F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre’s
Ostensible Biography (allegedly!)COPYRIGHTED © F. GWYNPLAINE MacINTYRE and GWYNPLAINE ENDEAVOURS, LLC.
A brief preamble before laying bare the facts of my life:
They’ve put my soul in a goldfish bowl . . .
The dead have no secrets. I’ve always believed that everyone has a right to privacy: that even the dead have a right to privacy, but clearly I’m now in the minority on that point. When Thomas Jefferson lay dying, he probably believed that his most shameful secret would die with him: nobody would ever be able to prove the persistent rumours that Jefferson had fathered at least one child by his black slave Sally Hemings. The deathbed patriot Jefferson would have been gobsmacked to know that — in 1998, nearly 200 years after his death — DNA technology would conclusively link his bloodline to one of Hemings’s descendants.
In Jefferson’s case, I’m not altogether dismayed by this invasion of his privacy. Jefferson’s trysts (more than one, surely) with Sally Hemings can’t be considered anything other than rape: by the laws of the time, Hemings was legally Jefferson’s property, so she was incapable of giving (or withholding) consent to anything Jefferson chose to do with (or to) her body, his chattel. The fact that America’s most “intellectual” President has belatedly been exposed as a rapist doesn’t strike me as a breach of his privacy.
Yet I find it distinctly creepy that scientists are ripping bare the most intimate secrets of Ötzi the Iceman, miscellaneous mallki (pre-Columbian mummies), Kœlbjerg Woman, Tollund Man and other human beings (not specimens!) whose remains have endured to the present day. Does the phrase “rest in peace” mean nothing to Science? The governments spying on us every day of our lives, in our lifetimes, tend to lose interest in our affairs once we’ve died and we stop paying taxes, so shouldn’t the dead be entitled to some privacy?
More importantly, shouldn’t the LIVING be entitled to some privacy? Here in Britain, many people consider it perfectly reasonable to require the rest of us to carry a national I.D. card, which contains a significant amount of personal information about the person carrying it. In the United States, thankfully, that horrible Orwellian notion hasn’t yet taken root.
I hope some smart Americans (with concern for civil liberties) are reading this. Software entrepreneurs have already approached the Bush administration, offering to set up a national-I.D. database that will track every U.S. citizen and resident alien. (Except for the illegal aliens, who are the ones most urgently in need of tracking.) Now get this part: the software entrepreneurs, claiming to be ‘loyal Americans’, have offered to set up this system for the U.S. government for FREE . . . supposedly motivated by patriotism rather than profits. Here’s the part they neglected to mention: once the system is in place, they’ll invoke their proprietary claim on the patent rights, and they’ll charge Uncle Sam (meaning the taxpayers) a teensy-weensy fee for every single time the database is accessed. Can you conceive how many MILLIONS of times per day such a database would be accessed? Those ‘patriots’ who want to set up a national I.D. system are about as patriotic as the 19th-century robber barons who got rich from monopolies . . . except that these 21st-century slime-wads want to have a monopoly on your identity. For the rest of your life, and then afterwards too.
Fortunately for your civil liberties, the Bush administration have explicitly rejected the creation of a national I.D. card. But eventually the U.S.A. will get a President who thinks it would be ‘convenient’ to pinpoint and track every American citizen. An archive of souls . . .
What’s this to do with my bio, you ask?
I’m still alive just now, but I expect to be dead a lot longer than I’ll ever be alive. I’d like to hope that, after I’ve emigrated to the undiscovered country, other people will have better things to do than post-mortem my privacy. Sadly, I expect otherwise. We’re swiftly approaching the point where every single bit of information ever scratched into a Victorian ledger or daubed into an ancient Babylonian clay tablet will now be uploaded into a searchable database. In 2137 AD, voyeurs with too much free time on their hands will be reading the emails I wrote back in 1996 (preserved in cyberspace like flies in amber), archiving all my ATM transactions, and alphabetising the DNA in my old socks. Am I so bloody important, or is my life so ruddy interesting, that I merit such attention? No, definitely not . . . and that’s precisely my point: because the spies of the future won’t be giving me special treatment; they’ll be snooping yesterwards and spying on EVERYONE ELSE in this century, too! YOUR life, and everybody else’s! The cyber-spies and cyber-eyes of the future will treat your life (and mine) like so much memorabilia to be collected and traded. And 200 years in the future (or maybe sooner), the personal details of the life you’re living right now will be trophies of cyber-fact in somebody’s stamp album.
