A dazzling day for the rest of our lives
No more dark night
Contents
Wongawilli – Aboriginal word meaning Windy Hollow
Island Bend
Aramac
The Jarratts hit the big smoke
NIDA
Finally! The lead role
Reality check
Little Boy Lost
My addictions
We of the Never Never
The rebound
John + Alcohol = Disaster
Back to the city, again
Wolf Creek
The transition
That’s it
Acknowledgements
Filmography
Image section 1
Image section 2
Image section 3
It was my first day at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), in early February 1971. I’d come straight down to Sydney (with the emphasis on straight) from Townsville. It was hot so I wore board shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of thongs. Everyone else was dressed to the nines; one even wore a full fur. I’d never met a homosexual before, a couple of suspects but not out-and-out real ones.
I realised that, for the first time in my life, I was a minority. I was a heterosexual in what seemed to be a room full of sophisticated gays of both sexes.
At the end of the speeches we were asked if there were any questions. Alan Ingram, a guy with ringlets in his long red hair, said, ‘Yes. Where’sss the boysss’ tooty?’
What was the son of a coalminer doing in this room?
Wongawilli – Aboriginal word meaning Windy Hollow
‘Wongawilli via Dapto’, that was my address. We didn’t have numbers on the miners cottages on ‘the Hill’ just below Wongawilli Colliery (est. 1916). We had electricity and the wireless, and an outside dunny, emptied by the dunny men once a week. Dad used to call the shit can ‘the chutney tin’. Tank water, no phone, no TV until 1957, and a fruit and vegie truck that came once a week.
The houses were rough-as-guts shacks, which men with building skills had transformed into quaint cottages. Dad had those skills, thank Christ. Dad could do plumbing, wiring, building, concreting and welding, and he could pull a car apart and put it back together again. He wanted a caravan, so he built one. Every time Mum got pregnant, Dad built another room. I never met a carpenter, an electrician or a plumber when I was a kid.
I was born in Wollongong Hospital at 3.30 a.m. on 5 August 1952. Dad came in later that morning, already pissed with a couple of drinking mates. I was breastfeeding at the time and Dad made some disgusting comment about breasts that made Mum cry. They all settled down and Mum said, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’
Dad looked at me. I was long, 21 inches long, and skinny and bluish. According to Dad, I looked like a skinned rabbit. After his ‘tit’ comment, he had enough sense to say, ‘Yes, he’s beautiful.’
Dad came to the hospital to take me and Mum home. I was dressed in some kind of little nightdress. Dad wanted to know why I was wearing a dress, and Mum tried to tell him that it was normal. He made Mum buy some flannelette material and she had to make me pyjamas.
Dad never held me; he thought he’d break me. He never kissed or hugged us, and as soon as we were old enough we were taught to shake hands. Bruce Robert Jarratt wasn’t brought up: ‘I was kicked in the guts and told to get up.’ His dad, John Robert Jarratt, started out as a drover, then became the first car mechanic in central Queensland. He later bought the Grand Hotel Hughenden (where Dad was born), moved to Townsville in the late 1920s and bought the Paragon Hotel at West End. Dad was raised by Aboriginal nannies while his parents worked full-time in the pub. Because of that, our family were never racist.
Dad’s older brother, Brian, had the mental capacity of a three-year-old. He stayed with his family until he died in his late twenties. Dad learned to fight at an early age because of the taunting his brother copped. Dad was a tearaway and always in trouble, and his father used to give him hidings on a regular basis. ‘That’s the way it is, you bring boys up to become men.’ Dad carried that tradition with him when he raised us. ‘Never hit a woman, they don’t hand out medals for hitting women,’ but you could bash the living shit out of an eight-year-old.
Dad was 5 foot 8 and he was 14 and a half stone (92 kg) of blood and muscle. He had a 34-inch waist, a 46-inch chest, biceps like tree trunks and an 18-inch neck. Never went to the gym. Dad’s father did all his own work around the pub and my dad had to work with him. He was a jack-of-all-trades and he taught Dad well: ‘had it drummed in to me before I could walk’. Dad’s grandfather was a bullocky. A long line of tough bastards from the bush.
