The Bravest Man I Ever Knew

       The bravest man I ever knew would have been useless in a fight. He couldn’t play football, or cricket. He could barely catch a ball. I first met him at Uni in the 1970s. We all wore ripped jeans and tshirts to class. He wore a houndstooth patterned suit and a porkpie hat. 

He’s dead now. He died of the crippling effects of a congenital illness he carried. Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH). It is a birth defect that causes all sorts of hormonal problems. It meant he matured physically very early, was short and his sex hormone production (estrogen and testosterone) varied wildly. He had to take steroids all his life. In women the condition causes intersexuality. Apparently not so in men, although Mark once pointed out that, in the absence of chromosomal testing, it was hard to know if he was a woman who looked like a man or vice versa or some variation of that. 

He always identified as a man and maintained a mostly platonic love life with women all the time I knew him. Mostly platonic, but extremely passionate. But he was not a “man’s man”, instead he was a complex mix of characteristics that defy any superficial analysis. You won’t doubt his courage, though, when I tell you the story. 

I first met him at the University of NSW in 1980. I had taken a few years off Uni to work in the Public Service in 1978 and 1979, and when I returned for the fourth year of my course he had established himself as a significant, albeit eccentric, figure at the Law School. He found University a liberating change from the bullying he had suffered at school. His short, hairy body was just not suited to football, athletics, swimming; all the things you needed to do at school to be accepted as one of the boys. He told me once that he expected that I would have been one of his tormentors at school. His tormentors were the sporty larrikins like me. But in the free-spirited days of the late 1970s at Uni, all that was unimportant.
Mark threw himself into the cerebral and social life on offer wholeheartedly.

 He had created a persona for himself by being the guy who dressed in a suit with a pork pie hat to come to uni. He was the only person who did anything like this. It marked a completely different situation from the one he was bullied into enduring at school. By dressing in the conservative fashion he chose, he gave off a signal of complete indifference to the standards others might try to impose on him. It was a nod to the nerdy pursuits he enjoyed, opera, classical music, and radio national. 

The other, completely counter-intuitive way he fitted himself into the social life at uni was by embracing the drinking culture of the University with unbridled enthusiasm. This is how we met and how we bonded. If it hadn’t been for the drinking, I probably would have dismissed him as “Zanker the Wanker”,(one of his nicknames; that he gloried in), because of his way of dressing, and all-around oddness. But I loved alcohol too and an enthusiastic and reliable drinking partner was valuable. So we became drinking buddies on Friday nights at the Royal Hotel in Randwick. 

There was one other nickname for Mark, besides “Zanker the Wanker” and that was “Old Man Zanker”. It was because of the way he dressed, but it had a strong kernel of truth about it. His CAH had meant he matured physically much earlier than his peers. He always seemed older than us in his attitudes and habits. When we were given an assignment he would make sure he wrote fifty or a hundred words written on it the next day. Most of the rest of us filed the assignment away, to be done desperately at the last minute. Needless to say, his marks reflected his more mature approach to study.

 Unlike me, he also adopted a very disciplined approach to his drinking. Night times were for drinking, daytimes (usually) for work and study. It was at uni that Mark commenced his, usually unrequited, passions for beautiful women. He did not find any need to keep his attraction secret and would broadcast it to all and sundry. I say, usually unrequited, because he had at least one romantic liaison that became slightly more than a one night stand. It was not Mark who terminated this relationship. He remained enamoured of her for the rest of his life. He remained enamoured of more than a few women over most of his life. 

I don’t know if I was Mark’s closest friend over the course of his life. He maintained deep personal relationships with many people until the end. But I was up there, and he confided in me the deepest aspects of his romantic life. There was not a lot of sex, but he treasured every episode fiercely. One of his great sadnesses was his apparent inability to attract sexual partners. By the time he was in his forties he had achieved an acceptance of this, but until then he worked tirelessly but fruitlessly at it. Even after then, he pursued hopeless romantic follies. He was a man of unbridled passion. He fell hopelessly, blindly in love. He was often badly hurt, but that did not stop him from trying again. The great gift he had, was to be able to form life long friendships out of these unrequited, or slightly requited, love affairs. 

The Zanker family consisted of Mark, his sisters, Carolyn and Robyn and his mum, Kay, and his dad Hector. They lived in a semi-detached early twentieth-century house in North Bondi. Next door in the other part of the semi lived Mark’s paternal grandparents. The house was small and crowded with five occupants. I remember Mark had a tiny room at the back of the house. Also nearby in a pensioner unit was Mark’s much-beloved maternal grandmother. 

