ran much deeper. They can best be described by terms such as gen-
eration gap, culture-gap, communication breakdown or better still by the fact that he was a plain bas-
tard. He was a Greek living in Australia and he wanted me to behave in the way that Greeks believe
their sons should behave. For instance he expected me and my brothers to do hours of homework
every night so that we could become lawyers and embezzle huge amounts of money or brain sur-
geons and do frontal lobotomies. He could not understand that I was a product of a pro-active-prob-
lem-solving style of education where we did not do homework or waste our time learning facts. My
teachers did not try to teach us the truth, no one knew what it was anyway, but instead they tried to
instil in us positive attitudes to learning. What those attitudes were precisely I have since forgotten
but they were not the sort of thing that I could explain to the old man. Anyway by then I had reached a
level of sophistication where I desired to communicate with people while he was still at the primitive
stage where he talked to them. He used to shout at me in Greek as I pleaded for caring communic-
ation. My pleas fell on deaf ears as he was incapable of listening to anyone in an open tolerant way.
His lack of listening skills reinforced my negative self-concept and heightened my feelings of reject-
ion. That is probably the origin for the prolonged dependency needs which my defacto finds so bur-
3
densome. I used to try to explain to my father how knowledge can be gained through other mediums
than school; how the bottom line of any learning experience was whether it succeeded as a preparat-
ion for the real world. I argued that only real world activities could endow me with genuine life skills. I
might as well have argued with a brick wall. His face would turn grey with anger and he would still
kick me out of the TV room. My three brothers meanwhile would be in their rooms studying. They
sided with the old man, a state of affairs which I felt bordered on the unnatural. If it had been them
who were in conflict with him they certainly would have got my moral support. As it was I felt an out-
cast in my own home, psychologically disoriented by the bad male and female role models provided
by my parents. I’ve often wondered why my brothers did not get into the same strife that I did. I think
its probably because at heart they were more Greek than my parents even though they were born
here. They all had scholarships to a Greek-Australian school which according to its year book has,
and I quote, “a worthwhile curriculum committed to the teaching of our best validated knowledge in a
coherent and systematic form, and also in a form which illumines experience and provides resources
for human purposes and necessities!” Every Greek parent knew that this meant a lot of memorizing,
plenty of homework and a likelihood that their kids would one day make a bundle in professional car-
eers. Which is in fact what happened to my brothers. I was made to sit for a scholarship too. My fath-
er’s occupation as a sanitary engineer was not a highly paid one and he could not afford to send us
to a private school without scholarships. I failed mine on purpose because I knew I could never fit into
a school full of such conscientious do-gooders as my brothers. I had already by then worked out the
un-usual nature of my birth and knew that I was not a Greek like the rest of my family. I was a post-
multi-cultural Australian, a new man at the dawn of a new age. It was important to me that the
educational process be one which empowered me not in society as they perceived it but in the future
society whi-ch was to be transformed by a devolution of authority structures into a spiritual haven for
mankind’s search for greater self-awareness. I was fortunate that at least at school I had people I
could relate to. Once I had outlined the nature of the emotional violence I was subjected to at home
to the school counsellor the teachers became very supportive and sympathetic. That’s another
reason I did not want to go to the Greek school – I liked it where I was. In particular my teacher in
Interdisciplinary Studies, which was my favourite subject, was very helpful to me and prepared to act
as a surrogate role model. When we were exploring as part of our social consciousness raising, the
role of fantasy and imagery in the sexual molestation of children, he encouraged me to act out my
own fantasies. One night when he was giving me a lift home after a school play we called in at his
flat. It was there that I had my first experience with marijuana. From then on at school I hung around
exclusively with the pot-heads. It was the beginning, for me, of a new path to personal discovery and
the actualization in my personality development of those aspects of my nature which had previously
been suppressed by my authoritarian upbringing. ¶ Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to
sea, - / Past the houses, past the headlands, / Into deep eternity! // Bred as we, among the
mountains, / Can the sailor understand / The divine intoxication / Of the first league out from
land? (Emily Dick-inson) ¶ That was also the beginning of my interest in body language for it was in
body language rath-er than the spoken word that we communicated with each other when we were
spaced out. Can you appreciate now that there was just no way I could explain any of the things that
were going on inside me to my parents. They and my brothers could talk about money and the
practicalities of life till I felt like spewing but I was forced to make my spiritual journey alone. ¶ My
education was a major source of conflict with my father almost as long as I can remember. This had
been a particularly bad year. Ri-ght from the start he took exception to my choice of subjects and
even threatened not to pay for the books. It was only after my Legal teacher wrote a note explaining
that he was obligated by law to pay for my education unitl I was 18 and that I could, if he didn’t do so,
get legal aid to sue him, did he ag-ree to pay. He was shit scared of the law. For a guy who had
almost no schooling himself though, he held very firm opinions on educational matters. He
disapproved of every subject I chose except for Society and the Law, which he reluctantly, as a result
of the aforesaid correspondence with my Legal teacher, had to admit would be useful. Besides
Society and the Law my other subjects that year at Moreland High School were : Peace Studies,
4
Environmental Issues, Media Studies, Comparative Re-ligion, Human Relations, Real Life Skills and
my favourite subject, Interdisciplinary Studies. You may wonder what happened to English which in
most schools is a compulsory subject. At Moreland High English was included in Real Life Skills.
Even my mother who usually kept out of our arguments won-dered about what kind of job these
subjects would qualify me for. The old man never stopped critici-zing and praised my brothers at
every conceivable opportunity. They were doing subjects like Mathe-matics, Accountancy and Greek
of course. And they were getting very good marks. My school never gave marks. The report at
Moreland High consisted of a bunch of written statements outlining verbally my achievements in
every skill a human being could possibly possess. On the surface it looked good but my parents
found out from a relative that the teachers were not allowed to say anything negative about even the
worst kid in the school. They didn’t understand what was written there anyway. Dick O’Tool (we were
encouraged to be on first name terms at Moreland), my teacher in Interdisciplinary Studies, wrote that
I had achieved major milestones in my journey of personal discovery. The truth of the matter is that
by Moreland High standards I was a gifted student; but try convincing my parents of that. They could
not or would not accept that I was a child of the future for as Teilhard de Chardin once put it : “Only
he who has fought bravely and been victorious in the struggle against the spurious security and
strength and attraction of the past can attain to the firm and blissful experiential certainty that the
more we lose all foothold in the darkness and instability of the future, the more deeply we pe-netrate
into God.” ¶ There were other problems too. Coming home one night after 1am from a form party at
Dick O’Tool’s flat I noticed that the light was on in the old man’s workshop, which was attach-ed to the
back of the garage. I did not think at the time to pay any attention to it and I let myself into the house
quietly, so as not to wake anyone, by the back door as was my custom. I made a special effort to be
very quiet so as not to alert the old fellow, who never stopped complaining about the hou-rs I kept. He
claimed that he was almost an insomniac and couldn’t fall asleep till everyone else was in the house
and in bed. As I later learnt it was true too. The old bastard slept with one ear open and always made
a note of when I got home; sometimes he’d even write it down. I didn’t want to wake up my mum
either otherwise she’d come out in her nightgown looking old and frail and as if she was car-rying the
world’s worries on her back and interrogate me about where I’d been and who else was the-re and
was everything alright and did I have a good time and was there anyone there messing with drugs
and so on. The plain fact is that that night I was concerned that the smell of pot could be detec-ted on
my clothes so I actually took off my shoes on the porch before entering, turned the key very gently in
the lock and crept into my room like a thief. I swapped the globe in my reading lamp for a dark purple
one and went to sleep. ¶ I had a strange and extraordinary vivid dream that the party was continuing
on in my room. In the dim glow of my purple globe I could see that the room was crammed with
people all talking incomprehensibly at the same time. Through the babble I could clearly hear the
faint sound of party music coming, it seemed, straight out of the wall. My room was only small but
there must have been a whole crowd inside. Through the gloom I could tell by the chuckling and gig-
gling more than by anything else that there were several people on top of the wardrobe. I also beca-
me aware of activity under my bed. Someone was thumping about under there and now and then I
could hear a girl or perhaps more than one squealing. There was a couple sitting on the edge of my
bed and even someone right in with me. They were smoking pot. Peering more closely into the face
of the bloke in the bed I recognized Dick O’Tool. He was offering me a joint. Frankly I was already
feeling a bit spaced out and I just lay back on the pillow again and went back to sleep. But I slept only
fitfully. I woke up again briefly but this time the room was bathed in bright light. The music was still
playing but the revellers and pot-heads had gone. Instead I was surrounded by a dozen or so doctors
and nurses in white coats peering intently at me through various instruments. I heard one of them say
that they had better put me to sleep now as I was waking up. Later again, probably still in my sleep, I
remembered the light in the workshop. My room faced the garage and was only a few yards from the
workshop. I became aware that the music which had appeared to be coming from the wall was actu-
ally coming from outside, almost certainly from the workshop. Obviously whoever had left the light on
must also have left a transistor going. Suddenly the music was switched off. I sat up in bed wide awa-
5
ke. There were people in the garage talking quietly; every now and then I could hear over the voices
the sound of something being dragged about as if the furniture was being rearranged. I almost got
out of bed with the intention of going out to find out what was happening but a sense of foreboding
warn-ed me to be careful. I was frightened now. I switched off my purple light and lay on my back
staring into the darkness. Later I heard the sound of doors opening and closing, someone laughed,
and the sound of cars being driven off. Although I cannot remember falling asleep after that I must
have, for the next thing I heard was the usual morning noises of my parents getting up and going to
the bath-room. I looked at the window and saw that it was already getting light. My desk lamp was
switched off. When my mother came to the door to wake me up she was surprised to find me already
out of bed and dressed. ¶ After breakfast when my father and brothers had already left I pretended to
my mum that my bike chain was playing up and went out the back to the workshop ostensibly to get
some tools. Everything in the shed was in place. The light was not on. It was perfectly tidy for the old
man was obsessed with tidiness. There was no transistor on the table and the room had been swept.
I was just about to go back to the house when I noticed what were clearly drag marks on the floor.
They weren’t obvious but they were definitely there. A closer inspection revealed more of them. The
rest of the room was exactly as normal. Something was very wrong! Back in the house I got my bag,
called out goodbye to my mum and left hurriedly for I didn’t want her to see me. I got on my bike and
slowly cycled off to school. I felt like swooning. ¶ Lord // hold me in your mighty arm / like a tiny
ship / in the eye of the storm / take me in your gentle hand // to the stillness of your heart ¶
Over the ensuing weeks I became very watchful. I did not tell anyone about the activity in the shed,
not even Dick O’Tool because I did not want my friends to think that I had a screw loose. Because of
the earlier events of that night I began to wonder if the pot and the occasional pills I popped hadnt
affected my mind. The marks on the floor, however, were clearly visible for weeks. ¶ I now became
aware of a series of small events and circumstances which previously in a less vigilant frame of mind
I would have most likely dismissed. I would sometimes look up and catch my mother staring at me
intently as if she was seeing me for the first time. She would turn her head away guiltily as if she had
just been caught spying on me. On several occasions I noticed my three brothers with their heads
together conspiratorially, in earnest discussion. This struck me as very odd because they were not
particularly close to each other and their usual form was for two of them to gang up on the third. Me
they had always ignored. As I walked up to them they would fall silent or one of them would suddenly
raise his voice with a comment which would start off an obviously fake conversation for my benefit.
The old man became much less abrupt and less volatile with me. He seemed to choose his words
carefully and even managed not to criticize me for a week at a time. This put me more on edge than
ever because it was so unlike him. I could tell that he was watching me like a hawk though. One night
when I was going to the bathroom I noticed under the door of my parents’ bedroom that the light was
on and when I made a few careful steps closer to their room I could hear a number of voices discus-
sing something. I crept back down the passage to the bathroom then cluttered about noisily, flushed
the toilet and stomped back to bed. Next morning was exactly like every other; no signs that anything
had happened over night, nor for that matter any signs of fatigue on my parents’ faces. A similar eve-
nt happened in the daytime once. It was a Saturday morning and the rest of the family had all gone to
the market. As I was walking past the lounge room door which was unaccountably shut, I heard the
sound of talking and even my name, followed by laughter. I was so surprised that I threw open the
door before I had a chance to be overcome with fear. All three brothers were inside fiddling with some
electronic equipment. ¶ “Just messing with some tapes”, one of them blurted out. ¶ They were too, I
could see that. There was nothing extraordinary about that as one of them was an electronics freak.
But it still did not explain why they had stayed home that day or why my name should be on the tape.
