The picture I’m going to build of him is mostly sourced from files held by the old delinquent boys’ homes he ended up in. All make clear that while Mark liked to describe himself as a ‘Bondi boy’ that wasn’t true: he was born in a tent on a hillside near the Snowy Mountains Project in New South Wales. His mother was a prostitute who went up there to service the migrants arriving in waves to help build the thing.

The way Mark liked to tell the story to his social workers, his mum fell pregnant with him while she was on the game, and since there was no single mother’s pension and no legal abortion up there on the hillside, she had to convince one of her clients to marry her. The person she chose wasn’t Mark’s natural father (she probably didn’t know who his natural father was), he was a migrant who had come out after the war to work as an electrician.

His name was Hans Helmut Friedgut.

Documents from Births, Deaths and Marriages in New South Wales show that he married Mark’s mum, Joan, in April of 1950, and that Mark – in those days, he was still Marcel – was born in July. The couple and their new baby stayed up on the mountain until the Snowy project finished, and then came down so Helmut could find work.

They settled first in Albury, and then in Shepparton, where Mark’s mum got a job in the cannery. She also pumped out three more sons, none of whom looked like Mark. One of the pictures I found clipped to his old Baltara Boys’ Home file shows a short kid with a carrot top, and a couple of gashes to the forehead, probably from beatings that old Mr Friedgut used to hand out to him.

The Friedgut kids, by contrast, and by which I mean the kids actually sired by old Hans, had olive skin and black hair and they were as big as bears. From the reports I’ve read, they regularly beat the crap out of Mark on the grounds that he wasn’t a real brother, a fact obvious to all of them.

By the age of ten, Mark was in trouble at school. He’d already been to at least four of them, because the family was always on the move, but this time he was being expelled for lashing out at other kids with sticks, biting and kicking the teachers, and throwing furniture around the classroom.

If expulsion was the punishment for that at school, I don’t want to think what old Mr Friedgut did when he got hold of him.

By the age of twelve, he’d done his first stint in the Baltara Boys’ Home, and he was only just out of there when Friedgut dropped dead from a heart attack, leaving his mum a widow.

His mum went back on the game for a while (she had four boys, after all), and started drinking and taking drugs, and she was committed to Caloola in 1963.