The boy who broke Australia's heart

A life blighted: Andrew Johnson and an unidentified man inject in Caroline Lane. Photo: Julian Andrews

When a skinny fair-haired child was photographed in a Sydney lane being injected with heroin by an adult man, it broke every parent's heart and sparked a national outcry.

The image is so confronting, it scarcely seems real today. But then this was Sydney in the late 1990s - caught in the grip of a heroin epidemic and suffering from the sorts of policies that included handing free injecting kits to children on the streets.

Enter Andrew Johnson. On January 31, 1999, The Sun-Herald published the shocking image of the 16-year-old shooting up in a syringe-littered gutter, at a taxpayer-funded mobile needle exchange in Caroline Lane, Redfern. The image gave rise to the NSW Drug Summit and 18 months later the first medically supervised injecting room in the English-speaking world was opened. But while Johnson's picture proved a game changer in cleaning up the streets and reducing fatal heroin-related overdoses, did it prove the turning point for him, as his family had hoped?

A fortnight ago, a gaunt, dishevelled seemingly middle-aged man of the same name sat fidgeting and mumbling to himself in Mount Druitt Court, where he faced charges of destroying or damaging property, and stalking or intimidating with intent to cause fear of physical harm. The offences relate to a recent heroin-fuelled episode at the home of his parents.

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This was the boy in the laneway, exactly 15 years on. Homeless and hooked on heroin, aged just 31.

''He's beyond help now,'' his mother, Roseanna, says. ''The police say we would be better off trying to forget we have a son.''

Andrew Johnson leaves Mount Druitt court. Photo: Kate Geraghty

His aunt, Alice Scott, says: ''It's a tragic tale to which, sadly, there is still no end. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, the ripples have just got bigger and bigger.''

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The boy who broke Australia's heart