(Setting the scene – recently two friends, Loz Lawrey and Keith Davis, sat on Keith’s verandah and recorded their conversation. They wanted to capture the ‘now’ of their interaction. That conversation, by agreement, ended up morphing into two separate and delightfully different audio interviews. Nothing was pre-planned and both friends had quite different styles of self-expression. The questions and responses were totally free-form and in the moment. Here is the transcript of Loz’s interview with Keith asking the questions and Loz responding to them … Keith’s interview will follow on Thursday.)

Loz, why music in your life, why not woodwork?

Actually Keith I do both. Look, I grew up with music. My family had a big record collection and I just have fond memories of lying on the living room floor. I received messages of all sorts from folk musicians like Peter Paul and Mary, and my parents were folk music fans at the time and they sort of passed that love on to me, and so it was listening to all those tunes and realising that music can tell stories and make you feel things, and I guess that’s where it all started.

Yes, well the other night over dinner you sang a song about India, which certainly brought up feelings/memories in my friend who had joined us for the meal (and who had travelled there). Even though I didn’t travel on that part of the hippie trail in the old days, I never got to India, your song did give me a feeling, a sense of what it was all about. Is that what you try to impart with your music, to evoke feeling in other people?

I heard my music can do that and have that impact. I don’t actually set out to do it. You write a song.You’re telling a story. Something’s triggered you to do it. Yes in my case, that song India was just remembering a road trip I’d done when I was 21 years old. I was living in London as a student and it was time to head back to Australia. And I decided I wanted to do some travelling on the way. And there was a well-known, what they called the hippie trail, a well-known route from England through the Middle East to India, that many hippies and vagabonds used to follow at the time. And I heard a lot about it while I was living in London and became more and more interested in following that route.

And at the same time I was trying to find my own place in the world and I was in a sense on a spiritual search. I’d already figured out Christianity somewhat, And I’d had an interest in other religions. I’d actually read up a bit about Buddhism and I was interested in what religions had to offer, in terms of revelations about human existence and our place on the planet and our place in the universe in a sense. And I read a book called Be Here Now, and I think I’ve told you about that, written by an American who went to India and really had his mind blown by the change in culture and the focus on spirituality that you find in countries like India, particularly in India, where it’s a greater part. It’s a much less materialistic place than the western world I’d grown up in, you know, Australia, England.

And what’s interesting, you said your family was a diplomatic family.

Yeah, that’s right.

So you’re exposed from an early age to travel, different cultures, different ways of thinking?

That’s right. That’s right in a way. We lived in Washington for three years when I was very young, when I was a baby, and we would periodically come back to Australia, but my father was posted to other countries, after Washington it was Indonesia, he was working in the embassy in Jakarta for a couple of years, and then we went back to Australia again, and then after that France for four years, and in every posting he sort of rose through the ranks in a sense. And once we’d been back from France, I had just done my first year of high school by then.

So we came back for a year to Canberra, and I went to a public school there, and then he was posted again, he got his first ambassadorial post posting to Cairo. And that’s the point where I was put into boarding school, because the advice at the time was that you don’t take your kids, you put them in boarding school. So I spent the next four years in a boarding school in Canberra.

And … Was it a secular or…?

No, well it was a Church of England boarding school, it was … what we’d now call an Anglican boarding school, and the religion was definitely part of it, I mean we had chapel every morning and evening, quite a brief session, and we had to endure an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, every Sunday, every day of chapel, and hymn singing, and services, and listening to endless sermons and so forth. But it was just, you know, to the kids, it was just part of the wallpaper in a sense, it was just how things were done, and it wasn’t, you know… I mean I was slightly intrigued by it all, but never felt part of it.

In fact my parents were non-religious, and I actually had to go and get baptised to actually… to be accepted in the school, and I’ve never forgotten this afternoon, going to this chapel with my mother and her standing there rolling her eyes, well… well this chap threw water on me and mumbled the various things, and then declared me baptised at the end of the process, you know.

You do strike me as a secular man, perhaps a spiritual man, but not a
religious man.

I’ve always seen religion as something ultimately evil, if I dare say that, because of the way young people are brainwashed by their parents to accept a certain world view, you know, involving worshipping a deity and judging others. It’s that judgemental side of religion I really hate, we’re called non-believers, or considered lesser, or other. And I do consider myself a spiritual person because I spend a lot of my life trying to understand my own essence.

And yet I am a secular person because I do not subscribe to any creed or faith, you know. I really believe we’re all on our own search and on our own journey, and we all come to our own conclusions, and hopefully we all develop a lifestyle that reflects our core perspective, if you like. And ultimately, I just think human beings have an amazing capacity and potential to, well, I mean, I don’t understand science but I am amazed at scientists and their ability to analyse the universe.

I’m not putting this very well, but in myself, I know I’ve always wanted completion, I was obsessed with it from a young age, from leaving school, partly because I felt a bit lost. I’ve always wanted to find some sort of completion, and then over the years, through reading about Buddhism and so on, I realised there’s a concept of self-realisation that’s out there. There’s a path one can pursue to actually realise and achieve that. And I guess in my own way, I’ve been trying to do that.

