Inside Geelong mayor Darryn Lyons’ den

DARRYN Lyons’ opinion of himself is well known, but does everyone share this view? Flamboyant fool or energetic entrepreneur? Andrew Rule plays referee in the fight that has an entire city talking.

Darryn Lyons

“GEELONG is known as ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and when the Darryn Lyons Circus set up in town it raised a lot of eyebrows.” - From Mr Paparazzi, Lyons’ autobiography.

THE Lyons circus still raises eyebrows. The ringmaster hogs the limelight in outrageous suits and boots and hair — a mohawk dyed so often for so long not even his mother knows what colour it is underneath.

With stubble on his face and a smoke in his hand, the best-known mayor in Australia could be fresh from the set of the new Mad Max film. He’s a born showman: part Barnum & Bailey, part Boris Johnson, part Johnny Rotten, part hot gospeller.

He can swear and drink like a pub cockatoo and looks the part, right down to the alert eyes under that colourful cocky’s crest. His enemies say he’s more a galah. Maybe they underestimate him.

Like him or loathe him, the lair with the hair is talented and ambitious, impulsive and inquisitive, abrasive and arrogant, vain and vulgar, a hard boss and a soft touch, a loyal friend and generous host.

He pleads guilty to a galloping ego and an exhibitionist streak. He’s often reckless and probably brave. He was one of the best young war photographers of his generation.

In Bosnia in 1992 a Croatian guerilla grabbed him at gunpoint, put a bullet in his revolver, spun the cylinder, pointed it at Lyons’ head and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked. He collapsed, dry-retching with terror.

He was dragged into a prison camp, fearing torture and death. An interpreter acting as a double agent recognised him and tipped off British troops, who rescued him.

Lyons got back on the horse. Next day he was on the job, aiming cameras at killers, at the bodies and the horror. He was 26, just four years out of Geelong.

Darryn Lyons cut his photographic teeth in Geelong before making it big on Fleet Street. Picture: Alex Coppel.

That year Lyons was the United Kingdom press photographer of the year. He rode his luck hard. Within a decade he was the Pope of paparazzi celebrity hunters, roaming the playgrounds of the rich and famous in private jets and his own luxury yacht.

Along the way he lost his first marriage and gained the mohawk, a seafront cottage in St Tropez, properties in New York, Barbados and Dubai, a polo team and a taste for cocaine, booze and random sex in his Ritzy West End house, the one where Princess Di once dropped in to tip him off about Charles and Camilla.

During those years the wild colonial boy regularly flew back to Geelong to see his family and old friends and to buy property. He knew he’d change his wicked ways and come back for good one day. It took the Global Financial Crisis to make up his mind.

He sold his dwindling business, Big Pictures, rented out his London house and came home with a few spare million to launch the second act of a dazzling career. He salvaged some mementos of the high life … Rod Stewart’s former Lamborghini, a Ferrari, enough art to fill a small museum and a roguish gallery of paparazzi shots.

He brought something else besides the hard edge that comes from hacking your way to the top in Fleet Street: 25 years overseas that let him see Geelong with an outsider’s eye. “It’s the jewel on the bay,” he says.

In November 2013, Lyons was directly elected Mayor of Geelong. The previous mayor had quit, shattered after a few months of trying to herd cats in maybe the most dysfunctional council in captivity.

No ordinary person could take the strain of leading a city struggling to survive in a global economy that poleaxed big local industries. So 38,000 voters took a punt on someone far from ordinary.

Now, 18 months into the job, Lyons might be tempted to swap mayoral robes for the flak jacket he keeps framed on the wall.

He is caught in crossfire between warring political and business factions, and an increasingly sceptical media. In the Balkans by the Bay, the celebrity hunter has become a hunted celebrity. Will he survive?

“People have tried to kill me before and failed,” says Lyons. “The knives keep getting thrown and I keep walking through them.”

There aren’t too many peacocks like me around, so I make a simple target – Mr Paparazzi, Page 298

MAYOR Mohawk is an ideas man. He keeps a notepad beside the bed to jot them down.

An early brainwave was a giant billboard of himself beside the highway east of town.

Critics liken it to some Korean dictator’s whim, even if the picture (sandwiched between footy slogan “We are Geelong!” and Lyons’ catchcry “Giddy up!”) seems more funny than fascist. Funny and cheeky, like adding “Opportunity” to the name of Enterprise Geelong so it spells EGO.

But even if Lyons can laugh at himself while he’s spruiking his hometown, not everyone gets the joke.

