‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ he said to me, clapping his hands gleefully like a dizzy chorus girl on Broadway.
The campervan salesman looked over at me with a smirk. He was wearing pleated trousers and an Akubra hat. I felt myself cringing like a humiliated teenager again, feeling his judgement. Have you not got a husband?
We drove from Darwin through crowded Batchelor, sleepy Pine Creek, vicious Katherine. The woman working in the local post office wore a t-shirt sporting the Australian flag with the words IF YOU DON’T LOVE IT, LEAVE plastered across it and I heard my mother and I tsk loudly at the same time. We caught each other’s passive-aggressive middle-class protest and turned, suddenly and shyly, feeling the tug of the invisible umbilical cord.
In the van they entertained and humiliated me; singing Easybeats classics loudly out of the window and bombarding passersby with their intriguing range of comedy accents. The laidback people of the Territory were clearly bemused by Mr and Mrs Boy from Oz and their overgrown retarded child. When we booked into caravan parks I would find myself slinking away for time alone, burying myself in a book and silently wishing—not for the first time—that I had at least one other sibling to bear the brunt of my parents’ aggressive love and companionship.
Travelling with them again brought back visceral memories. They were hands on, engaged. Everywhere we stopped they wanted to read from pamphlets and point out interesting facts and take photographs. It was like going on a roadtrip with the presenters of The Curiosity Show.
The first night we slept together in the van I lay awake for hours, listening to them rustle and shift and snore. Far from being of comfort, it was a lurch into quiet panic.
If they have sex, I thought, I am definitely going to kill myself.
At night we would eat barbecued fish and drink gin and play cards. I would sneak extra wine in order to try and overcome the discomfort of being bunk buddies with my mother and father.
‘Just going for a little walk!’ I would tell them, heading directly to the van park bar. I would sit in the baking heat, reading Vonnegut and drinking from face-sized glasses of syrupy warm Territory wine. By the third night I was so rolling drunk I accidentally tried to get into bed with them.
Kalkaringi was an odd place; frankly startled into life by the 40th anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off and ensuing two-day party that we were there to partake in. Everywhere you looked there were ABC outside broadcast vans and random community groups being bussed in from neighbouring towns. Teams of teenage boys with gargantuan surly clodhoppers of shoes roamed in sullen packs. People were there to celebrate Gurindji Freedom Day, marking the famous ‘handful of sand’ moment immortalised in the song ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’. It was utterly impossible to be anywhere near Kalkaringi without having Paul Kelly on endless rotation in your mind, like some kind of twisted jukebox. I could hear people humming it as they went past.
My father was due to make a speech, and he was nervous. He locked himself into the campervan for an hour and we watched it wobble as he paced inside, continuously bumping into the bar fridge with a merry little explosion of, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ My mother looked over at me.
‘It means a lot to him that you’re here,’ she said.
I wasn’t comfortable with this overt sentimentality. I ached for a drink.
‘Well . . . whatever.’
‘It means a lot to me too.’
I kicked at the dust like a mule.
‘Your dad never came here with his father. Frank was always so emotionally distant, and Alan was incredibly independent . . . I suppose when he was growing up he found Frank slightly embarrassing.’
The thought that my father might have been embarrassed by his own parents had never crossed my mind. It was the territory of the young.
‘I suppose he saw bringing you here as a sort of—reaching out, generationally. We know you’re busy. It’s really lovely that you took the time.’
Busy being drunk, busy drinking Jägermeister shots at the Tote. I felt suddenly and deeply ashamed of my overgrown adolescence.
There was a ceremony. People spoke about my grandfather in a way that made him sound like an important stranger. Some local kids got up and sang ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ in a shrill vibrato. Everybody clapped and fanned at flies. And then it was my father’s turn.
‘When my father came here, he had no spirit. He had lost his ability to tell stories. The Gurindji people and their spirit inspired him . . . and through this inspiration he found his spirit and his stories once more.’
He looked around at the silent mob of faces.
