My somewhat chequered career as a musician is documented here, in words and photos. The bands I played in had varying degrees of success, and through my career I guess I must have played just about every venue from Sydney to Perth (and all points in between!). There's a story behind each of these bands, and these days they're all like bookmarks of my life to me. In my testimony, you'll see how my life was completely revolutionised by an encounter with God. I hope my story touches you. If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line.
..........My Testimony.......... I was brought up by Christian parents here in Australia, along with two brothers and two sisters. I went to good schools, got excellent grades up until I hit about 15, and generally had a normal, though very strict, upbringing. When I turned 14 or 15, I started to question everything my parents had taught me - I began to question the strict religious upbringing I’d had, the values I’d learnt, everything. I felt like I was just getting told what to believe about life, that my parents had set a course for me to follow, and that they expected me to blindly walk that course. I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things
that other kids my age could - listening to rock’n’roll music, watching any TV
programs that contained sex or violence, going to unsupervised parties, etc etc. At that time in Australia, the whole drugs
sub-culture from the 1960’s was still going strong, and kids of my age who were
getting into this scene and alternative lifestyles thought we were finding a better and
more enlightened way of life than our parents had.
In that first year I embarked on what I
thought was a ‘voyage of self-discovery’ - my friends and I would sit around
having what we thought were ‘enlightened’ discussions under the influence of
various drugs - in that first year of drug use I tried pot, hash, hash oil, LSD and magic
mushrooms. Pretty soon I began to have some pretty weird
things going on inside my head - I would suffer incredible bouts of paranoia, thinking
that people were against me. A couple of times I had some pretty heavy LSD trips that I
had to be talked down from - I realise now that the effects must have been pretty close to
psychosis. I astral travelled a couple of times - floating above my body on my bed,
completely detached from the physical world. A few months later, I had a motorcycle accident, nearly losing my left leg in the process. I was in hospital for months and months, having operation after operation as the doctors tried to save my leg. All the time they pumped me full of pethidine, morphine and other narcotic painkillers, and I came close to a physical dependency at that point. I remember when I was finally released from the hospital, I was too weak to use my crutches, and my Dad had to carry me to the car to take me home.
My poor parents had been through so
much during this time, as they knew I had dabbled in the drug scene, but were not aware to
what extent. The thing was, I had discovered that there
was no enlightenment in these drugs, or in all the mystical practices and religions that
all my hip friends were into. Instead, it felt like there was this big black hole in the
centre of my being, a vacuum that kept screaming out to be filled. That hole in the centre of my being was still there, but I was starting to lose sight of any normal perspective I could have used to seek some help out of the mess. And all this time, at the back of my mind,
and at the heart of my desires, I could remember the first time I shot up heroin - that
warm wave that just enveloped my entire being, that seemed for a time at least, to put the
world where I wanted it - at my feet. As I began to move in these new circles, I discovered that people in the drug scene weren’t all peace, love and understanding, that terrible things happened in life, and a lot of them were done by people to each other. I was now 18, and my brush with the
‘hippie’ scene was well and truly over, as I saw a complete absence of the
ideals that the hippie movement claimed to stand for being manifested in real life.
The bass player in that band, his girlfriend and his brother were all heavily into the heroin scene, and I started hanging out with them, doing heroin occasionally at first, but mostly smoking dope and taking acid and mushrooms. But the more I hung out with them, the more heroin we did. Pretty soon I stopped taking any other drugs altogether, because I could never trust what was going to happen in my mind, whereas with heroin you always new how it would feel. The thing is, the first few times you try
heroin, you feel like the king of the world, but after that, the craving for that first
huge rush isn't satisfied as easily, and there begins the slide into addiction.
I was also starting to drop the
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