The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  Dad could never help himself. He’d found two old pushbike frames at the tip. A size 20 for Brian and a size 24 for me. He was bringing them back to life at a mate’s place at the bottom of the hill. They were Christmas presents and we still believed in Santa. In early December, Dad took us down and showed us our bikes; they looked brand-new. He’d rebuilt them and spray-painted them. All that was left was to put stickers on and streamers off the handlebars.

  They looked like brand-new Ferraris to me. It was a strange mixture of exultation and What happened to Santa? Brian and I were five and seven.

  Tony was fourteen and he rode a 28-inch racing bike. He went to Dapto High and we went to Dapto Primary. It was Brian’s first year at school and I was in Second Class. It was 3 miles to school, up and down hills all the way. We followed single file behind Tony. He was patient with us, but it must have been frustrating for him. I think for three years of riding, the only thing Tony said was, ‘Come on, hurry up.’ No gears in those days; poor Brian’s little five-year-old legs pumping diligently every day, trying to do his best for our hero. Six miles a day every schoolday was one hell of an achievement for little kids.

  One day we were pedalling past this paddock and there was a horse giving birth. We stopped and watched it.

  ‘We’ll be in trouble for being late, Tony.’

  ‘It’ll be worth it, mate.’

  And it was. The head hung out of the back of the mother for quite a while and then, clump, out it came and fell like jelly on the grass. It was then doused with fluid and afterbirth. The mother licked the foal continuously as it tried to find its feet. Finally the foal stood upright on shaky stick legs. It was a life leap for me, seeing a living thing arrive on the planet. Horrifying when Tony explained that we were born the same way. The visual I had of my mother entered my dreams at times, and I’ll leave that to your imagination.

  When I got to about nine, I was allowed to ride home by myself. Poor old Brian had to wait for Tony at the bus stop. My mate John Mayberry used to ride with me part of the way and peel off to his joint in the south of Dapto. John introduced me to the fine art of smoking. We used to buy a pack of Craven A 10s from this seedy bastard who didn’t care about our age. We’d ride just beyond the outskirts of town, drag our bikes off the road and into the bush and smoke till we choked. I smoked fairly steadily from then to my mid-teens, where I took it on with a vengeance.

  Tony was of average height and build. He looked more like a Jarratt than a Sellers; Greg was opposite. Tony had balls and he wouldn’t take shit from my old man. We had a ’38 Chev; it was Mum’s car. It had broken down just below our garage and Dad wanted all hands to push it about 20 feet uphill into the garage.

  A bunch of kids and teenagers helped push. Dad never gave instructions; he tended to yell abuse at our ‘pathetic’ efforts.

  Tony had had enough. He was about fifteen at the time.

  ‘Bugger this, mate, push it up your bloody self.’

  He walked away and we all bravely did the same. The eruption from Dad had to be seen to be believed. This tree trunk of a man with steam coming out of his ears and flames spewing out his mouth pushed a ton of car single-handed, up the hill and into the garage. Tony reckons if it had been recorded, Dad would’ve ended up in the Guinness Book of Records.

  Uncle Ben was one tough coalminer. He got his hand caught in machinery and had four fingers cut off. He picked up the fingers, held them onto the stumps, walked out of the mine, went to hospital and became one of the first people in Australia to have fingers sewn back on. He lost two but the other two were successful.

  One evening around about 1960, all hell broke loose. Uncle Ben had his legs crushed between two coal cars deep inside the mine. The right leg was crushed beyond repair and had to be amputated just above the knee. The other one was nearly as bad and the doctors wanted to remove it. Uncle Ben refused and told them to do their best to fix it. They did, but only just. The leg caused him pain for the rest of his life. It was so badly bowed out, it looked like it would snap.

  My father worshipped Ben. He would often say he was the greatest man he’d ever met and I think he’s right. My father had a terrible temper and the emotional maturity of a gnat. But he loved us a million times more than himself. He would die for us in a nanosecond and nearly did once. That story will come later.