I became convinced too that I was being spied on in the evenings from outside my window. I would
have liked to draw the blind but by doing that I would have given away that I was onto whatever was
going on. ¶ As you can see I was becoming very tense and frightened. Which may explain why I be-
came more involved in my Comparative Religion course than any other kid in class. We had a very
progressive teacher for this subject who encouraged us to assume responsibility for the content of
6
the course while she stayed very much in the background. She wouldn’t have had much time for
teaching anyway as she was always writing articles and answering phone calls in connection with her
other job as editor of a Man-Boy magazine called ‘Rear Passage’. I have heard that she has since
been prom-oted to a more senior job in the Education Department where she has fewer distractions
to her work. Most ot the kids concentrated on making costumes of Inca priests, bishops, the pope,
Mandrake ca-pes and angel wings, and so on. This was good fun as the suits had to be made back-
stage in the hall where we could muck around without any supervision. I decided that I would make a
Jesus Christ suit. The amazing thing is that when I put on my suit which was a kind of loose fitting,
floor length, white smock with very baggy sleeves, I felt a tremendous sense of relief as if all my
troubles had mel-ted away. ¶ Lord // when you hold me / in your mighty arm // my hand is firm //
by itself / it shakes like a reed. ¶ I also made myself a staff and a crown of thorns out of barbed
wire. I had star-ted out intending to make a total statement with my outfit but I ended up realizing that
I was a special being in the eyes of God. Dear reader, I ask you for understanding. I still don’t know if
God created children or children invented God, but I was only a youth then, not much more than a
child. How was I different to any other born-again Christian? It isnt even a rare experience. Jimmy
Carter is a born again Christian and so is Ron Barassi. The enormity of my discovery was so
shattering that I couldn’t sleep at nights and even forgot for a while to monitor the odd events going
on around me. ¶ Lord // my strength is yours // but tonight // I pray / you give me rest. ¶ My
parents viewed these develo-pments with consternation. My old man was really shaken up when I
started hammering together a life-size cross in the back yard! He had never seen me work so hard at
anything connected with sch-ool before. First I made a twelve foot long ladder which was to be the
upright and onto it I hammered a one by two inch cross beam. I also hammered in two nine inch nails
at the exact distance where my wrists were to be. Unfortunately it turned out to be too heavy for me
to carry on my back as I had ho-ped to make a pilgrimage with it to a local church to demonstrate my
devotion. So I attached it instead to a gum tree in the back yard. It was an impressive sight. I was
able to climb up it like a ladder and stand on a rung so that my wrists rested on the nails. My parents
and even my brothers, meanwhile, were behaving as if I was out of my mind. They were terrified of
what the neighbours were thinking; and I must say that I had noticed them examining from the
adjoining yards what I was doing with cu-riousity. When I told my family that on Good Friday I
intended to put on my thorn crown and a loin cloth and stand on my cross from midday till sundown,
they nearly flipped. But they were not to know that I was chosen to do this. That part is my secret. ¶
Lord / I am unworthy // in the music / of your wounded hand / I tremble // like a bird ¶
Nevertheless, soon afterwards my mother started trying to talk me into seeing a doctor. She said I
was over-stressed but I could tell she thought I was out of my mind. Dick O’Tool informed me that
both my parents had secretly visited the school and were in corr-espondence with the headmaster. ¶
In the days prior to Easter the whole family seemed obsessed with talking me out of my plan. ¶
“Why?” I kept on asking. “Why is it wrong to stand on a cross in the afternoon but alright ot go to
church at a crazy hour like midnight?” ¶ “Because you arent Jesus Chr-ist”, the old man muttered. ¶
“But we are all made in the image of God”, I said. “He was the son of man you know.” ¶ “He didn’t
smoke marijuana.” ¶ That did it! It had come like a thunderbolt from the blue: there was no way he
could have known I was a smoker. That night my head was in a spin. The same thoughts kept going
round and round in my mind: they were spying on me. I knew now that the clicks and whirring sounds
I had recently been hearing on the phone meant it was bugged. I spent the whole night listening to
the sounds in the house. I could hear what I knew to be the fridge and a dripp-ing tap but also a host
of sounds that had no explanation at all. It was amazing that I hadnt heard them before. It showed
just how self absorbed I had become in the religious experience. The house was wired, there were
bugs everywhere. The music I had heard in my room on the night my suspi-cions were first aroused
really had come from a transmitter in the wall. ¶ I now completely forgot ab-out my plans for
observing Good Friday. Easter came and went while I was desperately trying to find out how my
family was spying on me. I knew that one of my brothers was a whiz with electronics and that any
system he devised would be sophisticated and hard to detect. The house was rarely empty so I could
7
not get enough time to examine it exhaustively. I had, of course, gone through my own room with a
fine toothed comb. I even broke open the ventilation grill to see what was behind it and I dismantled
my clock radio and my tape recorder niether of which I was able to put together again. Al-though I
couldn’t expend the same care on the rest of the house I still got into the roof through a man-hole in
the bathroom ceiling and I also checked out carefully underneath the house. I found nothing. ¶
Though I was never able to precisely locate the listening devices and other monitoring equipment that
I could hear I kept finding new clues of various kinds all about me. By themselves some of these clu-
es were small but taken together they were overwhelming, mind-boggling and enigmatic. ¶ One day I
came across a Rolls Royce parked in Gilbert Road. Now Coburg is not exactly Rolls Royce country
but what stopped me in my tracks was the personalized number plate : JZ 666. It was the first time I
had come across my initials on a number plate. I knew that sooner or later it had to happen. But why
now and on a Rolls Royce? What really floored me though was the number for I recognized immedi-
ately that it was the number of the beast who was a man from Revelation, which was the only bit of
the bible I had read in full. I raced home to search for the relevant passage to make sure that my im-
agination wasn’t playing tricks on me. Sure enough, there it was in Chapter 13 : “Here is wisdom. Let
him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his nu-
mber is six hundred three score and six.” ¶ It began to dawn on me that I was the centre of not only
my family’s attention but the fulcrum for a much wider scheme of things the exact nature of which
was hidden from me. The discovery of a hidden agenda in the apparent normality of the world around
me shook me to the core. As I stood on the doorstep of the greatest discoveries of my life, perhaps to
the greatest insights of all time, I knew that I would have to call upon all the resources from the
deepest wells of my character if I was to retain my sanity. I wondered if I had the courage to open the
door. ¶ as we stood on the edge of the precipice / a companion remarked how glorious it
would be / to take a deep breath and dive into the abyss // my friend / even as you straighten
out into the dive proper / already you are travelling at fantastic speed / because of the special
nature of the abyss / your acceleration increases so rapidly / that in an instant the speed of
your dive / has choked the minds scream / into silence / far behind // the abyss goes on //
believe me my friend / unless a greater hand than mine pluck you out / you will never come
out of that dive ¶ Soon afterwards I was riding my bicycle back from school only a couple of hundred
yards from home when a Channel 10 News van passed me going the other way. In the instant that
we crossed I saw out of the corner of my eye someone behind the tinted window in the passenger
seat gesticulating to another person or persons out of sight in the back of the van as if to draw
attention to me. By the time I stopped and turned to have a better look the van was disappearing
around the corner ahead of me. It had no markings but I could tell it was a TV van because it had
tinted windows and was the same make as a Channel 10 van. It did not really surprise me. My role in
the events unfolding about me was still a mystery but it was obvious that there were powerful people
who knew what was happening and everything in time would be revealed on TV. I got an inkling of
the future when I was watching a documentary one evening on natural disasters in the third world.
