Tall Ships and Tall Tales: a life of dancing with history

By Jonathan King

Over the last 40 years, Jonathan King has brought history to life, re-enacting events such as the First Fleet’s voyage across the high seas to Botany Bay, the mutiny against ship’s captain William Bligh on the Bounty, Matthew Flinders’ troubled circumnavigation of Terra Australis, Ernest Shackleton’s death-defying dash across the icy waters of the Antarctic Ocean, and Marco Polo’s passage from China.

Along the way, King has encountered a cast of mavericks, rogues, entrepreneurs, dignitaries, and politicians — a veritable who’s who of Australia and beyond. These include bushman R.M. Williams, singers Slim Dusty and Helen Reddy, actor Jack Thompson, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, great train robber Ronnie Biggs, explorer Edmund Hillary, boxer Muhammad Ali, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, rock star Sting — and even Queen Elizabeth II.

So join this bestselling author and historian as he recounts his spectacular adventures: jackarooing on outback stations; trekking the Amazon to meet a remote tribe; sailing the perilous waters of the Atlantic; riding a traditional junk in the South China Sea; being detained by Spanish border guards; and becoming caught in an Antarctic hurricane, just metres from reaching Shackleton’s grave. These extraordinary tales will leave you breathless, dazzled, and inspired by King’s persistence and sheer courage in bringing history to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781922072764

Jonathan King

Award-winning historian Dr Jonathan King is the author of Gallipoli Diaries: the Anzacs’ own story, day by day (Scribe, 2014), and has been producing books and films about World War I since 1994. He leads battlefield tours to Gallipoli and the Western Front, and is a regular television and radio commentator, as well as a writer for newspapers. After lecturing at The University of Melbourne for many years, he has written more than 30 books and produced 20 documentaries. He is based in Sydney with his fellow adventurer and wife, Jane. They have four daughters and seven grandchildren.

Book preview

Scribe Publications

TALL SHIPS AND TALL TALES

Jonathan King is an award-winning author and historian. He has written 30 books and been published widely in newspapers and magazines, and has produced and presented numerous film documentaries, as well as television and radio programs.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

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50A Kingsway Place, Sans Walk, London, EC1R 0LU, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2013

Copyright © Jonathan King 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The front cover shows tall ships (National Archives of Australia: A6135, K4/2/88/3); Jonathan King sailing into Sydney Harbour (David Iggulden); a portrait of World War I soldier Les Hall (Les Hall); and a portrait of brumby-catcher Ken Connolly (Claire Leimbach).

While every care has been taken to trace and acknowledge copyright, we tender apologies for any accidental infringement where copyright has proved untraceable and we welcome information that would redress the situation.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are respectfully advised that this publication contains the names and images of deceased people.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

King, Jonathan, 1942-

Tall Ships and Tall Tales: a life of dancing with history / Jonathan King.

9781922072764 (e-book.)

1. Australia–History.

994

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

To Jane, my wife and the mother of our daughters, who has been the most wonderful partner since we met and the best possible companion on my journey through life

and

to Henrik Bak Nielsen, first mate of Anna Kristina, who was lost overboard in the South Atlantic Ocean on 22 August 1987.

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

John Masefield

Contents

Foreword (by Jack Thompson)

Introduction

Part I: Historical Awakenings

1 Kon-Tiki Dreaming (1942–1966)

2 To Russia with Love (1967)

Part II: The First Fleet

3 The Birth of a Big Idea (1973–1978)

4 The Sea Captain and the Dragon Slayer (1978–1980)

5 Back From the Dead (1980–1984)

6 Keeping the Faith (1984–1985)

7 Hawke Swoops and Heads Roll (1985–1986)

8 Countdown to the Royal Farewell (1986–1987)

9 The Sail of the Century (1987–1988)

Part III: Dancing with History

10 The Mutiny on the Bounty (1989)

11 Columbus’ Voyage to ‘Discover’ America (1992)

12 Sabotaged by Pirates with Marco Polo Journey (1993)

13 Banjo Paterson’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1994–1995)

14 The Nativity Journey (1999)

15 Matthew Flinders’ Circumnavigation of Australia (2002)

16 Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage (2003)

17 Gallipoli and the Western Front (1998)

18 In the Footsteps of Burke and Wills (2010)

Appendix: Tricks of the Trade

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

The Kon-Tiki raft on which Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific Ocean.

