by Sue Williams
She phones her mum on the satellite phone. Therese is extremely pleased to hear from her, and glad too that she’s had a good time. She’s interested to hear that Alyssa has done better than some of the adults. Some kids, Therese thinks, seem to have that element of toughness. Adults tend to talk themselves out of things sometimes, whereas some kids just go ahead and do them.
Glenn is amazed at how well she has done. The steps were big for adults, let alone little kids, but she managed. Uphill she was good and then she just flew downhill. He carried a lot of her gear but jokingly wonders whether it was a mistake, as she was faster than he was.
Now with that great adventure out of her system, Glenn and Therese hope that Alyssa will settle down back at home, and concentrate on her schooling. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, it’s the start of something much, much bigger.
CHAPTER 4
A Taste for Danger
Alyssa Azar’s dad, Glenn, embarked on an adventurous life early, too. For him, however, it wasn’t necessarily his choice. A difficult childhood with a father he sees as having bullied him all his young life led to him running away from home at the age of fifteen and living in a broken-down old Kombi van, parked in a mate’s family’s backyard.
It was 1988 and Glenn was in distance education at the time, having been kicked out of all the schools in Melton on the western outskirts of Melbourne – and one of them twice. He was the archetypal angry young man: furious with his dad, quick to lash out in arguments with his peers, and pretty damn full of rage about life in general.
‘I remember getting into a lot of physical altercations with my father, who was obviously much bigger and stronger than me,’ says Glenn. ‘But I didn’t have a very good personality for backing down. My two sisters, one younger and one older, both now go to counselling and say it’s largely because of the stuff they saw happening to me.
‘If anyone said anything to me that wasn’t acceptable in my world, there was no discussion; it was on – right then and there. It didn’t matter if they were older or bigger, I’d take them on. I wasn’t a big kid, but it didn’t matter to me if I lost. It was more anger with my dad that was the big issue. I look back and see my dad as an unhappy man, always with a chip on his shoulder. But I don’t worry too much about it now. I think of it as having made me who I am today, and I’m a lot tougher because of it.’
Glenn’s father, Richard, had been adopted at the age of three by his grandparents after his own parents split, leaving him also a troubled child. Glenn’s older sister, Tanya, believes it was a start in life he never managed to come to terms with. ‘He perceived himself as not wanted by his parents,’ she says. ‘As a result, he had a lot of issues. I can understand that, but it doesn’t mean I excuse my father, or forgive him.
‘A lot of awful behaviour came from that. When he came home, you never knew what mood he’d be in. I still can’t look at Glenn today without seeing him as a small, quivering boy, with a 6 foot 4 man breathing down his neck. My parents never got on and, because I was the eldest child, I was like the caretaker of the family. I always tried to protect Glenn, but he was very intelligent and sensitive and there was a lot of pain my father put him through as a boy. Every now and again, he would nick off and disappear and take solace in other people and other people’s families.’
These days, Richard looks back and sees himself as a tough disciplinarian, trying to bring up his only son in the one way he knew how: just as he himself was brought up by his strict grandparents, George and Eva Azar. George was Australian-born, with Egyptian and Lebanese heritage, the eldest of twelve children brought up on a cane farm in Gordonvale, a southern suburb of Cairns. He went on to run hotels, become a small business entrepreneur and keep racehorses. His daughter, Phyllis, married Australian-born Irishman Jack, who turned out a chronic alcoholic. The couple had Richard but gave him away to Phyllis’s parents to raise.
‘My grandfather was a tough man who defended his whole family,’ says Richard. ‘Probably as a result, I was a real disciplinarian-type father, too, more so than many people today. Our culture has changed a lot. Many wouldn’t agree with the way I brought up my children. But Glenn was a very sensitive child growing up, and had a lot of problems with my discipline, I could see that. He had a big element of mischievousness, and he was a challenger. You would buy him a new pair of jeans and he’d then go and climb a tree and rip the knee out.’
Occasionally, Glenn would go to stay with Richard’s father, Jack, and to this day he remembers the sound in the middle of the night of his grandfather drinking from the flask of wine he kept by his bed, the metal knocking on his teeth as his hand shook. As an adult, Glenn has rarely touched alcohol.
Richard had been in the Royal Australian Air Force and met his wife Carmel at the RAAF base in East Sale, in Victoria’s Gippsland region. Soon after, he transferred to the army, to the Royal Corps of Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and was there for many years while the couple had the three children. Glenn was born as the middle child in 1972 in Sale. Six months later they moved to North Melbourne, then to Toowoomba in Queensland, then to Oakey, 40 km further west, and finally back to Victoria, to Melton. Carmel stayed home to care for the children, and to take in foster kids.
Glenn turned out to be bright and good at school, but always seemed to be in trouble. ‘His father said to me that we spent more time at the school than he did!’ says Carmel. The teachers interpreted it as boredom and urged them to find him more interests. They took him to karate classes, and he turned out – not perhaps surprisingly – to have a natural aptitude for fighting, becoming a brown belt. It began a long love affair with karate, kickboxing and boxing, and the gym.
