No one in Coburg was gay in the 1980's - Patrick Bonello’s story of courage, resilience and finding connection

Patrick Bonello takes us to the 1970s and 80s, to the working-class suburb of Coburg, where his young self was destined to start his life’s journey as an identical twin. We venture through the ups and downs of childhood and into his passion for radio and all things gadgets. All the while, Patrick is learning that he must keep the secret that he is gay, to keep himself safe. 

Come with us on this heady romp as we look at the politics of sexuality, the AIDS crisis and the prevalent homophobic views of the 80s, through the eyes of a young man who is trying to understand himself and find connection.

What is When I Was Young?

Exploring the younger years and turning point moments of authentic, outstanding and inspiring people. See the world through the eyes of someone who may have grown up in an entirely different way to you.

Patrick Bonello – When I Was Young - Podcast Transcript 2026
Nina: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to When I Was Young, the podcast that explores the younger years of interesting people. This podcast is a chance to slow down and hear about the world through the eyes of someone else who may have grown up in an entirely different way to you. All stories are true and affirmed by my guests.
Nina: I'm your host, Nina Fromhold. And today my guest is Patrick Bonello. Welcome, Patrick.
Patrick: Hey, it's great to be here. This is exciting. I'm in a real studio, with a real podcaster. This is fun.
Nina: So Patrick is one of those wonderfully active people who fits a lot into life. He started his career as a radio journalist working for some of the biggest names in the business in Victoria, including Triple M, Fox FM, [00:01:00] and gold Mix 101.1.
Nina: Now Patrick has his own marketing and graphic design business, and he is a podcast host of Okay Smart Ass and a regular tech reporter on the U Project where he delves into his love of all things technology and gadgets. He's a tenor in his local Ballan community choir. And lastly, but most especially Patrick volunteers and shares his gifts with his local community.
Nina: He has championed LGBTIQA+ rights in Victoria. Runs a community book club at his local neighbourhood house, teaches Tai Chi and has created an audio guide for the Ballan historical tree walk. And that's all before he spends time with his beloved dog, Fritz. So today we're going to explore Patrick's journey from a tough start growing up in Coburg in the 1970s and [00:02:00] eighties to a young gay man trying to find his way in a homophobic world, and finally to a place where he could be true to his authentic self.
Nina: So today's conversation will include some reference to some of the homophobic laws, the norms, and the violence that were present in Australia in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and sometimes, unfortunately still today. Welcome Patrick to When I Was Young. Can we start with when and where were you born?
Patrick: When I was young. It seems like such a long time ago, but that said, I think we're all young at heart, aren't we? I like to think I am. Anyway, I was born at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne, six minutes after my twin brother in 1967 on the 6th of July. So 6, 7, 6, 7 twin numbers, twin boys.
Nina: And being born as an identical twin, it's [00:03:00] relatively unusual. What stood out to you about this when you were young?
Patrick: Well, it was unusual then too in the late sixties, early seventies, because we didn't have IVF. So we see a lot more multiple births now because of the IVF program. So this was pre that. So yeah, I was kind of a freak. It was really, really a novelty. I think we may have had one other set of twins at the school and that was it.
Patrick: So it was quite unusual at the time. And I guess growing up as a twin, the most common question you got asked was, “what's it like being a twin?” And I reckon from a very early age, my response was always, “I don't know, what's it like not to be a twin?” Because it just seemed like a really dumb question to me because how would I know?
Patrick: I've got no term of reference. I can look at my other brothers, but it's a different relationship and you are either a twin or you're not a twin, so that's gonna influence a lot about your life. And for me, we were really close, my brother Paul and I as pre-primary school, [00:04:00] so we played together. We didn't go to kinder, so we spent a lot of our time.
Patrick: You know, raining days, I can remember pitching a tent on the front porch of a house. But as soon as we got to primary school, we seemed to go off in our own direction. So we really split at some point in the zygote stage and then we did it again when we went to primary school and we did, we went our own separate ways.
Patrick: I've gotta tell you this funny story. Grade prep, first day of school, you got all the kids that are crying 'cause they don't wanna go to school. Our first day of school got cancelled 'cause of bad weather. I was crying because I had to go home. But we were excited to go to school because my twin brother and I had an older brother who was in grade six, we're in prep.
Patrick: So the six years gap between us. And so it was kind of cool. We knew that school was gonna be an adventure because we had an older brother there, and that was fun. One day in the school yard, my older brother tells this story that one day my twin brother was crying and a teacher called him over and said, look, your little brother's [00:05:00] ready distressed.
Patrick: Someone's hit him. And they said to Paul, “what happened?” And he said, oh, a boy hit me. And oh, okay. So they started walking around the school grounds to see if they could find the boy who hit him. And then Paul points out me in the school yard. That's the boy who hit me. So that probably gives you an idea of how we really did split as kids.
Patrick: The other thing with being a twin was you tend to have a conjoined personality in the eyes of other people. So you come as a set and you know, Mum and dad dressed us in the same damn clothes. So they'd put you side by side. The relatives would say, let's see if we can pick the difference. It got so tiresome so quickly, and I can remember at about the age of 13, 12 or 13, I was sick of it.
Patrick: So we divided our wardrobe in half and I took all the browns and greens and ended up looking like a tree for the next five years. But it was a way [00:06:00] for me to separate from my brother and have my own identity. And even birthdays, as I mentioned, we shared a birthday cake. It was happy birthday, Patrick and Paul, or Paul and Patrick.
Patrick: So you never even had your own identity at birthdays. So for me, St. Patrick's Day was my day. In fact, I think I preferred St. Patrick's Day to my birthday. It's a funny thing, isn't it? So I think some twins are known to be almost psychically linked. Uh, and there have been some quirky, weird things we can chat about if you want to.
Patrick: But really for me, I wanted my own identity from a really early age.
Nina: Yeah. And that makes so much sense. Yeah. Especially the things about sharing the birthday cake, sharing that birthday. My sister and I had just one day between us, but that first day was her day and then the next day was my day. Lots of times we had shared presents and all of that sort of stuff.
Patrick: Who does that?
Nina: Because there's only one day between [00:07:00]
Patrick: Who
Nina: Right?
Patrick: Does that, a shared present? My, my favourite auntie in the world is this lovely Irish lady who is my godmother. We would get the Guinness Book of World Records and I reckon by the end of the day it would be a fight.
Patrick: Probably pages were ripped out. You don't give two children a gift to share 'cause it's gonna end up in a fight. And that's generally, generally what happened. And even at school, you know, if there was a talent night on, they tried to get us to perform together. Hated that idea
Nina: Because it was cutesy to everyone else?
Patrick: Right! Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you have twins, don't do that. Let them form their own ideas of whether they wanna be connected or not. I think from my perspective. We have a relationship, an ongoing relationship, but it's very distinct. And I think that there are two types of twins. The twins that can't be separated.
Patrick: I've spoken to the wife of a set of twins who said, when we got married, I knew I would always come second to my [00:08:00] husband's twin. And she said that quite openly about it. Whereas with my twin brother and I, despite the similarities, we tend to have very different separate lives.
Nina: Yeah, absolutely. But within that, if he's in pain, do you feel that pain? And I don't mean physically.
Patrick: Emotional pain. Look, I'm gonna tell you a couple of really weird do do do do do do, do sounding kind of stories. So I moved outta home first before my six year older brother. And so I liked my independence and I came home for Christmas one year, got to the front door and it was locked.
Patrick: And so I knocked on the front door and mum opened the door and she said, oh, you've been talking to your brother? And I said, what do you mean? So I'd grown a goatee for the first time ever in my life, and I hadn't seen or spoken to my twin brother for over a month. I walked in and he'd grown a goatee at about the same time.
Patrick: So we had an identical goatee. I gotta tell you, I almost shaved it off there. If I could have got [00:09:00] to a blade and shaved it off there, I would have. But that was really kind of freaky. Like one day we went on the phone and you know, I asked him how his week's been. He said, oh, terrible. I had a root canal. I had to go to the dentist.
Patrick: It's terrible. It's painful. I said, yeah, me too. Which tooth? Same tooth, same week. You know, those sorts of little coincidences. And the other really strange thing that happens is I quite often get called his name by total strangers who don't know I have a twin.
Nina: Oh wow.
Patrick: A lot. A local politician in our area. We've known each other for years. And then one day mid-conversation, she starts calling me Paul. People on the phone I've been chatting to. So someone trying to flog off solar panels. And again, halfway through the conversation they'll change my name. And even though Patrick and Paul do sound kind of similar-ish, well they start with P and that's it really.
Patrick: They start with P. No, they're not similar. Let's face it. It's crazily weird, isn't it? Yeah. So those sorts of things make a really interesting, quirky thing about being a twin, I [00:10:00] think.
