Part One
WHACK. I watch the front left wheel sailing up the track and into the night, the car skidding to a halt. A big cloud of dust streams in through the open passenger window. Dorje wipes her eyes and coughs, and my little dog, Jezza pants on her lap. We all jump out. The dirt track is still baking hot beneath our bare feet, even at 1am.
We need to find this tyre because this car is my home. It’s been my home since I graduated a journalism degree eight months ago, December, 2016. This little red Kia Sportage wagon, all loaded with my swag and esky and surfboards and camera gear, my vehicle to a journey of immense self-discovery.
Like all young people, I’m out here trying to find my way in the world. Searching for home and purpose and joy and meaning, learning to understand and love who I am, and to love somebody else now too. This a journey that all young people must fumble their way through, only mine is amplified because of the childhood I lost to juvenile detention and ice addiction.
I went to the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre for the first time when I was 13-years-old. At 14, I had my first shot of heroin. By 15 I was injecting ice every day, staying up for days, weeks at a time. Searching in vain for all the things missing from my seemingly idyllic middle-class childhood at the bottom of an empty syringe barrel.
Now, aged 22, and the hardest part about recovering from drugs is not staying sober but relearning to how to live again. I’ve had to rebuild my entire life from scratch and start all over again. It is lonely and terrifying and addiction will always be with me on that journey, a skyscraper that I will forever be teetering on the precipice of. The only way I’ve can stop myself from falling so far is to build a safety net beneath me.
This life, this right here; this is my safety net.
The Kia.
After an hour of looking Dorje finds the tyre way off in the bush. We roll it 500m back to the car and I grab the jack, but it won’t jack. I realise we only have three litres of water left and we are alone way out in the Pilbara. I grab the little fold up camp shovel and try foolishly to dig the track out beneath the wheel. At 3am, there is nothing else to do but roll out the swag and wait for help.
Climbing into my swag with Dorje and Jezza, I feel calmer. This swag is one of the few and prized things that I own, an 18th birthday gift from my Granny, my hero. She bought it in Broome in the 1990s, where she had moved after escaping an abusive and violent marriage. That swag formed part of her escape. She gifted me that escape, a new way of life. I think of her and everything she has done for me as I pull the canvas over the top of us and try to get a couple of hours sleep.
6am; sun rising, already 30 degrees. Little swig of water and running up to the top of a hill. Nothing but spinifex and red ironstone ranges. The sun, a rising portent of doom.
9am. In the distance I see a dust cloud. I run, waving my arms, yelling: HELP! HELP! A LandCruiser ute has pulled up beside my car and two men in mining uniforms are pulling tools from the tray. They fix the wheel back on and fill up our drink bottles. They leave us, alone in the bush. I go to start the car. It lurches forward, stuck in gear.
I curse this bloody car and think about leaving it on the side of the road, but I could never leave my car behind because it is an integral part of who I have become. Just like my swag it was, quite literally, a way out of that world of drugs and crime.
The first weekend I got my licence I drove to Margaret River on a camping and surfing trip with my school mate, Oscar. On the way, we passed a turn off into bushland. Down there just a few weeks earlier, two of my closest friends had buried the body of a man they had murdered while high on ice. They were now sitting in a cell inside Hakea Prison, awaiting the life sentence they would eventually receive.
I carried straight along the road. Down to the beach.
After finishing school, I left my car for a year and travelled to Indonesia, Europe, North Africa. Anyone who can walk away from drug addiction needs some kind of higher purpose - God, a child, an occupation – and through travel I discovered mine in writing and photography and surfing. I returned to Perth to study a journalism degree and began building my life entirely around the freedom and joy I had rediscovered.
You see, the true cost of drugs is that they rob you of that joy. It is a real physiological thing. Just two years earlier, when I began coming off ice, my drug counsellor said that it would take years for my brain to begin producing dopamine at normal levels again. She offered to put me on anti-depressants. I refused. In essence, what was the difference? I needed a solution, an anti-depressant that was real and pure and fulfilling, and I was determined to find it within myself, not another chemical substance.
A mate helped me to unbolt the back seats of my car and we built a bed and basic camp set-up. I started travelling down the coast with Jezza, surfing, writing, taking photos. With each trip I felt more experienced, more confident, more capable. I began pushing further afield, beyond the popular surf breaks at Margaret River and down to Albany, Esperance. Up to Kalbarri with my younger brother, Chris.
Then in 2017 I met Dorje. That beautiful, blue-eyed wonder, a simple country-girl whose tender smile could melt away some of that toughness inside of me. It’s now twelve weeks we’ve known one another. Twelve wild and beautiful weeks, seven of them spent camping and surfing together at Red Bluff, living only off what we’ve brought down the 150km track from Carnarvon with us. Cooking fresh fish on the fire, the wind and tide and swell dictating to us the rhythms of our day. Now, pushing on, deeper into the outback, into love, unsure of where the adventure will take us once we get back on the road.
