The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  Zadia was with us at the time and she was very taken by the fact that she was there when her brother arrived. She feels there’s a special bond with him because of it. Ebony and Charlie are only two years apart, and they spent just about every second weekend and holiday until their teens together, so they’re close too.

  Having a baby in the house from the get-go doesn’t give you much chance to catch your breath. Charlie wasn’t the easiest baby in the world: he was terrible sleeper and he didn’t sleep through until he was two. On that day, Noni and I woke in the morning light. We looked at each and said in unison, ‘He slept through!’ A couple of beats and then in unison, ‘He’s dead!’ We ran down to his bedroom to look at him, and he was breathing. ‘He’s not dead, he slept through,’ we said – and that woke him up.

  When Charlie was a month old, I found he slept better on my chest. It didn’t worry me; I can sleep upside down on a bed of nails in a cyclone. It was February and it was hot, so I was sleeping in a singlet.

  Noni woke me. ‘There’s someone in the house, they’ve turned on the kitchen light!’

  Next thing, this bloke walked in with a torch. I placed Charlie next to Noni, rolled out of bed and started punching the bejesus out of this bloke. We went into the lounge room. The strangest things go through your mind at these times. I was halfway across the lounge room and I was thinking, I’m punching the shit out of this bloke with no pants on, this must look ridiculous.

  Then he pulled a six-inch flick-knife and tried to stab me. Luckily Noni hadn’t put the ironing board away, so I picked it up and used it like a shield. I thought, If he gets me, he’ll stab Noni and Charlie. I had to get rid of this bastard somehow.

  ‘Noni, ring the cops, triple zero, ring the cops!’

  The bastard ran out of the house. I later found out he was deaf. Luckily he could read lips.

  I pulled on my shorts and grabbed my Fields of Fire cane knife (this is a knife).

  Noni looked worried. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m gonna find him and chop his legs. Don’t worry, I won’t kill him.’ And I went looking for him. Luckily for everyone I didn’t find him. You can fuck with an Irish Australian but don’t fuck with his family.

  They arrested the idiot a week later. He still had his flick-knife, the dickhead. When he went to court in Katoomba, we had to turn up because he pleaded not guilty. I looked around and figured they’d bring him into court down the other end of a long hallway. I told Noni I was going to the toilet and went and sat at the door at the end of the hall. If they brought him in I was going to king-hit him, and I didn’t care that I might be jailed for it. It didn’t happen: he ended up pleading guilty and we didn’t have to go in. I told the cops I didn’t want to know the sentence because we didn’t want to know when he’d be released.

  We’d spent a fair bit of money on the house, so we were short of a quid. I had a couple of gigs but not until later in the year. Noni was offered a play, Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune, in April, only three months after giving birth. I felt terribly guilty but Noni impressed upon me that she was perfectly healthy and she could do the job. And she did: she brought the house down, as usual. If you want to see how well Noni can act, watch a film called Fran. In the script, the character of Fran has no redeeming features; she’s a terrible mother and a selfish bitch. Noni played her with so much heart that you can’t help feeling for her. You forgive her. Her performance is brilliant; she is one of the world’s great actors and she won another Best Actor AFI for Fran. She’s won two Logies, two FCCA awards, four AFI awards plus four other nominations.

  Noni was breastfeeding Charlie during the play. I sat through the first half in the dressing room and Noni would feed him during interval, then Charlie and I would head to our flat. We got a system happening and it worked quite well.

  Noni and I both got leading roles alongside Nigel Havers and David Gulpilil in a miniseries called Naked Under Capricorn, set in the late 1800s, which we christened Naked Under Nigel. Noni played Nigel’s wife and I played the bad drover next door. It was four hours of television and Noni and I were only in one scene together, so when she was working I’d look after Charlie and vice versa.