  He had a big heart, he cared, he gave and he’d do anything for anybody and often did. He carried a saying and I try to live by it. ‘Expect nothing from nobody and you’ll never be disappointed.’ (I know the double negative is wrong but ‘anybody’ doesn’t have the same punch.) He wasn’t a complete brute, by any means. He was a fucking bastard for the brutal punishments and verbal put-downs but, at the end of the day, he was a great man. These days he’d be jailed for what he did then, but he was a product of his time.

  He waited on Ben hand and foot. Was always at the hospital. When Ben came home, Dad carried him everywhere. He was in too much pain for a wheelchair, and a miners house on the side of a hill wasn’t exactly wheelchair-friendly. He finally mastered the crutches and eventually the artificial leg. Ben had a manual ’54 Pontiac. Dad somehow converted it into an automatic of sorts so that Ben could drive it. We had that Irish tribal family thing going on, still do. Uncle Ben was given a job at the weigh station for the coal trucks. He started out as a truck driver, so at least he was hanging with his kind. He was a great mechanic. I have fond memories of him in his shorts sitting on the floor of his four-car garage. Leg off, stump hanging out, pulling a motor apart beside him on the garage floor.

  Fay’s a couple of years older than me. She was the product of a broken home, before June and Ben adopted her when she was about two. She’s a great girl: she could match it with the boys no trouble, she drove a car like a champion, and she wore Wongawilli like a glove.

  She once said something quite profound, something I’ve always wanted to put into a movie, and it said volumes about my uncle and aunty. When she was about ten, Fay came home from school, walked into the house and there was a strange man standing there with Ben and June. June said to Fay, ‘Fay, this is your dad.’ Fay stood and stared at this man and uttered the words, ‘No he’s not, he’s my father. That’s my dad there,’ and pointed to Uncle Ben. I don’t think ‘the father’ ever showed up again.

  One day I went flying down the hill from my house towards the Sellers’ house on my bike, not unusual. The brakes failed, unusual. I hit the bottom corner doing about 700 miles per hour. I flew off the road into the lantana and banged flat out into a wattle tree. My crutch slid along the top bar and my balls were crunched by the handlebar coupling. I was wailing in agony and limped back onto the road.

  Fay was the only one home. She came out to see what the fuss was about. She put her arm around me and asked me if I’d hurt my privates, as I had a firm grip of them. I told her I thought my balls were bleeding. She took me up to her kitchen and asked me to drop my pants. I refused. She very kindly and considerately talked me around. They weren’t bleeding, just very red and swollen. My penis was spared any pain, so the first sighting of it by a girl was not very impressive. Fay and I always have a chuckle about that on the odd occasion we bump into each other these days. She can dine out with ‘I once rubbed cream on John Jarratt’s balls!’

  Bruce plus alcohol equals arsehole

  When Dad got drunk he was outrageous. I’m the same. In five minutes, he could go from all-singing all-dancing, to womanising, to fighting. Mostly ending in violence. On many occasions, Mum got a lift home ahead of him, dragged us out of bed into the ’38 Chev and off to Sydney, if she felt like leaving him, or off to Kanahooka Point if she felt like waiting it out.

  It’s funny being a kid. I quite liked the adventure of going to Kanahooka Point, sleeping in the car and waking up to dawn coming up over Lake Illawarra. Mum was usually still awake in the driver’s seat, red-eyed from crying all night. Another weird thing, she always looked really beautiful at these times. Her sadness had a profound beauty about i
t. She was so sad, already my inadequacy as a man was rearing its ugly head. She needed protection and she had no one, not even me. She was protecting us. She didn’t have a selfish, domineering bone in her body. She couldn’t understand violence and yet she was subjected to it all her life. She’d say of Dad, ‘Why can’t he be nice?’ She’d watch some war happening on the news: ‘Why can’t they just be nice to each other?’ It was beyond her, she couldn’t understand it because she was the nicest person I’d ever meet. If nine out of ten people on this planet were like her, we’d be in heaven.

  If Mum decided to escape to Sydney on these occasions, it was because she intended to leave Dad. The only place she could go was Nanna’s. Her brothers and sisters had their own problems.

