by Nino Culotta
JOHN O’GRADY was born in Waverley on 9 October 1907. Soon afterwards his father resigned from his job as editor of the New South Wales Agricultural Gazette and moved the family to a remote farm in the Peel Valley near Tamworth, where he was eventually to go broke. John was educated at home by his father along with several of his seven brothers and sisters. When he was twelve, John went to the Catholic school in Tamworth and later to St Stanislaus’ College, Bathurst. He hoped to become a doctor but there was no money and he graduated from Sydney University as a pharmacist, a profession he never much liked.
John O’Grady was married three times, and had four children. He wrote for most of his adult life, but did not publish a book until he dreamed up They’re a Weird Mob to win a bet. He was fifty when it came out. It remains one of the most successful titles in Australian publishing history. O’Grady abandoned pharmacy and went on to write fifteen more books. In 1959 he published his famous comic poem ‘The Integrated Adjective’, better known as ‘Tumba Bloody Rumba’ in the Bulletin. He died in Sydney in 1981.
JACINTA TYNAN is an author, columnist for Sunday Life, and news presenter on Sky News. Her first book, Good Man Hunting, a memoir about looking for love, earned her the accolade ‘Australia’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw’. Her second book, ‘Some Girls Do: My Life as a Teenager‘ is an anthology of female authors writing the true story of their adolescence. Jacinta is regarded as a commentator for her generation.
ALSO BY JOHN O'GRADY
Cop This Lot (Nino Culotta)
Gone Gougin’ (Nino Culotta)
Gone Fishin’ (Nino Culotta)
Gone Troppo (Nino Culotta)
The Things They Do to You
No Kava for Johnny
Are You Irish or Normal?
Aussie English
Aussie Etiket
It’s Your Shout, Mate
Smoky Joe, the Fish Eater
O’Grady Sez
So Sue Me (reissued by Lansdowne Press as Now Listen, Mate!)
Ladies and Gentlemen (photographs by Douglas Badin)
Survival in the Doghouse
There Was a Kid
Down Under to Up Over (with Molly O’Grady)
The Catherine Wheel
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Copyright © John O’Grady 1957
Introduction copyright © Jacinta Tynan 2012
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First published by Ure Smith Publishers 1957
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Print ISBN: 9781921922183
Ebook ISBN: 9781921921346
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The £10 Bet by Jacinta Tynan
They’re a Weird Mob
EVERY family has a claim to fame and ours is this: we’re related to Nino Culotta. That counted for a lot when I was a child and surpassed all other family feats, including the half-dozen published books of my grandfather Frank O’Grady, or the story of his father who, at fifty-nine, with his eight children and his piano, was forced off the land by drought, and became a barrister.
It’s more than five decades since Nino Culotta published his bestselling novel They’re A Weird Mob, about a young journalist arriving from Italy by ship and finding work as a brickie in Sydney’s Punchbowl, where he eventually learns to bellow, in a near perfect accent, ‘Howyergoinmateorright?’
I have never understood how John O’Grady got away with it. How did he write a book pretending to be Nino Culotta, and still become celebrated by the nation? Helen Darville was hammered nearly forty years later for wearing peasant blouses and feigning Ukrainian ancestry for her award-winning novel. Norma Khouri was pilloried for not having witnessed honour killings in Jordan, as she claimed in Forbidden Love.
So how did Uncle Jack pull it off? That’s my great-uncle John O’Grady, of one hundred per cent Irish Catholic stock, who convinced everybody that he was a naive, loveable Italian immigrant who lobbed here with nothing but an English phrasebook that bore no resemblance to the pub talk in Kings Bloody Cross.
Nino quickly learns that a ‘schooner’ is not a sailing vessel and a ‘shout’ doesn’t mean to yell, all handy material for the articles about the Australian way of life he is supposedly writing for an Italian newspaper. He takes a labouring job in an attempt to meet ‘Working Australians’, and is initiated into the world of mateship. Nino may not always understand what his ‘cursing, profane, laughing, beer drinking, abusive, loyal-to-his-mates Australian’ friends are saying but he learns to love them: they will always stand by him even if they give him a ribbing in the process. He winds up buying a block of land, marries a builder’s daughter and thanks God for ‘letting me be an Australian’.
The reviewers praised the ‘New Australian’ Culotta for his ‘triumph over a strange and ridiculous tongue’ and for ‘marching boldly but unassumingly into unfamiliar surroundings’.
Only, the surroundings were not unfamiliar, and there was nothing unassumed about it.
The book happened by accident. John O’Grady was a pharmacist. He accepted his lot until he took a bet with his younger brother, Frank, my grandfather, whose historical novels included The Golden Valley in 1955 and Hanging Rock in 1957.
John’s son, also John O’Grady, recalls it well. ‘Every Sunday the family would gather at my grandparents’ home in Bronte. One Sunday my Uncle Frank had a new book out and foolishly asked Da what he thought of it. My father used to refer to Frank’s books as “library novels”, because they were researched in the library. Da said, “Not much, and if I can’t write a better book than that I’ll give up.” So Frank bet him £10 that he couldn’t write any sort of book and get it published. “I’ll take the bet,” Da said.’
