Delving into the history of modern Australia

November 18, 2025November 19, 2025freshlyworded Leave a comment

There have been dozens of books written about the history of modern Australia since the arrival of the first fleet of English convicts to Sydney Cove in 1788.

The latest book hot off the shelves is Australia A History by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

I haven’t read it yet but have been delving into the story of European settlement via a much older book, which I bought for $2 at a book sale at the Athenaeum Library on Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD.

Seeped in history (the Athenaeum Library is one of Melbourne oldest cultural institutions), it seemed an appropriate place to pick up a copy of The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia by the late historian John Molony.

Published in 1987, it traces the 200 years (199 to be exact) since the arrival of the first fleet and finishes with the prime ministership of Bob Hawke and the success of Paul Hogan‘s Crocodile Dundee.

While it obviously misses out on everything that happened in Australia from 1988 onwards, I found it to be a really good summary – in less than 400 pages – of the key events that shaped the fledgling nation since those first majestic-looking e ships, laden with convicts, sailed through the Sydney Heads towards what is now Circular Quay.

Molony, who wrote many history books, was Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University. He died in 2018 at the ripe old age of 91, meaning he was alive for 61 of the 200 years encapsulated in the book.

Interestingly, I was midway through the book, when I happened to be in Sydney and visiting Gap Park in Watson’s Bay. Here you can stand at the edge of a cliff face that plunges into the turbulent Tasman Sea below (an infamous Sydney suicide spot) and look out over the Sydney Heads, the series of headlands that market the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

It is through this 2km wide entrance that the 11 ships carrying 732 convicts sailed through and made anchor at Sydney Cove, now known as Circular Quay.

As Molony describes it rather movingly in the opening chapter of his book:

High summer saw a fleet of eleven ships take up moorings at a small cove in a noble and extensive harbour on the eastern coastline of the southern continent. A few dark-skinned people of the Cadigal band, whose ancestral home that place had been for age upon age, watched closely from nearby scrub. The date was 26 January 1788 and the newcomers called the cove after an English public servant named Sydney…The modern history of the world’s oldest continent had commenced with the coming of a new people.

(In fact, as Molony’s book explains, the fleet first made shore first at what is now Botany Bay (where Sydney Airport is) but due to the “infertility of the soil” and a lack of fresh water, it was quickly discarded, and the weary travellers travelled a few miles to the north to the “finest harbour in the world”

237 years later, as I looked out over the Heads towards the sparkling Sydney skyline, I was filled with a sense of awe imagining these wooden ships, laden with their weary human cargo, making their way into a vast and primitive land, with not a single structure in sight.

And what did the weary English convicts, after a gruelling eight-month voyage from the docks of Portsmouth, make of what would be for most their permanent home?

No doubt they were filled with dread and fear (as were their aboriginal onlookers) and a longing to return the urban environment of England; the busy streets filled with people and buildings.

*Gap Park, with a spectacular view over the Sydney Heads*

Over the next 406 pages, Molony tells the story of the birth of modern, mostly white Australia. There’s a lot to get through, but he does a good job describing in an entertaining, easy-to-read manner the key events and colonial personalities that shaped what became the Australia we are familiar with today.

Looking out over the ocean towards a city of some 5.5 million people, with the Manhattan skyline of its Central Business District, the modern wonders of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House and the densely populated suburbs around the harbour, it is a stunning visual reminder of the pace of development that occurred over a relatively short period of time.

And to think that nothing was here, not a single building was standing 237 years ago, whilst Europe and the colonial parent (the British empire) were full of teeming metropolises.

In many respects it’s a miracle that Australia thrived at all. As Molony describes it, the early years of the colony of New South Wales was full of great hardship and suffering: starvation loomed as crops failed and desperate convicts dreamt of escape. In one instance, a group of convicts headed off into the bush, believing they could walk to China. For nearly all Australia would be a life sentence.

At first it was a primitive existence, with public hangings becoming a common occurrence. The first person hanged in the colony was a 17-year-old boy named Thomas Barrett, for stealing.

But slowly, as Molony describes it, an agricultural-based economy is established, centred around the production of fine wool and wheat (a sector which still thrives to this day). Amid the search for arable farmland, the colony expanded into Parramatta and then other regions of the country. Tasmania developed a whaling industry, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were founded and settlers travelled west to establish Perth.

Then came a momentous event: the Victorian Gold rush, which turned Melbourne into “Marvelous Melbourne” and brought settlers from all over the colony, and abroad to make their fortune. This included the Chinese, who were the subject of a well-entrenched colonial racism. At its height- as I learnt – Victoria accounted for 40% of the world’s gold production.

Another defining moment, and one where Australia lost its innocence, was the Great War in which thousands of young Australian men lost their lives or came back injured and shell shock. The horrific, but courageous battle of Gallipoli that left nearly 9,000 diggers dead.

Molony writes of the end of the war:

It was Anzac Day, 25 April, the day of the landing at Gallipoli, that overshadowed memory and made all new and vital in significance for it was seen as the day on which the nation had shaken off the bonds of subservience and Australians had come to know themselves. [Prime minister] Billy Hughes saw it a little differently. To him victory in the war meant national safety, liberty and the safeguarding of the White Australia policy. Despite some signs to the contrary, Hughes was still convinced that Australians were ‘more British than the people of Great Britain’.

This long adherence to the White Australia policy, one borne out of British racism and fear of invasion from the East, is remarkable given how Australia changed into a successful, and vibrant multi-cultural society (notwithstanding the recent re-emergence of a wave of anti-immigrant feeling fuelled by a cost of living and housing crisis).

For so long Australia had been a land only for Europeans, and it took visionaries like Gough Whitlam to dismantle its final elements and welcome Asian and people of colour to our shores. Even so, by the 1980s, after nearly 200 years of European settlement, “the new nation [of about 16 million] was still predominantly white, spoke mainly English of the Australian variety, owed allegiance to the English Queen and observed laws derived from British sources”.

What I wanted to get out of the book, was a well-rounded understanding of the making of Australia, and Molony’s did a good job of that.

While it impossible to include in detail everything that happened over 200 years, I felt the story he told captured all the important elements without too much politicising, and with some sympathy for the plight of the aboriginal people, whose suffering was immense.

Most striking is his portrayal of the pace of development, how Australia so quickly build up its cities and towns, established a civil and well-functioning society that very early on and to this day, is among the greatest places to live in a troubled world.

It may be an old book, but the Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia is a great place to start for anyone wanting to learn the history of the country of their birth or – as in my case – of their adopted homeland.

Reading “Too Many Men” and remembering my own trip to Auschwitz

May 1, 2025freshlyworded Leave a comment

I’m nearing the end of Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel Too Many Men, or as it has been re-titled Treasure in keeping with the movie adaption starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham.

It’s the story of Ruth Rothwax (Lily Brett), a 43-year-old thrice-divorced owner of a letter writing business who travels from her home in Manhattan to meet her 81-year-old father Edek (Max), a holocaust survivor to accompany her on a trip around Poland visiting the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow and culminating in a trip to Auschwitz and the nearby death camp of Birkenau.

Edek, who survived the hells of the Lodz ghetto and Birkenau has travelled from Melbourne where he lives alone. His wife Rooshka, an Auschwitz survivor, died in her sixties from cancer. Ruth moved to New York many years ago.

The pair are close but frequently argue. Ruth is wracked with guilt and worry about her father (Is this trip too much for him?) while Edek, who has an enormous appetite, berates her for “eating like a bird” and being rude to Poles they meet on their travels.

Having visited the Lodz apartment where Edek and Rooshka lived before being march to the ghetto, they make their way to Krakow and then to Auschwitz. Here, Ruth becomes physically sick after they visit the very barracks where Edek “lived” during his barbaric imprisonment. The whole visit is a terrible ordeal for her as she struggles to comes to terms with the suffering of so many people and the fact that her own parents were subject to the degradation and humiliation within the grounds she walks. On her arrival she weeps as she sees the famous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”) that tricked arrivals into thinking they were being sent to a work camp. Ruth is enraged by a group of school kids eating snacks and fighting with each other, and in the taxi ride from Krakow to the Auschwitz she repeatedly corrects the cab driver for referring to their destination as the “Auschwitz Museum”.

‘It’s a death camp,” she tells the taxi driver over and over again.

Ruth is angered by the cleanliness and order of Auschwitz, the huge numbers of tourists and the lack of a visceral sense of the horrendous suffering enduring within its walls.

Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How could you feel people’s anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted barracks? But maybe nothing could ever replicate a fraction of the atmosphere, a fraction of the events that took place.

Nobody would come here, she thought, if this place was still covered in shit and piss and lice and rats and vomit and ash and decomposing corpses. The car park wouldn’t be full of tourists coaches. People wouldn’t be looking at the photographs and other exhibits on display in these rooms. These renovations were probably necessary. She had to stop being so judgemental, she told herself.

