Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.

Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south.

You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing.