A Memoir 1974. My first escape. When I was seven I was in a government boys home called Brougham. Brougham was in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra on the corners of Nelson and Wallis Streets. I stayed in Brougham for about three years. At any time there might be fifty or so orphans or unwanted boys…

A Memoir 1981 When I was fourteen I lived in a large deep storm water drain for a while. It’s a little bit embarrassing to say that because it conjures up images of a rat type person. I didn’t want to go back to my government-supplied foster mother’s house because I just felt…

A Memoir. — When I was fourteen a man wanted to rape me and kill me. Then I got caught urinating on a public barbecue. It was 81' or early 82'. Sometime before I turned fifteen the government placed me with a lady who I will call Marylynn. Marylynne was a foster carer. I think she was a professional one because she took in a few wayward kids. …

Some mornings I try to remember my world as it was. — Some mornings if I’m awake I go outside just on dawn and I stand there. I can smell the grass. I tilt my head most times and try to smell what’s on the breeze. You know that slight cool breeze that runs ahead of the sun at dawn? I want…

I wrote this in 2008 for a short story competition and it got first out of seventy something entries. Personally, I think the title may have gotten it over the line. — The sight of the van with its amateur psychedelic artwork took his mind back to the days when he was a young hitch-hiker wandering the country. Such vans had been a dime a dozen back then and every hitch-hiker on the road wanted to catch a ride in one. …

You Are Being Deceived. When Putin entered Ukraine The United States Defense Department said he would overrun Ukraine in 36 days or less. They were right. He is prolonging the conflict. He moves, then draws back. He has prepared for thirty years. He is not bogged down by opposing forces. It is a ruse. …

In 1999 or so, I was drunk and missing my brother who had died years before. I wrote this. I am not a poet. — Where is my ending? Tell me what it will be. It walks always silently beside me, and yet is never in sight. How will I fall? And what will fall as a last fatal lot for me? Could I die in vain, and will I be slain, When I fade…

Poor Will cut his head off with a train. — When I was seven years old, I was in a boy’s home called Brougham in Sydney, New South Wales. It was late March 1974. There were anywhere between thirty and fifty boys there then, but I don’t know how many there were, exactly. On my seventh birthday, my mother came…

When I was sixteen the government let me go, but not before they locked me in an old convict cell where I had really bad flashbacks of spiders and other creepy crawlies. It was 1983. — On the day that they let me go from government homes, I was already sixteen. I had been taken from the juvenile corrections center by two detectives in a dark blue station wagon. It was about six-thirty in the morning. …