Nina: And then just that strange connection that we have sometimes to our siblings. And I did wonder if that was just a little stronger in you with this particular brother.
Nina: Can we talk about your home life? What were your parents like and your siblings, and how did you spend time when you were young?
Patrick: Growing up in Coburg, Coburg was a very different city than it is now. I can tell you, actually, I'm going to Coburg this weekend. For the first time in ages to a vegan market like that wouldn't have happened.
Patrick: I mean, you might've got a kebab on the corner in Sydney Road, but that was probably about the extent of the diversity. It was an interesting suburb, working class. Dad came out in ‘56 and he worked here for four years to then go back and marry mum, both from Malta, middle of the Mediterranean, little tiny rock that was really reeling and a lot of Maltese people exited Malta purely because economically, and they were devastated by the war.
Patrick: It was one of the most heavily bombed [00:11:00] locations during the whole second World War because it was such a strategic space. You know, at one point I think there were three British Spitfires defending the island, and they were running outta food. So historically, quite a fascinating place. So they came out.
Patrick: Dad was out in 56, went back four years later, and he came out on a ship and it took a long time to come out to Australia on a ship, but they had a slight advantage over a lot of the other immigrants at the time because Maltese people all spoke English. Because Malta was a British colony, they came out as 10 pound migrants, and that made it really a lot easier.
Patrick: So Dad, I think started off at a factory, but he became a foreman pretty quickly. Whereas the Greeks and the Italians, they had a bit of a tougher time because they didn't have English as a first language. It was a bilingual upbringing in Malta where everybody learned to speak English and Maltese, and quite often they spoke Italian as well because the only television they got was television from Italy.
Patrick: Malta was so small, it's still [00:12:00] tiny in terms of population, if you ever look at it on Google Earth, this is hilarious. I always show friends this. You zoom into the airport. In the middle of Malta and you can see the runway. And then as you zoom out and zoom out and zoom out, you see the entire island and you can still see the runway.
Patrick: And then you zoom out further and you see the other two sub islands of the archipelago. There's Camino and Gozo, and you can still see the runway. It's pretty small.
Nina: But it fits half a million people.
Patrick: So yeah, they cram a lot into that space.
Nina: So Dad worked at a factory?
Patrick: Yes. And he then got a job at the Children's Hospital.
Patrick: He was a machinist by trade, and then he was the plant operator at the Royal Children's Hospital. And Mum worked nights. Mum was a cleaner. She did it tough. My Mum, she raised the kids. She did all the chores. She did all the cooking. We'd have dinner prepared for us at 5:00pm. We had dinner at five because Mum had to go to work, and then she worked nights as a cleaner at the Commonwealth [00:13:00] Serum Laboratories.
Patrick: She was there for over 25 years, Mum. It was a long haul for her, and sadly, as it progressed, mum ended up, before she retired, she got dementia. So that was a tough journey for the family to take. Dad was pretty strict at home. I think a lot of families in that era give the kid a bit of a whack. Corporal punishment wasn't an issue.
Patrick: 'cause corporal punishment was at school as well.
Nina: That's right. Yeah, it was, it was commonly accepted as, what was the saying that I’m thinking of?
Patrick: Spare the rod and spoil the child. Was that the one?
Nina: That's the one and it comes from that religious background. Yeah. But at the same time, I think for a long time it was well overused.
Nina: Culturally, it's been an interesting shift in our lifetime. Mm-hmm. To see how that has really moved in parenting.
Patrick: Dad was soccer obsessed. I think his release was to go to soccer. He managed the local soccer team. My eldest brother was an absolute star soccer player. He played state, he was very good. And my twin brother played for [00:14:00] quite a while and dad managed the soccer team and I kind of started going along for a while.
Patrick: Hated it. And so I just play at the playground, which was good. I didn't mind my own company and I was inventive. I loved just to play by myself. I had no problem doing that. And so in some ways, I think of being, yeah, ostracised in a little way. At one point there was a bit of bullying as well, which was pretty tough.
Patrick: I dunno whether I presented differently, but kids are really good at picking kids out. And if you are the kid that's on the playground by himself, when all the rest of them are doing soccer training, then suddenly there's something different about you. That's right. And I think that as much as I've gone through my life, loving being different and embracing that, but there's always a time in your life, in particularly, I guess, when you're at school.
Patrick: You don't wanna stand out from the crowd too much. That's something you don't necessarily want to do. You wanna fit in. So that was the family life. I loved reading. I loved gadgets. I made friends before primary school. I [00:15:00] made friends with the rubbish man. So they would come to do their weekly rubbish collection.
Patrick: And if they had any toys they found they'd give them to me. 'cause they didn't have plastic bags those days. You just chucked stuff in the rubbish bin and it got dumped. And so they would give me gadgets and things and I'd take them apart. I was obsessed by stuff. And I can remember one day making a little helicopter with a straw and a little electric battery with the little electric motor on it.
Patrick: And mum proudly getting them to come in and see what I'd made outta this broken toy that I'd taken apart. It became a lifelong nerd obsession. So I guess I was a nerd way before the term nerd was A around and B Cool.
Nina: That's right. That's gone on its own evolution.
Patrick: Yeah, it has, hasn't it?
Nina: So you were starting a new in-crowd with your love of technology.
Patrick: For sure.
Nina: And so keeping on that vein of you pulling yourself out and keeping yourself company. Talk to me about when [00:16:00] you first recall feeling quite independent as a young person and what did that look like for you?
Patrick: I think independence or a sense of freedom to go out. We were of a generation where you could just jump on your bike and it was, make sure you’re home before it gets dark.
Nina: Mm-hmm.
Patrick: You know, that's the generation that I grew up in. Whether it rained, it didn't matter, put on a raincoat, it's fine. So I would head off on my bike on a Saturday morning, 6:00 AM I was outta the place. I'd catch up with my best mate. We'd ride down to Sydney Road. There was a bakery. We used to be able to spend 10 cents on a roll.
Patrick: That's our breakfast. So we'd knock on the back door of the bakery 'cause they'd be baking, of course, ready for opening time. And we'd just buy something to eat there and we'd be on our pedal bikes and just hanging around and hooning around. So that was quite young. Talking primary school here. We did the whole summer street cricket thing, the Liverpool Street kids and the next street across would play the Preston Street kids.
Patrick: And one kid had to get out and then throw the bat and it had to go [00:17:00] flying across the road. So I did a little bit of that. I think the biggest freedom for me was getting my first part-time job. 'cause it did two things. I was only 13 and I was jumping on the tram and going into Melbourne to Tandy Electronics, I was a cleaner.
Patrick: So I'd go on a Saturday morning and I'd just vacuum and clean toilets, vacuum and empty rubbish bins. But it was a job and I got money for it and I thought, this is awesome. I've got money. I can do whatever I want. I bought my first bike. That was pretty exciting because we weren't wealthy. Dad worked really hard.
Patrick: Mum worked hard as well, but they were struggling to buy a home, all that sort of thing. The great Australian dream was the dream of all ethnic people coming to Australia. You know, you came to Australia, you wanted your plot of land and you wanted your house and you wanted to pay it off as quickly as possible.
Patrick: So, you know, kudos to them. And all of those people who came out to Australia who were able to do that, to set up a life for themselves and having four kids and you know, my youngest brother's disabled. [00:18:00] So that was one journey in itself. So my independence in a lot of ways, I think was partly due to the fact that so much attention was put on my younger brother that I could just get away with anything.
Patrick: It kind of meant that Mum and dad weren't as attentive as they could have been, which wasn't a bad thing. 'cause I reveled in that. I came from a family where if we went visiting. If someone asked if we wanted a drink, we wouldn't even say yes. We'd look at our parents first to get the nod before we said yes, we had to be seen and not heard.
Patrick: Then I'd go to my mate's place and his mum would say, I'm gonna get you a drink. And then the rest of the time, just go help yourself. Go to the fridge, grab whatever you want. And it was really bizarre, and I was a wog kid growing up in Coburg, and suddenly these Aussies were great. They'd fling the door open.
Patrick: We could make cardboard houses that we could sleep in with our sleeping bags. Oh, we did so much. That was so contrary to my upbringing, seeing what it was like to be in a different environment. That was a [00:19:00] great thing for me. Having independence, not feeling any constraints so I could go out and just do whatever I wanted to do.
Nina: I wanna go into the gadgets a little bit more. So you've talked about making this wonderful little helicopter.
Patrick: Yes.
Nina: But I believe there's a story from about grade five with a radio. Would you like to share this story?
Patrick: It seems like it was a harbinger for my future career that I was attracted to radio.
Patrick: I remember being in a class that was boring and so my mate and I got transistor radios and little earpieces and I sat in class with my hand over my ear, leaning on the desk listening to radio and got into so much trouble. Had to see the principal 'cause I got caught years later. I got a little FM transmitter microphone and then I was broadcasting to all my mates in class, running a little virtual radio station as well.