Dad rarely lost a fight and he had plenty. ‘I can’t box, but I can fuckin’ fight, I just wait for ’em to burr their knuckles up on my forehead, then I kill them.’ ‘I’ll give ya two hits start, I’ll tell you where you went wrong and then I’ll kill ya.’ He once said to a bloke he was about to fight out the back of the Dapto Hotel, ‘I hope you’re fair dinkum, mate, cause I like this kinda shit,’ and he did.
One night shift way down underground, my old man fell asleep. The boys with him thought it’d be funny to tie him up and they did. Dad started bellowing like a bull. After a while one of them suggested they untie him.
‘I’m not gonna untie him.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Fucked if I will.’
They were all too scared in case the old man went berserk. On the cards, he had a rotten bad temper. So they left him there. Two hours later, he got free and his workmates were long gone.
I can’t remember much of my first four or five years on the planet. I only have anecdotes.
My pop (Mum’s father) was living with us. He’d been booted out of Nanna’s house in Chippendale, Sydney, once his youngest, Joan, was old enough not to need fathering any more. The love in his marriage was long gone. He slept in a shed in the backyard and he was drunk most of the time. A quiet, unassuming drunk, an easygoing, funny little Irishman. Dad found him under a bridge with a bunch of pisspots and brought him home.
My name is John William, after both grandfathers, and he called me John Willie. Mum and Dad would go out and he’d look after me. When they came home, my face would be covered in red. He only had one eye and had trouble seeing at night. He’d dip the dummy in strawberry jam and have trouble finding my mouth.
Because of his sight, he would drop his trousers just outside our backyard dunny and back into it. One day, he let out a bloodcurdling yell. Dad, Mum and I raced out. He was standing there with his long johns around his ankles.
‘Bloody big snake!’
Dad went in to find an 8-foot diamond python wrapped around the toilet seat. I was about a year old. He brought the snake out and I grabbed hold of its tail and started sucking on it.
Pop was from Sydney, born to Irish immigrants in Balmain. He started this silly game one night when I was about two. Mum was drying me after a bath and Pop grabbed me by the doodle and said, ‘Ding, ding, first stop, next driver.’ I don’t know what it means but it was said by the conductors on Sydney trams. This game got out of hand. Dad started doing it and I started doing it to Pop and Dad when they got out of the bath.
We were in Farleys in Dapto. The supermarkets didn’t exist in 1954. You could buy just about anything in Farleys, from groceries to hardware. Dad and Pop were over at the hardware section and Mum and I were at the groceries. I was holding Mum’s hand and we were standing beside a tall German man in rather baggy shorts. He mustn’t have had underpants on because I reached up his leg and grabbed his doodle. ‘Ding, ding, first stop, next driver!’ Mum was mortified. She looked at t
he German, lost for words. The grocer was doubled up on the counter in hysterics, my father was slapping the hardware counter laughing his guts up and my pop had fallen on the floor. The man said something in German, turned on his heel and walked out. For months afterwards, Mum and I would walk past the Dapto pub and locals would snigger, ‘Ding, ding, little fella, ding, ding.’
The memory I have of Pop is my first memory of anything. Pop loved fishing. Dad would drop him down to Shellharbour with his tent and camping gear, leave him there for a few days and come back and pick him up. Mum, my baby brother Brian and I came along.
I remember Pop’s tent. The guide ropes were red and looked like my dressing-gown cord. Pop was standing beside the tent wearing a felt cap, his long-john undershirt and long trousers.
The next thing I remember was being out in a boat with Dad and Pop. I had a blue cotton hat on. The wind blew it off my head and into the water. I became hysterical as it sank and disappeared. Mum said to me years later, ‘You remember that? You loved that hat. You were about two.’
That is my only memory of the first four years of my life. I can’t specifically remember Pop, but I know I loved him deeply. I still remember the strange confusion a four-year-old gets when trying to come to grips with their first death. They didn’t say he’d died, they just said he’d gone away for a long, long time. For a long, long time I thought I’d see my friend Pop again.
