My Story

   My mum said that I was born on the tarmac of Prestwick Airport, Scotland, or that I was born in an orange field, depending on her mood. Actually I was born on January 29, 1943, in my mother’s mother's hotel, an old building called Orangefield, very near Prestwick Airport. Eventually the airport was extended and Orangefield was torn down for the new tarmac.
   I cannot remember my father. Next year he was shot down over France on D-Day. After the war Mum married an Australian army captain and we lived for a while in Hampstead, London.
   But in the summer holidays I was sent to Alistair's parents in Kilmacombe, near Glasgow. When I was six, a brother, George, arrived. Then we sailed for Australia. Sort of transported.
   We went to Emerald in Victoria, where we lived in an old wooden house shadowed by thick silent bush. On my first walks to school I watched very closely for a prowling tiger or something. I did get into one or two fights at school.
    'Yer a Pom!' they said.
   'I'm not! I'm a Scot!' Bang.
   Then we went to the coastal city of Geelong - I still barrack for the Geelong's Cats - Drysdale and Portarlington, and I would not swap those few years I spent there with anyone on this planet.
   Drysdale was a very small bush town, surrounded by rabbits and cows. We lived in a primitive farmhouse - that you had to haul water from a deep well, a wood stove, electricity, but no TV - it hadn't been invented yet. But what we did have was the wireless - the radio.
   I would hare home from school to catch the fifteen-minute serials: The Shadow, Captain Nemo, Captain Silver and the Sea Hound, and Superman. Back at Forty Acres Dad taught me how to shoot cans off a fence, and I got a dog, a red kelpie bitch, which I called Macduff. We wandered through the open bush, looking for rabbits or anything else.
   Portarlington was a fishing village backing onto flat bush. There were many things that could be done in a place like that and most of them were done. I went rabbiting with Macduff and a mate, Peter, and his dog, Bluey. Macduff actually caught one. Learned to swim in a cove with a cave of many sinister bones, built go-karts for the dusty road that plummeted past my place, and very often sat in our sprawling apricot tree, read books, and gorged myself.
   But there were better trees on Peter's farm-great firs, the tallest trees in Portarlington, next to the bull paddock. So we did the Tarzan bit, swinging on a bit of rope out over the bull paddock. The bull was not impressed. Then I climbed to the top of the highest fir and with the mighty cry of the bull ape I leapt for the top of the second highest fir tree. And missed.
   I skidded past branches for a long time, still yelling, but that bull ape was now shrieking. Finally, I passed the last, soft, green fir branch and thudded into the ground. I was peeling myself from the depression when Peter scrambled down to see if I was dead. Astonishingly, I was fine.
   I ran a gang, made up from Scots, Poms, and a couple of Australians to make up the numbers. Some Dutch kids immediately started a rival gang. We hung around trees, they hung around cliff-top trees; we had a pennant, they had a flag; we had a secret underground room, they had a secret underground labyrinth. This was war!
   Actually, between plots and diabolic threats, we got along very well. They visited our tree, we visited their labyrinth, we fed each other and we planned together. But the headmaster did not know any of this. So when the gang war overflowed into the school ground, he was horrified. So he pounced on little innocent me.
   'Baillie, enough of this loutish behaviour,' he said. 'I want a Christmas play from you. And not any play. This one was to be The Nativity, and I was not to fiddle with the story.' And when I had written it, I was to produce it. The play was performed in the school ground, the swings were the stable, boxes were the cradle, a fire was red plastic paper, two boys and a rug were the donkey. And it was terrible. The donkey split in two, everyone forgot the lines, the doll was placed in the fire instead of the cradle. It was terrible, hideous... But it left me with a very strange itch.
   Very soon after we were moving again, to Melbourne. I had missed planting roots in one place, watching streets and people change as I grew, but I had learned that kids are the same anywhere and that I could fit in.
   We rented half a house in the inner suburb of Jolimont, and at Hawthorn Central to repeat what I had learnt in Portarlington until the spot in Scotch came up. The place in Scotch did not come up but I did not mind at all.
   I cannot remember name of our form teacher, cannot what he looked like, but I do remember what he did for me. He gave us a task, a huge task of creating a glove puppet play based on a novel we had read. Which meant that a handful of us would write a script from and the rest make the puppets, the get the music, whatever. I got the writing bit, so I picked Treasure Island. Then, because I was doing work of writing, I had the choice of which character I made and played. Of course Long John Silver. I doublooned, black spotted and 'Yo, ho, ho'd' for weeks. In fact I still do it.