Dorje, Jezza, and mishap.
I push the clutch in and start the car in fourth. We chug all the way back to town. A mechanic at one of the mining workshops replaces the missing wheel nuts and bashes the gearbox lever back into neutral. We drive 1600km with no third or fourth gears to the Bidyadanga Aboriginal community, where I work for a week taking photos and writing a story for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
On Friday afternoon we head for Broome and set up camp in a hollow in the Cable Beach dunes. Dorje bakes a damper in the fire with the last of our flour. Like almost everything we eat it’s coated with a fine dusting of sand, or bush pepper, as I call it. There is nothing else in the food drawer but some oats, a few mouldy potatoes, and a couple of packs of two-minute noodles. I have minus $8.53 in my bank account.
“Look at the positives,” says Dorje. “At least we have each other.”
I know she’s right, and I love her for that, but this whole love business also feels strange and confusing to me. Because, you see, while Rangeview grew me up fast, exposing me to the hardest lessons in life at such a young age, it also stunted my emotional development. I missed out on the chance to be a normal teenager. I missed out on a lot of things, but perhaps one of the biggest was that I never truly got to explore intimate relationships in a normal and healthy way.
While most kids learn to associate sex with love, my first experience was at 13-years-old in drug rehab with a 16-year-old ice addict, all the other boys in there watching and cheering as I had her out on the back veranda behind the clothesline.
While other teenagers learned to express their feelings to an intimate partner, I built up an impenetrable wall around my heart to protect myself from all the violence and anger surrounding me in juvenile.
Now, when Dorje tells me that everything will be ok, that she loves me, I feel those words bouncing back off that wall. I want to let them in but I don’t know how. It’s easy enough love somebody else but to accept love, to allow yourself to be vulnerable, the thought of is f…king terrifying.
On Monday morning we find a room to rent and I start working on some stories in the Notre Dame University library. I take the car all day and leave Dorje to sit around the house in the heat. At night, she cries to herself. She she just wants me to look after her. I tell her that maybe she should just go, pack up and head home. I distract myself from all this mess with work, the car. I find a second-hand gearbox at a wreckers in Adelaide for $500, and finally, when I get paid, arrange to have it sent up to Broome.
Conincidentally, Jezza finds someone to fit the gearbox for me when one night she wanders into a neighbour’s yard. When I go to collect her, Malcolm and Jimmy, two Scottish taxi drivers in their sixties are in sitting in their underpants at a green plastic table drinking cans of Emu Bitter. Both have Filipino wives half their age. I sit and have a beer with them. Malcolm tells me his brother-in-law, Ted is a mechanic at one of the workshops in town and does occasional cash jobs. That weekend, Ted installs my gearbox in his carport for $400 and a carton of beer.
Before leaving Broome, Dorje shaves Jezza down to the skin to stop her from overheating. At the hardware store I buy a temperature gauge and stick it inside the car. It climbs to 45 degrees, then stops working. Purple thunderheads swell over the Great Northern Highway. The build-up. Rattling onto the Gibb River Road in an ailing car, no air con, only two windows working and red dust coating everything inside the car including us. The Kimberley, church of the open sky. Billion-year-old sandstone ranges gorged by ancient, biblical rains. Crocodiles and secret rock art. Boab forests and citadels of termite mounds.
Night falls and we set up camp beside a swimming hole. We build a fire, starting small with spinifex, building it up with little twigs and then big roaring Acacia logs. We cook sausages on a little wire grill and bury some potatoes wrapped in tin foil in the coals. For dessert we eat some of the wild green stringy mangoes we pilfered from the roadside in Broome. We lay together in the swag looking up at a night sky like caster sugar spilled on a sheet of black velvet.
Camping on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, West Kimberley.
I tell Dorje that I love her.
I love you, she says back.
I look up at those twinkling stars. I climb out of the swag and throw another log on the fire. Flames lick at the bark. White ants scurry out from inside the rotten core, running, trying to escape the heat.
Part Two
I’m looking back at this photo of me. But wait, hold on, is that really me? No, it can’t be. He looks like a complete stranger, that 15-year-old boy in prison uniform with a deranged look on his face, his body all drug-addled skin and bone.
But it is me.
It really is.
I don’t recognise that kid but I do have a vague memory of the night this mugshot photograph was taken. It’s vague because I was in the midst of a drug-induced psychosis. For 12 days I’d had been awake on ice. Twelve full days and nights without a wink of sleep, the sleep deprivation as potent and addictive a drug as the ice itself.
No turning back.
Totally out of control.
There I was, in my bedroom at the back of Dad’s house, my mate Scott trying to help bring me down from this violent lunacy, 50 Valium and a quarter ounce of weed still not enough. Give me more.
