So What Do You Reckon?

by Robert G. Barrett

  The other thing that pisses me off with Madonna is her new song, ‘Justify My Love’. It’s a dog of a song accompanied by a steamy video clip of several wallies having a bisexual group grope in a hotel room.

  Yet here’s Madonna being interviewed on TV as if she’s some Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist: ‘Y’know. This is my art. Y’know.’

  Do they have to go on with all this bullshit just to flog some daggy pop record? What a dubbo. Give me Kate Ceberano any day. Still, you can’t knock her for success and good luck to her. I’d like to swap bankbooks with her.

  But can I make a suggestion? While she’s in Australia she’ll probably want to go jogging.

  So to save her goons bashing up any more unfortunate photographers, why not take another photo of Madonna’s grumble, untrimmed, absolutely au naturel? Then blow it up a bit bigger than poster size and have one of Madonna’s gorillas hold it up with her jogging behind.

  I don’t know about anybody else — but if I saw that tarantula coming at me I’d run quicker than a goanna in front of a bushfire. It could have the street to itself. Adoration of Madonna maybe, but not that monster bearded clam. No way.

  Heaps of people write to me asking my advice about getting into writing. They send me little scripts and ideas etc. and I only wish I had the time to reply to all of them.

  Unfortunately, there are just too many and it would cut too much into my drinking and drug-taking.

  I also get other people, a little more belligerent, who approach me mainly in pubs. They look me up and down, poke their chests out and say, ‘I’m gonna write a book too’. They really mean that if a mug like me can write a book, so can they, which is fair enough I suppose.

  I wasn’t bad at English at school but I’m definitely no Einstein.

  I used to laugh at these people and they’d invariably get the shits. A couple of different sheilas even told me I was arrogant and conceited and to get myself well and truly %#@*!, which is also understandable I suppose.

  They probably thought, like a lot of Australian authors, I was completely up myself. But I wasn’t laughing at them, I was laughing at something else. So I changed my tack.

  Now when they front me with their ‘I’m gonna write a book’, I just smile and say, ‘Good on you. What are you going to do then?’ That’s the one that stuffs them. They just look at you and blink.

  So I repeat the question. They end up just walking away. It’s the perfect squelch.

  The poor, silly bastards. They think you write a book, take it to some publisher, who welcomes you with open arms and says, ‘Hi there. Thanks for bringing us your book. Here’s $100,000 advance royalties. Let’s do lunch.’

  Hah! Are they in for a surprise! So for all those people who wrote to me about writing in Australia: I’m not trying to discourage you, but here are a couple of things you weren’t expecting.

  And believe your Uncle Bob: spending the best part of a year hunched over a typewriter, walking round the house talking to yourself, then staying awake half the night because you can’t switch your mind off, and people thinking you’re vague or more than likely half-mad while you’re trying to get a novel together — that’s the easy part.

  It’s when you’ve got it done and take it to a publisher … to use an old cliché … that, baby, is when the story really starts.

  You’ll more than likely meet some minion from the editorial department who’ll look at you like you were something left over from a garbage strike.

  After they’ve initially spat on you, set the dog on you and emptied the jerry over you for having the hide to bring the pile of shit in in the first place, they’ll say, ‘Leave it with us and we’ll get back to you’.

  About a month or so later they’ll read the first six pages and the last four, then send you a letter politely telling you to stick it in your arse: ‘Sorry, but we can’t list it at the moment.’ Ninety-nine out of 100 is the strike rate.

  But say, you poor silly bastard, you’re just that unlucky that they do accept it. You’ll sign a memorandum of agreement, full of words and clauses that you don’t understand till you find a couple of Arab oil sheiks on your doorstep come to take your sister away.

  You might get $500 advance royalties and around 70 cents a book. But don’t count on it. My first advance royalty was a counter lunch in a pub near Central Railway and I got 49 cents a book.

  They’ll print about 3000 that get a shelf life of three months. Meanwhile, you can piss off and they don’t particularly care if they never see you again. Your book now goes to a cover designer.