They were showing footage of aval-anche victims being pulled out of the snow in the Andes and
carried on stretchers to waiting ambula-nces. As one of the bodies was being placed in the back of an
ambulance I saw that the face of the victim was my face. How it could have been arranged so that I
would be sure to see this program I didn’t know. But unless similar inserts were being made in many
programs, and I had no evidence that this was the case, it was clear my movements could be
manipulated by hidden watchers. ¶ Minor incidents such as the time I spotted my father’s back as he
disappeared into the local police station no longer amazed me. I knew that he was terrified of the
police but it didn’t surprise me when he came home that evening as if he’d done a normal day’s work
pretending nothing had happened. I waited till Saturday and when they had all gone to the market
searched through a chest of drawers in the parents’ bedroom where they kept their personal
documents. Sure enough I found a card origin-ating from the Coburg Police Station with the name of
a Sergeant Wood on it and the names and phone numbers of two of my friends at school written on
the back. They had managed to infiltrate even the pot-heads in order to spy on me. Nobody, but
8
nobody, could be trusted. I would lay in bed at nights endlessly reviewing the most minor events of
the day and the expressions on people’s faces, even of shopkeepers and people I did not personally
know, in a futile effort to solve the mystery. ¶ The human mind works in perverse ways. Often we fail
to see the forest for the trees yet at other times we use the most obscure clues to make monumental
discoveries. Thus, for a thousand years, thinkers failed to discover gravity in spite of the evidence of
falling apples all about them, yet Newton deduced its existence by contemplating the elliptical paths
of planets which Kepler had discovered through a second rate telescope. ¶ I had overlooked such
tell-tale clues as the crumpled sheet of paper I picked up under the lounge and when I smoothed it
out found it to be a notice advertising a seminar for neuro-surgeons. After reading it I scrunched it up
into a ball again and without a second thought threw it into the waste basket. I drew no inferences
from the habit one of my brothers acquir-ed of always using a scalpel at dinner to cut up his
sausages; nor did I think to ask him where he had got it. I attached no significance to the fact that the
work-smock another of my brothers wore as he endlessly tinkered with his electronic equipment was
really a surgical gown. It suited him, too; he was the one who later became a brain surgeon. So,
surrounded though I was by all these obvious pointers to my condition, the crucial evidence which
caused the sudden insight, the flash of inspiration that made me stop dead on a crowded footpath
with my mouth agape and my eyes bulging, oblivious to the curious glances of the people walking
past, was enigmatic and superficially mundane. That evid-ence was my increasing punctuality; not
your ordinary punctuality but an effortless kind of punctuality, and sometimes, even in spite of efforts
to the contrary. I would arrive at a station just as a train was pulling in without even having looked at
my watch. Or I would get to the barbers for a haircut an hour after my appointment and be called
straight into the chair because someone else had cancelled theirs. No matter how often I slept in I
was never late for classes. I would arrive in schoool to discover that the classes prior to recess had
been cancelled due to a teachers’ meeting called without notice, or that everyone had been busy
doing a fire drill, or that my teacher for the period I missed was ill or away. I stopped wearing a watch
but it made no difference. At first I found it curious and even exhilar-ating but after a while I became
uneasy and later my punctuality became oppressive. It was as if I was a robot programmed to do
certain tasks without any input from my own free will. I was, I realized, a prisoner of the forces that
govern time. Not time by the clock as you know it, but a more subtle real time which made
allowances for human error and chance. ¶ It is possible, I suppose, that in my sub-conscious I had
been putting the pieces of the jigsaw together all along otherwise how can you expl-ain that at the
moment of enlightenment, as I stood like a statue on the footpath one foot in front of the other frozen
mid-stride, all the pieces fell into place instantaneously: I had been given a brain tra-nsplant. ¶ Now I
kwew why I felt like a robot. Together with the new brain they had implanted a mini-ature receiver-
transmitter which allowed them to control my movements by radio. I knew now why the rest ot the
family looked at me in that particular way and why I felt no kinship with my brothers. The music I had
heard did not come from the wall of my room but from inside my own head. The clicks and whirrings
did not come from equipment hidden about the house but was the sound made by the machinery
hidden in my head in response to various radio signals beamed at it. I also knew that the operation
had been done on the night that I imagined I had been dreaming about a party in my room but had in
fact gained consciousness long enough to have seen, however briefly, the doctors who did the
operation before they put me out again. In that one instant I understoood how my old man was able
to find out about the drugs I was fooling with; I understood why I had so little memory of my chil-
dhood; above all I understood why I was different to them. ¶ I also understood why I no longer had
any sex drive. For the time being my libido had been reduced to zero. There is a very intimate conne-
ction between the brain and the dick. You cant tamper with one without affecting the other. It is well
known in the medical fraternity that people who’ve sustained massive head injuries often lose their
sexual drive, as do people who have had a frontal lobotomy. I had attributed my own loss of sexual
interest however to my religious conversion. I knew better now. ¶ I must focus for a while on the horn-
y topic of my sexuality prior to the brain transplant. I realize what you’re thinking : you think that I’m
pandering to the modern reader’s need for vicarious sex; maybe you think that I’m doing this because
9
I have nothing of substance to write about. On both counts you’re wrong. I am doing this in the inter-
est of truth and science. Nor have I forgotten that I previously said I would keep sex out of it; but this
is not one of those cheap exercises in titillation. This is a gentle and sensitive examination of a
youth-’s sexual awakening; of a young man’s fumbling efforts to achieve a sexual identity in the face
of en-ormous odds and surgical intervention. Besides it would be impossible for you to have any
insight into my relationship with my defacto without some acknowledgement of my sexual past. Even
in this sex-ually liberated age when it is considered smart to use words like bum and dick in
sophisticated comp-any and when the most refined feminists use four letter expletives like builders
labourers I give you these autobiographical details with trepidation because I am afraid you will think
less of me as a re-sult. Please remember that as a consequence of being a virgin birth I was sexually
confused from the start. ¶ I had already become a poon by the time I was nine or ten years old. In
fact among the few vivid memories that I still retained after the transplant were the memories of the
countless times I put up my hand in class asking the teacher if I could go to the toilet and then
instead of going to the toilet the mad dash round the back of the school to the bicycle sheds. The
sheds could more easily be app-roached across the asphalted yard but I had to go around the long
way so I wouldn’t be spotted. There is some controversy about the current meaning of the word –
poon. A deluded friend of mine sincerely believes that he and his mates invented the word on a trip
through coastal Queensland when they bared their behinds at mindnight in the main street of
Yeppoon and stirred the locals with derisive cries of “You Poons.” This purportedly took place when
Yeppoon was still a sleepy coastal paradise before Jo Bjelke sold it to the Japs. I use the term with
the meaning that was in use still earlier when I was in primary school; that is, to describe a kid who
went round sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. That’s it! I’ve told it now! This is not one of your sanitized
biographies like Mother Theresa’s or Albert Schweiter’s. I stand before you with my past exposed to
the full glare of daylight to be judged for what I am. I make no excuses and I don’t ask for your
sympathy. I can just imagine the smirks of self-satisfaction on your smug faces out there in videoland
or pulpland or listenerland or wherever you are. But people in glass houses should not throw stones.
