The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  The Settlement is one of my favourite films, shot in Brisbane in 1982. Set in the fifties, it was about two itinerants who meet up with a wayward girl and form a ménage à trois. They acquire a shack on the outskirts of a small country town, which causes the straitlaced locals to revolt against them.

  Bill Kerr played my older mate and Lorna Lesley played the girl. Bill Kerr lived in London in the sixties and he was a regular on Hancock’s Half Hour. He played the coach in Gallipoli: ‘What are ya legs?’ ‘Steel springs.’ He was amazingly talented. He tried to teach me the soft-shoe shuffle. One great moment of my life. We were in a room with a stand-up piano. I was in a lounge chair and Billy sat at the piano, playing ‘As Time Goes By’, and did the perfect Humphrey Bogart impersonation.

  Part of the action was a tent boxing sequence. My opponent was a famous stuntman, Peter Armstrong, a big man and an ex-wrestler. We worked out the boxing sequence. He was supposed to throw a left–right combo. He went right–left. I threw my head away for the left and copped a right-cross fair on the button. He nearly knocked me out – it’s the hardest punch I’ve ever copped. He was devastated. He dropped both gloves and begged me to hit him. He showered me with gifts and T-shirts from his time on LA movies. Pete was a legend, and I’m almost honoured to have been thumped by him and not fallen over. Jarratts have hard heads, and what we lack in talent we make up for in staying power.

  Chase through the Night was a miniseries made in late 1982. For the first time I played an out-and-out dummy. I was part of a crime gang. There were three of us: Number One (Paul Sonkkila) was the brains, Number Two (Scott McGregor) was the nice guy, and Number Three (John Jarratt) was the comic numbskull. I loved this comic role that bordered on slapstick. My relationship with Rosa was not good and I was very sad at the time. I was pleased to be able to do something that made me laugh. We held this little town hostage, including a bunch of teenagers. The female lead was played by a sixteen-year-old Nicole Kidman. She was great then, she shone. Don’t believe what the papers say; she is just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch

  As I’ve already mentioned, my weaknesses at the time were tunnel vision, manipulation and idealism. I’d see the glimmering, shining end result and fail to see the amount of hard work it would take to get there and the things that could go wrong.

  Here’s a list of the things I took on between late 1981 and 1984. I bought my horse from The Last Outlaw. Horses take a lot of looking after and they cost money. I agisted the horse at Bert Carlon’s farm in the mountains, two hours away. I masterminded the acquisition of 100 acres with the Kelly Gang nine hours from Sydney at Kyogle, to build a mansion on. I finished my first house, put it up for rent and took my family across the road to live in a shed while I built a house on a block of land I’d just bought behind my first house. I helped to rebuild a house for Charlie’s widow. I spent every second weekend for a year helping Dad turn a shack into a duplex with a pool and a massive sandstone studio. I made five films and two TV shows. When I was home, I worked five days a week with Rossini’s Raiders.

  The Outlaw property

  While we were shooting The Last Outlaw, I thought it’d be a great way to keep the team together if we bought a country property we could all contribute to. We used to visit Michael Caton a lot in Melbourne (we called him the ‘Surrogate Outlaw’). The partnership ended up being me, Steve Bisley, Peter Hehir, Michael Caton, Ric Herbert and John Ley. Out of that crowd Peter, John Ley, Bizo and I had building skills. I came back from doing The Last Outlaw and told Rosa it was all decided, we’re buying this property. She was totally against it and was pissed off that she wasn’t consulted. I didn’t care, I’d already made up my mind.

  We went on a recce up the North Coast and found the most beautiful 100 acres you could hope for. You drove into a lush green paddock on a rise looking towards a mountain, a perfect house site. A creek ran through at the bottom of the rise. It boasted the best swimming hole in the district: the creek cut a 30 metre by about 300 metre cliff, below which sat the swimming hole, surrounded by God’s rainforest garden, with the odd rock island in the middle to sunbake on. Beyond the creek about 70 acres rolled up a gentle hill into a eucalypt forest. Where? Kyogle, nine hours from Sydney and an hour and a half due west of Byron Bay. Yeah sure, we’d visit that place frequently. Stupid.