The spies of the future will download your soul.
Mind you, I don’t much fancy having the Future looking over my shoulder, nor being spied on by people who haven’t even been born yet. To make their cyber-snoopery as difficult as possible — and in the hope that the Peeping Toms of time will bypass me in their chrono-espionage, and they’ll choose some easier target — I’ve kept my official biography confined almost entirely to my writing and my career, with only a few of the personal details that are more likely to interest snoops and voyeurs. Right; here goes:
This is the part you were probably looking for:
I was born in Perthshire, Scotland, in the late 1940s, to a lower-class couple who soon afterwards moved their enormous family to ‘Glesga’ (Glasgow, to you). I still have painful memories of Braid Street (in Glasgow C4) and of the Drumchapel housing estate. There were no shops, no factories, no labour exchange, just the one post office (which did double service as the local bank in those pre-ATM days), no pubs nor off-licences (yet my parents miraculously got drunk every night anyway), no private telephone lines and only one public ’phone box two miles away across the ‘Drum’. Today, in our modern twenty-first century, when I watch people pulling titchy little telephones out of their pockets, I remember the past . . . and I marvel.
My alleged father was ostensibly employed at the local Dunlop tyres factory, but not so’s you’d notice. (He had the P45 memorised.) My so-called parents soon enough decided they’d had more than enough ‘bairns’ and ‘weans’, and so they chose not to raise me . . . although they decided to keep my nine siblings. Effectively, my parents aborted me after I was already born. I spent some time as a de facto orphan in the Nazareth House orphanage in Cardonald, where — amongst many other ordeals — I had to contend with the rancour and physical abuse from genuine orphans who knew that, unlike them, I had parents and a family who simply didn’t want me.
At an early and vulnerable age, I became one of post-war Britain’s ‘child migrants’: more than 9,000 unwanted boys and girls who were stripped of British citizenship, crowded into ships, taken unwillingly to Australia and then used as slave labour in alleged ‘orphan asylums’ that were little more than slave farms operated by several different Christian sects, staffed largely by sadistic matrons and perverted priests. Some of the child inmates were juvenile offenders who had committed crimes in Britain, but most of us were not: most were orphans, or children who had been separated from their families during the war-time evacuations, or (including me) those whose families just didn’t want them. The obscenely true story of what happened to us — I was merely one among thousands of abused children — has never been widely publicised; the British government simply don’t want the rest of the world to read about the child migrants.
Before my adolescence, and during it, I was imprisoned in several slave-labour camps that masqueraded as orphanages in Queensland, including: Yarrabah Mission Station; Marsden Home for Boys, Kallangur; Mapoon Mission Station Industrial School (originally a shelter for aboriginal chlidren); Boys’ Home of Indooroopilly; and the notorious Westbrook Home for Boys. I also did some brief bird in the grossly misnamed Benevolent Asylum (more like a malevolent madhouse), an alleged orphanage in Quay Street, Sydney. In most of these institutions I saw children abused so severely that several of them attempted suicide, sometimes successfully. I was subjected to nearly every form of physical and psychological abuse (including sensory deprivation and outright torture) except for sexual abuse: I was spared from that one, but only because other children in the same place were weaker, slower, softer, cleaner or prettier than I was. I learnt to fight, but I’ve never learnt how to trade punches in the casual manner of brawlers. I only know the G.B.H. rules: how to fight to maim, or fight to kill.
By the time I got through puberty, I had escaped from four different juvenile prisons or prison farms, each time getting caught and returned to the same institution or a worse one. I also participated in several prison riots and mass prison-escape attempts, notably at the Westbrook (Farm) Home.
