they were involved in the theatre and movie business which is go to locations, set it up, bring all your people, get it all together, get ready for the production launch and – bang – you go.”
The adult Assange became a shape-shifter: frequently changing hairstyles, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. One day he was an English country gentleman; the next an Icelandic fisherman; or an old woman. Even his role at WikiLeaks seemed unclear. Was he a leaker, a publisher, a journalist, or an activist? When the show was over he would move on.
The Assanges lived for some of the time in an abandoned pineapple farm on Horseshoe Bay. Christine recalled slashing her way to the front door with a machete. She also claimed to have shot a taipan – a deadly snake – in the water tank. Royce Dalliston, who still lives on Magnetic Island, recalls Christine used to swim and paint under the banyan trees. The other boys would steal waste cooking fat from hotels, and smear it on the roof of the jetty’s sheds to go sliding into the bubbling swell whenever the ferry pulled in from Townsville. Dalliston and the bigger boys called Assange a “raspberry” because the “scrawny little blond-haired kid” seemed too scared to go jetty jumping. But Assange told the
By 1979 Christine was again living close to her parents in Lismore, in New South Wales, where local farmers and the hippies co-existed in a state of mutual incomprehension. Nimbin – the scene of the Age of Aquarius, a 1973 hippy music festival – was just up the road. She had a long swirly skirt and drove a green Volkswagen Beetle. Local hippies successfully stopped the logging of one of the area’s surviving virgin rainforests at Terania. It was the first victory for Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Old footage from the march shows a young woman wearing dungarees trudging along a track, together with a group of bearded activists and guitar-strummers. She looks remarkably like Assange’s mother.
Christine did not want her son to have a conventional Lismore schooling. Lismore was a traditional place, with women banned in the local club from leaving the carpet area, apart from on dance nights. Jennifer Somerville, whose children went to a small rural primary with Assange, recalls: “She was a little bit alternative, and she didn’t believe in terribly formal education. She apparently decided that it would be best if Julian went to a little country school.”
His two-year stint there was one of his most sustained periods of education; according to his own account, during his childhood he attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” Assange later said. Classmates at the school in the hamlet of Goolmangar remember a quiet but sociable boy. His exceptional intelligence and blond, shoulder-length hair marked him out.
One former classmate, Nigel Somerville, says there were “always puppets hanging out of his window … His mum was very artistic. I had a kite she’d made for many years. It was very colourful and had big eyes on it with oranges and reds and blues.” He and Julian would talk about crystal radios and experiment by pulling things apart. Amid the laid-back anti-establishment times, there were paranoid moments. In Adelaide, when Assange was four, his mother’s car had been menacingly pulled over, having left a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The police officer told her: “You have a child out at two in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady.”
Christine’s marriage was now also running into problems. Brett Assange, who ran the puppet theatre with her, was a good and close stepfather. Assange would in later life often quote sayings “from my father” such as, “Capable, generous men do not create victims: they nurture them.” Brett Assange would later describe his stepson as “a very sharp kid” with a “keen sense of right and wrong”. But according to transcripts of a court hearing Brett was, at the time, “plagued with difficulties with alcohol”. When Assange was seven or eight, his stepfather was removed from his life, when he and Christine divorced.
Assange’s mother then became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton. Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath. Hamilton allegedly had five different identities. “His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth,” Assange claimed in
Assange’s mother tried to leave Keith Hamilton in 1982, a court transcript reports, resulting in a custody battle for Assange’s half-brother, Jamie. Hamilton was an abusive partner who “had been physically violent”, court documents allege. Assange says Hamilton now pursued his mother, forcing her to flee repeatedly with her children. Assange told an Australian journalist in 2010: “My mother had become involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.”
For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives. Christine travelled to Melbourne, then fled to Adelaide for six months, and on to Perth. As a teenager, Assange returned to Melbourne, living with his mother in at least four different refuges. The WikiLeaks founder was to act out this pattern of evasive action all over again in 2010, believing he was being pursued by US intelligence because of his WikiLeaks exposures.
Court files from the teenage Assange’s eventual hacking trial in Melbourne – of which more later – document some of the effects of such a strange life on a gifted teenager with a strong aptitude for mathematics. His lawyer said Assange was deprived of the chance to make friends or associate normally with his peers. “His background is quite tragic in a way.”
When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present. Assange began teaching himself code. At 16 he got hold of his first modem. He attended a programme for gifted children in Melbourne, where he acquired “an introverted and emotionally disturbed” girlfriend, as he put it. Assange grew interested in science and roamed around libraries. Soon he discovered hacking. By the age of 17 he suspected Victoria police were about to raid his home. According to
