I tried to explain it. Very slowly and very patiently, as simply as I could, since these people were obviously idiots, I said, ‘These children aren’t normal. They have problems with their tongues – their tongues protrude, and if they’re left like that, they get problems.’

The Indian girl was saying, ‘What problems? What problems?’

I said, ‘Clearly you know nothing about children with poor motor function. If you have children who can’t keep their tongues in their mouth, they get chin rashes. They are also at risk of swallowing their tongue. It is very dangerous. The fishing line, it’s what I put in there to help them.’

But they didn’t seem to get it, Jack. It was like they couldn’t understand. The Indian girl kept saying, ‘But what’s it for? What’s it for? How is it supposed to help?’

I had to start all over again, saying, ‘When a child has a tongue that causes them all kind of problems – like swallowing it or biting it or letting it lie on their chin so they get a rash – you’ve got to do something about it. You have to try to bring the size of the tongue down.’

I told them, ‘Plastic surgeons do it all the time with the Down syndrome kids. They trim their tongues, so the tongues don’t hang out so much. But I can’t afford that and I can’t get permission to do it, not for every child I have in my care, so I came up with this.’

They said, ‘You cut their tongues with fishing line?’

I said, ‘I don’t cut them.’ Because that was complete and total rubbish. You can’t go cutting somebody’s tongue out, because if you try they’re going to bleed to death. There’s a lot of gristle in the tongue but there’s a lot of blood too, and it’s going to be painful. How are you going to stop the blood from flowing out? So no, I never cut anybody’s tongue out. It was such an exaggeration.

What I did was very humane. I’m quite happy to explain it: I trimmed their tongues – only those who needed it – and not with a knife. I did it with the fishing line! It was actually ingenious, the idea behind it. I don’t say that because it was my idea – it wasn’t. I actually got the idea from the Wentworth Courier. They had a story about one of those young guys at the tattoo parlour on Campbell Parade – Beach Skin Art, I think the place was called – and he was doing tongue forking on people as a kind of fashion statement. Some politician was up in arms about whether tongue forking was Satanic, or whether it should be banned for people under the age of eighteen, or some such thing. Anyway, the Wentworth Courier did a story on it, and it got me interested.

The tattoo artist – he was one of those strange-looking people with the large metal circles in his ears – was interviewed, saying tongue forking is perfectly safe, provided you know what you’re doing, and why shouldn’t people be able to fork their own tongues? I thought, how interesting, and not long after that I went to his studio. The tattooist was actually working when I got there – he had his little tattoo gun in his hands and he had his silicon gloves on – and he said, ‘May I help you?’