Yes, that's me. Picture taken by my brother Martin three years ago while we were building a bush rock patio in our dad's back garden. We were drinking our home brewed Graverobber Brand beer for inspiration regarding the artistic placement of hundred-kilo rocks, so when a dark storm blew in on the Southerly and the rain started Martin grabbed the camera and told me to make like a psychopath, which is something I'm good at. But only in jest, of course.

I'm Matthew Spong, I wrote a book called Down, and while waiting for some publishers to make up their minds in their own sweet time I turned it into Hypercard stacks. Just to see how it might look when it hit the shelves.

This got me thinking, and in my impatience I decided to publish it myself, online, where anyone can have a copy NOW. So here you are.

You want background? Colour? Depth? Well, I could start by telling you about the years I worked at Franklins supermarket as a freezer geezer, loading shelves from the inside in my parka and moonboots. I discovered the true joys of cold, then, the ice sharp breath of the blower down my back and the crackle of frozen peas in my mittened grip as I slung them into the trays. Scaring kids as they surreptitiously prized open boxes of Paddle Pops and chocolate eclairs on the shelves. The Abominable Grocery Clerk attacks!

That was before and during my abortive attempt to gain higher education, doing a Bach. Ed. at Kuringai College. It was cool, for awhile. About 80 percent of teaching students are female. But I began to notice things. Like, half of them were wearing lace yoke collars with string bows. I was surrounded by Waltons! And, there wasn't any graffiti at Kuringai. It was all neat, spick and span, green carpet everywhere and crowds of prim Quaker girls coming down the hall towards me, frowning in disapproval at my black overcoat, black shirt, black jeans and black paratrooper boots, and I'd have to work with them for the rest of my life, if this became my career. Sure, there were some cool nurses there and plenty of yobbo engineering students, but there was very little inter-course between the different degrees. So I bailed.

Spent a year selling weird doona covers at a street market, covers that I made myself out of neckties. It was a kind of joke on my part. Buying second hand neckties, cutting them apart, joining them edge to edge on an old sewing machine I bought at a garage sale for 2 dollars, then selling them to businessmen's wives as presents for their husbands. In every bag of ties I bought, about a quarter were too plain or old to use, so I would save them for Christmas. Then, me and an old school friend Edan Mumford (son of John Mumford, the tantric sex expert who writes for Penthouse) would take them into the city. On Christmas Eve we'd stand in Martin Place, the centre of the business district, handing out free neckties to passing strangers. Or trying to. The suits would sneer and glower and hiss as they walked past. They regarded the offer as an insult. Maybe they thought we were inferring something, I dunno. Maybe we reminded them of their servitude to their employers, or the harsh rules of old-boy mateship that govern Australian business, or were reminding them of their callous attitude to poverty by showing them this ersatz charity. I just wanted to loose the useless neckties, without throwing them away.

While looking for workspace to expand my operations early in 1992 I discovered Cyberspace, a warehouse in Glebe, an inner city suburb. The middle story of it's three levels is subdivided into an art gallery, studios and various common rooms. At any one time about 20 people live here, an assortment of artists, weirdos, drug addicts and techno-hoons.

I remember when I first saw it. Being shown through shadowy, cavernous rooms by the fattest junkie in the world, the only light coming from his torch and the giant Coke machine at the end of the main corridor. Pale, elven girls with hair full of bright cotton wraps and tattoos on their shoulders smiling at me in the kitchen as they fried sizzling woks full of rice and spring onion and tofu and ginger. Huge piles of discarded circuit boards and frosted picture tubes spilled from doorways. There was an auction room upstairs, and anything interesting left unsold at the end of the day was dragged away at night by the artists to weave into their dreams. The landlord, Sam Shovel (aka Bruce McInnes) was hunched over a disassembled but still working Mac Plus, trying to install a new hard drive without turning it off. He said to pick any space I liked and build my own walls. It was heaven.

We'd eat dinner seated at a 15 foot long conference table in the common room, big five course feasts we'd save for and plan all week, with strange music drifting from the studios and dozens of candles. Our connections through the local art scene gave us access to a diverse range of exhibitions and shows, and one day we'd be raiding the brie off a table at the New South Wales Art Gallery while another we'd be slugging down cask wine in some burnt out abandoned building while porno films were projected on the blackened rafters above. We had raves in the gallery, two of them. Imagine a rave happening in your own lounge room, with the bass duff duff duff duff shaking books off shelves in your bedroom while scented smoke coils lazily down the corridors and a thousand tripping strangers queue for the bathroom!

We're very protective about the name Cyberspace, now that it's become such a popular buzzword. It's apt, though. When I first moved in I was dreaming about Dog Solitude in Gibsons's Mona Lisa Overdrive. There's always been a lot of computers here. Sam the landlord installed an Appletalk network running through the building, and he soon persuaded me to buy the very same Plus he was breaking in when I met him. Now I use a Mac II and Powerbook 145B. Here's a shot of the Chooser window circa 1994:

At present the machines here range from Mac Plus up to Powermac, and the Appletalk twisted pair has been replaced by Ethernet coax. We play huge tournaments of Bolo and Marathon, and even poor artists with nothing but a Mac II can rent Sam's flatbed scanner, and do printouts through his dye-sublimation printer.

So I've lived here for over three years. Right now I've got a room on the corner of the building, overlooking the Harold Park Hotel. It's freezing cold. I'm stealing a little extra power to run my heater but I can't turn it up above 1200 watts or the fuse will go again. The cold seems to make my fingers brittle and my arms stiff, so it's a labor to type. Those years in the Franklins freezer seem centuries behind me.

Cyberspace itself will soon be nothing more than memory. The building's slated to be demolished around September 1995, so we only have a few months to make our escape. They'll build a bloody great block of pretty pastel units with cheerful little balconies and ceilings that press down on your head in it's place, to store the tourists who come here for the Olympics in 2000. The whole of Sydney's being turned into a giant sieve for money, like Gibson's Freeside Torus. A giant theme park. Everyone here is talking about how to capitalize on the tourism, and no-one's talking about what happens after, when Sydney becomes passe as a holiday destination, and all the hotels are empty.

I love this city, though. I plan to evacuate for the duration of the Olympics, and travel around, but I'll come back. There'll always be warehouses full of weirdos, living works of art far more complex than any Russian novel or Dali painting, and I hope to always be living amongst them.

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