The Never-Ending Suicide Note: 1) The Thief of Sydney Ripped Off.

 I have been writing a suicide note for many years consisting of thousands of pages in Blogs, novels, comics, letters, posters, flyers and stories shouted into the void. One day I will come to some conclusion and then, with a last breath of satisfaction I will off myself, this deleterious life will be over and I can leave the planet and all the tumult behind. 

I experience ongoing dread and exhilaration like two entwined snakes and the fight between the two wears me down. The dread of being homeless and penniless, of losing my work and my lover, of getting cancer or a death in the family. Then there's dancing ecstatic and abandoned, music to cause my heart to fly high, books to bring tears to my eyes, a golden crescent moon hanging on the horizon as seen from a mountain top, and sex, luscious sex in the arms of an angel, all so fleeting and I am so tired. 

The gist of my disappointment is BETRAYAL, by friends, acquaintances, strangers, even myself, but mostly my competitors in a competition I was naively not aware of. Yes there were times of exquisite joy, but my travails suffered too many depredations, hard labour, cruel beatings and mean spirited exclusions, and the perpetrators got away with it, so with my last breath I will indict them, with my truth. Until I decide when IT'S OVER I will keep on writing for I must tell my story, before some arsehole attempts to bowdlerize it. 

Part One : The Thief of Sydney Ripped Off.

After reading 1000 books and watching 3000 movies; after being the charge nurse in many hospital wards; after living for four years in India and sleeping on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, and dancing naked on the beaches of Goa; after hitching around Australia and the world, surviving rapists, bashings and serial killers, earthquakes, hurricanes and riots; crash landing in Sydney in 1977 I looked around me and said, "Yes, this is where I will base myself, this is where I will create my life's work,"

I decided to write a story and make a short animated film called "The Thief of Sydney." Its literary sources were: "The Time Machine" (H.G.Wells); "On the Beach" (Neville Shute); "Logan's Run" (William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson); "The 1001 Arabian Nights - The Thief of Baghdad" (Anonymous Sufis); "The Thief's Journal" (Jean Genet); "Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain); "The Hero's Journey" (Joseph Campbell.)

I began studying animation in 1978 under a Dutch master, Eddie van der Madden. He had built an animation-camera desk and taught me several techniques, cut-outs, stop frame models and acetate cells. I also attended a short course in animation in 1979 at the Australian Film and Television School. My story involved a dance competition in the future called "sound surfing" and I wanted naturalistic movement instead of the quaint loping-style of walking of traditional cartoon characters.

I was shown a short film by a Canadian filmmaker of an animated pair of legs walking realistically and told the process was called "rotoscoping." It involved the live action filming of a person walking, then inserted into an overhead projector and frame by frame beamed down onto a desk-top where each frame was traced onto an acetate cell that was fitted onto a registration bar. Then the collection of drawings, coloured in, was shot in sequence, again using a registration bar, frame by frame under a camera, until on film one had the exact same naturalistic movement only now drawn as a cartoon.

I did two experimental short pieces to use as examples of what I was hoping to achieve, close-up of real live-action of a woman's head eating a hamburger and smoking a cigarette which dissolved to a cartoon head eating and smoking, then consumer items flew out of her ears and rotated around her head as if she were hallucinating.

I also shot a girl dancing which I then rotoscoped and shot under the animation camera, only now she was drawn wearing a futuristic costume and dancing on a sound wave. The sequences were quite impressive in their realistic movements and I showed them, with a story board, to my assessment panel when I applied for money from the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission. After explaining how I was going to achieve a futuristic dance competition with this rotoscoping technique I was given $7000 to start the project and promised another $6000 later on to finish it.

With that $7000 I auditioned and choreographed the actors in dancing; I hunted locations; hired the crew and equipment; fed everyone and paid them union rates for 2 weeks work; made the costumes and props; insured the gear, the actors and the public; bought and developed the film; shot the life action; and recorded the main theme music. And for five years of slaving I took no wage.

In my first year of doing the live-action filming of this project I happened to go to a party and there met a vampire named Julie Cuntham. She asked me what I was doing and, instead of playing my cards close to my chest and keeping my production secret, I blabbed, "I'm making an animated cartoon." "Oh!' she chortled, "I'm very interested in animating, can I come and look?" The thing about vampires is they only get to bite you on the neck after you invite them in, this was a hard lesson for me to learn and I regretted it for the rest of my life.

She came to Eddie's studio and, without permission, brought two hungry, bug eyed guys with her, Jon "Hobart" Spews and Bruce Cold Curry, graduating arts school drongos. I stupidly told them everything about my project, the cut-out cartooning technique, the use of acetate cells, and rotoscoping which they'd never heard of. I even showed them my test footage of my dreamed up cartoon characters.

What a fool, wanting to help and encourage, it never entered my head that they were inexperienced dopes who were yet to experience life and didn't have a clue about the infinite potential of animation. They licked their chops as they avidly gazed upon the camera desk and before I knew it, within days, had talked me and Eddie into forming an "animation co-op" with them and a few other arts school wankers as the coordinators.