  Christmas 1981. We turned up with wives, kids and camping gear to start building the house that Peter had designed. Pete has a heart of gold, he’s still a good mate to all of us. He was raised in an orphanage, he’s very bright and in those days he knew everything. All there was to know about acting or building, he knew. A recipe for disaster. One of the best actors I’ve ever seen, a producer and director’s nightmare. He ended up leaving the biz. His famous saying is, ‘I look back on my career and all I can see is smouldering bridges.’ Needless to say, he got up everyone’s nose at Kyogle.

  He grabbed me by the throat one day. I looked him right in the eye as a lion would his prey and informed him of what would happen if he didn’t let go. He slowly released his grip, got in his car and returned to Sydney. Cliff, my mate and neighbour on the island, took over his share. We ended three weeks labour with sixteen large poles in the ground forming the octagonal shape of the ‘future homestead’.

  We did enjoy ourselves. We managed to drive to Byron a few times between building. There was a lot of tension, though. Bizo and I ended up yelling at each other for the first (and hopefully last) time.

  We rarely got back to the joint. Cliff and Johnny Ley spent some time turning the cowshed into living quarters. I went back once with Bizo to plant an orchard, which a neighbour was going to nurture; he didn’t and the trees died.

  We drove up in my freshly painted, restored 1959 FB Holden. Steve was driving as we came down the hill into Murwillumbah at night. We went around a corner and ran into a cow. Bizo sat there distraught.

  ‘Jack, mate, fuck, I’m sorry, I’ve smashed your beautiful car.’

  ‘Fuck the car, we passed a semi coming up the hill, get off the road!’

  Bizo managed to drive off. The semi came around the corner and ran over the injured cow. The truckie called the cops on his CB. We cleaned the car of empty beer cans and hid our stash.

  We spent two days going to the wreckers for a mudguard and a bonnet and repairing my car. We planted the orchard and drove home again.

  The second house; the end is nigh

  I still had a fair bit to do to finish the house. I was kind of hoodwinked by my father to buy the chalet-styled kit home for monetary reasons, and I just couldn’t embrace it. The council made me compromise from the get-go; they were a pain in the arse. From the beginning, I wanted to place the house in the middle of the block, so I removed two big sturdy gum trees. The council then said I couldn’t build there because it was a sloping block and removal of the stumps would cause slippage problems. I’d lost two good trees for no good reason. I won’t bore you with the rest, but I felt I was living in the house the council wanted, not the one I wanted.

  There was a block of land next to Cliff’s place for sale, directly behind where we were living. I wanted to buy it for a number of reasons. The block and Cliff’s block were long, thin rectangles. If you divided the block down the middle you’d end up with two very usable squares. Cliff’s house would be on the front square and I’d build my house on the back square. The back square was serviced by a road, so all good. Cliff loved this idea. I worked out a plan to build my house where the shed was on the back of Cliff’s block. I said to Cliff, ‘Let’s just do it and subdivide and put the plans in for the house after I build it.’ If I sold my house, I’d have enough to pay off the new block and pay for the new house. I’d be in my early thirties with no mortgage!

  I explained all this to Rosa and she didn’t want to know. We had a huge argument and I said I didn’t care, I’d earned the money, I was buying the land. I got a mortgage and bought the land. I had to rent out the house
with a ‘For sale’ sign on it. I couldn’t afford two mortgages. It’s hard to sell a house when there’s a six-month lease on it, and it wasn’t as easy to sell as I’d hoped.

  Rosa, Zadia and I moved into the shed at the back of Cliff’s block. I set up a makeshift kitchen and we had to share his bathroom. Things weren’t too good for Rosa and me. The angrier she got with the crap I was laying on her, the angrier I got at her for not supporting my crappy plans.