John had written before—one-act plays for the Sydney Repertory Theatre, which he resurrected, including a version of Julius Caesar in the vernacular —but never a novel. When he took time out from the pharmacy sometime in the mid-fifties to help a mate build a house at Punchbowl, it got him thinking.
‘He was fascinated by the people he met on the building site—but couldn’t understand them,’ recalls John jnr. ‘They were speaking “Australianese”, as he used to call it. He thought the language was wonderful, but asked himself, “If I can’t understand it, what about these poor migrants?” At the same time he’d been learning Italian from his barber, so that’s where the idea for the book came from.’
At the age of forty-nine, John O’Grady wrote They’re a Weird Mob in six weeks in an exercise book before heading to Samoa as the Government Pharmacist. He gav
e the manuscript to his son and forgot all about it.
‘He said, “Toss this in a drawer until I get back.” He certainly didn’t think it would get published. But I decided it was too good for that. I really did think it was very funny.’
John jnr, who was working with Reg Grundy on Wheel of Fortune on 2CH, decided to act as his father’s agent. After a rejection from the legendary editor Beatrice Davis at Angus & Roberston—‘in spite of some very amusing incidents and a fine command of Australian slang, the story would not make a successful book’—he sent the manuscript to the publisher Ure Smith, under the pseudonym Nino Culotta (‘culotta’ being slang for ‘bum’, a word John presumably learnt from his barber).
Sam Ure Smith gave the pages to his secretary, Janet Venn-Brown. ‘I was the first one to read it,’ recalls Janet, whose job it was to read the slush pile and ‘make the tea’.
‘I used to take the manuscripts to the hairdresser when I went to get my hair set in my lunch time. Most of them were very boring. Suddenly this one seemed brilliant. It was terribly funny. I laughed all the time. It was very original in its approach to Australia. I ran back to the office and said to Sam, “I think this could be a bestseller.”’
‘She came rushing back to the office waving it in the air,’ Sam remembers, ‘and said, “You have to read this now.” I started it on the train and I came back the next morning and said, “You’ve picked a winner.” It was plain good humour. Very Australian and entertaining. I thought, “I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t sell like mad.” I rang John O’Grady, the agent, and said, “I accept this for publication.”’
John was delighted but also disconcerted. ‘I didn’t know quite what to tell Sam because he wanted to meet the author. I tried to fudge it but decided to let him in on the secret that Nino Culotta was my father. Sam decided to leave it as it was. He thought the book would be more successful if people thought it was written by a “New Australian”, so we kept it between us.’
Australians new and old lapped it up. Published in November 1957, it sold a record 130,000 copies in its first year. ‘This averages at three thousand per week, sixty per hour and one every minute of the working day!’ Ure Smith bragged.
‘I started to get a bit nervous about how long we could keep this going,’ John remembers. ‘Journalists wanted to talk to Nino Culotta. I kept putting them off, saying he was out of the country, which was true because my father was still in Samoa. But they were suspicious. I cabled him and said we needed a photo, so he sent a picture of himself sitting on a kerosene tin with his back to the camera.
‘But then, two months after the novel was published, a journalist named Ross Campbell blew our cover in the Daily Telegraph. Ure Smith used the author’s real name when he registered the book with the National Library in order to obtain an ISBN. Ross Campbell was the only one smart enough to take a look. He rang Sam and said, “I know who it is. I’m breaking the story. You can have it your way or my way.”
‘We had to come clean. We were worried it might kill sales but it didn’t. They went through the roof.’
Sam Ure Smith recalls, ‘It was well-liked by the bookshops and that makes a big difference. It just took off. Boom! It was my greatest success in publishing. We flew ahead after that.’
When O’Grady eventually returned to Sydney, he had no idea of the hype. ‘I cabled him to expect press at Mascot,’ remembers his son, ‘and he got off the plane wearing the regalia of a Samoan chief in grass skirt and headdress. The press loved him.’
There were ‘Weird Mob’ parties across the country, with guests sporting blue singlets and workboots. Nino Culotta encouraged Australians to laugh at themselves, while providing a walloping hint for the ‘New Australians’ who were gracing our shores: ‘Get yourself accepted…and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed,’ he wrote. ‘And once you have entered it, you will never leave it.’ The book remains just as relevant today: Weird Mob is about good people trying to make a go of things. With its rollicking and affectionate humour, it showcases our manners, our wit and our distinctive vernacular—where ‘they open their mouths no more than is absolutely necessary’.
When Nino decides he needs a wife he starts looking in the Corso at Manly. He spots two girls in a cafe and offers to teach them how to eat spaghetti.
I said to her, ‘Please try it with the fork. It’s much easier.’
She said again, ‘Mind your own business.’
I said, ‘I am trying to help you. I will introduce myself. I am Nino Culotta.’
She said, ‘I won’t tell anybody.’…
Dixie said, ‘What are you doing out on an evening like this?’
