The Pyjama Boy
FOURTH PRINT RUN!
A story that motivates and moves your inspiration to even greater heights.
This is my true story of growing up in the slums of Redfern, abandoned by my birth mother who had 11 children and gave them all up for adoption.
My father later went to jail for 8 years. I grew up in one bedroom flats in very unhygienic cramped conditions and lived with an abusive alcoholic, drug addicted stepmother who could not read or write. I was not allowed to have any social contact with anyone outside of School and I was always dressed and in my pyjamas by 3.30pm daily.
Against all odds I achieved all my personal goals in life and I hope that my book provides inspiration and motivation to the reader.
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The Pyjama Boy
by Steve Murphy
ISBN: 0-646-45870-1
Retail Price: $24.95 Special Online Price $20.00 Plus P&H
---- Book Reviews ----
Story of Achievement
John Morrow
It is most people’s dream to be able to put their life story down in writing. I am afraid it would be a waste of time for me because my life has been rather boring compared to Steven Murphy’s life.
However, I would never swap my childhood for his, as readers of this book of hardship, achievement and love would agree. Young Brett Park, aka Steve Murphy, did not have the loving home life as most of us did. Brett’s mother went to Sydney to have him and did not return to Brett’s father until later in his life when he was a toddler. It was then that Brett’s father, Jim, realized that he would have to take Brett to his mother and father who lived on a dairy farm on the coast to be raised by them. Jim met Nell and married her.
Brett’s life then began to really take on a downward turn. Nell and Jim Park did not take to the domestic life very well as they were in a very depressing flat and at the absolute low ebb of their lives. They took to drinking and Jim eventually lost his job and ended up in jail. Brett was left with Nell who was mentally incapable of looking after herself, let alone Brett. When Jim was finally released from prison and learnt of the cruel torture Nell had vented on Brett, Brett was sent to live with his uncle on his grandparents’ farm. He was 11 years old. This is where Brett hoped his life would start to become better. He lived the farm life and milked cows while living in a country home. He had good food and loving relatives. Was this a dream for Brett or could it become his reality?
I won’t spoil this book by telling you the whole story but I will tell you that Brett goes on to achieve much in his short life, including a Correctional Officer, a Police Officer and a member of the Army as a Field Engineer. Brett has been to Africa with the United Nations and also won the Novice Body Building competition in 1997. Brett’s story is one of achievement under the most difficult of beginnings. He could easily have slipped into bad ways but he is a strong person, a true Aussie battler. Now known as Steve Murphy, Brett would like to visit schools to help young people achieve greater things from their lives.
‘A book is a private companion’ – John
Sad little Pyjama Boy left behind
Sunday Mail (Brisbane) Daryl Passmore
IF LIFE followed a logical pattern, Steve Murphy would probably be behind bars. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he was raised by an alcoholic father who later went to jail for rape, leaving the boy with a cruel and abusive stepmother.
Leaving school early with a limited education, Murphy went to live alone in Sydney as a 15-year-old. He had no family, no belongings and, it appeared, not much of a future. But the young bloke did have two things: a determination not to be like his father and a dream of becoming a police officer. It took 13 long years, via the army and the prison service, for Murphy to achieve his goal. Today, the 39-year-old is an officer with the Queensland Police Service, stationed at Clermont, 100km north of Emerald.
In his free time, he talks to groups of children at schools, libraries and community organisations about his life ? and theirs. "What I hope people get from it, is that no matter where they come from, their background or their upbringing, regardless of the circumstances, with guts and determination, hard work and a goal, you can achieve what you want in life," he said. "You can break the cycles of poverty and violence. You can choose to break out of it."
He says that as a young man, he went off the tracks. "I made mistakes and had to overcome them. I tell the kids to learn from my mistakes and not make it harder on themselves." He has now told his story in a book, The Pyjama Boy, and is touring the country. The book takes its title from the name kids used to taunt Murphy while he was growing up in the rough Sydney suburb of Redfern. His oppressive step-mother Nina allowed him just 15 minutes to sprint home from school every afternoon. His punishment for being even a minute late was to be thrashed about the legs, body and face with the electrical cord from a jug. After the belting, he was ordered into the bath and forced to put his pyjamas on by 3.30pm. While dinner, almost always stew, was heating on the stove, Nina would send him to the shop to buy her cigarettes ? and Bex powders ? to the great amusement of the neighbouring kids. "They would laugh and chant, 'Pyjama boy! Pyjama boy!' and Murphy would lower his head in abject humiliation'," he writes in the book.
