The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  I’ve never got over it, and I think that’s healthy.

  Smarties

  My cousin Larry is my mother’s sister Betty’s boy. He’s a year older than me and still one of my best mates, more of a brother than a cousin. Larry is one of those annoying bastards who take forever to eat or drink something. His family was visiting and we were off playing in a gutter near the house. I think there were four of us: Brian and I, and cousins Steven and Larry. We were each given a small box of Smarties. Three of us ate them in about two minutes. Twenty minutes later, Larry was still sucking the sugar off them one at a time and still had half a box left. I asked him for some and he, of course, said no. It eventually turned into an argument and I picked up a brick and threw it at Larry. I hit him hard, point-blank, just above his forehead. (He’s bald now and he can’t help pointing out the scar at family events.) Blood poured forth like I’d struck oil. Larry started screaming, adults ran out of our house and I ran downhill to the Sellers’. Dad yelled out to Tony and Greg to grab me. I eluded them and headed for my domain, the bush, with Tony and Greg in hot pursuit.

  I scrambled and weaved through the bush like some kind of animal. This was my backyard, this was my realm, this was my iPad, this was my Xbox. My body could do what kids’ thumbs can do today, and just as fast. Tony and Greg couldn’t catch me.

  I buried myself in a huge lantana patch. Tony started to talk to me, really kind and understanding words. Words saying I had to face up to what I’d done some time, it was no good running away, I had to say sorry to Larry. My hero, I remember thinking, ‘I wish he was my dad.’ He was already much more emotionally intelligent at fifteen than Dad would ever be. I came out, he put his arm on my shoulder as we walked back, and said, ‘You’ll probably get a good hiding when you get home, but, let’s face it, you deserve it. But it’ll only hurt for a little while. Larry’s head is gonna hurt for a long time.’

  Wongawilli burns

  Just behind our house was the beginning of a eucalypt forest that stretched up and over the mountains and endless miles north and south. One day the Cleary Brothers unloaded two big bulldozers beside our house and went up behind us to build a firebreak. The break was about 100 foot wide and a half a mile long, behind the highest houses on the hill. After school we were allowed to get on the bulldozers, help drive them and knock down trees. (Who needs Disneyland?) That would never happen today. Dad took us down the mine a few times, riding conveyer belts to the face. That would never happen today, either. We weren’t allowed to go right to the face, that was too dangerous! There might be a cave-in. Dad lived through one, and had the black scars embedded in his bald head for the rest of his life.

  The firebreak was in place, and our backyard extended into what looked like no-man’s-land. The dozers pushed all the trees and vegetation to the uphill side of the firebreak. I found a box of matches. I went over the other side of the break to the dead, dried-out trees and vegetation. I lit matches and dropped them into the dead growth, little fires would start and I’d stomp around and put them out. The inevitable happened, this dried brush went up like a fireball and I had to jump clear. I remember just standing there looking at it slowly turn into a raging fire and thinking, I’m only eight, I don’t know what to do. I really, really wanted to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Eventually I turned around, went to my house and looked for somewhere to hide. I ended up under my parents’ bed. I crawled up to the head of the bed and got in the foetal position with my back to the wall. There were three suitcases under there, so I pulled them around me.

  The fire was huge. It extended the length of the firebreak, from one side of Wonga hill to the other. The forest above was on fire, and spot fires were springing up all around the houses. We were lucky not to lose any houses. They fought the fire all night and part of the next day. At the same time, the women and older kids were trying to find little Johnny Jarratt. On a number of occasions people looked under the bed, but they couldn’t see me hidden behind the suitcases. Everyone thought I’d been burnt to death, and my parents were beside themselves. The roar, snap and crackle of the fire outside was freaking me out. All I could think of was that I was about to get the hiding of hidings. Compared to what I was gonna get, being nailed to a cross sounded like a better option.

  Someone found me (I can’t remember who). Mum and Dad came into the room. Mum grabbed me and hugged me and started wailing a river of relief. Dad just sat there beside us, saying nothing. His arms were locked straight and his hands were pushing forcefully into the mattress, his teeth were clenched and he was staring hard at the floor. I was looking at him with my head against Mum’s left breast, waiting for him to crucify me. Waiting for ‘Get into your room and wait for me.’ I kept looking at him and then he looked at me. His eyes puddled up and his chin quivered. He stood up and rushed out of the room.