  Your novel might be about a stockman in the Snowy Mountains. Don’t be surprised to find Bondi Beach and a Fijian holding a surfboard on the cover. While this is going on, your year’s work is thrown to a creature called a sub-editor. It’s hard to make a comparison to a sub-editor … drug squad coppers, parking police, heroin dealers?

  I think they’re more like fruit flies. They find a nice juicy peach, burrow into it and send the whole thing rotten.

  They’re either miserable feminists or frustrated academics with a low-mark PhD. They’re flat-earthers totally removed from the real world and they’re all frustrated writers.

  They say inside every sub-editor there’s a book dying to get out. And it’s true. Only it’s jammed in there like a big turd that no amount of epsom salts or herbal laxatives can shift.

  In the meantime, seeing they can’t write a book themselves, they’ll make sure nobody else can. So they’ll rehash your book to suit their miserable selves. You won’t believe what they’ll do to your stuff and, like they say in the army, there’s not thing one you can do about it.

  They’ve got the publisher behind them. He’s hired the flips in the first place and has to justify the decision. And you’re in there with your first book, convinced you’re going to be the next Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins and you’ll keep your mouth shut because you’re not game to rock the boat.

  I was always a little different. I could see I didn’t have much to lose so I didn’t only rock the boat — I used to torpedo it then machine-gun the lifeboats.

  So your book sits out there and roughly two years after you rolled a sheet of A4 into your Olivetti you get your first royalties cheque. Probably for about $600 — out of which you deduct taxes, expenses, workers’ compensation, sick pay, holiday and your 17.5 per cent loading.

  But here’s one you didn’t think of. You’re not writing waffle on an Arts Council grant; you’re writing for the general public. So naturally the literary critics have to bag your book to show their superior taste and it lays an egg and sells about 200 copies. It’s happened before.

  And your royalties cheque, when it staggers in, is for $140. But your kindly publisher gave you a $500 advance, less $140 is $360. And that’s what you owe your publisher. Pay up too, or they send the sheriff around.

  I reckon it’s beautiful. You spend over a year getting a book together and end up owing money. You’ll find plenty of starving writers in Australia, but no starving publishers. I’m not trying to discourage you, but that’s the way it is.

  So if the next time you buttonhole me in a pub or whatever and tell me how you’re ‘gonna write a book’, don’t get the shits if I roar laughing.

  I’m not laughing at you so much. What I’m really saying is, ‘I’m glad it’s you and not me’.

  If it wasn’t for the unions I wouldn’t have my house, even if it is a dump.

  In 1978 a hindquarter of beef fell on me when I was working in a meatworks in Sydney, knocking me flatter than a blob of cow shit.

  I was on compo for a year before the insurance company cut out my payments. Three years later, through the union, I settled out of court.

  I’ve still got a crook back and shoulders, and the amount I got wasn’t all that much, but at least I didn’t have to borrow all that much from the Shylocks at the bank. Just leave 20 litres of blood with my smiling bank manager and the rights to my corneas and all my internal organs if anything
should happen to me.

  So for me to indulge in even the most minute form of what could be termed ‘union bashing’ could possibly be construed as the act of a full-on unappreciative dropkick.

  But no matter what you say about anybody these days — whether it’s the police, public servants, schoolteachers — you’re bashing them; it seems we’ve become so insular you’re not even allowed a modicum of criticism.

  But the unions have been in the news a bit lately so I thought I might pass comment. And might I say things have certainly changed in the union movement since I was a card-carrying socialist member of the AMIEU. Thank you comrades.

  A garbage strike in Melbourne intrigued me. The aggrieved members stormed off the job because one of them got the punt for taking a sickie to go and work at another job.

  That stinks like the garbage that piled up for more than a week till the union members reluctantly went back (plus the member who rorted the system and the ratepayers and left his fellow workers a man short while he earned a buck somewhere else).