We visited her once. She was so important in Mark’s life that any new friend had to be introduced to her. Mark’s childhood, with his illness and the consequent bullying, had been difficult. Nan provided a safe haven for him. She was not a textbook grandma. She had acted for many years as an SP bookmakers clerk. Some of Mark’s happiest memories were listening to starting prices on 2KY and watching Clarence the Clocker on Television on Saturday mornings, helping Nan prepare for the days racing. He was not a huge gambler, himself, but he loved telling the tales of the visits to the Bookie’s operation headquarters with its bank of phones and the cockatoos outside. 

An interest in the bawdier side of life was another shared passion we had. In those days Mark had a part time job as a barman at a club in Kings Cross, and I spent some endless afternoons at the bar chatting to him, or playing the pokies. I was a gambler, and he was very comfortable around my gambling. 

The great love of Mark’s life was his mother Kay. She was his great supporter, but also his great critic. They brawled like an Irish Catholic family (Which I think Kay’s side was) until the day Mark died. The brawling, like the great love, started early. Before school age, Mark would pack his belongings and walk to the corner, intending to run away, but unable to cross the road. His sister Carolyn would solemnly report to Kay, “Boy gone”. By the time I knew him, Kay was criticizing his drinking. It became a familiar refrain. But never once did it deter Mark from sinking a VB or two when the fancy struck him. Which it often did. When he died, thirty cans of VB and a carton of smokes were left behind. 

But Kay and Mark loved each other deeply. They liked each other’s company, and over the years Kay spent many weeks staying with Mark in the various places he lived. 

It was from his father though, that Mark found his great love of trains. His dad was an engineer with NSW Government Railways, as it then was. Hec was heavily involved in the introduction and testing of the XPT trains that are now dated and unreliable. But at the time they were new and fast. Mark had been obsessed by trains from a young age.

 In those early years at Uni we took train trips to Broken Hill, Bathurst, and Cootamundra. The Bathurst trip was a typical Mark adventure. Up early, catch the morning train. Note the times that the train stopped at every station. Get out at Bathurst, go to the nearest club. Drink beer and play poker machines, eat an unhealthy lunch. Then catch the afternoon train back to Sydney playing euchre and drinking overpriced beers on the train. Those were the days. 

The Cootamundra trip was important to me.  It was my first time seeing my old home town through the eyes of someone who loved it as much as me. We caught the South West mail, I slept on the luggage racks over the dog boxes, but Mark was unable to climb and did the best he could on the seats. We arrived in Cootamundra in the early hours of the morning. We walked to his Aunty Eil’s house, which was on the border of the Golf Course. Walking all the way across town in the awakening dawn was a treat Cootamundra is a very beautiful town. 

We both had a strong connection to Cootamundra. Mark’s dad was born there and I had spent four years there as a child. That trip is clear in my mind. Playing golf, and drinking beer at the country club. Meeting old Nick Deeps who had been Auntie Eil’s employer at his menswear shop, and been her unrequited lover. Trips to the gap and other important landmarks of my youth. On one of our games, Mark picked up a ball he found and idly put it in the hole. The young champion, Jason Deep, playing behind us was so far back we hadn't seen him. He was excited to discover he had scored an eagle. Or so he thought.

The love of golf was an important part of those early years of Marks, although his ability to play became less and less as his disabilities worsened. His Uncle Fred Belle had been a golfing champion around Cootamundra.  His parents were also keen golfers at Moore Park golf course in  Sydney. Some of his other cousins and uncles in Coota had also been great cyclists. Ray Crowe’s bike shop was still an institution in town when we went there in 1981 or so. Ray was Mark’s uncle. The shop is gone now, replaced by a toilet block, next to the Globe Hotel.

 One of the happy memories Mark described was coming to Coota for holidays and staying at Aunty Eil's. Every time he came, and he would usually catch the train down by himself, he would devote one day to an expedition to Tumut. He would get up early, ride the bike kept for him by Aunty Eil, and bought from Ray Crowe, down to the railway station and catch the mail train to Tumut. He would watch the train being unloaded and reloaded then catch it back. He would be back home in time for lunch. I never caught the train to Tumut. But it sounds like heaven to me. On one of our many trips later on, we went to Gundagai railway station. Trains had stopped running by then, but the station master was still employed there, until he retired. We had a lovely trainspotting conversation with him. 

When we finished Uni Mark got a scholarship from the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department to do his practical legal training in Canberra and stay on and take a job in the department. His mother gave him her four-cylinder diesel-powered Holden Gemini and he grew wings. He had a ten-speed bike which he rode ferociously around Lake Burley Griffen on Sundays. He played golf every Saturday morning. Even in winter, he would head out to the golf course at Narrabundah, at 6 in the morning and tee off with his mates in the frost and fog. I did it a few times, but not regularly. This would be followed by some beers at the clubhouse until Mark realized the antisocial nature of driving home under the influence. Then he stopped the beers after the game.