  For the first time, I knew he really loved me, and it wasn’t the last.

  All singing, all dancing

  After the war ended Dad got mixed up with a bohemian crowd from the North Shore in Sydney. He got a bit arty and ended up messing with theatre at the Independent in North Sydney. He landed the lead in a play called The Bullocky. He got great reviews. He was encouraged to kick on, to become an operatic baritone. He decided to go back to his country roots and took a job driving a bulldozer for ten times more money and never looked back.

  Mum was one of the best mezzo-sopranos I’ve ever heard. We played her singing ‘Ave Maria’ at her funeral and it was phenomenal. That weekend Susan Boyle was making headlines singing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Compared to Mum, Susan was doing just that, dreaming.

  My Uncle Charlie was one of the first in Australia to own an electric guitar and Uncle Arthur won endless karaoke competitions into his mid-eighties. We’re of southern Irish descent, on both sides; we sing, we dance, we perform. My cousin Patrick Phillips and I are the only pro actors in the extended family. We lost Wayne Jarratt to cancer in 1988. Wayne was at NIDA with Mel Gibson. A great loss.

  My first public appearance was at the Wongawilli Hall in 1954. I got up on stage of my own volition and sang:

  Put anuvver nickew

  In da nickewodean

  Aw I want is wubbin nue

  And music, music, music.

  Everyone sang and danced at these events. ‘Sing us a song, ya bastard.’ Piano, piano accordion, drums, Uncle Charlie on banjo. Mum, Dad and Arthur were the headline singers and everyone had a ball, literally. The Wonga hall was huge to me, it was like Carnegie Hall. I’ve been back since; it’s tiny.

  Mum and Dad loved to dance. They were very good at it and they were always going to balls and dances. It’s where they fell in love: in Sydney dance halls in the mid-forties.

  A big part of our weekend was the Sunday drive. Lots of families did it. We’d drive down to Kiama for a surf, or up to a swimming hole on Mount Keira, or up to Nanna’s for the weekend.

  I never had a radio in a car until I owned one in 1969. No seatbelts. We’d stand up holding onto the back of the front bench seat and sing our guts out with Mum and Dad until we reached our destination. Did the same on the way back. I’m not a bad singer for an old bloke. Don’t believe me? Buy the StalkHer soundtrack.

  Au revoir, Wongawilli

  I’ve lived in many places in my life. Wonga has a special significance and reverence; it’s spiritual. It’s kind of spooky to go there these days: all the houses have been demolished, only scraps remain. The remnants of our house are the concrete front steps and patio floor, and a rotting piece of wood that was our tree house. And what a grand treehouse it was. The massive gum spread into three main trunks, perfect for a treehouse. You entered via a 12-foot wooden ladder nestled into the base fork of the tree. It was triangular, the point to the back and the base to the front, giving us a panoramic view across Lake Illawarra to the ocean. It had half-walls, with the top half of the walls fly-screened, and a skillion metal roof. Built by the old man, of course. We’d get a bunch of mates and we’d all stay t
he night up in the treehouse. The first time we did that, I was about eight. We stayed awake all night because we’d never seen daybreak. It happened so slowly, we were disappointed because we thought the ‘break’ bit was going to make a noise and bingo, we’d go from night to day in a bang. Watching dawn happen in the treehouse sang songs to my soul. It will stay with me forever.

  Island Bend

  Dad had climbed up through the ranks at the mine to become a deputy. He was in charge of the miners at the face.

  In the early sixties Dad took a course in concreting. He wanted to get a job in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, one of the biggest undertakings in Australian history. The idea was to build dams on the rivers coming off the Snowy Mountains and tunnel through the mountains to distribute water to irrigate the dry country to the west. Hydro-electric power stations were built below the dams at Guthega, Tumut, Blowering and Jindabyne.

