The most punk people Paulie Stewart has met, he declares, are Timorese nuns. An original member of infamous Melbourne punk band Painters and Dockers, Stewart has performed with Iggy Pop, The Cramps and Billy Idol.

But it’s definitely the nuns.

“Seriously, they’re the real punks, they don’t accept the rules of society, they’re not into material possessions or money and as women, they don’t take orders from men, which is amazing for that part of the world, which is a patriarchal society,” he says. “And these are Catholic nuns in the world’s biggest Muslim nation, so they’re real rebels.”

Stewart, these days as well known for his activism as for his flamboyant on-stage persona, has been tight with these nuns since making the soundtrack to the film Balibo, about the Balibo Five. But he became an advocate for the freedom of East Timor and West Papua long before, after the death of his brother Tony, one of the five journalists murdered in 1975.

Tony’s death has coloured everything in Stewart’s extraordinary life.

Facing death while waiting for a liver transplant in 2006, Stewart had time to reflect on his “kamikaze lifestyle”. In his wildly entertaining new memoir, All The Rage, Stewart writes that he’d had a “gnawing feeling of angst and sorrow” since the age of 15, the year Tony, who was just 21, was murdered. Without being conscious of it, he “had decided long ago to live each day as if it was my last”.

“I was lying there thinking, how did I end up here?” Stewart says of the gruelling 18 months he spent in the Austin hospital. When things were “looking bleak”, he met author and historian Inga Clendinnen; had no idea who she was, just that she was the hospital’s first liver transplant recipient. One day she asked what he did. When Stewart told her, she encouraged him to start writing.

“She got the ball rolling,” he says, “and it proved really therapeutic because I’d just be lying there, remembering crazy things and laughing.”

But he came close to death. The night he was told to make peace with himself, there was a Timorese nun working on his ward. When Stewart told her he played with Dili Allstars, the nun said she knew of their work, and promised she would help get him a new one, provided he would help the women and children of Timor Leste.

The next day, he was awoken by the news that a new liver had been found for him. Stewart says it’s “trippy”, and is convinced the nun played a role; he’s been working with these nuns ever since, despite having no religious leanings himself.

Everyone assumes his Hepatitis C and liver problems were an inevitable outcome of a musician lifestyle, Stewart reckons his years as a journo were worse. “People say, oh you drank a lot and took a lot of drugs because you were in punk bands and I say, they were the pussycats!”

When he started as an 18-year-old copy boy at the Herald and Weekly Times in 1979, “there’d be guys at 8.30 in the morning drinking longneck bottles of beer”. “And the cigarettes never went out,” he says. “It was another world.”

Sporting pink hair, shaved on one side, Stewart was regarded warily by many in the office (there’s a great story in the book about the time Rupert Murdoch visited the office), but went on to become the paper’s music writer, a job he held in varying roles for 30 years, interviewing some of the biggest rock stars of the day.

But his brother’s death always cast a pall; he was angry, he says, and frustrated. “I couldn’t believe that life just went on normally. I saw my mum at home really not coping with it and I just needed to … vent some kind of anger.”

When one of his mates suggested Stewart, who played the trumpet, get on stage for a one-off gig in 1982 to raise money for another mate’s parking fines, it was a defining moment. The gig was at the Rising Sun Hotel in Port Melbourne, the favoured pub of members of the waterside union the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers, at the time a subject of a royal commission; a risky band name to take on. When the music started, an angry neighbour came in with a machete and started chopping up the mixing desk, and all hell broke loose.

“It ended in a riot and six divvy vans turned up,” says Stewart, “and I realised that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Then they said, Paulie, you can go along every week, scream your guts out and we’ll pay you for it! And we’ll deliver 24 beers and a bottle of scotch before every show.”

“It ended in a riot and six divvy vans turned up, and I realised that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Punk rocker Paulie Stewart

The Painters and Dockers, which had a revolving line-up and encouraged anyone to join them on stage, became legends for their anarchic live shows, which usually featured nudity, stage invasions and more. Years later, the head of the notorious Painters and Dockers union, Bob Dix, while serving time in Pentridge, sent his wife and some heavies to a gig to decide if the union would let them keep the name; thankfully, she approved, and the Dockers have since had a long association with the Maritime Union.

“They’ll still call me and say, ‘the Dockers will be playing on this date for the union’, and I’ll say, ok, I’ll ring everyone and see if that’s ok. And they say no, no no, Paulie, the Dockers will be playing this date. And I’ll say yes, that’s right!” It has, though, he says, been a “fantastic” association over the decades.

