Chapter 1 — The Record

A provisional chapter from a developing account of my life. It brings together memory, documentary records, later reflection and questions that may remain unresolved.

By the time I reached my late seventies, a surprising amount of my life existed as files.

There were medical records, letters, emails, reports, complaints, scanned pages, photographs, notes to myself, transcripts and the accumulating contents of something I had come to call an Evidence Map.

The name made it sound orderly.

My life had not been.

The Evidence Map came partly from necessity. There were too many documents, too many versions of events and too many occasions on which something written by somebody else had acquired an authority that my own recollection did not possess.

Once something enters a record, it changes character.

A conversation becomes a clinical observation. An impression becomes a diagnosis. A diagnosis copied into another document begins to look like corroboration. Years later, somebody reading the later document may have no idea where the statement originated. They simply encounter it as history.

That became one of the recurring problems of my life.

I had lived the event.

They had the record.

And the record could win.

Between the Layers

For years I thought the task was to find the right document.

Eventually I began to understand that this was too simple.

There might not be one right document.

There might be one record made at the time, another copied years later, my memory of the event, my understanding of it at the time, and another understanding that emerged only decades afterwards.

Somewhere among those things was what had happened.

But the truth was not necessarily sitting conveniently on the top of the pile.

Nor was it necessarily buried at the bottom waiting to be uncovered like an archaeological object.

It could exist between the layers.

That was more difficult.

It was also more interesting.

How Records Travel

By 2026 I had several collections of medical records from different periods of my life.

Some had come through circuitous routes. Others had been obtained later through Queensland Health. There were records I regarded as incomplete, records that appeared to preserve material missing from other sets, and records that repeated descriptions I had spent years trying to understand or correct.

Two expressions became familiar to me:

Corr In.

Corr Out.

Correspondence received. Correspondence sent.

Administrative language.

Yet these small labels mattered because correspondence tells you something about the movement of information. It shows not merely what somebody believed, but what was passed from one person or institution to another.

That distinction became important.

I was no longer looking only for statements about me.

I was looking at how statements travelled.

A diagnosis made in one place could appear in another. A description could lose its original context. A possibility could become a fact. Once established in the record, it could influence the interpretation of the next event.

The file was no longer just a record of what had happened.

The file had become an actor in what happened next.

The Loop

For years my records carried a psychiatric description that I disputed. Eventually I began the formal process of having it amended.

That sounds, when reduced to a sentence, almost clerical: identify an error, request a correction, receive a response.

The lived experience was nothing like that.

A psychiatric label does not remain politely inside the document in which it was written.

It arrives before you do.

It can be present in a room before you have spoken.

It can influence whether an unusual account is heard as an unusual event or interpreted as evidence of the diagnosis already sitting on the screen.

This creates a peculiar problem.

How does a person challenge a record when the act of challenging it may itself be interpreted through the record?

It is a nearly perfect loop.

And once I recognised the loop, I became increasingly interested in records themselves: how they were created, copied, transmitted, changed and relied upon.

This was not an interest I had expected to acquire in old age.

But then, much of my later life involved subjects I had not expected to study.

What Memory Keeps

Memory presented a different problem.

I have a diagnosis of dissociative amnesia.

The clinical term is useful, but like most clinical terms it is much tidier than the experience.

People tend to imagine memory as a library. Something is either on the shelf or missing from it.

My experience has been stranger than that.

Something can be absent for years and then return because another event has given it a pathway back. A detail that made little sense can suddenly attach itself to another detail. Sometimes the return of a memory changes an interpretation I have carried for years.

That does not mean every recovered connection is automatically correct.

It means it has to be examined.

The Story Changes

There is a temptation, when writing a life, to eliminate this uncertainty.

Autobiography encourages sentences such as:

This happened, and because it happened I became this.

Life rarely behaves so obediently. Curiously I also learned that lawyers want you to be fully recovered with immediate and perfect recall and rarely allow for the process of returning of long hidden memories of traumatic incidents through natural human processes, others see it as evidence of "making it up", and this can make you unsuitable for the lawyer process. More on this later.

There have been times where I have been angry with somebody for years and then remembered enough of an earlier conversation to see their behaviour differently many years later.

That happened recently when I reconsidered something involving my psychologist, Sandy, and the question of discussing and including references to the early women abusers who formed an important part of my experience.

I had carried an objection to what I believed she had done. Then another part of the conversation came back.

I remembered arguing strongly for including those women because they represented such a substantial part of my experience. I also remembered her making a distinction I had not properly retained: talking to her, privately, was one thing; speaking about those experiences in court or before strangers could be entirely different. I also learned how seamless Dissociative Amnesia really is.

The recollection changed the picture.

For a long time I had thought she had been wrong.

Now I could see the possibility that she had understood something I had not. That was uncomfortable.

It was also valuable.

If I were constructing a case rather than writing a life, I might be tempted to choose one version.

The first version: I objected because Sandy was wrong.

Or the later version: I remembered more and realised Sandy was right.

But neither adequately describes what actually occurred across time.

For years, the first understanding was real to me.

Then something changed. That change is part of the story.

Perhaps one of the most important parts.

The Evidence Map

This is why I became interested in preserving evidence rather than simply reaching conclusions.

The Evidence Map grew out of that instinct.

Some of it was technical.