If I had been a queer you would by now have promoted me to a weather man on the ABC by using
provisions for positive discrimination. If a had diddled the common purse out of millions of dollars by
my expertise in company tax laws I would have become a tycoon and been the object of admiration
to the whole country. Your sons may yet grow up to be male models, sperm donors and urinologists
and your daughters female wrestlers and social workers. If I had been a young drug pusher or
prostitute or an aborigine you would have hired batteries of psychologists and counsellors to explain
to the world how I was the victim of incest and environment and brutal alcoholic parents and you
would have written countless sob stories in your Sunday papers on how I wasn’t responsible for my
own actions. But I am just a Greek boy with a brain transplant and I’m no longer young and I don’t fit
into any of the cliches or categories on which you are in the habit of expending your worthless
sympathies. And I admit it, I have been – a poon. ¶ But enough of this self-indulgent indignation. Like
a cat to its vomit or a fly to a turd, I return to the topic in hand: my developing sexuality. Right from my
early adolescence I was perfecting methods of looking up women’s dresses with a small mirror which
I initially held in the palm of my hand but later as I refined my techniques attached to the end of a
handle about a foot long. The idea of the handle was to save me from having to keep stooping all the
time or pretend that I was picking something up off the ground. By my mid-teens the passion for
mirrors had completely displaced my earlier interest in bicycle seats. It was a hobby which contained
a prediction about my future: there I was holding little mirrors to little bits of the world and here I am
now, a writer, holding up a much larger mirror to the world. As with the interest in bicycles this hobby
also had its origins in school. I was thirteen years old and in second form at Moreland High when I
took an optional subject called ‘Knowing Your Body’. It was taught by the same teacher who later, at
the time of my religious conversion, was taking me for Comparative Religion. I used to sit in the first
row in front of the teacher’s table which was on a plat-form about a foot above the level of the rest of
the classroom. The topic we were studying remains fixed in my memory in spite of later traumas. It
was called ‘When To Say No’. The general idea was that if propositioned by boys or men and
10
especially by defactos and uncles girls were always to say no, and conversely, if propositioned by
girls, boys were always to say no. Our teacher explained how she, like the majority of young girls,
was the victim of childhood incest which had resulted in making all subsequent relationships with
members of the opposite sex repugnant to her. Her faith in the entire human race had been shaken
and only partially restored by the loving relationship she found with the policewoman responsible for
prosecuting her uncle. Later, when the policewoman shifted to Rozelle in Sydney where she is now a
councillor, our teacher moved in with a social worker and her two pit-bull terriers. I was finding all this
rambling on about her personal life typical of teachers and pretty ted-ious stuff and would have been
inclined to doze off if it had not been that as I stared vacantly at her knee-caps, about three feet in
front of my nose under the table, they parted slightly and I was inst-antly galvanized into alert
attention by the discovery that she wasn’t wearing any panties. I glanced up at her face and knew
that I was blushing all over. When she saw that my interest was gained she parted her legs further so
that I was able to see right up to where here pussy was so snugly curled up. She played this game
with me for the duration of the course, which lasted six months, and I must say I have never been the
same since. ¶ Now I am not going to go into sordid accounts of how step by step this experience led
to a full blown interest in mirrors. It is not that kind of book. Suffice to say that I spent so much time
going up and down the escalators at Parliament Station, which by the way are the longest in the
Southern Hemisphere, that I am still on good terms with some of the Vic Rail staff there. Nor am I
inclined to recount my various adventures in the main reading room of the State Library except to say
that girls, and especially girls in short dresses, make their privacy fabulously vulnerable when they go
up those ladders to get books off the top shelves. ¶ A practical consequ-ence of my hobby was that
at the age of fifteen, in the company of a school counsellor and a lega studies teacher, I had to face
up to a case in the children’s court on a charge of invasion of privacy. My case was number 27 and
took about 1½ minutes of which over a minute was taken up with a speech by the magistrate on what
a social pest I was. I was let off with a twelve month good behav-iour bond. The school, consistent
with its multi-dimensional approach to education, encouraged me to get as much knowledge of legal
processes from this experience as I could. I have retained an interest in practical law to this day and
since that first time have made use of legal aid on thirteen separate occasions. Another consequence
was that Dick O’Tool’s extra-curricular interest in my education be-gan to wane. I greatly admired
Dick for the way he was prepared to spend so much of his own time on our education even to the
extent of ferrying students to and from his flat late at night. No teacher, apart from the Comparative
Religion teacher, was so devoted to the students. Dick had taken it on himself to turn me into a
cultured person rather than just the son of a Greek geek. He spent countless nights sitting next to me
on his little sofa reading out in a beautifully modulated voice excerpts from such great European
authors as Gide and Genet. We poured over the pencil drawings of the male form by the immortal
artists Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. You can imagine his profound disappoint-ment to discover that I
had been wagging school to spend my days wandering about the city with little mirrors. I felt deep
guilt at my failure to live up to his expectations. ¶ The reaction of my parents was nothing short of
monstrous but perhaps not too surprising given their lack of schooling or knowledge of the role of the
modern parent. Sensitive participatory parenting was beyond them. As soon as I was dropped off at
the front gate by Dick that night I knew something was wrong by the wailing com-ing from the house.
