Chapter Nineteen: Five Minutes of Arnold

This is the centrepiece of Book Three and it deserves the room.

The Senate would eventually hear that famous business and film celebrities — Arnold Schwarzenegger among them, and Sir Richard Branson — were paid to attend seminars in order to attract investors who were then sold land-banking options costing up to forty thousand dollars each. The Herald, reporting the ten-year ban, noted drily that McIntyre was renowned for his promotional stunts, and had once had Arnold Schwarzenegger front one of his wealth seminars.

Here is how it was done.

i. The creative

Melbourne. A stadium, hired. Nine thousand seats.

The marketing ran four months. Full pages in the press. Radio saturation. Billboards on the Monash.

And the creative, in every single instance, was one photograph and four words.

The photograph was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Read the fine print — and nobody reads the fine print, which was established in a hessian sack on a council weighbridge at Glen Innes in 1988 — and Schwarzenegger is described as a special guest.

Not a presenter. Not a trainer. Not a partner. Not an endorser.

A special guest, in six-point type, at the base of a poster dominated by his face.

The contract, as such contracts are: a fee in the low seven figures, private aviation, a security detail, a hotel floor, and a stipulated appearance duration.

The stipulated appearance duration was short.

In this novel it is five minutes.

ii. Backstage

Ninety seconds out. Jamie McIntyre in a charcoal suit that cost eleven thousand dollars, standing beside one of the most recognisable human beings alive, doing the thing his staff had learned to watch for and dread.

He is chatting.

"Big room, Arnold. Nine thousand. Biggest we've done."

Schwarzenegger, pleasant, entirely uninterested, checking his watch. "Good crowd."

"You know I grew up on a farm. New South Wales. Eight hundred hectares of nothing."

"Is that right."

"My old man never had a break in his life. Not one."

And Arnold Schwarzenegger — who has met ten thousand men like this and will meet ten thousand more, and who is being paid a great deal of money to stand somewhere for five minutes — says the thing he says:

"Well. You made it. Good for you."

And Jamie McIntyre carries that sentence for eleven years.

He quotes it in print. Arnold told me: you made it. He quotes it at dinners. He quotes it, in 2025, to a Balinese project manager who has not been paid in four months.

iii. The handshake

Then the lights, and the entrance music, and the roar.

Here is what nine thousand people experienced.

They saw Schwarzenegger walk out and they came to their feet. A number of them cried. That is not mockery; it is a fact about human beings and how badly they want something to be true.

He spoke for a few minutes. He said things about persistence and about believing in yourself, and they were true things, sincerely meant, and utterly generic — he has said them at conferences on dentistry, logistics and insurance.

Then he shook Jamie McIntyre's hand.

And that handshake was the product.

The photographer was positioned. Of course the photographer was positioned — three photographers, and a videographer with a long lens for the reverse angle — and the still that came out of that thirty-fifth of a second went onto the front of a brochure, onto a homepage, into the press advertising for eight years, and eventually into promotional profiles offered to Indonesian and international readers as evidence of standing.

Schwarzenegger left the stage. He was in a car in four minutes and on a tarmac in forty.

The applause had not yet begun to fall away.

iv. The room

And into the middle of it walked the man from West Broadview, and he said:

"How good is that."

Beat.

"Now. Let me tell you why Arnold and I wanted you all in this room today."

Arnold was on the tarmac.

Arnold had never, at any point, wanted anybody in that room, because Arnold did not know what was going to be sold in it.

But the sentence had been said, and the handshake had happened, and for the next four hours and ten minutes the boy who had watched Reg Tolley stood on the catwalk above the pens and described the cattle.

He did the childhood. He did the drought. He did the man from the bank in the short-sleeved shirt — and it worked, it always worked, because it was true. It was the only wholly true thing in the entire presentation, and you could hear that it was true, and that authenticity was the load-bearing wall of the whole structure.

He did the whiteboard.

He did the objection stack, all five, in order, before a single person had raised one.

He went nineteen degrees to twenty-two.

He broke in the middle of the logic.

He did, at one point, four full seconds of silence, and nine thousand people leaned.

And at 4:40 in the afternoon, with the room warm and the story closed and nine thousand people four hours into a state that is not intoxication but is adjacent to it, the tables opened at the back.

Land banking options. Up to forty thousand dollars each.

v. Row K

A woman in Row K stood up and joined the queue.

Call her Marion Dalgety. Sixty-one. A school administrator from Frankston. A husband on a disability pension. Sixty-one thousand dollars of superannuation representing the totality of everything she had.

She would tell a journalist, nine years later:

"I thought, well. If Arnold Schwarzenegger's involved."

He wasn't. He had never been involved. He had been present, for five minutes, for a fee, under contract, and the fine print said special guest.

Marion's forty thousand went into an option over a parcel of land outside Shepparton.