Ruth and Edek’s trip to Auschwitz made me think back to my own visit in May 2010, as part of a round-the-world backpacking trip I did with my wife after we got married.

I remembered the small minivan we took from Krakow to the death camp, a journey of about an hour through pretty countryside. I remember wandering the grounds of Auschwitz and seeing the rooms with the giant piles of shoes, glasses, hair and artificial limbs behind glass. I remember thinking I should feel more, or should be in shock, but perhaps like Ruth, I found it all too “neat” and “cleaned up”, too much like a museum rather than the remains of a slaughterhouse that treated people like insects to be squashed underfoot.

Then I decided to re-read the blog entry I wrote from the day of our visit, which I posted on our online travel journal.

How does one describe a visit to Auschwitz? A journey to the gates of hell perhaps? A place of unimaginable suffering and brutality? Probably all are insufficent. Yesterday we spent the day visiting Auschwitz and the nearby camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). It’s a little over an hour by bus from Krakow. We travelled in this strange mini-van, posing as a municipal bus, which picked up people along the route so that by the time we reached the little town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis. Incredibly, the town now bares the inscription, Oswiecim: city of peace) it was packed to capacity and stifling hot. It was a pretty unpleasant ride, (despite the very pretty Polish countryside we passed), but it did make me think of all these people crammed into those windowless cattle cars and though nothing at all like the horror of those cramped conditions, it felt quite appropriate to not be comfortable.

The two camps are joined by a free bus service. We first went to Birkenau. Beyond the famous main entrance and watch tower, through which the trains passed, the most overwhelming thing is the sheer size. It’s enormous. At its peak there were 100,000 people living here under the most appalling conditions. Each of the barracks housed as many as 1,000 people. We listened to a guide tell a tour group that the prisoners were only allowed to go to the toilet twice a day and because there were so many, they only had about 40 seconds to use the latrine. Just one of many awful stories.

(In the scene from the book, Ruth and Edek examine the crude toilet block comprised of concrete benches in parallel lines with holes cut out of them the size of dinner plates. Thirty-four circles, inches apart from each other so that the prisoners could not help but touch each other while they urinated and defecated. Everyone sick with diarrhea, the holes below filling up almost to the top, the stench unimaginable. Then she starts vomiting down one of these holes and cannot stop.)

My blog entry continues:

A lot of the barracks are still standing (where they are not, you can see the foundations so it is easy to get a sense of the scale). At the far end of the camp, at the end of the railway line, are the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. They were blown up by the Nazis just before the camp was liberated. Despite the heaps of rubble, you can see the steps down which prisoners were led, the changing room where they were forced to strip before being led into the “showers”.,

Auschwitz main camp houses the museum in the brick barracks (it was formerly Polish army barracks) where prisoners were held. Unlike Dachau, where the museum assaulted you with information, here it is relatively succinct, leaving you to take in the exhibits. One of the barracks contains huge displays of what was taken from those before they were gassed: mountains of hair shaved off prisoners (the Nazis sold the hair to textile firms), spectacles, shoes, toothbrushes, and artificial limbs. There are piles and piles of these things, and this probably just a fraction of what was found.

The walls of the barracks were lined with photos of prisoners admitted to Auschwitz including their date of arrival and death. Some lived only a few days, some a few months and some more than a year or two. How to survive such a hell hole for a day let alone a year, I just cannot fathom.

(In the book, Ruth and Edek visit Auschwitz on a “dull, grey wet day” and is relieved not to visit it in the sunshine. But we were there in Spring…}

It turned out to be a very sunny day. There were purple and yellow flowers growing among the grass and shady trees that offered respite. But the overwhelming sensation for me was incomprehension, sadness and anger. Though as many of you may know I am not a practicing Jew, I did feel a strong connection with all those who were lost.

At one point I found myself humming the tunes of Jewish songs we sang at King David High School, songs that I had forgotten or buried deep in my memory. Then I remembered we had a school teacher, Dr Yageel, who was a holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and had a tattoo on his shoulder bearing his prisoner number. I remember him to be a short man, with a beard and a lined face. I think he may have taught our class on a few occasions. I never really thought about what he went through or took the time to chat to him. I recall thinking of him as a survivor as if he were an ex-football player or someone who had climbed a mountain. What I mean is, I don’t recall me or anyone else at school for that matter paying him the kind of respect he deserved. I wish now I could shake his hand.

A decade of newspaper writing: a look back over the years

November 12, 2023freshlyworded Leave a comment

When I was unexpectedly offered a job at The Australian Financial Review in July 2013 I jumped at the opportunity to write for the country’s top business newspaper.

Alongside this excitement, I also remember having this unsettling feeling that perhaps I was joining a national publication near the very end of the newspaper industry, certainly the print one.

Might I be one of the last print journalists hired by the AFR before everything went digital?

Nonetheless, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to join the workforce at Fairfax Media, one of Australia’s great publishing dynasties and to forge out a career in print media for as long as I could.

At the time I was approached by the AFR, I was working for an online publication called Property Observer (now part of urban.com.au), which had been launched two years prior by the former long serving Sydney Morning Herald property editor Jonathan Chancellor. It was part of an umbrella of brands owned by Eric Beecher’s Private Media (Others in the PM stable include well known news and opinion website Crikey).

Somehow my name had made its way to the decision-makers at the AFR – I am grateful to whom ever suggested me as a replacement for departing property writer Ben Wilmot (now commercial property editor at The Australian and whom I had the pleasure to meet for the first time in September).

I had an informal interview with Matthew Dunckley (then the AFR’s Melbourne bureau chief, now deputy editor of The Age) at a café on Degraves Street, and after signing an employment contract a week or so later, and after seeing out my last few weeks at Property Observer, I flew up to Sydney for a week of training and induction, and to meet my new Sydney-based property colleagues on the newspaper.

I remember the chatter in the industry and in rival newspaper media columns at the time was all about when the Fairfax printing presses would stop rolling seven days a week while the company, helmed then by former AFR journalist and editor Greg Hywood, was in the throws of a massive and at times painful digital transformation that would result in a number of voluntary redundancy rounds in the immediate years after I joined.

(There was also talk at the time that mining billionaire Gina Rinehart – as she climbed up the share register – might buy Fairfax. But following a long battle with the Fairfax board and management, her interest in the company eventually petered out and she sold out of Fairfax in 2015).

Incredibly, on my very first day in the Sydney office (at the time Fairfax was based at Pyrmont) I sat next to veteran journalist and multi Walkley Award winner Pam Williams.

Pam’s blockbuster business book Killing Fairfax, which detailed how Fairfax Media had missed out on opportunities to invest in dotcom businesses like realestate.com.au and SEEK that would go on to be worth billions more than the 170-year-old media company had just been published complete with grinning photos of billionaires Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer on the cover.

I remember introducing myself to Pam and having a short conversation with her, whilst trying to get my head around the idea that she’d returned to the company she’d written so scathingly about in her book (which I read a few months later and reviewed on this blog). Later I would come to understand that this was part of what made Fairfax great; it’s unswerving belief in quality journalism, and Pam is certainly one of the best.

My first week in Sydney was spent learning how to use the antiquated publishing system known as Methode, meeting my boss Rob Harley, who was the paper’s long-serving and highly influential property editor, as well as many other journalists who would become friends and colleagues. I also wrote my very first article for the paper – a story about First Home Buyers – before flying back home to Victoria to join the paper’s Melbourne bureau and meet the journalists whom I would work alongside for many years.

The AFR occupied the Eastern corner of the third floor at 664 Collins Street opposite Southern Cross Station. On the other side of the floor was The Age, while upstairs were Fairfax’s radio stations including 3AW.

My first few weeks were spent meeting people in the property industry – agents, developers, investors – as I tried to build up a contact base and generate exclusive stories for the paper. There was back then and still is today a competitive, but highly collegiate mindset at the AFR, an attitude which helped me find my feet and carve out a niche of my own.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that for a little while after I joined the AFR I cut out and kept a folder of all my articles that appeared in the paper. It’s a practice I abandoned many years ago though I confess that I still get a kick out of seeing my name in print.

Initially it was quite hard getting scoops – we were a big property team in the early days – and being the newest member of a crew of crack reporters meant I had to find beats and niches that I could make my own.

At the same time as I was finding my feet and trying to show my value as part of the property team, Fairfax Media was trying to write the wrongs identified so glaringly in Pam Williams’ book and find new revenue opportunities in the digital world whilst print revenue continued to fall.

In 2014, Fairfax Media returned to profit and announced its move into video streaming on demand (to take on the likes of Netflix) via a joint venture with Nine Entertainment that would result in the launch of Stan.