What that is, I mean, I have no real vision of, does the world explode in blinding light? I don’t know. Do I become some super being? I doubt it very much. But to me, self-realisation or self-actualisation is really coming to peace with oneself, coming to know oneself, to feel an acceptance of oneself, and to banish self-doubt. I remember when Mahatma once said, I would rather have a bullet than a doubt in my mind. Because really, it’s that doubt that destroys us, our self-doubt, and the doubt that others inflict on us, through their judgement and the feedback they give us, or the criticism they use, you know.

And I guess what I aspire to in the world is to be a good person, a person who doesn’t harm others, who treats others with respect, basically.

Which leads me into another question. To you, what is love? What is your concept of what love is?

Well, that’s a big question! I grew up listening to a lot of pop songs about love, that’s for sure. And that kind of love is really about the love between men and women, or basically these days, you’d say, between two human beings. And yet, in a way, I feel like, before anyone can love, we have to learn to love ourselves. We can be love. We can feel love. Others can treat us with love, and we can feel that, and feel the warmth and the embrace of that. But I feel at the same time, we have to not love ourselves in some egotistical way, but come to understand ourselves. It’s only then we can really truly love others, and feel the love for others.

I guess, in a sense, it’s something we’re always developing a sense of, it is something we’re always working on because we’re always trying to understand each other. I’m still not defining love here. It’s a hard thing to define. We all know what it is. I really feel like they say love makes the world go round. In a way, there is something called love that is the kernel. It’s something that lies at the heart of human life, at the heart of our humanity. We have a capacity to feel love for others, to demonstrate love by how we treat them. As the song says, love is a wonderful thing. As much as we have light and dark, cold and hot, we also have love, and we have hate.

Where do you think hate comes from? What is the deep world that hate comes from?

It’s a deep well of ignorance, I believe. A black pit.

And how does hate develop in your opinion? I’ll circle back to political hate later.

It really develops through fear. Hate is really the other side of the coin to fear. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of difference, the type of fear behind classic racism, that hatred of people of other appearance or skin colour, hatred of other cultures. It’s all really founded in a lack of understanding.

We hear so often about people who have a fear of immigrants, and yet when the immigrants arrive and they get to know them, they realise they’re just like us. That’s why I’ve always felt that every school curriculum should have an overseas trip as part of it. Like kids should be sent overseas as part of their school education to experience other cultures that are different to if you live in a Western culture like Australia. A school trip to India, to the Middle East, to Indonesia, to Japan, to anywhere other than here. So the children can realise that it’s not all about us and our culture, that humans exist in many forms and have many varying societies around the globe.

And yet there’s a point where we are all the same, right at the essence of all of us. And that’s, I guess that’s what anyone in the spiritual search is seeking, you know, is that kernel, that inner truth.

That if we were all exposed to different cultures, different ways of being, that the level of judgement of the other would lessen?

It would lessen. Well that’s my personal belief, maybe wrong, but there’s a broadening
advantage to try. And I feel like the fact that my parents exposed me to all these different cultures, even in boarding school once a year I’d travelled to visit them at Christmas and I would land in Cairo and I would meet Arabic people and I would, I would get some understanding of their culture. I would see our servants fasting for Ramadan and I would learn what that was. And I would, you know, and my travels through the Middle East, that experience, it taught me a lot about the warmth of many of those cultures and the hospitality visitors receive, are greeted with. And I would come back to Australia and always feel a little bit sometimes like a stranger in a strange land.

You know, I did go back and live in London for a couple of years, but since that road trip from which I returned in 1974, I’ve really been in Australia since then, but I’ve never felt fully quite part of our culture here in one way, even though I speak with an Australian accent and so forth.

You almost beg this question. What time and place do you live in? What kind of world do you live in?

Well, I try to live in the present, totally in the present. I’m very bad at planning, looking ahead, you know. And really, I’ve really had an awareness ever since I read that book Be Here Now, which really, and the message of that book really was, life happens in this moment. In fact, I wrote a song about it on my last CD called Right Now, and it’s about how this is where life happens, right now, right here, and it’s never going to happen anywhere else. And John Lennon referred to this, that life’s what happens while you’re busy making other plans. We can think about the past, but it’s gone, It’s slipped through our fingers already. And the future’s an unrevealed secret that lies ahead. But we’re here in this moment where we both are sitting now, and we’re experiencing this moment, and this is where both our lives are happening, right now.

If you had to, which you don’t have to, but I’m asking you to, if you had to pick two people who have inspired you the most, who would they be?

That’s a really tough thing, because there are many people, and to say who’s inspired me the most, I would find it very hard to identify them.

Certainly, I did spend quite a few years following Prem Rawat, who used to be called Guru Maharaji, who taught me a lot about self-awareness and meditation and self-knowledge, and showed me techniques to meditate that have brought me much peace over the years, and helped me to accept life as it unfolds and accept myself and my role in it.

Do you think that we can actually inspire ourselves?

I guess so. That’s something I’ve never really thought about. I mean, inspiration can come from so many sources, I guess, from others, from experiences we have, from movies we see, you know, from songs we hear, from stories we’re told. From living we’ve done. I find that a tough one to answer, Keith. I’ve never really thought of how that I might have inspired myself.

