The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  We drove from London to Southampton and took the ferry back to France. I like travelling at sea and this was a longer voyage. We drove through France to Switzerland and back into the north of Italy. We were behind schedule and we needed to get to Sicily, so we drove with purpose from one end of Italy to the other.

  Finally we made it to the toe of the Italian boot: Reggio Calabria, the gateway to Sicily. We drove our trusty Fiat onto the car ferry. We took the short voyage to Messina. We drove onto Sicilian soil into the city where Rosa, her sister and her mother had boarded a ship bound for Sydney seventeen years earlier, in 1958.

  Back to the island of her ancestors, where her family had lived for hundreds of years. Since before Rome, invaders would march through Sicily on their way to Italy and back through after they were conquered. Sicily has been influenced by many and varied cultures, and it was by far the most beautiful place I visited, in many ways.

  We drove south for about an hour to Carmela’s father’s place in Casalvecchio. I meet Rosa’s Nonno, ‘The Rooster’, so called because he sadly lost his first two wives and was married a third time. He had many children. He was a pleasure to be around, a lovely, lively man. Rosa’s parents and I then drove way up into the hills to Charlie’s father’s home in a farming village called Petra Bianca. The road crept up the lush green hills through vineyards and olive groves to the little whitewashed village nestled neatly into the hills. We were met by Charlie’s father and his second wife. They took us down to their quaint house, the house of Charlie’s youth. Nonno showed us his flush toilet, his radio and his electric stove, thinking we’d be interested in the mod cons of his two-storey stone cottage.

  My eyes were popping at the massive woven poplar baskets used for the grape harvest, and the massive leather wineskins. The beautiful little courtyard outside the kitchen had a view of the steep hills weighed down with crops that kept plunging all the way to the Mediterranean many miles below. Nonno took Rosa and I upstairs to our room. He apologised profusely for making us sleep in the drying-rack room. Beyond our bed were woven racks, about 2 metres by 1.2 metres. On the racks were various fruits and vegetables being dried, beyond which was a window and through that window, beautifully framed, was Mount Etna. I looked out, mesmerised by the volcano, snow-capped and smoking. It is huge: 11,000 feet high and 460 square miles wide. One quarter of the Sicilian population lives on it. And Nonno was apologising for putting us in this fabulous room. We loved it.

  I was fortunate enough to be part of the grape harvest. Sicily is an ancient civilisation; it has the second-largest wine industry in Italy, dating back 4000 years! That’s 2000 years of hangovers before Christ was born.

  First up we had to take the big empty baskets up the hill to pick the grapes. I was with Charlie, a local woman and her two kids. We filled the three baskets while the kids played. I asked Charlie how we’d get the baskets to the crusher. He said we’d carry them. These baskets were 45 kg each. I thought, There’s three baskets and only two men. Next minute Charlie hoists a basket onto the woman’s shoulder. Now this woman was solid, fair enough, but she was only 5 foot tall. Off she went with the kids skipping behind her; strong woman. I was next. The basket made my skinny legs wobble; it was bloody heavy. Then Charlie threw his own basket on his shoulder; strong man.

  ‘Hey Johnny, I don’t need da Mafia.’

  The crushing of the grapes was like a village festival. The grapes were piled into a concrete tank-type structure about 6 metres in circumference. The walls of the tank were about a metre high and the floor was on a slight slope. Men, women and children jumped in with very clean gumboots and we walked in a circle stomping the grapes. The grape juice flowed to outlets on the downhill side of the tank, then into a gutter that flowed into containers. It was hot work and there were a few cups on hand to scoop up some grape juice. I drank a lot of grape juice that day.

  The squashed grapes in the tank were placed in another container and pressed again to get every last drop. A massive weight went into the top of the container, using a lever system to lower the weight in. The fulcrum was a pole about 4 metres long and 400 mm wide. Charlie picked this pole up by himself and put it in place. Why? Because he could.

  That night I woke with a full-on stomachache. I raced outside and threw up. Carmela heard me and came to my rescue, Rosa slept through it. I’d had many cups of pure grape juice, equivalent to about 5 kg of grapes. All that juice had started fermenting in my stomach. Poor Carmela couldn’t help laughing over it.