The old Fairfax printing press (shaped like a rolled up newspaper) near Melbourne Airport. Now the HQ of Zagame luxury cars.

That year was particularly tough one for me personally as we lost our second child Raffy to stillbirth in February, but I was heartened by the outpouring of support from my colleagues at the AFR when I returned to work after a few weeks of compassionate leave.

“Everyone from the top of the newspaper down is thinking of you,” I distinctly remember Rob Harley telling me.

Later that year I went on my first and to date only junket (or famil as they prefer to call it) to Bali, where I flew business class for the first time and sat next to The Australian‘s legendary restaurant critic John Lethlean. John was great company on the flight, but I recall was distinctly unimpressed with the food, while I thought everything was fantastic.

I spent two nights at the new Double Six Hotel (the reason for the trip) with a gang of Aussie journos, eating out at a plethora of fancy restaurants, trying out spa treatments and being chauffeured around amid the chaos and congestion that was Seminyak.

In 2015, I was lucky enough to be accepted into a mentoring program offered at Fairfax, and was given great guidance by senior Age journalist Michelle Griffin, (now Federal Bureau chief at the Sydney Morning Herald). We’d catch up for coffee in the café downstairs and focus on feature writing, which I always found challenging. Michelle was full of great tips and encouragement. These included suggesting I reading The Wall Street Journal’s The Art & Craft of Feature Writing by William Blundell.

Michelle is one of a number of highly experienced writers and editors who have provided advice, tips and encouragement over the years.

In August 2016 I interviewed the founder of British real estate disruptor Purplebricks, Michael Bruce when he came to Melbourne to launch the Australian business with a promise to revolutionise the way property is bought and sold through its fixed-fee model and online platform.

Over the next three years I reported in dozens of articles on the rise and fall of Purplebricks, which left Australian shores in 2019.

Covering the Purplebricks roller coaster journey Down Under was one of the highlights of my AFR journalism career (rumour has it my face was on a dart board at Purplebricks HQ in Sydney)

I should point out that soon after Purplebricks landed in Australia, our editor Rob Harley surprised everyone by announcing his decision to retire from the paper after an incredible 29 years. One of the most knowledgeable people in the industry and also one of its most influential and well-respected, Rob was a mentor to everyone on the team, and a generous sharer of his time and insights. (He continues to write for the Financial Review, penning a regular property column).

Upon Rob’s departure Matt Cranston took over as property editor for a couple of years before Nick Lenaghan took on the role when Matt took up a position as first economics editor in Canberra and then as the paper’s Washington correspondent. Both have been fine people to work alongside and like Rob, have been incredibly generous with sharing their knowledge and insight. (So too has been my property colleague Michael Bleby, whom I have worked alongside for most of the last 10 years. Michael lived for many years in South Africa, so we have that in common, plus a few words in Afrikaans.).

During those years of Purplebricks reporting, journalists at Fairfax and the AFR were undergoing their own rollercoaster ride as private equity firm TPG and a Canadian pension fund investor struck up talks to acquire the company.

Soon after, San Francisco-based private equity player Hellman & Friedman entered the takeover ring with a rival offer and it looked like we would all soon be working for new masters (noting with trepidation that private equity firms are notorious for cost cutting).

I remember also there was talk of the AFR being carved out of the company as a separate entity, perhaps through some sort of management buyout.

Thankfully (in my view), none of the takeover talks proceeded to binding offers and Fairfax moved on in July 2017 instead with plans to spin-off and float its online real estate listings business Domain.

Around this time I’d clocked up four years at the AFR, built up a solid contacts list and a half-decent reputation in the property sector for writing fair, balanced and interesting articles, occasionally with a bit of flair.

In June 2018, as traditional media companies fought back against the advertising power of Facebook and Google, Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment revealed plans to merge their two businesses.

It turned out to be less of a merger and more of a takeover as the great Fairfax name was retired and we became, on December 7 of that year, Nine newspapers. On that same day Fairfax Media was delisted from the ASX, bringing about the end of one of the world’s great media dynasties stretching back 182 years to when John Fairfax purchased the Sydney Morning Herald in 1841.

While a lot of my colleagues were skeptical about the Nine merger/takeover and a potential loss of independence, I was excited about being part of a much larger media company that had not only newspapers, websites and radio stations, but also a clutch of commercial television channels.

In fact under the Nine banner very little has changed in how The Australian Financial Review has functioned. We remain fiercely independent, and most importantly the most-read business publication in the country. There is also (for me) a sense of security in being part of a true media giant. Indeed, those Fairfax redundancy rounds that were part of my first few years at the AFR have all disappeared replaced by expansion of our newsrooms.

In April 2019, we moved from the Collins Street end of Southern Cross Station to the Bourke Street end, occupying level 7 of the Nine building (a shiny glass-facaded Rubix cube-like structure) at 717 Bourke Street.

That I year I wrote my first “Lunch with the AFR” – a popular weekend paper feature where you sit down with an interesting subject and discuss their career. My subject was the property developer and adventurer Paul Hameister, conqueror of Everest, the Antarctic and the Amazon.

We had lunch at a trendy café in upmarket Brighton and Paul entertained me with his daring mountaineering feats, savvy business dealings and sage advice. Spending quality time with people as successful and interesting as Paul has been a part of the job I’ve enjoyed immensely.

(It would be another four years before I did another “Lunch with the AFR” when I sat down with another industry titan pub baron and reality TV star Stuart Laundy. We had lunch at his family’s Woolloomoo Bay Hotel at Wolloomooloo Wharf in August. It turned into a very entertaining chat with a dealmaker and storyteller extraordinaire).

Also in 2019, I penned a long feature article about myself that ran in the long weekend Australia Day edition. It was the entertaining story of how the least likely Aussie of all time became an Australian citizen. The article originally ran on this blog, and got a spit and polish (with a great photo below) for the version that ran in the paper.

The pandemic hit in March 2020 and as the national lockdown took hold we all vacated the office, laptops under our arms.

The great work-from-home era had begun.

It was chaotic working from home, whilst dealing with two children requiring home schooling – sometimes I wonder how I managed.

Without a closed off home office, I just had to work among the chaos. I remember on one occasion I was interviewing the CEO of a major listed company and right in the middle of the interview two of my kids started yelling and going mental. I tried to dash to a quieter spot but the noise just followed me.

“Larry, what the heck is going on at your house?” the CEO asked.

Embarrassed, I apologised profusely, hang up the phone and called him back later. As time went on though, people became more accepting of the challenges of working from home whilst also home schooling. I also just adapted, became used to the constant disruption and soon it became the norm.

When things began opening up again and we trickled back into the office, it was almost exciting heading onto to the train for the 1 hour commute from our home in Gisborne in the Macedon Ranges to Melbourne. Seeing people face to face was a thrill for a while, so was a visit to a café.

The pandemic and post pandemic years seemed to roll into each other – 2021, 2022 and finally 2023. It all seems a blur, probably because it was such a crazy, muddled time, when there seemed no clear division between work and home life.

Journalism is an industry well suited to remote working (I remember one colleague quietly relocated for a time to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, but continued to write stories as though he were in Melbourne), and it can, in my opinion be an aid to productivity depending on the circumstances. Let’s not forget their are journalists who file in war zones and amid natural disasters.

The post pandemic years also brought a new skill to my repertoire – hosting interviews and discussions on stage at our annual property summit. This was at times nerve-wracking but also exhilarating speaking before an audience in the many hundreds, including many titans of the property industry.

Then in August this year, I suddenly found myself at the 10 year milestone. The years had flown by, and so much had happened both personally and professionally.

I’ve worked hard, but also been incredibly lucky to forge a career as a newspaper journalist amid all the seismic ructions that have reshaped how the industry functions.

Despite the minority who distrust the “mainstream media” and prefer their information from those shouting the loudest on social media, newspapers in Australia are still a very important part of the nation’s progressive democracy and a vital institution in holding those in power to account.

Long may the ride continue!

Fear of flying

September 22, 2021freshlyworded Leave a comment

In December 1994, after I had just turned 21, I lost my wallet and about US$300 in cold, hard cash somewhere in the departure terminal at OR Tambo International airport (then called ‘Jan Smuts’) just hours before I boarded a flight for New York and a dream solo adventure in the USA.

I remember saying goodbye to my parents, clearing passport control, and then while rummaging through my bulbous, black leather money belt, descending into a mad panic when I couldn’t find my wallet amongst my Thomas Cook travellers cheques and passport.

Heart beating feverishly, my anxiety building, I checked and re-checked my money belt, retraced my steps all the way back to the passport control kiosk I’d just passed through, but found nothing.

I was utterly forlorn. I would have wept, were it in my nature, but instead simply deflated quickly like a popped balloon.