More!
Foaming at the mouth, jerking uncontrollably, talking for hours with people who aren’t even there. Scott, trying to calm me, keep me from the toppling over brink.
What’s that noise? What’s that f…ing noise? It’s my phone ringing. A few friends had been drinking and barbecuing down at the river and they wanted to come around to buy some marijuana.
“Don’t come,” I told them. “DO NOT COME. I am in a bad way.”
They came anyway, bringing a barbecue tray of sausages as penance.
As they walked in the back door I snatched a meat cleaver from their tray, screaming, storming out the back door, toppling over that brink and out onto the street, chasing somebody, something down the road.
Next thing I knew, I was in the corner of an underground shopping centre carpark, the red dot of a Taser beaming onto my chest. A German shepherd lunged at me, straining his handlers hold on the leash.
“Drop the weapon. DROP THE WEAPON NOW. Or I’ll let the dog go,” one of the three tactical response officers screamed at me.
The meat cleaver clattered on the concrete floor. They pushed me, hard into the wall, snapping the handcuffs over my wrists and bundling me into the back of the paddy wagon and taking me back to the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre for the 10th time in two years.
Looking back at this photo, all of this flashes before me. It’s a startling reminder that once upon a time, this is how I used to try and find joy.
Woah.
Was that really me?
And how the hell did I end up there?
If you look at this other photo, here, this smart one, you can see my life started as far from the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre as you can get. Here I am, six years old in my first year at St Pauls College, one of the top private schools in London. Here, we learned Latin and Greek, played fencing, rugby, squash, and had chess club on Tuesday lunchtimes.
My three younger siblings and I left that life behind in 2003, when Dad lost his high-paying job as a foreign currency trader. My Western Australian parents decided it was time to come home.
In Perth, I struggled to fit in. I was an exceptionally demanding child, in need of constant input and stimulation. Here, at the local primary school, my peers were still learning their four-times tables and at lunchtimes had itchy bomb wars out on the oval.
Stultified, I refused to go to school, until after six weeks, Mum and Dad found me a place at a private school in the northern suburbs. It had a gifted and talented program, plenty of sports, and a junior school orchestra. I was happy there.
My happiness came with a heavy price tag though: more than $10,000 a year each for me and my younger brother, and Dad wasn’t working. He was also struggling to adjust to Australia. He had found authority and success in his work in London, and felt diminished by the insular scale of things in Perth.
For three years we lived off our savings and Mum’s mediocre wage from a local vet clinic. When the money started running out Dad moved to Hong Kong for work. The day he left, he told me I had to step up and be the man of the house.
I was 11 years old.
Does the man of the house have a PlayStation? I thought. A complete collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards?
I felt the loss of my father and I was confused and angry and hurt at the instability of our circumstances. And I couldn’t express these feelings because I had never learnt how.
See, from the outside looking in our family was perfect, but the one thing that truly let us down was our inability to communicate on an emotional level.
My mum and dad were good parents doing the best they could with the skills they had. But they didn’t have all the skills they needed because their parents never had them to give. And maybe their parents’ parents never had them either.
How far back does it go? How long will it continue?
These fault lines ran deep, far deeper than I could ever understand, but I felt every bit of them.
In 2007, I started high school at a private boy’s college in Perth’s western suburbs, where I had won an academic scholarship. With Dad returned from Hong Kong, this scholarship was our family’s last hope of remaining all together in Perth.
On Fridays, at my new school, we marched up to the assembly hall in our house groups. Cadets in army fatigues stood along the way, judging us on our uniformity. Sitting down in the hall, there was my name, written up there in gold lettering on the G.G. Gooch scholarship board.
The other boys saw it and started to chide me, calling me the Golden Gooch. In this ruthless culture of conformity, they ostracised me and made me hate who I was. Uncomfortable in my own skin, I set about destroying myself completely.
It started with wagging Friday afternoon sports, quitting the piano, swapping from the viola to the drums. The more people tried to pull me back into line, the more I pushed against them. Soon, I was getting stoned, painting graffiti, snorting stolen caffeine pills in the back alleys of Fremantle after school.
The pills did little more than a few cups of coffee but the act of rebellion was the real drug.
I started stockpiling sandwich bags of the powder inside the bass drum in the drum kit in my room. I added a few crushed cold and flu pills to the mix, which I’d heard you could make speed from.
One afternoon, Mum found the powder hidden inside the drum kit. She asked me what it was. I said nothing, determined to hurt my parents and punish them as a means of communicating how I felt.
Mum called the police. A well-meaning Sergeant convinced her that the only thing to do was to try and shock me into change. Send him to juvie for a night.
Looking back, I can understand why Mum and Dad went along with this. They were at the end of their tether: marriage falling apart, defiant, spiteful little s..t of a son doing the opposite of everything they told him. Sending me to Rangeview offered them a break. It would help to keep me safe from myself and protect my three younger siblings.
