Over an hour and a half, a portrait emerges of a brilliant, socially awkward crusader, a "hard-core geek" who would rather interact with a machine than a person but who was also determined to change the world.

The friend is intensely guarded, as many of Assange's friends are, but the admiration for him is abundant. Assange is described as a humanist, a man who serves no masters, a Renaissance man with 21st-century tools at his disposal, who "decided early on that the world is not as fair a place as it could be, but that the internet provides a way of creating a more level playing field in terms of justice".

Asked about Assange's political beliefs, the friend says he flirted with the Left but became disillusioned. He returned from one political meeting in Melbourne in the early 2000s "completely contemptuous of them, because they were fuzzy thinkers".

Rather than belonging to the Left, Assange "can see flaws in both Left and Right" but if anything, he is "more closely aligned to the libertarian values of the Right".

It is a purposeful comment, since the extreme Right in the US is baying for Assange to be jailed over publication of voluminous leaked US diplomatic cables, although no crime has been identified.

Today, Assange is the most famous man in the world. In four years, he has gone from obscurity to a potential Nobel laureate and Time magazine person of the year. He is regarded by his supporters as an apostle of free speech and by his increasing army of enemies as the most dangerous man alive - all on the strength of an idea.

At the same time, he is in jail in Britain facing extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault. In London yesterday, one of his lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, said he was in good spirits but frustrated to be behind bars, although he was reported last night to have been moved into segregation where authorities planned to give him limited internet access.

He wanted to refute claims he had instructed hackers to attack MasterCard and Visa for refusing to accept payments to WikiLeaks, which he believed was an attempt to conflate WikiLeaks and hackers. WikiLeaks, Ms Robinson said, was not hacking. "It is a news organisation and a publisher."

But a hacker he was, 14 years ago in 1996, when he faced a court in Melbourne, charged with hacking computers at two universities and two telecommunications companies. He had even hacked computers to monitor the Australian Federal Police investigation into the hacking. This was three years before he began to conceive of a website devoted to leaks, registering the domain leaks.com, and 10 years before WikiLeaks.

Assange had been hacking from 1987 under the moniker "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of the Roman poet Horace: splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful").

He and two other hackers formed a group they named the International Subversives. Assange was arrested in October 1991 and charged with more than 30 counts of computer crime. When his case was finalised five years later, he had pleaded guilty to 24 charges.

County Court judge Leslie Ross felt Assange, then 25, hacked into systems only to "empower" himself. Had he sought any personal gain, and not had such a disrupted childhood, he would have been jailed for up to 10 years.

Addressing him in court, the judge acknowledged the "unstable personal background that you have had to endure . . . and the rather nomadic existence that your mother and yourself were forced to follow and also the personal disruption that occurred within your household".

The judge, who initially thought a jail term was necessary, noted Assange had not been able to obtain formal educational qualifications, but said he could have put his intelligence to better use and he hoped the court case would send him on a better path.

"These are offences that could only have been committed by intelligent individuals and you now have this black mark against your name and if there is any repetition of this behaviour, I would have thought that your chances of avoiding a jail sentence would be very slim," Ross said.

Despite pleading guilty, Assange found reason to challenge the proceedings, even as he was signing paperwork for a $2100 fine and good behaviour bond.

"Your honour, I feel a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution," he declared.

He left the court apparently determined to leave the world of hacking. When he founded WikiLeaks, it would be as editor-in-chief, or publisher, or as a member of an advisory board boasting libertarians and dissidents, many of whom had never met Assange nor offered him advice. He would leave the hacking and the risk of conviction to others.

As Assange's fame, or notoriety, has risen in recent years, the evasive Australian has gradually revealed more detail of his life before WikiLeaks. But it remains a fragmented picture.

He was born in Townsville in July 1971 and some of his childhood was spent on tiny, rocky Magnetic Island, just off the coast of the north Queensland city. He has described his childhood as Tom Sawyer-like. "I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels," he told The New Yorker this year.

George Hirst, the editor of the island's online newspaper, Magnetic Times, says that in the 1970s the island was a magnet for non-conformists and hippies, "a kind of refuge for some people . . . a place you came to when you didn't fit in anywhere else". Islander Royce Dalliston, 49, remembers a young Assange and his "reclusive" mother, Christine.

"She used to do drawings in the shade of the banyan trees at Picnic Bay," Dalliston recalled.

"She wore green bikinis and one of those hats made out of coconut palm leaves. He was a pretty quiet kid . . . a scrawny, little blond-haired kid, pretty withdrawn."

Assange and his mother lived on Magnetic Island three times between 1971 and 1982, first in a cottage at Picnic Bay, for which Christine paid $12 a week in rent.

When Christine Assange revisited the island in September last year, she wrote of their time on the island in the Magnetic Island History and Craft Centre's visitors' book. She said she had relished the freedom there.

"I lived in a bikini, 'going native' with my baby and other mums on the island," she wrote. She recalled that when she returned to the island in 1976, with Julian and her "new husband", theatre director Brett Assange, they lived in Horseshoe Bay, another of the island's picturesque townships, in an "old abandoned pineapple farm".

