From adolescence, Gardiner was an avid reader. The only child of union delegate parents – his father a clerk, his mother an employee of the NSW State Lottery Office – Gardiner devoured the novels of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, notably For Whom the Bell Tolls, the latter’s classic portrait of the International Brigades fighting alongside the Republicans against Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War. His years at the multicultural melting pot of Parramatta High, in Sydney’s west, taught him “how to swear in seven languages”, but otherwise failed to fire his imagination. Almost every male in his family having served in the military, Gardiner hankered for the Army. He tried to join, unsuccessfully, at 16. A year later, he got his wish. “I always joke about wanting to join the Army because there’s less rules. I had a strict upbringing; my parents didn’t want to spoil me.” The army was home for the next decade. Gardiner obtained his Higher School Certificate, trained as a combat engineer and later as an engineering surveyor. One evening in early 1993, he saw on the news that Australia would send troops to civil war-torn Somalia as part of a US-led multilateral humanitarian force. Gardiner belonged to the 3rd Brigade overseas deployment force and knew immediately what would happen. Within 24 hours he was ordered back to Townsville; 28 days later his First Battalion Group was in the Somali capital Mogadishu, followed by Baidoa in the south – known as “the city of death”. His battalion’s role in Operation Solace included sweeping territory for land mines and unexploded ordinance, and building infrastructure. They extracted bombs from the wells, erected schools, court houses and jails – in the first jail they built, local leaders executed a bandit almost as soon as the cement had dried. “The locals knew we were the bomb people: we were their entertainment. They would rush up to our dump trucks waving their arms and guiding us to the right places, shouting ‘bomba, bomba’.” One night, in a village near the town of Burhakaba, Gardiner and his section commander stumbled on an unoccupied hut.

“There was a box in the middle of the hut and it could have been booby-trapped. One of us had to deal with it. My corporal was married so I said, ‘okay, you stay outside’. Turned out the box was an end cap from an agricultural pipe.” His tour lasted four months. He received his active service medal from a government minister on the flight deck of HMAS Tobruk. When years later Gardiner was introduced to Labor’s John Faulkner, he said, “I’ve met you before.” At 27, Gardiner felt restless again. He had met Andrea about two years earlier while stationed in Townsville; she was studying nursing at James Cook University. The pair was now itching for travel, so he resigned from the Army. His grand tour overseas saw him working as a hausmeister (caretaker) in a 400 year-old chalet near Innsbruck, a security guard in London’s Hayward Gallery, and a surveyor’s assistant on the construction of London’s Millennium Dome. “If you dive down to the bottom of the lake there, you’ll see my initials spray-painted on the concrete,” he grins. Returning to Australia, Gardiner figured his best option was to back his existing skills with formal qualifications and study surveying. He was accepted into Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. But when, in the early 2000s, the bottom fell out of the construction industry, Gardiner switched courses midstream, enrolling in nursing. Andrea and his in-laws being in the profession, he knew what he was getting himself into. After the blokey culture of the army, the nurses’ “smoko room” was an education in celebrities and handbags. He thrived in the “unstructured chaos” of the emergency department and, being a military man, he was also primed to the challenges of the operating room where “everything’s controlled, but when something goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong”. As Andrea’s close family lived in Darwin, Gardiner shifted to an accelerated nursing course at Charles Darwin University. He got a job at Royal Darwin Hospital. True to his roots, he served as the union rep for graduate nurses, then for theatre nurses. When someone from the nurses’ union went on maternity leave, Gardiner got a job as an organiser. Evidently, he developed a reputation as a canny operator because 18 months later the state secretary of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union – which changed its name to United Voice in 2011 – offered him a job as a lead organiser. Within a year, in 2007, he was “the first local secretary of the ‘missos’ in 10 to 15 years.” It was an adequate consolation prize for narrowly missing out on pre-selection for the Federal seat of Solomon the same year.

[L-R] Gardiner as an Australian soldier, his patches, and at ease in the Army.