Okay, I’ll circle back to the earlier question about hate, specifically political hate. Where does it come from?

You mean hating our political opponents?

Yes, to define it down a bit more, why in the current era do we have so many people who hate and cannot accept political difference?

Wow! Well, I think ignorance is a big part of it. I think inadequate education is a part of it. I think there are so many things that play into this. I think social media plays into it. I think as technology evolves and we rely more and more on it, there’s a diminishment of people’s ability to think critically. There’s an acceptance of shallow perceptions that are being shared and that we inflict on each other.

The lack of critical thinking, I think, is at the core of it. Because it’s really quite an amazing skill, and if one is able to do that, it’s a life-enhancing thing. But if you can’t think critically, you’re really living a more superficial life, where it gets harder to tell good from bad and see the true value of things. I think of what’s happening in America at the moment, and it seems that right at the core of the problems there, the lack of critical thinking and the possible potential of civil war, and the total tribal division between Republicans and Democrats, the way the country is split almost in two, and the inability of the two sides to even… You know, it’s becoming harder and harder for the both sides to even communicate.

Political hate is, as you say, it’s everywhere now, and there’s a resurgence in every country and it’s quite frightening, I find. There’s the rise of fascism that seems to be occurring globally, and the rise of these really narcissistic sociopathic autocrats who have no regard for either human life or the rule of law, or a sense of decency, the sense of decency that civil society requires as its foundation. Yeah, so political hate, political hate leads to war, does nothing to unite us, and yet, as someone who’s definitely on the left side, if we’re going to talk about polarised politics, I definitely am on the left, and there is always this great temptation to hate those on the right, mainly through a frustration that I simply struggle to understand their thinking. It’s as if there are two kinds in political terms, it’s as if there’s two kinds of human beings, and some are wired one way and some are wired another. And due to that there’s two different circuitries. it’s almost impossible to find common ground, because your world views are totally different, you know what I’m saying?

Yes. As you know Loz I’m known for quite happily going off on tangents. So … what is a question that you would like to ask of yourself?

That’s too hard. Yeah. Well, there is this one. The basic one is who am I and what am I meant to be doing in this lifetime, you know? If there was a creator, what would he or she want me to be doing? How would they want me to live? I mean, at the end of the day, I think our questions are answered by our own inner feelings. So, we resolve those questions within ourselves by a basic sense of right and wrong, I believe.

I mean, I have lingering regrets of having offended people at different times in my life, and now looking back at my age, I would dearly love to meet those people. I’ve tried to contact some through Facebook even, but simply cannot find some of them. They don’t seem to be on social media, but I’d love to meet up with them and apologise for the slight I inflicted on them at the time, you know? Because that has left a lingering sense of shame.

I remember in second-year high school, I got into a fight. One of the first kids who welcomed me to the school became a mate, and for some reason, one recess, and I put this down to teenage hormones, it’s a pretty weak excuse, I know, but we ended up in a fistfight, and I kind of punched him out. And as I drove off from school on my bicycle at the end of the day, someone shouted, good fight, mate! And all I felt was this cringing sense of shame, because I knew in myself that I had done it for bad reasons. I really had no…this guy had done nothing to deserve this. And it was a seminal experience for me, because it was a life-changing moment. These are the life-changing moments, I believe, when we make a terrible mistake and hopefully learn from it and change and modify our behaviour.

And there are moments when I’ve been rude to people, and wish I could take it back now. And yet I remember those things, because there aren’t that many of them, but they’re there. And yet at the same time, these are the things I believe that help us grow and mature. And I mean, I guess I see human life as a trajectory. We’re born into the planet, we come into this light, and then we’re subjected to everything. We can be lucky, we can be grow up in a family that’s loving and considerate, or we can be really unlucky and grow up in an abusive situation. And some of those situations can persist for years.

And I have to say, I’ve been lucky in my own way, and yet I’ve had my own struggles, such as being left in boarding school, which I didn’t find easy. But I feel at the end of the day, whatever we go through, we learn from, it informs our future behaviour. And hopefully, over time, we become better people and better able to treat others with decency and respect, you know? Which I think is really what lies at the core of the human condition and what it demands that we do.

People use the word humanity, meaning empathy, meaning decency, meaning respect for others, and a desire to include others. The word humanity has wonderful connotations. We speak of inhumanity as everything bad, everything evil. People describe Putin’s war on Ukraine as an inhumane venture, and clearly it is to anyone who has a love of humanity. How can some humans treat each other so inhumanely? It makes no sense to me, but history tells us it’s always happened.

And at the core of all that aggravation and warmongering and genocidal behaviour, I believe, is a lack of understanding. I mean, I also believe religions have a lot to answer for because they basically mess with people’s heads. I think of the Crusades and other wars of religion, and the atrocities that are committed in the name of the Lord or God or modernity, and I mean, at the end of the day, how do religions thrive? They thrive on ignorance.

I just remembered … I’m supposed to be asking some questions but I was quite happily getting lost in your discourse. Loz, I did read your humorous, really humorous article on The Australian Independent Media Network about flicking spuds at a photo of the Queen. So, are you a Monarchist or a Republican?