After eating however many portions of stew Nina ordered him to, Steve was sent to bed by 4.30pm and ordered to be asleep within 10 minutes, under threat of another flogging. His stepmother would then settle down in front of the TV and drink herself into a stupor, while Steve sat in wary silence watching from his bedroom window the other kids playing in the street. That was his life every day for five years until his father was freed on probation and, on hearing of the abuse, sent the 11-year-old to live with an aunt and uncle on a property near Port Macquarie. He struggled at school and fell into the role of class clown to gain acceptance. At home, he was exploited on the farm to the further detriment of his studies. A turning point came when he was 14 and stole a purse from the home of an elderly woman. He was arrested and put on a 12-month behaviour bond, with the threat of being sent to a boys' home hanging over him. "Everyone said I was going to be in jail at 18. I wanted to be different to my father." But Murphy bears no animosity towards his now-dead father. "He committed a very serious offence, which I'm very disappointed in, and I don't condone what he did," he said. "But he was the only person who showed me any kind of affection and love, even though it was sporadic." Perhaps more surprisingly, he is not angry at the mother who abandoned him, or the step-mother who made his childhood such a misery. "I have no hatred, just disappointment." At 27, Murphy finally traced his biological mother Doris Park, who also used the surnames Rowell and Coggan. They had "a very clinical and sceptical reunion" before she was killed in a car accident just weeks later. But there were more shocks to come. While writing the book, he discovered his mother had at least 11 other children who had all been adopted out. He has since met five half-brothers and hopes to find his other siblings. "It's very important to me. You need a link to your blood relatives." Murphy credits his former wife and their two children with inspiring him to continue to pursue his dream of becoming a policeman despite repeated knockbacks. He was rejected by every police service before Queensland gave him a chance to prove himself. Now he hopes his story will help other young people to never lose sight of their dreams. A percentage of sales of the book will be donated to Anglicare's prevention programs for youth. ?
‘I’m just a man,’ he says, ‘and this is my story.’
anna beth mccormack
Steve Murphy addresses a motley audience of kids and adults in my local library. We have been attracted by a flyer and report in the local paper. He has, he says, taken three months off duty as a Queensland police officer, to travel, talk and promote his first book: The pyjama boy.
He is outgoing and verbal (‘I can talk under water with a mouth full of marbles’). He produces evidence: school reports larded with Ds, family photographs, a video tour through a place you wouldn’t want to live, police records from his teenage years. His vigour and directness convince you that this is book you want to read.
Steve was abandoned by his mother soon after his birth on decimal-currency day in 1966. His father brought him to Sydney, but left him in the care of an alcoholic stepmother while he himself was in gaol. Although he was her meal ticket, she abused him cruelly at home, physically and psychologically, while outside he was ridiculed as the ‘pyjama boy’. At eleven his father rescued him and sent him to live with an uncle and aunt on a dairy farm. His aunt was a ‘Walton’s mum’, but his uncle exploited his labour and was abusive. Steve learned to be a clown in school, was in court for theft (‘This is my mug shot’), and at fifteen left school to find a niche in the adult world. The value of The pyjama boy for young adult readers begins here, for the niche to which Steve’s childhood destined him was likely to be narrow and dirty and quite possibly in prison.
Mercifully, Steve had found the value of work---be it bottle-collecting for his stepmother, or doing his uncle’s chores on the farm. (‘I don’t hate him. I learned a lot from him.’) By the time Steve was twenty, he had worked in many jobs, imbibed many tinnies, been intimate with many young women, married and fathered a daughter, fallen into hire-purchase debt, become well-known to the Townsville police as a ‘demon speeder’---and formulated some goals for his life. His main goal was to cross the divide and join the police. It took him eight years to acquire the necessary education and redeem his personal record. He spent some years in the army, including six months with the United Nations in Namibia (‘One you’ve seen African kids starving, no welfare of any sort, man, you’ve got no worries here in Australia’), and then as a prison officer in Townsville.
To keep his wife and, now, two children in the manner he thought they deserved, he also moonlighted in many jobs, including taxi driver, semi driver and ice-cream salesman. His physical fitness peaked as he did serious body building, resisting the temptation to ‘win’ through taking drugs.
Finally, he was accepted into Queensland Police, and the book ends abruptly with his graduation. Steve also managed to find his mother, and to meet her once before she died. In the process, he discovered that he was one of perhaps a dozen children, who were adopted out as babies. Now he has four half-brothers he can call family.
Against all the odds, against all discouragement, Steven persisted and fulfilled his goals.
Now, ten years a policeman, he speaks to the youth of Australia, using his story to motivate those who face great obstacles to living an ordinary life; and to adults, for no child should be allowed to slip through welfare cracks as he did.
Being one man’s story, one hero’s journey, the book does not present a blanket recipe for young adults trying to cope with the negative effects of a bad childhood. It does not, for example, mention sexual abuse, as this was outside Steve’s personal experience. He does give some coverage to the panic attacks he suffered while working as a prison officer, but there is little in the end about how he dealt (and still deals) with this consequential psychological disturbance. Nor does he treat how he avoided, or overcame, suffering from debilitating rancour against those who had abused or let him down as a child.
The book is not introspective. It is about behaviour, and assessing and changing behaviour and values to enable you to lead a good life. A point repeatedly stressed is the importance of doing good for yourself by making the best of your time at school, regardless of your other troubles. The pyjama boy does not suffer from the warts of self-pity or self-congratulation. Written in the third person, it reads as a hard-hitting narrative, backed up by photographs.
Not being a natural reader or writer, Steve went through seventeen drafts as he listened to and responded to comments from professionals and friends. The result is a well-polished, accessible, frank text that should be in every high school library. I look forward to its continuation in Steve’s next book. Over the last decade or so we have become accustomed to the genre of bleak social realism, in which young adults struggle in a storm of social and personal deprivation or abuse. It has even been suggested there has been too much of this genre. But here speaks a book that, ringing with truth, justifies the genre and takes up with ‘real’ realism where fiction often leaves off. Anna Beth McCormack is a New South Wales reviewer
Buy The Pyjama Boy
Signed copies of the Pyjama Boy are available through eBay.