At the moment when he felt the magnetic pull of an overseas battlefield, Gardiner was not only state ALP president, but also treasurer of the peak union body, Unions NT. He was regarded as a safe pair of hands. “I’ll tell you what was the final straw…” Gardiner reaches for his iPhone. He calls up a news story from – of all places – Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph. Dated November 2014, the story reports on four brothers from Gardiner’s home turf of western Sydney attempting to join IS in Syria. The report quotes Muslim community leader Dr Jamal Rifi remarking that as two of the siblings weighed more than 140kg, they would almost certainly be too unfit for terrorism training. Even now, Gardiner clenches his jaw at this article with its absurdist headline about the “Aussie jihadists ‘too fat’ to fight.” “I mean, they were too fat for jihad…” He shakes his head. “And this was when over a thousand Yazidis were taken (by IS) as sex slaves” “These guys weren’t going to Syria for ideology; they wanted to rape and pillage. I thought, ‘this is not Australia, this is not what we stand for. And if this is happening then we need someone on the other side, the good side.’ And I thought, ‘I have to go. No ifs or buts’.” “But you have a family, children..?” “Did you see the footage of the Yazidis being evacuated from (Iraq’s) Mount Sinjar? Those parents throwing their children at the helicopters, so desperate to get their kids to safety? It’s a question of what kind of world do you want your own children to grow up in. I knew my children would understand. To the question, ‘what does your dad do?’ they’d answer, ‘he helps people.’” As union boss, Gardiner always gathered intelligence on his employer opponents. He never embarked on an industrial fight without knowing everything there was to know about, say, the company manager who faced him across the boardroom table. How secure was this person within the company? What were their likes and dislikes? Who were they sleeping with? You can take the man out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army – and its warrior creed of ‘know thy enemy’ – out of the man. So having made his momentous decision, Gardiner once again gathered intelligence, frantically researching IS – he prefers the name “Daesh” because this denies the group legitimacy and avoids tarring ordinary Muslims with the terrorist brush – and the myriad actors in the Syrian civil war. His reading led him to the anarcho-socialist experiment in Kurdish-controlled Rojava, a verdant, roughly 400km stretch of northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He learned how, in the instability wrought by the Arab Spring protests of 2011, some 2.2 million Kurds created a loosely-federated quasi-state encompassing a patchwork quilt of ethnic and religious minorities. He discovered the YPG militias, the de-facto military of Syrian Kurdistan who, alongside allied guerrillas, were beating back IS troops on the ground, even as next door a hostile Turkey frustrated their nationalist ambitions. He learned the militias had all-female combat units. With a new imperative of ‘know thy friend’, Gardiner read the Rojavan constitution, noting its entrenched commitment to gender equality and secular democracy in a region blighted by regressive politics. He came to see the Rojavan Kurds, and the dozens of Westerners fighting in their ranks, as almost the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish republicans and the International Brigades in their prescient war against fascism in the 1930s. On Facebook, Gardiner contacted a woman known as Kader Kadandir, whose name had been linked with the recruitment of Westerners to a YPG brigade known as the Lions of Rojava. Then, in homage to the journeys of his literary hero Hemingway, he booked his ticket. Departure date: 15 January 2015.

Later that month, when the news broke of Gardiner’s flight to Syria – he says his family never spoke to the media – Kadandir wrote on Facebook that she had not known he was a “political man”. “But I have shock now,” she added. A man from Perth admonished her: “He was a normal family man. You appear to have helped change that. Shame on you.” One former union colleague expressed admiration for Gardiner, describing him as a passionate “but also level-headed” bloke. The AFP announced it was investigating him. Attorney-General Brandis said it was illegal for Australian citizens to support any armed group in Syria and those who go to fight “face up to life in prison upon your return to Australia”. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said, “We don't want to see cowboys running off, whether or not they have been trained, or whether they were part of the Australian Defence Force.” Labor leader Bill Shorten said he did not know what triggered Gardiner’s actions, “but he needs to come home”. “Whatever the guy’s motivations, he’s not going to solve anything by going there and my thoughts are with his family, actually.” In a move that still stings Gardiner, the party, citing the “serious reports,” immediately stood him down as NT president and suspended his membership. Some party members speculated he was angry about missing out on pre-selection for Solomon. In al-Hasakah province, the YPG commanders bunched the Western volunteers together. When Gardiner arrived, there were around 15 all up. He soon clustered with four others – two Americans, a British national and a Frenchman – to form a core inner group of senior ex-military, with combined experience from the French Foreign Legion, French Marines, and the US Army and Marines. “People who throw around the term ‘solidarity’ don’t know what that means,” he says. “But the look on the face of a Kurdish fighter when you turn up and say, in Kurdish, ‘I’m from Australia and I’m here to help’...” It had taken Gardiner little time to figure out that survival depended not just on dodging the bullets of the IS snipers taking cover in churches, schools and hospitals, but also on steering clear of Dutton’s “cowboy” Westerners. Americans, for instance, still pumped with adrenaline from the Iraq campaign and alarmingly ignorant of this yet more complicated war zone. Although, Gardiner laughs, even the more sophisticated Americans found the ideological milieu as confronting as the flat bread with salted goats cheese passed around for dinner. Some were genuinely shocked to discover their Kurdish brothers-in-arms, while avowed secularists, were culturally Muslim, and more rattled still when they learned of the YPG’s Marxist politics.