It broke their hearts but they didn’t know what else to do. This was the advice they were being offered by the people who are experienced in these things. This was the conventional wisdom of our society. Punish people to help try and fix their problems.
Because the powder contained cold and flu pills it returned a positive reactive test for methamphetamine. The police charged me with dealing ice. They arrested me, and took me away from my family and into the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre.
The moment the entry gate clanked shut behind the paddy wagon was the moment my childhood ended. Finished. Gone. Over, no turning back.
In a bright sally port, the policemen took the handcuffs off me and handed me over to two Sirs, as they told me to call them.
They shuffled me down a long, bright corridor that smelled of hospital-grade disinfectant. Into a small changing room. Strip search. Get naked, squat and cough, pull your foreskin back, ball bag up. They took my clothes and left me to shower and change into uniform: blue tracksuit pants, navy polo, grey sweater, velcro Dunlop volleys.
We passed through two heavy doors and into a curving corridor, all hard incandescent lights, freezing cold air-conditioning. Everything, hollow and airless. Every few metres, a pair of empty shoes sat outside a cell door, a detainee number slotted into a little plastic holder above.
Was that all my life meant to the world now?
A girl screaming and banging echoed in the hollow corridor. “I’LL SMASH MY F…ING HEAD IN ON THESE WALLS.”
The violence of it terrified me. I mean, I was angry, I smashed things up in my parents’ house when I didn’t get my own way or couldn’t communicate how I felt - but this, f..k, this was next level. There was a lifetime of neglect and pain in that screaming. Several lifetimes.
The Sirs took me to a broom cupboard and told me to pull out a blue gym-mat mattress and pillow, and a sheet and pillow case. They led me back to one of the observation cells. It was about 2m by 4m with just a steel toilet, a little water fountain in an alcove, and a red distress button by the door. The walls were stained with spit and blood and dried bits of toilet paper. At the back, a large floor-to-ceiling window faced a control room.
This was October 2008, before the public knew of Don Dale and the spit hoods, before Casuarina’s Unit 18 and the Banksia Hill riots. Rangeview no longer exists; the remand centre has now been merged with Banksia Hill. But conditions in here were still the same. They will always be the same, so long as our society continues to treat the symptoms and not the cause.
I lay back on my hard mattress and listened to the girl smashing her head against the walls. She started booting the observation window, screaming. There was a crack.
I heard keys jangling, radio chatter, boots clattering down the hall, her cell door opening. The girl screaming as the Sirs dropped her to the ground, folding her legs up over her head. Crying as they took her mattress from her as punishment.
All I desperately wanted was a hug. All any of us needed was a hug; somebody to tell us they loved us, that they cared, that everything was going to be ok.
I understand now that Mum and Dad sent me to Rangeview because they loved me. They were trying to help me. Only, Rangeview was a place where love was expressed to me in ways that neither I nor any other child will ever understand.
It told me society rejected me, my family rejected me, and made me hate authority more than ever before.
There is an African proverb: the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth.
After my first night in Rangeview, I was ready to take to mine with a petrol can and flame thrower.
Part Three
Jerry Mondlane stands at the front of the most disruptive classroom in Western Australia.
He has one leg up on a desk, a guitar straddled across his thigh, strumming the chords to
Bob Marley’s ‘You Can’t Blame the Youths’.
You can’t blame the youths
When they don’t learn
You can’t fool the youths
Can’t fool the youth
We are six students in his class, all detained here in the Rangeview Juvenile Remand Centre
for various crimes. Beside me, there’s the 17-year-old father-of-four from way out
in the western desert, here for attacking his wife with a machete in a drunken, petrol-
sniffing rage.
Beside him, two Noongar boys who took police on a two-hour high-speed chase about the suburbs of Perth in a stolen ute. The other boys: home invaders, car thieves, burglars.
We are all children who do not listen to anyone; our parents, the police, the magistrate. But
right now, everybody is listening to Jerry. It’s Friday, June, 2009, and there has been no
violence in his art and music class this week, so as a reward Jerry is singing to us and telling
us a story.
It is a real story; his story, of how he refused to be drafted into the civil war in Mozambique,
instead walking to find freedom in Johannesburg, fighting his way out of the slums to be
here in Australia, the lucky country, giving music, art and boxing back to the unlucky
ones who landed here, in Rangeview.
Jerry grew up in a subsistent coastal village during the Mozambican civil war, he tells us. He
was one of 24 children - that’s right, 24; an entire football team with subs and reserves, all
16 boys and eight girls sired by one father to five different wives.
“It’s not an unusual thing in Mozambique. In Africa, a lot of men had been taken for slavery
and others gone to fight in the civil war. There were a lot of women without men. The men
there were open to having two, three, four wives, as long as they could provide for them,”
says Jerry.