Now I was entrapped within a coven of deadhead, avaricious, ambitious vampires and I could only swoon as I got my wild inspiration sucked of its originality. They quickly snaffled the camera-desk away into another location, to become their private toy and fame machine. At an evening show of the "co-ops" happening production, at which only my test footage was shown, all their eyeballs popped. One of them, a trendy cow named Lucinda Clusterfuck, quickly made a short rotoscoped cartoon of... a girl dancing on a sound wave, for which she got some notoriety and money to make her next masterpiece. Duh! WTF... I started to get a hint of what I was dealing with in these dicks, copycat morons.

"Hobart" Spews asked me if he could borrow my test reel to watch in the comfort of his home and, like an idiot, I gave it to him, never suspecting his chicanery. (Oh how I wish I could go back in time and smack him in the mouth instead.) What he actually did was take it to a band called "Mental as Nothing" that was trying to launch itself into the pop stratosphere, also graduates of the National Art School. Whether he told them it was my footage or his own I'll never know, but I suspect the latter as I just can't believe they'd be party to such a rip-off of my intellectual property. They all took it to Martin Flabini at Mushroom Records and he gave them money to make a music clip using similar designs.

After getting the final $6000 instalment because I had shown the Film Commission what I'd achieved with the liver-action shoot, I took 4 more years to alone paint, photograph and edit twenty thousand cells and fifty backgrounds for a thirteen minute film. Spews and Cold Curry together made a 3 minute part-animated clip of the band in a few months, using rotoscope to dissolve between the live action and the musicians prancing about. To add insult to injury the plagiarists actually copied my very design, even though they could've done a zillion other amazing effects, they did a design of a head eating shit food, using that fuckwit clown Flacco instead of a woman to act the part, and they had crap fly out his ears and circle around his head. He probably knew it was stolen from me as they were a tight-knit gang of wannabes who knew everything about each other; such is the hunger for fame there is no dastardly deed fools won't pull. Many of those NAS graduates are self-entitled brats, that's what the school teaches them in the main, and how to stab in the back or fuck up any competition, no dirty trick is below them

For example, in the midst of carrying on about an "animation co-op" Hobart Spews found out the AGNSW was asking for submissions to an exhibit they wanted to hold showing the latest in Australian animations. Spews must've got the info from his NSA contacts and entered a piece of his inane crap but didn't tell the rest of us about it. I only found out after submissions closed, this is the kind of cooperation this asshole was into.

They were so hopeless and lazy I had to tell them where they could buy acetate animation cells, (Hannah Barbera Studio in Camperdown); what factory to go to to buy the cheapest tubs of acrylic paints, including fluros; and I had to buy for them the all-important registration bars to place the acetate cells upon, (I had scoured the whole city of Sydney and eventually found a man who made the in a shed in his backyard.) One day I came home to my squat studio to discover my own registration bar was missing, someone had broken in and took it, right in the middle of my own production of "The Thief". My intuition zeroed in on one perp, that dummy Cuntham and I rushed over to her studio and asked her about it. "Oh yes," she admitted, "I sent a guy over to break in and get it. I needed it for my own film." I was furious and snatched it off her desk. This was the kind of uncaring, self-entitled no-hoper they all were in this animation "cooperative."

Th is was the early '80s, a pandemic was raging through the gay community, and the callous het supremacists were probably hoping I'd die of HIV so I wouldn't tell the story of their betrayal, little did they realise I'd live till my seventies and finally tell the truth of what happened, and even prove that I'm not a one hit wonder, as I've produced a lot of hot art over the years.

When showing him my film I told Spews that I used animation to depict the thoughts and hallucinations my characters were experiencing, and years later I read an interview in an arse-wipe magazine where he said, "I and Cuntham started a cartoon co-op together in 1981, (no mention of me and Eddie), and I used animation to depict my characters' thoughts and hallucinations." My blood boiled!

Spews and Curry got some fame for this clip, eventually scoring well-paying jobs for life, and the band got further artistic "kudos." What they didn't have were literary stories, cutting ideas, meaningful themes, their stuff was inane, vacuous crap, all packaging and no content. With determination and hard work I finished my "Thief of Sydney" in late 1984, and got it shown for a few weeks on the big screen at the Academy Twin Theatre where on opening night it got thunderous applause that nearly brought the roof down. It has since shown on television, in theatres all around the world and on cable, and sold on DVDs, though I hardly got a penny.

I was nominated for Best Animation in 1985 by the Australian Film Institute and at the nominations dinner at The Ritz Hotel I was seated next to Dickie Lowenstein, as if we had something in common. Each nominated filmmaker got an excerpt from his/her film projected up upon a wall for all the elite diners, sitting at their Cinderella tables, to scope. My piece pictured my protagonist, Singood, graffitiing "KRAP!' on the wall under a giant video monitor upon which the Emperor of Sydney, the Turd Doc, makes a portentous announcement, "You too can join the Elite.". The audience's collective jaw dropped. I was dressed in a sequined matador's jacket, my hair gelled up into two Luciferian spikes, and I stood out like cat's balls. All the nominated artists were asked to stand up so everyone could stare at them, I felt like a whore on an auction block so instead of springing to my feet I sank very low into my chair, and thus I pissed the elite off with my intransigence. Dickie Lowenstein wouldn't talk to me and turned his back on me for the rest of the dinner.