‘When I was last here, I sat with Mick at the Victoria River and he told me that my father’s spirit lives here, with the Gurindji. We owe so much to this place and its people. Thank you for having us here with you today.’
It was heartfelt and succinct. My mother’s face was wet with tears when he returned to his seat, but I saved mine until I was safely returned to the bosom of the crowd; big dollops soaking behind my oversized sunglasses, safely hidden beneath my Stevie Nicks hat with the swooping brim. I wasn’t even certain why I was crying until my dad reached over and took my hand for a reassuring squeeze.
The drive back to Darwin was infinitely more relaxed. I joined in the singalongs and tried not to hide in the back when my mother insisted we take turns in re-enacting scenes from Bugsy Malone. As we motored into the campervan rental yard I felt a sharp stab that this trip would be taken from me before I truly had a chance to appreciate it. I berated myself for wasting precious moments anaesthetising myself with liquor when I could have been doing cartwheels in the desert sand. As we unpacked the van I found a collection of serviettes and business cards in a small plastic bag, along with a notebook and a tube of glue.
‘For the scrapbook,’ my father said, when he saw me standing with it. ‘We thought you might like to do it at the airport while you’re waiting to board.’
I had been saddled with the responsibility once more of maintaining the memories and to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure I’d been sober enough to document anything past 7 pm. I tied the neck of the bag with a knot and placed it in my luggage. We hauled everything out of the van and stood looking at it, feeling the scorch of the sun.
‘I don’t know about you two,’ said my mother, ‘but I could murder a scotch and dry.’
On travels overseas now I shun the dozy, blinking tourist routes and attempt to blend into the landscape, to immerse myself in the daily life of a town and only participate in the occasional modest begging episode or two. When fragments of memory return from that Darwin trip they are inevitably less about the magnificent landscapes and culture and more about my relationship with my parents . . . what it felt like to fall asleep in a strange van to the sounds of their breath, how they challenged me and educated me and continued to show me the world despite my best efforts to drive them crazy. And when I hunger for the detailed anecdotes, the dates, the places, the people, the francs and pennies and lire, I go directly to the scrapbook and am transported instantly to an A3 cache of perfect recognition.
Parts of this story first appeared in Sunday Life magazine and the A2.
The business
It’s nobody’s fault specifically that I was a child actor.
My parents were against the idea from the outset, and tried to discourage me by saying educational, nurturing things like, ‘It’s not that we don’t want you to be an actor. It’s just that we’d prefer you to do something more productive and fulfilling with your life, like ingesting peyote and running naked onto a busy highway.’ They had both been actors themselves, and knew the emotional tumult, creative humiliation and crippling self-doubt that came hand in hand with consistently prostituting oneself out for auditions in front of unimpressed directors named JP or Cozzo. It was a difficult world, a lonely one. It was a world that destroyed upstanding human beings like Winona Ryder and John Barrymore and Gary Busey. They were naturally afraid for my long-term wellbein
g.
Before I was born my father’s stint as ‘the Australia Post guy’, had involved adorning pamphlets at post offices nationwide that provided people who may not have known any better—those awakening from a deep coma perhaps, or hairdresser to the stars Lillian Frank—with information and helpful hints on how to send parcels and aerogrammes. The ‘How to Send Air Mail!’ one was a particular highlight, featuring as it did my father wearing an aviator jacket and flying goggles whilst standing inside a cardboard box, scarf flying out at an angle implying great gusts. I used to study these pamphlets with intense concentration, digging them out of the shoeboxes he’d stuffed them into years earlier, forgetting them along with his unfulfilled dreams of ever being the next Henri Szeps.
My father is on a pamphlet, I would marvel. I am without question the luckiest kid alive.
A VHS showreel of his earlier performances was later brought out to humiliate him at some party or other, introducing friends and family to a whole new chapter of his acting career. He had cut his teeth on the stage in children’s panto, and then spent a miserable few years repeatedly saying yes to the corporate cock suckingness of commercials and a humiliating handful of forgettable background guest roles. That footage of my father in a bowler hat and false moustache exists for posterity while Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s seminal sketch comedy series Not Only . . . But Also was erased by the BBC and left to die is, I’m aware, brutally unfair and an all too grim reminder about the futility of human existence as a whole.
