WikiLeaks by Luke Harding, David Leigh Read Free Book Online Page A

WikiLeaks, a mobile organisation that could be rolled out or packed up in a matter of hours – “something that my family did do when they were involved in the theatre and movie business which is go to locations, set it up, bring all your people, get it all together, get ready for the production launch and – bang – you go.”
    The adult Assange became a shape-shifter: frequently changing hairstyles, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. One day he was an English country gentleman; the next an Icelandic fisherman; or an old woman. Even his role at WikiLeaks seemed unclear. Was he a leaker, a publisher, a journalist, or an activist? When the show was over he would move on.
    The Assanges lived for some of the time in an abandoned pineapple farm on Horseshoe Bay. Christine recalled slashing herway to the front door with a machete. She also claimed to have shot a taipan – a deadly snake – in the water tank. Royce Dalliston, who still lives on Magnetic Island, recalls Christine used to swim and paint under the banyan trees. The other boys would steal waste cooking fat from hotels, and smear it on the roof of the jetty’s sheds to go sliding into the bubbling swell whenever the ferry pulled in from Townsville. Dalliston and the bigger boys called Assange a “raspberry” because the “scrawny little blond-haired kid” seemed too scared to go jetty jumping. But Assange told the New Yorker profile writer Raffi Khatchadourian: “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”
    By 1979 Christine was again living close to her parents in Lismore, in New South Wales, where local farmers and the hippies co-existed in a state of mutual incomprehension. Nimbin – the scene of the Age of Aquarius, a 1973 hippy music festival – was just up the road. She had a long swirly skirt and drove a green Volkswagen Beetle. Local hippies successfully stopped the logging of one of the area’s surviving virgin rainforests at Terania. It was the first victory for Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Old footage from the march shows a young woman wearing dungarees trudging along a track, together with a group of bearded activists and guitar-strummers. She looks remarkably like Assange’s mother.
    Christine did not want her son to have a conventional Lismore schooling. Lismore was a traditional place, with women banned in the local club from leaving the carpet area, apart from on dance nights. Jennifer Somerville, whose children went to a small rural primary with Assange, recalls: “She was a little bit alternative, and she didn’t believe in terribly formal education. She apparently decided that it would be best if Julian went to a little country school.”
    His two-year stint there was one of his most sustained periods of education; according to his own account, during his childhoodhe attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” Assange later said. Classmates at the school in the hamlet of Goolmangar remember a quiet but sociable boy. His exceptional intelligence and blond, shoulder-length hair marked him out.
    One former classmate, Nigel Somerville, says there were “always puppets hanging out of his window … His mum was very artistic. I had a kite she’d made for many years. It was very colourful and had big eyes on it with oranges and reds and blues.” He and Julian would talk about crystal radios and experiment by pulling things apart. Amid the laid-back anti-establishment times, there were paranoid moments. In Adelaide, when Assange was four, his mother’s car had been menacingly pulled over, having left a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The police officer told her: “You have a child out at two in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady.”
    Christine’s marriage