Pop got bronchitis; he had it every winter for years. He smoked a lot as well. His regular doctor was away and he saw another doctor, Dr Finney. There was a flu going around. Dr Finney didn’t look up Pop’s history, just told him he had the flu. A fortnight later, Pop was in hospital dying of pneumonia. Mum came to see him. ‘See, I told you the drink wouldn’t kill me, it’s the bloody cigarettes.’ Old people with pneumonia died in the fifties.
When they buried Pop, he was only sixty-five. Dad went back to the coalmine, ‘the pit’ was what they called it. On his way home from the pit one afternoon, Dad dropped in to the doctor’s surgery. He asked to see Dr Finney.
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘Nah, this won’t take long.’
When Dr Finney came out, Dad said, ‘This is for Pop,’ and right-crossed the doc and knocked him out. In those days you literally took it on the chin if you deserved it. Nothing more was said. I remember Dr Finney, he used to be our doctor.
Christmas holidays 1956, my memories begin. The John Jarratt that I know starts at four years and four months. We were going on holidays to Townsville, north Queensland. We drove north from Wongawilli in a brand-new FE Holden sedan. My first memory of the trip was my brother and I pushing our blow-up boogie boards around in shallow water at the inlet at Swansea, just south of Newcastle. Not terribly exciting reading, I know, but it’s the start of my bloody memories, all right!
This trip was the most exciting event of my brief life. On the antiquated Pacific/Bruce Highway, we crossed rivers endlessly on car ferries. I never got over the wonderful experience of six big cars and a truck driving onto these punts and floating miraculously to the other side of the massive coastal rivers. The majesty of these rivers has never left me. Sometimes you’d float past a heavily wooded island that seemed so lonely and haunted. I’d imagine that no one had ever been on them because it was obvious that monsters lived inside the tangled mangroves, the thorny shrubs and the stunted gums.
We’d set up camp every night, assembling the clumsy six-man canvas tent with its wooden poles and guide ropes. Brian was a couple of months off three, so he got to sit and watch.
Mum and I had to hold the poles while Dad secured them.
‘Hold it straight, boy, hold it straight.’
‘Don’t let it go, why did you let it go?’
‘It’s not too bloody heavy, if you hold it straight it weighs nothin’!’
‘Why’d you let yours go, Helen? He doesn’t need bloody help, he just needs to listen!’
‘What are you crying for, you big girl? I’ll give you something to bloody cry for!’ Whack, under the ear. My ears rang more often than a church bell. Every night we’d put up the tent; every night it’d be a nightmare.
Dad rarely said sorry. He’d start crawling back into favour.
‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach, we’ll take a bag and Mum can collect shells, hey Chook?’ (his pet name for Mum). Apart from putting up the tent, our holiday was fantastic. We learned to live with Dad’s down side, which was a constant part of our upbringing.
Townsville was magic. We spent it with the Sellers family. Big family. We stayed in the backyard at Grandma Sellers’ in the dreaded tent. At least it was up for a few days in a row.
We went to Magnetic Island. This was the beginning of a love affair with possibly my favourite place on the planet. We have a great photo of Dad standing on one of the big round granite boulders on the island. He’s bare-chested, holding two pawpaws like breasts. Most of the time Dad was a very funny, witty, knockabout bloke.
I remember going to the beach in Townsville for Christmas dinner. Heaps of people, men, women and kids, everywhere. As the sun was setting the men dragged this massive fishing net off the back of a truck. It seemed to my little eyes to be about 6 miles long. They waded out with one end of it, formed a massive semicircle and waded in again so that both ends of the net were on the beach, about 100 feet apart. They then started to haul the semicircle towards the beach. This required strength and patience. After an eternity, they pulled the net almost to the beach. There were fish jumping everywhere, it seemed like a million of them. What a great night. Our stomachs exploded with fish, watermelon and mangoes. God I love Queensland, up the Mighty Maroons.
During the war, Dad’s older sister June fell in love with a local boy from Townsville, Ben Sellers. The toughest, greatest man I’ve ever met. My father had absolute admiration for this man.