Jerry’s father was a strict man who expressed his love for his children in a harsh way.
Punishment as compassion. Darkness as love. Every afternoon, when he returned home
from selling bread around the village, he would call everyone to come and line up in the
living room. He asked them what they had been doing today. If they had not been to
school or work, they were beaten and forfeited their dinner.
“When my father, called us, my heart would race. He was a brutal man. He wanted us to be
successful, of course, but if you didn’t go to school, you didn’t eat.”
“It was compromising, because if you are deprived of food it makes you sick. And when I
mean sick, it isn’t always physical. It mentally affects you. Makes a psychological sickness.
Then that makes a cycle, because if you are sick you don’t want to go to school.”
Jerry saw darkness in his father but there was brightness in his grandfather; a Catholic man
who ran a casa dos medico – a safe house – in the village. The lights were always on at his
grandfather’s, and it was a home for anybody who needed it.
“If anyone was struggling to eat or looking for shelter, they ended up there. Some came for
a week, some for a month, and they left when they found their feet. Some never left,” he
says.
“My grandfather, it was always his way to help others and encourage them to make sure
there are less troubles. For him, you could help yourself by going to school and having an
education. Education was power. If you were educated, you could understand, help to
create a better world. I grew up with those values.”
When Jerry finished school he was compelled to fight in the civil war. But he refused. His Grandfather and Catholic upbringing had inculcated in him a strong sense of what was right and he was prepared to fight for what he believed in, even if he were prosecuted for it.
“Killing another man, it was not on my terms. As long as I lived, as far back as I could
remember, I had been taught by my school and my grandfather that the aim in life is to
preserve life. Any man who kills another man, I don’t think he ever lives with dignity, with
freedom. You are living under the dark cloud of that forever.”
Instead he planned with two friends, Frank and Beto, to run away to the relative safety of
Johannesburg. To many Africans, Johannesburg is known by its Zulu name, eGoli; the city of
gold, a kind of Mecca to young African men where you go to seek your own personal
fortune and find your way in the world.
“In Africa, you must reach the city of gold. To us it was the land of promises. My uncles
went there, my father went there. eGoli was the point of the beginning of my dreams.”
He told none of his family his plans to escape except his father. He was terrified to tell him
but he knew he had to. To tell his Dad was to legitimise his journey and reinforce his own
sense of purpose and self-belief.
“My father, he couldn’t believe it. He was laughing, saying it’s impossible. But I convinced
him. He saw I had the strength, the willpower. And when he saw that he said, ‘son, I wish
you the very best in life.’ He gave me the biggest hug and $100.”
Jerry left with only that money and his best pair of Doc Martin boots and jeans and Sunday
church shirt, the blue one with a pocket on each breast. He, Frank and Beto took a train
for eight hours, getting off as close to the border as they could.
Then they started walking.
They walked for nights and days, over mountain ranges and game parks, dodging lions,
land mines and armed border guards. They drank from streams and ate plants and wild
animals, sometimes buying a small loaf of bread or pilfering fruit from roadside orchards.
They kept mostly off the road and in the jungle, afraid of being caught.
“One of my first nights, I slept on a rock. When you hear Bob Marley singing, ‘cold ground
was my bed last night, and rock was my pillow too’, I know it, man. I know it. I looked at
the rock and said, ‘hey, rock, I’m gunna make you my pillow, man.’ I couldn’t stop thinking
about my own little bed, thinking, was this a right move? But I knew I couldn’t turn back.”
After weeks of walking, the boys were tattered and exhausted. They stopped to work on an
eggplant farm until they had enough money to replace their ruined clothes and boots and
continue on. They battled on, suffering together, sweating together, smiling together,
trying to find a way around the live 3500-volt fence and the crocodile-infested Limpopo
river separating Mozambique and South Africa.
One night, the three boys were stopped by an armed border guard. They told him they
were walking to their grandmother’s house up there in the mountains but the guard saw
straight through them and arrested them. In the police truck, Jerry knew there was nothing
that could save them now. At least, nothing but the truth. He made a desperate plea to the
guard and told them about their journey to eGoli. He asked if he could help them make it,
offering him all the money they had as a bribe.
“Why did you lie to me, boy?” said the guard. “The people who lie, we arrest them.”
“I understand what you are doing. I would love to go to eGoli myself, but I made a
commitment to defend my country and I am bound. Don’t lie - it is only if you tell the truth
you can be saved.”
In the true African way, the guard took the boys money and let them go, showing them a
safe passage into South Africa. Finally, after six-months and almost 800km of walking, the
boys made it eGoli.
They headed for Soweto, a shanty town where Jerry knew he had some family. Here, every
day was a struggle, every meal uncertain. Crime offered an easy way out; one of Jerry’s
older brothers there was a thug who tried to entice the boys to join his gang of car jackers
with flash cars and big wads of cash. But Jerry could not be swayed.