  Nanna was unbending. ‘I told you he was a mongrel. You wouldn’t bloody listen, you married him, you bore his children. That’s where you belong, not here. Don’t talk to me about drunks, your father was a useless drunk. But I made my bed and I did what was expected of me. Go home to your husband, where you belong.’ Mum had no way out, nowhere to go. People from the US had divorces and went to shrinks, but not Aussies.

  Driving back in the ’38 Chev to Wongawilli from one of these escapades, Mum lost the brakes going down a 5-mile hill into Wollongong called Mt Ousley. It was frightening, it was ‘we’re gonna die’ frightening. Mum wasn’t the greatest driver, and even good drivers would struggle with a ’38 Chev with no brakes. Mum was chanting ‘We haven’t got any brakes’ over and over. Mount Ousley is a fairly straight road but it’s a steep grade. We were starting to go very fast, Mum was trying to drop it down a gear to slow the thing, and all we got was the crunching sound. The synchro in this old bus wasn’t good. The road was approaching a large cutting and there was a steep grassy hill to our left. I started screaming, ‘Go up the hill, Mum, go up the hill!’ and she did. We bounced and banged up that hill, and nearly went over the side; our heads were hitting the roof. Mum gripped onto the steering wheel like her life depended on it, and it did. She sprained her thumb and it blew up three times its size, but she hung in there and we stopped almost at the top. We were alive.

  Dad could see that his drinking could have inadvertently killed us. He swore he’d never drink again. He said that as regularly as he got drunk. He took the Chev off the road and gave it to the Sellers kids. The boys took the doors and roof off and turned it into a flat-trayed ute. In Wonga, as soon as your feet could touch the brake and the clutch, you drove. They painted the Chev bright yellow and wrote smart-arsed stuff all over it like ‘Rolls Canardly – rolls down a hill, can hardly get up the other side’. The adventures they got up to on this jalopy are a book in itself. They loved it when the brakes failed!

  Sometimes Dad would get home drunk ahead of Mum, or with her. Dad would also wake us up and put us in the car, except it was extremely frightening, especially because seconds before you were walking down the path in your PJs, you’d been sound asleep. One particular night, I think Tony must have been babysitting, because I can remember him and Uncle Ben trying to stop Dad driving away with us. I remember three different watches on these six wrists, which all seemed to have a violent hold of each other. Next thing, Dad smacked Uncle Ben in the mouth and it was on. Mum took the opportunity to get us out of the car. ‘Run down to Aunty June’s, quick, quick, run, run.’ Folklore has it that Aunty June had to be talked out of taking her brother’s head off with a shovel. She was only 4 foot 11 but she became 6 foot 4 if you hurt her Ben.

  It was good if Uncle Arthur was around on these occasions because he could take the old man. He was the Forces’ middleweight champion during the war, which was equivalent to Australian champion.

  There was a barbecue at Uncle Arthur’s one afternoon. He lived just below us. Dad was full as a boot and he was trying to take Arthur’s car to get more booze. Arthur took the keys out of the ignition. Dad took umbrage at this and it was on. Like lightning, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Dad went down. Dad called Arthur ‘Mick’. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Mickey.’

  Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Dad went down. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Mickey.’ This went on for half an hour. Dad looked like he’d been through a mincer. Arthur was only hitting him once at this stage, knockout blows, couldn’t knock him out. Dad would slowly get up, and through busted lips, ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Mickey.’ Arthur was crying in frustration, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bruce, stay down!’

  There were many times Dad came home drunk. We’d see the headlights of his car illuminate the lounge room. ‘Quick, go to bed. If your father comes in, pretend to be asleep.’ Off we’d rush. Inevitably, soon after he got home, he’d start yelling at Mum and she’d start crying. Always in their bedroom, because Mum would race into her bed and pretend to be asleep too.

  God, he yelled loud. It always seemed he was ready to hit her, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d never forgotten Charlie’s threat to shove Dad’s head up his own arse. Arthur could beat Dad; Charlie could kill him.

  The upside was that the next day, Dad would be overly nice to Mum, who would barely look at him, never mind talk to him. Dad loved taking us to the beach or a river for the day, or camping. When he was desperately trying to get back in the good books by being extra nice, we revelled in it. It was so bloody good! We were such a happy family, swimming and surfing and jumping and splashing. How could such an intelligent man be so fucking stupid? ‘Why can’t he just be nice all the time?’ I know, Mum, I know.