When they formed in the early 80s, Melbourne’s music scene, says Stewart, was dominated by Nick Cave and copycat bands with “private school kids moping… saying ‘life is so hard’,” he says, “but our main goal was to shock and offend,” he says.

I first saw them as a teenager in 1987, and lost a shoe in the mosh pit. “Alan Brough went to a gig in New Zealand and he reckons he lost his shoes and his pants,” Stewart says. “No-one ever talked about us like, ‘oh that was a fantastic chord change in the third song’.”

Their live gigs – they often played 200 a year – were legendary, but they also enjoyed courting controversy off stage.

“I’d never name any names because it’s still an active, open case… but I’ve got my strong suspicions who was involved.”

Paulie Stewart on the case of the stolen Weeping Woman duvet cover in 1985

They were banned from venues, at one point the West Australian parliament wanted them banned from the state for their use of the Last Supper artwork in an illustration featuring the band members and a table loaded with Fosters and pizza, and there was a long held rumour that the band was actually TISM, who famously remain anonymous and play wearing masks. (They’re not, Stewart swears, TISM.)

And no, he says, they didn’t steal Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the NGV in 1985; when they used a copy of the ransom note on a single cover (which he pinched from a colleague’s desk at the Herald-Sun), and a photo of the band under a duvet printed with the artwork, the police arrived at their recording studio demanding the missing artwork.

But he does intimate in the book that he thinks he might know who did take the painting. “I knew a couple of guys that used to love getting into places at night and sort of, having a look around,” he says. “I’d never name any names because it’s still an active, open case… but I’ve got my strong suspicions who was involved.”

From the outset though, the Dockers, who released six albums between 1988 and 1994, including 1988’s Kiss My Art, which almost made it to gold record status, had a political undercurrent. They played benefit gigs and supported campaigns including gay rights, safe sex, and the Performers Releasing Information about Clean Syringes (PRICS) at the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and were - and still are - regulars on union picket lines.

“Growing up my family was always into social justice,” Stewart says. “Mum was a big one for walking in someone else’s shoes, and that had a huge effect on me.”

In the early 90s, Stewart teamed up with Timorese musician Gil Santos, (who he met at a Melbourne protest on the day Xanana Gusmao was captured by Indonesian forces; today Stewart considers him “like a brother”) to form the Dili Allstars, a funk/ska/reggae collective committed to helping the people of East Timor.

In 1999, ahead of the East Timorese vote on independence from Indonesia, Stewart heard about the Indonesian government broadcasting anti-independence song, so the Dili Allstars recorded a song, Liberdade, and, with the help of students and others, smuggled 500 cassettes into East Timor. The song became a classic. Since then, the band has raised money at dozens of benefits for disadvantaged Timorese people.

While he has a much less hectic lifestyle these days, Stewart, now 62, works with Jesuit Social Services, helping young people. He’s a mentor for two former child soldiers from Burundi, and he’s hoping to get back to Timor to see his old mate Ramos Horta. “The Timorese crew I was hanging out with as a young activist, are all now, like the Minister for Education, and Ramos Horta - he was just a wacky guy sleeping on someone’s couch in St Kilda when I met him!”

Through his former partner, Indigenous artist Donna Brown, Stewart says he had his eyes opened to the struggles of First Nations people. He and Donna have a daughter, Aretha, who is an activist and artist (he also has another daughter, Frances, from an earlier relationship).

“That’s been another part of my journey,” says Stewart. “A real education for me.”

Writing the book, which features incredible anecdotes and a roll-call of rock legends; they worked with the legendary Lobby Loyde; they pissed off Bono, and so much more, was cathartic, says Stewart, who was awarded an Order of Australia in 2020. (He’s happy to sell the medal, by the way, to raise money for the nuns. “We could do that on the quiet,” he says.)

“But the real thing has been meeting the nuns and working with them; I could channel all my anger and grief into something worthwhile. When someone donates a liver to you so you can keep living, you do feel a sense of … obligation. I was like wow, I’ve been given a second chance, don’t waste it, don’t f--k it up. Do something of value.”

Next year marks the Dockers’ 40th anniversary, and Stewart is determined to mark the event.

“Although at this stage I don’t think too far ahead. I’m aware that every day above ground is great, particularly at my age, among my peers.” He’s keenly aware that many of the musicians he talks about in All The Rage have died.

“I’m grateful to be alive. And I’ve had a fun time,” he says. “If you’d said to the 13-year-old boy in East St Kilda that this is what you’re going to go and do, he would’ve said, you’ve gotta be joking! I sit back sometimes and just think, it’s been a hell of a trip.”

All The Rage by Paulie Stewart (Melbourne Books) is out now