While still an adolescent, I escaped from the work-farm system (success at last!) and I lived in rural Australia, working as a jackaroo at livestock stations where I learnt useful skills: baling wool, castrating sheep, mustering brumbies (wild horses) and lungeing them, and taming the outback. I saw my very first movie (a silent film) while employed on a station (ranch) in central Australia. I’ve written about this incident in my book MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary. The ranch had a movie projector but no audio system, so the entertainment on their occasional movie-nights consisted only of silent films. I was well into my teens before I saw (and heard) a talking picture. I may one day be the last living person who thinks of silent films as the movies in their normal state, and sound films as movies with something added . . . instead of sound movies being ‘normal’ and silent films being movies with something missing.
I did the artwork and typography for this (mostly very funny) book, which is available from Wildside Press. Oh, and I wrote it, too!
One of the very few good things to come out of my exile to Australia was that I got to meet and live with some of the aboriginal people, and to experience their culture. Aboriginal children were inmates in some of the children’s institutions where I was imprisoned. Later, I lived among aboriginal adults, working alongside them in livestock stations and in settlements at Borroloola and elsewhere in rural Australia. While still in my formative years, I came to understand these tribal people’s native concepts of time and distance, which are utterly unlike the ‘enlightened’ concepts of Einstein, Newton and Euclid . . . and far beyond the absurdities of that over-rated sexist buffoon, Aristotle. Mind you, I did NOT undergo any ‘Crocodile Dundee’ scenarios of being ‘inducted’ into a tribe (no whitefella will ever receive that privilege), but I came to know these tribal people and their lives and souls and magics — their song-lines and their Dreamtime — as deeply as any outsider can ever do so.
Some of my published writing (and much of my life) has been profoundly influenced by the indigenous Australians’ tribal concepts of time, distance and presence. I’m especially proud of two of my published stories: “Death in the Dawntime”, a murder mystery set among the Wiradjuri people of ancient southeastern Australia in 40,000 BC (originally published in The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives) and “Martian Walkabout”, a science-fiction story about a young Arunta male’s initiation into manhood, and his journey into adulthood, ultimately becoming a member of the first Earth expedition to Mars. (This story was originally published in the March 1980 Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, was reprinted in the prestigious anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year #10, and is now available in my anthology MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary.)
Early on in my science-fiction career, I had the good luck to have my story “Martian Walkabout” chosen by editor Terry Carr for inclusion in this major anthology (even though I’m not one of the authors listed on the cover). Other authors in the same book include Philip K. Dick, Clifford D. Simak, Suzy McKee Charnas, Michael Swanwick, Howard Waldrop, George R.R. Martin, Zenna Henderson, Barry Malzberg and the one and only James Tiptree, Jr. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to know many of these authors as friends and colleagues.
At an early age, I discovered my secret to wealth and success: What some despise, others prize! During the slaughter season in the Queensland cattle stations, I saw stockmen slaughtering cattle but discarding their gallstones . . . or using the stones for fertiliser. I collected the gallstones, took a few days’ sickie and went to Kowloon, where I sold the gallstones to Chinese apothecaries who considered them valuable ‘cow pearls’. I made more money in that one transaction than any of the drovers made in a full season of hard yacker. What some despise, others prize!
Decades after I was abandoned by my birth mother (who was never my mother in any other sense), I learnt that she was trying to locate me, claiming that she wanted me to ‘come home so we can all be a family again’. I made some discreet inquiries, and I learnt that one of my brothers (whom my mother had chosen to keep, while abandoning me) had kidney failure, and needed a new kidney. They wanted me back, right enough: as an organ donor. First they aborted me, then they wanted to harvest my stem cells.
When I applied for a British passport in Australia so that I could return to Britain lawfully, the authorities told me that I was no longer a British subject and could not be issued a U.K. passport; if I wanted to leave Australia, I would have to apply for an Australian passport, thus acknowledging Australian citizenship. With considerable help from a Scottish expatriate whom I now fondly recall as my ‘aunt’ (although she was not related to me), I re-entered Britain illegally using a U.K. passport issued to a dead person. (The British government are now aware of my former illegal activities, and the Home Office have declined to prosecute.)