Well, I don’t know what the best model for a Republic is. The best model for organising society, but I’m definitely not a monarchist because I really think the idea of kings and queens and people being set apart as being special in some way or superior in some way is crazy, basically. You know, I mean, we’ve always had kings and queens and emperors, and today we have one of the autocrats … it’s pretty obvious Trump’s always wanted to be a king and Putin’s behaving like he thinks he is one, and they managed to weasel themselves into positions where they nearly get away with it.

But I believe in egalitarianism. I believe in equal rights, no one is superior to anyone else. And that’s apart from all these things that give us an appearance of difference such as our level of education. At the end of the day, people are people, you know, any race, any culture, any indigenous group. We’re all part of the same human race, and we are all equal. And I wish societies around the world reflected that because most don’t. Most have social structures that put some at the bottom and some at the top and others in between. And, I mean, the very concept of middle class, governments are always trying to please the middle class, and then other more right-wing governments seem to favour the rich. I mean, there’s so much that plays into all this, our world order and the social structures that different countries have that are really a vestige of their past history, and an outcome of past events.

As a musician, as a singer, a songwriter, from your point of view, what’s the value of music in our lives?

Well, well, I think music’s a touchstone. It evokes feelings. It brings up feelings that are already latent within us, and it triggers them, hopefully good feelings often. It’s something like smell you know. Music can touch us. Songs tell stories, and we need stories. Stories are the way we share our understandings, our knowledge, our culture, whatever that is. It’s how we learn music. Music inspires dance, inspires smiles. Well, there’s just something about music. It’s another way of communicating, I believe.

Interviewers always try to have the last say but let’s turn that one on its head. The last say in this interview is your say.

Well, I’m not sure I really have any big say. I’m just another little ant on the global ant heap, you know. I guess I’d love to see more empathy in the world. I’d love to see more coming together, more unity. I hate, I just hate what people are doing to each other and what evil people are inflicting on others around the world. I hate the fact that we’re unable to solve issues of hunger and starvation in some countries.

I’m very worried about the world and about our race and our treatment of the planet. Sometimes I feel we’re on a terrible course that can, in no way, be good. I think there’s a sense, a sense at large that people have, that the world is in a terrible state. And yet we are the perpetrators and the instigators of that. What we do, everything we do, every tin can we throw out, every plastic bag we drop into the ocean does harm. And yet it’s hard to live in a way that doesn’t have those side effects, you know. I guess I just hope for a world where we get it together before it’s too late.

(Setting the scene: Two friends. Keith Davis, Loz Lawrey. A verandah. A conversation. This is a transcript of an audio recording, ums and ahs included. The view from the verandah was of a wonderful slow sunset over the Mapleton Ranges. The content of the interview was unscripted and in the moment. Listening to Loz Lawrey is a companion interview to this one. Note: some difficult issues, as well as some lighter issues, are discussed in this interview).

I first became aware of you Keith when you wrote an article about the job industry for The AIMN and I realised he’s someone who’s lived on both sides of the fence in the sense that he’s worked for Job Centres and he’s also been a recipient of Centrelink benefits and been unemployed and at the mercy of the system if you like. That’s when I realised what a great writer you are and I’d like to start with that. What led you to writing?

Surprisingly enough, given my background, a Nun led me to writing. Initially, this is when I was quite young, six or seven years old in the orphanage and this particular woman really did have a love of children and a love of fostering whatever nascent abilities they had and she saw in me a very curious mind, and rather than suppress it, she chose to feed it. And she introduced me initially to the joy of reading and essentially she was saying, read first, absorb, learn as much as you can. Now she did not use these exact words, it’s the feeling it evoked in me. And then, learn to speak with your own voice.

Ha, that led me down a couple of trails and I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. And I really started to take writing seriously when I had this crazy idea of publishing a hippie newspaper in the 90s and I was building a house at the time, didn’t really have a brass rahzoo and I thought, oh, why are you doing this, do you realise you are going to have to write most of the copy, I couldn’t afford to pay anyone very much.

And so I started to write articles and at that stage, the French were letting off their huge bombs in the Pacific. So I wrote about things like that and through that whole process, for various reasons, I lived a life riven with self-doubt. But I did think, hey, here’s something I love doing and at least the majority of people who’ve read what I’ve written say, you’re OK at it. So I’ve stuck with it, and I love the fact that in this modern era, small voices, our voices can get out there and this part doesn’t come from me, I’ve been assessed as having a reasonable level of intelligence, a very impaired intelligence as it happens, but intelligence nonetheless.

Impaired in what way?

Oh … childhood stuff.

And I thought, well, OK, if you can add two and two and write one sentence that makes sense, then for fuck’s sake just add two and two and write a sentence that makes sense. And that generally has been my motivation. With writing, it’s like that old trope about failure. You’ve got to fail to learn to succeed, right?

I’ll write 100 lemons of articles, but the sweet spot is when you get one that hits, one that says something that is understood, that is responded to, but apart from all that deeper stuff, writing is like woodwork for me, writing is like hobbies that other people have, writing is both a love and a hobby, you become better, you question what you write, you look at what you write, you try to improve.

I’ll never be an author type person, I’m too tangental, I get dragged off in different directions, and part of that is autism, part of it is, my mind is just so curious, it’ll focus on something for a period, but it’ll bump another issue and I’ll focus on that. So I do find when I’m writing, I have to rein myself in, I have to think, stay on topic!