In Melbourne for the awards, after the celebratory dinner at the Ritz, each of us was supposed to be picked up by a limousine and whisked off to the Victorian Arts Centre where they were going to present the tacky trophies. I stood out the front of the hotel with my girlfriend Sylvia but as all the limousines sped past I realised there was to be no silver chariot for me. All the elite sniggered from their windows as they made me eat their exhaust, on and on I waited forlornly for the ride that never came. Honestly, it was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my entire life. Car after car rushed by and I felt like a fucking idiot. Suddenly a limmo pulled up and the door swung open, Alessandro and Marianne, up for the best documentary award, waved for me and Sylvia to get in, they had come to my rescue and were sharing their limousine ride with a Punk persona non grata, it was so cool and democratic of them I will love them forever.

"The Thief of Sydney" didn't get a mention at the Awards but it was those arseholes' loss, I didn't want to get up on the stage anyway, it was being televised and that made me shudder. I proved I was a good loser by jumping onto the dancefloor at the after-party and dirty-dancing with Sylvia to Rene Geyer's band, knocking everybody else off the space, grappling and pogoing, much to the shock of the staid Melbournites and Mal Glibson watching from a balcony. All the women were in frumpy ballgowns that looked like their mother's lounge-room curtains while Sylvia wore a simple silk slip, very chic and sexy. All the guys wore penguin suits while I sparkled like a Christmas tree in my sequined black and blue Punk matador's outfit.

You can't keep a good story down, it is still alive here in 2021 and I sometimes get stopped on the street by young enthusiasts and told how much they love "The Thief" and that it inspires them wonderfully, for its main theme is about a young, unemployed man who dreams he will get a future and succeed at something, no matter what disasters may befall him. I was vindicated on the world stage when I won The Gold Dragon, for script, at the 1985 International Animation Festival, Krakow, Poland.

In 1982 I applied to get into the National Art School using my "Thief of Sydney" story board as an example of my art and I was knocked back cold. They did me a favour as, in my view, they're only interested in "corporate art", art that will hang in boardrooms and foyers of multi-national corporations. I went down the street and applied to do Communications at the University of Technology, using the same story board as my admission ticket, and they snapped me up to do their amazing, "mind-feeding" course. I majored in Writing and Text Studies and this has been the foundation of my story-telling, though I know many would say, "whining."

The three vampires didn't really do much of note for the rest of their careers. Oh, the two guys each won Best Animation with inane cut-out crap at the Australian Film Institute awards, a renowned conservative fuck-fest, and their films were never seen again. The mob of AFI culture-vultures who had ignored my cartoon gave the 1985 prize to an innocuous, "nice", safe piece of fluff about some goody-two-shoes and her quaint uncle, which also has hardly seen the light of day since. I'm proud to say the lone Australian prize that "The Thief of Sydney" did win was the "Children's Panel of the Australian Teachers of Media Awards"; the uptight teachers who ran the show had tried hard to get the kids to vote for something else but they adamantly stood their ground and swore my "Thief" was the best animated film in 1985. How I love those kids!

Those vampire art students pre-empted my originality, they took a huge bite of the kudos, like grey-nurse sharks. Similar to Crick and Watson who snuck into the female scientist's lab and stole her research on the DNA double helix and got the Nobel Prize, nobody likes their intellectual property stolen and there's a good reason most savvy film producers keep their original scripts secret, everybody concerned made to sign contracts that they won't divulge the content. The betrayal of those dickheads devastated me, they broke my heart and I have never forgiven them.

The lust for fame, and of course the money that goes with it, makes soulless creeps willing to sell their grandmothers to the glue factory to get a piece of it. What happened to that scarecrow Julie Cuntham? She got a job doing some special effect on a film of a good friend of mine, which he told me she fucked up totally. As he drove her home he asked her if she knew me and she had the nerve to say, "I taught him everything he knows about animation." My mate said, "Toby will be surprised to hear that," for he knew my story and he watched her grimace in dismay. This was a woman who couldn't even press the button that shot one frame of film under the animation camera, she constantly had to have the boys show her what to do.

What really pissed me off was she couldn't dream up an original design for her one piece of animation that managed to get some notice. She desperately wanted notoriety in a field that is infinite in potential, such as a speeding car turning into a Pegasus and flying away into the heavens. But no, she didn't have an original idea in her flaccid brain, she did a realist head dissolving into an animated head, just like in my test reel, for a short film called "Arseholes From Woollongong." I eventually placed my animated dissolve of a woman's head into my Super 8 music documentary "Darling It Hurtz!" which I didn't finish until 1987.

A major theme of "The Thief of Sydney" is a gladiator dance contest fought out above the Opera House, each contestant knocking the others off their sound wave to splatter upon the pristine white tiles below, blood flowing freely down those famous curves. This is how I saw life in many workplaces of Australia, nasty dicks killing off their fellows and putting themselves forward.