I stepped inside to be greeted by the sight of my mother wandering around in circles holding her head
by pressing on her ears with the palms of her hands with her elbows sticking out at right angles as if
she had every intention of squeezing her head into the shape of a sandwich. Her eyes were staring
up at the ceiling and the gurgling and wailing was coming from her mouth. I could discern a lament
something along the following lines: ¶ ‘Ai, ya-yai! Yezu, Maria, Kristu! Ai, ya-yai, ya-yai …’ ¶ The old
man was at the other end of the room waving a rifle about while my brothers George, Jim and Arthur
appeared to be trying to pacify him. I never did find out what he had intended to do with the rifle on
this occasion: perhaps he had meant to shoot himself or perhaps put my mother out of her misery, or
maybe he had been waiting up for me. ¶ That rifle needs some explanation. I had never seen it
before though I knew the old prick had one. Apparently Jim and the old boy had once gone shooting
11
and actually managed to pot a couple of bunnies. That single occasion had often been mentioned as
if it made them a pair of great white hunters. That’s how they liked to think of themselves anyway. For
my part I have no recollection of the event or for that matter of eating rabbit. Now while it may be true
that Greeks are embezzlers, make lousy lovers and that they’re humourless, I have to say in their
defence that they don’t go in for shooting everything that moves as some people imagine. It’s the
Italians that do that. Carlo Chinchotta, next door, had enough shotguns and twenty twos to start a
small revolution. He shot anything that moved but especially if it was feathered. When you had
Rosella soup at the Chinchotta’s you knew it was made with real rosellas. His kids even shot
sparrows and blackbirds in their backyard with a slug gun to feed the cat. Carlo would come back
from his expeditions to Kinglake National Park with magpies, kookaburras, bronze-wing pigeons, gal-
ahs, cockatoos and assorted parrots, but his favourite game birds were black swans and lyre-birds.
He did not observe bag limits nor, as I say, did he restrict himself entirely to birds. One day Maria his
wife, beaming broadly, asked me to try a piece of special pie she had just baked and waited for a ver-
dict. I had to admit it tasted delicious. It was koala pie without even a trace of gum-leaf taste. Maria
could cook anything. But lets not stray too far from the story. The point is my old man had a rifle. He
kept it in the wardrobe in his bedroom and as I was to discover later, though the magazine was hidd-
en in another part of the house, he always had the rifle loaded with a single bullet in the breech. It
was a point 22 Winchester. ¶ I cant give you more details about that night because they are lost eith-
er in my subconscious or have been permanently erased by the transplant. The mind’s capacity to
subsume traumatic experience in the subconscious is one of the wonders of nature. We take it for
granted now and it has found its way into popular culture but actually the idea was discovered relativ-
ely recently by that shrink without peer, Sigmund Freud. While casting doubt on his sexual theories
based as they are overwhelmingly on his experience of wealthy, bored and neurotic Viennese matro-
ns let’s put our hands together in due recognition for the great contribution he made to popular literat-
ure and the film industry by publicizing the subconscious mind. ¶ The main application of the idea is
in psychoanalysis. The theory goes that if the ghosts, buried in the labyrinths of our subconscious are
raised from the grave and dragged out into the full glare of daylight, they lose their magical powers.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? The classic example in medical texts is of the young lady who developed
paralysis of the legs on her wedding night for which no physiological basis could be found. With the
help of psychoanalysis she was able to remember that her Hungarian step-father had violated her
with a dill-cucumber when she was eight years old. As soon as she realized she had more to fear
from cucumbers than men her paralysis disappeared. Now she only gets paralysed when someone
opens a jar of dill-cucumbers. Unfortunately, beautiful clear-cut cases like this are as rare as hens’
teeth. So rare in fact that they can more easily be used as evidence that the subconscious, in a med-
ically useful sense, hardly ever exists. A more typical example is that of Mahler who after years of
prompting by the aforementioned Sigmund, remembered that as a child he had seen his father rape a
servant girl in a wine cellar. The childhood experience was so traumatic that it made him virtually imp-
otent as an adult. His two daughters were born by artificial insemination. Needless to say, there is not
a shred of evidence to corroborate Mahler’s account nor did he by dredging it up from his subconsc-
ious solve Elma’s (his wife) problem. Our hospitals, prisons and drug rehabilitation clinics are full of
prostitutes, addicts, liars and sleeze-bags who are prepared to remember umpteen traumatic experie-
nces, incapable of being either proved or disproved, rather than accept any responsibility themselves
for their inadequacies. Most drug addicts and prostitutes would much rather think of themselves as vi-
ctims of incest than as the plain nerds and dags that they are. The role of victim is easier to live with
than the role of dickhead. Which may account for the skyrocketing number of incest victims in our co-
mmunity; incest, and in particular incest long ago, being almost impossible to prove. The subconsc-
ious as well as providing us with a convenient mechanism to avoid ever blaming ourselves keeps
piles of gullible therapists and shrinks in employment. Mind you, if placebos can cure physical ailm-
ents, imagined traumas may be able to cure psychiatric ones if only by the contribution they make to
our self-esteem once we realize that the fault lies not with us but events beyond our control buried in
a dim past. The important thing, apparently, is not what you are and what you do but what you perce-
12
ive yourself to be. The subconscious is the biggest cop-out of the age. ¶ Which brings me to that
other sacred cow of shrinks, social workers and educators: self-esteem. Now, dear readers, even the
dullest among you will have worked out that self-esteem is a commodity in short supply with me. I
once took a twelve month course of injections from a Ceylonese doctor operating from his garage to
increase the size of my dick. At least I admit my shortcomings to others and am, albeit with an occas-
ional outburst of resentment, able to live with them. I can tell you its not easy writing all day cooped
up in a one room flat and then at the end of the day when she comes home from work have your wife
tell you you’re a shithead and laugh at the size of your dick. But I can take it. Even when I was at
Mor-eland I would rather my reports had told of my weaknesses as well as my strengths, so my
parents might at least have believed them. To this day I myself don’t know if I was quite as good a
student as indicated by the fact that I never got less than 10 out of 10 for any writing I did from form
one to form four as no one got less than 10 out of 10 for anything at my school. All in the interest of
preserving a kid’s self-esteem. My self-esteem works differently: I’d rather live with the knowledge of
my abject inadequacy than have to pretend to myself that I’m a different kind of person. Such
pretence would lose me more self-esteem than admitting I have a tiny prick. I would like to say my life
is a rich tapes-try and its threads contribute to the beauty of the overall design, but I will be satisfied
with the lesser achievement of having outgrown a youthful interest in mirrors and bicycle seats. I was
confused then and totally out of touch with my own feelings. I admit that my tricks with mirrors were
the actions of a self-indulgent compensator; what do you expect from a kid who hasn’t even seen his
parents’ knees. Mea culpa. ¶ I write on these matters with the experience of someone who’s
undergone every kind of counselling there is, who’s been in half a dozen institutions, who’s been
subjected to group therapy, family therapy, assertiveness training, sex therapy, hypnotherapy, play
therapy, hydro therapy and even bibliotherapy. When I first began suffering from angophora, that is
the fear of open spaces, I al-so underwent a course of psychoanalysis. I did it really more from a
desire to discover my past than in the hope of curing the angophora. And I wasn’t cured. That’s why I
never leave the flat. All our sho-pping is done by my wife, and that includes my underwear and
condoms. I can’t blame the shrink as I never told him about the transplant; I didn’t want him to think I
was crazy. To give him his due though I did dredge up quite a bit from my sub-conscious: a lot of
what I’ve told you about my life at home I learnt in these sessions. Huge gaps will never be filled. My
shrink had never had a patient with so lit-tle memory of his past. His conclusion was that as well as
suffering from angophora I had a severe case of Waldheimer’s Disease, that is, a selective loss of
memory. But, of course, he was not to know. ¶ I cant remember much about the night my parents
learnt about my court case and I’m very sketchy about that other fateful night, the night of the
argument, when I left home. Perhaps they were one and the same night although logic tells me that
the first took place before the transplant and the second after. It has all receded into the mists of my
past. Did he throw a punch at me or did I punch him? Did he punch my mum? Did I punch myself?