Foreword

During the quarter-century that I have known my friend Jonathan King, he has shared with me his passion for Australian history and the environment. We also have something else very special in common: we both started our working lives as jackaroos in the outback, when it was still much more like the world portrayed by Banjo Paterson. Back then there were no helicopters, motorbikes, or televisions, let alone mobile phones. In those golden years of our youth — a time when stockmen, black and white, still rode horses everywhere, mustering and droving cattle and sheep on horseback — the bush really was remote, a world cut off from the cities. We camped out under the stars around a campfire, drank billy tea, cooked damper, and swapped yarns. That is probably where Jonathan fell in love with storytelling. He certainly would have heard a few tall tales before he left the bush to go to university and embark on a career in the world of media and live events.

Like millions of other Australians in 1988, I watched spellbound as Jonathan’s fleet of 11 tall ships sailed in from England. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have seen, as this proud flotilla sailed past thousands of spectator craft in the harbour, straight to its Farm Cove anchorage to kick-start the bicentennial celebrations. I knew from the media reports just how hard Jonathan and his mates had worked over ten years to mount this private expedition. It was the highlight of Australia’s 200th birthday party. Once again, it made me proud to have started my life as a jackaroo alongside men such as him. I was pleased that in 1989 the National Australia Day Council awarded him a medal, presented by the prime minister, Bob Hawke, for Australian Achiever of the Year. The Victorian division of the Australia Day Council had in 1988 already awarded him a medal as Australian of the Year. Both were well deserved.

Jonathan first came to me right after his fleet sailed in, asking me to climb on board one of his tall ships and launch the first national summit on the environment for the Australian Conservation Foundation. It was also a great success.

Since then, in his dance with history he has produced an amazing series of events, inspired and helped by a host of people. These individuals have included legends such as Thor Heyerdahl, the ‘Kon-Tiki Man’, and the great bushmen’s outfitter R.M. Williams. Jonathan has retraced Columbus’ voyage to America, Flinders’ voyage around Australia, Bligh’s mutiny on the Bounty, and Shackleton’s escape from Antarctica. On land, he has re-enacted Mary and Joseph’s biblical journey, and, returning to our common roots, the legends of Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. They are all in this book, in which he has also bravely recorded his failures, such as the Marco Polo voyage, which was sabotaged by pirates.

In fact, Jonathan came to me in 2009 with one of his events — the last in this book. Combining his love for history and the environment, he asked me to be the patron of a 150th-anniversary expedition he was organising across Australia in the footsteps of Burke and Wills, in order to conduct an environmental audit along the track. I had played Burke in the 1985 feature film Burke & Wills, and loved the old, ill-fated rascal. As a fellow environmentalist, I agreed immediately. With the help of veteran adventure cameraman Michael Dillon AO and the team of volunteers Jonathan always seems to muster, he followed in the explorers’ footsteps, filming changes along the track and interviewing pastoralists about solutions needed to repair environmental damage over the last 150 years. It was a perfect combination of his two loves, history and the environment.

But now my mate has reached the grand old age of 70, he obviously feels it is time to return to that campfire, pull up a few logs, and ask you all to sit down so he can spin a few yarns, tall tales included.

As a fellow jackaroo, I recommend you give him a hearing. These are pretty good yarns.

Dr Jack Thompson AM

18 July 2013

Introduction

‘I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine.’

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

This autobiography tells the story of how I organised re-enactments of some of history’s most exciting events on the high seas and on dry land. It also introduces the wonderful, larger-than-life characters who helped me. I got the idea from one of these people, R.M. Williams, who wrote a memoir called I Once Met a Man, which presented to readers all the sorts of outback characters he had met throughout his long and colourful life — drovers, ringers, shearers, horse-breakers, and swagmen, to name a few. Now, having reached the grand old age of 70, I thought it was time to share the stories of some such characters, and the insights I gained from them, along with my own experiences.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I explains how I came to begin my adventures: it tells of being inspired by a childhood hero, Thor Heyerdahl, who undertook a daring sea expedition, and of my early days as a jackaroo, working on sheep and cattle stations in the outback. It also tells of my first foray into historical anniversaries, when I went behind the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. These early experiences whetted my appetite for adventure and cemented my love of history.

Part II tells the story of my ten-year struggle to mount the First Fleet Re-enactment Expedition in 1988, against formidable government opposition. I recount the Australian government’s opposition to the privately funded re-enactment, and try to demonstrate how my partners and I navigated the reefs of that resistance.