A few years later XL Capris took me to Mushroom Records hoping to get me the job of doing the video clip for their song "Sunday School." I tried telling Flabini the sorry tale of being ripped of my designs for the "Mental as Nothing" clip but he wasn't interested. I showed him "The Thief of Sydney" as an example of what I could do and his eyes lit up when he saw my animated mushroom cloud at the beginning of my film, a nuclear explosion blowing the shit out of Sydney. Flabini gave me the job with a not so big budget and we had to go back a few times and hassle him for my wage of $1000 for 2 months hard labour, (it being part-animated.) A year later I saw the logo he had dictated to be put in front of all the clips and films his company made, a mushroom cloud rising above a ruined Sydney, the Harbor Bridge broken in half.

At the beginning of my project in 1980 I had to show every bureaucrat in the Film Commission my story-board revealing every shot I hoped to make to communicate the tale of "The Thief of Sydney." I also had to show the many interested parties I hoped to get involved, the actors, the film crew, the insurance brokers, the costume and props makers, the musicians and sound recordists. As I shot each piece of film many workers in the development lab, Atlab, got to see what I was making, right from the start of the nuclear explosion which I shot first under the animation camera.

Sydney was a small town then with a very small arts community, it's obvious word of my project must have gotten around. A few years later I saw the cover of Peter Carrot's album, "Dead Snails in the Sunset" which he says he got an artist in Japan to create in 1984, the same year I finished "The Thief". It's exactly the same as my design of an empty Sydney harbor, a nuclear bomb having gone off in the middle of it, the Harbor bridge in ruins.

Are you telling me it's a coincidence that exactly the same design idea can be created in the same year, 1984? Considering Carrot's pathetic history of supposedly being anti-nuclear then in future opening uranium mines when he was Environment minister for Labor, I don't doubt that turncoat would be all ears to a hot idea he heard in some flake's whispered gossip. Oh shock horror, not our dickhead hero Peter, who am I to question his politically astute reverence?

It seems hot, cutting, edgy ideas are hard to come by in Australia, it's a country of sheep and coal, and some young desperados, who have rarely experienced the heights and depths of a broke, street artist's tumultuous life, want desperately to be famous quickly, NOW, no matter their middle class wishy-washiness was not up to it, for celebrity status rules. And they will steal, lie, trample and backstab to get it. I honestly wouldn't do such bastardry, I don't push others out of the way, I don't need to, I wait, for my time will come. And I dread becoming a celebrity, owned by the public, with everybody knowing your business; I prefer to go under the radar.

Though I'm from a very poor, working class family, am queer and anarchic, with no boy's club from a private religious school to rely on and no powerful connections to give me a leg up, I still managed to make world class art, In actual fact, "The Thief of Sydney had its world premiere in the backyard of Pyrmont Squats, projected onto a stained bed-sheet, with a mob of anarchists and punks drinking home brew beer, smoking joints and cheering. I've had a marvelous, adventurous life, of boons and abasement, wondrous highs and devastating lows; and I don't give a damn what spoilt shits and fascist power-mongers do to push their flaky careers, or what jealous, mean-spirited untruths they can make up about me.

This is my truth, my story, for what it's worth. Those creeps I've indicted will lie, they'll squawk, "That's not what happened, TZ's a loser, mad and deluded, he's a nobody, a whining little poofter, and he got his karma by being relegated to the gutter and ignominy." But the gutter can be where the punchy art gets created, such as

"The Thief of Sydney Ripped Off.

The Ongoing Existential Dread of Living in a Fucked World.

 

Many of us on this planet, throughout history, have suffered pain, loss, alienation, dread, I know I'm not the only one; and I don't mean to come on with the usual grizzle, "Oh poor me, boo hoo hoo, I'm so fucked over!" Still, I don't mind getting some sympathy, some support, maybe engender some assistance, it's terrifying to cry out in the wilderness and have nobody answer. And anyway, if you have a harrowing story to tell, you might as well get it off your chest, you might even pique someone's interest, give them a window into the human condition, way out on the edge. I live to tell stories.

Imagine existing in dread for much of your life. Of course there were happy times, ecstatic, educational, entertaining, high. But these were like pearls strung upon a razor-sharp wire of angst that cuts to the bone. As an infant I lived in dread of being punched out by my hair-trigger bad tempered father, who coming home from World War 2 suffered PTSD and hit out at the constant jangle of his nerves. I never knew when that punch would come, the tension in the shared house was suffocating, building to a hurricane of violence, exploding over my head, my mother getting an horrific beating, her black eyes were my black eyes, her blood on the linoleum was my blood.

I dreaded going out to play on the streets, the local kids enjoyed being bullies, a sissy boy like me was ripe for victimhood, lords of the 1950s inner-city blow-flies had someone easy to stand-over and torture in me. A gorgeous, blue-eyed child with a Tony Curtis cow-lick of black hair hanging over my forehead, like a puppy you want to hug to death it's so cute, beautiful innocence shining like a diamond among ugly brats, it had to be destroyed. School was just as bad, I often went with trepidation, what teacher would strap me next for disrupting the class, bored as I was by all the slow, plodding dummies around me, I was reading and writing by six years old, they had to move me ahead a year and still I was head of the class, even after being thrown out of most of them. Recess, lunchtime and after school was like a gladiator contest. As a queer boy I was made to fight or flee, until the day came I learned to hit back, hard, square on the nose, then the brutes mostly kept their distance.