 At first, Mark lived in a unit in Kingston which he shared with friends. Then he moved into a unit in Lyneham, which he bought. The Lyneham place was on the top floor of a three-story block. There was one fabulous interlude where Mark had a torrid affair with the Egyptian woman living downstairs. Nobly, he ended that relationship when he realized he had no intention of spending the rest of his life with her. That unit in Lyneham was my safe haven as my life fell apart over the years. There was a spare room I occupied for weeks at a time. 

And they were good times. Beers at the Lithuanian club next door, beers at home, drunken Thai meals at the Thai restaurant in Lyneham shops, Karaoke at the Old Lyneham Inn. When I was not there in the spare room, others would visit, his uni friends, new friends, older friends, family members. He was a very social man. I can’t remember how long Mark stayed in the Unit in Lyneham. But his career advanced rapidly during those years. He went from being a very junior lawyer to fairly Senior, in Family Law, then Bankruptcy Law.

 His camping trips to country areas had been a highlight for him, and remained so. At first, he used tents then he graduated to camper trailers, then finally in the last years of his life a luxury motor home. I went on many trips with him. He would take the Diesel Gemini all over New South Wales and Victoria with tents and camping equipment stowed away. I can recall camping trips to Pebbly Beach, Gundagai, Bright, Orbost, and Broken Hill. He loved the conviviality of shared camping experiences so he did not mind camping at caravan parks. It was more opportunity to meet new people. 

As soon as Mark left University he had completely altered his dress code. He became a blue singlet wearing casual dresser. He was chipped once or twice in the Attorney Generals' office for wearing flannelette shirts. Largely he dressed barely appropriately for the office.  It was another one of his trademark re-inventions of himself. At home, it was a blue singlet or flanno and shorts.  My fond memory of him is him with a beer in hand wearing a blue singlet and shorts next to a campfire.

 He went camping with anyone he could rope into a trip. I went several times, but he also went with workmates, Uni mates, schoolmates. He just loved it out the bush, relaxing under the stars. I suspect it harked back to happy times camping as a child. One anecdote I remember involved his Dad catching a giant Murray River Crayfish at Tom Groggin on the Upper Murray. 

Mark moved out to Kaleen to a four bedroom house in the 1990s. It had a chook yard, which he filled with chooks. He built a makeshift outdoor shower arrangement to recycle his water into the garden. I am not sure when the fascination with green issues began but it was a strong force by the time he moved into the house in Kaleen. I suspect it was tied in with his love of the bush. His green efforts included recycling all water used in the house. Now that he had garage space he took up the hobby of woodworking. He set up a well-provisioned workshop with up to date tools and turned out bookcases and the like. 

But with his increasing disability, the house was probably a bad idea. There were falls. The steroids he took made his bones chalky, and fractures were common. The cycling gradually had to cease as his bones failed to mend. The golfing was long gone. He started using a walking stick. He would still shower outside even in the depths of winter, propping himself up as best he could. 

Even though Mark became a committed green supporter, he never went into the depths of the looney left. He didn’t mind the idea of shooting feral animals. He was not an animal rights activist, he supported sustainable agriculture. What he was concerned about was the destruction of the native environment so dear to him. So feral cats and pigs could be shot because they destroyed native wildlife. 

As the years went on at Kaleen, Mark became more and more disabled. He started using a zimmer frame to move around. He continued to work full time, though. The trips overseas to represent Australia at international conventions must have been a nightmare. His zimmer frame would have to be disassembled and reassembled. He lived in fear that one of his mobility aids would be lost during transit. He progressed to a mobility scooter soon enough. The house at Kaleen became too much for him and he moved into a Unit in Inner Canberra. 

He continued to work, moving around the offices on a scooter. It was about this time that a Norwegian documentary maker made a film about his work protecting the Patagonian Toothfish in Australian waters near Christmas Island. It was also the time he participated in the "Children Overboard" affair, as a senior advisor to John Howard. Like much of the politically motivated work he had too, Mark was disillusioned by his role when he retired and reflected on his career.

  I can’t remember how old Mark was when he retired from work. It was in his early fifties. He had exceeded the expectations of the actuaries who placed him on the commonwealth government superannuation. I think they had calculated that, with his disability, he would live to 47. He celebrated that milestone with a big birthday bash at Cootamundra Country Club. But work became too much for him and he retired without warning. He said to the admin staff at work one day, “Well you won’t see me around here anymore”. And that was it. 

And thus began Mark's life as a grey nomad. He rented his unit out and bought a camper van and commenced a transient life traveling around the places he had loved in his life. His disabilities were afflicting him badly by now. He had a Zimmer frame for small steps and a scooter for longer trips. But I think he gained an enormous sense of freedom driving long distances to his favoured remote places. He recalled being stopped by a police officer north-west of Longreach. When the officer found Mark had no ability to walk more than a few steps, he was gobsmacked. 

