Sam De Brito - 1969-2015

The Fading Glory of Youth, The Flowering Wisdom Of Man

Sam de Brito was a tremendous writer who dressed up his offerings in a larrikin prose. He had a command of topics and profound insight that any one with a brain would envy. He was the jocular entertainer as well as the sanguine philosopher as he probed how contemporary masculinity shaped up and disintegrated on the shores of its own limitation.

I started reading Sam's blog 'All Men Are Liars' blog back in the 2007. It's a catchy title, and with it  came his bounding observations about our sexual mores and the unraveling of the traditional masculine as it shed a skin and turned into something new. A committed feminist, he argued the case for women's equality on a regular basis even to the chagrin of 'proper' (read female) feminists; yet his writing was also archly masculine and was frank about what men wanted. He was simply a marvellous advocate for men being men, and for which he advocated  that in exchange for that acceptance men had to make room for women.

Occasionally he would self-depracatingly refer to himself as a "wog", which betrayed the scars of identity alienation in his teenage years. He was an interesting study in how one became - existentially - a man in the twenty-first century. He would read up on history and regale his readers with ancient observations about men and women, as much as he would cheer for teams, athletes, causes and people. He was the egalitarian voice of a Gen-X Sydney.

In more recent years his blog gave way to a more mature column that took on weightier issues. While in his thirties and without child he was still a wild man writing about his experiences with cocaine or with prostitutes. Hemingway would have been proud of this bloke. As a father of a young child, he grew up into being a responsible citizen commentator - much more considered, erudite and rounded writer than many of the other columnists plying their trade. All the while the glory of youthfulness in his writing transformed into a robust persuasiveness for the right causes, and a better way to look at life.

Needless to say either of the speculations by the police that his death was suicide or murder gives rise to an alarm. It is hard to imagine the man from his writing that he would commit suicide and leave his daughter in this world; equally it is hard to imagine him offending anybody so much as to incite murder.

Vale Sam, you will be missed by all of your readers.