I knew I was "homosexual" from a very young age, good looking boys made my guts drop, I was always trying to seduce them, and getting a bad reputation among the boys as I succeeded enough times to make them both wary and amused. I'd heard the rumors about "dirty poofters", creatures of the night, beasts to be hunted and murdered, imprisoned or hospitalised, twisted and electric shocked. It promised a dreadful future for me, all my fond dreams of adventurous life full of accomplishments shattered by the ignominy of being "different", less than zero, queer. I went to bed in dread of what tomorrow might bring, whispering a prayer, "Oh god, please don't let me grow up to be a poofter!"

But a queer I was, my teenage years spent in criminalised lust, running towards the hot guys who shunned me, running from poofter bashers and cops who were ever on the look-out for those nasty sexual outlaws, rejected by landlords, refused and dismissed by employers, frowned upon by all the upright, bigoted citizens lurking at every interstice of society. My few friends didn't worry when I came out at seventeen, they liked me for my humanity and intelligence but the rest of the world was a war zone and I went to bed every night in apprehension of what the morning would bring.

I became intensely disquieted when I got conned by a cult, The Family, to have psilocybin therapy to straighten me out, in reality it was an attempt to brainwash me into joining their cult. Under the heavy drug I was dismayed to have my central identification, "me", shaken, fractured, threatened with dissolution, to become putty in the hands of the madwoman Anne Hamilton-Byrne. A life of "gay" aberration, chased and brutalised by "straight" society had made me extremely strong mentally and physically, thus I was able to resist the madness and eventually escape to indeed lead the adventurous life vagabonding around the world that I wanted. Yet even on the international road I had to watch my arse from getting fucked by thieves, blackmailers, rapists and serial killers, many days not knowing where my next meal or roof was coming from.

Back in Australia in 1976, I was 26 and still on the run from a creepy, judgmental society, particularly the cops who ever chose homos to incriminate instead of catching murderers, gun-runners, heroin overlords and corrupt politicians. Over the ensuing years I got myself a bad reputation for civil disobedience acts concerning the anti-nuclear industry, prisoners' rights, women's rights, queer liberation and social housing (squats) as I'm an intersectional activist in my art and thinking. In 1993 corrupt pigs framed me for an armed robbery of my local cake shop. Even though I had every proof  that I didn't do it, these two bastards from Kings Cross pig-sty had every imaginary piece of crap to prove that I did do it, telling me while I was chained to the wall, "We hate thieves, liars and poofters and you're all three!"

I was under house-arrest for near-on three years, having to beg the courts for reprieve if I wanted to leave the city, which I did once, to my great humiliation. The pigs assured me that I'd go to Longbay gaol for seven years for this and I better learn to keep my mouth shut. For three long years, as my trial approached, I went to bed in dread. I had to have psychiatric intervention for depression and suicidal tendencies. That anxiety of dread towards the following day was something I had experienced all my life, I should've been inured, resolute and fatalistic about it, for dread was my default condition. But I was so tired of this existential intimidation, would it never end? I was lucky enough to get a genius queen's counsel who pro bono eventually got me acquitted, but the stress on my mind and heart wore me thin, it has neve left me, I still have repetitive nightmares of cops chasing me and wake up in a sweat with my heart beating fast.

So here I am in 2021, 71 years old with mild heart disease, hoping against hope life will go smoothly for me from now on as my nerves can't take any more harassment. Only yet again I'm going to bed with dread as to what the morrow may bring, for the demanding world just can't help trying to takes strips from my back. I got a notice from my bank, witch bank, the Commonwealth bank, telling me they are going to close my account on May 13th, not telling me the reason why or how I can appeal this mendacious decision. Like everybody today, my bank account is my lifeline. I receive my old age pension paid into it, I get my rent paid out of it, I pay all my bills with it, I purchase goods and services online with it, and I have any earnings from my art bought by individuals and companies paid into it, (I have a business name, "Hard Art", and an ABN for this.) I'm told to go open another account with another bank, I'm so fatigued, I don't have the strength to negotiate all the corridors of bureaucracy to get my life back on the rails with a new bank account.

This is incredibly callous treatment by the Commonwealth Bank towards a customer who has loyally been with them since I was 7 years old in 1956. The account they're threatening to close is 30 years old, created in 1991, with never a problem over those long years, small money flowing in and out, not enough to participate in crime, gun-running, drug dealing, money-laundering, nothing except selling art and purchasing goods online. In my paranoid terror I wonder if some LNP troll who works in the CBA bureaucracy has noticed my anti-LNP art and diatribes that I relentlessly post online, and Morriscum or his troll factory, (Young Libs), being vicious, ruthless bastards who brooks no resistance to their fascism and cruel policies, would perhaps have sicked one of their banking cronies onto me.

Or the same could be said of Hillsong cultists who have infiltrated every niche of society, banks, bureaucracies, businesses, the arts, everywhere and anywhere, and they brook no exposure, criticisms or subversive satire. One of those sneaky rats with their cheesy bigoted milk-toast nasty niceness could be ploughing away deep in the guts of the CBA like tapeworms pressing buttons that cut off any possible enemies' lifelines.

