Leaving Australia - introduction & why

• Original 2003 & Updated 04 October 2021 & re-read-edited 21 July 2025 Adelaide, South Australia

  
  

  Everyone should have an autobiography. Not for a blog, a tweet, or an AI-generated piece—but for ourselves. For our families. For our friends. For the strange acting neighbours. It’s the story of our life so far: the details, the roadmap, the journey. Something to look back on and understand how we became who we are.
  
  This is my story.
  So much is hard to believe, yet all of it is true. Long before the internet could save, lose, share, delete, edit, or rearrange our lives, there were tangible fragments, letters, photographs, keepsakes. Now, it's time to let go of nearly 75 years of accumulated memories. Thankfully, I’ve documented it all. Not in the cloud, but somewhere more permanent, even as the originals fade away into landfill. Cheers.
  
  

  What I imagine my son, Sacha, would have written if he was asked to create a portrait of me when in high school. Based on what I have seen in his diary, notepads, and with discussions with his teachers and other adults.
  
  

  ‘I was about eight when I started to see how my life was different than other kids my age. I knew other single parent children though at the time only a few and they lived with their mother. My brother and I being raised by my father was different, but it still should have been a little like other kid’s lives. It wasn’t. We moved a lot – ten times in ten years. I was in six schools just in my primary years. But that could have been somewhat normal. There were other things that seemed not to be normal. I could not say at the time what was so different than what I thought our life should be like. There was the unusual business of making tofu which consumed his life. He moved his tofu factory often: from the city to being on a farm and into a dairy barn amongst the cows, to being in two different huge old cheese factories in two towns out in the country. He thought he was a writer too and would often say he was going to write novels, but we never saw any. We were always out of money. There was one winter when we had no electricity, no phone, and no car – and we were living in the country on a farm with a long walk to the main road. None of these things seemed unusual at the time. It was the life we had. What I look back at now is that my father was happy, and he played with us a lot. Some days he would spend hours on the floor with us building train tracks around the house. Other times he would paint, but not normal painting. He would splash paint on cardboards then write poems on them. He said he would make a lot of money doing this, but I did not see him sell one until much later in life when he would take them into Adelaide on weekends and hang them up in a park. He said he used to be a street artist in the States. He sold a few in Adelaide but not enough to help our lack of money. He had many great ideas though none of them worked out.’

  
  

  ‘In 2003, when my father was 55, he started writing about his life. It took him eighteen years to finish. My early life began to make sense when I read it. This is the story he wrote.’

  ♦ ♦ ♦
  As a sidenote to what I imagined my son would have written about me at the age of eight; I did tell him later in life (30+ years) that I would often take LSD. Probably what made parenting so interesting, at least for me.
  

  From Sacha’s school diary in seventh grade.

  Things I used to believe:
  1. that my father was normal
  2. that my father’s name was Saint Terrell
  
  

  

  Charts for writing ‘Leaving Australia'

• NOTE: There is a lot of reference to in-depth astrology, which I have a love-hate relationship with. At times over the past fifty years I have lectured, written, and believed in it whilst at other times I believe it is all nonsense. Few humans I have found are interested in more than the daily newspaper Sun-sign readings of their horoscope. My suggestion is to skip over the in-depth conversations I have with myself about astrology unless you follow astrology at that depth. For me I have written some interpretations from my own research/amusement/fascination and wonderings if there could be something to it.
  
  The same goes with my rather in-depth discussion/research/amusement with HOOM (The Holy Order of MANS), an occult order I was involved with between 1969 and 1979. It could be of possible interest to others, but this too is an area that could be glossed over. I have put in notes, reflections, and other’s ramblings that I have gathered from my own involvement and from speaking with past members and friends embroiled in this stuff.
  
  

  These are somewhat memoirs and somewhat my own notes on what I once believed and now believe, which change quite regularly as well as observations and ramblings on life-on-earth. As I wrote and edited this over a twelve-year period with several ‘final edits’ there are some discrepancies between what I said at a time of writing in 2003 and again in 2015-2016. It is because the world not only has changed so much in connectivity and communications, but my own observations and beliefs have changed as I have gone fighting and screaming into somewhat my elderly section of life between those non-magical years of 56 and 69 years old. Now at 78 in 2025 I will go through this one last time before deleting it all and burning any books or notes regarding this. Just for fun. And probably because no one has ever bought a single copy of this and now I am giving it away for free until I delete it all…read quickly before it is gone.
  
  

  Being a critic of one’s own life is interesting after the fact. Most humans do the best they can with the knowledge they have. The fact that every moment is so final and usually undoable it makes for a dilemma of whether to live in the moment and try to fully experience life based on our current knowledge or to try and systematically plan what comes next. For me I have had little choice but to live in the moment as my planning exercises seem to turn to mud; perhaps because of my Neptune aspects that cause me to be so delusional or perhaps because I have brain damage (according to others but not to anyone official) or because I am an impractical human or because to know what comes next just would be boring. For whatever reason my life is the way it is I have laboriously detailed and tried to interpret myself to myself in the notes below.