I had hundreds of scanned pages. They needed filenames, links, indexing, descriptions, tags and ways of finding relationships between documents.

I knew enough about computers and information systems to recognise the problem.

Information becomes almost useless when you cannot retrieve it.

But underneath the technical problem was another one.

People also become difficult to retrieve.

Their experiences are distributed across institutions that each hold only part of the history. A hospital sees a patient. A psychologist sees a client. A complaints agency sees a complaint. A lawyer sees a legal issue. A government department sees an administrative matter.

Each may produce a perfectly respectable record of its own encounter.

Yet nobody necessarily sees the person created by the combination of all those encounters.

Fragmentation can therefore produce distortion without anybody deliberately lying.

That became increasingly important to me.

It also began connecting with questions that reached far beyond medical records.

Who Owns the Story?

• Who owns a person's history?
• Who gets to describe it?
• What happens when institutional descriptions contradict lived experience?
• What happens when the person cannot immediately retrieve all of their own memory?
• What would an information system look like if it began with the sovereignty of the person rather than the convenience wanted by lawyers or the institution?

Those questions eventually became part of the thinking behind the Blue•Print and the Survivor App.

But their origins were less abstract.

They began with me sitting at a computer trying to work out what had happened to me.

Forty-Five Geologists

There is an irony in this.

Long before I became preoccupied with documentary evidence, I had spent a great deal of my life looking at landscapes.

Geology was one of the interests that opened Australia to me.

As a young man I drove coaches. Local work, charters, interstate travel, tours, snow country and longer journeys provided an education that no classroom could have given me.

On one journey I had a coachload of geologists.

Forty-five of them.

Australia became their classroom, and because I was driving them, it became mine as well.

Geologists teach you to look differently.

A landscape is not merely what is visible.

The surface tells you something, but not everything.

A cliff is an exposure of time. A road cutting reveals layers that were previously hidden. A river may occupy a landscape shaped by events millions of years earlier. Something that appears uniform from a distance becomes complicated once you stop and examine it.

Perhaps that way of seeing stayed with me.

I cannot claim that, as a young man, I foresaw an elderly version of myself examining medical files like geological strata.

That would be too neat.

But looking backwards, I recognise the similarity.

The surface matters.

The buried layer matters.

The relationship between them matters more.

Sometimes one layer has been disturbed.

Sometimes material from one period has intruded into another.

Sometimes an apparent boundary is not the boundary at all.

And sometimes the most interesting question is not simply:

What is this?

It is:

How did it get here?

Look, Measure, Compare

In 2025 and 2026, that question followed me through hospitals.

There were new physical problems, investigations, scans, procedures and disagreements about what was happening to my body.

There were also old questions that refused to remain old.

An action as ordinary as raising an arm, washing my hands or drying them on a towel could have consequences that seemed entirely disproportionate to the action itself.

I observed them.

I repeated things.

I measured oxygen levels.

I tried to describe what happened.

Other people observed some of it.

Sometimes the observations fitted together.

Sometimes they did not.

And surrounding all of this was the accumulated medical record.

Here again I encountered the problem of layers.

There was what my body appeared to do.

There was what I experienced.

There was what somebody else observed.

There was what they wrote.

There was what another clinician subsequently read.

And there was the meaning that clinician gave to everything that followed.

None of these things was necessarily identical.

Yet neither could I simply declare that my own interpretation automatically explained everything.

That would reproduce the very problem I was objecting to.

My experience deserved to be taken seriously.

It also deserved examination.

That distinction became increasingly important to me.

To be believed should not mean to be exempt from scrutiny.

It should mean being considered seriously enough to warrant scrutiny.

I had spent much of my life feeling that unusual experiences were too readily placed into categories that made further investigation unnecessary.

By my late seventies I wanted almost the opposite.

Do not accept my conclusion because I say it.

Do not reject it because it is unusual.

Look.

Measure.

Compare.

Find the records.

Find the missing records.

Ask what travelled from one file into another.

Ask what I remembered then.

Ask what I remember now.

And when those things do not agree, resist the temptation to make the disagreement disappear.

That disagreement may be where the story is.

The Record Is Not the Life

Perhaps that is why I am writing this book now.

Not because I have finally assembled the definitive version of my life.

I have not.

There are things about which I am certain.

There are things I strongly believe.

There are things supported by records.

There are things contradicted by records.

There are things the records do not mention.

There are memories whose significance became apparent only much later.

There are also things about which I may never know enough to reach a conclusion.

For much of my life, uncertainty felt like an enemy.

An unanswered question seemed to demand an answer.

Age has changed that somewhat.

I am less interested now in manufacturing certainty merely because uncertainty is uncomfortable.

A blank space can remain blank.

A disputed event can remain disputed.

A later understanding can sit beside an earlier one without pretending the earlier person never existed.

That may be the only honest way to write some parts of this life.

I still want answers.

I still become angry when systems avoid questions that they are capable of answering.

I still believe records matter enormously.

But I have also learned that the record is not the life.

Neither is memory.

Neither is diagnosis.

Neither is advocacy.

Neither is the story I tell myself today.

They are layers.

And somewhere between them is a man who once drove a busload of geologists across Australia, who later built information systems, who spent years arguing with institutions about what they had written about him, and who, approaching the end of his life, was still trying to understand what all those layers revealed.

The Evidence Map was one attempt to do that.

This book is another.