  It was a holiday weekend in WA so naturally the aircraft refuellers walked off the job. Somebody actually suggested they did a bit of work while they sat around on their fat arses waiting for planes to arrive.

  Kicking and screaming and with faces longer than King Kong’s wozzer, they went back to work.

  And as soon as they did the refuellers in Sydney walked off in sympathy.

  Stuff the poor mugs and families waiting for planes, the already half-stuffed tourist industry and fledgling companies like Compass trying to get going and maybe create a few jobs. Loafing, overpaid bludgers.

  I don’t know, I always thought if the job was that tortuous and the conditions so unbearable, if you had any balls you shot it in and got another one.

  Remember I wrote about the public servant I knew who told me how big a bludge his job was — then went on strike not long after for more wages and better conditions?

  The meatworks doesn’t come within a bull’s roar of the public service for a bludge, but we pulled the odd stroke now and again.

  I was working at a shed in Sydney near Central Station; the worst part about it was that there was a pub next door. We were about to start work one morning and there weren’t quite enough clean overalls to go round.

  Out we stormed, up to the amenities room all po-faced for a meeting. We weren’t going to cop this.

  And the delo said: ‘Okay. We all know the reason there are not enough overalls to go round is because we’ve been knocking them off. But that’s beside the point.’

  We lost half a morning’s work and the pissheads went to the pub till the company bought more overalls, then we sulked our way back to work. The place eventually closed down and they all wondered why.

  But the aggrieved members go out over the silliest things: sunglasses, the smell from a nearby Chinese restaurant, pie-warmers, even when they ran out of free beer at a Xmas party.

  But take the dreaded sickie. Public servants scream at the merest suggestion of cutting back on their unlimited sick leave that we all pay for. But is there one worker in Australia who hasn’t rorted a sickie?

  I know I would have died before I’d take a sickie if I was genuinely crook. I’d rather go to work and suffer there.

  Before I’d take a day off crook, I’d make sure I had eight hours’ sleep and it was a perfect day and either go surfing or spearfishing. And if the waves or the fish were still on the next day, I’d have a relapse.

  With people like Lang Hancock around, and that mob that run Robe River, you have to have workers’ compensation, but I’ve seen it rorted. I used to be a big, bad Sydney wharfie; three months I lasted before I went off with the lockjaw from talking out the side of my mouth all the time.

  I watched this gang carry a bloke in one morning who’d done his ankle playing touch football on the weekend. They got him halfway up the gangplank before he did the WWF’s version of Swan Lake. It was truly a memorable performance.

  They took him away moaning in agony on a stretcher and he went on compo. Good luck to him, I suppose, and it’s good to have staunch mates. But it’s a rort.

  And the workers’ compo act has definitely added to our multiculturalism. Besides spaghetti marinara our overseas friends have introduced ‘Mediterranean back’.

  And that grouse line that was going around: ‘How do you tell the Greek in an Italian restaurant? He’s the one with his neck in a brace.’

  Wages are almost sacrosanct. Everyone is entitled to be paid what they’re worth and what the boss can afford. But it’s all the silly bloody conditions that are causing half the unemployment and a lot of the factories going to the wall.

  But for conditions and perks you can’t beat the public service. Take those fat cat pencil pushers in the ACOA. Besides making more money than they can possibly spend, they get leave loadings, higher duty allowances, study leave, maternity leave, compassionate leave, furniture and removal expenses, tea-stain allowance, paper-clip stress syndrome and, of course, the good old unlimited sickie. It runs into billions of dollars.

  Besides nurses, ambos and coppers, i.e., public servants who actually earn their money, there’s about another half-million out there.

  If these public servants really tore their hearts out, suffered unbearable torture and self-sacrifice, and took just two fewer sick days a year — I know it’s a lot to ask — but at around $100 a day, we taxpayers would save about $100 million.

  How many jobs could the government create with that? How many pensioners could get a feed? How many street kids could be given a home and a bit of a chance?

