ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A Betoota Heights man who grew up knowing he’d leave our cosmopolitan desert community forever and never come back has reemerged today after four years, telling the world that he just ran the New York Marathon and it was really hard.
Despite the best efforts of The Advocate, this masthead was not able to discover what Matthew Smith does in the Big Apple or how he ended up there.
Friends say he was remarkably quiet in school and achieved the desired marks in the high school leaving exams to get out of Betoota, which some say was his utmost desire as a teenager.
The 34-year-old’s LinkedIn suggests that he went to Brisbane briefly before leaving for London, followed by some time in Berlin, Amsterdam and Barcelona – where he worked ambiguous jobs in tech startups such as a Culture Manager for a mid-level social media company in Span.
In that time, Mr Smith has only updated his Facebook once to sell chairs in Berlin and to share a picture of him, alone, throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
On his Instagram, just two posts from 2019. His first post is an illegal photo of the Sistine Chapel ceiling with the caption ‘Fuck the Polizia [sic]’ and the second being him with a fish he’d just caught off the Costa Rican coast.
Those two were followed by a third this morning of him running the New York Marathon. Who took the photo remains a mystery.
The caption read: “It was really hard but finally ticked the box”.
Matthew’s parents told The Advocate that he’s happy and doing well in life.
More to come.