The anticipated thrill of the trip – a birthday present I had chosen instead of having a party – and the excitement of traveling abroad had completely vanished, replaced instead with a dark cloud of guilt (what would I tell my parents?) and deep embarrassment (what a careless fool I was).

All that wasted money.

Later, as I sat dejectedly on the South African Airways jumbo jet waiting for take-off I realised what had most likely happened: I’d gone to a store in the airport to buy something to read on the plane (a South African Sports Illustrated magazine no doubt) and other nick nacks. After paying, instead of putting my wallet back into my money belt, I had mistakenly and carelessly slipped it between the money belt and my pants, where it had simply fallen to the ground.

Either that or it had been stolen by some brilliant pickpocket whose speciality was money belts. Either way, someone hit the jackpot at Jan Smuts that evening. I hope they spent it well.

After sitting forlornly on the plane for a number of hours, as it sped through the night sky on the long 18-hour journey to the ‘promised land’, I resolved that I couldn’t allow these unfortunate series of events to ruin a four week adventure. After all, they would mean wasting even more money.

Initially, I tried to work out a plan where I would somehow be so spend thrift on my travels that I would recoup the lost funds – this involved a journal of daily entries of savings made, drinking water instead of buying a Coke, that sort of thing- but that ‘brilliant idea’ did not last long.

Instead, I simply chose to forgive myself and went on my more or less merry way exploring the sights of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego – minus US$300 in cash.

My carelessness was not though confined to losing my wallet.

Arriving in the US in my jetlagged state, having forgotten about things like time zones, but eager to unburden myself, I’d rung my parents at some ungodly hour to tell them of my misfortune.

My father, fearing the worst when the telephone rang at that time, had sprinted down our passageway, forgetting in the dark there was a security door in the way (a phenomenon of many Johannesburg homes, it separated the bedrooms from the rest of the house) and nearly knocked himself out trying to get to the phone in the entrance hall.

In the confusion of the corridor dash he’d presumably also forgotten that he might disturb a gang of burglars rifling through the display cabinets of my mother hand-me-down antiques and bric-a-brac. (We were, if my memory serves me true, actually burgled once while we slept in our beds snoring safely behind the locked security door).

Despite being on the receiving end of more stupidity on my part, my parents were exceedingly nice about all of their money I had lost and encouraged me to enjoy my holiday.

However, for years later I was reminded by my family, whenever I prepared to go overseas, to try not to lose all my money before even getting on the plane.

This long-running joke, that was never quite a joke, created I think, a kind of Pavlovian reaction in me: whenever I prepared to fly anywhere, an uncomfortable general anxiety surfaced in my gut accompanied by some irrational thoughts and somewhat obsessional behaviour.

Irrational – in that my anxiety about flying has manifested into a palpable fear of missing my flight.

To counter a myriad of possible, but unlikely scenarios that might befall me on the way to the airport – getting a flat tyre, getting stuck in traffic, the taxi I have booked not arriving, forgetting something and having to go back home – I like to leave for the airport many, many hours earlier than is necessary.

As I usually arrive, without incident, many, many hours earlier than necessary, this only feeds another nervous affectation – a need to constantly pat myself down, checking that I still have my wallet, passport, boarding pass and any other important documentation, and that they hadn’t dropped to the floor, been stolen or simply carelessly left behind.

You will at least be pleased to know (dear reader) that I have dispensed with the god-awful money belt. I prefer having my wallet and passport in the front pockets of my pants where I can reassuringly feel their presence.

As I have grown older and a bit more chilled, I have become a lot less anxious about the trip to the airport and departure lounges no longer generate quite as much stomach-churning action as they did in the past.

Somewhat wiser, or at least more experienced at life, I am able to acknowledge the irrational nature of my worries and doubt.

If anxiety does surface, I remind myself that if I miss my flight, the trip simply wasn’t meant to be or that the plane I never boarded will almost surely plummet into the ocean. It seems to work a treat.

Ironically, my wife and I backpacked around the world in 2010 and pretty much nothing went wrong.

We travelled through 26 or 27 countries, took dozens of flights, bus, train, ferry and boat trips and never missed any of them.

We never lost a single piece of luggage – our expensive Kathmandu backpacks always reappeared no matter whether they were thrown on the roofs of dusty buses in Marrakesh, loaded onto a plane in Delhi or squashed onto a boat in Kho Phi Phi – and we never lost a passport or wallet between us.

As for airports, we breezed through all of those without – miraculously – a penny unaccounted for.

Re-reading Into the Wild: what killed Chris McCandless?

May 17, 2020September 29, 2022freshlyworded 7 Comments

One of my all-time favourite books is Into the Wild by journalist Jon Krakauer. The film adaptation by Sean Penn was also superb.

I first read Krakauer’s beautifully written investigation of the short, but eventful life of idealistic adventurer Chris McCandless – who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 – whilst travelling around the south and Midwest of America on an Amtrak pass in the late summer of 1997.

Having recently re-read the book whilst on holiday, it occurred to me that back then in 1997, I was the same age – 24 – as Chris McCandless when he died, alone, in a rusting bus, on the Stampede Trail overlooking the Teklinaka River.

People around the world have become fascinated by the story of a well-educated and intense young man from an affluent North Virginia family who gave away all his savings, burnt his money and credit cards and abandoned his car to tramp around America for two years on a rite of passage “to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution”.

McCandless wished to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London and test himself with a final adventure in the wilds of Alaska.

Chris McCandless – at Bus 142, in the year he died

After the first Associated Press article was published on September 13, 1992, about a body discovered by moose hunters in a remote camp, accompanied by a diary and a final plea for help, Jon Krakauer wrote a 5000 word article for Outside magazine “Death of an Innocent” based on interviews with people who had met McCandless on his wanderings. He then expanded that article into a book which became a 1996 bestseller. Sean Penn’s haunting film came out in 2008.

Alongside these mainstream retellings, hundreds of videos have appeared on YouTube about McCandless including documentaries, tributes and amateur investigations. There’s also hundreds of articles online discussing the book, film and McCandless’s adventures and final misadventure most of them captured on an excellent website, christophermccandless.info

People have become obsessed with his short, but adventurous life, his unique philosophical view of the world and his tragic death. Not all are hero worshippers indeed Krakauer has received plenty of criticism for – in the view of some harsh critics – glorifying the death of a naïve and arrogant young man who thought he could tame nature, but who ended up succumbing to it in the most terrible way.

The journal McCandless kept at the back of a book on edible plants

I was one of those people who became fascinated about Chris McCandless, in particular his tragic end and the mystery about what actually killed in. That fascination has never died, and I found myself, upon re-reading the book this year, scouring the internet again for clues and answers.

As Jon Krakauer himself wrote in an article for New Yorker magazine in 2013:

The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now.

What I discovered is that a lot has happened – both in terms of conjecture and scientific research – to try to come to a definitive answer.

It is worth remembering that Jon Krakaeur first came to the conclusion – in the article he wrote for Outside magazine – that Chris McCandless had most likely died when he mistook the supposedly poisonous wild sweet pea (Hedysarum mackenzeii ) for the edible wild potato (Hedysarum alpinum) and ate its seeds.

“Wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart,” wrote Krakauer in the Outside magazine article.

As depicted in the movie, Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) is seen studying the leaves of the plants he has been eating and discovering his mistake, to his horror.

But in the book Into the Wild, Krakauer said he had got it wrong, and that Chris McCandless did not make the mistake of mis-identification and that he was not as reckless, naive and possibly even suicidal as some claim. (Even, if he had eaten the wrong plant, some food plants experts say wild sweet pea is not in fact very poisonous.)

After McCandless wrote in his cryptic keyword diary on Day 90: “EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEEDS. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP” Krakauer concluded that skinny and desperate for food, McCandless had accidentally poisoned himself by eating wild potato seeds not just the roots. Three weeks later he was dead.

Krakauer hypothesized that wild potato seeds contained a toxic alkaloid that weakened McCandless to “to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation”.

Then in 2007, Krakauer suggested that a toxic mold had grown on the seeds McCandless stored in a damp Ziploc.

“Now I’ve come to believe after researching from journals of veterinary medicine that what killed him wasn’t the seeds themselves, but the fact that they were damp and he stored them in these big Ziploc bags and they had grown moldy. And the mold produces this toxic alkaloid called swainsonine. My theory is essentially the same, but I’ve refined it somewhat. You know, who cares? But I care and his family cares,” Krakauer said.

Six years later, in the 2013 New Yorker article, Krakauer admitted he had made a “rash intuitive leap” by suggesting in the first edition of his book that the alkaloid that killed McCandless was perhaps swainsonine, a toxic agent known to inhibit glycoprotein metabolism in animals, leading to starvation.