“I knew to make the decision to be a positive person was the way to a long and happy life.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword, and in Soweto you can die over $5. I saw that.
I didn’t want that life. I wanted to be true to myself, to help ease the suffering in the world.
Not taking away from others.”
Instead, he set about educating himself and transcending his worries and struggles through
art, music, and boxing. He learned to draw and exhibited his work in a local gallery. He
taught himself to play guitar and joined a local band, earning a small income performing covers of Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Lucky Dube; music, a beacon of hope and consolation
when you have nothing else left to turn to.
Jerry also began training in Jan Bergman’s gym. Tall and strong, he was naturally suited to
boxing and was soon winning cash prizes in amateur fights. That money helped him to pay off some of his debts and earn the respect of people around him. To Jerry, boxing was an art
form that occupied him and defined the values he lived by.
“Boxing is like music. There is always something new to be discovered, to perfect. And to
keep on showing up to the gym, it helped me to stay focused and not stress.”
“I learned about fitness and I learned about respect. I learned about discipline and
responsibility. A man who is trained is different to a man who is not trained. A man who
has the skills, he has the responsibility to use those skills in the right way. Not just randomly
go out there and hit people. He has to know when to hit, where to hit, how to hit.”
Through boxing, Jerry began to realise his own power. It was a true power, a calm, internal
strength that radiates out and lifts up the people around him. In his thug brother, he saw a
false, misguided version of that power which many young men have confused. He saw the
consequences of this too, when one day, aged 30, his brother was murdered in prison.
Jerry lived with the regret of never having told his brother he truly loved him. He had grown
up in a family where love was not openly expressed, and he wondered how things might
have been different if his Dad had told him he loved him, if he told his brother he loved him.
This regret haunted him, and he vowed to dedicate his life to helping other young men
avoid making the same mistakes. He would show them the way as he had found it: through
music, art, boxing.
He brought his mission to Perth, Western Australia when he immigrated here. He expected to find a place of total prosperity here in the Land of Plenty, but he was surprised to learn of the disadvantage in his Fremantle community, particularly among its Indigenous peoples. A champion at heart, Jerry was compelled to help. He began running a youth fitness program using his own earnings, and later found work at Rangeview as an art and music teacher.
In 2002, he set up boxing studio in a basement beneath the Starland video
store. It was a not-for-profit community gym, a little safe house on the edge of town, where
anybody was welcome to sweat and smile with him.
Hearing Jerry’s story at Rangeview, I was inspired to start boxing. When I was 17 and my
association with Rangeview finished, I began training at Jerry’s gym.
Most weeknights at 6pm, Mum would drop me and my brother, Chris at the gym. We
slipped our $10 contribution into an honesty box on the front desk and marked our
attendance in a calendar. In the warm-up, everyone shouted encouragements and high-
fived one another, feeding off Jerry’s indefatigable enthusiasm.
“Everybody, sweating together, smiling together. BOOMBAYAH! Put your hands in the air
and say, I AM STILL THE CHAMPION!”
The more I trained, the better I felt about myself. The natural high of boxing was a necessary substitute for ice, a constructive outlet for the violence and anger I felt. The gym helped me to make new friends and discover a real sense of
belonging and community.
Soon I was training almost every day. I began sparring with some of the more experienced
boxers, where I learned there were no shortcuts in life; to cheat was only to cheat yourself.
The only way to self-improvement was through training, discipline – the work.
Some nights after training, Jerry would counsel Chris and I if there was a problem
we needed to work through. He was one of the few positive role models I was permeable to. I listened to him because heunderstood. He wasn’t just here, reciting lessons from some textbook. He knew the struggle. He had lived and breathed it. He knew the only way forward was through patience, compassion, love, empathy, kindness, and he was a part of the solution that Rangeview could not offer me.
Now, as you drive down Hampton Road, the Starland video store and boxing studio are now just piles of building sand behind a temporary mesh fence. In 2022, the building was set to be knocked down, Starland disappeared to online streaming services and the studio to the exorbitant rise of post-COVID rental prices.
Still, Jerry is searching for a gym, with available facilities way beyond what he can afford to
provide for the community. Some nights now, you might find him out in one of the parks
around Fremantle, training with the few who cannot bring themselves to give up what boxing has given them.
Some nights, you might find him out there alone. Shadow-boxing, doing push-ups beneath
the street lights in the park. Still sweating, smiling, training beneath those lights that never
go out.
Part Four
I stand in Perth Magistrate’s Court looking at my little brother standing at the other side of the dock.
He is 23 years old, not so little anymore. Built like a heavyweight boxer, hair slicked back, tattoo sleeves running up both forearms. He has on his best blue collared shirt, two damp patches spreading from the armpit to his breast as he waits to learn of the sentence he will receive on two counts of armed robbery.
