David Penberthy: I can’t help but admire Mr Higgins’ professional contempt for authority

The widespread condemnation of Tony Higgins proved we are a nation that is enthusiastically regulated and obsessive about compliance, writes David Penberthy.

Tony Higgins on-board The Margrel in between ill-fated voyages. Picture Matt Turner.

This is not intended as an obituary and hopefully will not serve as one.

But as things currently stand, there appears to be zero chance that 57-year-old Tony Higgins has survived his latest ordeal at sea – his second in less than a fortnight. In some kind of unfortunate record, he sparked not one but two police search-and-rescue operations, the first of which stands as the largest in state history.

When news broke of his distress call on Tuesday, I – like every other person I know – was totally dumbfounded that the bloke could have been so reckless as to have got himself into strife again, so quickly after his last misadventure aboard the very same ramshackle craft where he first found trouble.

That boat is the 33ft Margrel, built in 1956 and in desperate need of TLC, bought a few weeks ago after Mr Higgins saw a “for sale” flyer pinned to the community noticeboard at a Goolwa supermarket.

Mr Higgins has been called every name under the sun over the past few days over his decision to head out again in the Margrel, even though people generally qualified their judgmental remarks with the hope that he was actually all right.

But many people have demanded that, if he is still all right, he should be handed the bill for this second rescue, if not also the first one, which Police Commissioner Grant Stevens estimated had cost in the order of $650,000.

Clearly Mr Higgins was not a paragon of safety or a stickler for the rules. When he was retrieved from the drink a couple of weeks ago he was fined $1000 for not having a current boat operator licence and for having an out-of-date EPIRB beacon and flares.

There is nothing to suggest that he necessarily rectified any of those shortcomings before heading out again – although this is speculation, for it is also possible that he did not intend to head out this week at all, but that his boat broke its moorings overnight on Monday while he was asleep on board, meaning he woke on Tuesday to discover it adrift and filling with water, at which point he rang triple-0

Sadly for Mr Higgins it now appears that we will never know the answers to any of these questions. On Friday, wreckage from the Margrel was found near the Murray Mouth, a day after the search was officially called off.

Even though it runs contrary to public opinion, I believe that Tony Higgins deserves a qualified tribute for living life on his own mad terms.

In these buttoned-down times, where so many people with nothing better to do spend half their life trying to regulate or judge the conduct of others, I can’t help but admire Mr Higgins’ professional contempt for authority and his dogged lack of interest in his own safety.

If you haven’t already, read Nathan Davies’ interview with Tony Higgins from The Advertiser earlier this month.

It is a rollicking read, and one made better by the fact that Davies, a knockabout sea-salt himself from Port Lincoln, clearly found himself feeling a lot of affection for his subject and got the best material out of him.

Much of what Higgins says in that interview sounds prophetic now, and it is of course laden with profanity, as befits a bloke who happily posed up for photographer Matt Turner dressed in bare feet without a lifejacket holding a lit fag on a crumbling boat filled with petrol cans and bourbon. Asked about the critics of his first rescue, Mr Higgins said: “They can stick it up their arse.

“They need to get a life and spend a bit less time critiquing people from an armchair. I went and bought a boat. How else was I going to get it back? Fly it?

“People have been punching around the ocean for thousands of years. They never had anyone to go out and rescue them, and I never expected anyone to look for me. I’m self-sustaining and if I f**k it up, then I have to pay the price.”

Mr Higgins also spoke of how his two adult children and partner had become accustomed to his conduct over the years.

“To be honest, if I’m not doing something crazy, they’d be asking what the matter was,” he told Davies.

“My son’s mother actually posted something on Facebook saying, ‘can everyone support my son after the loss of his father’ and I thought, ‘Jesus, I’m cooked already!’ That was a bit surreal.”

My former ’Tiser colleague Phil Coorey reminded me last week of the great observation about the Australian character by the late writer Clive James, namely that Australians like to regard themselves as the descendants of convicts when in fact we are overwhelmingly the descendants of prison guards.

The second search for Tony Higgins and The Margrel was called off on Thursday and wreckage of the boat was found on Friday. Picture: Matt Turner.

However, as silly as Mr Higgins might have been, the widespread condemnation he endured proved James’s point, that we are a nation that is enthusiastically regulated and, in many cases, obsessive to the point of being priggish about compliance.

There was a bloke in Victoria a couple of weeks ago who proved this point, and struck me as infinitely more annoying than Tony Higgins has ever been.

In a tweet he subsequently deleted after being the subject of a reassuring mass pile-on, this misery guts had noticed that two children aged under 10 had set up a lemonade stand in his local park.

He photographed them – he actually photographed other people’s kids – and tweeted the photo expressing his dismay that at the height of stage 4 lockdown any parents could be so reckless as to let their kids set up a lemonade stand, and urging the council to move them on.

That bloke sadly symbolises a certain miserable mindset that permeates our nation, which, as Clive James says, revels under the delusion that it is rugged and raffish and freewheeling.

As I said, this isn’t meant to be a vale for Tony Higgins, but if it is, good on you mate for reminding us that there should be a little bit of Tony Higgins in all of us, even if the lesson came at the ultimate price.