  Johnny Jarratt’s notorious Wongawilli moments

  The gastro

  When I was about six months old I got gastroenteritis. In those days it was suggested to give the patient flat lemonade. To flatten lemonade, you add more sugar to the drink! We now know it’s not good to give a baby lemonade at the best of times.

  Within a week I wasn’t better and I looked like the starving African babies from the newsreels. Mum instinctively knew the doctors might kill me, and she wanted her mother. Nobody was on the phone in those days. We were a big extended working-class family, we were spread all over the country and not one of us was contactable by phone. If it was urgent, you’d go to the post office and send a telegram. It’d take a day to deliver and another day to get a reply. Mum wrapped me up in a bassinet and drove to Chippendale, Sydney. Nanna took one look at me and gave me a dose of castor oil. A few minutes later I cut loose and emptied my intestine from the stomach down. ‘You’re lucky the poor little bugger’s not dead…yet.’ Two more doses of castor oil and a few bottles of water taken slowly over about four hours and my Nanna had saved my life, no doubt. Give me an old Irish witch remedy any day.

  Reppocgums

  When I was a kid, my dad taught me that police were called ‘reppocgums’.

  Mum and Dad were driving back from Nanna’s with Brian and me in the back. I was four and Brian was two. I don’t know the brand of car, but I remember it had running boards. Dad was speeding and a cop pulled him over. The cop put his foot up on the running board and rested his ticket book on his knee to write out Dad’s speeding fine. I poked my head out of the window and said, ‘Get your foot off my dad’s car, Mug Copper!’

  The cop retorted, ‘I wonder who he learnt that from?’

  He licked his pencil and threw the book at the old man.

  Mum was livid. ‘You don’t teach children to say “Mug Copper”. Never say that in front of them again.’

  The old man was Irish and he hated coppers. When he was a young lout he used to slop them in the face with custard tarts when they were directing traffic. From then on, he taught us that police were called Reppocgums, Mug Copper backwards.

  The pitchfork

  We were visiting Dad’s mate down at Gerringong near the beach. Mum, Dad and baby brother Barry were in the house, while Brian and I were messing around in a vegie garden in the backyard. Brian started teasing me, which was not unusual; that was basically our childhood relationship. Brian teased me, I’d lose my Bruce-like temper, he’d run, I’d catch him
and belt the shit out of him, and Dad would belt the shit out of me. This was what Brian wanted and it made him happy. At least someone was happy.

  On this day he’d driven me so hard that I picked up a pitchfork. He teased me, I plunged the fork close to his feet, purposely just missing. The inevitable happened, I got his foot, the prong went through his plastic sandal, entered between the second and third toe and out his instep. I pulled it back out covered in blood. I went pale with shock and dread that Dad might literally kill me. I immediately begged Brian to say he accidentally jumped on it. I didn’t know if he’d heard me as he was screaming his head off.

  The adults arrived, they eventually calmed Brian down and they asked him what happened. He told them he’d accidentally jumped on it, and they bought it. I surprisingly wasn’t relieved. The turmoil of guilt and grief at what I’d done was immense, because at a base level, the love for my brother was, and still is, immense. I’m reliving it as I write it. I need a coffee.

  Brian was off school for a fortnight, and he nearly lost a toe. One morning Mum slammed my bedroom door into the wall. Through sleepy eyes I awoke to my worst nightmare.

  ‘You horrid boy, you horrid, horrid boy, how could you do that to your brother, you evil little pig. He just had a nightmare, he was yelling out, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, John, don’t stab me with the pitchfork.’ How could you? You’re gutless, you don’t deserve a family. Stay out of my sight.’ Slam.

  I sat there. I wanted to die. I didn’t care if I went to hell. My father spoke to me like that once a week. My mother never spoke to me like that before or since. My mother was an angel, she never put anyone down, and she would never hurt anyone unless they deserved it, unless they crossed her line. If she’d have stabbed her sister with a pitchfork at any age, she’d have taken her punishment. I failed in her eyes, which hurt me more than all of the endless insults and bashings from my father put together.