‘I am looking for a wife.’
‘Whose?’
‘Nobody’s. I mean, I wish to get married, and I am looking for someone who is my type, and whom I can marry.’
The brunette looked up at me. She had large blue eyes. They were very cold. She said, ‘Have you tried the Zoo?’
I said, ‘You do not appear to like me very much.’
‘Give me three reasons why I should.’
‘I am strong. I am not married. I have money in the bank.’
‘Think up three other reasons,’ she said, and took up her spoon again.
Dixie said, ‘That last reason’s very interesting. How much?’
John O’Grady still has his father’s first and only rejection letter framed on his wall. As the former head of situation comedy at the ABC, whose best-known success was Mother and Son, he says it is a reminder to never turn down a hit show. ‘I always got asked if I was that John O’Grady. My father loved it because he claimed credit for all the TV shows I did, except the ones he didn’t like.’
They’re a Weird Mob was reprinted every year for the next thirty-eight years. It sold the best part of a million copies. The movie, which premiered in 1966, echoed the novel’s success by breaking all box-office records for a local production. Originally optioned by Gregory Peck for $10,000 in 1958, the film was eventually made by the British director Michael Powell, starring Walter Chiari as Nino alongside Chips Rafferty and John Meillon, with a cameo by Graham Kennedy.
John wrote eighteen more books, including four sequels to Weird Mob, and never went back to the pharmacy. Or Samoa. And yes, some time before he died in 1981, he collected on that £10 bet with my grandfather.
This is a work of fiction, and is dedicated to all Australians who work with their hands, in gratitude for their very real contributions to my education.
Anyone who thinks he recognises himself in these pages, probably does.
N. C.
CHAPTER ONE
Who the hell’s Nino Culotta? That’s what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn’t it? Well I’m Nino Culotta. My father had me baptised Giovanni—John—well Giovannino is like Johnny, and Nino is an easier way of saying it. Or a lazier way, if you like. The Culotta family is not famous for doing anything the hard way. It is not famous for doing anything. Because as far as I know it doesn’t exist. Not in my family, anyway. My family name is something quite different, but I can’t use it here. Because this little book is about Australians, and if they knew who wrote it, some of them might put bricks through my windows. My windows cost me a lot of money and perspiration. To have windows you must first have a house, and I built my house with my own two hands and used the sweat of my head. Whenever I had a fiver I bought something, and whenever I had a week-end I built something. Sometimes concrete, sometimes brick, sometimes wood. And all costing plenty. And you know where I am now? I’m sitting outside my house early on Sunday morning, and the sun is just coming through the trees, and a dog is looking at me. In those trees there are kookaburras, and they laugh. Flying amongst those trees there are dollar birds, and they squawk. There are other birds whose names I do not know, but they all talk and the dew is
shining on my grass, and I’m glad I built my house here. There are ants and flies and mosquitoes too, but everybody has to live, and I don’t mind if these little ones live off me a bit. It would be nice if I didn’t have to go to work to-morrow, but ants and flies and mosquitoes are not a satisfactory diet for a man as big as I am. My wife doesn’t like them either. She’s still in bed. I like to go to bed early and get up early, and she likes to go to bed late and get up late, so we don’t see each other very much to talk. Except when there’s a party, and nobody goes to bed. But she’s a nice wife. She’s an Australian. Not a black one. The ordinary kind, with one Irish ancestor and one French ancestor and some other kinds further back. I met her in a café, when she was trying to eat spaghetti with a spoon. This is not possible, I told her so, and she told me to mind my own business. You wouldn’t think that could lead to marriage, but it can. So you see she is Mrs-what-my-real-name-is, and I don’t want the bricks that might break my windows to fall on her head. So I call myself Culotta. But the Nino is true. I was baptised Giovanni.
My father had me baptised Giovanni because that was his own name and he was very proud of it. I do not know if he consulted my mother. But he often told me when I was a boy that I must grow up strong and brave because my name was Giovanni. I grew up strong enough, but bravery is a thing I haven’t got. I had to have a good education too, because all Giovannis were knowledgeable men. We were big frogs in a small puddle in Piedmont, and when I left the village school and was taken to board with a relative whilst acquiring ‘higher education’, I found myself a small frog in the big puddle of Milano. It was in Milano that I first began to be interested in people as something other than just somebody else. I wanted to find out the reasons why they did the things they did. This curiosity got me much trouble. It also got me much hard work. Many foreigners came to Milano, and I couldn’t find out much about them, because I couldn’t understand them. So I studied languages very diligently. When I thought I could speak English well enough, I began to ask questions of English people, and I got more trouble than when I was asking questions of the Milanese. But I also got a job with a big publishing house, interviewing foreigners and writing stories about them in the magazines. The French people were troublesome, because they said so much in answer to a question that much had to be left out of my articles; and the English people were troublesome because they said so little that I had to fill up from my imagination. What I imagined was not always true, and some of the English people could read Italian, and my troubles were plentiful.