But later analysis by Dr. Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry
department at the University of Alaska, found no trace of swainsonine or any
other alkaloids.

Into_the_Wild_(book)_cover In his 2013 article for New Yorker magazine, Krakauer wrote of how his theories had brought scorn from many, especially Alaskans, but that he had then come across a “brilliant” writer named Ronald Hamilton who had discovered “hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death”.

Hamilton’s paper “The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless,” offered, Krakauer wrote “persuasive new evidence that the wild-potato plant is highly toxic in and of itself, contrary to the assurances of Thomas Clausen and every other expert who has ever weighed in on the subject.

“The toxic agent…turns out not to be an alkaloid but, rather, an amino acid [a neurotoxin called ODAP causing lathyrism, a kind of paralysis], and according to Hamilton it was the chief cause of McCandless’s death. His theory validates my conviction that McCandless wasn’t as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be.”

Worryingly though Krakauer notes that Hamilton is “neither a botanist nor a chemist; he’s a writer who until recently worked as a bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania library.

But after further scientific testing supported Hamilton’s theory, Krakauer concluded: “considering that potentially crippling levels of ODAP are found in wild-potato seeds, and given the symptoms McCandless described and attributed to the wild-potato seeds he ate, there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds”.

Alas, in a 2015 article for New Yorker, titled “An Update: How Chris McCandless Died” Krakauer admitted, following more criticism from a journalist in Alaska, that he needed to do more testing to prove his theory that neurotoxins are present in wild potato seeds and publish the results in a “reputable peer-reviewed journal”.

This he did – after further scientific research – authoring a paper with Dr. Jonathan Southard, Dr. Ying Long, Dr. Andrew Kolbert and Dr. Shri Thanedar, titled“Presence of L-canavanine in Hedysarum Alpinum Seeds and its Potential Role in the Death of Chris McCandless,” It appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine in March, 2015.

The paper concluded that L-canavanine (an antimetabolite with demonstrated toxicity in mammals) was a significant component of wild potato seeds and because they made up a significant portion of his meager diet “it is highly likely” they were a “contributing factor to his death”.

Of course ‘highly likely” meant Krakauer was still not 100 per cent about his latest theory and it was again an Alaskan journalist – Craig Medred from the Anchorage Daily News – who took him to task in a highly critical and daming article titled “The fiction that is Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into The Wild'”.

Originally published in January 2015 – a month before Krakauer’s second New Yorker article – but updated in September 2016, Medred posited that it wasn’t wild potato seeds that killed McCandless, but toxic mushrooms.

Medred points out that entry 89 of the 113 entries McCandless left in his terse diary states: “Many Mushrooms. DREAM.”

“DREAM is written in the largest, boldest letters of any word in the journal, and there are large, dark arrows connecting mushrooms to the word DREAM.” writes Medred.

He also notes that photos of mushrooms appeared on film found with McCandless’s body and appeared as photos in the McCandless family’s book about their son “Back to the Wild”.

Medred says a noted authority on Alaskan mushrooms – scientist Gary Laursen, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks – had identified mushrooms McCandless had eaten as “Amanita muscaria’ a variety known to make people sick and cause hallucinations. Laursen also identified other varieties of mushrooms in the photos that made people violently ill.

(Medred’s criticism of Jon Krakauer’s book extends way beyond the wild potato seeds theory and claims the chapter he wrote about the time McCandless spent in Alaska has no basis in fact and that some of the books found with McCandless’s body (with underlined passages and notes that gave clues to his view of the world) were not actually his but that of an Alaskan adventurer “who’s now a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks”).

I looked up the mushroom Amanita muscaria online: depending on the location/variety it is either bright red, yellow or orange with white warts, similar to those I have seen myself whilst walking in woods near my own home of Gisborne, Victoria.

They are about as toxic looking as any mushroom could look in my opinion, and it seems hard to believe Chris McCandless would have gorged on them, let alone eat one.

Even if he had tried one, according to the research I found online, it would have made him violently ill – but not fatally so – and it is unlikely he would have tried anymore.

Then in December 2018, Medred published another article about Jon Krakauer and Into the Wild.

In it he quotes an “authority on wild edible plants, Samuel Thayer” who he says lumped all of Krakauer’s poison plant claims together as part of a “poisonous plant fable.”

Thayer’s main criticism is that any poisoning theory requires one to know how much of wild potato seeds McCandless actually ate.

“While it certainly is true that people can poison themselves with wild vegetation, the fear that we attribute to plants is monstrously out of proportion with the actual danger they pose,” said Thayer.

Medred has another monumental dig at Krakauer, writing:

“Krakauer has never been able to accept the idea that McCandless simply starved to death. To do so, would be to recognize that McCandless was killed by his own incompetence, and that would undermine the whole “Into the Wild” myth of a bright young man on a sensible adventure of self discovery murdered by twists of fate at the hands of nature.”

That is a view held by some – though not by me.

Regardless, we will likely never know with any certainty what caused the death of Chris McCandless. It will remain an unsolved mystery, his death a tragic end to a life full of promise.

What I believe is that Chris McCandless did not intend his Alaskan trip to be a suicide mission, and that he planned to walk out of the bush and re-enter society sometime at end of 1992.

How do we know this? From his photos of course. After all, why document your travels, if not to share them with others.

RIP Chris.

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His final photo: The card reads: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

The bar was packed: last drinks in the age of Coronavirus

March 31, 2020April 1, 2020freshlyworded Leave a comment

As the rest of the world went into lockdown a couple of weeks ago, I found myself, on a Saturday night, having a drink with my good mate Jonny at a bar on Carlisle Street, in Balaclava, a trendy, somewhat grungy inner southern suburb of Melbourne.

Half-jokingly, I’d set the wheels of the catch-up in motion, by suggesting we get together for a beer and a burger because it might be the last time we could do it “before the world ended”. It was also Jonny’s birthday later in the week.

At the time, New York and other major cities were already shutting down. Restaurants and bars were about to close in Manhattan and Italy was already a nation quarantined. But in Australia there were no real restrictions on daily life, except for a growing shortage of toilet paper, hand sanitizer and pasta.

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Packed no more: The Rooftop terrace at The Local Taphouse (Facebook)

‘Social distancing’ however was swiftly becoming a buzzword, but not on the rooftop terrace at The Local Taphouse on Carlisle Street at 8.30pm on Saturday, March 14.

The scene was busy, loud and convivial. People sat shoulder to shoulder at tables or stood in small, huddled groups near the bar, drinks in hand, conversing about their lives, telling stories, laughing and smiling.

Jonny and I ordered two large ciders (a craft cider, particularly tasty) and found some seats at an unoccupied table, where we sipped our delicious drinks and held our own conversation talking about our lives: our families, our jobs, gripes, the latest shows we’d watched, books read, podcasts listened to.

Both of us, now past the mid-forties mark, reminisced about the old days back in South Africa as we always tend to do on these catch-ups and wondered, as we always do, where all the time had gone.

Around us the bar was still noisy and buzzing. We enjoyed a second round of drinks and continued our conversation.

Though I was immersed in the scene, part of its social fabric (part of the problem I guess), I couldn’t shake the feeling that this supposed normality was both strange and fleeting. It was as if the terrace of happy people existed on a different planet from the rest of society who were at home, worrying about a disaster about to unfold.

A couple of hours passed and then it was time for us to depart and return to our separate worlds of parental responsibilities.

I headed to the bathroom on the way out, where a bloke standing next to me at the urinal exchanged some sort of half-drunk pleasantry. Then, as I attempted to wash and dry my hands at the basin, I nearly collided with two men who emerged simultaneously from the toilet cubicle looking rather sheepish after a spot of, I imagined, illicit drug-taking.

A minute later, Jonny and I emerged back on Carlisle Street and into the fresh night air. Drunken chatter wafted across the road from another pub a few shops down. Cars whizzed past and a couple waited, in intimate embrace, for the traffic lights to change.

We walked past a half-lit dessert cafe with a display window full of eclairs, pastries and cream-filled cakes. Driving back along Carlisle Street to drop Jonny off first in a nearby Melbourne suburb we passed another busy bar full of banter, booze and music.

It was only on the long drive home along the Calder Freeway under the endless expanse of stars and black night sky, that it dawned on me that perhaps I should not have been so cavalier as all those social beings on the rooftop of The Local Taphouse, sipping their drinks, grinning, laughing and carefree. Then again, the party was only hours from ending. For everyone. The music was about to stop.

The next day, Sunday March 15, brought with it the first of the restrictions: all overseas arrivals must self-isolate for 14 days, all cruise ships banned from Australia, gatherings of over 500 people no longer allowed.

A week later all pubs, clubs, gyms, cinemas, casinos, restaurants and cafes (save for takeaway orders) were ordered to close their doors and indoor gatherings were reduced to 100 people (now cut to two people). A 1.5 m social distance from others should be maintained and all non-essential travel should stop, we were told.