  It was a sad day when we left Sicily. Nonno cried. He was built like Charlie but a lot taller, and was one hell of a tough dude in his time, so it was sad to see his big frame shaking with tears. Charlie kept it together. He took a walk and went behind a tree for about fifteen minutes. He regathered himself, said his goodbyes and got into the Fiat for the trip to Rome Airport.

  We arrived back in November 1975.

  We stayed with Rosa’s parents because we came home broke. Picnic at Hanging Rock had been released and it was a big hit. It made it into the Cannes Film Festival and received rave reviews. I missed the premiere in Australia and I wasn’t invited to Cannes. In those days, Australian actors were considered second-class. During the Picnic shoot, the English actors stayed in first-class accommodation and the Australian actors stayed in a motel on the highway.

  I was asked once by a journo in the seventies, ‘Who is your favourite actor?’

  ‘Hard to say, I have quite a few I admire…’

  ‘Just name one then.’

  ‘Okay. John Hargreaves.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean Australian.’

  Oh, internationally you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘John Hargreaves.’

  In our day, Mel was the only one who cracked it. He had a dream run: Mad Max, Gallipoli, Mad Max 2, The Year of Living Dangerously. If he’d only been in one hit film, I doubt whether he’d have made it at that time. Things are different now, thank Christ – half the big stars in the world are Aussies. Russell’s come a long way since Romper Stomper. If that was all he’d done in the seventies rather than the nineties, I don’t think he would have made it. It’s not just your ability as an actor to make it internationally, you’ve usually got to have a hit Australian film to go with it. With the exception of the very gifted Anthony LaPaglia who just sat in the States pushing until he cracked it, just about every Aussie star’s career started with an Aussie film.

  I had a bits-and-pieces year in 1976, but it got me by. I played a bad guy in an ABC drama called The Outsiders. I played Bob in The Emigrants, a BBC show about migrants. A Matlock and a Bluey for Crawfords in Melbourne. I did the Matlock with a sixteen-year-old girl called Sigrid Thornton. Six episodes of a soapy called The Young Doctors, playing a chef. These roles were a walk in the park and I can hardly remember them. I do remember a play I did called Bees at Nimrod Street. That was fun.

  My private life was more memorable. After Christmas I went househunting. I found a huge 1920s brick house on Bondi Road. I figured we could get at least three boarders to share the rent. Monroe asked his NIDA students if any of them were looking for a room. He found one; her name was Judy Davis. Judy was a shy person and she kept to herself. The rest of us were very social and quite rowdy. She seemed to handle it.

  Monroe had moved into a grubby ground-floor flat around the corner. He shared it with his two NIDA mates, Mel Gibson and Steve Bisley. They were great blokes, fun to be around; we partied at their place and they partied at ours. We became mates. Steve is still a close mate, he’s more like a brother, a beautiful bloke. Mel has lived in the States since the eighties so the tyranny of distance has turned him into a distant mate. We stay in contact via emails and we bump into him now and again either in Oz or the US.

  Monroe, Mel and Steve lived on the smell of an oily rag. Mel drove an EH Holden. You opened the boot by putting your hand through a huge rust hole and clicked it open from the inside. Steve had this bloody big van. They had dustcoats, and one day they
went in Steve’s van to a posh hotel. They walked to the outside pool area and took all the garden furniture to furnish their flat with. No one said a word to them, thought they were tradesmen or something. Another time I walked into their flat and Steve was playing a pinball machine. I was just about to ask when he said, ‘Don’t ask!’

  Steve and Mel were as thick as thieves. They had similar humour – both witty and quick off the mark – and told a great yarn laced with caricature and impressions. Mel loved a practical joke and disgusting things. His nickname was Pus or Gibbo and Steve was Bizo.

  Partying and pub culture was the go in the seventies. Drug experimentation was high on the list. A bottle of Scotch and a bag of weed were the norm for me and I was a happy boy. Occasionally I’d experiment with other drugs, but not on a regular basis. If you were in the money, cocaine became regular, so more often than not cocaine didn’t play. We got onto some magic mushrooms one night, gold tops. We chopped them up and put them on slices of toast. We were watching the late, late movie, off our tits, when I realised Herbie was missing. We lived on Bondi Road. I walked out and there’s Herb standing outside the all-night hamburger joint, which was run by two big Greek guys. At this hour the patrons were cab drivers, coppers and people staggering home from a big night. Herbie had a distinctive hysterical laugh. He was off his face laughing and pointing at the people inside the shop. They were all looking incredulously back through the glass at him. I rushed across and whisked him away down the street. We made our way to Bondi Beach to watch the sunrise. We were sitting on the empty beach, tripping. As the sun began glowing in the sky, Herb said to me, ‘The white caps are turning into seagulls and flying away.’ I looked at the white caps and sure enough they turned into seagulls and flew away for me too. We were sharing the same hallucination.

