LITMIR.BIZ

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       MAGNETIC ISLAND

      For most people, childhood is a climate. In my case, it is perfectly hot and humid with nothing above us but blue sky. What I recall is a feeling on the skin and the cool nights of the tropical savannah. I was born in Townsville in North Queensland, Australia, where the trees and the bush crowded down to the sea and you looked over to Magnetic Island. In the summer the rains came and we were always ready for floods. It was beautiful, actually. Heat like that goes down into the bones and never leaves you.

      The people of Townsville lived in suburban housing, many of them living the ‘Australian dream’ of a small house and car. In the late 1960s there was an army base nearby. The population was about 80,000 and the local economy dealt in wool and sugar, or in minerals and timber from the region. For some reason there were a lot of Italians, many of them working on the cane farms, and I remember the closed sense of community that existed among them. Italian was the second most spoken language. It must have been a conformist kind of place in many ways, filled with quietly industrious people growing bored in the constant sunshine. You could say it was a distant province in a country that was itself a distant province of the world. That would describe how it seemed to my mother’s generation. By 1970, she was keen to see the world, or at least to see it changed.

      That year my mother bought a motorbike. She was a bright and creative girl who loved to paint, so quite soon, aged eighteen, reeling from the mediocrity of her schooldays, Christine hopped on her bike and drove the 2,000 miles to Sydney. She was a country girl, though, and she later told me Sydney was too much. But life was happening right in front of her, as it tends in all our cases to do. She was standing one day on the corner of Oxford Street and Glenmore Road in Paddington, just opposite the Victoria Army Barracks, when she saw a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration slide past her like a modern history tableau. Though she didn’t understand much about it, my mother wanted to join this great tide of feeling. As she stood there, what she remembers as a gentle voice appeared at her ear. It belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old, cultured guy with a moustache. He asked her if she was with anyone and when she said ‘no’ he took her hand.

      About 60,000 Australians were involved in the war in Vietnam. It turned out to be the longest conflict they’d ever got involved in: 500 men lost their lives and 3,000 were wounded. In May 1970, around the time my parents met, the anti-war demonstrations were at their height in Australia; about 200,000 people marched in the major cities, some of them being arrested, as the law then allowed, for not having a permit to hand out leaflets. The 1970s are now routinely called ‘the decade of protest’ in Australia (Gay Pride happened in Sydney in 1973) and my parents – the bright young creative girl and the cultured demonstrator who walked into her life – were dyed-in-the-wool protestors. There was something theatrical about it, a conservative society finding its voice, and I must have taken it in with my mother’s milk, the idea that non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by. I believe I was conceived in that spirit.

      Back in Townsville on 3 July 1971, my mother was taken to the Basel Hospital, and I was born around three in the afternoon. She says I was round, dark-haired, loud, with the look of an Eskimo.

      It would be safe to say that Christine, my mother, has – and had then – a natural disinclination towards doing what she was told, and I soon picked it up. My grandmother remembers my sense of dreamy wonderment, and I’m not in a position to argue with her, though it seems reasonable to assume I might have been dreamily wondering at an early age what was happening at the Townsville army base. In any case, my grandmother rocked me to haunting Greek melodies recorded by Maria Farandouri and I quieted down. When I was a few months old my mother moved us to a cottage on Magnetic Island, to a house with mango and eucalyptus trees outside the windows.

      Forgive me for going all Proustian, but I believe my mother bred a sensualist in me, and, somewhere in my mind’s eye, I can see the many patterned scarves she hung over the bassinette. The light would pass through them, casting shapes over my hands and legs. When I had grown just a little, my mother took me around in a sling or in a backpack that I loved and soon took to calling Peck Peck. Early childhood is so important, I think. It gives you all your capacity for wonder. My mother had a gift for love and for making life no less interesting than it was. You can’t take that for granted. Some people press their children into dullness before they’ve even opened their mouths. And there’s probably something to be said for Magnetic Island itself at that time: it was a freedom-haunted place, a beautiful Eden of about a thousand inhabitants, where people who didn’t fit in any place else came to live. It might have been a lush and forgotten hippy republic, and I can’t discount its early influence; like hoop pines or cabbage palms, a child

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