So you’ve referred to having a degree of autism, when did you, when was that revealed to you or when was that concept floated?

Yes, it was confirmed for me late in life, the diagnosis was late in life. For me, as strange as it sounds, it was a joy to finally find out.

Why is that, because it helped to make sense of your experiences?

It helped to make sense of the fact that throughout my life, I did not feel that I belonged, this life felt very strange to me, I could not understand other people. I did not understand why this world appeared to work the way it does work, and to my mind, getting on is so easy, love is so easy, hate and division are hard work. And so I couldn’t understand why the prevalence of hate and division, the prevalence of it, I couldn’t understand that.

(Silence …)

Um, I know enough about self now, to know that silence is OK. Right, I have a view of the world, it is shared by a number of people, it is not shared by many. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but finally, after many, many years, finally, after some grounding psychotherapy work, I now understand that my view of the world is valid, sure it comes through a different lens, sure, I have had to counteract the rewiring of my brain from the childhood abuse. And I now, not so much understand perhaps, I simply accept, my view is OK.

So you are referring to childhood abuse, and you have mentioned being in an orphanage, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be in the orphanage and what the impact of those years was on you?

Isn’t it funny, many people think there is single cause, either your family broke up or there was an abusive family member or things like this. Now everybody comes from a different experiential background. I ended up in a Catholic orphanage, because the Japanese, love them as I do, dropped bombs on Port Moresby Harbour in 1942, and a particular sailor on the M.V. MacDuhi happened to be my father, and the war experiences he went through, not only the bombing and sinking of the MacDuhi, but also his later war experiences with the Americans, because he drove landing craft, and the later era of that Pacific war changed him forever. He saw such horror, such inhumanity, and it changed him.

It seared out of him a softness, he lost softness and caring, he didn’t want to, but it was the result of what he saw, what he experienced, what he felt. So that in the 1950s when he had children, he could not develop the necessary sense of responsibility, so as soon as anything became a bit difficult, as it does, often does, in marital relationship, he ran away. The fact that my mother ran away, as well, completes the picture. Found myself at five years old in the orphanage.

Right, so you found yourself in an orphanage abandoned by your parents. And how many years was that period, and what were your experiences there?

Oh. (Silence …)

Do you not want to talk about any of that? It’s just that I know it’s there, so I’m bringing it up, you know, you deal with that as deep as you want to.

Yeah. Um, OK.

I was placed in the orphanage at five years old. I came out of the orphanage at 11 years old, seven years, and I didn’t know when I first took those steps on the verandah in that orphanage, what a hell of a rocket had just been shot up my arse, I didn’t have any feeling of that, I was just a lonely little kid, but I felt the rocket over the next seven years, and the experiences generally were not very good.

What do you mean by the rocket? The rocket of, you were abused?

Yeah, mental cruelty, rape, all of that was a constant, a lack of love that children need, oh there was no love, there was no love. Now I will refine that, I did feel love from one Nun, and that’s the Nun I mentioned who fostered me into reading, but as for the rest, as for the visiting priests, as for the so-called loving Catholic families we were farmed out to on holidays …

Where more abuse occurred?

Oh, yes.

Really?

Hmm, ever been locked in a chicken coop? Hmm, remember I was young, ever had a horrible old man tell you he loved you as he molested you? Now remember this is me now at 70 years old talking, yes, for most of my life all of that was a unique experience, oh god it only happened to me, I realise now how prevalent it is in our society, I wonder what is wrong with our society, that these things not only happen, continue to happen, hmm, equally you could argue a similar case for what happens to women in our society,

Yes.

Yes. But generally, as far as the orphanage goes, it shut down my spirit, it shut down my interest in life, it showed me what anger truly is, which is why in my life, I cannot express anger easily, and don’t want to.

Showed you what anger truly is. You mean your own anger or the anger you experienced from others?

It showed me the warped deviated anger of deeply frustrated and religious people.

So, in a sense, you share my dislike of religion?

I do not dislike religion, I dislike what people do with it, I mean I have never had a concept of God, I cannot understand a concept of needing a God, you know I look around, I see the planet I live on, I see the bottle brush over there, I see the beauty of the night sky, I see the Milky Way and I think well is that not enough, why do we have to attach myths to all that? There is a silly little part of me, because I have a Celtic background, that occasionally mutters nonsense like I adhere to the Celtic gods of river earth and fire, but that is just fun for me, it is not serious, okay.

So seven years in the orphanage, and you came out around the age of eleven, what followed from that, you went into foster homes I think, you went to school, and how are you feeling at this time ? You’ve just come through years of abuse and mistreatment and emotional cruelty, and how did you move on from that, and how did you, I know this is a hard question, how did you process that, and because I see in front of me a seventy year old man who is, who exudes wisdom, warmth, empathy and respect for others, and I am amazed that that is what I see when I know so much, when I know a certain amount about your history, and that kind of history often affects people negatively for the rest of their lives, would you mind sharing a bit about that, about sort of from the orphanage on, and how you process life and learn to move on and grow?