Patrick: So I, I didn't really learn my lesson. I just got worse.
Nina: But that was your start into radio. [00:20:00]
Patrick: Yeah, it was. I guess that's, that's very true. I'd have this one recollection in primary school where we had a teacher who got us to do a little radio station where we had a turntable. We had to bring in our favourite vinyl record and then do a little radio station.
Nina: What a great thing.
Patrick: I know. How good is that?
Nina: We didn't get that at school.
Patrick: I know. So it started it. It was that little spark that just sat there for me, I reckon.
Nina: Just gorgeous. And in your junior years of high school, you made a best friend. Talk to me about how you and Nunny cemented your friendship.
Patrick: That was a funny one. I changed schools and you go from primary school to secondary school. It's a really big step. I got there on the first day and I can remember wandering around the yard for whatever reason I was by myself. 'cause obviously I wouldn't have spoken to my twin. And I sat down on the playground next to this blonde kid, big mop of blonde curly hair.
Patrick: And we got chatting [00:21:00] and it ended up, we were in the same classes. It was a private school, like a working class private school, St. Joey's in Pasco Vale. And it ended up, we were in the same group and Pete and I just became fast friends, you know, became best mates, right from the word go. And you hear those little stories about how you connect and I guess, what are you about 12 at the time.
Patrick: And that's a big time in your life, as I said, changing schools, going to secondary school.
Nina: That's right. And you wouldn't have had all your primary school friends with you as well.
Patrick: Not necessarily. No. That's right.
Nina: Yeah. So it does leave you a little bit vulnerable and where do I fit in this new world? And everything's new.
Nina: Mm-hmm. I remember feeling quite out of my comfort zone when I first started high school. Took me a while to settle in.
Patrick: I had a similar experience. Our primary school had two campuses. So we had a campus that went to grade four and then grade five and six. And this is probably touching on a, a little bit of a sense of being different for me because I [00:22:00] remember getting to the new campus.
Patrick: My best mate had got a scholarship to another school, so he wasn't there anymore. Another mate had left school and went to a different school. And I remember being in the playground one day thinking, oh, I don't actually have any friends here at school. And one of my former friends had got into footy, so he started playing footy with the other kids.
Patrick: And I wouldn't, I refused to play sport. Maybe it was because of dad's obsession with soccer, but whatever it was, I absolutely hated sport. As a consequence, all my friends kind of gravitated. They formed their own little ecosystems and there was this tiny point where I didn't fit in. And then other kids came to the school and I discovered nerds.
Patrick: There were other people who were nerds and that's where like attracts like, isn't it?
Nina: It's a nice thing. Is it uncomfortable when you are becoming aware of in-crowds and out-crowds and all of that. But then when you find your people, it's like, oh, finally my people. So beautiful.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: And [00:23:00] now, what inspired you to follow radio?
Nina: How did this start to intrude in your world and call you to it?
Patrick: I did drama studies and we had this amazing drama teacher who encouraged us to do a radio play. So we wrote and scripted a radio play, and then we recorded it on cassette and performed it and gave it to the teacher as our assignment. What we didn't know at the time is we got called out of class and the teacher said to us, yours was the best play out of everybody in the class.
Patrick: And I've entered you into the 3AW Radio Play Festival.
Nina: Ah
Patrick: It was pretty big. So we performed the radio play in front of an audience at the Melbourne Showgrounds and we didn't win that year. And I say that year we didn't win, but one of the judges took aside my teacher and said to her, this kid has a future in radio.
Patrick: And then [00:24:00] the teacher of course said to me, you were singled out by the judges. They were really impressed with you. And that started that spark. I think that continued on from there and I thought, I have no idea how I'm gonna get into radio. So I wrote a letter to the number one breakfast host in Melbourne at the time.
Patrick: A guy by the name of John Blackman. So John Blackman was on, Hey, Hey It’s Saturday, but he also was the number one breakfast host in Melbourne on 3AW. So I wrote a letter to him and I was on school holidays with my friends. We were out and about and I got back home and mum said, oh, you got a phone call this morning from John Blackman.
Patrick: And of course we didn't have cell phones. Then I said to mum, what John Blackman called, I had no idea that he would've picked up the phone and taken the trouble to call some kid. Anyway, she said, oh, no, no. Well, when he finishes his shift tomorrow, he'll give you a call again. So he called me and I chatted to him and I said, look, I really wanna get into radio, which is what I'd written to him.
Patrick: And a mate of his had just started the [00:25:00] Melbourne Radio School, a guy by the name of Gary Mack, who was an amazing guy. And I thought, I've gotta go to radio school.
Nina: Ha ha. How wonderful.
Patrick: So that's how all that came about. So from the radio play to John Blackman, but it was kind of funny 'cause I said to Mum and dad, I wanna get into radio.
Patrick: And they said, don't be ridiculous. That was out of the scope for dad. It was get a trade. That was it. Radio was so far separate. I might as well have said, I wanna join the royal family and there's a whole thing different there about a queen, but we won't get into that. I thought to myself, well that's not gonna stop me.
Patrick: I had my own money and it was really expensive. It must have been maybe four or $600 for a kid who's 15. But I signed up, I went in and I signed up to the Melbourne Radio School and I think I was sneaking out at night for the first two or three weeks. 'cause it was late at night and it was in South Melbourne.
Patrick: So I had to run up to the tram, stop, then catch the tram in to get there in time for it to start. And it was the middle of winter, so it was dark. I'd say to him, I'm just gonna go and do some study. And then I'd just [00:26:00] take the fly wire off, jump out the window and rush up to the tram stop. And I got caught, I think week three.
Patrick: Dad caught me sneaking out and he said, what the hell do you think you are doing? I said, I'm going to radio school. And the first question he asked was, well, how much did you pay for it? And I said, well, I've paid this much money. He said, oh, you better keep going then
Nina: Because you're sneaking out to educate yourself.
Patrick: Yeah. Don't figure out I'm the worst kid ever. Other kids were doing drugs, you know, they were vandalising things, but No, no, no. I was sneaking out to get further education.
Nina: It's just gorgeous. But the other thing in your story that really stands out there is you had two adult strangers really step out of themselves to give you a beacon.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: So the first guy, the judge on the panel who singled you out and gave you that little bit of recognition followed by this famous person that you listened to on the radio Yeah. Who just reached out to you to bring you [00:27:00] in.
Patrick: Can I just say to any adult listening, and I'm hoping there's a lot out there who'll take this on board.
Patrick: Anything you say to a child could have a permanent fixture in their life for that memory, that encouragement, but also the opposite side of it as well. You know, when you put somebody down, that can be an emotional scarf for the rest of their life. And so think about what you say to kids. They're so impressionable.
Patrick: And you could change the life of a kid just by encouraging them.
Nina: Exactly. Right.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: So many people have that story about that one person who just said that perfect thing at that moment in time and it just changes your trajectory. It's, it's a beautiful thing. Skipping forward. Now I wanna go to senior high school.
Nina: You had another change of school this time to North Melbourne.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Nina: And you're about 15, and you're starting to get some inklings about who you might be in the world. It's a scary time, especially if you do [00:28:00] already think that you might be a bit different to your peers around you. So talk me through the things that were playing out for you at this time.
Patrick: Yeah. I'd always felt that I was different for different reasons. Creative. I loved sketching. I didn't like sport, but. I think I still presented pretty atypically. I'm one of those people that tends to blend in. A bit of a chameleon, and I started to, I think around the age of 14, 15, you start getting attractions.
Patrick: So you start to work out where you are in the world and you don't choose your attractions. If you get a group of a hundred people and you look around that room, you may be drawn to someone on an intellectual level, on a spiritual level, on a sexual level. So there's no real way to govern that except by the pure fact that you connect with someone.
Patrick: And I think at about the age of 14-15, I started coming to the realisation that I kind of liked some of my mates. [00:29:00] My friends were getting girlfriends, and that was a struggle for me because my twin brother was getting regular girlfriends. For me, that was a challenge because my brothers had girlfriends and I didn't, and I kept getting asked, oh, do you have a girlfriend?
Patrick: Do you have a girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? And, you know, you'd make excuses. I did have a girlfriend for about 30 seconds, and I've gotta tell you this story. I talked about it on a podcast once and people were shocked. So the first time I ever kissed someone was this girlfriend and she had a stubby tongue.
Patrick: It was like making out with a blue tongue lizard. So I, I'm not suggesting that she turned me off women, I don't mean that in any way, shape or form, but it was particularly unrewarding. It also happened that her best friend was my best friend's girlfriend. So we did this double dating thing for a very, very short time.
Patrick: So that coincided with me doing the radio course, then changing schools and going to a Christian Brothers school in North Melbourne. Which was [00:30:00] horrendous. So I'm emotionally going through all these changes and I'm struggling, like really, really struggling with the idea that I was queer, that I was gay.
