The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  I collected a bag full of them and brought them to class. After about five minutes of girl-scaring, we knocked the toads out with chloroform and cut them open still alive to look at their innards working: boy heaven, girl hell.

  I got bored with this so I killed two toads, skinned them, pinned them out and salted them, starting the tanning sequence. I eventually sewed them together and made quite an ugly tobacco pouch. We should start using toadskin for bags, shoes, all sorts of things, the skin is fantastic. Anyway, Miss Biol wasn’t amused and kicked me out…again.

  I actually got quite sick of Miss Biol’s punishment. I decided I’d behave myself and keep quiet during her class as she had no sense of humour. She was one of those who fawned over her little pets and crucified the ones she hated. She hated me most.

  The funny thing is, I shut up long enough to start to get really interested in biology. I was sitting there with this textbook called The Web of Life, a big, thick, hardcover book. I’d been behaving for about three weeks and it was driving Miss Biol crazy.

  I was sitting next to a couple of her pets and they were talking, so I actually couldn’t hear what Miss Biol was saying. I turned to them and said in a low voice, ‘Shut the fuck up, will ya, I can’t hear what she’s saying.’

  Immediately Miss Biol pointed at me and said, ‘Get out of this class. Disturbing the peace again.’

  ‘I was just…’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘But I…’

  ‘Get out.’

  I picked up The Web of Life and I threw it at her head. It flew past her right ear and hit the blackboard. I got up and left.

  ‘Go to the headmaster’s office!’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  All hell broke loose. I was threatened with expulsion. My class­mates came to my rescue and explained what had happened. I got out of it by the skin of my teeth.

  In a backhanded way, I got my revenge on Miss Biol. My brother was at the bus stop at school with about 100 other kids. Four white boys got stuck into an Aboriginal boy. Brian stepped in to help him, then more whitefellas joined in so all the blackfellas joined in and suddenly it was an all-in brawl.

  Miss Biol and Mr King came running over to break it up. Miss Biol grabbed my brother from behind to drag him away. Brian was hitting everything that came his way by now, so he spun round and right-crossed Miss Biol, thinking it was another student. She went down like a bag of spuds and passed out.

  The fight stopped immediately. Mr King went to her rescue. She came around, saw Brian and went nuts. Brian was dragged before the headmaster, and Miss Biol was baying for blood. Thankfully, Mr King was sensible and explained to the boss that it was an accident. In the end, Brian got caned for fighting and that was the end of it. He came home and told us the story. I must admit, I saw the funny side. It made my day.

  The form teacher was a nasty stickybeak busybody. She was an easy set-up. We were having weekend parties, usually every Friday night, famously called Senior Parties: in a house, on a beach, at the weir, up Castle Hill, all over the joint. Loud music, lots of grog and lots of loving. Cars were rockin’ and we were rollin’. I usually got too drunk to score, so then I’d get angry and want to hit someone. I wandered out in the scrub to take a leak one night and I almost pissed on two blokes, Jimmy and Rob, hiding. They looked at me with scared, startled eyes.

  I said, ‘What are you hiding from?’

  They said, ‘You.’

  If Nial was at the party, he’d punch me in the guts for two reasons. One, to calm me down, and two, to make me throw up so’s I wouldn’t be too hungover to play football the next morning. One time we had such a big piss-up the night before that we turned up drunk. I played the best first half ever while I was drunk and dangerous, and the worst second half, as by then I was hungover and sick.

  The drunken-night trophy, however, goes to Nial. Nial is stubborn, and if he makes up his mind to do or not to do something, it’s very hard to persuade him to change his mind, especially when he’s drunk. He very rarely gets drunk, mostly because he’s so bloody big that he’s got to drink a hell of a lot to get there. He’d broken up with his girlfriend, so he got drunk. He decided he was going to get on his motorbike and go to Brisbane and he was about to do it. We thought we had to stop him or he’d kill himself. But how? We couldn’t hold him and we couldn’t fight him, there was only four of us, we didn’t have the numbers, we were sixteen short. Sooo, I got the wheel brace out of my car and walked up behind him. I held the wheel brace up to belt him, but I hesitated. Because I didn’t want to hurt him? Bullshit, I was scared. Then the most gut-dropping feeling I’ve ever experienced…

  He turned around and his face looked like the devil. I ran and the other three ran. We piled into my car, the bloody thing never started first kick. Suddenly Nial was standing at the front of my car staring angrily at me. This was a 1958 Holden made of solid steel. The bonnet had a roll at the front, which was strong steel either side of the bonnet emblem. He lifted his bloody big arm up and hit either side of the emblem, making two fist-sized dents in the steel. That could have been my head. The car fired and I reversed away at approximately 100 miles per hour.

