Damned if I Do by Philip Nitschke Page B

relationship; sensitive and enlightened and well before my time. The relationship went along quite well for a few months and then I got a letter fromJenny.
    She was in Mount Isa,James Powell was in gaol, and she was broke. She said it had been a mistake breaking up with me and she wanted us to get back together. It was a total shock; I thought it was over and had tried hard to forget her, but I somehow cobbled some money together for her ­airfare to Melbourne. I wanted her back and, since Virginia was so liberated, I thought something might be worked out. Jenny came, stayed a week, became pretty miserable and decided again that it was off, and so I paid for her to fly back to Mount Isa. She was there a fortnight, came back again to Melbourne and this time she stayed.
    So I was in a two-way relationship and, strangely, the women decided they wanted to meet. I wasn’t there, but apparently they got on well, and have spoken fondly of each other ever since. Then James Powell came to Melbourne, saw what was going on and erupted. He smashed up my Toyota, then threatened to kill me and I had to get the police involved. Jenny decided she had to get right away and took off to Kalgoorlie, eventually moving on to Perth.
    I still had strong feelings for Jenny though, and when I got a message from Perth that she’d met someone new, I thought I’d make a last-ditch attempt to get her back. I borrowed Virginia’s old AJS 350 motorbike, fixed it up and set off for Perth. It was a hell of a ride over the unsealed stretch of road across the Nullarbor; the corrugations were horrific and you couldn’t avoid them. I travelled with another couple of bike riders, whose machines broke down. I made it to Perth, only to find Jenny well and truly on her feet. She’d teamed up withJay Harman, the wealthy Perth entrepreneur and financier of the Rajneesh (Orange People) sect, and was by then installed in his Trigg penthouse. They eventually married, had a child and divorced, but that visit to the west effectively ended the Jenny chapter in my life.
    On the way back to Melbourne, the bike broke down and had to be freighted back in horse transport while I hitched a ride in the truck. But on arrival, Virginia announced that she didn’t want our live-in relationship to be sexual any more.
    While all this was going on, I was still working on thetrams, with a view todriving taxis. You were supposed to have a good geographical knowledge of Melbourne to get a cab licence and I thought tram conducting would help. However, after a year at the South Melbourne depot, I knew a lot about the Moreland to St Kilda route but little else. I did, however, meet a lot of different people in that job and mostly I enjoyed it.
    In many ways, things were more free and easy then. I’d often carry a little transistor radio in my conductor’s bag, as I’d always had an observer’s interest inboxing and admired the courage of the fighters, and used to listen to the major fights. On the day of the ‘thriller in Manila’ fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, a bunch of people travelling on the South Melbourne tram clustered around me to listen too. These days the conductors are gone, and no one entertains the passengers like that.
    I eventually got my taxi driver’s licence, but only worked driving yellow cabs for a few days, long enough to make me realise what a difficult job it was. I remember one night when a passenger asked to be taken to Richmond and then abused me and said he wasn’t going to pay. As luck would have it, we were in Swan Street and only a few hundred metres from the police station. I accelerated suddenly so he couldn’t get out, pulled up outside the station and asked again for the fare. He paid up.
    Around this time, I went on a black rights march and met up again withJean Cully, a much-loved nurse who occasionally visited Wave Hill. She’d always spoken about her daughter,Paddy, who was