I expect the world to treat me and how I want to treat the world. So if you wear your
camouflage gear and your armalite rifle and your rocket launcher, you’re making what
sort of statement? If you’re wearing ‘hippy-dippy’, tied-dyed clothes, that's another sort
of statement.
Has your style changed over the years? And in what ways?
I’ve noticed that I have a mixture of fashion and ‘loin cloth’. If you think back to our
ancestors going into the jungle to kill a kangaroo or dinosaur or whale or mammoth or
something, to bring it back home for the family to eat, they would put on the appropriate
clothing. If you wanted to travel lightly you’d wear a loin cloth, if you were fighting a
killer bear you’d wear a bit of fur, all that sort of stuff. So on one hand, doing the media
stuff, I’d dress up nice and bright and have exactly as much fun as I’d feel like. On the
other hand, when I’m doing a corporate speaking event, there is the essential thing of
playing the game of pretending to be like your host. So I’d wear a suit and shiny new
black trousers and a suit coat, but I’ll never wear a tie. I always wear my bright shirts, so
even in the middle of my corporate amour I’d still manage to sneak in a little bit of
renegade.
It makes it easy, best of both worlds.
Well it shows respect to your host. The stuff you wear, for example, to a Saturday night
party would be different than going to the funeral of a loved one, which would be
different to meeting the grandparents of your beloved, or something like that. They’re all
different, different clothing for different occasions. Some people, and this is astonishing
to me, when you go out to parties and the Triple J concerts and stuff and you see these
couples together, boy/girl couples, and the girls are just dressed up fantastically for the
event while the guys have sort of got on a T-shirt that they might have worn for a couple
of days and some shorts they might have worn for about a month... and they never really
care! It’s amazing the difference that you sometimes see.
Is it true that you make some of your own shirts/clothes?
No, no, my wife makes my shirts. There are many rumours, as probably you have
guessed yourself, that go around but my wife makes my shirts and I help her. I ask many
incriminating things, like “why did you turn that inside out?” and “why is that doing
that?” and I'm gradually picking up knowledge, but my wife is different. Recently we
were doing a photo shoot for Spinifex and the brief was for something ‘Christmas-y’. So
my wife got up at 5:30 AM and by 8:30 AM I had my shirt, in three hours.
Wow, that’s quite fast.
Oh, man, it was so impressive! I was amazed by how good sh