I came out of the orphanage like a deadened lump of lead, I had no feeling within myself, I had no joy, I did not know what love is or could be, I certainly knew what hate is, I knew what anger is, you know we never figured out over the years, whether my inability to read faces was caused by trauma, or whether it was simply a natural autistic trait, you know that has never been figured out, but when I left the orphanage, the simple things in life meant something to me, now as a ward of the state, you had nothing, nothing, nothing that was your own, no space that was your own, no protective space that was your own, and when I came out of the orphanage, the state gave you a little kind of cardboard port, and in that wrapped in cellophane, 1960s cellophane, there’s a pair of little sandals and a shirt and a pair of shorts, I thought I was fucking king muck, here I was, I have something that is mine.

Then I landed, you know the state organised, well in concert with the Sisters of Mercy, which is a bit of an oxymoron that one, I was placed with a foster family. They weren’t good, they weren’t bad, they were in the end perhaps maliciously indifferent, and so I came from a background where, this is not like boohoo stuff, you get over all that pretty quick, I wasn’t wanted by my parents, I was abused in the home, by people who were meant to protect you …

A betrayal?

Oh. A betrayal. We could spend some time in that space.

(Silence …)

So, I ended up in another situation where I wasn’t wanted, and all I can say about that is I wasn’t physically abused in that situation, I simply endured it, and I couldn’t wait to gain my freedom, and when I did gain my freedom, when I finished high school, and I had no idea who I was, I had no idea how damaged I was, I simply thought that life was this dark place, that was my view of how I felt, and that was probably my view of life until I reached my early 60s, when I totally fell apart. My ability to mask pain and horror, my ability to pretend to fit into this world I didn’t feel part of, finally became too much, finally my psyche collapsed.

But since leaving school you’ve had marriages and relationships, were they impacted by your previous experiences?

I think many survivors would identify with this. Every relationship experience, whether it be with my children, partners, friends, employers, were affected by my past experiences.

Just as your life was impacted by your father’s experiences?

Experiences. Yes. You know the idea, if you break a leg, try to explain how it feels to another human being, they can empathise, you bet they can however they still don’t know how your broken leg feels. They can’t. And so, to be a child, exposed to not one or two instances of sexual abuse and mental cruelty, but to years of it, you, not only can you not vocalise it, but you couldn’t explain to someone if you tried, and even if you managed to explain it, they wouldn’t understand, and even in my early adult years, I knew that, you know.

I started to question things like, hey Bozo, you have some intelligence, yet you cannot complete anything in the area of achievement, you come in with great enthusiasm, but then your energy just sinks and you collapse. And that has been a recurring theme throughout my life, yes, in whatever I’ve tried, whether it be marriage, whether it be in the work sphere, whether it be trying to maintain a wonderful relationship with my wonderful children, I lose the ability to communicate.

So, you hit the, you reach the age of around 60, and you hit a wall, and a breakdown happened, and how did you get through that, and you’ve obviously come through and survived that, and you’re here with us now. Do you mind talking a bit about that, and how you’ve moved on from that, or?

Hmm.

We both agreed together to do a very open/honest interview, I will not now say no.

OK. Yeah. Here we go.

You never get over it, I never handled it, and the best thing I ever did was never handle it, because it led to me falling apart. It led me into a couple of sojourns in acute mental health wards over the last two years. It led to a total demolition of self, a feeling of self.

It led then, now some psychiatrists and psychologists shouldn’t be in the job, it’s just a job for them, but boy did I meet a couple of extremely beautiful people, and as part of the legal process I went through for redress against the Catholic Church, I met a, I was flown down to Sydney to meet a leading forensic psychiatrist, wonderful man. First thing he said to me, he saw my hope, my yearning, my please change this and make me feel better. First thing he said was, I cannot heal you, you cannot be healed, but, but, and see people see that attendant but as a bad thing, and sometimes it is, but that particular but had incredible value, but I can almost guarantee you can feel happier in your life, and it was quite a big step for me to understand, accept and roll with the fact that I could not be healed, the legacies are permanent.

So a shock, a shock in one way to hear that in the end?

No, it wasn’t, in the end it was a relief, so all this striving, all this hoping, all this trying, all these weird and wonderful therapeutic ways could finally be let go, oh, okay, I can’t be healed, but what’s left, how do I live with what’s left? Rather than focusing on what is wrong with me, right, yeah.

Is that like a change from a seeing things in a negative light to a positive light, or encourage you to develop a new way of approaching things?

No. It runs a lot deeper than positive negative, yeah, it bites into that level of what truly is truth, what truly is truth, and it was truthful, right, so I’ve, and truth is always helpful, since that period I’ve been dealing in truth, been dealing with truth, through the feelings, truth about legacies, and understanding I cannot go back and change a thing.

That’s right.

There are certain aspects of how my brain works that cannot be undone, there are certain aspects of how my brain works that can be changed, and probably sounds weird, I am so glad I fell apart, I am so glad I ended up in, now I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone to do it, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a method to seek an understanding of truth, but those times in the mental health wards were invaluable, incredibly invaluable, and I’m glad it happened, you know, people regret, oh, I couldn’t have a life, I fell apart, no, I’m glad I did, because it would not have cut through, all the protections I’d thrown in front of myself, all the masking.