I only ever broke the law because my government told me I no longer exist. By petition to the Court of Session, and with consent of the Home Office, some of my early records have been sealed and are not publicly available. I have occasionally inserted false information about myself into the public record (false reports to police in Australia and elsewhere; false census filings; inaccurate documents filed about me at my request by other people claiming to be my relatives; and so forth) in order to confound anyone who ever attempts to write a biography of me or otherwise invade my privacy, while I live or afterward. I stopped falsifying my records after the events of 11 September 2001 — the day the world changed — when it became clear that, from now on, we’re all of us living in a world where misdemeanour acts of civil disobedience will now be prosecuted as major acts of terrorism.
In England, in the early 1960s, I hauled a wagon to private homes: intentionally targeting upper-middle-class residences that had been occupied by the same family for several generations, and had acquired plenty of artefacts. At each household, I made the same offer: For a small fee, I’ll clean out your attic or cellar, and clear away everything you don’t want. By this method, I acquired huge amounts of rubbish . . . and respectable amounts of antiques, rare books, vintage postcards, valve radios, 19th-century postage stamps, vintage photographs dating nearly to the Fox Talbot era, early films (not always deteriorated), Victorian banknotes, retro clothing, armour, weaponry, gramophones and gramophone records, oil paintings, Rowlandson prints, collectible magazines, antique documents and other memorabilia . . . some of which I mended to improve its value, and all of which I turned over for a tidy profit. What some despise, others prize! I was the original Del Boy Trotter, with a dash of Gary Sparrow: harvesting the past to profit the present. Every hour of the day is dosh o’clock.
In the 1960s, I wrote paperback novels (science-fiction and horror) for Badger Books in Britain. (This cheapjack publishing firm are now defunct; I wonder if I had anything to do with that.) All of my early novels were published under house pseudonyms or noms de plume which I now refuse to identify: those novels were, frankly, rubbish. They served the purpose of keeping me off the dole and out of a Borstal, but they are now unworthy of resurrection.
In the same decade, and for much of the 1970s, I was employed by the Grade Organisation, working closely with legendary showman Lew Grade (later Sir Lew and then Baron Grade). Much of my work for him was clerical, but I got some hands-on experience as a tech crewman on some of Lew Grade’s television programmes, notably ‘The Champions’ and ‘The Prisoner’. The latter is now recognised as one of the most intelligent offerings in television history (and I agree!), yet I actually preferred working on ‘The Champions’. On the crew of ‘The Prisoner’, I was merely one more dogsbody (or what Yanks would know as a “gofer”), just occasionally appearing onscreen in crowd sequences. None of the ‘Prisoner’ directors gave a toss about me or what I wanted to do. But while working on ‘The Champions’, I actually got some useful tech experience, and during a couple of difficult set-ups I was even consulted for my opinion!
While filming locations for The Prisoner at Portmeirion, the astonishing village in North Wales which featured so prominently in that series, I met and befriended Clough Williams-Ellis (later Sir Clough) — the eccentric architect and war hero who designed and built Portmeirion — and his amazing wife, Lady Amabel Strachey Williams-Ellis . . . who was in her own right a novelist and science-fiction anthologist (like me!), so we got along splendidly. Until her death in 1984, I continued to visit Lady Amabel at her family home Plas Brondanw (also designed by Sir Clough) and to correspond with her by post, although most of her letters to me didn’t mention The Prisoner. Here’s one that does, though (above).
While tech-crewing for early episodes of ‘The Prisoner’, I befriended that programme’s script editor George Markstein, the former newspaperman who created ‘The Prisoner’ and who (unlike its star actor) actually knew the significance of all the aspects of that very cryptic series. One of the projects I’m now planning is a book, The Prisoner Revealed, in which I will finally answer once for all such questions as: what those weird bicycles in the Village really signified, and why the Prisoner was Number Six instead of some other number. If enough people indicate interest in this project, maybe I’ll prepare a book proposal for a publisher.