Did he shoot himself through the foot or did I shoot him through the head? Gaps and enigmas in the
mists of time. Time. Who knows what it is? Does it flow like a river or does it move in little jumps like
a ticking clock? Can it be dissected? Can it be turn-ed back? ¶ The time when I left the house of my
birth was late, close to midnight, my midnight hour. I had nowhere to go, so soon after midnight I was
knocking on the door of Dick O’Tool’s flat. He open-ed the door dressed in his frilly pink pajamas with
the little fur collar, looking displeased. Stephen, a physical education teacher from Heidelberg High
whom I had met there before, came out of the bed-room. He was wearing what appeared to be an
imitation sailor suit but was really a pair of pajamas. He looked sick. Dick explained that the previous
day Stephen had found out he was AIDS positive and had come here for consolation. Which, when
you come to think of it
, didn’t explain what they were doing here in the middle of the night in their pajamas. Over a cup of
coffee, a glass of port and finally, a few long drags on a bong, I explained what had happened but
didn’t tell them about the $150 I had in my pocket. I told them I wanted to go to Sydney where I had a
cousin; if I could get there. Dick rang train information and found that I would have no trouble getting
a seat the next morning. He would drive me to the station and buy me a ticket himself. I spent the rest
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of the night slumped on Dick’s couch in a state somewhere between stupor and nightmare. In the
morning Dick and Stephen together drove me to the station and put me on a train. I think they were
glad to get rid of me. A new chapter in my life had begun.”). I think u will like him. 2 sgn off 4 2day
here r a few werdz x Georges Luis Borges (28/3. ncidntly I may hav bn mstkn wen I rote in ‘7/2/02 –
22/2/02’ p23 that havn bn a ag-nostk all hiz life he kceptd th last rites in th kathlk tradtion. All w no 4
sure iz th@ shortly b4 hiz deth he spent sum time prv@ly wth a prtstnt minstr & spr8ly wtha kathlk 1.
Hiz funral on June 18, 1986 in Geneva took place @ th Protestant Cathédral de Saint Pierre & woz
knduktd x both. “Pastor Monm-ollin read the opening verses of St. John’s Gospel – “In the beginning
was the Word …” – and gave an address in which he observed that “Borges was a man who had unceasingly
searched for the right word, the term that would sum up the whole, the final meaning of things,” (28/3. That seems a
bit arrogant – if he fou-nd the word, he would be God – Helh&z (28/3. @ least th term if not th
werd may hav lredy bn found ~ E = MC²)) but man can never reach that word by his own efforts; he is lost
in a labyrinth. As St. John taught, “it is not man who discovers the word, it is the word that comes to him.” For his part,
the Catholic priest, Father Pierre Jacquet, revealed to the congregation that when he saw Borges before he died,
he had found “a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins.” “ (29/3. On heern he had
died Susan Sontag rote a mpashnd ssay az a trbute in whch sh +rsd him az if ritin a letr 2 a 4mr
luvr.)) : ““I have already identified, among thousands, the nine or ten words that go well
with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, who knows,
just one page perhaps – the page that will justify me, the page that only the assessing
angels will maybe listen to on the day of Last Judgement.” & Williamson rites kwotin him fer-
thr : “His “greatest literary ambition” however, was “to write a book, a chapter, a page, a
paragraph, that would be all things to all men … that would dispense with my aversions,
my preferences, my habits.” This transcendental work should also be “unfathomable and
eternal.” : it should “preserve (for me as for everyone else) a changing angle of shadow; it
should correspond in some way to the past and even to the secret future; it should not
be exh-austed by analysis, it should be the rose without purpose, the Platonic,
intemporal rose.” ¶ We may see in the mys-tical Aleph (29/3. 1 of th ·s in ‫ ٱ‬th@ kntainz all ·s) vision
Borges was proposing to compose ….” etc, etc. It seemz th vizion woz lso cn all th way O th uthr side of
th O in Japan (29/3. Borgesz last wife Maria Kodama woz ½ nip & he had vzitd nipn x 2 wth her &
dmired th tolrnce of shinto.) whr th rmainn mmb-rz of th Shoko Asahara (mastrmind of th SARIN GAS
@k & like Borges ~ blind; leedr iz Fumihiro Joy-u) kult (Aum Supreme Truth (pokalptk vzion of
mmnnt hlkorst (‘Age’ sez Kurt Vonnegut sed Susan Sontag sed what sh had lernt from th hlkorst woz
“that 10 per cent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 per cent is
merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 per cent could be moved in either
direction” (H reknz they may b dffrnt 10%s kkordn 2 Ostancez (it sjests a role 4 riterz (26/3. but not
4 1z like me. Mgine lngauge az a tree whr th lrge limbz r dskorsz & dscplinz 1 of whch iz ltr@ure
(hooz smallr brnchz r genrz) & th leevz r green wth meenn. I take the meenn out of thm & they turn
brown & shrivl & fall ↓ gO whr they swrl O in edeez in ded pokts in th sity & durin sleeplss nghts in my
hed. But it haz 2 b so if new budz r 2 sprout. Lso th brnchz hav 2 b pruned.) & Im rmindd th@ Borges
sed : “Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed
cruelty; more loathesome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders,
portraits of leaders, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous
ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking (25/3/-05. He forgot to
include flag waving, flag holding, flag flying. In fact anyth-ing that involves flags (26/3. &
all sorts of evnts kommr8n th ded (27/3. esp of soljrz)) should terrify us all .Helh&z) …. Fighting
these sad monotonies is one of the many duties of a writer.” But Im nklined 2 think th@ all ·s
of vew hav their riterz @ th redy & th@ 1 majr terrrst evnt in oz will swing th 80% → krulety &
dikt8rshp (25/3. of th norm (26/3. Mammon & th norm hav komn ntrsts)) (25/3. They’ve already
had a practice with the Tampa, the SIEV X & the detention (co-ncentration) camps.
Helh&z))) korzd x NUKLULR ramagedn from a @k x th US of A) since the year 2000 hav gon ndr th
name ~ ALEPH. I m knfuzed : iz 2day th day th@ jzuz of nzarth woz in Bethany @ th haus of Simon
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& a womn kame in & pord xpensv (wrth 300 silvr koins) prfume of pure nard ovr hiz hed? Thursday
24/3/05. 8.50 am. Last nght I did get thrgh 2 H & vrythn iz a OK & then I rmmbrd 2 O the Woodlucks 2
ask Bill (26/3. hoo klaimz Im xitabl but not motionl & HOaLnLdIyS gree-z. So what iz th dfrnce? (27/3.
my way of nvstg8n th dstnkshn iz 2 ask what is cheevd x it (ie th poltks of it))) 2 put out th binz @
Miller st & Jan sed OK & drive kairfly. This mornn the mgpize (Gymnorhirna tibicen) r karolin & thr r
lrge p@chz of blue in th sky 4 a change. Iz 2day th day of THE LAST SUPP-ER & 2nght th nght of th
vgil in th GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE? But Im hedn → Melbourne & will kn-tnue my ssortmnt of
odmnts whn I get bak …. Ivanhoe 3.25. I hav 2 make a krektion 2 ‘10/2/05 – 18/-2/05’ p3 O th dramtk
evnt whch took place on 19th feb @ 5 pm outside Joes in Chapel st. H found th rlvnt rtkl in th edshn of
th HeraldSun her skool libery rtaind. Th numbr of hevly armd pleece nvolvd woz 7 not 4 az I had
rmmbrd. A kupl of weekz l8r I met sum1 hoo new th dtailz of th evnt & 1 of th womn nvolvd & hoo sez
it woz a krimnl not a ntlgnce rl8d m@r. If so Id like 2 no on what basis th newz woz sprssd? My last
piece licitd a letr +rsd 2 Mallacoota Man (c ‘10’2’05 – 18/2/05’ p11) here in Ivanhoe wth a poem. The
orthr of th 1st 4 versz iz nknown; th last 2 wer ritn x Tony Hunt 1 time mmbr of th Bushwackers b&. It
woz sent x HAdRaRvIeS of Casual Manor. Here iz th poem/song : “FIVE MILES FROM GUNDAGAI
¶ I’m used to punchin’ bullock teams /Across the hills and plains, / I teamed outback for forty
years / In blazin’ drought and rain, / I’ve had me share of trouble boys, / But hang me till I die;
/ I’ll never forget what happened me, / Five miles from Gundagai. // It was raining hard, the
team got bogged, / The axle snapped in two, / I’d lost me matches and me pipe, / Lord, what was
I to do? / The rain came down, ‘twas bitter cold, / And hungry too was I, / And the dog he shat
in the tucker box, / Five miles from Gundagai. // Some blokes I know have lots of luck, / No
matter where they fall. / But there was I , Lord love-a-duck! / No flamin’ luck at all. / I couldn’t
make a pot of tea / Or keep me trousers dry, / And the dog, / He shat in me tucker box, / Five
miles from Gundagai. // I can forgive the dark and cold, / I can forgive the rain. / I can forgive
me flamin’ team, / And go through it all again. / I can forgive me rotten luck, / But hang me till
I die, / I can’t forgive that bloody dog, / Five miles from Gun-dagai. // All that is now past and
gone, / I sold the team for meat. / And where I got the bull-ocks bogged / Now there’s an
asphalt street. / The dog? Oh, well he took a bait / And I reckon that he died, / So I buried
him in the tucker box / Five miles from Gundagai. // Yes, all that is past and gone, / And things
are looking sweet, / Now I drive a big Mack truck, / In fact, I own a fleet. / I churn up lots of
diesel fumes, / Turn people’s faces sour, / And drive through bloody Gundagai / At ninety miles
an hour!” Uthrwize thingz seem bak 2 norml here. 2nght me & H r goin out 2 Brunswick st (26/3. met
BRIpCaKuHlILL (c ‘16/2/04 – 27/2/04’ p6)) az w lwayz do @ th nd of th week. Oh yair, 4got 2 mnshn I
bort ½ a smokt eel in Str@4d, & they told me th@ conger eelz like th 1 V saltd & took home 2 Brigita
ftr I rfuzed 2 take it off hiz h&z r greezee & taste orfl (29/3. tasted a bit of it 2day & it woz A O K. He
had fried it ftr 1st skinin it. He woz stil tryin 2 parm it off on me (“4 H”) but I rfuzed). I knot rzist nuthr
kwote from Borges whr he pasz komnt on hmslf az ‘I’ & hmslf az ‘Borges’ : “It would be an
exaggeration to say that our relations were hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that
Borges may devise his literature, and that literature justifies me. I have no difficulty in
admitting that I have achieved some wor-thwhile pages, but those pages cannot save
me, perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to any-body, not even to the other,
but to language or tradition.” Friday 25/3/05. On this day th gr8 prfet jzuz of nzarth woz †d.
Kkordn 2 ‘GOOD NEWS Australia’ based on Matthew 28,16-20; Luke 24, 36-49; John 20, 19-23; Acts
1, 6-8 jzuz ppeerd 2 th 11 ftr he roze from th ded & told thm “Believers will be given the pow-er
to perform miracles : they will drive out demons in my name; they will speak in strange
ton-gues; if they pick up snakes or drink any poison they will not be harmed; they will
place their hands on sick people and they will get well.” Only xprience (yor own ize & eerz)
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kan tell u if this iz so. Whch rturnz (c ‘30/11/04 – 9/12/04’ p1) me 2 th klaim x Blaise Pascal in ¶ 563 of
‘Pensées’ th@ : “It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not
believing in mirac-les.” Hiz klaim iz not so much O mraklz as it iz O th limts of lnguage.
Lnguage knsists of gr-eemnts O meennz & proofs r systmz of meennz. Any rgument whr th
part (sub set) makes a kl-aim O th O (set) iz NULL & VOID.

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