“A bull in a china shop,” scoffs one political enemy on condition of anonymity. “Wants to turn Geelong into Darrynville.”

“A bull at a gate … but his heart’s in the right place,” says a Lyons supporter.

“Sometimes you have to tell Daz he’s being a tosser,” says an old friend who lists his flaws as well as loyalty and charm. She let him camp on her floor when he hit London in 1988 with a battered camera and no money, and he’s never forgotten it.

“For a certain demographic he’s a working-class boy made good, for others he’s the Biggest Bogan,” says a political axe grinder. “All sizzle, no sausage.”

“A force of nature — but very loving,” says Lyons’ proud mother. “He just can’t sit still very long.”

There’s a theme here. Even Lyons himself uses the b-word. “Bullshit and bravado” disguises “a complex character,” he says of the over-the-top persona he turns to the world.

His critics use stronger language. That might make him angry but it shouldn’t make him blush: after all, he has T-shirts printed with words that can’t be used in a family newspaper. For that matter, he has T-shirts — and bath robes, towels, caps and car numberplates — all labelled MAYOR. He’s the Floyd Mayweather of municipal affairs.

The only thing everyone agrees about him is that he polarises opinion.

To his supporters, he’s the homegrown celeb whose sheer chutzpah might just conjure Geelong out of the wilderness left by Alcoa and Ford being euthanised.

Darryn Lyons with an old vintage camera outside his Geelong house. Picture: Alex Coppel.

To detractors, he is a political greenhorn swaggering around like an ageing rock star at a church social. Just two weeks ago, local state Labor MP Christine Couzens slashed him in Parliament, calling him “self indulgent” and “a one-trick pony who cares more about selfies than he does about jobs and services”.

Couzens wisely used parliamentary privilege to launch her tirade. Lyons has previously sued publications including some owned by News Corp, publisher of the venerable Geelong Advertiser (and the Sunday Herald Sun).

He says now it unsettled him to have clashed with his old employer, as it was “the Addy” that launched his stellar career.

Its editor of the 1980s, Graham Vincent, is still a staunch Lyons supporter. The present editor, Nick Papps, is understandably prepared to run robust coverage of a mayor under attack. In a year when the Cats are not playing so well, Lyons has made himself the biggest story in town.

In fact, he got in first, telling many stories against himself in his racy ghosted memoir Mr Paparazzi, first published in 2008. Besides an explosion of exclamation marks, the book has many insights into its subject’s character.

One yarn reveals the sharp kid who became a larrikin millionaire at 30.

Before he fell in love with cameras, celebrity, cigarettes and (for a while) cocaine, he loved cricket and played it well. Like so many 1970s kids, he admired the dashing Dennis Lillee. They even shared the same initials; Lyons styled his own signature on Lillee’s.

The kid wrote to the great bowler asking for five photographs — but with only one signed to him by name. He got the lot and sold the extra four to his mates. An entrepreneur was born.

He stood out from the herd even in primary school. His mother Lorraine, who met her husband, Graham, at the Baptist Church, jokes she didn’t know where her youngest child sprang from. He wasn’t like his older brother and sister.

“He was a rough and tumble little kid — he’d come home from school every night hoarse from bossing the other kids around,” she says of the prodigal son who has finally returned to settle down in his trophy waterfront house on The Esplanade. She and her husband are proud of their 49-year-old “baby” — although Lyons senior, a church choirmaster for 60 years, disapproves of the language and behaviour revealed in his son’s book.

“Dad says, ‘You weren’t brought up like that’,” admits Lyons affectionately. He loves his family and they love him. But he riles some powerful people in Sleepy Hollow. Especially because he stars in a controversial (and hilarious) film clip showing him as a super hero on horseback, riding into town to save the citizens from turning into zombies with a wave of his magic staff.

He says the zombie clip, the “dictator” billboard, last year’s floating Christmas tree, his non-stop Twitter feed and regular television appearances all put Geelong on the map.

The knockers point to the same things and say it makes Geelong a laughing stock.

They can’t both be right. Or can they?

If you gave my enemies a sword, they would stick it in and twist it with relish — and, yes, if the situation was reversed I would do the same thing – Mr Paparazzi, page 310

THE Lyons legend sounds like a self-help, motivational spiel: high school dropout chases dream, turns problems into opportunities, conquers world, gets the girl, lives happily ever after. The full story is a little more complicated.