  Imagine if this spread through the workforce and we all stopped whingeing about conditions and we did a bit of work and got some extra money in our kicks, and if the boss makes a bit more, good on him or her.

  We might even get on top of this recession and Australia might get back to where it was 20 years ago — a pretty good place.

  Not a cross between the 51 st State of America and a geisha house with Foster’s on tap.

  How do you tell what’s funny and what isn’t? I don’t ever class myself as a comedian like, say, Barry Humphries or Wendy Harmer — everything they write or say is supposed to be funny.

  I think if you put your head up as a funnyman-person, it’s a bit like laughing at your own jokes. I see myself more as a humourist.

  I write this column for instance, about this-that-and-the-other and try to see the funny side of things. Some people get a laugh out of it now and again because they write in and tell me.

  Others tell me to go shit in my hat. So I definitely don’t see myself as a comedian. What strikes me as funny can be total anathema to somebody else. I’ve told jokes I thought were rip-snorters and they’ve gone over like a bomb in an air-raid shelter.

  A critic in Melbourne even described my books as ‘an extended version of the shaggy-dog story’. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

  But I’m buggered if I know what’s funny and what isn’t.

  A quote doesn’t go astray, though. For instance, Peter Ustinov: ‘Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.’ Or Lord Olivier: ‘A comedian is closer to humanity than a tragedian. He learns not to take himself seriously.’

  But one I like comes from Elsa Maxwell: ‘Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.’ It’s hard to imagine a Yank saying that — in other words, get your head out of your arse and don’t bore the tits off people.

  So what makes me laugh, an alleged humourist and author of supposed shaggy-dog stories? One has to be careful here, because owning up to what you consider funny can tell a few home truths about you, and you might wish you’d kept your mouth shut.

  I reckon Rodney Rude’s funny. He’s that ugly and obnoxious, how could he be anything else?

  He reminds me of Mo McCackie on mescaline but he can tell a joke! I used to boo and hiss him at the Comedy Store in Sydney and would have given 10 years of my life to hit him in the face with a custard pie.

  I could
n’t get off on The Big Gig. It was a bit like the curate’s egg, not bad in parts, but kept reminding me of that ABC ‘aren’t we oh-so-raunchy, different and clever’ humour. Yet my darling grey-haired mother thought it was as funny as all get-up. And mother always knows best.

  I still get a laugh out of those old Barry McKenzie movies. And has there ever been a greater insult to your sensitivities than Norman Gunston? He did for the in-depth TV interview what Pol Pot did for inner-city housing. Mike Gibson described him as ‘the kid in class who always made awful smells’.

  I’d swap 20 Steve Vizards and five Bryant Gumbels for him any day.

  A good simile always turns me on. I think an all-time simile was the one by the Pommie journalist who described Clive James as ‘looking like a bank robber who forgot to take his stocking off. You can’t beat the Poms for humour on their day.

  Was there ever a funnier show than Fawlty Towers? Oddly enough I did an ad with John Cleese and he’s one of the most delightful people you’d ever care to meet, not at all like Basil.

  Minder is a funny show, possibly my favourite, probably because as well as the cockney lingo, situations and characters, they weave a bit of pathos into it. Poor Terry, he no sooner gets it than Arthur takes it away.

  Pathos to comedy is like garlic to a meal. A little can enhance the dish. Hello! That’s not a bad author’s quote for off the cuff.

  I like fart jokes; which is why I gave that balding, stercoraceous gnome who does the breakfast show on 2MMM a rap. When it comes to a fart joke, Doug Mulray is the capo di tutti capi. Imagine being stuck in a mini-sub with him.

  Irish jokes are starting to get a bit samey. And I’m not just saying that because my kinsfolk were some of the nicest people the English judges could send out here and the first bloke hanged in Australia was called Barrett.

  Then there are all those ‘didjahearabout’ jokes. Like, ‘did you hear about the wharfie who got killed when a forklift ran over his finger? He was picking his arse at the time.’