Damned if I Do Read Free Page A

job of getting everyone into the vehicle for the 18-­kilometre trip from Koolunga to the school at Brinkworth, and everyone was impressed by the livid welts I had for the next day or two, and my hand swelled up quite badly.
    Then we all got mad keen onmodel aeroplanes with small internal combustion motors, and Slee, probably trying to steer me towards more peaceful pursuits, gave me a plane of his that had a solid main wing, in contrast to the hollow tissue and balsa ones we were building. It had a big, by our standards, engine: a 5.0-cubic-centimetre glow-plug motor. We spent a lot of time—Lange, me and a couple of others—playing around with model aeroplanes. We were ­building them and flying them, and using those motors for other things, such as putting them in boats that we raced up and down in the waterholes in the Broughton.
    Myfather and mybrotherhunted—kangaroos—with .303 rifles. Sensibly, my father forbade me to have a rifle until I was well into myhigh-school years. In fact, I got into trouble for stealing his .303 and firing it into a tree when I was eleven or twelve. Eventually I saved enough money from part-time jobs to buy a .22 rifle. With this I hunted rabbits and foxes. I also had a huntingknife. Questionable now, I know, but I’ve been around firearms all my life. A knife and a gun were to play unusual roles in my life.
    It wasn’t all explosions and engines. For instance, I saw a unicyclist at a circus and thought, I’d like to do that . I built a unicycle out of spare parts and set about learning to ride it, which I became able to do quite well. It cost me skin and gave me bruises, and it tookpersistence, but that’s an attribute I have.
    Religion played no role in my family’s life. I was dragged off to church when we visited the Richardsons at Christmas but it made so little impact on me I don’t even remember its denomination, though it was probably C of E. I was more exposed to religion in the later stages of my secondary schooling. My mother wanted me to go to university and I’d need solid school results to make it. And as my school at the time,Brinkworth Area School, only went as far as third-year high school, my father decided I should go toConcordia College, a private Lutheran boarding school in Adelaide, which my older brother had also attended.
    One snag was that it was an intensely religious ­institution, and it insisted that all students be confirmed in theLutheran religion. Somehow, my father knew that an unconfirmed ­student would certainly receive a large dose of prayer and scripture, something he also knew I wouldn’t take kindly to, so he arranged for me to get some instruction in Lutheranism in the local Brinkworth church. This instruction was minimal and uninteresting, but it enabled me to present at the school with my shonky certificate attesting I was a confirmed Lutheran. When I saw the drills the unconfirmed students were subjected to, I was grateful for my father’s foresight.
    Nevertheless, I was herded with the other boys into chapel every morning. There were prayers at night and on Sundays, with two long church services that were torture. The school aimed to train boys for the ministry, and stressed scripture and Greek and Latin, none of which appealed to me. I wanted to do science, which wasn’t held in high esteem, and may even have been viewed with suspicion. I found the school’s atmosphere and culture stifling, and begged my parents to put me back in the state system.
    I did my final school year atHenley High in Adelaide. That suited me much better but I ran into serious trouble. I was fourteen, not turning fifteen until the August of that year, and 100 kilometres from home—pretty young to be boarding in a strange place with people I didn’t know. Not to mince ­matters, the man in whose house I was boarding was feeling me up whenever he got the chance. This was done in the guise of getting