Julian Assange. Julian Assange

      3

       FLIGHT

      My mother’s people came to Australia from Scotland in 1856. The head of the clan was James Mitchell, a tenant farmer from Dumfries, who lived at the same time as the radical Scots poet Robert Burns, another farmer. Burns protested all his life against injustice and tyranny, penning a universal ‘Marseillaise’ to the human spirit, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. The poet died in poverty in Dumfries just as my kinsman Mitchell was growing up, and he would have understood the Mitchell family’s wish to emigrate. Like him, they were Protestants subject to the laws of the established Church of Scotland, and life was hard for them in the soggy fields.

      Hugh Mitchell, with Anne Hamilton and five children, set himself up as a dairy farmer in New South Wales, at Bryans Gap, near Tenterfield. He was well known in the New England district, and died at the age of eighty-four, leaving an estate of £121 and a son, James, just like him, who in time took up a freehold on land at Barney Downs. James was an able horseman and he served as a volunteer in the Boer War. On 2 June 1900, he wrote a letter to his son Albert from Bulawayo in Rhodesia, telling of the hard time he was experiencing in the regiment and saying how frustrated he was not to find himself fighting at the Front. This complaint – the complaint of many a serving soldier – was answered by fate, who saw to it that eight weeks later he was part of a garrison in the Transvaal that came under a heavy Boer barrage, and James Mitchell, a squad sergeant-major, died of wounds. The man who buried him wrote a letter home. ‘It was a sad duty for us,’ he wrote, ‘the saddest I have seen in South Africa . . . This war is a sad, cruel business.’ Other ancestors of mine, on my father’s side, the Kellys and the Greers, owned the Imperial Hotel at Nundle, after coming from Ireland. My paternal great-grandfather, James Greer Kelly, had four sons who were brilliant sportsmen, well known for their prowess at cricket and football. He also had a daughter, Miriam Kelly, my grandmother, who came to Sydney and married a man called Shipton, and together they had my father.

      Our early families pass on life to us, as a matter of science, but do they also pass on their ideas? I can’t claim to know them, but I can see that this Celtic journey they made for goods and gear, for plots and for gold, also brought with it the yearning for a new world. Some of them on my mother’s side suffered for their idealism, in Gallipoli and elsewhere. My great-grandfather, Alfred Hawkins, was on the Japanese prison ship, the Montevideo Maru, when it was sunk by a US submarine in 1942. It was, I believe, our family’s first known experience of friendly fire. And not just our family: 1,051 Australian soldiers and civilians went down about sixty miles off Luzon in the Philippines, and the wreck was never recovered. A few years ago, there was one surviving witness, a Japanese sailor, who recalled the terrible cries of the Australians as the ship sank. Others, he said, sang the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. History doesn’t record where my kinsman was on the ship that night, and whether Alfred Hawkins was crying or singing, but it should be noted that the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was written by that famous Scottish neighbour of ours, Robert Burns.

      My own father was missing from my life, and only became part of it again when I was grown up. I’ll come to that. But it meant that Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. Brett was one of those cool 1970s people who were into guitars and everything that went with the music scene. I’ve got his name – Assange – an unusual one, which comes from Mr Sang, or ah-sang in Cantonese: his great-great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate. He ended up on Thursday Island and married a local girl and moved to Queensland. The name was Europeanised to escape the rampant discrimination against the Chinese.

      When I look back to these people, I see a group of families who moved around Australia from crisis to comfort, and mother’s story, and mine, was little different. My mother divorced Brett Assange when I was nine. He had been good to me, and was good in general, but not so good to himself, and the end of their relationship represents the end of a kind of innocence in my life.

      My stepfather’s place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell. My mother met him as a result of some cartooning work she was doing for Northern Rivers College of Education. I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm, which at the time I considered as proof that he was born in Australia in the early 1960s, though these inoculations might have been common elsewhere as well. From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us.

      I was opposed to him from the start. Perhaps that’s normal, for a boy to resist a man like that, or any man, in fact, who appears to be usurping his father or stepfather. Leif didn’t live with us, though my mother must have been besotted with him at first. But whatever her feeling for him was, it didn’t last. She would see him off, but he had this ability to turn up and pretend it was otherwise. Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him. We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realisation that he had found us. He’d suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn’t about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.

      We had moved again, in about 1980, to this house on a nice stretch of the northern coast of New South Wales, about fourteen miles inland. It was an avocado and banana plantation gone to seed and we rented this property. I remember tying my kite to one of the fence-posts and watching the green light coming through the banana leaves. It was all a bit like a gothic novel set in the tropics, and Leif, I suppose, was Heathcliff in shorts and thongs, coming back like some dark force. My mother became pregnant by him and, seeing the possible impact of my opposition, he tried at first to be reasonable, pointing out that he was now the father of my brother and that my mother wanted him around. ‘But if you ever don’t want me around,’ he said, ‘then I’ll leave immediately.’ He wanted to stay with us, and did, for a time, but I was conscious of wanting to look after my mother and the baby. She had mastitis, and I nursed her through a fever. I nursed her with orange juice. It was very dark around that house at night, with the moon lighting the way, and there was this tremendous feeling of stillness and isolation.

      My mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn’t my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother’s father and everything. But a time came, at that plantation house, when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn’t known adults could lie. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened.

      Nomadism suits some people; it suits some people’s situations. We just kept moving because that’s what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find a house there. Simple as that. Except that the moving in these years, because of Leif, had a degree of hysteria attached, and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear. It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called ‘The Family’. On reflection, I can now see