  Dad graduated from his concreting course with flying colours. That, combined with his ability to tunnel into mountains in search of coal, got him a job on the Island Bend–Eucumbene tunnel. He was an overseer, which meant he was in charge of the gang at the rock face of the tunnel. The only position above him were the engineers.

  The tunnel was 13 miles long, from the Snowy River at Island Bend through the mountain range to Eucumbene. Construction on the tunnel began in 1961, and we arrived in Island Bend in March 1963. Funny, I can’t remember packing up and leaving Wongawilli at all and I can’t remember arriving in Island Bend. You’d think you’d remember stuff like that. My first memory is waking up one morning after a very cold night, I think it was only a couple of weeks after we arrived. All three of us slept in the one bedroom of our new two-bedroom house. Barry and I were in a double bunk and Brian slept under the window in a single. He woke us up looking out the window.

  ‘Hey, come and look at this – it’s snowing, it’s snowing.’

  We looked out and there was about an inch of snow covering everything. Fluffy powder snow was drifting out of the clouds like God had ripped open a giant pillow. I think this was such a magnificent early memory of Island Bend that the other stuff just faded out. I couldn’t believe the silence: no wind, just millions of big fluffy snowflakes.

  In an instant we were outside in the freezing cold, in our pyjamas and bare feet. We didn’t feel a thing except the sting of snowballs ricocheting off our cheeks and foreheads.

  The Snowy Mountains are far from the most spectacular mountain range in the world, but to my ten-year-old eyes, they were magnif­icent. Island Bend was way down in a massive valley carved by the Snowy River. Arcing up out of the valley to the north was Blue Cow Mountain, a forest of tall native gums stretching up its steep sides from the river, shrinking back to the stunted snow gums about 1000 feet up. These dwarfs of the eucalypt family crawled up another 1000 feet or so to the snowline, the point at which it’s too cold for even a gnarly snow gum to survive. The final 1000 feet was white with snow or green with snow grass in the summer. This great wall of Blue Cow stretched west of Island Bend about 15 miles all the way to the front door of Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest mountain at 7310 feet. When we looked west from Island Bend, pride of place at the top of the valley was Mount Townsend, Australia’s second highest by only 63 feet. A triangular, pure-white mountain that came to a pointed peak, picture-perfect, right in the middle of the vista. To a kid’s eyes, this was phenomenal.

  Island Bend township was a Snowy Mountains Scheme town. The wooden two-bedroom houses, designed to be demountable, were brought onto the site in modules. The town was demolished between 1966 and 1968 when the construction of the dam and the tunnel was completed. The houses were moved to the new township of Talbingo.

  I don’t know the population of the town. There must have been sixty or seventy houses, so that’s about 300 people. Most of the population were single men in the barracks just beyond the shops, mostly migrants from Europe escaping the aftermath of World War II. There could have been up to 1000. We were, after all, there to build a major dam and a tunnel under the mountain range. There was another little temporary township about a mile downhill on the banks of the Snowy River called Utah. A company called Utah Australia and Brown & Root Sudamericana was contracted to build the tunnel. Full of Americans, of course. So maybe we had about 2000 people there, which is a sizeable small town.

  We weren’t allowed to go near the barracks. Sometimes the Yugoslavs would have knife fights over card games. Then they’d raffle their cars to pay gambling debts, and if that didn’t work they’d have another knife fight.

  Just below the barracks was the cinema, or ‘the pictures’, as it was known to Aussies then. We’d go every Saturday afternoon. One shilling to get in and threepence for a big bag of lollies. We’d watch the serial, the newsreel and the main feature, usually a John Wayne film. We didn’t have TV, so the newsreel was where I first saw the Beatles, and I remember the footage of President Kennedy getting shot. Big news then. We heard it first on the radio. I was walking home from school and Mrs Thompson was sitting out the front, crying. I asked if she was all right. She told me President Kennedy had been killed. That was the first time I’d ever heard about him.

  Mum and Dad would go to the pictures on Saturday night. I was eleven and old enough to babysit. Brian would tease me, I’d bash him up and threaten to bash him up again if he told on me. Barry, who was six, just looked on and enjoyed the entertainment.