Oh look, here’s the happy hippie. He drives a kombi. Load of bullshit, I didn’t know what I was doing, I couldn’t feel, you know, and I often laugh about that period of my life, because I can’t smoke dope, it just brought up all the searing memories. Visually I looked the part, long blonde hair, you know, well he’s either a surfie or a hippie, he’s one of them, he’s got a kombi. But I never felt the part, it was my effort to fit in.

This is over those years before you’ll break down in your 60s?

Oh yeah this is through my 20s, 30s, and the, I just hit a period of thinking, I don’t know who I am, I just don’t know, I have no feeling of self.

Would you say that happiness is a state that’s related to our ability to accept ourselves in our past and who we are in a sense, or not, can you speak to that?

As best I can, I would say that my past has ruled the majority of my life, I’ve lived my life, and have not had the ability to live my life to the full in a sense, it was very much restricted. In fact I did not have the ability to live in the present, I lived in the past, I spent my time where I lived seeking high places to live, because that way you could see predators approaching now, I well know cognitively, part of my brain said, oh come on, seriously, most people wish you no harm, but the deep rooted stuff ruled you, and so I’ve lived my life full of fear, looking over my shoulder continuously, not even recognising the fact that there’s nothing there, it’s because the brain is such a malleable beast, there’s actually nothing wrong with my brain, very early on it learnt, I have to protect this human being I’m part of, and it protected me well in the sense that it shut me off, it made me aware, constantly aware, in fact hyper-aware, for most of my life, and, I mean ..

A human state of hyper-awareness means you’re never totally relaxed?

You’re always in fight or flight, always, it’s a perpetual state, but the human system cannot sustain that for a lifetime, eventually it crashes, which is why now I say I’m glad I crashed, I’m glad I fell apart, I’m glad I was, now, you know, maybe there should be a trigger warning at the start of this interview, but I’m glad I became suicidal, I’m glad I had to explore all that and live it, and be searched by security guards to not so much protect other people from me, but to protect me from me. It is such a juxtaposition on the one level to live such an empathetic life, to love, to be that way, and yet on a very equal and complementary level, to live your life feeling, you have no value, you have no worth, and I don’t forget you’re speaking to me at 70 years old.

How does the world look now, how is life now?

The world doesn’t look good or bad to me, it depends on the day, the day tells me what life is like, today is a good day, I’m sitting here with a friend, looking at the birds and the trees and looking at the bottle brush, so life is good.

You know, I’ve lived most of my life with a, in the old days they talked about a tape running through your head and you had to unpack the onion and get to all the different layers and you know, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff, well it hasn’t quite been like that to me, I’ve simply had a 35mm film running in front of my eyes for most of my life, and it’s a replication of all the horror events, right, and see eventually, it’s not like I have to go into deep memory to dig it up, it’s always there, for a non-religious man I’m quite happy to say thank christ that after the year of intense psychotherapy, the film is gone, what a blessing, what a blessing.

So life does get better, life gets happier, the damage doesn’t go away, but your ability to deal with it improves.

The process of recovery is endless?

Oh. Umm. I have an opinion that not many people would agree with, there is no such thing as recovery, you know recovery is a false sell, no, it’s like grief …

Because you can’t undo the past, you cannot undo it, you cannot unexperience?

Yes. Exactly. Grief. I often think of the issue of grief, people tell you, oh it gets better and you move on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all I say to all that is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, the grief never leaves, but you learn to deal with it a bit better, that is the truth of it, not I’ve moved on etc etc.

Let me ask you a nice question, one that you asked me. What is love?

What is love? Interesting question. I love women, I’m of that type. Love is a heart that opens up and shows itself, that’s love, You know what is hate? It is a closing of the heart and a closed heart like for whatever reason I don’t know, a closed heart seems to have a predilection for attacking an open heart. I don’t know why that is, just a appears to be the way it is. I think love is a wonderful thing, I don’t have a romantic view of love, I think love if I had to define it right down, love is truth and care combined, extended towards another human being, love can’t be manufactured. It is something we can experience, at 70 I can say it can be experienced and I am experiencing it now in my life.

Keith Davis, thank you so much.

Welcome, Loz, now it’s time for that Shiraz!

By Loz Lawrey  

Throughout the current Coalition government’s term in office, social activist groups and even business leaders have been calling for the abysmally low Newstart (now JobSeeker) payment of $565.70 per fortnight to be raised to at least a minimum level that affords recipients the ability to meet their basic needs: food, shelter and the necessities of life.

In real terms, the rate of Newstart has been frozen at its current punitive level since 1994, as this 2016 article in The Conversation explains.

For years, successive governments have allowed this social justice issue to fester as one of the elephants in Australia’s room (like climate change inaction, the inhumane treatment of indigenous Australians and asylum seekers in detention… etc… ).

A religious obsession with neoliberalism has always strangled the Coalition’s ability to acknowledge and respond effectively to the real-world issues that our nation confronts.

That cultish ideology reframes every debate in money market terms: the economy becomes pre-eminent and over-arching while society, where the actual real people reside with their very real need for assistance and support from a government that claims to govern in their name. Trickle down rules.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has, however, thrown the economic and social cards into the air and forced  the Morrison government to deliver what society required: an immediate all-encompassing (more or less) protective response to both the pandemic itself and its resultant economic damage and unemployment.