  Through all this, I was going off on location, then coming back to work five days a week with Rossini’s Raiders. I walked in and out of my building job whenever I had to. My old man was asking for help with his new house build, turning a shack into a duplex with a pool and a massive sandstone studio. I had to help him because he helped us. And I’d started work on our new house. Rosa never knew that I hadn’t put the plans through council or subdivided. She had started a full-time arts course in the city. She drove there five days a week and I looked after Zadia, who’d just started school. Rosa got her ready in the morning and she arrived home off the ferry at 3.45 p.m. I had to knock off for when she came home, so it was easy to keep things from Rosa. Deceit never works. How naive and stupid I was.

  I kept the lantana patch on my front boundary to hide my building. An island local Dave Lahm used to drive the council building inspector around. They were driving below my place and the inspector looked up. ‘Stop!’

  Lahmy hit the brakes.

  ‘There’s a building up there.’

  Yeah.’

  ‘It’s on the back of Cliff Kane’s block.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There’s no building approval for that!’

  ‘Oh.’

  He jumped out of the car and headed for my place. He found me cutting timber. I saw him coming, and I knew who he was.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m building a house…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This way I can build the house I want, instead of putting in the plans first and building the house you want.’

  ‘It’s on the back of Cliff Kane’s fucking block!’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ve bought the block next door, we’re going to subdivide down the middle.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘I’m putting a bloody demolition order on this!’

  ‘Hey! Don’t yell at me, mate. I knew you’d put a demo order on me, but there’s already a precedent: a retirement home was built without plans, you put an order on it, they submitted the plans and you passed them. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m putting an immediate stop-work on this.’

  ‘No worries, see you at the next round-up.’

  I’ve never been good with authority. Blame it on my daddy.

  The cat was out of the bag. Rosa found out and all hell broke loose. We had a big fight and I ran away. That’s how I always coped with adversity, right up until fairly recently. Hopefully that’s the last of the many defects I’ve had to conquer over a lifetime. If I argue with someone and I can’t hit them, my first instinct is to run away. It’s called fight or flight. I sometimes used to run but not go anywhere. I’d run behind the veil of a drug, mostly dope, sometimes booze.

  So Rosa had to put up with a driven, deceitful, tunnel-visioned, manipulative, addicted, alcoholic, workaholic nutcase. She had her problems too, but pretty minor compared to mine. We really weren’t getting along very well at all at this stage.

  Rosa and I went to a fancy-dress party. As our relationship at the time was tumultuous I thought it would be funny to go as a priest and a nun. I brought the costumes home and she couldn’t see the funny side. Neither can I, now.

  The party was ‘out there’ and I got very drunk very quickly. Rosa wanted to go home. She tells me she looked into my glassy eyes and it was almost like I wasn’t there. She left me there. I was among the last to leave, around 3 or 4 a.m. On the way home an indiscretion happened that I don’t wish to discuss any further. I was found out and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back on my marriage. It should never have happened.

  We broke up. I went to my brother Barry’s house on the island. I was a mess, completely shattered. I knew this was different to the odd times I’d run away. For a start, I’d never been kicked out before. I went into a dark hole I’ve never been in before or since. The universe gave me Rosa, my Garden of Eden, and I turned it into the Land of Nod. I felt like my arms and legs had been cut off.

  I was still. I stopped still and I couldn’t do anything. For the first time since I’d cleared the block of land back in 1978, I stopped. I didn’t do anything: no drugs, no booze, no work. One evening I walked down the road and looked up at my house. I could see the two shapes moving around the lounge room. Rosa and Zadia. It was like watching a movie, they were right there but I couldn’t touch them, I couldn’t be with them. My two angels up there and I was down the hill in hell. I wanted to end it, I wanted to die. There was a small bridge leading across a gully to a property. I saw a skeleton under it. It wasn’t there, but I saw it. A voice said to me, ‘You’ve got a daughter, you can’t die, you’ve got a daughter.’ My dad often said things like, ‘The gutless bastard’s got kids, he has no right to kill himself.’ That’s as close as I’ve ever come to suicide.