  Island Bend school

  Island Bend Primary School was built just below the town. A set of steps took you about 100 feet down to the dirt playground. Across from the playground stood the long, boomerang-shaped school building. It didn’t take long for me to get into the initiation fight with the allocated tough guy, I think his name was Stan. Again, nothing compared to Dadzilla at home. I won.

  Mr Darling was the headmaster. (I know! How did he live with that?) He was a great bloke and my teacher for two years. We were a combined Fifth and Sixth Class, only about fifteen of us all up. Mr Darling was the first teacher I’d meet who was human, like the rest of us. He didn’t talk like other teachers of the day. ‘Jarr-att, I am talking to you, yes you, am I mis-taken or are there other Jarr-atts in theee room? You will write down one hundred tiiimes, “I must pay attention at aall tiiimes.” Do I make myself cleeear?’

  ‘Yes…yes…yes…yeeeees?!! Yes, sir.’

  Mr Darling didn’t do that, he just talked and cracked jokes and made the subjects interesting. I looked forward to his classes, I didn’t realise there were interesting things to learn. My conclusion is that there are no uninteresting subjects, just uninteresting teachers. For the following two years I actually looked forward to going to school and, not surprisingly, I got into a lot less trouble there than at any other school.

  The first year I was in Island Bend, the snow cover was good. When there was snow on the ground, we’d ski to school, downhill all the way. At lunch we’d ski. Up the steps, five minutes of carrying your skis, down the hill in thirty seconds, back up the hill. Sneak your sandwiches into the class after lunch, take a bite when the teacher wasn’t looking, chew really slowly so you didn’t get sprung.

  Although I said a lot less trouble, there was still trouble to be had. I was party to two events that severely damaged the school. The first was just dumb. Brian and I and two of our mates were at the top of the hill looking down at the school. I noticed this big disc-shaped rock about 3 foot wide and about 6 inches thick, similar in shape and size to a truck tyre. We pushed it up onto its side, aimed it at the school and let it go. My God! It started rolling and picked up speed like you wouldn’t believe. All four of us were bug-eyed and crapping our pants. It was heading for a big log lying across its devastating path.

  ‘It’s gonna run into the log and stop!’

  It hit the log and flew into the sky. On re-entry it came down on the other side of the log doing about 800 miles per hour. It bounced twice and flew into the weatherboard wall of Class 1 and 2. From the huge gaping hole it created you could see th
e rock demolishing the chairs and desks before coming to a stop at the teacher’s desk. It was lucky that nobody was killed.

  ‘Go to your room and wait for me.’ Big hiding, big hiding.

  Above the school, just above the playground, was a natural spring, always trickling out at a steady pace. I came up with the idea of building a dam. We made a relatively small one of mud, rocks and clay using our hands. It worked really well, and filled up in no time. The little dam was about 2 feet wide and 10 feet long. Eventually, the spring water started trickling over the top, so we built a little spillway. Very quaint, if only we’d stopped there. A little further down, I worked out we could build a sizeable dam about 20 foot wide and not that high. Trouble was, we’d need more than hands, so we decided this was what we would do on Saturday. About five or six of us turned up with picks and shovels. I can’t remember all of them, but definitely Brian and I (we were as thick as thieves) and my best mate from Island Bend, Robert Hawkes. We’d watched how they were building Island Bend Dam: work the wall up either side of the flow and have a decent rock and big chunks of clay for the final plug. It took us all day. It was a magnificent wall, about 20 foot wide and a foot and a half high. As the night fell the dam was filling up slowly but beautifully.

  We reconvened about nine the next day. It was about three-quarters full, better than all expectations. The pond behind the dam wall had spread significantly, about 20 foot back and 40 to 50 foot wide. We decided to walk away and come back at around three, by which time it was almost full. We pulled the big rock out of the middle and let it go. We thought it would drift across the playground, past the school and off down the road on the other side. Whooosh, the water flew out of the small gap, quickly eroding about 3 foot of the wall on either side. The water just kept coming and coming.

  Just below the dam was a well-worn path leading across the playground to the school entrance. The path very quickly turned into a fast-running creek. It hit the front entrance like a tsunami, the wall of water splashing into the double door. It was surprising to see how much water went under the door and through the cracks.