Essentially, what the Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA), the legal entity the federal government created to organise Australia’s 200th birthday, tried to do in the lead-up to the anniversary was bury the story of the British settlement of Australia. It attempted to erase that heritage, with its chief executive, David Armstrong, describing the re-enactment as ‘a white wank’. As Melbourne historian Geoffrey Blainey said at the time, it was like the communists erasing the achievements of the tsars in Russia’s history before the 1917 revolution. He was not alone, as many writers and commentators weighed in. In 1985, journalist Tim Duncan wrote in The Australian that the ABA leaders were trying very hard to phase out the British heritage by replacing the First Fleet re-enactment with their more neutral ‘tall ships’ events. Writing in The Australian in 1987, political journalist and supporter of the re-enactment Peter Blazey estimated that the ABA had spent $10 million over ten years trying to stop it from sailing. Robert Hughes, Donald Horne, and Ita Buttrose also wrote articles urging the government to reinstate references to the British, the First Fleet, and the convicts — all 166,000 of them — who had worked so hard to build the country.

So although I launched the First Fleet Re-enactment Expedition as a tribute to a great maritime event, it inevitably became political — highly political, especially in regard to the dreadful damage done from 1788 to Aboriginal people. Yet while the ABA sidestepped that issue, the re-enactment tried to confront it head on. I wanted it to include reference to what had happened when whites arrived in Australia, and to call for a makarrata (a treaty of commitment, facing the facts of wrongdoing and attempting to negotiate a way forward).

More importantly, the government bureaucracy also seemed to be trying to extinguish the Australian spirit of adventure and creativity that the re-enactment aimed to champion. Thankfully, they didn’t succeed.

Hardly ever has a federal government got it so wrong, or misread the electorate so badly, with their attempt to erase the account of the European influence on the formation of Australia — against the wishes of its people, many of whom shared a common European past and were proud of their ancestors. But in the end the people revolted against the ABA, to save the events they thought important from being ‘thrown into the dustbin of history’, as the late historian Manning Clark was fond of saying. Radio 2GB listeners donated $900,000 to the re-enactment out of their own pockets, and in 1988 an estimated three million Australians cheered the fleet into Sydney Harbour.

I thought it was important to make public what really went on, as the Australian Bicentennial Authority cost the taxpayer so much, and its achievements were, in my view, questionable — to say the least. Many people have died since those days of passionate political debate over the nation’s identity, and I feel I have a duty as a witness to reveal what happened behind the scenes.

Part III tells the story of subsequent historical events that I brought to life — some that succeeded and some that failed. These include the 1989 commemoration of the mutiny on the Bounty in the Pacific Ocean; the 1992 re-enactment of Christopher Columbus’ voyage from Europe to America; the 1993 attempt to re-enact Marco Polo’s return passage from China for its 700th anniversary; the 1994 and 1995 centennial celebrations of the legends of Banjo Paterson’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Man from Snowy River’; the 1999 retracing of Mary and Joseph’s nativity journey for its 2000th anniversary and the turn of the millennium; the 2002 bicentennial re-enactment of the circumnavigation of Australia by Matthew Flinders; and the 2003 voyage through the Southern Ocean, retracing Shackleton’s expedition from Antarctica to South Georgia, in the lead-up to its 90th anniversary. In 1998 I also travelled to Gallipoli, and then to the Western Front for the 80th anniversary of the World War I armistice, with four of the last survivors from that bloody war. Finally, in 2010 I retraced the ill-fated journey across Australia by Burke and Wills to mark its 150th anniversary.

I learned a great deal from trying to mount all of these anniversary-based events, each of which had their own challenges. I have been taught so many salutary lessons over the years that I am keen to share some of these with any would-be adventurers. At the end of this book I have included an appendix containing some ‘tricks of the trade’ I have learned; some of these insights may help readers to organise their own projects in the future.

An inspirational philosopher, Peter Shenstone, told me when I was contemplating leaving the academic life to organise the First Fleet re-enactment: ‘A popular historian should not just teach history, but make history.’ These were wise words. As a journalist, I am well aware that newspapers tend to emphasise bad-news stories about politics, disasters, crime, and violence. Through this book I want to counter this with stories to inspire modern generations with the wonderful achievements of great heroes from the past and of the present, those too good to forget.