Patrick: You know, you didn't want to be gay then. Not in the eighties, that's for sure. It was the last space that you wanted to inhabit when we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis and school was terrible. I was really good up to year 10, and I loved maths and science. I was a nerd. And then I did this pure and applied math, science course, physics, chemistry, biology, advanced maths A and B.
Patrick: Talked into it by my teachers. I wanted to do drama, I wanted to do English, I wanted to do the creative stuff, but got talked into doing a pure and applied math science. Did really good at bio and English, terrible at everything else, but I'm gonna blame the teachers to a degree. I can remember getting my work handed back to me, telling me that my words weren't close enough to the margin.
Patrick: Oh, so I had to redo it or I didn't like the color of the pen that you used or your words were too small and I couldn't read it. So there was [00:31:00] a particular physics teacher, a Christian Brother, who just criticised me for everything. So I got back at him. I used to sabotage all his experiments. Whenever I knew he was doing experiments, I'd sneak in and it might have been spring measures, so I'd just stretch all the springs and none of them would work.
Patrick: Um, I, it was awful. He had a vendetta against me and I had a vendetta against him. But guess what? He was the adult.
Nina: Yes.
Patrick: Go figure.
Nina: Yes. And his feedback was petty.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: It wasn't actually helping you grow or learn anything new.
Patrick: Yeah. And it wasn't a different head space then. I reckon it, it's so hard being a teenager, I, you know, you've got hormones running around your body, your brain is totally rewired.
Patrick: It's nothing like the human adult brain. It's totally different. And I was kind of rebelling. And I had these attractions that I didn't wanna acknowledge because Catholic upbringing, that didn't help. So you've got someone from the pulpit talking AIDS stuff and how you're gonna burn in the fires of hell.
Patrick: I [00:32:00] can remember going to confession and I was a pretty good kid and going in there and the Catholic priest saying to me, what have you done? What have you done bad? I don't know what he was digging around for. 'cause I was actually a pretty good kid. And then it got to the point where he said, well you need to go out and think of more things.
Patrick: And sent me out for 20 minutes to try to think of more stuff. So I just made up a whole lot of crap. And no, I was actually just an okay kid. I did my own thing. I generally didn't lie. Tried not to. The first time I ever openly lied was about being gay. Denying being gay. Yeah, I never lied. I prided myself as a kid on never lying.
Patrick: And then people started grilling me, have you got a girlfriend? Don't you like girls? And then suddenly I learnt to lie.
Nina: What was your alternative? You were young.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: You were just working it out for yourself. Yeah. You're in a very conservative environment where people are telling you that your sexuality is wrong, that it's unhealthy or that it could be fixed or changed.
Patrick: Or fatal.
Nina: Yeah. And you're in a Christian brothers school as well, so where was your safe place to be able to say, actually, this is how I feel.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. It wasn't. Yeah, and radio then was great for me. I wagged school for 10 days after radio school finished.
Patrick: We were contacted by the Melbourne Radio School to say that they teamed up with a radio station in Melbourne to run a showground studio at the Royal Melbourne Show. It was an opportunity when they weren't broadcasting live for the radio students to then do simulated broadcasts. So we weren't broadcasting live, but we were in a studio at the show interviewing people, playing music.
Patrick: It was phenomenal. “Drive” by The Cars, for some reason, is one of the songs that sticks in my mind at that time in that era. I love it. So I was wagging school to volunteer. I wagged for the 10 days of the Royal Melbourne Show, so I could be there at the showground [00:34:00] studio, every single day. And that led to my downfall in terms of my schooling.
Patrick: But it was already on the way down. It was plummeting, you know, this was a space shuttle without any heat shields. It was burning up in the atmosphere big time, and the emotional rollercoaster. I was working at Coles at that point, and because of the trauma, I guess, of things that were going on in my life, I was self-harming.
Patrick: You know, my first job in the morning was to grab all the trolleys that had been left out. And I vividly remember grabbing the trolleys and brushing up against the wall and watching the skin of my knuckles just get scraped off and as they bled and not feeling it. Like the pain. The pain was there, but you're so numb inside.
Patrick: It just was a way to feel something. Because emotionally it was so vacuous you didn't know what to feel. And at least this was something that was definitive. Pain was a way to, to [00:35:00] focus later in life. Early twenties drinking was a bit of a problem as well, 'cause you went to parties and you just got blotto.
Nina: Mm. Before we go there, let's talk a little bit more about your young self because something cool happened when you went to Luna Park one day. I wanna hear that story please.
Patrick: It was interesting. It was certainly a life changing experience for me. So my best mate was turning 14 or 15 and his Mum had got us vouchers to go to the Luna Park in St. Kilda.
Patrick: Big adventure for us coming from the other side of Melbourne. I'd never been before. And we rocked up. There was a group of maybe six of us, you know, on the tram. We were gonna St. Kilda. We went to Macca's. One of the guys started laughing and snuffled a piece of ice, went through his nostril. It was hilarious.
Patrick: Anyway, we get to Luna Park and the first ride as we walked in, on the right hand side was the Ferrari cars. And they were not dodgem cars. Dodgem cars were for wusses, right. The Ferrari cars were [00:36:00] basically petrol driven cars, like these go-karts. And they went pretty fast and they smelled terrible and they made lots of noise.
Patrick: It was fantastic. We are there lined up and we're just so excited. And there's this guy standing next to me, random. I'm in the end of the line. And this random guy I got chatting to him, you know, we're just talking about getting on the Ferrari cars. We jump onto the Ferrari cars and it always goes so quickly, doesn't it?
Patrick: I reckon it goes for about 45 seconds and then they make you get off again. But we kept doing the loop and so we get back in the line and I kept chatting to this guy, this random guy, just for whatever reason I've got all my mates with me, so there's six of us or so, and get chatting to this guy. And he was just cool like my age.
Patrick: We connected, we got talking and he was there by himself. So he was probably from the southern suburbs or eastern suburbs or somewhere. It was definitely nowhere near Coberg, I can tell you. And we got chatting and there was a connection. I couldn't articulate it at the time and even now, I dunno what it really meant, but we just really resonated.
Patrick: You [00:37:00] know, the harmonics, how you can have those tuning forks and the music or the noise starts to vibrate at a certain level and that's what it was. We kept going on the Ferrari cast, then we wandered to somewhere else. My mate, whose birthday it was, he wanted to try something else. He was leading the show.
Patrick: So the other guy said, can I come with you? I said, yeah, of course you can. So he starts following us around and my best mate turns to me and says, who is this guy? It's like, oh no, he's really cool. You know, he was on the Ferrari cars and you don't mind if he hangs out with us. And so suddenly this extra wheel was part of the crew, and we just hung out for the whole day together.
Patrick: It was this really interesting moment. My closest friends were with me, but there was something about this guy. The one thing that I do remember is heading back into the city and we got to Flinders Street Station. Our tram was going further, so we were still on the tram. Before he got off the tram, he said to me, oh, so where do you [00:38:00] live?
Patrick: And we were trying to connect and work out our backstories. And he was from one side of Melbourne and I was from another side of Melbourne. And you didn't swap phone numbers, you didn't have phone numbers. We didn't have emails, we didn't have Facebook, we didn't have any way to connect. And he got off the tram and he stood there out the front of Flinders Street Station.
Patrick: And the tram pulled away and we made eye contact for as long as we could until it was broken and I was gutted and I didn't understand why. You know, I'd met this person, spent a day with him, with my mates, and I reckon it took me six months to get over it.
Nina: Yeah.
Patrick: I had no idea what had happened. I guess I'd fallen in love. Is that what it is? It was something. It's a bittersweet memory, isn't it?
Nina: It's a beautiful thing.
Patrick: Yeah. I look at it with such fondness and I've had crushes over the years, as you do, and probably on a few school mates as well. My mate Nunny that I met when we first started school, year 10, [00:39:00] we had a traditional road trip to Central Australia, which is so much fun.
Patrick: So we camped along the way and for some reason we were in one tent of four, but just the two of us. I really felt close to him. And again, it was that connectedness. And I remember on the bus at one point he'd fallen asleep and he just had his head resting on my shoulder and that tactile contact.
Patrick: 'cause growing up we weren't a tactile family. We never hugged ever. In fact, I got talked into getting into a youth group when I was about 19. And I had a number of people who were ex-school friends and primary school friends who kept talking me into it. It was religious. It was a group called Antioch, so a Catholic youth group.
Patrick: It was great. It was very uplifting and lots of songs and singing and that sort of stuff. And I remember the first meeting I eventually got talked into going to, it was a Sunday night, and right at the end of the meeting people started hugging each other. I freaked out. Yeah. Like I pushed people away physically because I'd never had a hug that I could remember.