   At last we shifted into our own the flat suburb of Moorabbin and at 13 I wrote my first book. It was written in two exercise books and illustrated by me. My writing has become a little better, but my drawing hasn't. It wasn't sent off to a publisher, that wasn't the point. It was done for fun, like the puppet play. The book was called The Silver Streak telling of the gallant crew of a starship and a slimy bunch of aliens like huge green eggs. The eggs were destroying civilization but the Silver Streak found some allies around Centaurus. The eggs were driven into the Sun in a space battle where they became a monstrous green omelet.
   I finished high school a few years later and became a cadet journalist with the Melbourne's Sun a few weeks later. I made my first sale of a suicide story to a farming newspaper for four pounds (eight dollars).
   I built a canvas kayak, sank it in the headwaters of the Yarra and almost drowned. Another stupid accident put me around hospitals for a year, leaving me with a limp and an annoying fumble with words.
   But that made me think. I had been so close to death so much that anything after the accident was a bonus, a gift. You don't throw away gifts, so I left the paper to wander the world.
   With a friend I went to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, India and I was arrested as a spy. I was taking a photo of a bridge with an expensive camera in raggedy clothes and the Indian police thought that I was a Pakistani agent. They changed their minds. Nepal, saw Everest at dawn and was struck down with dysentery; Kashmir, lived in a houseboat and was caught in a building a riot; Afghanistan, stayed at the open cells of Heart and met a hippy Missing Tribe. Iran, almost caused a riot; Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, France and worked in England.
   Toured Europe on a motor scooter then Panama and Central America. On a mail boat that ran from Guatemala to British Honduras (now Belize) with turtles, chickens, pigs, baskets of fish, vegetables, and singing Caribs at the bow under the stars.
   A French boat took me to Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Sydney. I caught a train home to Melbourne and finally stopped.
   Or so I thought.
   I spent time in newspapers in Sydney and Auckland as I started to sail, but I was getting interested in Cambodia and Laos as a freelance journalist.
   At that time there was the Vietnam War over the Cambodian mountains and an odd civil war going on in Laos, but there was nothing in Cambodia. However, Prince Sihanouk banned Western journalists, so I entered the country as an artist. Fine, so long as I wasn't asked to draw. I wandered about a rich and sleepy country. I shared fractured French with Buddhist monks at Phnom Penh, spent a night with bats in a ruined temple at Angkor, cruised the Mekong with a fourteen-year-old ferry captain who smoked banana-leaf cigars.
   Laos was different.
   On my first day there I was captured by the Communist Pathet Lao, and was released after a jokes. I flew with Air America - the CIA transport arm - into the mountains. 'Bullet holes?' said the pilot. 'We bombed a house with rice bags accidentally. Man came running out of the wreckage and started shooting.'
   I wrote an adult novel, Mask Maker, set in Laos after that.
   I married a librarian, Agnes Chow, in Sydney and we had a daughter, Lynne. But in that time Cambodia had been torn apart by civil war, the brutal Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge, and the war Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge.
   In 1980 Agnes took Lynne to her family in Penang as I went to the desperate Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai border.
   I stumbled from bleak story to story in the camps: fathers bundled into a midnight bus, families cut down to a single survivor, little girls pointing out other children for execution. One camp was attacked half an hour I left, killing 300 people.
   I tried to write a novel about what had happened to Cambodia, but when I had finished the first draft, I knew it was a porridge that nobody would want to read. And I did not want to write it again.
   Then Agnes came into my office with a newspaper clipping that told of four Lebanese boys and a dog who were rescued from a crate in the Mediterranean. She suggested I might make a story out of that. That became Adrift and that got me thinking that the story of Cambodia's could be seen through a boy's eyes. The story became Little Brother.
   We soon had a son, Peter. We went back to my Scottish roots and then to Agnes' roots in China - and to chase a vague book. We travelled to Guangzhou, Sichuan, down the Yangzi, Shanghai, Beijing, always stirring crowds of students. The family left me to chase photos then at 1am on June 4, 1989, I was woken by some reports and shouting.
   The slaughter of Tiananmen had begun.
   The China Coin had changed radically and I had to rewrite it eight times to control my anger.
   I worked at the Aboriginal settlement Yirrkala in Arnhem Land and treked over to Sulawesi for Songman, and spent some time with some orangutans in southern Borneo for Saving Abbie.
   I am still moving around...