  
  “…I noted in his writing that he talks about disintegration within his personality; and there is evidence of thought disorder such as loose associations and flight of ideas, which together with his general suspicious demeanor suggests psychotic thinking...”

  
  My ex-wife’s psychiatrist’s (also archaically called an alienist) written report of me handed to a judge in the Adelaide Family Court 1985 during one of more than sixty court appearances over a decade in regard to the matter of parenting of our children.

   

  I was born This Way Everything Else

  I make up As I go

  (Terrell’s law #3 from Neuage’s ‘Definition of lives of greatness’)

  
  

  Great lives only happen to other people. We live in a world of marketing with the use of other humans only as buyers of what we have to offer – primarily our life. I will sell you my thoughts, art, poems, theories, body. If you are not interested, then move on because with more than seven-billion people alive today there is always another potential buyer. We know of someone who we call great because we have bought into his/her/its’ life. Every single being that has existed could just as easily have been replaced by another person who marketed what they had to say. Every thought, invention, creation, myth or belief system could just as easily have been produced by someone else than who we currently give the credit to. We are all as insignificant to the evolution of life as we are insignificant to one another unless you are willing to buy into my story then you have value just as we have value to the evolution of life if we buy into it and re-produce.
  
  

  This is my story – as insignificant as it is to you it was of value to have lived it because I could not have lived any other story. And now I realize that not only greatness at any level was not offered to me but I never got a grip on what greatness is as I have made the remarkable discovery that everything is bullshit. July 1995 Hackham, South Australia.

  Where does anything fit?

  
  

  I have gotten to

  Where anyone born before 1947

  Is too old to be young enough for me Where anyone born after 1947

  Is too young for me to believe March 18, 2015, Adelaide, South Australia

  

  I try to find the pattern or the reason for the way it is or the way it should be. Perhaps at times I try to be so bold as to attempt a conjecture of what ‘it’ is.  If society is an accidental evolution what is our existence? If I were born into a different place, would I still be me? If I had been adopted by African head-hunters, Taliban Warlords, the Queen of England or maybe never adopted but instead grew up in a Catholic adoption refuge-centre in Rensselaer, NY; would I still be writing this story? If I had been born a woman or with one leg, blind, deaf, black, in Chicago, Paris, Sydney, Mexico I could not have written this story the way it is. If someone different had become pregnant; with my “purpose” yet-to-manifest, would this story be much different? If someone different had become impregnated from me would this story ever have needed a Part 2 or Part 3? Perhaps there would have been Parts 4 or five or a whole bloody series of sequels of Parts for the narcissistic society that I live in; to ignore. If I believed the government, the conspiracy writers, saints, celebrities, newsreaders, the internet, philosophers, messiahs… would this have sounded different? Would my life have been different? It is precisely due to not believing anyone anymore that I must write this so that I can try to find out where I fell off the belief wagon.  If you were not you, would you read this? If you were me, would you be writing this? Re-writing this? I have re-written this five times in ten years. This is my final time and then I can let it go. Today is Wednesday 24 June 2015 and my goal is to complete reading this one more time by my birthday August 10th then delete it all or make a copy and bury it somewhere. (That is the ‘Leaving Australia’ full edition with headings and a lot of extra comments and verbiage. This e-book edition, ‘Leaving Australia Again’, I started the sixth of June 2016, and it is 65% lighter than ‘Leaving Australia’. I am re-writing it as I am home for two-weeks with my newly installed defibrillator-pacemaker and I am not supposed to drive for six months or work for two weeks, and I desperately need a project. This is that project.)
  
  Of course, now, mid-2025 I am rereading this again because this morning I was listening to Janis Joplin and thinking about the 1960s and thought I would read what I wrote about my past.

   

  

  This was the top news story on the BBC News iPhone App on the day I finished my final edit before doing this final final edit (before doing this e- book edit):

  Earth 'enters new extinction phase'

  ‘The Earth has entered a "new period of extinction", a study by three US universities concludes, and humans could be among the first casualties.’
  
  

  There was a whole lot about humans being cactus… the final line was, “Last year, a report by Stuart Pimm, a biologist and extinction expert at Duke University in North Carolina, also warned mankind was entering a sixth mass extinction event.

  But Mr. Pimm's report said the current rate of extinction was more than 1,000 times faster than in the past, not 114, as the new report claims.”

  Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33209548 (blimey, it is still there now in July 2025)

  OK so there will be no one left to read this anyway…

   

  NEXT: Clifton Park, New York 1960 – 1965

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