  I managed to drag myself back to work. I was walking around like a zombie. I just had to get back with Rosa. When I make up my mind to do something I normally do it. I think I just wore her down. It wasn’t the way to do it. I needed to heal the wounds, show more compassion, learn something from my mistakes, take it easy. I just wasn’t like that. I had it in my head, I want her back and I’ll be a good boy. It was like ice between us: she didn’t trust me and why should she? She was wary of me and I couldn’t please her; I was on trial.

  By this stage I’d built the lounge room, the kitchen and a bedroom divided into two. I spent all day plumbing the sink taps off Cliff’s tanks and putting the drainage in as well. Rosa came home from the art college just as I’d finished sweeping up the sawdust. There were a lot of dirty dishes beside the sink. I proudly turned the taps on, filled the sink and pulled the plug out to show off the drainage.

  Rosa said, ‘You could have done the dirty dishes.’

  I was still in purgatory. A sensible man would have ridden it out and kept working towards redemption. Not me, I wanted it now. Patience and tolerance weren’t strong points for me.

  Not long after, I brought a big box of vegetables home. Rosa and I got into an argument, I can’t even remember what it was about. I lost my temper, and I had a doozy of a temper. Rosa had put up with it in the past, but no more; those days were gone. I threw the vegies at the rock wall, at the house, onto the courtyard; they exploded everywhere. I called her for everything and did my usual flight. Rosa had had enough: she needed a complete break.

  Rosa came to me and said she was going to Italy for a while with Zadia. Rosa is one good-looking woman, so my heart sank. I thought she’d meet a rich, handsome Italian man and I’d be flying to and from Italy to see Zadia. I was sure it was over now. I kind of came to grips with it and started to try getting back into life.

  I lived in the house but I couldn’t bring myself to do any work on it. I saw it as part of the problem. I never worked on it again, which was dumb. If I’d finished it I would have got a good price. It was sold as half-built, not even that. I sold the A-frame, owned the new property outright and didn’t get the profit. No mortgage at thirty-three.

  My wife and daughter were sitting pretty. It’s what I busted a gut for and I blew it.

  At this stage of my life I’d never sought any help for my behaviour. No counselling, nothing, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I thought I was a good bloke, better behaved than a lot of the men around me. There were a lot of local workers around the island and the bays: barge operators, jetty builders, house builders, electricians, concreters, tilers, carpenters, plumbers, ferry operators, outboard mechanics, boat builders, slip o
perators. We used to drink illegally at the ‘Church Point Arms’, a park beside the general store, next to the grog shop. Many of this crowd used to drink there every afternoon at beer o’clock, and they’d still be there at 9 p.m. around a fire drum in winter, but I wasn’t one of them.

  I did what my father did, because that’s what I’d learned unconsciously. I worked all day at my job and spent all weekend building a house for my family. Dad did that all his life. So did I, up until four years ago, but never as full-on as in the early eighties. Dad had a bad temper and he said he couldn’t help it; it was the way he was. I had a bad temper and couldn’t help it (so I thought). I got it from my father. Dad loved Mum and his sons very deeply; he would have cheerfully died for us. But he took Mum for granted. He worked his guts out, he did what was expected of him and felt she should be grateful. I did the same thing. He took Mum for granted, I took Rosa for granted. I didn’t think I was anything like Dad at the time, but in so many ways I was just like him. I never belted my kids and I told my kids (and still tell them) how much I love them and how wonderful they are. Why? Because every time I sat there heaving with the pain from a hiding, being told I was an idiot, I swore I’d do the opposite when I had kids. If only Mum had taught me to tell my future wife how much I loved her every day, to never yell at her or call her names. To take time out to be with her and our kids, and take her on a holiday, often. Instead my mantra was I’m gonna own my home outright by the time I’m thirty-five. I beat it by two years. I owned my home but it was empty.

  Zadia was gone. She was only five, and she was gone. I was on my own in our home, watching kids TV. My left arm reached out to where Zadia’s shoulders usually were; my arm fell flat and I started to cry. Georgie, my dog, got on my lap and put her paws around my neck. This was not unusual: this dog was amazing, she knew when I was suffering. I didn’t talk to Georgie in words, I talked in sentences and she understood. I thank God for her. I was never alone, thanks to her.