I Loved My Life

Most of what I write here lives on the heavy end of things — pain, addiction, the courts, watching my dad fade. So before any of that, I want to put something else on the record, because it’s just as true: before life got complicated and painful and heavy, I loved my life.

A footballing start

I was born on the 18th of August, 1975, at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, Scotland — an only child, and, I’m told, one of the first babies ever delivered there. Football was in the water from the start. My dad, David McIntosh, played for Dundee, and one of the first photos of me that exists is a newspaper cutting: me at about nine months old, in Dad’s arms, after he’d scored against Celtic in the Scottish Cup.

When I was around eighteen months old, my whole world picked up and moved to the other side of the planet — Dad was bought by Sydney Olympic, and just like that, we were Australian. I was too small to understand any of it. Australia simply became home.

A free-range Sydney childhood

My earliest memories are scattered but vivid — the kind of bright little fragments that somehow outlast everything around them. A lady I called Auntie. The garages out the back of our units. Trying to pat a cat and having it grab the back of my head. Knocking a tooth so hard it turned black. Sneaking off for a ride with a mate without telling Mum and Dad, and copping it when I got home.

Then Sydney proper. The Coogee Bay Hotel beer garden, where I’d climb the tree and watch bands play — AC/DC, Cold Chisel — which sounds made-up now but was just an ordinary afternoon then. A kindergarten that looked like a great old church. Being cast as Hansel in Hansel and Gretel. Wade Street in Maroubra, Matraville Soldiers Settlement school, and Maroubra Soccer Club, because of course there was a soccer club.

There were dogs — Buddy, who chased a motorbike one day and didn’t come home; then Saturn, who had a litter, and we kept one and called her Fluffy. There was Heffron Park, the pools, Maroubra Beach, days out at Bronte. And running through all of it, Dad’s football games, and Mum. I was always with Mum.

Migrant parents and good hearts

Some of it makes me laugh now. Firecrackers from the milk bar on the way to school. Pinching cigarettes for the older kids. My very Scottish parents being told to “bring a plate” to a party and turning up with an empty one, because nobody had explained the rule.

But the thing I remember most about Mum and Dad is that they were open-hearted. They tried fostering — I still remember Matthew. They weren’t perfect people, and I’ve written plenty about the harder truths elsewhere. But back then, in those years, they made a kid feel loved and included and busy and part of something, every single day.

The end of the first chapter

Then, like always, everything moved again. We went to Melbourne when I was nine or ten — Templestowe Park Primary, where they sent me in on the first day in my old school uniform, so I stood out a mile; then Milgate Primary, and a house in Maroney Court.

That move quietly closed the first chapter of my life. Sydney was the beaches, the dogs, the footy, the freedom, the innocence. Melbourne was the start of something else.

I’ve spent a lot of this site being honest about how hard things got after. So let me be just as honest about this: that early life was a good one. Free, noisy, sunburnt, loved. And on the days the weight is heaviest, it helps to remember that the boy up that tree at the Coogee Bay, watching the band and waiting for his dad — he existed, and he was happy. That part was real too.