But he hated some of the things that happened in their home, from the army-type room inspections to the tasks they were set with punishments if they failed, from his dad’s challenges to wrestle him to the putting up of posters over the holes in the lounge room walls that were often a consequence.
Throughout his youth, Glenn remembers, the children urged their mum to leave their dad. ‘But she wouldn’t,’ he says now. ‘She only eventually left him when she found someone else.’
Carmel now says perhaps she was wrong not to have heeded their advice. The couple eventually split in 2000, and divorced in 2002. They’ve both since remarried. ‘Their father was a good man, but he was very strict,’ she says. ‘He used to say having a strict upbringing hadn’t hurt him, and he thought he should bring up his boy tough. But Glenn was a different boy, in a different time, to what Rick was.
‘They used to clash a lot and go toe-to-toe. Rick tends to be, You do as I say, but if Glenn didn’t think it was right, he wouldn’t go along with it. He was bullied by his dad. That was Rick’s idea of making Glenn a man. In hindsight, I should have left earlier, but I thought that the kids needed a father. I should have got out, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.’
Today, none of the three children have much contact with their father. ‘We don’t see a lot of each other,’ says Richard. ‘But Glenn is a good man and I’m proud of him and what he’s achieved.’
While living in the Kombi made Glenn feel like the coolest kid on the planet for a while, very soon he grew bored with his life. In between the distance studies, which were fast going nowhere, he was working as a kitchen hand and cook for a catering company, but decided he needed to take drastic steps if he wasn’t going to end up there forever more. He turned eighteen in July 1990, and a month later Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, a move that ultimately sparked the Gulf War. It was the call to action Glenn had been waiting for. Always having enjoyed karate classes and boxing as a kid, he thought he might as well continue fighting and get paid for it. He decided to join the army.
‘I guess I was just looking for something, and thought it might be good to get over to fight in the Middle East, as an eighteen-year-old does,’ he says. ‘The 8th/9th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, was an infantry battalion based in Brisbane that was recruiting, and I t
hought it would be pretty cool to get a guaranteed job there. To be honest, I think the main reason I joined, though, was because my dad said I wouldn’t hack it. But the war ended long before I finished recruit training. I remember being disappointed about that. It’s not till years later you realise how crazy that is.’
Glenn started out in infantry, being immediately nicknamed ‘Razor’ since, when people misprounced his name, they could make it rhyme with Azar, but then transferred to the medical corps. It hadn’t really been his decision. During a bayonet assault course, he broke his leg badly in two places, which everyone knew would rule him out of heavy physical activities for a lengthy period. As a result, he was given the choice of two jobs in the medical corps: in admin or as a medic. He chose the latter.
Not being able to move around freely concentrated his mind wonderfully when it came to studying the medical course, something he quickly found he enjoyed. As soon as he was well enough, he also did a physical training instructor’s course to give himself more of an edge, and dropped martial arts to concentrate more on boxing. Then he took the infantry commander’s course, and was sent on his first overseas tour – to Bougainville in the North Solomon Islands as part of the peace-monitoring team following decades of strife with PNG.
The wilful destruction of all the infrastructure and the resultant poverty and desperation came as a shock to Glenn. One night, a man stumbled into the medical centre after having been stabbed in the chest. It turned out he’d rowed a boat five hours with a deflated lung to get there. ‘We were all a bit blown away by it,’ says Glenn. ‘But when you think about it, he had no choice. The only other option he had was to lie down and feel sorry for himself and die. I guess he thought he might as well die on the way, trying.’
Another day, a woman close to full-term pregnancy hobbled in. Something had fallen on her foot and broken it, and she’d walked over 30 km on her heel to reach help. But even when people were much closer to medical aid, it could still prove traumatic. Supplies of all medicines were very limited, and frequently the only postoperation pain relief was a simple Panadol. It all proved one hell of an eye-opener, and Glenn determined to try to help people in every way he could.
‘A couple of days a week I volunteered at a local high school, teaching PE with others from the army,’ he says. ‘You had kids there who might have been sixteen to twenty years old but still in Grade 4, because through the twenty years of conflict there’d been very little schooling. The school ended up with about 500 kids – most of whom were really adults – and they worked in a split shift, so they would come to school from 7 a.m. till 1 p.m. and then from 2pm up until 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. So we ran sports sessions in the middle of the day and we had hundreds of kids turning up.’
Having had a difficult childhood himself, helping kids was close to Glenn’s heart. When he was posted back to Townsville, he and three mates, two from the army and one from the police force, got together and decided to hold an event to raise money for SIDS and Kids. They planned a 1500-km bicycle ride from Townsville to Brisbane, but when a group of schoolchildren completed a ride in the opposite direction – and markedly more uphill than the one the adults were planning – they switched it to a run instead, billing it as 1400 km in fourteen days by the team they christened ‘Combined Forces for SIDS’.
The army provided support vehicles and a backup crew, and the logistics were all figured out by another soldier mate, Kyle Williams. ‘I wasn’t a runner at all and it was bloody hard,’ says Glenn. ‘It was so hot! Every day the heat of the road would burn our shoes, and you could feel it on your feet. In the end, we started getting up at midnight so we could run at night instead. You only really had to run during the day when you were coming into a town and wanted to rattle some collecting cans.’ They ended up raising $20 000, and Glenn determined to raise money for kids’ charities whenever he could.
