Last night I saw Roslyn Oades' extraordinary 'documentary' play I'm Your Man, downstairs at the Belvoir. Based on interviews with boxers including Jeff Fenech and Billy the Kid, it was a portrait of life lived fully - if not always sensibly - and to the edge. I was on my way home when I got a text from a friend. Our mutual friend Andrew McMillan, a writer, music journalist and unofficial king of Darwin, was no boxer, but he certainly lived life fully and to the edge, and not always that sensibly either - but no one who knew him could imagine Andrew any other way and we loved him for it.
I only learned he was dying of cancer ('Jack the Dancer' he called it in a prose poem) in December, when he'd already lived well past his doctor's predictions. We exchanged a number of emails and phone calls and texts over the last month of his life. He never complained of the pain. He preferred to talk about the album he was making of new songs and spoken word and to which the likes of Paul Kelly and Rob Hirst had contributed. He spoke of friends, Scrabble, the anthology of poetry he was hoping to finish, and the airplane models he was making - each model took about a week, and he was marking his life by them. He told me that a photograph I once took of him was his favourite, and that he was planning to use it, for either the CD or anthology, I can't recall. It's the one you see here.
Andrew got through those most difficult days on friendship, morphine, cigarettes, whiskey and weed. 'Would you believe some people have tried to convince me to give up smoking?' He laughed and I could hear him taking a drag on the other end of the line. 'Now?!'
On the 29th of December I texted him to ask how he was. He responded: '54 today and ready to party!'
An obituary on the website of the ABC describes Andrew as one of the Northern Territory's 'great eccentrics' and 'best contemporary writers'.
Vale Andrew.
Andrew McMillan 1957-2012
(posted 28 January 2012)
