The hold was filled with livestock and produce. With the crowding - and the tropics – the effect was putrid, hot and stinking.

In the bathroom urine spilled freely out of the overburdened toilet bowl and slopped onto the floor, but it was at least private. The future Councillor Murray locked the door, did his best to avoid the muck, and shot heroin into his veins. 

“It was so hot in the confines of the crapper, when the rush hit you, with its accompanying hot flush; the smell of the urine would be particularly sharp and burn your eyes,” he would write, years later. “I didn’t recognise it at the time, but I had dropped down quite a few pegs on the ‘if I ever get as bad as that’ scale.”

After 10 years in public office, with three decades in the public service behind him, Shellharbour City councillor Murray has detailed his descent from university scholarship recipient to heroin addict in a memoir, To Hell with Smack.

The one-time Warilla High School teacher’s account focuses on his white-knuckle 1975 heroin odyssey along Asia’s hippie trail and his life-altering encounter with a Salvation Army counsellor.

Mr Murray attended Sydney University on a teaching scholarship, but outside of classes led a fast-paced party life. He shared a house with members of the then-fledgling Comanchero Motorcycle Club. Their outrageous parties gave rise to initiation rituals, including “distasteful” group sex rituals  (he never participated) for “unattached women” who wanted to be in the club’s good graces.

He drank and took drugs but drew the line at heroin until January 1975, when he departed Sydney for Bali. He returned eight months later weighing 51kgs, with his arms covered in track marks. He suffered malnutrition and hepatitis and was so weak he couldn’t go to the toilet without leaning against a wall. 

Now 62, Mr Murray told the Mercury he did not want to hide his past.

“It happened and I’m not ashamed of it,” he said. “I’ve changed my life, I’ve made a contribution and I guess I’ve got something to pass on to people who might want to do the same.” 

Mr Murray credits a counsellor, Rex, with turning his life around during his rehabilitation at the Salvation Army’s William Booth Institute. 

“I was a fool in a hurry and he taught me to refocus that so I had energy to do things.”

“A lot of people tried to help me … but they didn’t tempt me with anything else. This guy tempted me with [the idea] that life could be different.”