AT MY high-school reunion a few years back there was one character everyone wanted to know about.
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Where was Phillip Jack? What was he up to? Rumour had it that he couldn't make it to the reunion because he was in the Middle East learning Arabic. No-one was surprised at that. Jack could do anything at school. He not only intimidated other students, he intimidated the teachers.
Back in the '60s, we periodically had talks from representatives of the banks. One of these unfortunate speakers spotted Jack using a razor blade to carve tiny chalk chessmen, which he was lining up on the desk. ''I suppose you'd like to come and tell the class what SRDs and the LGS ratio are?'' he barked.
''Okay ...'' the 16-year-old Jack said, lazily rising to his feet. ''SRDs are Statutory Reserve Deposits, the frozen assets the banks are required to hold at the Reserve Bank to ensure security for depositors and the LGS ratio is the ratio of liquid assets and government securities the banks must maintain. Both help keep our deposits safe and ...'' ''That's enough,'' the banker cut in.
I went on to study economics at Sydney University but I have to say that to this day I remember what SRDs and the LGS ratio are, thanks to Phillip Jack.
No teacher at Cronulla High ever would have been so stupid as to challenge Jack on his knowledge of history, economics, politics or sociology. The school had a real mix of students, ranging from the sons and daughters of the British physicists sent to Australia to establish the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, to the wild kids from the isolated National Park village of Bundeena, who crossed Port Hacking by ferry when the weather permitted, and the kids from Kurnell, where the new oil refinery and chemical works desecrated the environmentally and historically significant site of Captain Cook's landing place. We were the second year at the school to reach the Leaving Certificate and the 30-year reunion revealed that we had turned out the usual sprinkle of teachers, doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, real estate agents and a murderer.
My other abiding school memory of Jack is from our Leaving Certificate exam days. I had pretty well completed my exams, and was down at Cronulla Point considering the surf, which looked too big for me.
Jack emerged from over the rocks; long blond hair, suntanned, six foot tall. ''Got to go,'' he said. ''Got my ancient history honours exam.'' He headed off bare foot, carrying his flippers, to trudge the couple of kilometres up the road to school. It's my recollection that he got a maximum pass - three first-class honours and two As in the Leaving Certificate - and may have topped the state in Ancient History.
But these were the '60s. There were three broad types at university. Most were there to get a meal ticket; secondly, there were the political activists, anti-Vietnam war, budding feminists and gay activists; and thirdly there was the hippie drug set. Phillip could match it with any intellectual and at times associated with the much older Push pub crowd at the Rocks, but he mostly fell into the hippie drug culture. Some years later, Jack wrote a brilliant account, for Rolling Stone, of the notorious police raid on the hippie colony at Cedar Bay in Queensland.
I had not heard of, or seen, Jack for many decades, but last week when I got my journalists' union magazine, The Walkley, there was an obituary for him headlined, ''Reporter and sub with a gonzo streak Phillip PD Jack (September 11, 1947 - September 16, 2011)''.
In Jack's obituary, journalist Lee Duffield noted that he turned to journalism in Queensland, but moved back to Sydney, joining the staff of the ABC's 2JJ (later Triple J). There he made a name for himself as an investigative journalist, before turning to business, finance and crime, and making some memorable trips overseas. One British journalist described him as an ''Oz Socrates''.
Former colleague and friend Graeme Bartlett told AAP that Jack just turned up at the [2JJ] news room and was sent to ''find the Third World War'', being dispatched to Vietnam, Lebanon and then Afghanistan. In Afghanistan he rode atop captured Soviet tanks and reported on the addiction of Soviet troops to heroin.
The ABC website currently has a 1980 Jack report describing the violence and devastation in Afghanistan in chilling detail. ''I thought I could smell a corpse. There's a corpse in the gutter there in khaki ... black, bloated, indescribably disgusting.'' After dry-retching he counts the bodies in the gutter before walking away, up through the hemp fields.
Although he used drugs, Jack remained productive and creative. Dying from liver cancer, he joked that it had been a fight between lungs and the liver and in the end the liver got him. Had he been born in another era he might have had a very different life. But he would never have been a conformist.