"I slashed way to the front door with machete," she recalled. "Shot a taipan in the water tank and on son's bed. Had to suspend fruit from ceiling to protect from possums."

In 1979, Christine Assange remarried. Her new husband was a musician, who, according to friends, had a relative who was connected to Anne Hamilton-Bryne's new age cult The Family.

In 1982, she was back on the island with a baby on her hip, living in a flat at Picnic Bay.

None of her three homes on the island appears to have survived housing estates and subdivisions. There is no record of Julian Assange attending the island's only school, at Nelly Bay.

In the early 1980s, Julian was living in the northern NSW town of Lismore, where locals still recall how his "alternatively lifestyled" mother and stepfather ran a puppet theatre. He attended a tiny school in the nearby village of Goolmangar, where he appears to have struggled to fit in with his fellow students, mostly the children of dairy farmers.

"Jules wasn't a ratbag or anything," classmate Sharon Graham says. "He just kept to himself."

Bart Doohan remembered a "really laidback" boy and if Assange was destined to become an international cause celebre, it wasn't obvious to Doohan, who said the kid with the long hair and hippie upbringing "wasn't exactly the brightest kid, but he wasn't the dumbest either".

Another former pupil, Peter Graham, remembered Assange mostly for his compassion.

"He was the sort of kid who moved a spider and let it free when the others wanted to kill it," Graham said. "He was always a nurturing sort of fellow."

Christine Assange broke up with her husband in 1982 and during the custody struggle for Julian's half-brother that followed, she took the children into hiding.

Assange had reportedly moved 37 times by the time he was 14.

Christine has said her son was taught not to blindly respect authority figures, and was often home-schooled because she did not want to see her children's spirits broken by the school system.

Julian Assange's arrest by the federal police in 1991 came at a low point in his life. In 1989, when he was 18, he had started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel. After the raids, she left him, taking Daniel with her.

Christine Assange says her son was hospitalised for several days with depression. "I wouldn't call it a breakdown. He was stressed, highly stressed, and needed a rest and break from it all," she said from Noosa, where she runs a puppet show.

Julian Assange and his former partner engaged in a long custody struggle that did not end until 1999. Daniel Assange, who works as a software designer in Melbourne, tweeted this week: "I have much respect for my father and his cause, and these ridiculously ill-handled allegations of sexual abuse serve only to distract from the audacious awesomeness that he has actually done."

Author and journalist Suelette Dreyfus met Assange through mutual friends in Melbourne in the early 1990s. He struck her as "a very impressive person", with a restless, deep intelligence.

Assange was the principal informant for her 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. During these years, she says, Assange studied, without any particular regard for graduating, haunted the state library and worked towards the idea that became WikiLeaks.

Dreyfus says there was a strong common theme among the hackers with whom Assange associated.

"These were gifted kids who the system really couldn't accommodate and so they had exited - mentally, emotionally, physically. "These were kids exposed to poorly equipped teachers . . . who were unable to deal with high intelligence, who would spend all night on computers . . . effectively teaching themselves electrical and software engineering and computer science."

In 1998, Assange co-founded his first and only Australian company, Earthmen Technology, with the aim of developing "network intrusion detection technologies". According to a book called Google Hackers, the company developed "Linux kernal hacking" and algorithms before it was deregistered in 2002. According to Dreyfus, it was a bunch of computer geeks trying to develop security software out of their dining rooms and it "didn't fly".

Shareholders included Julian Assange, Dreyfus, fellow computer software developer Richard Jones and his wife, Annabel, a cryptographer based in Germany, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Casey Bennetto, Stephen McDonough and Peter Tonoli, who has tweeted this week: "Please don't let Julian Assange be another David Hicks - let your parliamentarians know!"

Bennetto, according to online biographies, went to the University of Melbourne and had many jobs in the 1990s, including as an IT specialist. He could not be contacted by The Weekend Australian.

Another close friend whose association dates from this period, Daniel Mathews, another maths prodigy who studied with Assange at Melbourne University and who has done some research and writing for WikiLeaks, said yesterday he was "deeply concerned" for his friend's wellbeing "and outraged at the hysterical attacks against him".

"Calls for him to be assassinated should be investigated as incitement to murder, and calls for WikiLeaks or Julian to be prosecuted for espionage or the like are an egregious attack on free speech and the free press," Mathews said.

"What was he like? I've always found Julian a warm and pleasant person, witty, knowledgeable and intelligent. He has a very wide range of interests and he is passionately committed to justice and creating a better world."

Assange registered the domain leaks.org in 1999 but then, he has said, "I didn't do anything with it" until founding WikiLeaks in 2006. He left Australia and travelled in Europe, Africa and Asia, sometimes working as a computer programmer. Several of his friends have described him turning up with a backpack, looking for somewhere to sleep. "He's a very minimalist human being," Dreyfus says. "He's like a religious aesthete, two robes and a pair of sandals. Aesthetes live a very sombre existence in terms of material goods and that's what he's like."
Source: theaustralian.com.au