Chapter Twenty-Eight: Bromwich

There was no drama in the courtroom.

Novels always want drama in the courtroom and there wasn't any. It took eleven minutes. Jamie wasn't there; counsel was. The bans were accepted. The newspapers used the word capitulated.

Two phrases came out of it, and they have followed him for a decade across three countries and will be in the first line of his obituary:

Completely financially incompetent.

A menace to the investing public.

He read them on a phone, on a balcony at Main Beach, with a coffee going cold on the rail.

And of the two, only one of them cut.

Menace he could work with. Menace was a coat. Menace implied a force to be reckoned with, a man the establishment feared — and within a fortnight it was, literally, in his own promotional copy. He quoted the judge against the judge, and the audience he would cultivate over the following five years loved it.

But completely financially incompetent he never quoted.

Not once. Not in nine years, across ten websites and a thousand posts and four media entities he controlled.

Because he was nine years old at the Glen Innes saleyards, and there was a man on a catwalk who could make grown men lean in, and there was his father in the ute saying someone's got to grow the bloody cattle —

and a judge of the Federal Court of Australia had just looked at the entire thirty-year project and said, in the flattest available language:

You're not the auctioneer. You never were. You just had the coat.