The best of my father’s commercials was for Bristol Paints. He played an over-eager junior salesman wearing a velour v-neck sweater over a white skivvy, and flared trousers so tight it’s a miracle he was eventually able to work up enough semen to create a child. His long-suffering manager was, if memory serves, a man with the all-purpose boss name ‘Mr Weatherbee’ or somesuch, and whose sole job was to look ham-fistedly fed up while my father comically knocked over precariously stacked pyramids of paint tins. Dad also did a television advertisement for a popular ’70s wine label that involved him pacing a bottle shop wondering how to match the foods he was serving his fussy girlfriend with the vast and confusing array of alcohol on offer.
‘Rita doesn’t like seafood,’ he bemoaned to the portly shopkeeper, who rolled his eyes and nodded sympathetically at the general idiocy of the gentler sex. They agreed eventually on a three-dollar bottle of sticky port or something equally reflux-inducing.
I grew up telling people ‘my father’s an actor’ which ironically set off the same sorts of pitying tsks and frowns of disapproval he had experienced thirty years previous when informing passersby that ‘my father’s a Communist’. I didn’t know that theatre folk were to be looked down upon and treated as tiresome jesters who had never grown up; gypsy spirits with a lax attitude to finance and sexual morality. One teacher at school weighed me compulsively, as though possessed with a secret knowledge that my parents were blowing precious grocery money on frivolous purchases like glittery costumes and trapezes.
‘You’ve lost point three of a kilo,’ she would say accusingly, picturing the delight on my father’s face as he selfishly took delivery of a shiny new pair of maracas while I wasted away in my bedroom. The other children in my class looked on without comprehension. I was weighed more than anybody in my grade. One day she weighed me three times.
When I was born my father was working in the script department on a popular war soap called The Sullivans—a show since described as ‘like Neighbours, but with bombs and Hitler’. Unable to rid himself completely of the acting bug that had infested him as a teenager, he shamelessly wrote himself a modest part in the series. This was to be a common occurrence with my father, and if one day you’re short of amusing things to do you can search his name as a writer or producer or script editor on IMDB and find almost without exception that whatever shows he worked on in a behind the scenes role, somewhere his name will also appear in the cast list. It’s hard not to admire his naked ambition. I imagine him sitting in production meetings, script in hand, broad smile across his face.
‘You know who would be perfect for this role?’ I picture him saying in a hopeful, sing-song voice while his colleagues shifted uncomfortably and wondered just how long it would take before management grew wise and fired him. He played a returned soldier in The Sullivans, a priest in riverboat series All The Rivers Run, and someone known memorably as ‘Customer 1’ in Homicide. In overlit, overacted police drama Cop Shop he either played a character called Streaker or an actual streaker, I have been too afraid to ascertain which exactly.
Coincidentally, the first acting job I ever had involved me getting naked, which set the lowbrow tone for the remainder of my drawn out and tawdry career in front of the camera. To my eternal shame I allowed myself to be stripped down and placed on a rubber bath mat, appearing alongside my smiling mother, who at that time was sporting the haircut of the day, a sharp, glossy bob and fringe made popular by daffy Hey Hey It’s Saturday co-host Jacki MacDonald. My job was to look inherently delighted by the fact that with the assistance of scientifically proven grip tests I was enjoying bath time without all the bothersome business of slipping over and knocking myself unconscious on the soap dish. I believe I acquitted myself with aplomb. I was, I think, fifteen months old.
It seems unlikely that I was nagging my parents for an agent prior to the bath mat commercial. At that point it was all I could do to pronounce the word ‘kaka’ and not wet the bed.Which does seem to suggest that they are partly to blame for my crossing the line from insufferable family showoff to professional actor. ‘One bath mat ad won’t hurt,’ my mother must have said, ironing her bob into its sleek, rigid helmet. ‘And it’s not like she’ll remember being naked in front of an entire camera crew. If anything, we’re doing her a favour by getting her out of the house.’