“Dazza” the working-class hero? Not quite. His parents weren’t rich but they were ultra-respectable and prosperous enough to move from suburban Manifold Heights to a farmlet near Leopold when Darryn was a teen. His father had his own small architecture firm, commuting to Melbourne for years.

School dropout? Only later, after he worked hard to be dux of his class while it mattered to him. It was at school he discovered photography, inspired by his art teacher, Mal Donnelly.

He started with a “pinhole” camera made from cardboard then borrowed the class camera every weekend. His parents’ hopes that he’d study for a profession ended when he did work experience at the Geelong Advertiser and had a picture published. Hooked, he snared a job on the Geelong News and quit school.

Glen Quartermain, now a sports editor in Perth, met Lyons at the News while going for his first reporting job in 1985. Lyons, wearing a pink double-breasted suit, blew him a mock kiss and suggested a beer. “Quarters” got the job, a workmate and a friend for life.

Mayor Darren Lyons at last year’s Geelong Cup. Picture: Colleen Petch.

In 1987 Lyons won an award and parlayed it into a job at “the Addy”. In April 1988, he slipped away from the Fleet Street pack following the Queen on her Bicentennial visit. He hid in a mob of sheep at a shearing demonstration because he guessed the animal-loving monarch would relax around sheep and dogs.

He was right. He nailed a rare exclusive of Her Maj laughing. It went around the world, and with his boss’s blessing, Lyons followed it. He had a good reason to leave: he’d lost his driver’s licence. A “snapper” without wheels was no use in Geelong.

He lost most of his holiday pay in a card game on his last night, spent his last $500 on second-hand camera gear in Los Angeles, and the morning he landed in the UK, walked from Victoria Station to News headquarters in Wapping to beg for a casual job.

He fluked seeing Rupert Murdoch in the lift, introduced himself and blurted that he had been working at Murdoch’s Geelong newspaper and wanted to do the same in London.

Minutes later, while a distracted picture editor was advising him to try suburban newspapers, the telephone rang. The editor took the call, hung up and immediately offered Lyons freelance work. Lyons swears Murdoch gave him “a leg up”.

He worked madly, did double shifts non-stop, leapfrogged the pecking order and became a staff photographer on the Daily Mail.

His old boss Graham Vincent recalls visiting his protege during a big tennis tournament in 1992. They had a beer during a break in the tennis then Lyons got a tip that Princess Diana was up to something newsworthy.

Next day Lyons had Di on the front page and the best tennis shot on the back.

“I grabbed a lot of copies and took them home to Geelong,” Vincent recalls. He wanted to show those who had predicted the kid from Leopold wouldn’t cut it.

Years later, Vincent was living at Port Fairy. Lyons made the long trip there to visit him. He was driving his Lamborghini. Following was a BBC crew, making a documentary on the paparazzi king. It would attract more than six million viewers.

If I were caught doing copious amounts of cocaine or shagging twelve hookers, many of my mates would think I was a legend! Still, they’d better make sure the story’s true before they print it… – Mr Paparazzi, Page 298

HIS Worship is grabbing a quick Friday lunch at the Elephant and Castle Hotel in East Geelong when a pushy Canadian visitor interrupts. She wants her picture taken with him.

Lyons obliges, smiling. It happens a dozen times a day — the price of being the world’s most recognisable mayor south of Boris Johnson. Bus drivers wave and toot, passing hoons and tradies give the thumbs up, kids want “selfies” with him.

Lyons owns the pub, which features framed photographs on the walls and a stuffed lion behind the bar. It’s one of a string of properties he owns around town, including a nightclub, Home House, and a “younger” pub, the Eureka. Then there’s Pizzas With Attitude. All managed by his oldest mate Mario Gregorio.

“Daz” and “Mars” sat together in their first science class when they were 12 and have been close ever since. Gregorio is a careful accountant counterweight to Lyons’ mercurial artist’s temperament.

Today Lyons has his adviser, Alister Paterson, riding shotgun in the Range Rover. The former Liberal MP for South Barwon, Scotch College old boy and one-time television newsreader seems everything his boss isn’t. In signature grey suit, impeccable tie and a shirt as white as his smile, the affable Paterson looks like “a Tory prime minister”, says Lyons, chortling at the contrast.

Paterson, whose hiring drew “jobs for Liberal mates” barbs, has a pile of glossy brochures marking milestones of Lyons’ progress. There are action plans, slogans, snappy captions — and lots of pictures of Lyons with everyone from the Prime Minister to council gardeners and school kids.