  Nial got on his bike and headed south. The next day we were all worried sick. The day after he rang from Bowen, two and a half hours south. His bike had broken down. Dad had a work ute, so we drove down and picked him up. We threw the bike in the back and headed home. We sang songs as usual, I remember one of the songs was ‘Without Love’ sung with gusto. It was a hit by Engelbert Humperdinck. Dad called him Angle Iron Lumpy Dick. Nial loved Dad, they shared a birthday. Nial lost his dad when he was a kid, and I think Dad was a bit of a surrogate father to him.

  Towards the end of the year, Rubin decided that one party a week wasn’t enough, so he invented the Wednesday Night Blast, to get us through to the weekend. We were an untidy rabble by then. We decided to set Miss Form Teacher up. Whenever she was in earshot we’d talk about who was going to sterilise the needles, or ‘How much did you get for your mother’s jewellery?’, or ‘The shit’s in my locker, I’ll keep it there until Friday afternoon.’ A few weeks went past and suddenly the cops turned up and went through our bags, lockers, cars and desks. Nothing. They asked about heroin. We were wide-eyed little innocents, and Miss Form Teacher had steam coming out of her ears. Next we were herded into the classroom and the cops gave us a lecture on drugs. It was a great Friday afternoon, by all accounts.

  At the end of the year, Miss Form Teacher wrote the references for us to take out into the world to find work. My reference was so bad that in retrospect, I think I should have framed it. Instead I marched into the staffroom with it in one hand and a toilet roll in the other. I said to Miss Form Teacher, ‘Please rewrite my reference on this dunny roll because it’s shit.’

  Oh brave new world

  I played prop in the front row. I was too skinny for a prop but I’d grown too tall for my favoured position, hooker. So having me loose head gave us two hookers in the front row. I had a hard head, so I could handle opposing big bastards clashing heads with me. Chris Cummings was the hooker and a good mate.

  Chris had a strange activity outside of school called amateur theatre. I knew about it but I didn’t take that much notice. I asked Chris what he was going to do when he left school, and he said he was going to audition for NIDA. I said, ‘What’s NIDA?’ Turns out it’s the number-one drama school in Australia.

  ‘How do you get in?’

  ‘You have to audition.’

  ‘What senior results do they need?’

  ‘None, you’ve just gotta pass the audition.’

  I remembered what the headmaster from Longreach had said: ‘You’d be a good actor’. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life at this point. I responded to Chris, ‘I’m in, what have we gotta do?’

  Chris organised everything for us both. NIDA sent us a bunch of speeches. We had to do one Shakespeare and one generic piece. I chose Hotspur from Henry IV and The
Play by C J Dennis.

  Chris’s amateur theatre mate helped us with the pieces. Then we jumped on a bus to Brisbane (there were no cheap flights in 1970).

  Chris and I were sitting outside the Twelfth Night Theatre shitting our pants, along with the other aspiring actors. Chris went in first. It felt like six years later when he came out. He had a big smile on his face.

  ‘I think I nailed it.’

  ‘Onya. mate.’

  In I went.

  I walked onto the stage of this quaint little theatre. One person sat in the auditorium, John Clark. He seemed like a pleasant Aussie bloke. I was expecting some toffy-nosed bastard. It turned out he was the artistic director, the boss man of NIDA, but thankfully I didn’t know that. He became my friend, and still is.

  I did my two pieces, didn’t miss a beat. I knew them backwards. John responded positively. So far so good. Then we had a bit of a chat, he asked me about myself and through the conversation I found out he was from Tasmania. Then he asked me to describe the theatre. I went pale and my hands started to sweat. I’m colourblind and I thought that if he found out, maybe I wouldn’t be accepted. I described the theatre without using any colours. Got away with it.