I never set out to create an adventurous life for myself, but once I started dancing to that first historical tune I could not stop, especially as I was lucky enough to be able to change partners through the decades. This fascination has taken me to all corners of our planet, which I have travelled dozens of times. I have indeed been blessed with an extraordinarily rich life — due in no small way to my love of history. Nevertheless, so much has happened over the last 70 years that, like that great 13th-century traveller Marco Polo, I must say, ‘I have not told half of what I saw.’

PART I:

HISTORICAL AWAKENINGS

CHAPTER ONE

Kon-Tiki Dreaming

(1942–1966)

‘If you have a dream, you must find at least one other loyal partner to share your dream — then together you can work hard enough to mobilise the necessary support to make it happen.’

THOR HEYERDAHL

If I was born with a maverick anti-establishment streak, it was because I was conceived when my father deserted his fellow troops on an army train during a Melbourne stopover and spent a few hours with my mother, Zelma, in their South Yarra home. It was March 1942, in the middle of World War II, and Captain (Reginald) John Essington King had persuaded his second-in-command to cover for him, knowing that the penalties imposed for being caught absent without leave were severe. But he got away with it, setting a cavalier example. On 28 December 1942, he was back in the jungles of New Guinea, and I was born — named after the Old Testament warrior Jonathan, who spent his life fighting against the Philistines.

Yet I began my own battle against the odds after my father returned from the war. I developed chronic asthma, and was always in and out of hospital, struggling to survive. Sustained by a series of respiratory sprays and a strenuous swimming program, which I followed in the sea baths at Melbourne’s Brighton Beach, I made it to my 11th birthday. To inspire me to hope for better things, my parents gave me a book about a Norwegian sailor, breathing in the fresh sea air as he sailed across the Pacific on a raft in 1947. Having written a controversial academic thesis claiming that the early South Americans had settled Polynesia, the sailor had decided, despite the enormous risks, to prove it; he set out to travel 6,900 kilometres from Peru to the Pacific island of Raroia. This sailor had the unlikely name of Thor Heyerdahl.

Heyerdahl had begun by sending one of his crew, Torstein Raaby, a telegram.

AM GOING TO CROSS PACIFIC ON A WOODEN RAFT TO SUPPORT A THEORY THAT THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS WERE PEOPLED FROM PERU. WILL YOU COME? I GUARANTEE NOTHING BUT A FREE TRIP TO PERU AND THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS AND BACK, BUT YOU WILL FIND GOOD USE FOR YOUR TECHNICAL ABILITIES ON THE VOYAGE. REPLY AT ONCE.

Torstein Raaby replied with one word: COMING.

I remember looking up from the book after I read this, and gazing dreamily out the window. If I had been older, I would also have said yes. I thought his daring voyage — sailing his balsa-wood raft, Kon-Tiki, through shark-infested oceans with a brave crew of six Scandinavians, drifting before the wind, with the currents, for 101 days — was breathtaking. I dreamed of doing something similar. Heyerdahl fired my imagination for life. In that pre-television age, he demonstrated that the spirit of adventure was still alive, and beckoned young boys like me to join him — to dare to dream.

Eleven-year-olds have no place on an ocean raft, but this story was just what I needed. Heyerdahl became my boyhood hero. As I swam in the sea each day, I imagined him crossing the ocean that was connected to this body of water. He gave me something to aim for. He was like a shining light entering the dark world of my struggles with asthma (which not only kept me awake at night but also woke my worried parents and my long-suffering siblings, Julie, David, and Belinda).

In 1958, a few years after I was introduced to Heyerdahl’s book, my parents sent me to Timbertop, the school in the Victorian mountains, hoping the fresh air and exercise would help me to throw off my asthma once and for all. The campus, part of Corio-based Geelong Grammar School, was not far from Mansfield, and was designed to give 14-year-olds a year in the bush: hiking along the rivers and up the surrounding mountains, cross-country running, and learning to survive outdoors. With its limited places, it was difficult to get into this exclusive school, especially at short notice, and it cost a lot of money. But my maternal grandmother, Marion Sprague, offered to pay the fees.

Timbertop was another turning point in my life. With my lungs expanding thanks to daily exercise in the fresh air, I learned to run along rivers and up mountains, and to hike for days with a heavy pack. I also discovered that I loved the bush and being outdoors. I developed a real taste for adventure and a fiercely competitive spirit, which drove me forward in these extremely challenging circumstances.