Patrick: And they were encroaching on my [00:40:00] space and I thought, this is awful. Yet that one instance in the bus going to Central Australia, having someone just rest their head on my shoulder was electric. The sensation of just that tactile contact. So from a kid who didn't ever have tactile contact, kids didn't hug then, I mean, I love now that kids can do that.
Patrick: I was walking, my dog might've been before the start of the school term, just the first day back and it just happened to coincide and there's a primary school at the corner of my street, and this little boy ran up the street as fast as he could to give his friend a hug. I was almost in tears watching that.
Patrick: I thought, I'm so glad that boys can hug each other now, and they can be tactile and say, I love you. You know, and it's nothing else but the fact that they really love their friend, you know, it's so sweet with no stigma associated with it.
Nina: It's a nice thing and we all need. That tenderness and intimacy.Yeah. And something so simple as your closest [00:41:00] mate falling asleep on your shoulder.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Nina: There's a real trust in that. Yeah. It's so lovely.
Patrick: Well, I'm a real huggy person, you know, after this podcast, I'm so gonna give you a hug. Right. Just warning you.
Nina: Now, all my loved ones know that I'm a hugger, so that won't come as a surprise.
Nina: So you've had that first flutter of a crush. I remember the very first time, well, when I'd moved to Melbourne and I was starting to question my sexuality, I didn't know where I fit. One day I walked to the tram stop, and as I was walking towards the tram stop, I was like, wow, that has gotta be the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.
Nina: And she was just sitting there in this tram stop. I started a conversation with her, oh, how long have you been sitting here? And blah, blah. And we talked all the way into the city. And it turned out that she lived on my street.
Patrick: Oh, no way.
Nina: Yeah. She lived on my street and I didn't see her for a few months and then we bumped [00:42:00] into each other down the street and we ended up starting a friendship that lasted for a very long time, but always in my mind, she was Beautiful Jen.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: Because that was how I'd met her. Very rarely you meet someone and you're like, something about you takes my breath away.
Patrick: Isn't it funny, you can have sexual attraction, but sometimes you can be attracted to someone on a such a different level where just spending time with them enhances your life so much.
Patrick: It feels like they're the EverReady battery on superpower charge or something. It's funny how it can just jumpstart the emotions. They can bring something to the equation and hopefully it works the other way too.
Nina: It's so good. Those crushes, they're powerful, I think. Mm-hmm. Just helping us connect with people we are meant to meet for some reason, whatever that may be.
Nina: But I wanna go back to you. Okay. You've had that first crush. You've [00:43:00] realised it's a crush on a boy. You're starting to wrangle with the idea of being gay in this quite homophobic world.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: How did you keep yourself safe?
Patrick: That was tough. Well, the first thing that I did was, I was sharing a bedroom with my 16-year-old twin brother bunks and a tiny desk.
Patrick: Honestly. The room we're sitting in now would you say is what, three and a half meters by two and a half meters or something? Definitely. That was our bedroom with bunks and a desk. It was awful. And of course at 16 you want privacy. I decided I was gonna buy a caravan
Nina: With your part-time job money?
Patrick: With my part-time job money!
Patrick: I think it was about two and a half thousand dollars. Wow. It was a lot of money in 1986. And I changed schools and I was going to Glenroy Tech and I'd met the student welfare coordinator who was amazing, and became a mentor and I started going and learning to surf. So I was going out to the coast and I saw a caravan for sale and I said to my parents, I wanna buy a caravan and put it out in [00:44:00] the backyard.
Patrick: The house that we lived in had a concrete slab in the corner, which obviously at some point the previous owners had used for a caravan. That was my argument. We also adjoined a laneway with quite wide gates to get the caravan in. So I had it all mapped out in my head and then asked for permission and they said, no, absolutely not.
Patrick: You're not buying a caravan. So I went and bought one anyway and convinced an older mate to drive it back. So I bought it at Ocean Grove and we drove it back and rocked up. Imagine being my parents? Dad looks over and there's this caravan in the laneway beside our house, and he said, what the hell have you done?
Patrick: And I said, I bought a caravan. I wanna live in it. And he said, absolutely no way is it going in the backyard. I said, fine, I'll live in the laneway.
Nina: No.
Patrick: So I wasn't gonna be moved. I've bought it. I've paid for it, like my mates dumping it here and that's it. It's not going anywhere. And so he relented.
Patrick: And in fact, it's a funny story. When we [00:45:00] opened the gates for the caravan to come through, they weren't wide enough. So I had to take out one of the posts to allow the caravan to get in there. I moved into the caravan at 16 and that gave me a lot of independence. It was my own space, it was my own privacy.
Patrick: That was pretty monumental for me, having that space. Look, I, I touched on it before and I can say it now. I was a victim of abuse by an older sibling. I was punched and hit, spat on, called a fag. You know, it's funny, I was called a fag before I realised I was one, but to be hit. I can remember one day mum coming home from work and saying, oh, have you got a hickey on your neck?
Patrick: And it wasn't a hickey on my neck. My brother tried to strangle me and had left marks on my neck, so I can talk about that now. The violence, and we've talked it through many, many, many years later, over a joint. It was in Canada, not in our jurisdiction. So I think we can get away with it.
Nina: You can
Patrick: But it was [00:46:00] pretty tough.
Patrick: I was scared a lot of the time, and home is supposed to be a safe space and I don't know how much of my family knew what was going on. I really don't. But there was a lot of violence and I was very scared. And so buying the caravan gave me that independence and I could lock the damn door. Dad asked me the first day I got it, he said, have you got a spare key?
Patrick: I said, no. There was no way I was giving anybody a key to that. And I locked it and no one was going in there ever unless I gave them permission.
Nina: That's fair enough. It was an era where so much actual violence was fobbed off as “Oh, that's just boys being boys”. Yeah. And they're just siblings fighting like they would normally fight.
Nina: But actually if you were the one on the receiving end of that violence, it didn't feel like that. There was a lot that our culture just excused in the eighties.
Patrick: You know what? I don't understand, and I still reconcile this in my mind, and as I said, I've talked this through with my brother who's apologised to me.
Patrick: He's [00:47:00] six years older, so when I was 12, he was 18.
Nina: Mm-hmm.
Patrick: You know, when I was 15 and he was beating the shit outta me.
Nina: Yeah.
Patrick: He's in his twenties, so it's hard to reconcile that. When I look at the young people around me, I've mentored young people over the years. I've got a young guy who's working for me, he's a lovely guy.
Patrick: He's worked for me since he was 14 and nine months. I had to get special permission from the employment directorate to hire him. His mother's a friend of mine, and he's been working for me for four years, and now he's taking a gap year traveling with his girlfriend, which is really lovely. But I'm always conscious of the age gap, and I think, well, when he was 14, if a 20-year-old beat the crap out of him, I can't even begin to imagine what you would do. You’d get the police in, wouldn't you?
Nina: Yes. You would now.
Patrick: Yeah,
Nina: you absolutely would. Now.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: I know it doesn't make any sense in hindsight.
Patrick: Hmm.
Nina: But I certainly used to hear it. You know, I grew up around Drouin and when I got to [00:48:00] 17 ish, there would be going off to the pub underage and almost every Friday or Saturday night, there would be some kind of fist fight out the front of the pub between the guys.
Nina: And people would talk about it as if they're just blowing off some steam. This is normal. Let 'em play it all out. They'll be best mates again tomorrow. And people would just talk about it like that, as if it wasn't violence. It was so normalised, people downplayed it. Whereas now we look at all those sorts of things and we go, hang on a minute.
Nina: That's actual violence. And I think that's how things like domestic violence remained so covered up for so long, is that culturally there was a level of violence that was accepted or silenced
Patrick: Oh, giving the Mrs. a backhander. Yeah. You know what an awful thing, you know, when you think of masculinity in Australia, it's a frightening [00:49:00] thought that that was an acceptable thing in households.
Patrick: Yeah. Not in every household, but it happened. The next door neighbours were a Croatian family and the husband was a drunk and he used to beat the crap outta the kids. In fact, Tom, Tom was a little bit of a crush as well, now that I think of it. Gosh, Tom was an amazing guy who was so independent, so tough.
Patrick: He was the toughest kid at school.
Nina: Yeah,
Patrick: He was the kid everybody was scared of except me, 'cause we were mates and it was funny 'cause I remember we'd gone to secondary school and everyone was just frightened of this tough kid and he was my next door neighbour. We hung out all the time and there was no differentiation, none of that.
Patrick: So the fact that I was good mates with the toughest kid at school was kind of funny.
Nina: But he was probably full of all that facade because he'd seen some of that.
Patrick: Oh, the violence at home was horrendous. Yeah. Yeah. He was certainly a victim of that as well.
Nina: So tell me how you came to be kicked out of high school in North Melbourne and what you did next?