He took Aunty June out on his motorbike, which had a sign on it, Y Worry. Later on, that’s what he called his speedboat. Ben lived up to that name.
He married June after the war. A couple of years later, he got a job driving his Bedford truck carrying coal for the coalmines, just south of Sydney. Dad followed and got a job at Wongawilli Colliery. Mum’s two brothers, Arthur and Charlie, followed us to Wongawilli. Arthur built a new house next door to Ben and June.
Ben and June lived in the house below us. They had five kids: Tony, Greg, Fay, Kerry and Richard. Three older and two younger than me. Ben was tough, bright and had a great work ethic. His kids did well at school. He was very disciplined but didn’t seem to yell or hit anybody, unlike Dad. Ben and June were soulmates. My mum asked him how they seemed to get on so well. His answer: ‘I never tried to change her and she never tried to change me.’ So if you’re having marriage problems, you don’t need a self-help book, just remember Ben’s advice.
Charlie, Mum’s eldest brother, was a bricklayer. He bought a block of land on the flat below the Hill, known as the Flat, surprisingly enough. He still lives there in a brick house he took thirty years to complete. He’s ninety-one and he’s fantastic. He was on the phone to Brian’s wife recently: ‘Still sexually active, not allowed to practise.’
I look like Uncle Charlie and I got my height from him. I’m a bit over 6 foot 1, he’s a bit under 6 foot and built. When my Uncle Arthur was fourteen, he was hit in the mouth with a cane by a Catholic brother. He ran to his sixteen-year-old brother Charlie with his gums bleeding. Charlie knocked the brother out. They had to lock the brother in a room so’s my Pop couldn’t kill him. They left St Benedict’s Chippendale and went to Forbes Street public.
Uncle Arthur was the forces’ middleweight champion during the war. Charlie could beat him, Dad couldn’t, but more about that later. One night Dad got drunk and ended up in the lockup. He was horrid when he was drunk. Mum refused to have him released that night. Next morning he walked the 3 miles from Dapto to Wongawilli. Charlie knew about this and he caught Dad stomping past his house with a look to kill. He caught up with him.
‘Bruce…’
‘Fuck off.’
Charlie grabbed Dad firmly by the shoulder and spun him around. ‘If you ever lay a hand on my sister, I’ll rip your head off and shove it up your arse, got the message?’
I really didn’t think Dad ever would, but he did, once, many years later. He gave up alcohol in the same second and didn’t drink again, bar one little slip-up that led to nothing.
Wongawilli Primary, established in 1927, was a typical off-yellow weatherboard, one-teacher school, as seen in many small country towns. On my first day of school I remember walking in ahead of Mum and Brian, clutching my leather satchel like a scared old woman clutches her handbag. It was a strange mixture of elation and scared-shitlessness. I knew a lot of the kids. My older friend Elwyn Jordan and Raymond O’Hara, my age, were from the Hill. Still, I felt completely out of my depth and kind of not belonging, not good enough.
I’ve always had this feeling that, on one hand, I’m the most amazing person who ever lived, maybe even the Messiah, and that I was going to be famous. In the next breath I’d feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet, that I was annoying, a fake, and that people were only friendly to me because they felt sorry for me.
I don’t know why, because I can’t remember too much of my formative years, but I think I was an amazing little kid. I was full of wonderment; I was happy where I lived and who I lived with. We had the highest house on the Hill. Above it was the Illawarra escarpment, a bloody mountain range in my backyard. My brother and I could run through the thick bush at 100 miles per hour, screaming and laughing and grunting in our heaven on earth. Tiger snakes, red-bellied blacks, diamond pythons, carpet snakes, rabbits, bandicoots and wallabies were our mates, part of the bush furniture. Leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. To our knowledge, we never came close to being bitten.
We loved the creek, flowing over big rocks, waterfalls, temperate rainforest. Big gum trees, bloody big gum trees. There was a flooded gum growing next to the creek which was the biggest in the district, I reckon, and not many knew about it. It’s probably still there. Brian and I would hug it, talk to it. We called it ‘House’, ’cause we reckoned you could easily build an entire house out of it.
The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life Page 1