  We travelled back to Townsville. We wouldn’t get the results until January. Back at Pallarenda the family sat down to discuss the future. Brian had always wanted to be a mechanic, preferably a diesel fitter, working on things like bulldozers. We had an uncle in Sydney who worked for a firm called Tutt Bryant. Their business was heavy machinery and Brian could do his apprenticeship there. I’d decided that NIDA or not, I was going to be an actor. I’d got the bug, and I’ve still got it. My nanna wasn’t too well and Mum wanted to be closer to her, so we all moved to Sydney in December 1970.

  We sold my ’58 FC Holden panel van as Dad had got onto a cheap ’63 EJ Holden panel van. It was a rust bucket. We packed the EJ to the gunwales. Dad made up a special tow bar with two threaded lugs for our World War II WLA Harley. We took the front wheel off and bolted the front forks to the two lugs. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies. Brian and I went in the EJ. Dad, Mum and Barry were in Dad’s new Torana. We travelled in convoy. The back was so packed that the front wheels were just touching the ground. The steering was dangerously light. Just as well I’m a good driver.

  We drove into Sydney’s north and down the Pacific Highway to the Harbour Bridge. I was petrified driving in this kind of traffic in an overloaded car. I refused to get out of the middle lane, especially going over the bridge, that was almost beyond me. We must have looked a sight with a bloody Harley being towed behind. I was very pleased to get to Nanna’s in Chippendale. Luckily the terrace across the street was available for rent. We moved straight in.

  In those days, the word ‘unemployed’ belonged to the Great Depression. You could get a job very easily. I chose a job doing sewerage maintenance, because you got a shitload (literally) of money for working with poo.

  It was a hoot working with the Poo Boys. There was the ganger, a muscled guy in his mid-thirties; the bikie, who had a lotta hair and looked like a bikie; two Kiwis, regular blokes who took the job for the poo money; and Tom, an old prospector who’d had enough and chose an easy job in the poo.

  I was a long and skinny eighteen-year-old. The boys joked that I’d been employed because of my shape and they were going to rope to my wrists and ankles and use me like a rifle pull-through to drag me through the sewer pipe to unblock it.

  The funniest thing that happened was when I was working with old Tom. They were widening the road and we had to reroute the pipes. The road was at the bottom of a hill. On the ridge of the hill above us was a row of houses. Their sewer pipes were now poking out the bank of the widened road. Tom and I walked up to each house as we repaired their pipe below. They were instructed to not flush until we gave them the all-clear that their pipe had been rerouted. We’re down fixing a pipe. Tom is bent over at right angles to the bank. First we heard a gurgle and next instant thwack, a big turd and paper hit Tom right in the ear. I pissed myself laughing. The turd broke in half when it hit the ground.

  Tom was a very quiet laconic bushy. He picked up the turd and walked up to the house above. A new Australian Greek woman answered the door. She had very little English and obviously hadn’t understood the first message. This time she understood emphatically.

  Tom said, and pointed accordingly (and I’ll never forget it): ‘No shitty in toilet. Shit in ear. No shitty in toilet!’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh…so sorry, so sorry…’ and she shut the door.

  The two Kiwis and the Bikie thought I should be introduced to the Sydney high life. They took me to a strip club in Kings Cross on a Wednesday night (they stripped naked during the week). We were sitting in this seedy joint, crammed around tables covered in booze, a poky black stage with splashes of red, and a red fake velvet curtain. We had a seat right down the front, inches from the stage. The first couple of acts were OK but they all looked a bit seedy. The Kiwis said they were all smack addicts – finally came face to face with this drug called heroin.

  The third act was the headliner. I must admit, she was quite a woman, not as seedy as her fellow strippers. She striped naked and started to gyrate almost into the Bikie’s face. The Bikie was built like a truck; he was drunk and he was whoopin’ and a-hollering. Next thing, he put his arms around and grabbed the cheeks of her arse in both hands. She started screaming, then he buried his face in her crutch. Bouncers descended from everywhere and started thumping the hell out of the Bikie, but they couldn’t prise him off her. I got up and left them to it. The Bikie took two weeks off work to get over his beating.

