This is his official life story. I like it!!!

You’re part of the story now… Seven generations ago, the Aitken clan left the Scottish Highlands on their leaky wooden ships, shivering and churning through the rough Atlantic seas as they headed for their beautiful dreams of a better life in the sun of the far Antipodes. What they got was the brutal tropical heat of Far North Queensland, and harsh lives built on relentless hard work and copious quantities of rough Aussie rum. Among the first European settlers to open up the far north in the 1800s, the red-headed Scotsmen battled it out in the fever and the heat, hacking out corrugated mud roads and rough bush camps in the wilderness. Amid the searing droughts and the torrential floods of the Burdekin region, the clan clung together, as Scotsmen far from the rainy Highland moors tend to do. Eventually, in the bone-dry, snake-bitten lands west of Townsville, their labours bore some bitter fruit – but not without years of tears and struggle – and in two generations they created a settlement, where they could find some sense of home. They called it Aitkenvale. The Aitken men became known for their bushmen’s skills, rounding up cattle, cutting the cane, and fussin’ and a fightin’ when they weren’t otherwise engaged. They eked out an empire fuelled by kangaroo meat, home-brew, and the law of the fist. Nobody messed with them – no-one dared. They conquered all they saw, particularly the women. And so it was that the Aitken name carried far and wide, as the march of the feral red-heads spread ever further North with every generation, Celtic super-hybrids inexorably drawn towards the source of the sun that burned their toughened, sinewy backs as red as redback spiders. None of the Aitkens has ever returned to bonny Scotland. They‘ve never even left Queensland. They’ve seen no reason to leave. They’re part of the landscape now, Australian internauts of the hillbilly realm, part of the very red dirt they roam. And so it is that young 8 Ball Aitken has come to be here today. There has been some mellowing over the generations, with the workingman’s rule of ‘might is right’ replaced by an inner struggle of a more idealistic sort, the desire to make a difference. He’s dropped the axe and the shovel, and picked up the guitar. He comes from good stock, generations of men bred tough. Coming from the farming community of Mareeba, Far North Queensland (Australia’s answer to Mississippi) 8 Ball Aitken is the oldest son of an impoverished family of eleven children. 8 Ball spent his adolescence on a banana plantation, living in a rough tobacco shed with resident rats, bats, snakes, and spiders as his sleeping companions. He started work as a farm labourer aged fifteen, doing back-breakingly hard work on the mango and banana plantations of the Atherton Tablelands, a man's work for a boy's pay. He had to help support his family with these wages. When 8 Ball was nineteen years old, a radical conversation altered his life path. “I used to work on a farm all week, then party all weekend,” he explains. “An Aboriginal elder from Townsville was visiting my town, and we were talking on Sunday morning after he had been watching me play guitar all weekend. He sat me down and told me off sternly – ‘I will be really disappointed if I visit next year and see you still here drinking and smoking, just wasting your talent and your life away,” explains the ex-farm worker, recalling his labouring in the Atherton Tablelands fruit plantations as a young teenager. He packed his bags, grabbed his guitar, and hitch-hiked south to the Big Smoke of Brisbane. “This was a ‘time stands still’, life-changing experience”, adds 8 Ball. “From that point on, I have stayed true, and followed my dream of making music and taking it out to the people”.