  Having a baby on set, we needed a caravan, and Bill, our agent, had that in our contract. We turned up on set and there was a big Hollywood trailer. Charlie had pooed, so we ducked into the trailer and changed him on the table. During this, the first AD came in with Nigel Havers. We said our hellos and apologised for our son’s bad timing. Nigel seemed cool, but the AD wasn’t. He asked me to step outside, where he explained that the trailer wasn’t ours, it was Nigel’s. He then pointed out ours: an old unregistered Viscount which we had to share with wardrobe. These bastards put an actor from England into a six-berth megatrailer and put the lowly colonial actors with a six-month-old baby into the stinking-hot front end of a rundown Viscount caravan. I said, ‘Where have you got Gulpilil, under a piece of bark?’ After much swearing from Agent Bill, we ended up with a little two-berth Swagman campervan. Yahoo.

  Funnily enough, I enjoyed making this show. The actors were great. Nigel was a tonne of fun, Gulpilil was always a pleasure to be with, the crew were terrific, the director was a pain and the producer was wanting. The location was Alice Springs, so no complaints there.

  The direction was so bad that Nigel and I would leave for location early and rehearse the scenes in the scrub before we got to set, then we’d stick with it no matter what, as the director was quite often way off beam. Noni wanted to kill him; he called her ‘Princess’, brave man.

  There was a sequence where I had to push 300 head of cattle into a holding yard single-handed. Not easy to do. We created a funnel, a fence leading up to the gate on one side and the crew trucks in a line on the other side of the gate. The trucks were framed out. There were three cameras shooting it. My instructions from the director were to get the cattle in, close the gate, move in among the cattle and then they’d cut. I did it first take! I rode in as instructed, cracking the whip and waited for cut, but it didn’t happen. The director was a long, bony urban cowboy. He was beside the camera, yelling at me. I couldn’t hear a thing except a lot of loud mooing. Now, I’m old school, I keep going until we cut. So I was looking at this dude trying to work out what he’s saying, while still in character cracking the whip. This mongrel got the shits and jumped down among the cows, which parted, allowing him to walk up to me. I could now hear him and he was very angry, swearing at me profusely, so I cracked the whip at him. That shut him up! I was very popular after that, with everyone except him.

  John + Alcohol = Disaster

  We virtually went straight from Naked Under Capricorn to Fields of Fire III. I had a hand in writing the script for this one and I put in an alcoholic plot line with my character, Jacko. When Jacko loses his mate Bluey in a light-plane crash, he blames himself and starts drinking heavily. He starts losing friends including his girlfriend, played by Noni. Elsie, the pub owner, drags Jacko out of bed, shoves his head under a tap and gives it to him. She persuades Jacko to go on the wagon. This is one of my favourite scenes ever. Kris McQuade was dynamite. Jacko then falls off the wagon. This scene was the one and only time I stopped being John for a moment and became Jacko.

  When I met Noni I was still smoking dope and drinking. I con­tinued to do both, leading to a couple of embarrassing drunken episodes. The drunkenness didn’t impress Noni. I can’t remember her ever getting legless. Tipsy at times, sure. When Noni was pregnant she kept herself in the peak of good health and put aside all bad habits, but I didn’t. I smoked a lot of dope. Noni became fed up with a partner who sat in a corner, blurry-eyed, talking shit and passing out. I’d work all day on the house and get ripped for the evening, as I was usually physically buggered. Add some THC and pass out. So I gave it away. I had no trouble, which really surprised me. I replaced it, however, with grog.

  I started to have a few beers after working, and then I’d get my favourite red for the evening meal. Noni would
have half a glass and I’d drink the rest. I wasn’t getting drunk, just glowing a little. But parties and get-togethers were a different story. I didn’t get into any fights (although I came close), but there were still plenty of arguments and inappropriate language and chandelier-hanging outrageousness. Something stopped me from any womanising. That something was Rosa. At heart, that’s what destroyed me in Rosa’s eyes, not realising then that the root of our problems was alcoholism.

  A few people, including Noni, suggested I had a drinking problem. I thought they were being ridiculous – I was a long way from being even a heavy drinker. One person with experience of Alcoholics Anonymous told me, ‘It’s not about how much of it you drink, it’s what it does to you when you drink. I’m suggesting when you drink, you drink alcoholically.’ This kind of made sense. I ended up going to AA to shut Noni up, which was the wrong reason. It didn’t last long. I first went to AA in early 1988. I went to one meeting a week; you’re supposed to do ninety meetings in ninety days. I didn’t think I was alcoholic enough. I thought I was a ‘light alcoholic’, like a light beer, compared to most of the AA people.

