You’d be surprised at the number of famous people living just down the road, in hidden little valleys, tucked away in the bush, or living in plain sight.
From the super famous to the somewhat famous, and even the famous adjacent, we’re going to bring you their stories in this monthly column.
This month features multi-award winning author Alex Miller who chatted with the Express about his career as a writer, working as a stockman in the outback and his lovely wife Steph.
Inspired by a book featuring ‘mesmerisingly wonderful’ photographs of outback Australia, 16-year-old Alex decided to leave his family and his home in England to seek adventures.
“I was absolutely enthralled by the idea of the place, and I thought, I’ve got to go and see it. I’ve got to go and be there,” Alex reminisces.
“I had a strong vision and determination. My mum and dad saw that, and they let me go.
“Mum was very upset. I probably never realised until after she died how upset she was, but Dad wasn’t. He knew it was the ‘real thing’ and that’s what men do.
“It took six weeks by boat, and if you were underage you had to be accompanied.
“A man called Vin Fitzgerald – a tall, skinny, classic, lantern-jawed Aussie bloke, beautiful, the real thing – looked after a group of three or four of us during the journey.
“After I’d been in Australia for several years, probably eight, a friend and I fetched in Melbourne, totally broke, 100 per cent broke, and I said, ‘look, maybe I can get in touch with this fella Vin Fitzgerald, and we can borrow enough money to get our s**t together.
When I called Vin, he didn’t say ‘Who’s that’ he just said, ‘G’day Alex, how’s it going mate?'”
When Alex told Vin about their money problems, Vin invited the pair around for a ‘feed’ and handed them each 100 dollars, putting his total trust in the pair.
“We went off, and we both got jobs, mine was sweeping the floor at Myers, where the sweet counters were, and my friend, he put the money that Vin had given him on a horse at Caulfield. And it won. It was the rank outsider and he finished up with a substantial chunk of money. We both looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go and see Vin’.”
Arriving in Sydney in 1953, Alex hitched a lift up to Gympie where he visited the stock and stations agent looking for work on a cattle station. A job on a small 64,000-acre station as a lone stockman had Alex boarding a train for a place called Springsure.
“I got off the train expecting and hoping to be met by the new boss, but nobody came. Eventually, a woman from the pub nearby came up and said, ‘You coming to have your breakfast or what?’ They knew I was there and were just offering me hospitality at the pub, which is what happened in those days in the place we call the ‘outback’. I told her who I was and she said, ‘I know who you are. Are you coming or what?’
“I went up to the pub and ended up staying there for a week, drinking with the mailman because that’s all he really did. He was one of those great big barrel-bodied men, enormously strong, probably about 30 years old at the time. He’d pick up a 40-gallon drum, hold it against his chest, and chuck in on the back of the truck. Full.
“I worked at the station for two years. It was wonderful. They were great people and I just loved it.”
Alex went on to work at a place called Augustus Downes, an enormous station up in the Gulf of Carpentaria, with Aboriginal stockmen who were still on their own country.
“I haven’t written about that time. Mainly because the story of that period belongs to, or I feel belongs to, one of those stockmen-blackfellas. I don’t feel a sense of ownership of that story, I never have. I don’t know why, except that it isn’t my story to tell.”
When it was time for Alex to leave Augustus Downes, he and another man went up the coast where they got word that there was big money to be made in a place called Benmore in New Zealand.
“Of course, there was nothing happening in Benmore, and nothing has happened since then!” Alex laughs.
The two men were ‘taken for a ride’ a couple of times and were flat broke and out on the road when a man driving a Land Rover pulled over and offered them work on a sheep station, breaking in horses.
“I was just turning 21 when we left there; we spent all our money on grog, and we were both broke again,” Alex said.
“I finished up in Auckland and joined a group of people who were kind of the worst group of people I ever met, in some ways.
“It was the only period in my life that I look back and there’s a kind of despair about what a horrible time it was.”
After getting enough money together Alex headed back to Australia and got a job on a beaten-up old Ferris Wheel owned by an Irishman called Paddy McCarol.
“I quite enjoyed being a spruiker. Standing up there, there’d be some smart ar**e coming up, with three girlfriends and a couple of mates and I’d say, ‘There’s a bloke who’s not game to get on this, it’s too fast for him. And the girls would say, ‘Go on, get on, get on’ and he’d come up to have a go at me and I’d say, ‘You can have a free go with your girlfriend’. Once he got on, everyone got on,” Alex laughs.
“I had no inclination to write back then. I felt fairly depressed about abandoning my dream as a stockman, but I’d always referred to art as a kind of safe place for myself, drawing and painting, those sorts of things, I’d do that and disappear into that world.
“And then I realised, I was in a boarding house at the time, and I thought, ‘f**k this, I don’t want to finish up like these guys, all they’ve got is Caulfield races and nothing. They’re all single men and they’re all getting old and they’re in this place – I’ve got to get an education.”
“I thought, what can I do that I won’t be disillusioned about? Where can I become my own master?”
Alex went on to study an honours degree at Melbourne University, with a view to becoming a writer.
“I’d always been a good reader, a habitual reader, and the study was a pretty serious commitment. I wasn’t that interested in the degree; I was interested in learning, and I still am.
“I wanted to find a way to really express the other world that was within me, my inner life that I hadn’t spent a lot of time on until then.”
Although it was many years later, in 1975, that Alex met his wife Steph, he says his life didn’t really make sense until he met her.
The pair have been together for 50 years now, moving to Castlemaine 23 years ago, where they live in a gorgeous, humble and warm home, complete with a large study, where Alex, now in his mid-80s, is currently working on his 16th novel.
Steph has also put together a wonderfully crafted collection of Alex’s notebooks and letters going back to the 1960s, titled A Kind of Confession, which is due to be released at the end of November with a launch with Northern Books at the Tap Room in December.