Patrick: Well, we talked a [00:50:00] bit about how I kind of sabotaged experiments, failed dismally, failed at all the subjects I didn't want to do. Here's one too. You're sitting in front of the principal and they're saying, well, you know, you're not suited to our school 'cause they only want kids who are academically successful or sporting successful.
Patrick: But I got an A in English and in biology, F in everything else. That should have been a message, but it wasn't, and they didn't care. So we changed schools. I repeated year 11, went to Glenroy Technical School and I touched on my mentor, who was my mentor for 30 years. I met this guy who was the student welfare coordinator.
Patrick: It was his first school of student welfare. He'd had a trade background and I'd only been at the school for six weeks. As you could probably tell by this conversation, I don't have a problem talking. After six weeks of being at a totally new school in year 11, I get voted onto the SRC, right? So I'd made an impact on the student body as well as, as everybody else.
Patrick: I was pretty charismatic as a kid. I like to think now, [00:51:00] that's what fuelled my journalism passion, because I think I learned at an early age to be a chameleon. You fit in, you morphed into something else to suit the situation that you are in. So as a journalist, if I was on a picket line, well then I'd be treading very differently than when I was in Spring Street talking to the treasurer.
Patrick: I think that for me, from a very early age, I understood that. And the other thing that I worked out was a smile can disarm people. It's something that's viral. Smile at someone, they'll smile back. And I learned that. I think working in customer service at Coles, I. But for me, then with school, just going pear shaped and then changing schools, repeating, it was pretty humbling and embarrassing.
Patrick: Repeating school. But I met this amazing guy, Clem was the student welfare coordinator at Glenroy Tech, and he became a real mentor. He was the dad. I didn't have. He became a father figure. He helped me through some really tough times. I don't know that he knew at that stage [00:52:00] why I was self-harming or why I was drinking at an early age, but there were obvious signs.
Patrick: I think that getting into the SRC was what saved me, I mean, really saved me because I was on a bit of a downhill trajectory, as I mentioned, changing schools, but it really asserted my personality. I chose subjects that I loved. I was doing Australian history, I was doing biology, and I still was doing maths, but just a basic maths, which I enjoyed and I loved it.
Patrick: I loved school. I was interested in school and then I got onto school council, got into school politics. Then was setting up SRCs at other schools. I was giving guest talks and running in services. And then subsequently the second year, I was a school captain and won the school fellowship award two years in a row.
Patrick: So, I dunno what happened there with year 11 at the other school, but I don't think it was the kid. Just quietly
Nina: It was a blip.
Patrick: Yeah. And, and then I, I actually entered the radio play festival again for 3AW Radio Play Festival and we won.
Nina: Oh, [00:53:00] amazing.
Patrick: And got to perform it live on 3AW. We did it live on air.
Nina: And what was the play about? Do you remember?
Patrick: It was called Earth Quest.
Nina: Yes.
Patrick: And it was an alien spaceship is heading towards Earth and all they've got to go by is television and radio. Basically their whole perception of Earth was based on TV ads and sitcoms. So you've got this tracking station at Houston and two guys that are tracking the spaceship, the alien spaceship, and then you've got the alien spaceship.
Patrick: And everything they know about Earth is through our media broadcasts.
Nina: Ah.
Patrick: So that's fabulous. That was the story. That was the premise of the story. It was called Earth Quest.
Nina: That's so clever. So clever.
Patrick: And I did lots of character voices. Yeah. Because I loved doing character voices and I, you know, I wrote ads when I was in radio.
Patrick: I think that's what got us the play. And here's an irony for you. The day that we performed it, I had night classes. I was doing chemistry at night school, and I wasn't able to stay for the [00:54:00] presentation of the award 'cause I'd had to jump on a tram to go to Preston TAFE to do the chemistry class. And before we got the award, the judges asked the students whether I professionally wrote.
Patrick: 'cause the script was so good. They said that they were questioning whether it was legitimately in my script. There was no AI then and I had no internet. I didn't rip it off from anybody. It actually came outta my head, which was a lovely compliment. And so we ended up winning the radio play festival and performing it live.
Patrick: And yeah, it was pretty epic. Yeah.
Nina: That's fantastic. And what a nice success to have as a young person, sort of rebuilding your world and reengaging with a whole bunch of things.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: Nice to get there.
Patrick: You need those wins.
Nina: What was your first big break? Working full-time in radio.
Patrick: Well full-time. I finished year 12 and I'd done really, really well.
Patrick: Straight As, having done the reboot the year earlier, I was working part-time at a community radio station. I was going up on the weekends during year 11 and 12. So this mentor of [00:55:00] mine connected me with another teacher at another school who was a volunteer at a community radio station, knew that I was interested in radio.
Patrick: So on the weekends the station was applying for a full-time license, but we were doing test broadcasts. So the station would run for two weeks to prove to the broadcasting authority at the time that they could actually run a full-time radio station. I finished school on a Thursday, and I started on a Monday as station coordinator.
Patrick: So the government funding was for nine months. There was a trainee, broadcaster, receptionist, researcher, and station coordinator. So at 19, finishing year 12, I stepped into the job as station coordinator of a community radio station for nine months. It was only a nine month grant, and in fact, our job was to make the station self-sufficient so they didn't need us.
Patrick: So in effect, I was kind of working my way out of a job whilst I was working in my new job. And then, like for two years, I think maybe 18 months, two years, I sent cassettes to every radio station Victoria, twice. 'cause you sent it out on cassette. And the first [00:56:00] time you get a letter back from a radio station saying, oh, we received your application, we're gonna put it on file.
Patrick: Thanks for applying. Should something come up, we'll give you a call. Oh my God, they're going to call me. And then the second letter comes in with exactly the same thing. Thanks for your tape. We'll put you on file. If something comes up, we'll let you know. And I reckon I've still got some of them. I've got a stack of letters that are all the same.
Patrick: And then I reapplied again to radio stations all over Victoria. So this went on for about two years. One of the things I always tell young people who want to get into radio or pursue a career in the media, just practice and do it every time you can, you know, get on air, go to a community radio station, start a podcast.
Patrick: But for me, I can remember listening to a 3AW radio bulletin, and I would record the bulletin, transcribe it, and then read it out and record myself so I could mimic the presenter, so I could teach myself how to write news and read news. And I did that for so many [00:57:00] months whilst I was still sending out tapes to radio stations.
Patrick: Yeah I just practiced the craft and analysed the craft. And then finally, and this is a funny story. I applied for a job at 3GL in Geelong. I get called in for an interview. So I sent a cassette tape in. I'm thinking, this is it. I get called in. They just had a big reshuffle in the radio station.
Patrick: They've been bought out by Hoyts and a lot of people have got the sack. A lot of jobs have been moved around. And halfway through the interview, I'm thinking to myself, they're not interviewing me for an on-air position, right? They're interviewing me for something totally different and I get wind of the fact that they're actually asking about promotions.
Patrick: So suddenly promotions was the one thing I've always wanted to do in radio. And so I get a job as the promotions assistant. So the backstory is Hoyt buys the radio station, shuffles all the staff around, sacks a whole lot of people. And the guy who was running their marketing and promotions, who has been doing it for years, doing all their beach concerts and all the wonderful things that he was doing, [00:58:00] he suddenly gets thrown into sales and they put this other person in to do marketing and promotions, and she botched it up.
Patrick: So it had been a total botch up. She was also having an affair with the manager and there was a scandal. It was great. Radio in the eighties was amazing. Consequently, I'm applying for this job. They've put an ad out for a promotions assistant and the guy who was promotions manager gets put back in the role.
Patrick: So it's become a shambles. They've got a whole summer campaign that's fallen into a hole and he says, well, I can't do this without an assistant. So they advertise, not the job I applied for. And they get all these people apply. Well, they're all young women. And the job necessitated someone driving around, setting up equipment, hauling speakers and stages.
Patrick: So the reality of it is, I was only hired because I'm a bloke. 'cause I could lift heavy things. And that was the reason I got my first job in promotions in commercial radio. [00:59:00]
Nina: So not the radio hosting job that you hoped you'd get, but radio adjacent
Patrick: Promotions. But you know, they talk about getting your foot in the door.
Nina: Indeed.
Patrick: And that's what it was for me. I got a reputation as someone who was gung-ho. On the weekends when I was working, we had this lovely journalist, Roe Jackson, and she was doing weekend news. And I discovered early in the piece that if I saw a potential news story, I could ring her up and get on the air by being an on the scene reporter.
Patrick: anything I could possibly report on. So that got me on-air and airtime, and then people realised that's where I wanted to go. And I got my first big break doing Midnight to Dawns on K-Rock. That was kind of exciting.
Speaker 3: Midnight to Dawn?
Patrick: midnight to Dawns, and I was doing six days a week. Mind you.
Nina: Wow.
Patrick: That was pretty full on. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. I'd never imagined ever being a jock, like an all-night radio host. But it [01:00:00] was fun.