My last paranoia concerns a gay, drunk nobody who also pretends to be an artist and who I've had scabrous fights with in online commentaries about nothing important. He is talentless, dumb and a real vindictive piece of work, obviously extremely jealous, and I've heard he is the boyfriend of some arsehole who works high up in the CBA. The two of them are malicious enough to pull this dirty trick of cancelling my account and killing me off. It's not just straights who have given me a hard time in my life, some of the most horrible rats who have fucked me over have been my fellow gays, slamming doors in my face, making sure I got excluded, ripping me off, bashing me up and, when I was young, raping me.

Of course all of this paranoia could be my delusions, after a lifetime of being a zero-class citizen I have a bitter view of this neo-liberal, high capitalist rats' maze of a world. I find it almost incredible that I'm still going to bed in dread of tomorrow, and I stay in bed late into the day with a blanket pulled over my head, too weary to face my ongoing problems. Yet I didn't survive to 71 and achieve the art, the films, the writings, the adventures, by being a wimp. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" is my cliche for today, otherwise the race is over but, like most vivacious humans, I cry, "Not yet, not yet! There's got to be something more good coming my way, just around the corner!"

76) Amiria and the Green Tara.

It's hard for me to fathom that today, the 27th of December, 2020, marks 10 years exactly for the passing into infinity of one of my dearest friends, Amiria. She was a reliable support, a companion at shlock movies that no one else liked, a shoulder to cry on when I was sad, and a great joy, knowledgeable and compassionate. She could give you a reality check without putting you down, a true taskmaster who spurred me on to be a good soul and not a fuckwit. And when I was framed for armed robbery by crooked cops in 1993 she was my alibi, a witness as to where I was at the time of the crime, standing up to the pigs and laughing in their faces, and they were nonplussed, as she was very intelligent and attractive.

She stuck by me for the three years it took to go to trial out at Campeltown Courts, disappearing every ten minutes to go into the courtroom next door where they were trying Ivan Milat, the horrid serial killer, then reporting back to me, whispering into my ear about the chilling demeanor of the murderer, while my own judge was intoning a long summation as to why I was innocent and what a waste of public money the bullshit charges were. After my acquittal my Queens Counsel, Phillip Boulten, took us both for a meal on Oxford Street Darlinghurst, and oh how we laughed at the cops, the goings on in Canberra and my final reprieve as a cake-shop robbing criminal.

In 2010, on December 31, I was sitting in a chai shack on Vagatore Beach in Goa, India, getting ready for the big trance party at the Hilltop Hotel later that evening, when I got a phone call from another friend of Amiria with the sad news that she had died a few days previously, having fallen off a chair and gotten a blood clot that travelled to her brain and sent her into a coma. I was devastated, I could only stare out at the Arabian Sea in shock, into infinite space, thinking of her, and crying, because I would never see her again.

She was a Mahayana Buddhist, giving much of her energy and hard-earned wealth, from working as a nurse in Emergency at the Prince of Wales Hospital, to that much beleaguered nation, Tibet, even sneaking into forbidden Lhasa with her lama friend to give what succor she could. She referred to the Dalai Lama as his Holiness and prattled on about reincarnation, Bodhisattvas and Nirvana and she had me half believing the mumbo jumbo, so impressed was I by her sincerity. She balanced this cosmic spirituality with an intense critique and dislike for what China was doing to Tibet, basically destroying its culture, its identity.

So there I was, in a blue funk, in my friend Prem's chai shack, "Green Eyes", reminiscing about Amiria. I'd known Prem and his family for 14 years, loyally eating with them and, knowing I love seafood, they spoiled me with the most exotic catch of the day. OK, it's un-PC of me but I do as the Hindu Goans do, they live from and on sea food, and no other meat. Suddenly, into the beach shack, stomped five Indian muscle Marys, bloated on steroids and drunk as punks. They carried their own bottles of noxious booze with them and, collapsing around a table, demanded Prem bring them glasses to drink from.

He refused, saying they had to buy their drinks from him if they wanted all the facilities of the shop. The leader of this gang of thugs bellowed in fury, jumped up cursing and, picking up an iron bar lying in the sand, whacked Prem over the back with it. I yelled for him to stop at which he smashed the glass counter-top next to me then swept my laptop off the table, telling me to, "Shut up!"

Prem has three brothers in the business but two of them were away at other beaches while his older brother, sitting at a table nearby, got up and ran away in terror. Other patrons also ran away, inside and outside the shack, foreigners and Indians, everybody wailing with fear. But I stayed with my friend, I didn't even think about it. (To reiterate: I'm no hero desiring a militant masculinity as compensation for my homosexuality. As a boy growing up in social housing, used to the rough and tumble, I don't think out these affrays, otherwise I'd probably also run, I simply jump in to help friends, it's a knee-jerk reaction. a peace-keeping tactic, not glorifying violence but to not live in fear either.)