[L-R] A pro-YPG poster, Matthew Gardiner with the Rojava flag, and the late Australian YPG volunteer Jamie Bright, who was shot dead in May 2016.

“The Americans were like, ‘what, you’re caarmunists?’” Gardiner says, mimicking a southern drawl. Other, more-clued up Westerners respected the Kurdish militias as the most effective resistance against IS, even if they viewed their utopian agenda with some scepticism. One British volunteer using the 'nom de guerre' of Macer Gifford – who at the time of writing had returned to Syria after a period of leave in the UK – is reportedly a former currency trader and Tory councillor. (Gifford has spoken openly about his experiences in Syria because the laws in the UK, and for that matter the US, do not automatically criminalise volunteers with foreign militia.) “We had some fierce political arguments,” Gardiner says. Whatever their ideological inclinations, the Westerners looked on with awe – and occasional bemusement – at the Kurds’ commitment to military democracy. After a soldier fell asleep during guard duty, a meeting of his peers was called to decide on his punishment. On another occasion, during a visit to an Assyrian church that had been targeted by IS, Gardiner, in a casual gesture, left a cash donation. He was immediately reprimanded by his Kurdish comrades, who explained the YPG must be above any charge of religious or sectarian bias. But it was also true, he explains, that the key to safely navigating the cantons and ethnic enclaves of a newly disintegrated Syria is understanding the “war of the flags”. Drive into an area controlled by a particular militia and you had better ensure the right flag flaps at the bonnet. At night, people debated politics and philosophy around the campfire. It sounds impossibly romantic, except the discussion was mostly in Kurdish, and Gardiner’s Kurdish phrasebook only really equipped him to identify the body parts he treated for injuries and bullet wounds. “A lot of Kurds called me a doctor,” he smiles. “I told them I was not a doctor but they couldn’t get their heads around a man being a nurse.” He met a Kurdish female fighter known as Seran Altunkilic, “a geneticist, a PhD candidate, worked in Italy, was educated in Istanbul, spoke several languages,” including, crucially for him, English. She became his best friend. “She was going to go back to Italy to do her PhD when her work was done.” When the work was done, the pair vowed, each would visit the other’s home town. As the temperature fell below zero, everyone slept huddled together “in the middle of nowhere, in the open, on the ground”. On one bitterly cold night, Gardiner “snuggled up to this little Kurdish guy,” taking turns at spooning on one side, then the other. At one point during his time in Syria, Gardiner reached an internet cafe. Holding his breath, he googled himself, saw the number of results and immediately went off-radar. “You know you’ve made it when you’re on CNN,” he deadpans. “The downside is you have a bounty on your head, and for ISIS it’s higher for Westerners.” Some of the Kurdish fighters told him the publicity had inflated his value tenfold: whereas IS paid $US20,000 for a standard kidnapped Westerner, for him they were willing to fork out $US200,000. And that’s a telling illustration of how Western volunteers, however well-intentioned, can do more harm than good in the Syrian conflict, says Deakin University’s counter-terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton. “There’s a certain logic, and a positive impulse, to picking up a Kalashnikov and joining the brothers. But the publicity Westerners generate and the language and cultural barriers can become a liability for the group – and the volunteers might find they struggle to make a contribution.”