Julian Assange's link to the Northern Rivers

"WE TRY to develop free thinkers and people of independent thought here and Julian would be the ultimate example of that.”

Julian Assange, circled, attended Goolmangar Public School in the 80s.

THE ECUADORIAN embassy in London is a far cry from Goolmangar Public School, but what they have in common is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who spent important years of his life at both locations.

Mr Assange was arrested yesterday after spending close to a decade in exile at the embassy, and faces an uncertain future after the Ecuadorian government withdrew asylum.

So what is his connection to the Northern Rivers?

In 2010, as the furore was first erupting over the WikiLeaks release of US Afghan war documents, former classmates from Goolmangar Public School remembered the whistleblower.

Mr Assange lived in Terania Street, North Lismore, with his puppeteering parents from the mid-70s to the early 1980s, attending Goolmangar Public School from 1979 to 1983.

When he spoke to The Northern Star in 2010, the then principal of the Goolmangar school, Don Sams was bemused at the fuss, but not surprised Mr Assange spent his formative years at the small rural school.

"We try to develop free thinkers and people of independent thought here and Julian would be the ultimate example of that,” he said.

A distant family relative still living in the area remembers the young Julian as a 'geeky smart kid'.

"It didn't surprise me when I heard what Julian is doing now,” she said, asking not to be named.

After splitting with Mr Assange's father in the mid-70s, his mother Christine moved to Lismore where her father, Warren Hawkins, was principal of the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education, now Southern Cross University.

Christine, and new husband Brett Assange, Julian's stepfather, ran a small eccentric theatre company opposite the current Rainbow Wholefoods site in Terania Street in the 70s and 80s specialising in puppets.

Julian Assange, now 39, has since told reporters he was enrolled in 37 schools and six universities during his childhood.

He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne and worked as a computer programmer and free software developer before starting WikiLeaks.

As a Melbourne teenager he pleaded guilty to 24 charges for hacking into government and commercial websites, receiving a six-month suspended sentence, and was arrested again for hacking into a Canadian telecommunication company's website in the early 1990s, but escaped prison when the court ruled his actions benign.

Mr Assange said that angry reactions to WikiLeaks' release of tens of thousands of US military documents on the Afghan war show the whistleblower website is succeeding in its mission.

"If journalism is good it is controversial by its nature - it is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction,” he told the Guardian newspaper.