  I’d busted badly on Naked Under Capricorn. I had a week to go in Alice Springs. Noni had left for Sydney as she wasn’t needed. I got drunk at the bar with Gulpilil, and I woke up at sunrise in a disused drive-in, alone. Last I remembered I’d been in the bar. I’d made an arse of myself as usual.

  I remained sober through Fields of Fire III until New Year’s Eve 1989. I went to an AA New Year’s Eve party. I didn’t know anyone very well, because I used to leave straight after the meetings. I was wandering around the party bored shitless, on my own. Suddenly I thought, This is bullshit. What am I doing here with all these holier-than-thou ex-pisspots? This is so fucking boring. I’m out of here. I drove to Katoomba and got rolling drunk at a street party. I drove home on the back roads. Noni wasn’t impressed.

  In 1989 there was a downturn in the entertainment industry. There wasn’t a lot of work for anyone. Noni had Playschool and the occasional casual shift with ABC Radio 702. This kept us going for most of the year. I picked up a bit of building work renovating Nick A’Hearn and Joanne Samuels’s house around the corner. I’d met Jo on a TV show in 1974. My schoolmate Chris Cummings, who went to NIDA with me, scored a regular gig with Jo on a soapy called Class of ’74. Nick’s a filmmaker, and we made a terrific doco together about the Blue Mountains in 1989 called Spirit of the Mountains, with my blackfella mate Stevie Dodd as presenter. Apart from that, I finished off my house and looked after Charlie a fair bit.

  Charlie was amazing. By the time he was two he could speak flawlessly. He was full-on: his energy was astounding and he was very bright. (I know parents say that but he was very bright.) He hardly slept. Every night you’d put him to sleep, and he’d wake at 1 a.m. ready to party. I’d calm him down, put him in the pram and give him a bottle, then slowly tilt the pram back and rock it gently. I’d start counting slowly back from 100. ‘Ten, nine, eight,’ very gently put the front wheels down, ‘seven, six, five,’ very slowly remove my hands from the handle, ‘four, three, two, one.’ I’d creep towards the bed. Waaaaahhh! ‘One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six…’

  I bought an old house in Mount Victoria for $30,000. Part of the roof was burnt off and it was water damaged. I put the roof back on, repaired it, cleaned it, painted it, refurbished the kitchen and Dad rewired it. Sold it a year later for $80,000. I built a massive shed on my 60-acre property, as well as doing ongoing work at Nick’s house and finishing our house. I was doing all the things that strained my relationship with Rosa, all over again. I only stopped to sleep at night or to look after Charlie when Noni was working. And I wondered why she wasn’t happy.

  Noni felt she was in a rut, and that Blackheath was too far away from where our industry was happening. We’d get more work if we lived in the city. I didn’t want to go. I’d just finished the house and now we were selling it? I lost that battle, and we headed to Sydney in late 1989. I had a Bedford truck at the time, so I saved a few bucks by doing my own move. Tommy Lewis was in town and he helped me pack the truck. We were all packed up and I made a cuppa before I left. I was coming back for another load the next day, so Tom stayed in the house. We were on the deck and a bird whistled. Tommy turned his ear towards it.

  ‘You hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That bird?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘My grandmother just died.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My grandmother just died. Can I use your phone?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Tom’s grandmother lived in Beswick in the Northern Territory. You could only get through on a satellite phone and he was having trouble. I left him with it and headed to Sydney. The next morning he rang me in tears. His grandmother had died when he’d said she did. He went to the bottom of Govetts Leap at daybreak with his didgeridoo and into the valley. He performed ceremony down there. He looked up and hovering above him were two wedge-tailed eagles, Tommy’s totem. I found that extraordinary, but he didn’t. He found it normal.