And so the world as I knew it ended for us in Australia as it had already for many others in New York, Rome, Los Angeles and London – and almost certain to never to return in the form it once was.

The Local Taphouse on Carlisle Street is now shuttered. The cider and beer taps are turned off, chairs are stacked on tables, the roof terrace empty and deathly quiet.

Just the ghosts of good times past remain as I try to conjure back the taste of that fruity cider.

Recurring memories: A London long weekend, lonely and lovely

December 18, 2019December 19, 2019freshlyworded 2 Comments

The things we remember, the things we forget.

Recently, a memory resurfaced after years lying dormant in my befuddled brain.

It was of a long weekend in London, that has stayed with me I think because I spent the three or four days of its duration almost entirely on my own.

I don’t recall the month or year, but it would have been around 2003 (I lived in London from 2000 to 2004) and probably in summer, as my memory is of it staying light till late.

The emotions that accompany memories of that brief period in my life are: loneliness, contemplation, poignancy and a strange feeling of pleasure. This last feeling I connect to the enjoyment of my own company and the absolute freedom to do as I pleased for 72 or or more hours.

At 46, balancing the demands of family and work, the idea of having all that time to just wonder about at my leisure, exploring new streets and old lane ways in that ancient city, idling away my time over coffees and beers, is hard to fathom.

My time now, though incredibly rich and meaningful seems so incredibly rushed.

Foolishly, I have dived straight into a pool of warm nostalgia regarding my London days, trying to reconstruct that distant weekend.

Most of the details have disappeared with just a ‘sense of things’ dangling before my eyes. Here I must resist the urge to use some corny poetic metaphor such as ‘like dust dancing through a ray of sunlight in a quiet room’ but its true, my recollection is both tangible (and potent) and intangible (and elusive).

Who knows if what of the little I remember of that weekend actually happening or is nothing more than a wishful re-imagining of events, moments and places, like how one constructs fragments of a quickly disappearing dream upon waking up.

So what do I recall of that lonesome and lovely long weekend, long ago?

I remember (quite distinctly) that almost everyone I knew – friends and family – were out of town or worse, not seeking my company, leaving me to my own devices.

I remember that the weather was good, and that I was outdoors a lot, exploring previously undiscovered parts of North London, not far from my home base, a flatshare above a kebab shop on Brent Street, Hendon and one floor up from Harold Schogger’s Bridge Club (also my landlord).

My flatshare above the kebab shop (third floor) in Hendon

I recall almost for certain that I walked up Primrose Hill opposite London Zoo (a feature of many London movies) and took in the famous view across to the city (now with so many more skyscrapers).

Later, I am almost certain, I explored the nearby cobbled streets lined with stately Victorian terraces, the homes of rock stars like Oasis’s Noel Gallagher and movie god Jude Law and his former wife, the actress Sadie Frost

plath-plaque More than likely, I was descending into London’s rich literary history, seeking out the Blue Plaques, which commemorate the homes where famous residents once lived.

At the time I was quite obsessed with Sylvia Plath (her plaque is at 3 Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill not far from where she gassed herself at 23 Fitzroy Road), the doomed poet whose biographical novel The Bell Jar I read so intently in London.

I even memorized one of Plath’s poems (a feat I have never yet attempted since) – ‘Lady Lazarus’ – about her numerous suicide attempts.

I had experienced something of a mental breakdown of my own – panic attacks mainly – and was undergoing therapy which I think explained something of my fascination with Plath and her poetry and prose. Perhaps that also accounted for my solitary status that long weekend. Depressives reciting Sylvia Plath poems out aloud are not usually magnates for social invitations.

This state of mind – a search for meaning of some kind – had no doubt encouraged my interest in the more morbid side of literature more generally. I recall reading a book about Plath and suicide called ‘The Savage God’ by the English Poet Al Alvarez (who Wikipedia tells me died in September aged 90) and enjoying long periods of introspection. (I was also doing yoga at the time, one evening a week in an old church building in Hampstead and falling asleep, accompanied by snoring, during the meditation at the end of the class).

Primrose Hill

But I am digressing from that London long weekend to general London nostalgia.

Like an iceberg, I only remember a fraction of what floats above the surface of my conscious mind: memories of walking past the still, dark green waters of canals, walking over bridges to peer down at the boats and barges below, a sandwich at Pret-a-Manger, maybe a gelato at that Italian place near the Chalk Farm tube station. Maybe Nandos?

Whatever did or did not happen, I am there, on my own. A backpack, glasses, comfortable walking shoes, lost in my own thoughts, searching for those blue plaques. Perhaps George Orwell‘s at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town or Dylan Thomas at 54 Delancey Street in Camden Town or William Butler Yeats at 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill.

Perhaps I walked all the way up to from Camden Town, through Chalk Farm, past the trendy cafes and shops of Belsize Park and into Hampstead Heath, that giant, sprawling, and in parts wonderfully untamed London park for a bit of wander.

Then finally, as the sky darkened, on the tube or bus (route 113 or 13) home to my grubby flat in Hendon, stopping for a greasy kebab and then relaxing on the blush blue sofa, perhaps smoking a joint offered by a flatmate, flicking the through the endless channels on Sky TV.

‘Black territory’: the dark story of Sunbury’s asylum on the hill

May 12, 2019June 14, 2021freshlyworded 17 Comments

In 1945, Maraquita Sargeant, a young teacher and concert pianist living in rural Victoria was admitted to a notorious lunatic asylum north of Melbourne.

Here she would remain for the next 22 years, incarcerated against her will and tragically, completely sane.

Years after her release in a more enlightened and less cruel age, psychiatrists would describe Maraquita as being nothing more then “mildly eccentric”.

Her ‘lunacy’ in 1945: not wanting to have any more children.

Her youngest child, Tony, who was only 18 months old when his mother was taken away, calls the now empty lunatic asylum “black territory”.

“This is a black place. I don’t want to be here,” he says in a short video about his mother produced by Washington’s famous Smithsonian Institute.

This “black territory” is a place I have only recently discovered for myself.

It’s only a 20 minutes drive from where I live and somewhere I pass almost every day on my train ride into work.

Maraquita Sargeant (from the Smithsonian video)

For months I’d thought the majestic looking red-brick mansion rising above trees on a distant hillside was a country estate, perhaps built long ago for a Melbourne land baron.

It was only when I found myself standing outside its locked-up gates, staring up at the classically proportioned Victorian structure with its steep black roof, long-tall chimneys and large empty windows that its real purpose came into focus.

Known originally as the Sunbury Industrial School, the vast complex of mostly abandoned and decaying buildings was for over 100 years a lunatics asylum. It occupies almost the entire hillside of housing estate called Jacksons Hill.

In its most recent incarnation, until 2011, the asylum complex was a study campus occupied by Victoria University. Search online and you’ll find plenty of ghost stories.

More recently known as Caloola, the site’s history goes back over 150 years to 1864, when it became the site for one of Victoria’s twelve ‘Industrial schools – institutionalised homes for delinquent or neglected children, that were a horror of diseases, death and discomfort in their own right.

The ‘Hospital for the Insane’ or ‘Sunbury Asylum’ was built in 1879 and then expanded over the next 40-odd years into a complex of 20 separate buildings, including a psychiatric hospital.

Back then there would have been very little to see from the hillside apart from farmland and another famous Sunbury landmark, the grey-spired Rupertswood mansion – home of The Ashes grey-spired Rupertswood mansion – home of The Ashes. Rupertswood was completed in 1876 and is now incorporated into a posh private school.

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Rupertswood: Home of The Ashes

While the building of a modern highway has made Sunbury an outlying suburb of Melbourne today, back in the 1870s, Caloola asylum inmates would have felt very isolated from the wealth and power of boom town Melbourne, then one of the richest cities in the world thanks to the Victorian Gold Rush.

This separation was of course deliberate – people considered ‘mad’ in those days like Maraquita Sargeant were locked up far away from the chattering middle-classes, often to be forgotten about or no longer mentioned (except in whispers) by their own families.

“Asylums were typically distant from population centres, with extensive grounds and ha ha walls to prevent escape,” the Victorian Heritage Database entry says of Caloola.

This is black territory, a dark place of menace.

According to the VHD, the purpose built Sunbury asylum with its “pavilion wards in brick with terra cotta roofing tiles conformed to international standards of asylum and hospital planning adopted in the later nineteenth century”.

“Caloola is of historical significance for its physical fabric and spaces which demonstrate nineteenth century attitudes to the treatment of mental illness, including the padded cells, ripple iron cells and dormitory accommodation.”

