The next step in Julian Assange’s extraordinary adventure will be a return to an “ordinary life”, his father says.
The WikiLeaks founder landed in Australia on Wednesday night.
If the media coverage of his return is anything to go by, he will be welcomed home as a hero by some, pilloried as a pariah by others, and provide fertile ground for febrile discussion for years to come.
The 52-year-old, who described himself in court on Wednesday as a consultant, journalist, computer programmer, producer, editor and documentary editor, touched down in Canberra after his US plea deal.
From there, his family says, he’ll go somewhere quiet to recuperate from his years of incarceration.
At a press conference on Wednesday night, his wife, Stella Assange, said he needed “time to recover”. “I want Julian to have that space to rediscover freedom,” she said.
She also asked the media to give her family time to recover.
“He wanted to be here. But you have to understand what he’s been through … I ask you – please – to give us space, to give us privacy. To find our place. To let our family be a family before he can speak again at a time of his choosing.”
His father, John Shipton, told the ABC that Julian returning to an “ordinary life after 15 years of incarceration in one form or another – house arrest, jail and asylum in an embassy” – was “pretty good news”.
Although Assange’s physical and mental health declined in incarceration, Shipton said his son’s spirits had lifted and he looked forward to spending quality time with his wife and two children, Gabriel, seven, and Max, five. Assange also has a son, Daniel, from a previous marriage.
“[Assange] will be able to walk up and down the beach and feel the sand through his toes in winter, that lovely chill,” Shipton said. “And be able to learn how to be patient and play with [his] children for a couple of hours. All of the great beauty of ordinary life.”
On Sunday Stella Assange said she had not yet told her sons about their dad’s release. Owing to the sensitivity of the plea deal, all she told the boys was “that there was a big surprise”.
The human rights lawyer met Assange in 2011, when he was under house arrest in the UK. Soon after he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. They fell in love, set up a tent for privacy, and Stella became pregnant.
The two boys will not have seen their father in the free world until now.
His brother, Gabriel Shipton, said Assange would now seek somewhere he would be “left alone”. He told the ABC it had been a “bloody long slog”.
“I think we’re all looking forward to sitting back and having a beer or a champagne and celebrating him being back in Australia.”
He didn’t say where, exactly, Assange would now call home.
Assange lived all over Australia during a nomadic and eventful childhood. He was born in the military town of Townsville, a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef in northern Queensland.
From Townsville, he and his mother, Christine, moved to nearby Magnetic Island. In Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography – Assange’s disowned memoir – Assange describes it as an Eden.
But it wasn’t to last.
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Because of his mother’s nomadic lifestyle and, later, the spectre of an ex in pursuit, they lived in places including the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, Brisbane, Fremantle in Western Australia, and Lismore in New South Wales.
Along the way, Assange (who would later plead guilty to 24 counts of hacking in 1996) encountered his first computer – a Commodore 64.
Assange claimed to have attended more than 30 schools in his childhood, although Christine says it was more like 13.
Later he shacked up in a sharehouse in Carlton, near the University of Melbourne. It’s the sort of place you might spot a “Free Assange” tote bag hanging off someone’s shoulder.
The Greens, with the Melbourne MP Adam Bandt at the helm, have long battled for the Free Assange cause. Bandt said on Wednesday he would welcome Assange speaking in federal parliament.
But Assange, as a poster boy for press freedom, has become a hero of both the left and the libertarian right.
A cross-party delegation of Australian MPs travelled to Washington last year to lobby the government to drop the prosecution. Labor representatives, Greens and an independent were joined by the larger-than-life Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce and the “Trumpian” rightwing Liberal Alex Antic.
Fast forward to now and Assange will be met by a media storm, not all of it welcoming.
The conservative broadsheet the Australian ran an opinion piece headlined: “Fittingly pathetic end to the tawdry tale of a traitor” and asked “Is he simply a criminal activist who endangered people’s lives or a crusader of press freedom that his backers claim him to be?”.
The Sydney Morning Herald asked whether it was a win for press freedom. “Perhaps,” Peter Greste, a journalist who was imprisoned on trumped-up terrorism charges in Egypt, concluded.
The Australian Financial Review referred to his “disputable image as hero of press freedom”, while the Guardian’s view was that it was good for Assange, but “not [for] journalism”.
And then there is Julian Assange the man. As well as being accused of carelessness with leaks, he has been accused of poor hygiene, rudeness, mistreating staff at the Ecuadorian embassy, and “imperiousness and a callous disregard for those of whom he disapproved”.
In 2013 he declared the Labor government (then led by Julia Gillard) perverted and said he hoped Gillard’s “cronies” would be wiped out in a Coalition victory. He has even flown a kite about his own political potential.
Then there are the two reasons for the 2010 arrest warrant – a rape allegation in Sweden (an allegation he denied, and which the Swedish government discontinued an investigation into).
Assange may seek solitude and ordinariness but the clamour over his return home is unlikely to be easily quieted.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