While the monster with the iron bar kept swinging it at me, and I kept ducking it, another of the thugs rushed over to Prem and, grabbing him by the hair, slapped his face, hard and continuously. The creep attacking me got bored with me ducking his swipes and went back to Prem, brave lumps that they were, to beat him with his fellow devil. He hit Prem a few more times over the back with the iron bar then cracked him on the head, heavy handed. I freaked out, if that didn't kill my friend the next blow would. The brute lifted the iron bar and was about to whack him on the head yet again. At this I felt to do something, no matter my own safety, I couldn't let my friend die in front of me, I thought I could throw sand in the father-fucker's eyes then run at him with one of the cane chairs and bowl him over, even though the other four might stomp me to smithereens.

As the iron bar descended towards my friend's head and I was about to jump into the fray, I screamed, with that voice of authority I had long learned on the streets of Melbourne, as a charge nurse in the toughest of hospital wards, and in the back alleys of Indian cities, where robbers and serial killers had targeted me as a likely victim. "Don't do it!" The idiot's arm froze in mid swing, the iron bar poised; the dope, as if awakening from a trance, looked about him in glum stupidity and then threw the iron bar to the floor of the shack. He marched like a zombie out into the sun of Vagatore beach and the other dickheads followed him, their chests puffed out, as if they'd won some grand victory.

Green Eyes Beach Shack, Vagatore Beach

The local Goans showed up quickly, Prem was sent off to the hospital to get stitches put into his split skull, his face was swollen like a pumpkin from the weightlifters' slaps; he was furious with his older brother for running away, and he told all the Goans that I, the Aussie, was the only one who stayed with him and had made sure the bastards didn't kill him. Wherever I went for the next few years the Goans treated me with great respect, it was a wonderful respite from the usual stranger danger one gets as a queer renegade. At the Hilltop New Years Eve party that night I couldn't enjoy my usual abandoned trance dance as I kept thinking of Amiria and my great loss, and Tibet's and the world's, for she is a great soul.

But immediately after the event, as I dwelt upon it, it drifted into my awareness that I had felt a presence standing next to me throughout the entire ordeal, and as I focused Amiria's smiling features came to me, as if she'd been there in the form of a guardian angel. And not just Amiria, when concentrating upon the vision, she morphed into the Green Tara Goddess of Tibet, who I was not particularly familiar with, but there She was, in all Her effulgent glory, hovering over me, green light enveloping me.

I know I'm a bit of an hysteric, with a run away imagination, and I have "tripped" a lot in my life, especially on Vagatore Beach, since 1972 to 2010 in fact. Yet I have always had strong intuition, and lived by it, my life saved countless times by obeying it. So I was intensely impressed with Tara's fantasised aid. Years later I discovered the "meaning" of Tara, the Green Goddess, which I swear I never knew. She is the Protector from harm, She keeps one safe and Heals one's wounds. I was blown away.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a rationalist, a scientist, an atheist, but there is a thing called magic realism and, let's face it, this Universe is a mighty mysterious phenomena. The Mind is capable of creating all kinds of hallucinations, for all I know my unconscious dreamed up Tara and projected Her next to me, I could be Tara myself. While Amiria would smile enigmatically at this, I don't want to present like a crackpot, a follower of Pentacostalism, communing with a personal God, talking gobbledy gook, receiving a reward, I'm adamantly opposed to such religio-fascism.

So here I am, exactly ten years in the future, on the anniversary of Amiria's passing, blessed by her friendship, for she is still with me, in my heart, in spirit. The world has radically changed, in the middle of the COVID pandemic I'm stuck in Sydney for New Years Eve, I can't even visit my family in Melbourne, and I'm not able to make my yearly pilgrimage to India, to the Himalayas, to Goa beside the Arabian Sea, and all my "Thief of Bombay" adventures. But to kill this virus I don't mind staying put, weathering lockdowns, wearing a mask, keeping a social distance. It's okay isolating in my room, with my videos, books and reminiscing on my rambunctious life.

I cry for all those who are ill, who died and for their grieving loved ones. I send out vibes to the Green Tara, please heal the planet, the human race, for all its flaws and squabbles, bring wisdom, peace and protection. Amiria emanates that beauty.

The Artist as the Beggar at the Door.

 

Surveys have been done that revealed most of those who succeeded in 'arts careers', i.e. made a good living at it, came from families with money. They went to the best art schools where they formed mutually helpful cliques; were supported with a generous allowance while they practiced art; were introduced to Society's elites, the arts bureaucrats and gallerists who could connect them with rich collectors; and were provided with sharp lawyers who could protect their copyright, make sure they were paid properly for their work and not ripped off in any way.

What a foolish dreamer I was to think I might make a decent living from art. I'm a queer anarcho-activist from social housing with no connections or money. I was rejected from the NAS, the snootiest art school in Sydney, when I applied in 1982. I won't draw/paint crap just because I think it will be fashionable or sell like a piece of decorative furniture. And I won't enter the Establishment's art competitions as I think they prostitute "art" as apologists for The System i.e. high capitalism, fascism and elitism, with wankers judging them based on their personal taste and politics, or whatever is flavour of the month.

I got a small level of notoriety from sheer perseverance and hard work, wall papering the city with my posters, exhibiting in numerous shows, handing out flyers to every urbanite I could get near, showing my films in all mediums possible and expressing my creativity on every digital platform I could think of. Maybe this is enough, I might even be able to claim the grand title of "artist", after all being renowned on "The Underground" has some cachet.

