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Writing for Sado-Masochism''s sake.

Article Excerpt
When I attended Keon Park State School in the early 50s, my best book was the sacred-to-me School Reader whose gorgeous pen and ink illustrations made me wish to draw. and whose poems by Henry Lawson and Dorothea McKellar and Alfred Noyes, particularly his ultra-romantic 'The Highwayman', made me wish to write.

Not just verses, with their eloquent winking unheard-of rhymes and breathless rhythms, but heroic historical heartfelt essays, brave and unusual arrangements of passionate new sentences that, once read in awe by the virgin reader, would be stowed away in heart and memory for as long as beauty is, which is endless.

By the time I was seven, writing and drawing was all I was any good at. They are still the only things I am any good at. Gardening eludes me entirely and I and science don't get on.

During my teenage years I read Uncle Scrooge comics as one might study the Qur'an. There used to be, forty years ago, Classic Comics. In them you studied Homer in shorthand in comic strip form and went mad.

My mother used to read the captions typeset upon cans of Golden Syrup with her mother at breakfast; indeed she once recited that copy to my little brothers and myself as my father sprang into his Spartan breakfast arrangements, which included great tablespoonsful of black nauseating Molasses and gigantic helpings of Krushcens salts dissolved in masochism and boiling hot glasses of water.

My father read aloud to us, my sleepy brother John and quasi-unconscious me. He turned those fly-spot-marked and dreamy pages of adventure books over, and the result was literature. It was working-class heroism and even now in my mind I can hear Len Dickins reading about tidal waves and his approval of black cannibalism comes fitfully to me, half a century after a whispery reading of Coral Island by R.M.Ballantyne, I think.

I was first published with my rapt classmates of Grade 4B...