We often played British bulldog, in which we had to run from a back line on a tennis court to the other end by fighting our way past a wall of opposing — usually bigger — boys. As a skinny and slippery kid, I was often able to get through before being bullied to the ground, and so this became my favourite game. Although some of the bullies also mocked my frequent coughing — by mimicking this to my face — and ridiculed my late-developing physique, this personal abuse thickened my skin, which helped in the years to come. I also realised that I could survive tough punishment from the draconian Timbertop headmaster, E.H. ‘Basher’ Montgomery, who often caned me with ‘six of the best’ on either the bottom or the hands for misbehaviour. He was a tall, humourless, and frightening man, and, as a former state politician, was used to calling all the shots. Yet these confrontations with authority toughened me up for later life, when I had to ‘take it on the chin’.

I was so keen to take part in everything at Timbertop that I often broke the rules. Once, the matron locked me in the sanatorium before the annual 26-mile (42-kilometre) marathon, forbidding me to compete due to my asthma. Climbing out a toilet window, I just managed to join the runners as they started. Some time later, approaching the finish line, I was about to overtake the school bully when he warned, ‘If you pass me, King, I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.’ Although I hesitated for a second, I could see that the finish was within reach, and so took the risk and sprinted ahead — to come first in my Timbertop dormitory and 20th out of 120 boys. I had to finish strongly in order to show the matron I could breathe well enough to finish a marathon. It was well worth the risk, especially as that beating never happened.

A hopeless pupil, I then failed matriculation at the Corio campus, only passing one subject: British History. This was thanks to never-say-die teaching by Michael Persse. Yet at the time I was disappointed to find out I’d passed this one subject because I had bet my mate Hugh Chomley a dozen bottles of Foster’s that I would fail every subject. So British History cost me a case of longnecks.

I might have lost the bet, but it turned out that a love of history, especially British, would stand me in good stead in the years to come. My unexpected interest may have had something to do with my proud father explaining that my British ancestor Lieutenant Philip Gidley King had sailed on the First Fleet, so perhaps I did not want to let him down. Whatever the reason, as life went on I would cling to history like a drowning man to a straw.

When I left Geelong Grammar I headed for the bush once again, this time to jackaroo in outback New South Wales. My parents thought the fresh air would be good for my asthma. Mind you, there weren’t a lot of options, considering that I had done so badly. Many of my fellow pupils at Geelong Grammar were wealthy graziers’ sons, and they had also been encouraging me to go bush for years. As I came from suburban Melbourne, they had taunted me with accusations that I would become a weedy little bank clerk working in a city skyscraper in a white shirt, suit, and tie. So I decided to follow Banjo Paterson’s hero, Clancy of the Overflow, in seeking The vision splendid of the sunlit plain extended / And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars’ instead of ‘sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy / Ray of sunshine struggles feebly down between the houses tall.

I got a job as a junior jackaroo on seven pounds a week — a pound a day — with the New Zealand and Australian Land Company. They owned about 25 large stations around Australia and trained jackaroos to become managers. I was sent to Bundure, a large sheep station near Jerilderie managed by Fred Hutchins, and then to Wingadee, a cattle and sheep station between Coonamble and Walgett.

This jackarooing, where I saddled up my horse every day and worked as a stockman, drover, boundary rider, shearer, and general station hand, taught me some great skills. It was exciting to gallop after runaway cattle with experienced Aboriginal stockmen, who showed me how to ride, crack a whip, find rogue steers hiding in the scrub, and round up wild horses that had got away. I also had to muster big mobs of sheep, perhaps 5,000 at a time, with my loyal kelpie, Boy, and my border collie, Blackie. I even had a go at dagging, crutching, and the bloody and cruel mulesing of sheep’s bottoms; not to mention marking, where I would cut the tip off the sheep’s scrotum, seize the tiny testicles in my teeth, and pull them out of their unsuspecting housing. This life also toughened me up physically because I was thrown from bucking horses, chased by wild bulls in stockyards, and forced to defend myself from drunken bushmen in the sorts of pub brawls that were common to outback towns at the time.

Fights aside, it was fun, full of adventure, and romantic — especially if your head was full of Banjo’s ballads. It was not as thrilling as crossing the Pacific on a raft like my boyhood hero had, but it seemed the next best thing. I became a jack-of-all-trades and was, by the end of three years, ready for anything. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my second inspiration was Paterson, whose iconic characters, Clancy of the Overflow and the Man from Snowy River, helped me to fall in love with the bush and its characters, and inspired me to embark on a life of adventure. Decades later, in the mid 1990s, I would bring these wonderful Australian icons to life with re-enactments of their journeys.