Child actors are, on the whole, abhorrent little creatures. Brittle dwarfish adults with forced, eager-to-please smiles and the sort of complicated maze of eating disorders usually found on the set of Bret Michaels’ Rock of Love. They are forced into constant adult company at an age where they should instead be curiously sticking their fingers into each other’s pants behind the shelter shed or eating rocks, and accordingly grow intolerably precocious. They tell jokes they don’t fully understand, they become sexualised long before it’s healthy and occasionally at Christmas they’ll utilise that weird politician-style double-hand handshake, unnerving grandparents with their robotic manners and cold, dead eyes.
I became one, seamlessly. I took to it like Wilson Tuckey to an unhinged racist epithet, and graduated from bath mats to tap shoes. Once my parents had accepted that I wouldn’t be swayed from my bloodthirsty lust for stardom, they were reluctantly and dutifully supportive.They permitted me to go to ballet school even though I showed all the co-ordination skills of an epileptic duck. They sent me backstage flowers on ‘performance days’; interminable afternoons where one hundred and fifty girls under the age of eleven wearing leotards flung themselves about beneath a cloud of toxic hairspray to songs like Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ or the less conventional Toto Coelo classic ‘I Eat Cannibals’. I showed no talent in any particular area—jazz, classical, modern; I was determinedly dreadful at all—yet persisted gamely.
‘I want to be a star . . . like Little Orphan Annie, or Astro Boy,’ I told disturbed relatives at family gatherings.
In All the Rivers Run I got my wish, playing a delightful street urchin, running amok on the streets of Echuca in voluminous skirts. My parents were producing the series and I bothered them incessantly until they allowed me on set for the afternoon to elbow my way in front of the camera.
I have since spent my entire life dodging accusations of nepotism. Clearly I didn’t do myself any favours as a child by forcing my way onto everything with a Hardy name in the credits. In children’s series The Henderson Kids (Season 1) I can be seen in the background of a scene protesting outside a logging mill with my mother. I am six years old. And yes
, my never-say-die father gave himself a role in that show too. He was a corrupt high school teacher who stole precious excursion money and spent a not unmoving confessional scene wringing his hands and stroking his chin in a way that suggested deep remorse.You should see it, not a dry beard in the house.
They were obviously paranoid about the association too. For the Henderson Kids 2 I was made to audition three times because my father was so worried that casting me would damage both his reputation—what was left of it after giving himself so many plum acting roles in his own productions—and my innocence. Eventually I got the role and spent the subsequent ten months playing Sally Marshall, pigtailed pesky neighbour to Tam and Steve Henderson. Wherever there were scrapes, you could be sure I was in ’em! And so forth. I was a reasonably terrible actor, but even more mortifyingly I had yet to grow into my cumbersome peg teeth and subsequently had the sort of lisp people would shield themselves from with wet weather gear, as though my mouth was an out-of-control car driving through a puddle of words.
Imagine those excruciating, sullen years of your pubescence, between the ages of about ten and fifteen when you gracelessly straddled the bridge of childhood and adolescence. Nobody survives this period unscathed. Overnight you morph from lithe, fresh-faced, eager-to-learn wee little boundling, to chunky, poor-postured, stringy-haired slattern. Your brows grow together, you get angry smears of acne, you’ve not yet learned how to hide the fact your untameable hair grows brittle and upwards, like a Steelo pad. When you look back at photographs of yourself from that time—always somehow sullenly mid-present opening at Christmas, cheeks flaming red, oversized t-shirt to hide your lumpy, misshapen frame—you see the adult you will one day become, trapped in the body of Alf. Imagine now that you had spent that particular period devotedly ensuring that every agonising moment of that interminable process was captured on film and later broadcast on national television. And that at any moment of grownup reprieve years later where you want to start congratulating yourself for being a not abhorrent human being, someone will dig out the Aquavac commercial where you are parading around in front of the camera sporting high-waisted boardshorts and a cowlick.
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