I feel a sense of responsibility for my brother. Don’t get me wrong, I do not blame myself for his actions. I do not feel guilty. Kids feel guilty, adults are responsible, and I acknowledge that he looked up to me and I set a bad example.
The responsibility I feel now is not a burden. It is responsibility to be there for my brother, because now, finally, I can.
Just a few weeks earlier, late September, 2020, when I was still with Dorje I could not have told you this. For the three-and-a-half years we were together, ever since that first magic trip through the Kimberley when we fell in love, I could not have told you this.
I was not able to be there for my brother, for my now ex-girlfriend, even for myself because there was a wall around my heart that nobody could penetrate.
Ironically, the moment Dorje left me was when that wall came down.
It was a real physical sensation. Behind that wall was a flood of tears I had hidden from myself for almost 10 years, and from Dorje for our entire relationship. Tears I had swallowed, pushed down into a place deep inside of me. I felt safe from them there, but really they just hardened into anger, the default emotion of all young men.
Now, when I look at my brother up there in the dock, I cry. The tears feel beautiful and soft as they roll down my cheek. I let them fall, freely. The magistrate tells Chris to stand, and reads out his verdict.
Two-and-a-half years in prison.
Two guards lead him out of the dock and down to the holding cells beneath the courtroom.
Chris and I climb out of my four-wheel-drive. We walk down the sandy track to an empty Margaret River surf beach. Sitting down, he picks up a handful of sand and watches the grains fall out through his fingers.
He wonders aloud if there was a point in time he could somehow return to and undo all this mess. Maybe when he was 11 years old and I gave him his first bucket bong at Mum and Dad’s house. Maybe the first time he smoked ice, aged 15, from the bag he found at Dad’s house, where I was living full-time.
Chris wonders, but he knows too that this is the hand life has dealt him and he must take the hard lessons that he has learned in prison and keep moving forward. He can see now how all this happened. He can pinpoint it right back to that fateful moment in early January, 2016, when he was 17-years and hopped in his little green Daewoo Lanos and started driving down the Bussell Highway to Yallingup to see his family, off his head on liquid Xanax.
“I was out of control. I had no idea what I was doing. I’m driving down there, somewhere between Bunbury and Busselton. It was raining. I must have looked at my phone or something, and I’ve looked up and I’m off the road. I swerved back and went straight over to the other side, rolled into a ditch at 90km/h. It happened so quick,” he says.
“I remember just sitting there in the seat, glass all over me for like 10 minutes. I thought I was dead. I took me a while to realise I wasn’t. Eventually I got out of the car and just fell to the ground. I was like, s..t, I’m in trouble.”
Chris looked back at his car. It was a complete wreck. He wasn’t sure how he was still alive. He crawled to the boot and wrestled his bodyboard bag out with all his things in it, dragging it with himself out onto the road. He managed to flag down a passer-by, who called an ambulance.
At 1am, Chris limped out of the Bunbury hospital with his broken ankle in a cast, afraid of the drama that might ensue if the police arrived. He stood out the front of the hospital and tried to hitch a ride. A black Holden ClubSport pulled up. The driver told him to get in.
“He asked me if I had any money. We go to this house and he buys a half weight, half a gram of ice. I thought we were just going to be smoking it but he pulls out two syringes. I was a bit hesitant, you know, cos I’d never done it before and I’d seen what had happened with you. But what else was I gunna do? He mixed them up and did me up.
“That feeling, you can’t explain it, it blows your f…ing head off. A knife in the back of your throat. Gasping for air. The most intense thing I’ve ever felt. It’s so intense that it’s just sinister. But in a weird way, it made me feel normal. It made me feel alive. I just felt that everything was all right. Everything was going to be fine.”
Once you inject a drug you cross a physical threshold that you can never really come back from. After Chris’s first shot, the doors were open. His descent into total destruction was rapid and unstoppable.
When I was at my worst on ice, Mum always had this intuition that I was going to be OK but with Chris she feared for his life. She knew she had to get him away. Two months later, in March, 2016, she put him on a plane to live with Granny in Queensland. If there was anyone who could help it was Granny. Good old Granny, 80-years-old and tough as iron, soft as silk, a woman who would give everything for the people she loves.
For the first six months at Granny’s house Chris was suicidal. He felt abandoned, terrified, alone. When he thought about his future, everything was blank. Without drugs his life felt empty. When you stop banging your head against the wall, how is it going to feel? There was nothing, no-one except Granny. Our champion. Our hero.
“That was toughest period of my life. It was tougher than prison. Way tougher. In jail, you just accept the fact that you’re there, there are four walls around you, you can’t get out. In Queensland it was like a prison with no walls. If it wasn’t for Granny, f..k man. Granny saved my life. 100 per cent.”
