I grew up in a tiny country town in New South Wales, about 180 miles north of Sydney. It was like living on an island. There were 11 or so houses, and a gas station, and a farm. For a while we ran the local cinema.
When my father came out of the Vietnam war we were forced to have extremely short hair. This was the 70s, when if you didn’t have long hair you were a dead person, so it was a big problem. My parents broke up, I got estranged from my dad, and ended up in Sydney with the freedom to grow my hair. I’ve got really curly hair, and all the mean kids at the Christian Brothers’ College I went to started calling me Basil Brush, which then became Baz, which I then painted on the side of my school bag. When I was 19 I changed my name by deed poll to Bazmark. I’d always thought Mark was a boring name.