But No God help me if I ask to be paid for my work or attempt to have my work taken seriously. The poster I've included with this story is a good example of the continuous fuck-over I've experienced in my turbulent life. I was a member of The Prisoners Action Group and was seriously concerned with prisoners' rights, for as a queer man and anarcho-activist my very existence was considered criminal. I've been continuously threatened with gaol and I felt terribly for the harsh conditions prisoners had to endure within The System. Myself and fellow travelers, lesbians, gays, feminists and allies, decided to do something about it. We pursued campaigns to stop screws from bashing the inmates; we got Violet Roberts released after many years of incarceration due to her murdering an husband who bashed her throughout her marriage; and we tried to help Ray Denning, the bank robber who'd had a shocking life of neglect and brutality, till The System indeed turned him into the human animal they'd long branded him as.

Some of us, Wendy Bacon and friends, got arrested a few times, either at "Right to Life" rallies fighting for women's issues, or for barricading ourselves into the screws' union office to highlight their cruel practices inside the gaols. Many years later these stunts were held against me by the pigs, the activism was indicative of my own criminality and I was thus easy to frame for an armed robbery and have any small chance at a successful life ruined.

I considered my political activism as part of my art practice, the "situationist" stunts, the posters, performances and gigs, all of it holistically connected. I organised the Garibaldis benefit with the help of Women Behind Bars and allies, I silk-screened the poster at the Tin Sheds and I used my film "My Survival as a... Deviant?!" as one of the acts, as that's what I had to offer and I felt it had some merit. We raised money for the campaigns and managed to communicate facts about prison issues to a wider public.

On the night three drunk witches threw wine in my face and accused me of trying to get fame off these political issues. My eyes stung, it was vicious, I was crestfallen as it had been hard work, no one else had volunteered to do it. Fame hadn't entered my head, I had come from the gutter and I knew I was going back to the gutter, and that's where I went, for the next forty years, middle class cunts be damned. I knew anyone connected with Ray Denning would get the opposite of fame, disgrace.

In 2019 I submitted the "Garibaldis Violet Roberts Campaign" work to the Paper Tigers Poster Exhibition put on at The NAS Gallery by the SEDITION Festival. Two of my works were accepted, nicely framed, not submitted by me, (I don't know who), and I was very happy about it. But my poster below didn't make the grade, not "seditious" enough, or maybe it didn't even get reviewed as it somehow disappeared, perhaps stolen while it waited in a stack for the curators to peruse.

Someone must've realised its value, as a hand-crafted artefact and an historical document, and stolen it. It never made it back to me and when I've mentioned it to the organizers or my rep, Mr. Minton who carried it out of my apartment, I'm told, "I don't remember it." It might not mean much to others but it meant a lot to me and I'm absolutely seething when I think of it. It's par for the course when one is a powerless, nobody artist. Mr. Joseph Lebovic, Paddington poster-seller extraordinaire, if someone approaches you with it, remember, it was stolen from me, as were many of the posters of mine you've been selling, which I made while on the dole and starving.

Recently I was sent an email by the State Library of NSW that an old 1979 work of mine, "Garibaldis Benifit - Cabaret Conspiracy" is to be shown at an exhibition titled "Coming Out in the '70s". This of course pleased me. But there would also be merchandise depicting this artwork of mine, on tea-towels, lens cleaner cloths and tote bags. Not a word asking for my permission, it was a fait accompli, and no mention of any financial compensation or a contract to be signed. I quickly wrote the curator a peremptory letter asking, "What's in it for me? If there's nothing then I'll have to talk to Arts Law and my LGBTQ community about it." I got an urgent message back, "Please consider 10% royalties of net and come in and sign the contract ASAP", which I gratifyingly did.

It took a long time, I'm 71, but I'm getting stronger about these matters every day. What annoys me about things like this is I have to chase them and, after being upset for a few days, I had to ask like a beggar at the door. When I went in to the gift shop to sign the contract for my measly 10% I gazed lovingly at the lens cleaner cloth, so gorgeous with my "fluoro queer gang" upon it, but was I offered a discount if I wanted one? Not on your fucking life!

I'm not talking about art as only worthy if it's making money, bullion art, big money. I've made art, not as a commercial proposition, but for the sheer joy of it, or the community need for it. Nearly everything I've ever done was given away, stuck up on walls or shown on social media. But it pisses me off when I discover some entrepreneur making big bucks from what I starved to create. Or they turn up repeatedly expecting artists should do it for free, then go die in their garret, the romantic bohemian ending.

All through my life-long non-career I've had to plead to receive any sort of payment. It's hard enough getting considered for inclusion, one is meant to be ever so thankful and honoured to be in a show, a book or whatever, one is willing to bend over and get fucked up the arse for the sheer joy of it. I promise you, I'm over it. Glory doesn't put butter on my butt.

(Many years ago one creep asked me if I'd submit one of my prize-winning drawings as an illustration in the book of poetry he'd got a grant to publish. I said, "OK, you're offering no money but I'll give it to you for free anyway." And he replied, "Oh no, you have to pay me $300 for the privilege of being seen in my book." I told him, "Stick your arse-wipe poetry where the sun don't shine!")