Writer

Jeffrey Jones stood at the bottom of our driveway and called me a choker. “If your pants were any higher you’d choke,” he said. “What’s wrong with ya? For Christ’s sake pull ‘em down a bit.”

I was stunned. I had always thought I wore my shorts at a reasonable height. After all, that was the height Mum told me to wear everything at. I didn’t even really know Jonesy, he was just a kid with hair as white as tooth-paste, who lived up the road and always looked like he was grumpy about something but didn’t know what. That didn’t make it any easier though. I can’t explain why I felt like I did. There was just this sickness in my tummy like I had gorged myself stupid on musk sticks and Easter eggs. I stood and stared straight at him, secretly hoping that if I smiled long enough he would say he was only joking. But he didn’t take kindly to this silence — his fists forcing down my shorts six inches as he barked in my ear, “ You’re a regular little poofter aren’t ya Choker?”

(Extract Taken from Stephen’s autobiographical Novel BITUMEN)

I discovered that day that I was cursed with one of the most merciless, mischievous, malicious maladies known to man. I was SENSITIVE. Which would have been fine if I had grown up in a family of mimes living under a bridge in Prague. But I grew up in a family of ten-pound-Poms wilting under the sun in one of the most remote and inhospitable places in Australia. A place called Paraburdoo where everyday day in summer the mercury soared above 42 degrees Celsius.

Add some back-story of a 16-year-old girl giving birth to a child out of wedlock. Putting that baby up for adoption. My adoptive parents coming to collect me from the Orphanage where they found me presented in the nicest thing they had and my father saying, “For Christs sake Jean get him out of that thing No son of mine is getting about in a pink dress” and any chance of leading a normal life was obliterated. A fractured sense of self, a mosaic sense of place, a nonexistent sense of belonging and a voice in my head that would never stop saying “Why?” meant there could only be one outcome. I was destined to spend large chunks of my life in small dark rooms tapping away at a keyboard in the hope that one day I would be understood.

Photo by Natasha Blankfield