Nina: So you're coming of age, you're a young man out in the world. Now. Talk to me about your experiences of coming out, because now you're in radio, you've got a platform.
Patrick: It was the early nineties now.
Patrick: Yes. And look, AIDS still was a big thing. And I was very, very, very much in the closet. And you know what? I was so thick. I had guys trying to pick me up all the time. Waiters would proposition me. I was totally oblivious. Happened all the time. I just wasn't in that zone. You've heard of the term gaydar?
Nina: Yes.
Patrick: Broken doesn't work.
Nina: No Gaydar?
Patrick: No idea. Absolutely zero. I failed gay school, so it was funny because I didn't pick up on those signals and I was so immersed in radio. And then one day I was in the elevator at work. It was only a small building. It was in Geelong. We had the radio station there.
Patrick: There was an accountancy firm on one floor. There was a vacant floor, I think. Anyway, I get into the lift one day and bump into this guy. About the same age as me [01:01:00] working for the accountancy firm. Upstairs was his father's firm, and we got chatting and I thought, oh, he seems nice. Anyway, we bumped into each other a few times in the lift and suddenly we were messaging each other at coffee break time and bumping into each other at the lift, and it was all very, very romantically, kind of cute.
Patrick: It was nothing extreme or anything like that, A bit of a kiss or something like that. It was really fun. We'd go to, you know, it'd be a message, meet on the fourth floor and that sort of stuff. So suddenly there was these little rendezvous that were kind of, yeah, just really exciting. It was something that was really new to me, and we were both very, very much in the closet.
Patrick: It was tactile, it wasn't explicit, anything like that. It was just connecting with someone physically, connecting with someone. That was really lovely at the time, it was confusing because he didn't want to take it any further. And I think I probably would've, I was at the point now where I'd been living away from home for quite a long time.
Patrick: I was independent living in a share [01:02:00] house, but starting to come to terms with, well, this is me. I'm not changing this. I don't necessarily like it because there's a lot of stigma associated with being gay. And there was at the time, and there still is for a lot of queer kids. But for me, one of the biggest challenges was the fact that the AIDS crisis was very disconcerting.
Patrick: It was horrendous for the gay community, but it was also very scary for the people in the general populace. You know, we had those awful ads on television, the Grim Reaper ads, and I can remember reading news articles at the time where they thought it could have been passed by mosquito bites. Mm-hmm. You know, there was a lot of trauma and fear in the community.
Patrick: Mum worked at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and I can remember her coming home saying. There's no way I'm working in the zones. I'm only gonna work in the offices. 'cause at the time they were doing some sort of AIDS research and there was no way any of the cleaners, you know, it was almost industrial action.
Patrick: We're not working in those areas. We don't wanna be anywhere near the zones where they're doing any [01:03:00] research. So they stayed in the offices. They wouldn't ever go into the zone areas. So it was interesting, the fear. I can remember my father sitting there watching the TV news saying, just send them all to a desert island and let them die.
Patrick: You know, with AIDS victims. That was really challenging. And then subsequently leaving home and coming to terms with all of that and realising it still is quite a precarious life. Because you were still mindful of the fact that there was this “gay epidemic” that was out there. It was linked to the gay community so strongly.
Nina: Yes
Patrick: That was a challenge, but I'd had some mentors along the way. I worked part-time after I left Coles. I worked at a cinema for a couple of years and that was great. There were these wonderful guys that ran a little cinema in Coburg, the Progress Theatre, which I think at the time was the oldest continuously running cinema in Melbourne and they were gay guys.
Patrick: And you kind of got a sense they were very protective. They were lovely. They were always wonderful to us. The [01:04:00] boys working there, I used to like to hang out after it finished, after the movie's finished. It was a double feature. And then they'd be there, with all their friends, and it'd be quite camp and flamboyant.
Patrick: And it was fun to hang out because you know, I was just a kid, but they were very inclusive and protective, which was lovely. And the owner of the cinema I still catch up with now, you know? And I came out to him years later and I said, oh, can we go and have lunch somewhere? And I told him, and you know, it's funny, he kind of said, I kind of had an inkling, but they were very protective.
Patrick: It was a lovely experience to be able to kind of be mentored in a way. They were very much on the flamboyant side of gay, I would say. And we know that that's a spectrum now. Yeah. We know a lot more about how people are just themselves. Sometimes, whether it's getting dressed up in drag because you can express yourself that way.
Patrick: Or a girl wearing a pair of jeans and hating to wear dresses, or a guy wanting to put on nail polish. I love when I see young guys put on nail polish and put on [01:05:00] makeup. I think that's great. Be yourself. Be who you are. Wear the colour that you like. You know, wear the clothing that makes you feel like authentically you.
Patrick: And I love that, that now you know, no one blinks. It's great. You know, or guys and girls walking down the street holding hands. It's nice. I'd love that.
Nina: And he'd invited you in to see another crowd where they were each other's in-group. In a way, you got to observe that before you had to commit, if you like.
Patrick: It was illegal. Don't forget. Yes. In Australia, at that time in the eighties, there were still territories and states where you potentially could be jailed because you loved another man or you, you had sex with another man.
Nina: You're having your first proper romance. Yeah. And that's pretty exciting. I believe there is a story about coming out on national tv. Come on, bring it out.
Patrick: I don't, I don't do things by halves. Come on. You should know that by now. [01:06:00] So that journalist I was telling you about, who was doing the weekend news, and kind of mentored me as well. I've been lucky with mentors. She helped me write news. She helped me get on the air. She left and went to Channel seven. And I've been part of Twins Australia.
Patrick: So there's an organisation in Australia for twins, and we're a really sought after research group. Researchers love twins, particularly identical twins who are genetically identical because we are just an anomaly and they love it. We can do such cool things. We're a good study group and the Twins Association put out an email to say that Channel 7 was running a TV show called Australia's Most Identical Twins.
Patrick: This is probably the early nineties. And it was, I think, a copy of a British show and we were invited to take part. So for the first time in forever, we wore the same clothes. We were told to wear the same clothes, but I had a friend who worked in fashion and I got two shirts that were mirror image [01:07:00] shirts.
Patrick: So where the patch was on one side, it was blue. It was blue on the other side, on the other shirt. It was kind of cool. So I thought that was a bit of a cool thing to do. They got us, and 87 pairs of identical twins.
Nina: Wow.
Patrick: It was phenomenal. It was the one time in my life standing in a room, a whole group of people, and the person who wasn't a twin was the one that stood out, not the people who were twins.
Patrick: It was fun. We were there taking part and they got us to do all these tests. It was coordination tests, you know those electronic games where you've got a dance on a mat. Did that, they blindfolded us and got us to sample different flavours of chocolate to see whether our tastes matched. So there was lots of different things.
Patrick: They measured our teeth and in our case, our teeth were mirror image. So where one was crooked one way, the other was crooked, the other way, kind of freaky. Again, that's that twin thing. Wow. Anyway, I knew from the outset there was no chance we were ever gonna be Australia's most identical twins. In fact, we were gonna be lucky to make it on air 'cause it was 87 sets twins.
Patrick: And a lot of them were more identical than us because in a lot of ways, and I'd been living out of home, [01:08:00] so I adopted a different lifestyle. We started looking more different, even though we're identical twins, we started to look very different from each other. And the last thing we did was a couch interview with just an interviewer by ourselves.
Patrick: And I knew that if I said something controversial, it would get airtime. So they do all these questions about us and being twins, and they've taken my brother in first and they take me in. And so one of the last questions was, you're obviously very close, you look similar, you've got a lot of similar traits.
Patrick: Is there anything that kind of stands out that makes you different? And I said, no, not really. Oh, wait a minute. I'm gay and he's not. That was it. That was the soundbite. So that got played on national television and suddenly every person I knew was watching it, obviously, because the twins were gonna be on television.
Patrick: And that was when I outed myself to absolutely everybody at the same time.
Nina: Oh wow. And how did you then [01:09:00] feel going to be with the people in your life who didn't know before that program? How did you go about integrating that afterwards?
Patrick: I guess I adopted the notion, you know what, they can contact me. If they wanna talk about it, they can talk about it.
Patrick: I shouldn't have to, you know, I've done my bit, I've outted myself. And it's funny, in my family it was the unsaid thing. You know, I've only had a sister-in-law who's ever really sat down with me and asked me what it was like growing up gay. What was it like? How hard was it? And I think that that carryover from putting on a brave front and that not hugging, and just not a tactile family has kind of persisted.
Patrick: I mean, I've spoken to my nephew a bit. He's got an amazing girlfriend and the three of us have this lovely relationship, so that's nice. But yeah, I guess we didn't really discuss it so much as a family after that. At the time, as a journalist, I had a pager, not a phone, and that pinged a lot. [01:10:00] I can tell you that thing was vibrating its little battery off.