My heady days of jackarooing nearly ended when I got drunk and crashed my car. Returning to the station from the pub one night, after a beer or two too many, I lost control and rolled my Volkswagen Beetle.

‘What a pity,’ I heard a voice say early the next morning, as I lay semiconscious and bleeding, trapped in the upturned wreckage, stuck in a ditch beside the road.

‘Yeah, he only looked about 20,’ a gruff male voice said. ‘Bloody roads!’

‘More likely too much alcohol,’ I heard the woman reply. ‘Poor kid.’

‘What a waste of a life,’ the man concluded as the ambulance arrived.

But I wasn’t dead. The car was a total write-off, but once the ambulance got me to the Coonamble hospital, I regained full consciousness, and, after a few days of intensive care, I recovered.

If my life had been spared by the Almighty, I vowed that I was going to make good use of it and do something worthwhile. I started studying for my matriculation by correspondence through Taylor’s Coaching College. Determined to pass English, by far my worst subject at school, I carried copies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield around the station in my saddlebag, reading them while boiling the billy under coolibah trees beside the creek, in the paddocks, or in our shared jackaroo’s quarters.

‘Wattayer doin’ all that book lernin’ for?’ one or other of my fellow jackaroos would call out as they flipped over another page of their comic books.

‘I’m studying to get into university,’ I would say, as innocently as possible.

‘Fat lot of good that’ll do yer runnin’ a cattle station, eh?’ they would reply with a laugh, grabbing another beer from the fridge. ‘Waste of bloody time, mate!’

But after a year of balancing the demands of cattle droving and sheep shearing with study, I sat for my matriculation in an empty cell at the police station in Jerilderie (the same lockup where, 85 years earlier, bushranger Ned Kelly had imprisoned the local policemen after he rode into town with his gang to rob the bank). I wrote my answers under the watchful eye of the local officer, whose chain-smoking in the confined space nearly gave me an asthma attack. As the cell only had one high window with four iron bars, and he was sitting on an armchair right in front of me, I could hardly breathe.

Although the smoky exam papers I submitted from Jerilderie were awarded a pass, I could not enrol in an arts degree without a language, and so I had to settle for a diploma. Admitted to the University of Melbourne through a back door for low achievers, I started a diploma in journalism. I was lucky to get that place. I needed to be working for a newspaper to gain entry, so I persuaded a friend, Andrew Weigall, a cadet at Rupert Murdoch’s new national daily, The Australian, to swap places. Tired of the dirty dusty city, like Paterson’s Clancy, Weigall wanted to go bush, so I got him a job with New Zealand and Australian Land Company, and he introduced me to the Melbourne editor, who let me take Weigall’s place — once I put my age down a few years, that is.

As my course included an English major, which involved literary criticism, I learned to read and analyse books with fresh eyes. Picking Kon-Tiki off the dusty shelf for holiday reading one summer, I retreated to the solitude of a fire lookout tower in the Victorian forests, where I had a job as a fire spotter. This vacation role was poorly paid, but I had plenty of uninterrupted time to read, looking up occasionally for any telltale smoke. I could stay up there all day. If I did spot smoke, I climbed down and reported it to the Country Fire Authority by phone from the hut below.

High up in my lonely tower, by now in my mid 20s, I re-read Kon-Tiki, and it sank in as never before. I realised that Heyerdahl was not only telling the story of his great expedition, but also explaining how he had pulled it off against the ‘dire forebodings’ from doomsayers who warned he would never get away with it. He was actually revealing strategies for organising adventures. To make his dream come true, Heyerdahl started telling people he was going to do it, and that momentum helped him to attract support. He never admitted to any doubt. Heyerdahl also explained how he had used pioneers such as Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who was first to the South Pole, as inspirations. But a turning point for him was winning the support of his first partner, a refrigerator salesman and an unemployed engineer called Herman Watzinger, who pledged unfailing loyalty to Heyerdahl and invested funds in his dream. Heyerdahl could not have done it, either, without finding a figurehead — the president of Peru, who opened doors for him. But it was his total faith in the dream and its energy that kept him going. He trusted his gut instinct — his intuition, rather than cold, calculating reason — and in the early days he never worried about practicalities. He always had to appear positive, he wrote, and hide his weaknesses (such as the fact that he couldn’t even swim!).