After such an ambitious slog, army bosses said he and his two colleagues could have a two-week break. A week later, however, he received a phone call: he was being dispatched to East Timor on an urgent mission.
There, Glenn led an evacuation team of six ambulances with crews spread around the country to support different elements during the Australian-led international peacekeeping effort of 1999, following the explosion of Indonesian-backed violence after the vote for independence. Originally he was supposed to be there for just thirty days, but gradually, as the full extent of the fighting and horrific genocide slowly became apparent, the period was extended to four months.
Glenn arrived on a beach landing at Suai in south-western East Timor and, surrounded by infantry units, helped take over the area, supporting the locals’ rebuild and providing medical care at a level they hadn’t seen before. ‘That experience definitely changed me,’ he says. ‘One of the jobs I had over there was going out to locate bodies, and make notes for the war tribunal that was going to happen later. So locals would tell us what happened and where, and we’d go and find the remains. It was terrible. One of the villagers told us about two guys whose hands were tied behind their backs and told to run down a trail. They were given a five-minute head start, and then soldiers chased after them and hacked them down with machetes. Seeing so many bodies, and pulling them out of dams and everywhere, changes your view on life a little bit.
‘After that, I found myself a lot more emotional – and I still do – watching certain things on TV. I don’t like seeing kids harmed, even in make-believe drama. It was bad having to deal with the deaths and slayings of so many kids over there, and that was just the circle of life to so many people at that time. It was all so tragic.’
The army proved a watershed in Glenn’s life in other ways, too. ‘I don’t think I really felt love in our family, growing up; it felt a bit like everyone was out for themselves,’ he says. ‘But what the army taught me was that there was a support network of other people out there, and that you could also work as a team and help other people, not just yourself. So I learnt to become more of a team player as opposed to just being a survivalist, or someone who thought solely about themself.’
He’d also met someone who would change him, too. While working as a medic at Oakey, Glenn had treated another soldier who’d injured her back and, was working with the physio to get her up and running. The soldier’s name was Therese Finch and she was, unusually for that time, a vehicle mechanic in the army. A Sydneysider, she’d had a problematic family life too; her parents had split up and she no longer had contact with them. Glenn and Therese got together, and found their relationship worked well for them. After a while, they had their first daughter, Brooklyn, then married and Therese fell pregnant again with Alyssa.
At that point, disaster struck: Therese was posted up to Townsville and the army refused to post Glenn up there too until the end of that year. ‘The army used to have a saying: “If we wanted you to have a family, we’d issue you with one!”’ says Glenn. ‘I didn’t get posted up there straight away, so I discharged myself, intending to get back in later, which was a big risk. The army said they might not accept me back when I was ready, but I chanced it, and went up to be with Therese, Brooklyn and the new baby.’
While there, he took a cleaning job to keep the money coming in, but soon went back to the army and asked to be allowed back in. They didn’t hesitate. They were short of medics, and he rejoined within two weeks.
This time, it was Therese’s turn to quit the army, and the family moved back down to Toowoomba, the site for all the army’s aviation medicine, in 1999. Therese took a nursing course via distance education through James Cook University in Townsville. ‘I used to work with medical people and saw what they were doing, and thought it was really worthwhile, so I wanted to try it too,’ she says.
With a young family and hopes for more children, Glenn resolved to start taking more control of his own life, rather than just waiting to see where the army posted him. While the army was about obeying orders, it also offered young men like him a lot of opportunities if they were determi
ned enough to seize them. Having joined the army with an education only up to Year 9 before dropping out, he applied to take a nursing degree through the army at the same university as his wife, specialising in aviation medicine for helicopter medical evacuations.
He’d always enjoyed emergency work and being out in the field, but discovered he didn’t much like sitting still studying at a desk. He was determined to stick it out, however. It didn’t help either that, while he was enrolled at uni, he wasn’t allowed to work for the army. Boredom quickly set in. It was then that he received a call from a friend of a friend, a lawyer who wanted to learn to box but didn’t want to go to a boxing gym. Could Glenn teach him in his spare time?
Glenn tried it out, using the techniques he’d known from his own days of fighting, and the training techniques he’d learnt in the army. He quickly found he loved it. Very soon he was training the lawyer, as well as a growing number of other clients, every week. Within just a few weeks, he was running more than thirty training sessions a month, and struggling to cope with the rising demand for his services. To fit them all in, Glenn started his day at the gym at 4.30 a.m. and ended it at 9 p.m., with his uni work and spending time with his family squeezed in between.
Many of his clients were so buoyed by the improvements they were seeing in their fitness that they were keen to do more, and he started to take some of them out trekking over the weekends. Very soon, he had a close-knit, loyal bunch of clients who seemed ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. As his treks became more and more popular, so did the eagerness of his little band to walk further and further over ever rougher terrain to challenge themselves and their new levels of fitness. ‘I had to find an adventure for them,’ he says.