The tabloid press, in their annual scare stories on kids up to no good in drains, routinely ignore people like Predator. The Cave Clan has long tried to resist being typecast as little more than vandals and kids with a death wish; Predator, the Sydney branch founder, was an especial case study in complexity. "Amongst other things," says an obituary on the Indymedia.org forums, “[he] was also a dumpster diver, anarcho syndicalist, molecular biologist, squatter, and well known good guy.”

Predator was a member of the CAT collective, also known as cat@lyst – a late-90s group of hackers and IT geeks trying to build a collectively owned and censorship-averse internet service provider. Their website proudly proclaimed their aim: “low tech grass roots net access for real people. Pedestrians, public transport and pushbikes on the information super hypeway [sic]”. In a 2003 blog post, Predator expressed prescient disgust for the direction the 'net was taking. “[It's] a corporately controlled wasteland these days…tolls at all the interesting offramps. ”

Predator was a prolific writer. He wrote for the University of Sydney Union Recorder, the precursor to today’s Pulp and yesteryear’s BULL magazine. On his blog, a collection of .txt files uploaded to a bare-bones homepage, he wrote on everything from molecular genetics to police corruption to a meticulous and wrenching account of the seven or so months from his cancer diagnosis to his death in 2004, aged 33. Everything he wrote was detailed, a little dark, tinged with a characteristic dry wit and wry anarchist sentiment. Even his cancer didn’t escape anticapitalist analysis – he wrote of his tumour as “several billion cells, all of whom took time to execute their capitalist genetic imperative of ‘go forth and uncontrollably exponentiate’”.

His best-known piece of writing is on urban exploration: a 21,000 word “sprawling manifesto on the art of Drain Exploring”[6]. It’s the closest thing the Cave Clan has to a foundational text, and utterly dispels the idea of drainers as unprepared teens trespassing on impulse. It covers every aspect of drain exploration in remarkably thorough detail – everything from scouting locations ( “dress up in overalls and go around at night popping every manhole you can find…if you look the part the cops will drive by without batting an eyelid”), to cheerful tips on knowing your manholes (“the nice thing about round manholes is you cannot drop them down the shaft and kill someone”), to basic safety advice (“testing handrails by swinging on them is not a life-prolonging practise for reasons which should be obvious”).

Some of the advice is sound and practical – listing handy vaccinations to seek in advance of expeditions, advising people that it’s impossible to turn around in a tunnel with a diameter smaller than your femur, the longest inflexible part of the body. On staying dry: “you can also take boot-to-armpit waders, however this may not be acceptable to followers of Catholicism who tend not to believe in barrier methods”.

Other tips escalate quickly to dubious spaces: according to Predator, spray paint cans double nicely as pesticides – “since there is never methane buildup in [the] open-aired grille-boxes, you can safely convert your spraypaint to an impromptu flame thrower and nuke the little mothers (gouts of flame emerging from drainage grills may arouse suspicions, however)”. Several parts of the document are devoted to explaining the seemingly obvious in ways that suggest the information wasn’t so obvious to some: “If you’re in a sewer, it’ll generally have small fragments of white paper floating along in the stream. This is toilet paper. Along with this you will also notice there are turds rolling along in the stream… if you are in a sewer, you want to leave.”

The most sobering part of the manifesto is the part on flash flooding. The Cave Clan’s cardinal rule is “when it rains, no drains”, and Predator’s pretty serious about adhering to it. “The last thing you want is to inflict the responsibility of rescue upon some poor SES member or fireman who really doesn’t need to risk his life getting you out. To jeopardise the lives of such people is selfish and stupid.”

The odds of survival are pretty slim if caught in a drain in the rain. According to Predator, though, an alert explorer usually has “between two and four minutes to get out, up a shaft or on a high ledge before the system is primed…a few minutes which, when used appropriately, can make all the difference to the length of the rest of your life.”

There are warning signs. An increase in noise as small tributaries fill and empty into the main canal, a rush of cool air from upstream. His advice: run to the nearest downstream manhole shaft and climb higher than the “bathtub ring” of crap stuck to the wall, the most recent high-water mark. “You may be up there a long time before the raging torrent desists. It will be loud and frightening, but breathe calmly, conserve your airspace.”

There is no indication as to the survival rates associated with this technique.