Granny did everything to try and get Chris back on track. She was there to pick up the pieces when Chris deliberately drove his car into a brick wall at 60km/h. She helped him to get a new one, find a job as a furniture removalist, then later an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker. She helped to teach him basic living skills and the merits of cleanliness. She also introduced him to the local boxing gym, where he found real, genuine friends like his mate AB.
Boxing helped Chris to feel less alone and gave him refuge from his feelings. That and Granny were the only two things he felt he had to live for. He put everything into his training, and soon he was competing in state and national title fights. It gave him purpose and helped him fill the void that ice had left, but still he was tormented by the things inside of him he did not understand.
“I put everything into these fights. Then afterwards there was just this hole still. I was going through relapses and off the rails, then trying to get myself back on track again. It was just a cycle. I was stuck in it. I didn’t understand any of it. I was just reacting. I didn’t have the skills to be able to deal with the shit that was going on inside of me. I didn’t even know what was going on inside of me.”
Chris didn’t understand what he was doing when he got back with his ex-girlfriend either. He knew it wasn’t right, and when he looks back he can see he was seeking a solution in somebody, something else. Still, it was a better alternative than drugs, he reasoned. If he couldn’t help himself maybe she could help him. With nine months left in his apprenticeship, in early 2020, he moved back to Perth to be with her.
“It takes courage to walk away from someone you love, knowing that it is not right for you. Most people can’t do it. I couldn’t. The only way I felt I could get away was just to go off the rails. Completely sabotage myself.”
A cold, windy night in May 2020. Chris, awake for an entire week, putting any drug he could find into his body. Ice, coke, GHB, clonazepam. Out of control, storming around the streets of Perth in a psychotic rage. Get out of my f..king way. At the Melville Plaza, he walked up to the first car he saw. He tapped on the window. The two men inside wound it down. He pulled out a knife and demanded they get money out from the ATM.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I’d lost it. I was in my Ugg boots, and there were people around, calling the cops. I heard the sirens and just remember legging it, jumping fences. I ended up hiding behind this big letterbox. I called an Uber. I called a f…ng Uber, bro. How stupid is that. I got in the car and the cops picked me up like 30m down the road.”
As the sun drops below the horizon, Chris wraps the towel around himself and huddles in from the cold. He is frightened of the road ahead but he knows he is on the right path. He found that path in prison through Solid Steps, a residential rehabilitation program at Casuarina Prison. It is the only program if its kind in Western Australia. It helped Chris to deal with the real issues underlying the drugs, and to discover the self-awareness he needed to create change.
“In the beginning, I was just there because I was trying to get parole. But it turned into something bigger. I started learning, and I saw the people around me learning too. Even the bad ones: the standover men, career crooks, lifelong junkies. I watched them changing too, only I was lucky enough to have the support they never did.:
“Solid Steps taught me things I needed to know about myself. I learned to understand my behaviour and how that was causing this pattern of drug-taking. Like the self-sabotage and all that. I learnt more there in nine months than I did in the 25 years before. I found yoga too, and saw the need to nurture the spiritual side of myself which I had neglected through years of drugs.”
Chris is continuing this work now through kinesiology, counselling, yoga, meditation. These things form a safety net beneath the precipice of addiction that he, and I, and every other ex-addict will forever be teetering upon. Slowly, by being kind to himself, he is learning to understand and love who he is.
But in the sad, strange irony of prison, it helped him move forward but also kept him back too. He feels tainted by it. Jail, a filthy black mark against his name, keeping him confined within the four walls of his past. A reason for some his old friends, the good, positive ones to dissociate themselves from him.
But perhaps the greatest damage prison has done, Chris says, is forced him to deny the tender parts of him from himself. He has had to build an impenetrable wall inside of him to survive in there. Now, on the outside, he doesn’t know how he can bring that wall back down.
I tell Chris about the day I watched him sentenced to prison and how it came in the same week that Dorje left. About how it was the toughest day of my life. How it was the closest I’ve ever come in the seven years I’ve been clean to sticking a shot of ice straight up my arm. About how instead it was actually the best possible thing that could have happened to me, because breaking in half opened me up.
I tell him about how I cried for him and for Dorje and for myself too. I tell him about my efforts in the months afterwards to try and remove that wall completely. How I’m still frightened by the things I continue to discover behind it, and how I’m learning to talk about these things with people whose opinions I respect and care about. Vulnerability, that tender little flower in me, once closed to all the darkness and the cold, now blooming into the light and the nutrients it needs to survive and grow.
“You know, by uncovering those things and allowing them out into the open, as words, as feelings, just as they are, I’m starting to understand them. And now I understand, they don’t seem so frightening anymore. Just remember, bro, that whatever happens, I’m here for you. I love you,” I say.
Now I mean it, truly.
“I love you, bro.”
“I love you.”