  The smog hole down below

  We moved into a four-bedroom rental in Neutral Bay. The rent was exorbitant and I wasn’t happy. Noni was invigorated and rubbing her hands together at the abundance of creative pursuits at her doorstep, rather than an hour and a half away in the backwoods. We made a decent profit with the rebuilt Blackheath house and I didn’t want it going out the door on rent, so I suggested we buy property. We looked around but we couldn’t afford a house, so I found a block of land in Narrabeen, Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

  It was a large, steep block with views to the ocean from the top. It had an old fishing shack, a completely ant-eaten wreck with a collapsed roof. Noni was worried the access was too difficult. I reminded her it was just like the island, only you could actually drive a truck straight to it, not a problem. ‘John the Builder’. Would I ever wake up to myself?

  There was no work for me and Noni was pulling as many episodes of Playschool as possible. Noni was in the pursuit of spiritual growth and a meaningful life, and I’m all for it, I’m still pursuing that now. She found this woman whom I called the Soothsayer. The Soothsayer resonated with Noni, and with me too, for a while.

  They’d decided between them that our industry was in fatal decline and I had no future as an actor. It came to the Soothsayer that my ideal profession would be a postman on a pushbike. I heard what they said and immediately went to Narrabeen to demolish the shack, landscape the property and prepare the building site. My brothers, Peter Hehir and Steve Bisley helped me out at times. What with looking after Charlie while Noni worked, it took me about three months to prepare the block. We went for a kit house and we engaged a company to draw up the plans, visit the site and put the plans through council. We paid for that and put in a deposit towards materials. That took a few more months and more of the Blackheath profits. Then the company went bankrupt and we lost the lot.

  I had my three kids together for the first time on Christmas night and Boxing Day 1989. It was so wonderful for me to sit at a table beside my three children that night. Charlie was two, Ebony, four, and Zadia, twelve. It was a pleasant, dreamy, completely contented Christmas.

  There was no work on the horizon in 1990. Money was tight and TV networks stopped making miniseries, which were too expensive and not commercially successful enough. Treasurer Paul Keating was shown the budget of a high-budget film that had failed at the box office. At the time, government-backed films had a whopping 150 per cent tax concession for investors. It was a licence to easily raise money for films in the eighties, which is why, up until then, I’d never been out of work. Keating saw the above-the-line and the exorbitant fee the producers were paying themselves and said, ‘How long’s this been going on?’ It was put back to 100 per cent. I can’t mention the name of the film, let’s just say that it was Blah Blah ba Blah Blah, we rechristened it Blah Blah Fucks the Film Industry.

  Keat
ing and Phillip Adams went on to form the Film Finance Corporation. I think the FFC was weighed down with lawyers and executives. The only thing they knew about making films was what they saw during lunch on a set they’d been invited to. Maybe I’m being harsh, but too many film boards are bereft of film creatives. I know it should lean towards finance, but the funding-body creatives I’ve had to work with to get a film up have had very little feature-film experience. Too often they’ve made a couple of short films, an SBS doco and created a film festival. Festivals with titles like North Bondi Road Bus Shelter Short Film Festival. They’re not people who know enough about movies to make the right choices. Movies are at the top end of what we do. There’s no room for amateurs at this level. Too often the films receiving funding were coming-of-age films or happy little epics about smack freaks in the back streets of Melbourne. Too often too arthouse. The difference between commercial and arthouse films is that people want to see commercial films. Before the FFC was put together, we had blockbuster films like Crocodile Dundee and The Man from Snowy River. So that’s why I was out of work.

  One film that did get up was Waiting, a Jackie McKimmie project. Jackie had written, directed and produced Australian Dream. Waiting was about a surrogate mother about to give birth, and all the people connected with the birth converge on a little country cottage. We’d known about this project when Noni was heavily pregnant with Charlie, so we’d filmed Noni two years earlier swimming with her preggy belly proudly exposed. It looked amazing in the film, and critics were bewildered by how it had been accomplished. I wasn’t in the film; I was there caring for Charlie full-time. He and I had a great time mucking around in the beautiful Hunter Valley every day. Waiting turned out to be a very good film; it deserved a better fate.