Amazing, I thought, as a flock of kookaburras landed in a gum tree below me and began to laugh, and darkness slowly fell. His expedition against the odds sounded much more exciting and important than droving cattle down the Cooper in outback Queensland.

By the time I climbed down from the tower for the night, Heyerdahl had a firm place in my mind. As I went to sleep in the hut below, listening to the frogs and crickets, I thought a lot about the last thing he had explained: when he set out on his adventure, he realised that he would have to be the one telling the story — the one writing the articles, the radio reports, the book, and the film script, even though he was not a professional writer.

I didn’t think much more about Heyerdahl right after that, because I had to start studying for exams again. Yet when I returned to university, I got the chance to meet my first professional writer, Alan Marshall — thanks to a fellow student, my kind-hearted girlfriend, who was trying to lift my game. And that meeting would, in time, reactivate the seminal vision with which I had so deeply identified because it set me on a course of encounters with adventures in history — starting in 1967, with a trip to the Soviet Union for the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Bolshevik Revolution, which had introduced communism to Russia.

CHAPTER TWO

To Russia with Love

(1967)

‘Don’t worry about the communist threat — it’s all been exaggerated by the conservative media. Go behind the Iron Curtain and see what Soviet Russia is like. It’ll be an eye-opener.’

ALAN MARSHALL

The first person I met who inspired me to embark on a historical adventure was Melbourne writer Alan Marshall, whose 1955 biography I Can Jump Puddles was an international bestseller. The book explained, with great enthusiasm, how he had overcome polio to live ‘a normal life’, jumping over obstacles such as puddles despite his leg irons. Later on, Marshall would also give me skills to overcome obstacles blocking my own progress as I went about organising historical re-enactments.

Polio had claimed 1,500 lives and crippled thousands more since its insidious arrival in Australia in the mid 20th century, so when I first met Marshall, we talked about how his story gave heart to many, not only in Australia but also around the world.

‘Yes, I’ve sold thousands of copies, even in the USSR,’ he told me over lunch at his country retreat, just outside of Melbourne, in May 1967. ‘The Soviet ambassador must have read it in Canberra and sent it to Moscow for translation.’

‘But why Soviet Russia?’ I asked. As a student of politics, my interest was aroused. I grabbed another beer out of his fridge to save him from lifting himself from his bunk and staggering over on his crutches.

‘Because it fits in with their socialist ideal of achieving against the odds, which is what the Communist Party wants all Soviet citizens to do to create the communist utopia prescribed by Marx and Lenin.’

‘Do you reckon they’ll create a communist state?’ I asked.

‘They’re doing pretty well feeding peasants who used to starve under tsarist rule,’ the old writer said defensively. ‘And giving the Americans a run for their money on the world stage.’

‘But it must be so hard to control human nature, forcing citizens to put the needs of the community ahead of themselves.’

‘Why don’t you go and see for yourself? If you’re studying communism, put your textbooks down, get out of that ivory tower, and go to the USSR. You’ll find one thing leads to another.’

Our student newspaper, Farrago, had advertised an upcoming university tour to the Soviet Union, which I’d heard about. But I hadn’t considered joining: after years of reading the conservative Melbourne Herald, I was frightened of going behind the Iron Curtain. Yet Marshall dismissed this fear. ‘Of course it’s safe,’ he said, leaning his frail figure forward. ‘The Russians are lovely people — and it’s a good time to go because they’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution later this year. The citizens will be eager to talk to you. Just make sure you collect notes for the books I’m sure you’ll write.’

That night, I recorded his unexpected words of support in my diary. I had never dreamed of writing a book, but here was an author predicting that I would. ‘I can see from the way you listen and take notes that you’ll become a writer,’ he had said.

The next morning, I applied for the first Australian university student tour of the USSR that had been offered since the October 1917 revolution. The Soviets had invited students to visit and celebrate 50 years of ‘successful’ communism. Having come to university later in life, I was older than most, and so the student representative council offered me the position of leader and a $200 discount on my ticket. Despite having never led anybody anywhere before, I accepted — with great trepidation — an appointment that would take me to another level: controlling 35 unruly Australian students and negotiating with an obstinate communist bureaucracy.

Marshall had started something. Already, as he had predicted, one thing was leading to another.

I also