Several photographs feature “the Mayoress”, as Lyons calls his fiancee, Elissa Friday, a tall and exotic 32-year-old who once worked as a model in London and in real estate before arriving last year. Her assets include a large diamond engagement ring and, Lyons says proudly, an agile brain.

Darren Lyons and Elissa Friday at the Melbourne Cup. Picture: Julie Kiriacoudis

“Girl Friday” (his words) studies at nearby Deakin University, making her one of the 11,000 students he hopes will turn Geelong into a college town on British and American lines. He calls it the “smart city” model.

His vision sounds something between Silicon Valley and Cool Britannia. Deakin’s Vice- Chancellor, Jane den Hollander, praises him for pushing Geelong as an education destination.

“I like him,” declares Den Hollander, who shares his faith in the potential of the bayside city. “He’s a bit impatient but a much better mayor than he was six months ago and he will be much better again in another six months.

“A lot of people said he’d last only three months,” she adds mischievously.

Lyons says he’s an entrepreneur “not an accountant or number crunchier”. He makes much of being directly elected but has only one vote among the dozen bickering councillors from far-flung wards that stretch from Avalon in a huge arc around the bay, taking in all but the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula.

Lyons takes credit — and criticism — for the floating Christmas tree that knockers dismiss as “bread and circuses” but which he insists will generate massive tourism dollars. The tree, to cost $1 million over a few years, first lit up on the harbour last December.

Lyons says it lured thousands of visitors and millions of dollars of turnover for small business. Most Geelong powerbrokers and many “stakeholders” see wasted money, not farsighted investment in “new tourism”.

Lyons’ “big picture” schemes make tempting targets at a time when council is trimming basics like Meals on Wheels. Even if he’s not always wrong it does make him always vulnerable.

Away from the buzz of public appearances, the selfies, relentless tweeting and interaction in the street, the local business establishment sneer at Lyons, says a source who has worked in the mayor’s orbit.

“They say, ‘What’s the dickhead done now?’.”

Lyons shrugs off criticism of his populist style, saying he’s happy to be tagged a shameless self-promoter if that’s what it takes to promote his city. He is probably the only Geelong figure now better known than Gary Ablett senior. Some find that hard to swallow.

Lyons is a fierce Cats supporter but there’s a sense the football club doesn’t love him back. Club boss Brian Cook ducks talking to the Sunday Herald Sun about him, reinforcing a perception that the club’s powerful patron and former president Frank Costa has given Lyons the thumbs down.

Few people in Geelong, in the fruit and vegetable business, or even the AFL, pick fights with Costa. Lyons’ critics say bagging the beloved businessman cost him dearly; the Lyons camp says it shows he’s game to take on “the big end of town”.

Costa versus Lyons might not be the only power struggle in Geelong but it’s the biggest. Beneath the surface, it’s a case of pier envy.

Costa owns the elegant but outdated wooden Cunningham Pier. It’s said he wants to sell it so it won’t be a drain for the family to maintain.

Darryn Lyons has divided Geelong’s politicans and business leaders. Picture: Alex Coppel.

Lyons, on the other hand, wants to build what he calls “my” Yarra Street Pier, a modern structure capable of servicing and attracting the international cruise liners he sees as a tourism bonanza for the bay city.

If Lyons got his way — now hugely unlikely — it would make Costa’s pier a white elephant. As it stands, the old pier can’t service ships properly and Lyons’ cruise boat dream is stalemated. No government is going to spend money to buy into a fight between two local heroes.

No local parliamentarian on either side fancies upsetting Costa. Labor’s member for Corio, Richard Marles, describes Costa as the most “decent man I’ve ever met” and “incapable of telling a lie” — glowing praise for the man who rescued the Cats and delivered three AFL flags in a dominant era. That dominance is receding faster than Stevie Johnson’s hairline but “Frank” still gets respect.

Costa’s dim view of Lyons is well known but not well recorded. His lawyers advised him last week not to comment because Lyons is suing a former mayor, Brian Fowler, over comments about Lyons’ business acumen in an advertisement for Costa’s mayoral candidate Ken Jarvis. It’s a close-knit community.

Lyons’ foes say he burned political capital trying to fund a grandiose pier and convention centre that was doomed, instead of nailing achievable targets.

One of his shrewdest supporters says “Darryn should do three small things and sell them to the public”. He concedes what Lyons’ critics trumpet: that the new mayor made “rookie errors”.