In the 1970s, while working for Lew Grade in London, I maintained a residence in Bryn Awel, Pentraeth, in the beautiful countryside of North Wales. I felt so much at home there, I even felt proud that I was listed in the local telephone book! I am now ex-directory; the ’phone book (along with its database, hackable and searchable) has sadly become one more tool for those who would invade our privacy.
I worked for the Grade Organisation in various capacities for more than a decade, with sabbaticals to pursue my own projects. In the late 1970s and 1980s, I worked part-time for the brilliant and legendary international showman Alexander Cohen, the only theatrical producer who maintained permanent production offices in both Broadway’s Shubert Alley and London’s West End.
Although I tried not to obsess about my so-called parents who had abandoned me, I was curious about the fate of my siblings, whom my parents had favoured over me. As far as my parents were concerned, they had aborted me . . . yet they’d also decided to keep and raise my brothers and sisters. I made inquiries to the Scottish authorities. Two of my sisters had ended up on the game (as ‘prossies’), another was murdered by her common-law husband and a fourth is on the dole. Three of my brothers are dead from alcoholism or drugs abuse; two more have long prison records. I am a self-employed tax-payer making a positive contribution to the community and to several nations’ economies. I am the child who was discarded and aborted, yet I am the only one in that bloodline who has contributed anything to society.
In winter 1998 and autumn 1999 (Australian seasons), I gave testimony under oath to the Forde Inquiry, the Queensland government’s belated investigation of the abuses inflicted on some of Australia’s child migrants. I testified to the commission under my birth name; this is the only occasion since the early 1960s when I have used the name given to me by my birth parents. From the mid-1960s through the late 1970s, I experimented with various pseudonyms and identities. “F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre” or “Fergus MacIntyre” is now my legal name but was not my birth name. My friends call me “Froggy MacIntyre”, for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere. The name I wore while imprisoned in Australian child-welfare institutions is, frankly, nobody’s business. I deeply thank the Court of Session and the Home Office for agreeing with me, and for sealing my records. Since we’re all now living in a goldfish bowl, I prefer to erect a few walls that aren’t transparent.
I now work full-time as a free-lance author and journalist; some of my projects consist of ghost-writing (for public figures, but not necessarily famous ones) or for-hire assignments which don’t carry my by-line. I’ve published a substantial amount of fiction and non-fiction under my own by-lines, usually as “F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre”. As this website expands, I hope to add samples of my published work to it. Just lately, I’ve branched out into playwriting and screenplays.
I maintain two base camps: an urban one in New York City and a rural one in North Wales between Minffordd and Porthmadog (not too far from Portmeirion, which is officially in Penrhyndeudraeth but actually nearer Minffordd, the name of which is Welsh for “mine-road”). Through time-sharing arrangements with other individuals, I also maintain part-time residences in London and in Pordenone, Italy.
My favourite pub is The Australia, 31 High Street, Porthmadog, conveniently near the railway station (and even more conveniently near the police station). This pub got its unusual name because, allegedly, this was where the British sailors quaffed their last pint on solid ground before embarking on the long voyage to Australia. Good job they weren’t going to Siberia.
I have been married three times, to three very special ladies. These were Goldilocks marriages: the first was too hot, the second was too cold, and the third was just right. My first two wives died far too young, both of natural causes. My third wife and I parted company amicably, and we remain friends.
I have two wonderful adopted children, now both successful adults. I choose not to post their photographs (nor their names) on this website. My son is an investments broker in Canary Wharf, and my daughter is a home-maker near Los Angeles with two wonderful children of her own. I am much happier than I ever expected to be; perhaps much happier than I deserve to be. Every day of my life, I remain aware that other people have never had the opportunities I’ve received, and that this is still a world in which a person’s gender and skin colour make more difference than they ought to do. Every month, I do volunteer work for several charities, and I make financial contributions to others. I avoid all contact with my original Scottish family.
Some people collect stamps or mementos. I collect the fragments of time that other people throw away, and I put these to good use. Thank you for all that time you wasted last week; I gave it a good home.
I shan’t aspire to literary immortality; twelve billion years from now, when the sun ejects its outer core and collapses into a white-dwarf star, all of my books will be out of print and nobody will remember me. I am content.
