Old Boy: Georgia Tree’s debut novel tells her father Grant Tree’s story of addiction and resurrection

Life is “grotesque”. Who gets to live, who has to die? And why? They’re questions Perth’s Grant Tree has grappled with for decades. Now his daughter Georgia has tried to find some answers, in her debut book Old Boy, a retelling of her father’s life spanning decades and the length of the State. Throughout the tale, Grant comes off as a sort of West Australian Forrest Gump with a heroin habit, popping up on the peripheries of a number of critical junctures in the State’s history and contact — sometimes fleeting, sometimes not — with some of its most well-known characters. There’s the 21st birthday party crashed at a home on Dalkeith’s Victoria Avenue — John Bond’s birthday and his father Alan’s house, it turns out, some years before the word “controversial” had become the adjective of choice in reference to the fraudster tycoon. Sightings of then ACTU president Bob Hawke surrounded by armed protection officers as he popped in to visit the neighbours. A stint banged up in Fremantle Prison alongside notorious armed robber and killer Archie Butterly, whose penchant for jail breaks would eventually leave Butterly dead, with a bullet in his brain. And, most importantly to the narrative, Grant’s relationship with a drug mule named Charlie. Charlie’s real name is one which will be familiar to West Australians over a certain age. The trial, appeal and eventual execution of Brian Geoffrey Shergold Chambers, along with his accomplice Kevin Barlow, in Malaysia in 1986 for heroin trafficking was the subject of enormous publicity at home. Both Hawke and then foreign minister Bill Hayden’s appeals to the Malaysian Government to spare the men’s lives were ignored. In the book, Chambers is referred to only as Charlie, the alias he used during his years running drugs between Penang and Perth on behalf of the Italian mafia. A semi-fictionalised version of his truncated life story runs parallel to Grant’s own, a reminder of how it could have turned out so differently. The pair first meet at a party at one of a series of grotty western suburbs sharehouses inhabited by Grant and his mates. It’s a period in his life in which he measures time by how many episodes of Skippy have passed while supine in front of the telly, and the only way to keep track of the seasons is by recalling which hemisphere the Australian cricket team is playing in. Despite being just months apart in age, and dope dealers, Charlie and his doomed girlfriend Susie become “surrogate parents” to Grant, their home a refuge of lamb roasts and gravy boats from the noise outside. “I think I loved how much they loved each other. They were a team, strong. There was something comforting in that for me. And I’d never felt like that before,” Georgia writes, as her father. Charlie’s arrival in Grant’s life is preceded only just by that of heroin. In the Seventies, heroin was Perth’s drug of choice, loved to death by the surfie and music set Grant found himself absorbed into in his young adulthood. It is only a four-year jail term for trafficking that persuades him to get clean. He refuses to give up Charlie and Susie to police throughout the ordeal, a decision made out of love and loyalty that Grant wrestles with in the decades to come. If he had named names, would he have saved Charlie from the hangman? The arbitrary nature of life and death, those who are offered redemption while others are denied, is a theme that comes up in Old Boy again and again. At one point, Grant is shocked to realise he needs the digits of two hands to tally up his mates killed by heroin addiction. There’s other loved ones lost — to sickness, to suicide, to greedy bosses with no regard for their workers’ lives. Why should they die, and Grant survive? His eventual conclusion is there is no reason to be found and to search for one is a mug’s game. Life is absurd and that’s all there is. “Dying can be a game of chance as much as flipping a coin or winning a footy game. And living can be a choice too.” Grant had always told his daughter she would be the one to tell his story. And in 2020, with time on her hands after finishing her master’s degree in international relations and a pandemic forcing everyone to turn inwards, Georgia, 31, decided to accept the challenge. Most of us see our parents as supporting characters in our own lives. By recasting her dad as the lead, and choosing to tell the story from a first-person perspective, Georgia is more than his biographer; she inhabits his voice. Doing so seemed the natural option, she says, rather than recounting such a deeply personal tale from the more clinical vantage point of a third-person narrator. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get into his head,” Georgia tells STM. “It’s been an amazing opportunity to be able to do it while he’s still here and interrogate his story with him being present.” Though Georgia grew up in a tight-knit family unit, describing her dad as her “best mate”, many of the tales in Old Boy were new to her. Some were fresh even for their teller — ground not traversed out loud for decades. It wasn’t until Georgia’s adulthood that she found out about her father’s heroin addiction and that he had been in prison. “It’s just not one of those things that you expect from your parents,” she says. “Especially as a child, when you have more of a binary understanding of good and bad. Bad people go to prison. “So finding out someone close to you had gone was confronting to me at the time. But obviously now as an adult, and as a more educated person, I understand there’s so many nuances around that. People find themselves in situations where they do get in trouble and it doesn’t mean that they’re inherently a bad person. They might just be unlucky or a victim of circumstance.” Throughout the story, Perth and WA are portrayed as characters in themselves. “It definitely reinforced my love of the city and the State,” Georgia says. “Driving around the western suburbs and streets that my dad lived, and imagining him at different stages in his life in these places, it was just so special.” The chapters of Grant’s life are catalogued by geography, starting in his grandparents’ home in Lyall Street, Shenton Park, and criss-crossing Perth and WA from Cottesloe to Wembley and North Fremantle, and eventually to Dampier, where he met his wife, Di. Writing in her father’s voice of the early stages of his relationship with her mother, described in the book as a security guard with a country twang and a truck driver’s licence who died when the author was a little girl, was one of the heavier emotional moments, Georgia says. As was witnessing her father reckon with his tumultuous childhood, including the story of how he came to live in that long since demolished house in Lyall Street after his mum took off to Port Hedland without him or his siblings, following her split from their father. ‘His generation, especially men, spend a lot of their lives not talking about things like that, and their mental health and the impacts on their lives,” Georgia says. “Reflecting on that has been an emotional thing for him but, hopefully, I think healing in the end.” While this is the Old Boy’s story, it also belongs to the younger Tree. It’s clear how much of the author’s outlook and career has been shaped by her father’s attitudes. In particular, his relationship with the union movement, kickstarted by witnessing rail workers’ strikes in the 1960s and cemented during his time as an Australian Workers’ Union shop steward while working for Hamersley Iron. Georgia’s day job is as a policy adviser to Resources Minister Madeleine King, a career she says has made her father immensely proud. Her brother Callan, now based in the UK, is also involved in the labour movement, having previously worked for former Brand MP and now Ambassador to Ireland Gary Gray. Grant, who is still working in resources for Alcoa and gigs around Perth with his band the Single Fins, has read the book and is coming to grips with his new status as a literary Perthonality. “There’s things in there that his work friends don’t know, or he hasn’t told many people in his life,” Georgia says. “So that has been a lot for him to deal with because, although he’s a larger than life person, he also doesn’t exactly crave being the centre of attention. That’s been a bit of a whirlwind for him. “He’s very happy with it, though. Every time I go out with him, he’s bragging to people about how great it is.” Old Boy by Georgia Tree is out July 4 through Fremantle Press.

Old Boy: Georgia Tree’s debut novel tells her father Grant Tree’s story of addiction and resurrection

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