His first mistake was political naivety. Instead of paying lip service to bipartisan politics and consensus (some say) Lyons saw direct election as a licence to get his own way. It isn’t.

As a self-made millionaire who got rich in the bear pit of London media, Lyons is right-wing. His error was to identify so stridently with the then Liberal State Government as well as the federal version.

This made Labor people angry and local Liberals anxious. He made enemies by pointedly leaving Labor “shadows” out of announcements.

When Labor’s Daniel Andrews won the state election, Lyons found himself handcuffed to the losers. Who, judging by cagily neutral comments from former premier Dennis Napthine and others, are now wary of cuddling up to the lair from Leopold.

Labor tacticians aren’t about to forgive him or give him oxygen — especially because he seems a potential political threat.

They avoid attacking Lyons on the record but mug him anonymously. This looks like a backhanded compliment for his populist pull on the young, the old and the “battlers” — especially in “struggle-street” suburbs he cultivates with an “us and them” pitch against “the business establishment”.

The repeated complaint that Lyons divides the council rings hollow. A well-travelled professional who worked in Geelong until recently says it is “the most political and dysfunctional place I’ve ever worked” and ridicules the notion it is Lyons’ fault.

On the other hand, he says Lyons’ self-promotional schtick is shortsighted. “Darryn’s very good at saying he’s great and everything else is shite. The trouble with saying just one person stands between Geelong and oblivion is that it doesn’t inspire confidence among investors — because what happens when he falls over?

“He says ‘I’m ya Daz, sticking it to the man’ but politics is about alliances and he hasn’t built many.”

Former Premier Jeff Kennett says Lyons — “a challenge to the old guard” — has to patch up support, but can’t be blamed for all that’s gone wrong.

The difference between Lyons and his friend Robert Doyle is that Melbourne’s Lord Mayor — a former state opposition leader — is astute enough to have at least half the councillors voting with him.

Doyle praises Lyons’ loyalty and kindness as well as his raw energy and broad appeal. He lived at Lyons’ house after the breakdown of his first marriage (“a tough time in my life”) and is grateful.

“He’s a politician who connects with non-political people,” Doyle says. As such, he declares, if Lyons “rose above party politics” and stood as an independent in any seat around Geelong, he could win. Which could explain why so many are keen to paint him as a buffoon.

One Geelong identity who knows players on all sides says from the side of his mouth: “They’re scared that enough idiots will vote for him.” He laughs but he’s not joking.

Darryn Lyons says Geelong is the jewel of the bay. Picture: Alex Coppel.

There’s a delicious irony about the Paparazzi King worrying about his public profile, of course. Maybe someone will turn me over one day — and good luck to them — I won’t be bleating – Mr Paparazzi, Page 398

WHEN Lyons played cricket — and polo, later — he says he “played to win and sledged like hell”. Now he’s the one being sledged.

A persistent claim is that he is at least partly responsible for the departure of two City of Geelong chief executives. The most recent, Gillian Miles, took a pay cut in April to return to her previous job with a state department after just eight months.

Liberal conspiracy theorists say Labor conspiracy theorists want her “in the tent” to supply inside information against Lyons in case he runs for Parliament. This spy versus spy scenario might well come as a surprise to Miles who, as a public servant, couldn’t possibly comment.

Her predecessor, Steve Griffin, now happily heading the State Emergency Service, chuckles at the allegation he was mauled in the Lyons den. The truth, he says, is his five-year contract was ending when Lyons was elected and he had already lined up his next move. Nothing to see here, folks.

Then there’s the claim that Lyons scares off more investors than he attracts. One example given is the Sustainable Farms project, announced by Lyons and its backers last year as a massive vegetable greenhouse project to be built at Avalon over six years. The plan has since been postponed but a Sustainable Farms spokesman, Barry Dungey, is angry that Lyons is being blamed. He says the delay is because the scheme needs more overseas investment.

But there are other complaints. One insider suggests that Lyons tends to assume too much credit for other people’s work, treats council staff as if they worked for him personally and has the “Rex Hunt” habit of referring to himself in the third person.

The source also says the mayor’s office claimed support from a cruise line on a flimsy pretext: a business plan ostensibly endorsed by the company had in fact been signed by a public relations adviser who did not adequately represent the cruise company.

Besides that, they say, Lyons can be immensely irritating and frustrating to work with.

“But he’s hard to hate,” the insider adds. Amazing as it might seem, underneath all that swagger he really wants to do something for the town where he grew up.

“Deep down, I think he’s a romantic.”