  Towards the end of the year I was offered a role in a film called Summer City, about four surfer mates going on a surfing trip up the coast. The producer, Phil Avalon, was playing one of them and they were having trouble casting the other two. I said that I knew two blokes who’d be perfect. I went along to NIDA to watch the odd play being performed by Monroe’s crew. Even then, the three big stars out of that year shone: Mel, Steve and Judy. My cousin Wayne Jarratt was in that year too. He was good, and I seriously felt we’d compete. Unfortunately, he died of a brain tumour not long after he got into the biz.

  Mel and Steve got the parts and filming coincided with their Christmas break. I should have given up acting there and then and become a casting agent. I was doing a show for the Sydney Theatre Company at the Opera House at the same time. Summer City said they’d work around me. It nearly killed me: I worked at Catherine Hill Bay, near Newcastle, during the day and drove back to Sydney in the late afternoon to do the stage show.

  The play was called The Season at Sarsaparilla, written by Patrick White. It was directed by Jim Sharman of Rocky Horror fame, and starred Bill Hunter, Max Cullen, Kate Fitzpatrick and Robyn Nevin. I worked with Julieanne Newbould, who is now Paul Keating’s partner. I shared a dressing room with Max Cullen and Bill Hunter, who drank a lot. During interval they drank a schooner each and considered me a wuss for not joining them. Then they found out I was a NIDA graduate and thought I was an even bigger wuss. I got sick of their lip and brought in a buddha stick each. Bill and I slowly got through ours. Max didn’t touch his, so I had a go at him and Bill joined in. Max snapped the buddha stick into three equal parts, sprinkled his entire third into a joint and started smoking it. We had to be on stage in twenty minutes. Bill and I took up the challenge and smoked our third.

  I was stoned out of my tiny mind. I never worked drunk or stoned; Bill and Max, however, were used to it. They got through the show with flying colours, but I didn’t – I left pauses you could drive a Mack truck through. When I got the line out it made little sense. At the end of the show I was sitting in my make-up chair, freaking out. The door of the dressing room flew open and in stormed Julieanne.

  ‘Don’t you ever walk on a stage with me drunk again, you bastard!’

  I was stoned, Julieanne – again, I apologise; I learned my lesson.

  We were all conned on Summer City. Phil Avalon didn’t have the budget together and we kicked and scratched our way through it. I really don’t know how we did it, but for some strange reason we all pulled together and got it done. Not for Phil’s sake; we were all pissed off with him at the time. Pity, looking back on it, because it wasn’t a bad yarn. If I had hold of it today, I’d do a lot more work on the script, which wasn’t ready. Given the cast we’d assembled, with the right budget and script, it could have gone somewhere. I was a bit try-hard, Phil wasn’t the greatest actor going around, but Steve and Mel were great, especially for a couple of greenhorns not getting much help. Mel is one of the world’s great actors, and there’s a scene in Summer City where he cries over Steve’s character’s corpse: it’s knockout. As I said, great actors are born, not made.

  Two great things did come out of Summer City. The first was that they gave Dad a cameo appearance playing an angry old man. If I ever need to see Dad, I just fast-forward through Summer City and find his scene. He did it very well, and if you ever see it, you’ll know where I got my talent from. He was in his fifties and hadn’t worked hard manually since he left coalmining almost twenty years earlier, so he wasn’t the hulk you see in the photo in the picture section. But he was still formidable. He had a part-time job at the El Rancho drive-through bottle shop. I was twenty-five at the time and I thought I could take him. Three young punks in a Volkswagen took a carton of beer off Dad, refused to pay and started to drive off. Dad opened the passenger door and pulled one guy out and drove a savage punch to the side of his head, KO’ed him. The driver, meanwhile, ran around and flew into Dad. Dad walked through his punches, took hold of him and threw him against the car. He banged the guy’s forehead into the windscreen twice and KO’ed him, too. The third guy sat in the back. Dad went in for him. He was yelling, ‘Don’t hit me, mister,’ and trying to exit through the other side. Dad dragged him out and hit him. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to take him.