An inmate of Sunbury asylum, in what appears to be a strait jacket

In the Smithsonian video, Tony Sargeant enters one of the claustrophobic former padded cells, the cushion lining peeling back from the wall like dead skin adding to the sense of horror. In another, he finds the large empty former linen room, where his mother spent her days monotonously patching up sheets and pillow cases.

“That was her big job in life. Even though she was a concert pianist,” Tony says.

Caloola remained a mental institution and training hospital until 1985 when it housed intellectually handicapped people.

From 1992 to 2011 it was a campus of Victorian University. Some of the building are still in use as a primary school, radio station, art gallery and theatre company.

For a while – after the university campus closed – a passionate local lady called Julie Mills and her husband ran popular two-hour guided tours of the asylum buildings providing insights into how the facility operated and how patients were treated at the time.

Ms Mills told the Sunbury Leader in November 2015 she wanted to shine a light on the mental health system in those days, and how it has changed, and tell the stories of some of the people treated, often harshly, within its walls.

“A lot of the Sunbury asylum history is about stigma and it is something that was buried in family histories,” she said.

Often people – many of them women – were placed into the asylum for conditions that today would be compassionately treated like post-natal depression, or for just being drunk and disorderly.

In the case of Marquita Sargeant, she was denied her freedom – and later sent for a failed lobotomy at the Royal Melbourne Hospital – because a director at the asylum deemed her “a threat to certain prominent people’s reputations”.

I found countless other example of the cruelty, deviancy and filthy conditions that were part of asylum life for inmates, right up until the 1990s when the asylum housed mental patients, many of whom were abused or over-medicated.

A newspaper article that appeared in the Melbourne Argus in December 1881 reported on investigations into the lecherous behaviour of the asylum superintendent at the time Albert Baldwin, after he had a 17-year-old girl Agnes Simmonds visit him in his office, where he locked the door.

“The patient was alone with Mr Baldwin in his officer for some time,: testified William Walker, the asylum storekeeper and clear.

“Eventually she left with the attendant. Baldwin then called me in, and I found him in a flurried state. He pulled up the blind of his window, washed his hands and face and brushed his hair. The patient Simmonds left on the 5th September and I believe has gone to New South Wales.”

A feature article on Sunbury Asylum that appeared in The Age newspaper in 1999 talks of Elizabeth Kennedy, 31, a suicidal dressmaker, who spent 7200 hours “in seclusion”, from 1894 to 1896 which meant she was forced to wear a camisole – the notorious straitjacket – and webbed trousers daily.

“A woman in seclusion also wore canvas gloves shaped like oven mitts. Many of the inmates died of pneumonia and, in the early years, they were given cold baths. Difficult patients were deprived of dinner,” the article says.

Last May, Jackson’s Hill and asylum complex was acquired by the State Government’s Development Victoria. However, plans to turn it into a community, arts and cultural precinct appear to have stalled.

Instead, it stands still and empty, a decaying and ghoulish Dickensian shrine to those who suffered unjustly and often terribly behind its walls.

As for my mistaken belief that this hillside of horrors was a majestic country estate, I can take some solace from a 1996 article in The Age newspaper, in which the writer described Caloola’s gardens, open-air pavilions, and curved ha-ha walls as having a “beauty that seems at odds with their original purpose”.

Becoming an Australian: a brief summary of an unexpected 14 year odyssey

October 17, 2018December 19, 2018freshlyworded 2 Comments

How Emu-sing

A few days before I took the pledge and became an Australian citizen, I celebrated my impending ‘Aussie-ness’ in true style by enjoying the spectacle of the AFL Grand Final – Pies v Eagles – in my local pub in country Victoria.

Can there be anything more Aussie then sipping a pot of cold beer, surrounded by dinky-di locals hurling abuse at muscly boofheads on a big screen amid the pungent aroma wafting up from an unwashed carpet?

Perched on a bar stool, holding an ale, there I was offering my limited analysis of the great Australian game (whose rules I still haven’t quite figured out after 14 years of trying), wondering how the hell I ended up here in the first place?

After all, I was the least likely person among my circle of Johannesburg friends to ever contemplate moving Down Under, someone who once famously vowed never to live in the same country as Steve “You’ve dropped the World Cup” Waugh and Shane Whatshisname and all the other Aussies that had, more often than not, thrashed us South Africans on the cricket field and other sporting arenas.

But here I was, a few days out from joining the other 25 million-odd people in this vast and curious land who call themselves ‘Australian’, and feeling rather pleased with myself.

This might have had something to do with the three or four pots of ice-cold beer I’d enjoyed as the game drew to its thrilling climax, creating a warm glow in my belly.

Or perhaps it was the un-expectantly jovial conversation (unexpected, since I’d walked into the pub knowing no one) I’d struck up with Jason, the larrikin bloke sitting next to me at the bar, who it turned out lived on my street and was full of funny tales from his job on the Melbourne docks and his travels with his wife to Nepal and who by the end of the afternoon was slightly rat-arsed and could only make it half way through a story before chuckling to himself, because he’d forgotten the point entirely.

But the feeling was deeper, like maybe, I actually belonged here, that I’d absorbed something of the country’s essence – it’s essential “fair go” good heartiness, it’s fair dinkum spirit and inexplicable cultural oddities and contradictions.

It was as if I’d grown a new layer of ‘Australian identity’, over my South African roots and the other layers of ‘me’ – my traditional Orthodox Jewish upbringing and my adopted Englishness, courtesy of four cherished years living and working in London.

Sydney

As the evening of the citizenship ceremony at Kyneton Town Hall drew nearer, I became gripped by nostalgia for the past 14 years.

My mind danced back to the day I touched down in Sydney in late September 2004 after a long flight, and feeling the muggy heat of a surprisingly humid Spring day as I exited the airport building. From there I was taken to La Perouse, named after the French navigator who landed there before Captain Cook, to enjoy the view across Botany Bay whilst be warned to watch out for snakes.

The bright sun and deep blue waters were a stark change from the grey, Autumn skies of London, where I’d said goodbye to my friends a day earlier, before hopping into a mini cab in Golders Green in the metropolis’s northern suburbs for the motorway out to Heathrow.

In suburban Sydney, newly unemployed and work visa-less, Australian pop culture got its early hooks into me courtesy of morning re-runs of The Secret Life of Us a show about a group of twenty-something friends living and loving at Melbourne’s St Kilda Beach, narrated by the philosophical observer and writer, Evan (played brilliantly by Samuel Johnson). I took daily jogs beneath the fig trees of Centennial Park only a short walk away, went on weekend excursions to the Central Coast, visited Canberra and attended the Floriade (an annual flower shower) and was introduced to the music of Cold Chisel, The Whitlams and Powderfinger.

Brisbane

Sydney soon departed, as did my relationship, in a cloud of self-induced misery, giving way to the humidity of tropical Brisbane where I secured a job in PR (writing media releases that no one read) and a cherished 457 work visa. I vividly remember feeling both exhilarating and melancholic waking up on Australia Day 2005 in a shared townhouse in Stafford in Brisbane’s Northern Suburbs realising I was completely on my own.

I also won’t ever forget that scorching hot day wandering aimlessly around the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, Southbank, and the city, the Triple J Hottest 100 playing on the radio, (the number 1 song that year was Wish You Well by Bernard Fanning) wondering just what the bloody hell I was doing here.

Rather then become a recluse, being alone jolted me into a new and surprising phase of gregariousness and adventure. Within a few months, with the help of websites like the Gumtree, I soon gathered around me a motley crew of new friends, most of them local Brisbanites, who had returning from London work stints. They were all lovely, warm and welcoming people who made me feel at home, and I’m sad to think that I’ve since lost contact with all of them.

We’d catch up after work in the city or in Fortitude Valley (Brisbane lively inner city party suburb), drink ourselves silly and rock out to the local band playing cover versions of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Hunters & Collectors, Paul Kelly and the Rolling Stones at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow or Pig & Whistle. By that time I’d relocated to a shared apartment in leafy New Farm on the banks of the Brisbane River (my previous flatmate, Sharon, with a propensity for having loud, moaning intercourse with her boyfriend, having kicked me out for a few harmless indiscretions including using her expensive goat hair winter blanket without asking).

I would often stumble home down Sydney Road after a night of drinking, dancing and canoodling in the Valley, crawling into bed as the sun was just starting to come up.

I remember a wonderful Christmas spent as the pseudo-adopted son of my delightful new flatmate Jane’s Gold Coast family in their swimming pooled home, a holiday which included a Formula One-like ride in her father’s super-charged Holden Commodore to pick up a relative in Murwillumbah across the border.

There were new discoveries: the gaudy neon delights of Surfers Paradise only an hour away, the beaches and markets of Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, the rather depressing hippyness of Nimbin, a weekend away to taste the bohemian air of Byron Bay, a holiday at Rainbow Beach below Fraser Island with its bleached white sandy beaches -and a string of short-lived romances.

