No one publishes obituaries for junkies

The October 10 - 11 edition of Brisbane's Courier Mail carried an obituary in Kathleen Noonan's "Last Word" column. It appears below:

MOST of us make mistakes and survive. We pick the wrong car to get into, go to the wrong party, kiss the wrong boy or girl, drive when we should have walked, walk when we should have caught a cab, say yes when we should have said no, try things not worth trying, trust someone not worth trusting, wake up in dumb places.

Most of us make mistakes and get away with it. We survive with no awful, lifelong consequences. Not wrapped around a tree at high speed. Not overdosed on the bathroom floor. No fatal outcome.

Robbie Edgar didn't get away with his mistakes. He paid for them. He died recently because of them.

No one publishes obituaries for junkies. That's what his sister Rosey wrote to me. You usually have to be a fine upstanding citizen, sportsman, businessman, dedicated Rotarian or notable academic.

Junkies, really, don't rate. Once we see the word junkie, it sort of makes all the other words in our head disappear. "Junkie" negates everything else. It makes a big, complex, sometimes beautiful, life disappear into one small judgmental word.

"What of someone who did not rise high above his demons, from whom others might feel entitled to withhold their respect? Who will speak to keep his name alive? I will," writes Rosey.

"I will write of Robert Edgar, born 17 May, 1954, to Thomas and Eileen Edgar in Brisbane, precociously interested in the sciences, with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a sharply detailed memory."

He left school early, started an apprenticeship with an optician, but threw that in to come to northern NSW for the Aquarius Festival and the blossoming of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual freedoms promised in the counter-culture.

Robbie embraced transcendental meditation, became vegan, practised yoga, grew organic vegetables, his evenings glowed under kerosene light, he rose early, was fit from long walks, swam with platypus, found glow-worm caves, sought enlightenment.

"He created food gardens at each place: Nimbin, Tuntable Valley and Jiggi," writes Rosey. "He lived by his belief in karma. He did not steal; neither did he drink alcohol nor smoke. He abhorred hard drugs.

"His passions were for food, knowledge meditation and women.

"With the smooth golden skin, a ponytail of long wavy black hair to his waist and a beautiful face, he was a hippie heart-throb."

So what went wrong? One morning Robbie was arrested for possession and supply of drugs – LSD. By his standard, these were not hard drugs. His logic differed from the court's. He was jailed. By the time he was released, he smoked cigarettes, he ate meat and had developed a bad habit that he never came clean of – heroin.

Around this time, he acquired the hepatitis C virus. He continued to live in northern NSW, a junkie. His health suffered from his lifestyle.

But, says Rosey, his humour was resilient and as dry as the dust that swept over Lismore the afternoon of his death. Wicked sarcasm, misquotes, deliberate Spoonerisms: "Time wounds all heals" – were things Rosey loved about her brother. And always pertinent facts, a snippet of history. "Did you know that Pope Leo VIII died of a stroke while committing adultery?" he'd ask.

He made his mark in the community, with well-written and wry articles and letters to various magazines and newspapers.

"He would decimate prejudice with logic and facts," writes Rosey, "and lambast and enlighten with irony and history and humour."

His last article was published posthumously in The Northern Rivers Echo. He wrote, in part: "Greedy people smugglers . . . sneaking unwashed, unwanted aliens with a very different and foreign religion, with superstitious dietary rules and modes of dress . . . incapable of assimilation and as part of a world-wide creed bent on the destruction of our way of life. None but a soft-headed government or left-wing intellectuals would hesitate to intern, in the remotest possible location. Welcoming these illegals and queue-jumpers would open the floodgates to millions of their brethren . . . Ideally, they could all be returned immediately to where they should be waiting, in an orderly manner to be properly and legally processed.

"From a press release from the Swedish Nazi Party, late 1941, in response to the arrival of 90 per cent of Denmark's Jewish population on Sweden's shores, aboard Denmark's fishing fleet.

"Signed Robert Edgar, Lismore."

When Robbie wasn't being Robbie the junkie, he sounds like a bit of a ratbag. Back a couple of years violinist Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, spoke on ratbags and why we need them in society. "The ratbag is one of the essential bacteria in our culture . . . By breathing in ratbaggery, we become less likely to fall to the illness of moral hypocrisy. Ratbags have no moral agenda; they have a hyperactive bullshit detector; they cannot be entrusted with money, for if they are given money, they will use it on valueless things, such as adventures and storytelling; and the ratbag should confound, astonish, query and disrupt, rather than confirm and soothe."

I think of this reading Rosey's words about her brother. "So much knowledge, such a beautiful, perverse, sharp, contradictory mind. Such a placid nature. He was not demonstrative; he never yelled or lost his temper (except that one time when the Nolan's cow gorged on his vegie patch). His laughter was a chuckle, his rage was a scowl, and his retaliation was a roll of the eyes. And grief did not fall in tears but was breathed as a sigh. Except for that one time, two weeks ago when told that he had terminal liver cancer."

Robbie died on September 22 aged 55. I spoke to Rosey the day after she and her father Tom had seen his body for the last time. Grief threatened to shipwreck her. She spoke of the waste of her whip-smart brother and the care the doctors, nurses and other staff of the Lismore Base Hospital and community nurses who cared for him with non-judgmental respect and loving kindness.

Coming home late the other night, I turn the corner near South Bank and there's a young man near the train station, too drunk or off his tree on something to be a threat. He's thin, that dry, papery Yellow Pages-thin of the addicted. I watch him shuffle off through a dirt-filled empty block, his feet breathing dust in the moonrise.

Many families have a Robbie, someone who makes mistakes and doesn't get away with them.

They don't publish obituaries for junkies. Rosey, you're right. They – we – don't usually see past the word "junkie". It's like the moon blocking out the sun in an eclipse. Everything else they are and they have done in their lives is hidden by the dark side. So let's make the exception. Just because we got away with our mistakes, doesn't make us better than anyone. Because we all make mistakes and we are more than our mistakes.

AND ANOTHER THING

Noonan had this piece in her column the following week:

Last week's obituary for Robbie brought such a strong response from readers, who emailed, wrote and phoned, stopped me in cafes and in the street to say thanks to Rosey and her family for sharing his life. Which makes you think that in this crazy world, there are deep pockets of tolerance and gentleness and open-mindedness. "It made me believe a little more," wrote Ben, who spent a year in jail for something stupid when he was 19 and is now a fine upstanding citizen, putting his kids and two foster kids through uni.

Source: The Courier Mail