The places he loved to visit and stay for months on end were Katherine, Kununurra, and Cootamundra. But there were other places too. He would tend to migrate north as winter approached. Then head back south as the wet season approached. I camped with him only a few times over the years of his roaming. Once at Boorowa in the height of summer, then another time at Port Augusta, in late spring. There were also a few trips to Mark’s beloved Cootamundra.  Remote places fill me with fear and despair, but not so Mark. He had his camper perfectly set up for himself. Setting up camp was easy. But his lack of mobility made even that easy process, difficult. Washing his sheets in the camp laundry and drying them out would tire him for a few days. So he severely rationed his tasks. That was why he would stay in one place for weeks and months. He loved the freedom of the open road, but it tired him out too much. 

 Mark had been predicting his own death from the time I first knew him. His life expectancy with his condition was about 50 years. That is what the government medical officer had said when he first joined the commonwealth public service. I never knew how seriously to take these dire prognostications. I have done my research now and I can see that he was right. He lived far beyond his expected life span through the “wonders” of modern science. But the last few years were very difficult indeed. 

It all started to go rapidly downhill after a fall at Nelson Bay, where his parents had moved after Hec retired. That was about six years before his death. But it caused a big gash in his leg, a stay in hospital at Shortland to allow the wound to begin to heal and a longer stay at his sister’s place in Moss Vale, as he recuperated.  The wound, like all the wounds and sores he suffered from as he got older, never really healed. Life for mark usually included a twice daily regime of unbandaging his sores, cleaning them with saline solution, then rebandaging.

 While in hospital, he was encouraged to reconsider his drinking behaviours. We discussed this when I visited, and we had a minor rift when I said that I wouldn't smuggle grog in for him if he wanted it.  I later relented and said I would. For Mark, the problems caused by drinking were never enough to make him stop. I think life would have become intolerable much earlier if it wasn't for the daily reprieve of a few cans of VB.

Falls were a constant issue. The one at Nelson bay was particularly bad but there were many others He didn’t have the balance I had, due to his congenital condition, and of course, the steroids made his bones chalky and made it difficult for sores to heal. His bones broke easily. He broke his back numerous times over the last few torturous years of his life. He broke his legs and his arm too. Mark told me that he was part of a new cohort of CAH sufferers who had lived long past their life expectancy, and whose bodies wore out. In the past, those with CAH would die before they entered the nightmarish world of broken bones, unhealing sores, and total immobility that Mark courageously faced for those last few years. 

He stopped traveling after his stay in the hospital at Shortland. He had formed a reattachment to Cootamundra over the last few years. He spent months camped at the Caravan Park. On one of his stays there he did a deal with the owner of a small townhouse opposite the hospital. They swapped Mark’s Campervan plus $100000 for the townhouse. This was another case of Mark perceiving a need to change his lifestyle and doing it immediately and without fanfare. 

The house in Coota only lasted a couple of years. More broken bones and more unhealing sores saw him surrender to the demands of his mother and sister and move into a small bedsitter behind the house Robyn and Kay now shared in Moss Vale. He knew this was the beginning of the end. But he remained sanguine. He had no other choice but to accept it. He accepted the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, finally. Although for years he had refused the blandishments of his mother, and others, to live more sensibly, in the end, he had to stop his courageous attempts at independence. For nearly ten glorious years Mark took arms against a sea of trouble, and by opposing did his best to end them. In the final analysis, he lost the fight. But what a courageous struggle. 

 And did he lose the fight? I had a phone call from him on Thursday 29 October 2020. I was on a train, on my way to work. I cut him short, “I can’t talk Mark, I am on a train, we are about to go into a tunnel”. We were about to go into the underground part of the city circle. “It’s ok Jim. I just wanted to say goodbye. The nurse is coming, I think I will be going into palliative care” “I don’t expect I will live through the weekend” I had heard Mark predict his own death many times, this one did sound certain though. And it was immediate."I can't get out of this chair. I can't clean myself, I can't toilet myself" "It's terrible, I am ready to go". “I love you Mark” “I love you, Jim” Then we hung up. His mind was still sharp, but his body was broken.

I saw my brother on Saturday the 31st of October. He showed me the heartbreaking post Mark had put on Facebook on 30 October saying goodbye to everyone. I was in Bowral. I could have gone to the hospital to see him. But I didn’t. Then on Sunday 1st November, I saw he had died. I spoke to his Sister Robyn later that day. She told me, among many things, that Mark had stopped taking his medication for his CAH on Wednesday. I knew, from many conversations I had with Mark over the years about euthanasia, that stopping his medication would kill Mark in a few days. It would be a very painful death, but a fairly quick one. I knew then that that had been his last courageous act. He went out at a time of his choosing when life had become intolerable to him. 

The bravest man I ever knew.