The party stopped soon after that Rainbox Beach Christmas holiday, when I got “boned” from my job (they finally figured out I actually did very little all day) and ended back in Sydney, working as a journalist for a trade publishing outfit on the North Shore on another 457 visa.

(As a side note I should add that Brisbane was where I sat enthralled watching the epic 2005 Grand Final between Sydney Swans and West Coast, a game which was instrumental in developing a surprising interest in the sport alongside my established passions of rugby, cricket and the English Premier League.)

Back to Sydney: Coogee Beach and Dural

Coogee Beach

In Sydney, I made my first home in an Art Deco flatshare overlooking Coogee Beach and then later, after I met the gorgeous Kiwi who was to be my wife (we were introduced by mutual friends at the bar at the Lord Nelson Hotel at The Rocks), to a two-storey apartment in Woolloomooloo that we shared, nestled amid the hipsters, drug addicts and down-and-outs of Kings Cross (as well as Russell Crowe) for two funky years.

With the bustle and hustle of rainbow-flagged Oxford Street only a short walk away Betty’s Soup Kitchen (sadly no longer there) and its homemade damper bread and cramped Don Don’s with its enormous bowls of Chicken Katzu became favourites as did drinking holes like the Gaslight Inn, Dolphin and Clock Hotel.

I attended my first Mardi Gras parade, ran my first City to Surf run, and took our dogs, two playful silky terriers for morning walks, heading up to the NSW Art Gallery, as trains rattled below, and to the rocky wilds of the Royal Botanical Gardens and sensational views across the harbour.

Python-esque

When our Woolloomooloo lease ended, inner city Sydney with its buzz, noise and congestion gave way, for a magical six months, to country living as we joined my future wife’s sister and her partner sharing a large house on a couple of acres north of Dural on the rugged and bushy northern outskirts. On the property were half a dozen horses, five dogs, and a couple of Diamond-backed pythons who made a home in the roof above the living room, feasting on rodents. They could often be seen slithering through vines outside our expansive lounge windows. (It was at this time that I bought my now well-thumbed copy of A Guide to Australian Snakes).

A delightful wedding in historic Clyde, below the snow-capped majestic mountains of Central Otago surrounded by 50 of our closest family and friends (followed by a honeymoon road trip around the New Zealand South Island) gave way to a magical year-long backpacking adventure around the world (read about my BEEG Adventure here) and then a new chapter, Melbourne, when we returned to Australia from our travels in February 2011.

There after I got an online writing job in the city, and soon after, we started a family that has most recently grown to five. It was in Melbourne, that I also landed a cherished role writing for The Australian Financial Review in August 2013 where I recently clocked up five years. Where does the time go?

Return to the country

We spent almost six years in the rather bland Northern Suburbs of Melbourne – Oak Park and then Niddrie – before packing up and heading north on the Calder Freeway for leafy Gisborne with its rolling kangaroo-hopping green hills and country fresh feel.

Which of course brings me right back to the country pub, and the big screen telly, and the Grand Final and the pots of beer in the belly, and the locals laughing and yelling and my new friend forgetting the point of his stories and me feeling rather pleased with myself after my unexpected 14 year odyssey.

So here I am. As Aussie apparently as the next bloke, part of this fabulous, swirling multi-cultural melting pot with an uncle called Bruce (truly), father-in-law who barracks for Collingwood (sadly) and three Australian children, wondering…who the bloody hell I am going to vote for at the next federal election? aussie citizenship

Why go abroad? Reading Alain De Botton’s ‘The Art of Travel’

September 30, 2018October 1, 2018freshlyworded Leave a comment

the-art-of-travel-alain-de-botton “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,” laments the melodramatic Withnail in the cult film ‘Withnail and I’ as his escape from his filthy London squat for the fresh country air of the English Lake District turns out to be anything but idyllic.

Withnail and his of out-of-work actor chum “I” are enduring what so many have experienced for real on their own travels: when the pictures on the holiday brochure (or in one’s imagination) turns out be nothing like the real experience.

This all too familiar feeling of traveller’s gloom is one of the many aspects of that great human urge to “go on holiday” that the British philosopher and best-selling author Alain De Botton explores in his highly entertaining and insightful book The Art of Travel.

“We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, [but] we hear little of why and how we should go,” muses De Botton in the first chapter called “On anticipation”.

De Botton recalls his own disappointing experience of a tropical island holiday to Barbados where he went with his partner one year, to escape the London winter.

Withnail and I: We’ve gone on holiday by mistake

Prior to traveling he imagined only “a beach with a palm tree against the setting sun”, a “bungalow with views through French doors” and an “azure sky”.

What he didn’t imagine was the “large petrol storage facility” near the airport, the long line of people waiting to have their passports stamped, adverts for rum above the luggage carousel and “a confusion of taxi drivers and tour guides outside the terminal building”.

It’s not just that the holiday ‘looks’ nothing like the brochure. Even when the author does find himself in a place which should be restful and calming – the idyllic sandy beach of his imagination – he struggles to relax, his mind is full of worries about “back home” leading De Botton to the depressing realisation that he has taken ‘himself’, with all its anxieties, fears and frustrations, on holiday with him too.

“…the mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.”

This candidness and almost painful honest is one of the great joys of reading De Botton. He is never afraid to draw on his own bitter experiences, failings and annoying habits to illustrate a key point; in this way, he makes himself a very likeable and sincere narrator.

As with the other books of his I have read (The Consolations of Philosophy The Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life) De Botton draws on the wisdom of the great thinkers of the past – philosophers, artists, writers, painters and poets – to provide answers to the questions he has about the paradoxes, ironies and mysteries of the travel experience. (Surely no other writer has managed to make philosophy so interesting and so practical).

These include the American realist painter Edward Hopper whose evocative scenes of lonely travellers waiting in empty motels rooms, gas stations and automats, De Botton relates to the idea of travel as a journey of reflective introspection. The poetry and power of these melancholic scenes De Botton also says explains why we take pleasure and comfort in ugly highway rest stops, where we find kingship with other fellow travellers amid the harsh lighting and plastic furniture.

I particularly enjoyed De Botton’s description of a lacklustre visit to Madrid, where he could barely muster the strength to get out of bed, despite the great Spanish city with its palaces, museums and art galleries beckoning him from below his hotel room. Only the fear of the hotel maid entering his room for a fourth time and exclaiming “Hola, Perdone!” roused him from his depression.

While one’s first reaction is to be annoyed with De Botton for squandering such a great opportunity to see the sights, who on their own travels has not grown lethargic and bored at the prospect of a visit to yet another ancient ruin, art gallery or museum, which our travel guide tells us we should be enthusiastically visiting and gazing at in wonder.

Here De Botton takes his cues from the great German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt whose curiosity for all the things strange and unusual he discovered and catalogued on his expeditions reminded De Botton that what we find pleasurable or interesting on our travels should not be determined by the latest edition of the Lonely Planet or Rough Guide.

Humboldt did not suffer such intimidation…He could unselfconsciously decide what interested him. He could create his own categories of value…

Curious explorer: Alexander von Humboldt

De Botton’s other guides include Vincent Van Gogh, whose vibrant paintings of bright yellow wheatfields and whirling Cypress trees in Arles reveal the hidden beauty and power in seemingly ordinary places and the poetry of William Wordsworth, which celebrated daffodils, sheep and trees – as an explanation for why we yearn to escape the city for the restorative piers of the countryside.

(It’s just a shame my paperback edition of The Art of Travel reproduced all the artworks and photographs in black and white, though its easy enough, albeit a little disruptive to one’s reading, to look up the full colour version on one’s smartphone or tablet.)

There is of course another message that De Botton is so eager to share: that one does not have to jump on a plane and fly 5000 miles to a remote island to undertake an enlightening journey. Just exploring one’s own neighbourhood with a curious eye and alert mind can reveal wonders, as the author does himself with a meditative walk through his London suburb of Hammersmith.

In fact, one does not even have to leave one’s bedroom to “travel” if one subscribes to the wisdom of French writer Xavier de Maistre whose bizarre book Journey Around My Bedroom, published in 1794 De Botton brings back from obscurity.

While De Botton acknowledges there is clearly something rather silly about de Maistre’s suggestion that rather then go travelling we instead admire the elegance of one’s bedroom furniture, he also recognises a more profound message that “the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps more dependent on the mindset with which we travel then on the destination we travel to”.

It’s one worth remembering the next time we reach for the chunky travel guide wedged in our bookshelf, when the urge to go on holiday hits us again.

(Readers of The Art of Travel, might also enjoy an accompanied documentary Alain De Botton made on the topic, which you can watch for free on YouTube: