Voyage of the Southern Sun Read online

  Thirty seconds.

  In those first crucial moments I was caught by surprise. I looked out the window again. It was still white. My mind kept telling me: You have thirty seconds to get out of here.

  ‘Focus,’ I told myself. ‘You’ve trained for this. Get on your instruments, get the plane level, fly due east and you’ll reach the coast.’

  I looked at the instruments. The plane was almost level but slowly turning. That didn’t make sense. I tweaked the controls but couldn’t get the plane to fly straight ahead at a constant compass heading, which would give me some breathing space while I worked out how to get out of the cloud.

  The Sun’s speed was normal but I was still in cloud. Why hadn’t I emerged yet? I couldn’t see anything. The windows might as well have been painted black. The compass seemed to be turning faster, which suggested I had entered a slow spin to the right, a potential spiral that could end with the aircraft smashing into the ground. I’m still not sure if it was – more likely I was just turning slowly – but my next decision was one of the worst of my life. I kicked hard on the left rudder to counteract what I thought was the spin to the right.

  The aircraft jerked. Something was wrong. I could feel the g-forces pulling at my body. I looked up. The windows were still white. I looked down. The artificial horizon, which displays the angle of the aircraft relative to the ground, showed I was banked at 80 degrees – which meant the Sun had almost flipped on her side. The Sun was accelerating towards the ground. The speedometer hit 129 knots, which was way beyond the maximum speed she was designed to withstand.

  I looked out the forward window again. Not only was it still all white, but now the tough plastic windscreen was caving in towards me. The Sun was falling so fast she was about to break apart midair.

  Thirty seconds.

  This was it. I had lost it. I was madly scanning the instruments without reading them. I couldn’t take in the information. It was happening too quickly. Images of my wife and sons flashed through my mind, filling me with guilt. I cursed myself. How could an inexperienced pilot from suburban Melbourne fly around the world in a seaplane? It was absurd. I had failed.

  I looked out the window and whimpered, to no one other than myself, ‘I’m going to die.’

  2.

  The Founder

  ‘Oh, yes. The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it . . . or learn from it.’

  RAFIKI, THE LION KING (1994)

  The moment still haunts me.

  I was alone at one end of a long table. At the other end were eight lawyers, one a Queen’s Council, another hopeful of taking silk. A judge, all-powerful, stared down from a high bench, my life in her hands. I was being sued for $75 million. I could no longer afford to hire legal advisers.

  I had no choice but to defend myself in the Federal Court of Australia, the nation’s second-highest court. Most people, lawyers included, told me I was out of my mind. I was facing charges that I had abused my position, lied, tried to cheat my partners and exploited people who had trusted me. I accepted that I had made mistakes, errors of judgement. But I wasn’t a crook.

  I suspect the lawyers opposing me didn’t think I would get through the first day, let alone the three weeks reserved for the case. They were almost right. On the first day, while questioning my first witness, the weight of three years of stress crashed over me like a wave. I collapsed to the floor. The judge adjourned the hearing; ‘You poor man,’ she muttered as she walked out. For me it was the lowest point of what, with many highs and a few lows, had otherwise been a generally successful forty-five years of life.

  I grew up east of Melbourne. My father ran a cleaning-chemical business that was successful enough for us to progressively move to better properties every few years. I spent my formative years on an orchard in Seville. From the time I was young, Dad had a strong influence on me. During weekends and holidays I would help him at the chemical factory or on the farm, planting trees, driving tractors and building sheds. Like Dad, I wanted to work for myself, take risks and get my hands dirty.

  After three years of a four-year engineering degree at the University of Melbourne, I picked up a summer job as a labourer, erecting cinema screens for Village, a cinema chain which was building new complexes in fast-growing Melbourne suburbs such as Airport West and Dandenong. I was offered four weeks of casual work.

  The work was fun and I had always loved films. After four weeks I was offered more work, as there were more cinemas opening across Australia, so I planned a gap year. I would work for six months, then travel for six months, before returning to complete my engineering degree. The six months came and went, and I never quite embarked on my European tour. Instead I took a leave of absence from university and set up a company to design, manufacture and install cinema equipment. Apart from a lot of energy and those few months of erecting screens, my only qualification was running a weekly film night at Ormond College, my university residence.

  The movie theatre companies must have liked my enthusiasm and attitude, though, and the business took off. A couple of years later, my girlfriend, Anne, an interior designer, became my business partner. We did it all: screens, sound, projection, curtains, seats. Even projection port windows.

  Our timing was perfect. The growing scale of Hollywood blockbusters had helped trigger a boom in multiplexes. We worked for most of the major Australian cinema chains, including Village, Hoyts and Palace, and set up offices in Singapore and London to give us access to the Asian and European markets, which were expanding fast. We helped create hundreds of complexes across thirty countries.

  Within three years I was living at our headquarters, an almost-groovy warehouse in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. The business was outgrowing the building, and I wanted a more interesting space to work in. I went looking for an old cinema we could use as an office and a large studio space. A retired projectionist I had met at the Nova cinema in central Melbourne, Brian Davis, told me about a theatre for sale near his home. In fact, he had worked there back in the 1960s.

  The Sun Theatre had been closed and unloved for eighteen years, and lay forlorn. When it opened in 1938, the Sun was the most luxurious cinema in the area, perhaps an over-ambitious single-screen in Yarraville, a suburb on the ‘wrong’ side of the river that separates central and eastern Melbourne from the city’s western suburbs. Like many of the grand single-screen cinemas of the era, it was able to screen Hollywood’s finest fare to a thousand people at one sitting. The introduction of television in the late 1950s dried up the Sun’s audiences. She then screened Greek-language movies until the advent of VHS tapes and SBS TV, along with many of the Greeks leaving the neighbourhood, simply left no audience to keep her alive.

  A film hadn’t graced the Sun’s screen for almost two decades when I crawled in through a hole in the back wall. The lead flashing which sealed the edges of the roof had apparently been stolen and sold for scrap, which meant nothing was stopping the rain pouring in, and so the ceilings had collapsed. Squatters had lit fires to keep warm. Hundreds of needles were strewn about the place.

  Yet I fell in love. Standing among the debris, I could see only potential. Her art-deco interiors, from a terrazzo-laid foyer to ornate plaster work, even oversized ceramic urinals, were like an architectural time capsule: a physical reminder from another generation that cinema is a grand artform and deserves a worthy home.

  Over coffee with Anne, I sketched out a plan on a napkin to restore the Sun to its former glory. Something like $70,000 and a few months should do it, I reckoned. Anne loved my enthusiasm but was sceptical about my budgeting. ‘Try five or ten times that,’ she laughed, ‘just to get started.’

  No one lodged a credible offer at an auction organised by the owners, who were desperate to pass on responsibility for the decrepit building. After the auction failed, my modest proposal was quickly accepted. The week after settlement, as we cleaned out the debris, we discovered that the building was riddled with white ants. Every piece
of timber would have to be replaced – a huge task. We installed a new roof, using the shed-building skills of my youth, laid a new floor and painted every surface in undercoat so that we could move in and get back to running our business.

  The Sun was a renovator’s dream – or nightmare. Ultimately, restoring it would take many years and millions of dollars. We had to fix the building in stages, only moving onto the next when we had saved up enough money to afford carpenters, labourers and materials.

  We never intended the Sun to be a cinema again. The surrounding Yarraville village didn’t have any restaurants, and only a single simple cafe. Many shopfronts were closed and empty. Would anyone in this neighbourhood even want a cinema? There didn’t appear to be enough affluence to support one.

  But film was an important part of my life. After running the film club at Ormond College, I had begun a film society, Cinema Ulysses, which operated first from my warehouse, and then monthly on Sunday nights at 11 p.m. at the Valhalla Cinema in Northcote. A few years after we bought the Sun, we began screening old movies once a month in the upstairs lounge there. The rickety wooden-framed seats were from the 1930s, and we provided blankets made from cinema curtain offcuts because there was no heating. Over the next few years the club became a popular, if quirky, place to see a film. We didn’t have a liquor licence, but turned a blind eye to the bottles of wine that patrons snuck in. Soon we were screening several shows every weekend, which we promoted through an amateur-looking yet appealing quarterly calendar, which I took great pride in writing. It became a fixture on the fridges and toilet doors of many homes in the area.

  The neighbourhood morphed around us. Like many inner-city working-class suburbs, Yarraville became wealthier as younger professionals took over the last remaining pockets of cheaper housing close to the city. Those young, hip couples wanted entertainment venues. Our weekend screenings were regularly full. On Boxing Day in 2002, Mike Moore’s anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine began screening in Australian cinemas. It was exactly the kind of movie that our neighbourhood wanted: fiercely opinionated but still entertaining. We asked the distributor for a print and scheduled a few sessions over a weekend. When the opening day at the Sun came several weeks later, the queue stretched around the block.

  It was at that moment that I knew our once-decrepit warehouse could become a real movie house again. We’d been building cinemas for other people for fifteen years; now it was time to build one for ourselves.

  Anne and I had strong opinions about the movie theatre we wanted to build. Having worked on hundreds of cinemas and visited many more, we knew it had to be a community-focused place that was stylish, comfortable and inviting. Local residents needed to think of it as an extension of their lounge rooms – and that included the right to a drink. The local council agreed, and the Sun became the first cinema in the state of Victoria to obtain a liquor licence for the whole building. It was an important victory. Every film is better with a glass of wine.

  Our first three screens were opened in 2003 by the Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks. We took enormous pride in making sure each one had a specific art-deco style. We wanted to offer space and comfort. The smaller cinemas had leather couches. Each auditorium was named after a local theatre icon long since closed.

  The first years of operation were tough, but slowly, steadily, the community embraced the Sun. At the same time, our cinema manufacturing business, after fifteen years of steady growth, was struggling. We had work but faced pricing pressures from imported competition, two of our international clients went into liquidation, and I wasn’t as focused on it as I should’ve been.

