A Bit to tell

To my children and grandchildren

I’m writing this book for a few simple reasons and a lot of complicated ones.

The simple version is this:
I don’t want my life to disappear into a handful of half-remembered stories, two or three funny anecdotes and a couple of “He used to work out bush somewhere” lines at my funeral.

The more complicated version takes a bit longer.

A different kind of inheritance

I don’t have a farm to hand down, or a successful family business with my name on the sign. What I do have is a long, crooked run of years spent in and out of small towns, remote communities, airports, cheap hotels and government offices. I have a head full of places you’ve never seen and people you’ve never met, and I’ve spent most of my adult life working with families who don’t own much that can be passed on at all.

Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that stories are part of what we inherit.

You’ve each inherited bits of me whether you like it or not – a nose, a way of talking, a temper, a sense of humour, a tendency to move around or dig in. What you haven’t really had is the full picture of how I ended up like this. You’ve caught glimpses: a few stories over dinner, a phone call from some airport, a rushed explanation of where I’m working “this time”.

This book is my attempt to give you a proper map, not so you can follow it, but so you can see where you come from and where you might like to go differently.

Filling in the blank spaces

If you look at my life from the outside, especially from the viewpoint of a child or grandchild, what you see might not make immediate sense.

A father who was often away, a man who changed jobs, towns and even countries more than was strictly necessary. Someone who seemed to be drawn to difficult work with difficult systems in difficult places.

If you put that together without context, it can look like restlessness for its own sake, or even avoidance. In some cases, that’s not completely wrong. I’ve had my share of running away from things as well as towards them. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But there were also reasons

There were communities that needed staff who’d actually go and stay. There were young people who needed someone in their corner, even if only for a little while. There were programs to be built, clinics to be staffed, and projects in places that most people in comfortable suburbs will never see or think about. There were also times when I simply didn’t know what else to do and moving seemed better than standing still.

I don’t want you or your children growing up with just the blank outline of “Dad worked a lot and was away a fair bit.” That’s technically true, but it leaves out why, and it leaves out the parts where I was trying – clumsily and imperfectly – to be useful in the world.

This book is my attempt to fill in those blank spaces without turning it into a self-justifying sob story

What I’m not doing

I’m not writing this to settle scores, re-litigate old arguments or make myself a hero or victim

There are things that belong to other people’s stories – your mother, partners, siblings, colleagues, communities – that I will not be airing. That’s not my right. Where I’ve failed, hurt people or simply made a mess of things, I’ll own my part. That’s as far as it goes.

You won’t find a neat narrative where I bravely overcome everything and end up on a mountaintop with perfect clarity. Life didn’t go that way. There are marriages that didn’t last, projects that failed, people I disappointed, and opportunities I mishandled. Some of that will be obvious as you read. Some of it you already know.

What I am trying to do is tell the truth I can live with, in a way that might actually be useful to you

Why now?

I’m in my mid-sixties. I’ve had a longer run at this than some people get, and I’m very aware that time isn’t refundable. I’ve got more behind me than in front of me. It’s not morbid; it’s maths.

I’ve also watched plenty of people die with their stories half told. You end up with families trying to reconstruct a life from a few old photos, a service record, some comments in a eulogy and a couple of second-hand anecdotes. “He never talked about that.” “We didn’t know she’d done all that.” “I wish we’d asked.”

I don’t want you to be left saying, “We never really knew where he’d been or what he’d done.”

So I’m doing this while I still remember enough of it, and while I can still tell it in my own words, not filtered through someone else’s idea of who I was.

The two-way part

Over the past few years, we’ve all had many two-way conversations about life, work, politics, mental health, parenting, money, country, culture, Indigenous communities, and this strange era we’re all living in.

Don’t remember … that’s ok most of them were in my mind and to myself. The conversations I would like to have but never did. Some of those talks have been easy, some prickly, some half-joking and half-serious. That’s normal. We’re different generations, with different default settings, at least in my mind.

I’ve watched the way your generation and your kids’ generation talk openly about things that were whispered or buried in mine. I’ve also watched some of the less helpful cultural trends creep in and wondered how any of you are supposed to make sense of yourselves in the middle of it.

This book isn’t my attempt to have the last word in those conversations. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s me laying out the backdrop: the towns, communities, accidents, decisions, characters and crossroads that shaped me.

I want you to see that when I react strongly to something – good or bad – it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of a particular history, full of kids removed from their families, communities starved of services, long fights over small improvements, and thirty-plus years of watching policy collide with reality.

You don’t have to agree with my conclusions. But you deserve to know where they came from.

For the grandkids

For the grandkids, this book is partly a decoder.

It’s one thing to know Poppie as the older bloke at Christmas who tells stories about “back in the day”, vanishes to strange places for work, and occasionally goes on about remote communities and some internet project in the Pacific. It’s another thing to see the whole run laid out: the kid on the fruit block, the teenager changing schools, the young bloke in the railways, the welfare worker, the man in the desert community or on the island, the tired fifty-something in a court room, the sixty-something trying to stitch together something useful from all of that.

You may never want to work in the kind of fields I did. You may never go to most of the places I’ve been. That’s fine. This isn’t a recruitment drive.

What I hope you’ll take from it is more basic:

That you can come from a tangled, imperfect background and still do things that matter.

That there are many kinds of success, and not all of them look like a corner office or a big house.

That you don’t have to repeat my mistakes to benefit from them.

You’re welcome.

If it also gives you a few good travel stories, some laughs at my expense, and a sense that you have permission to live a life that doesn’t follow a straight line, I’ll take that as a win.

Putting the pieces together

This book isn’t written in one sitting. It’s being pulled together out of:

Old notes

Scraps of memory

Photos from phones and shoeboxes

Half-told stories I’m finishing properly

Reflections I only had the language for later in life

There’ll be gaps. There’ll be things I’ve forgotten or blurred. Memory does that. It sands off edges, exaggerates some details and loses others altogether. Where I can, I’ll be honest about what I know for sure and what’s more feeling than fact.

I’m not pretending this is an objective record. It’s my version. If others wrote their own, you’d have a fuller picture again. That’s how it should be.

What I can promise is that I’ll try not to lie, not to prettify too much, and not to wallow. I’ll look clearly at the places where I’ve fallen short, and I’ll let myself be quietly proud where we actually did something worthwhile.

After I’m gone

A lot of this is for after I’m not here to explain it.

One day, someone will be cleaning out a cupboard or a hard drive, and this book and its matching USB or online folder will turn up. You’ll have the option to ignore it, skim it, or dive into it. That’s up to you.

If you do open it, my hope is simple:

That you’ll feel you knew me better than you might have otherwise.

That some of your questions are answered, and maybe some new, better questions are asked.

That you’ll see the thread of care running through the mess – for communities, for kids, for your mother, for you, even when I didn’t show it particularly well.

The truth is, this book is as close as I can come now to sitting down with each of you individually and talking properly – not just about your current worries and mine, but about the whole long run of how we got here. None of us has the time or patience for that in real life. Life is too busy, and I’m not that entertaining in person for that long.

On the page, though, we can take the time

In the end

So that’s why I’m doing this.

Not because I think my life is extraordinary, but because it has been occasionally less than ordinary in interesting ways, and because I think you deserve to see the full version rather than the highlights reel.

I’m writing this book because:

I love you,

I’m proud of you,

I’m aware I haven’t always been easy to live with or easy to understand,

And I’d like you to have something solid to hold onto when you wonder who this bloke was and what on earth he thought he was doing all that time.

If nothing else, when someone one day says, “What was He actually like?”, you can hand them this and say:

“Here. He had a go at explaining it himself.”