Suddenly, the Coalition’s tiresome judgmental weasel statements such as “a fair go for those who have a go” sound like the screech of fingernails on blackboard.

At times like these, what choice do conservative governments have? Knocked off their ideological perches and pedestals, they embrace a form of socialism. And throw some money around in the public interest.

This irony has not escaped many, but what choice do they have?  Australia is, after all, a social democracy and we expect our governments to step up and act to assist us all in times of crisis.

Although it has been widely reported that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic the Morrison government has “doubled” the fortnightly JobSeeker payment, this is in fact not the case. The payment remains at $565.70, or a mere $40.40 per day.

It is the provision of a separate additional “coronavirus supplement” of $550.00 per fortnight that has, for practical purposes, “doubled” the payment, bringing it to $1,115.70 or $79.69 per day.

Why not just increase the JobSeeker payment? Why the separate ”coronavirus supplement”? It’s simple. In September 2020, once eradication or sufficient suppression of the virus has been achieved and things return, to some extent at least, to “normal” (we hope), the Coalition intends to jettison the supplement and return JobSeeker payments to the previous punitive and insufficient Newstart level of a mere $40.40 per day.

Yes, they are indeed that bloody-minded.

What the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted is this: the government has only succeeded in keeping pre-pandemic unemployment payments at such a low level because charities have taken up the slack and unemployed Australians were an easily-disregarded minority.

Come September, those charities expect a surge in demand they will be unable to meet should payments revert to previous levels. Let’s not forget that vast numbers of newly unemployed Australians may never work again and may require ongoing assistance.

The arrival of the pandemic and the need for a Keynesian “pump-priming” response forced the Morrison government to raise the Jobseeker payment to a level that actually worked in the real world.

It’s one thing to demonise, marginalise and underpay unemployed Australians when they constitute a small percentage of the population, but quite another to treat the hordes of citizens who’ve lost their livelihoods in the past three months with similar contempt.

Under the Coalition, the JobSeeker payment has been kept deliberately low, an inadequate support payment deliberately designed to punish those unable (or, in the government’s twisted view, unwilling) to find employment.

When only a small percentage of the population is unemployed, they become easy targets for demonisation by others.

When most Australians are enjoying the good times provided by a healthy economy, for those left behind the “dole bludger” myth is easily maintained, stoked as it is by commercial media and conservative politicians.  With the arrival of COVID-19 that myth collapsed.

The millions of working Australians who’ve lost their livelihoods due to the effects of the pandemic cannot be tarred with the brush of laziness that the Morrisons of this world have always applied to those in need.

In Australia in 2018-19, the “poverty line” (measured as 50% of median income) was $457.00 per week for a single adult or $65.28 per day.

The poverty line represents the income level below which an individual is considered “poor” and unable to provide for their daily needs. Clearly $40.40 per day represents a level of support that leaves recipients living in a state of constant stress and anxiety, struggling to pay for rent, bills and food.

It should be a given that, in a civilised society, even one suffering from the current pandemic-induced upheavals, that social support payments for the unemployed and disadvantaged should never be allowed to fall below the poverty line.

That line represents the cutoff point, the social Plimsoll line below which loss of dignity, misery and marginalisation become the lived experience of  those forced to rely on welfare.

By adding a coronavirus supplement to JobSeeker, the government raised the payment to a level that sits just above the poverty line, a level at which the many recently unemployed could manage to pay their rent, feed their kids and survive these most difficult times.

Surely this is the level at which it should have already been set? The Coalition’s creation of the Corona virus supplement was a clear admission that payment levels to date had been woefully inadequate. It also helped them avoid howls of anger and outrage from the most recently unemployed.

So what will happen come September? Will the pandemic still be with us? Will the need for lockdowns and social distancing still be the dominant force?

Whatever the answer, the JobSeeker allowance must not be allowed to revert to pre-pandemic levels.

We must ensure that future governments focus on job creation rather than implementing a regime that punishes those with no job.

COVID-19 has taught many formerly working Australians a harsh lesson about unemployment: that dole bludger can easily be you. And you can find yourself in the dole queue overnight.

We can only hope that in the future our society and its governments will show more compassion and understanding to those of us who, at one time or another in their lives, need help.

Trade unionists, social activist groups, charities and individuals are now coming together to endorse the simple claim for a Living Income, in other words a minimum social support payment that allows recipients to provide for themselves and continue their quest for employment with the dignity that all members of society deserve.

The Living Incomes For Everyone (LIFE) campaign is organising via Facebook to ensure $1,100 per fortnight becomes the absolute minimum payment below which no-one should be forced to struggle for survival.

This national campaign is receiving more endorsements from groups and individuals each day as we head for the government’s cutoff date of 27 September. The list of participating organisations is growing longer and longer and is regularly updated here.

The grassroots LIFE campaign is people-driven.

You can find a summary of its demands here.

To participate, go to the Living Incomes For Everyone Facebook page.

To find out more and to hear speakers from some of the collaborating organisations, you can attend the official online launch of the LIFE campaign on 21 July at 7.30pm here.