  I was walking along the footpath back to my EJ, which I’d parked at the bottom end of Victoria Street. I spotted my car across the road. There was a bloke at the driver’s side with wire, trying to break in. There was a pantech truck parked opposite my car. I crept around behind it and ran straight across the road. The bloke turned his head towards me and I thumped him. He hit the road, bounced straight back up and took off holding his cheek. From a safe distance he yelled every four-letter word he could lay his tongue to. Welcome to Sydney.

  NIDA

  I got into NIDA, and so did Chris. It was a strange place for me. I was a bushy by Townsville standards, let alone NIDA. I was a complete and utter fish out of water, but I knew I could act. I’d done it all my life. I didn’t listen in class, I didn’t do my homework, I just played up every day at school and every weekend at home. Why? Because I was good at it. I got laughs. My dad taught me to have no respect for authority. ‘Nobody’s better than you are and no one’s worse. Don’t take shit from anyone.’ (Then he turned around and put shit on me, but I stood up to the big bastard. Why? Because that’s what he taught me.) So I was a monster to discipline at school.

  I was a natural performer and I knew it. As a person, I didn’t fit in. I was completely ignorant about Australian theatre and who was in it. I’d never been in a theatre to see a live play. I only went to the movies to get it off with my girlfriends. And yet, I somehow knew how to play Hotspur in the audition. I’d seen enough biblical movies to do the Old Vic accent. I can do most accents. At a party in Townsville, I once convinced a girl I was in the Irish air force visiting Australia with my battalion, playing war games off the coast. I came undone when I slipped back to Australian during lovemaking.

  The basic classes were Movement, Dance, Speech, Voice, Singing, Acting, and History of Theatre. They were what the names suggest. The confronting ones for me were Movement and Dance, because I was hopeless. I couldn’t even touch my toes, still can’t. The dance teacher was Keith Baine, a lovely guy. He’d prance around, expand his chest, his arms would fan out from his chest, he’d look up, eyes sparkling: ‘Headlights, people…headlights…headlights.’ Then he’d start doing little jumps, ‘and you go up…and you go up…and you go up.’ Terrific bloke. He ran his own ballet school, and he also choreographed dance sequences in Aussie movies.

  Miss (Maggie) Barr was the Movem
ent teacher. She was between sixty and 100, no one knew, fit as. She was 5 foot tall, wore black dance slacks, a black top and a black rag wrapped in her black hair. We think she was gay (she drove a manual ’68 Falcon ute), single, probably scared her girlfriends to death. She had a deep, booming, theatrical voice, and rolled her Rs for effect.

  The girls and boys had to wear black tights. I had two problems with that: one, it was girlie, and two, I had bony legs. You had to wear a support underneath to keep your block and tackle under control. The back piece went up the crack of your arse like a thong. I was not a happy straight camper.

  Miss Barr was a torturer. She played the Carmina Burana and you had to throw your body into these hideous configurations. The pain was excruciating after two minutes and I’d think, Fuck, I’ve got an hour to go! The closest I’d got to Movement before was football training and boxing training. I was as stiff as a board.

  We were doing this exercise where you lean your head to your left shoulder and, using the weight of your head throw it to your right shoulder. My head was going from shoulder to shoulder in a series of jerks.

  ‘One, two, three, and throw your heads, one, two, three, and throw your heads.’

  She stopped the music.

  ‘What are you doing, Crrreature?’

  ‘I dunno, Miss Barr. I just can’t seem ta chuck me head…’

  ‘I’m obviously using the wrong vernacular. And one, two, three, and chuck your heads, one, two, three, and chuck your heads.’

  Another time she came up to me and said, ‘I shall call you CorpSsse until you find Some Sign of LiFe, now movvve, CorpSe!’ I finally improved and I graduated to GorrrilLA.

  I loved her. I thought she was great. She had more balls than most of the male tutors. She liked me, too. At the end of the year I got 4 out of 10 for ability and 8 out of 10 for trying, which gave me a pass mark of 6.

  The rest of the classes were easy. Making sounds, tongue exercising (that’s come in handy over the years), singing (too easy), speeches (a bit tricky, but not too much trouble), improvisation (like being back at school), History of Theatre (boring, like being back at school, and the only subject I didn’t do well in).