Nina: So people were reaching out.
Patrick: Oh yeah, for sure. There's kind of two lots of people. There's the person who has absolutely no idea. It was an absolute shock to them. Oh my God. How could you possibly, 'cause I didn't present, I wasn't effeminate, you know, I'd been in radio. I really worked hard not to hide being gay, but my diction, my enunciation, the way that I presented myself was my career.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. I was on radio, I was reading news. And it was funny, when I went to radio school, I remember I was on the tram back from school with my mates in year 11, and one of my mates turned to me, he said, you're doing that radio voice again. So at some point I'd adopted the idea that this is me now.
Patrick: I'm gonna train myself to be like this and to talk like this. And I wasn't obviously hiding from being gay. I just wanted to be in radio and I wanted to present and I wanted to articulate [01:11:00] myself as much as possible. And I love using words. So people sometimes are shocked. A lovely friend of mine who I've known for a few years now, she said to me, you know, when I first met you, I was trying to hook up with you.
Patrick: I had no idea you were gay. We've laughed about it a few times.
Nina: That's the way it goes.
Nina: As radio presenter, you were quite the big deal, and I know you're pretty humble about this stuff, but you had a big personality and you worked on some of the really important stories of the time. So what would you mention as a bit of a highlights reel as some of the things that you covered?
Patrick: I was doing an afternoon shift and a story came through on wires. It was on the weekend and we finished doing news at 12 and then they wouldn't do news on FM radio. And a story came through on Wires that Princess Diana had been in a car accident. I read the story and I thought, there's more to this. She hadn't been declared dead at the time.
Patrick: And I said to my colleague, this is a weird story. This just reads [01:12:00] strange. Let's hang around for this. And then subsequently it ended up that she had died. And that was a massive story at the time. But the reason it resonated with me is because I met her. I shook hands with Princess Diana.
Speaker 3: Did you, at what point did you do this?
Patrick: So I mentioned that I changed schools, repeated. I won the school fellowship award and I represented our school at a function when the Prince and Princess of Wales came to Australia and she singled me out. It was a few of us all standing there at the Melbourne Museum and she came over and shook my hand.
Patrick: So when she died, I was really emotional. You know, you've got that degree of separation.
Patrick: 911 was really big, you know, that was phenomenal because at the time my partner woke me up, I was doing breakfast radio on the Fox and Triple M, so I was in the Fox newsroom, but doing breakfast news editor of Triple M and suddenly this story had broken about the attack on the US and I called my boss, it was maybe three in the morning and I said, should I come in?
Patrick: And we just started and that was it. [01:13:00] We were doing bulletins every 20 minutes. We got rid of sport and all we did was this story that was unfolding in front of us. That was phenomenal.
Nina: I bet
Patrick: That was so full on. The Gulf War. I remember when the first Bush, president Bush declared war, and that was pretty full on because they declared war and we were going along with it.
Patrick: That was pretty epic as well. There were a couple of big things that I got involved with. Even in radio, I got involved in the environmental movement. I was Community services coordinator at K-ROC. That's right, which had gone to FM, which is really exciting, and I started supporting environmental groups and pushing that agenda.
Patrick: I met a couple of surfers who were trying to campaign against sewage discharge in the water off 13th Beach, and they had a campaign called Stop the Crap, which I loved. So I got involved with that. I think I've got a t-shirt somewhere. And so I was helping push early kind of environmental issues. So a few years ago, quite a few years ago, when the Japanese whaling fleets were going into [01:14:00] the southern ocean and encroaching on our area, and they were culling whales and saying it was for scientific research, I started a campaign called Whale Revenge.
Patrick: So this is just before social media kicked off and I started a campaign. I had this idea, design a game. So play the game. Sign the petition, send it to your friends. So I designed a space invaders game with whales and the whales were blowing air bubbles and sinking the Japanese whaling ships. It went viral and I got 1.2 million signatures for this campaign.
Patrick: I became a bit of a poster boy for Greenpeace, got all this media attention, but what it did do was, you know, 1.2 million people signing the petition. It actually had an impact. I was being called by politicians. For me as an achievement to do something like that, that resonated so much. And I had just left radio, so I kind of knew where I was at with being on air and being interviewed and it just resonated with the public as well.
Patrick: 'cause people were pretty outraged and government was being pretty piss poor at the time. They weren't really asserting [01:15:00] themselves. They were letting the Japanese get away with a lot. And I think it really helped change policy. I think knowing so many people were so adamantly in favour of the idea of stopping illegal fishing of whales, that was, yeah, that was pretty epic.
Nina: And you got to use your voice and your platform.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: To progress something that was a passion for you, something you felt was a good cause, something you connected with. So that's lovely because it's partly in a way your story then.
Patrick: Yeah, very much
Nina: So beautiful. You were born in 1967.
Patrick: Yep.
Nina: Which means you're 58 now. What matters to you now about how you spend your time?
Patrick: There is a point in my life where I came to the conclusion that there are two types of people that you associate with, people who enrich your life and people who suck the life out of you. Now I'm all for helping people and I think that probably comes through, but I think you need [01:16:00] to realise that you have a finite resource.
Patrick: And for me, I love to give and share and I've gotta be careful about that because I've been on lots of community organisations. There's a staggering statistic, there are 14 million volunteers in Australia.
Nina: Yeah, we do a good job
Patrick: staggering,
Nina: putting our hand up to help with stuff,
Patrick: but it's getting harder to get younger people involved in volunteering.
Patrick: Their lives are under a lot of pressure. So for me, touching the community, I moved out of Melbourne and did a tree change. I got out of radio. I think my ego was quenched. I had done all the things I wanted to do. I read breakfast news. I was a radio personality. I had my photo on t-shirts or a caricature of me on t-shirts and milk cartons ,on the back of a tray in parades and all that sort of stuff.
Patrick: It was crazy and that was fun and it was very uplifting at a time where I needed it. I needed to have that, you know, I had these two conflicting personalities. There was the media me and then there was the gay me coming to terms that we lived in a really oppressive world. We haven't spoken about it, but that lovely guy that I met, the accountant.
Patrick: When he came out to his family, his father was my accountant, he called me at home and said, I'm sacking you as a client. I hope you die of AIDs.
Nina: Oh.
Patrick: So I was being blamed for his son coming out, which should have been a joyous thing. It should have been a lovely thing for the family to have a son who was being honest with them and wanting to embrace who he was.
Patrick: And their first reaction was to take it out on the person who they thought turned his son guy. It definitely wasn't me. He was well and truly there before I got there, I can tell you.
Nina: But also to feel the need to punish you.
Patrick: Yeah.
Nina: That comes across really strongly in those words. Like I could feel that
Patrick: There was a lot of hate.
Nina: Yeah.
Patrick: And a lot of hate because of the lack of understanding. The lack of tolerance, the fear for his own son. Indeed. You know, potentially getting AIDS [01:18:00] or whatever. So I get why it was said. It was an awful thing to say to someone. Yes. And I can laugh about it now, but it was pretty tough.
Patrick: But getting back to community, that's the thing that I've embraced. I think living in a small town, starting my own business, becoming independent was a really big thing.
Nina: Thinking back to that lovely young man, you were at 15 and 18 and at 25, what would you say to that young man now to give him some assurance?
Patrick: I wouldn't say anything. I'd hug him. I just put my arms around him and say, it's okay. You're gonna be all right. You'll get through it all. It's okay to be you and you gotta love yourself first, and then everybody else comes second.
Nina: Thank you so much. So thank you, Patrick, for being my guest today and sharing the world you knew as a young person.
Nina: I met Patrick through the Darley Neighbourhood House where I hosted a workshop about Family Legacy and making audio [01:19:00] recordings with people we love. So when the staff there heard about this podcast, they connected me with Patrick, and he stands out as someone in the community for his efforts in volunteering.
Nina: So, Patrick, if someone wants to connect with you about Tai Chi or book club, or your business, or your podcast, the many, many things you're involved with, what's the best way to catch up with you?
Patrick: Well, they could go to websitesnow.com.au or [e-mail], and they can do Tai Chi with me and Fritz my dog.
Patrick: I set it up during COVID for my students to be able to do some exercises and take part. So I'd love to connect with you.
Nina: Lovely. When I caught up with Patrick about this story, he said that if just one person connects with his story and feels less alone with their struggles, that would mean everything.
Nina: So Patrick, here's to you and all the days to come for the generosity that you share in everything that you [01:20:00] do. May you have much joy. You have been listening to When I Was Young, an exploration of the formative years of authentic, outstanding, and inspiring humans. I'm your host Nina Fromhold, and this is a Memory Lane Life Stories production proudly made in Narrm, Melbourne, Victoria on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people.
Nina: We have new episodes and guests regularly. If you've enjoyed this episode, please follow the show to hear more of the series. Thanks for listening.