  In 2004, with the newly opened Sun not yet profitable, and with the manufacturing business struggling with dwindling sales, mounting debts and cash-flow issues, things got so tight we had to sell off assets where we could and restructure through administration, which brought great emotional turmoil. Through the grace of people we had worked with for a long time, we were able to come out of administration by finding a buyer for the manufacturing business, with all staff retaining their jobs.

  I was proud to have saved the business, but I was unable to meet the demands of a tax burden that became my personal responsibility, and therefore had to declare personal bankruptcy. I have never shared this publicly before. I was and continue to feel ashamed about that time. While I learned a lot and committed to never let that happen again, it would feel deceptive to celebrate the highs of the last few years without being clear about this.

  I went back on the tools for a couple of years, erecting screens for other cinemas in order to cover the Sun’s losses, and worked hard to ensure that the dream we had for the cinema would come true. We’d come so close to losing everything, and I was determined never to put us in such a position again. As much as we had been thrown some curve balls, I knew it was my seat-of-the-pants management style and lack of long-term planning that had taken us to that point. I had to find a way to balance my sense of fun (and what others would call my entrepreneurial flair) with some sound management techniques. I applied for an MBA program, but at the time couldn’t afford the fee so put it off for a few years. In the meantime I read as much as I could. We chipped away at improving the Sun, doing as much of the work ourselves as we could, as the crowds built and funds became available.

  A decade after screening Bowling for Columbine in the dusty, converted lounge area, the Sun Theatre had eight fully functioning cinema screens, plush leather seating, stylish decor, luscious carpet, a thriving bookshop, Hollywood blockbusters and as many niche movies and documentaries as the best arthouse cinemas in any Australian city. The average patron visited about seventeen times a year – a rate three times better than that of conventional cinemas – making the Sun one of the more popular movie theatres in Australia. We became an integral part of the social and cultural life of Yarraville, which is now one of western Melbourne’s most vibrant suburbs. I was proud we had contributed to the social and economic life of our community.

  In the mid-2000s, movies started shifting from film to digital. Instead of reels containing thousands of frames of film, movies were now delivered on hard drives containing billions of ones and zeros. Cinemas had to replace their old projectors, technology almost a century old, with high-end computer-driven projectors. To help cover the cost of this expensive transition, the Hollywood movie studios handed over approximately $100 million to the large Australian cinema chains. Independent operators like us were left out.

  I was determined to get the same deal for the Sun and other indie cinemas. Without the new technology, our projectors would be limited to showing old movies and the few niche movies still shot on film. We would be out of business in a few years. I could see that the survival of every family-owned cinema in Australia was on the line.

  With the support of other independent cinema owners, in 2008 I became the chief negotiator for our sector of the industry. I flew to Los Angeles, Hong Kong and London dozens of times over two years to negotiate on behalf of the Sun and hundreds of other struggling operators. Most of the trips lasted one or two days, and I flew economy and travelled as frugally as possible. I convinced the film studios, which stood to save hundreds of millions by no longer making film prints, to contribute $80 million to our independent (mostly family-owned) cinemas across Australia for the digital transition. I relished the experience and the confidence boost it gave me, and I agreed to undertake the negotiating for no charge other than having my travel costs reimbursed once the mission was completed.

  In 2010, after two years when it looked like a deal was almost done, arguments broke out over who owned the rights to the money. Despite my best intentions, it was perceived that I had a conflict of interest. I owned a cinema and needed the rebate. I was also a director of a digital projector supply company, with partners and fellow directors who would benefit from installing the new equipment. A disagreement arose. I should have stepped back and let someone else finalise the deal, but I was too proud. I really wanted to fi
nish what I had started.

  A lawsuit unfolded between the two companies claiming to have the right to the rebate scheme. I got caught in the crossfire and was named as the third respondent in a $75-million suit because of my dual role negotiating the deal and also serving as a director of a company installing digital projectors. Ironically, I actually owned part of the company that was suing me.

  The judge found I had acted inappropriately – as a director I had breached my fiduciary duties to the equipment company – but seemed to understand what had happened. She observed, during the trial, that ‘I was digging a deeper and deeper hole’ I could not climb out of. My situation had almost derailed the entire rebate; frankly, I’d made a real mess of it. Once I withdrew from the negotiations, two of my fellow independent cinema owners stepped in and completed the deal. Independent cinemas across Australia now receive the money.

  But these were the worst, most stressful years of my life. I was depressed and achieved little in that time. Our cinema business under-performed. My long-term trusted business adviser, John Geilings, said it was the equivalent of a bad divorce – which was ironic, given how steadfastly Anne stood by me, despite the legal mess and my poor emotional state. I was perpetually drained.

  The two main companies on either side of the case appeared to have allocated over a million dollars each to the fight. I had much more limited means, and had to be realistic. After having a lawyer and barrister advise me at the beginning of the three years it took to get to court, I could not afford them when I needed them most – at the trial. So I made the tough decision to defend myself in court, an unusual occurrence in such a complex commercial case. I dreaded the beginning of the hearing so much that every delay, although prolonging the agony, quietly pleased me.