  The other good thing about it was that I met a legend, Ross ‘The Nail’ Bailey. He’s still my mate. Ross taught Mel and Steve how to surf. He was the funniest guy with the best stories. He was also a muso: blues harp and sax are his instruments, and he still plays gigs at seventy in and around Newcastle. Ross was arguably the best surfer in Australia in the late fifties and early sixties. He was great before the pro circuit. He was famous for surfing a 30-foot swell in Merewether in the early sixties. Big boards, no leg-ropes, no wetsuits. Google him, it’s worth it. What a guy.

  The Pittwater

  Summer City took us to Christmas 1976. Early in the new year we moved to a little cottage in a tiny settlement opposite Palm Beach called Coasters Retreat. The only way to get there is by boat. We were just back from the water. Our view was across Pittwater to the mouth of Broken Bay; the centrepiece was the majestic Lion Island. This part of the world has everything for me. It’s picture-perfect, easily one of the most beautiful places on earth. The water, the bush, the gum trees, the hills and escarpments, the waterfalls, the wildflowers, the peace and the serenity. ‘How’s the serenity…so much serenity.’ (The Castle, 1997)

  There was a public wharf at Coasters. I bought a 4-metre Hartley timber half-cabin boat with an ancient 50 HP Evinrude. I wasn’t used to boats and I didn’t know how to anchor it properly. The anchor let go and the boat drifted under the jetty. The tide came up and crushed the half-cabin. I suddenly had an open boat. A couple of days later the Evinrude shat itself, so I had to fork out for a 20-horse Mercury.

  Marcus Cooney was a playwright. His most famous plays were Hamlet on Ice and Henry Lawson – In Between the Lines. He was a mate of Bill Hunter and Max Cullen. I got to know him through them and that’s how I ended up at Coasters. Marcus lived a little further north at Mackerel Beach. He saw what I’d done to my boat and immediately christened it the HMAS RS.

  Marcus
was a big bear of a man: about 5 foot 10, with long hair and a beard, a big chest, a big gut, big arms, big legs and a gruff voice, great bloke. Every Friday he would catch an early-morning bus from Palm Beach to the city, his trusty leather briefcase in hand, to see his agent and his publisher. He wrote plays, novels, how-to books, anything to make a quid. After he’d done his business he’d go and get rolling drunk at the East Sydney, the ‘Actor’s Pub’, old-school drunks. We were new-school, drunken drug addicts.

  Marcus always managed to pour himself onto the last bus back to Palm Beach. My phone would ring around eleven-ish for me to go and pick him up. This was the one thing I’d do for him on a regular basis. One night in July it was blowing a southerly gale. To get across to Palmy I had to ‘snake the trough’ (weave my way along the valley between the waves), otherwise I’d get soaked. The waves were between 1 and 2 foot, which is pretty rough for the Pittwater. As I approached the Palmy jetty, I could see Marcus’s massive frame swaying in the breeze. Here’s the funny thing: he never admitted he was drunk. I nosed the boat in for him to step onto. The bow was rocking up and down like you wouldn’t believe. Marcus stepped on with his great weight, which increased the instability. He lost his footing and fell into the bitter cold Pittwater. He somehow kept his briefcase relatively dry. His forearm with fist holding the briefcase was thrust above the water like he had hold of Excalibur. His head slowly emerged from the water and all he said was, ‘Bit rough tonight.’ He was so bright, witty and funny. I loved the big bastard.

  Nineteen seventy-seven was the year of the telemovies for me. First up was Plunge into Darkness, which was shot in Sydney. I played a bad guy with Tom Richards. I can honestly say I don’t remember even the tiniest thing about it; it’s like it didn’t exist. The only thing I remember was a quote from the director, Peter Maxwell. A young actor started acting before ‘Action’ was called. Peter called, ‘Cut,’ and said, ‘My job is to say “action” and “cut”. If I only say “cut”, they will only give me fifty per cent of my wages.’ And that’s all I remember.