A year or so later Brian was runner-up in bantam weight at the Golden Gloves championship. It’s the highest achievement in amateur boxing. Brian was built like Dad, a tank. Because of this he was quite heavy for his age and ended up fighting a thirty-two-year-old bloke who worked as a navvy on the railway. He was a fully set man and hard as a rock. Brian copped a couple of big hits, and one punch broke his nose. He didn’t go down, but he lost on points. That night Mum put an end to our boxing careers. We loved our mum and we agreed. Dad was pissed off.
Not long after that, Dad went to hit Brian and Brian blocked it. He went to hit him again, and Brian blocked. ‘Aaw, it’s like that, is it, boy?’ So Dad shapes up and starts swinging. Brian easily blocked every punch and cleverly kept moving around our sprawling house. If the old man got you in a corner, you were history. Finally Mum came up from the laundry and screamed ‘What’s going on!!?’ which put an end to it. He never hit Brian again.
I only got away with punching Dad good and proper once. Sometimes we’d do some boxing training at home. We’d use gloves thick with padding, called the pillow gloves. I was sparring with Dad.
‘Come on, son, don’t muck around, try and hit me in the head, don’t hold back, you can’t hurt me.’
‘I don’t wanna hit you, Dad’
‘Come on, don’t fuck around, hit me!’
As I said, I’ve got a great right hand, and Dad was as slow as a wet week. I right-crossed him on the lower jaw, close to his chin. He wasn’t ready for it. I was, I gave it everything I had; he got fifteen years of gut hell rage that made his brain ricochet around his skull. He fell on the lounge, got straight up and started shaking some sense back into his head.
‘I’m sorry Dad, you all right, you all right?’
Inside I was screaming, I got the bastard, I got the fucking bastard!
‘Yeah, I’m all right son, good shot, righto, let’s go, let’s go.’
We tapped gloves, we circled, jab, jab, circle. Suddenly the old man went whack, whack, whack, whack, WHACK! Fair in the guts. I was on the ground, holding my stomach, desperately trying to get oxygen.
The old man looked down on me. ‘Just in case you were getting any ideas.’
Horses
On many a Saturday afternoon, three mates and I would go horseriding. They were Greg Wright’s horses and they were on a property just outside the town. We’d ride our bikes out. Greg had his favourite horse, so we’d have to fight over the other three. One of the horses was a short, stocky pony; this horse was literally the short straw. Occasionally I’d be lumbered with it. I hated it. My long skinny legs would be almost scraping the ground; the bloody thing couldn’t keep up, so I’d end up frustratingly behind all the time. We galloped down this hill once, and at the bottom of the hill was a gully about 2 metres wide. The three bigger horses jumped the gully, and I followed at a gallop on ‘old short arse’. He shied at the gully, tried to pull up, couldn’t. He didn’t jump the gully, he went down and up the other side. By now I was only just clinging on. When he came out of the gully, he flicked his arse and I got flipped off his back and went bum-first into a patch of goat heads. Goat heads are four-pronged thorns, 30 mm long. About ten of these ended up embedded in my arse from the impact. It hurt like hell and made my arse itchy for hours. Yes, of course the others were laughing their guts out.
I had the time of my life galloping around the wide open spaces of central Queensland. I fell in love with horseriding. Nothing like lining up with your mates and racing full tilt across a claypan. Moseying back to the yards with the sun going down, imagining what it was like for my dad’s dad mustering from Hay in New South Wales into the Aramac area, where he met a shearer’s cook, my grandmother.
My grandad had many a good story. This is one of my favourites. He was sitting around the campfire after a hard day pushing cattle. They had a singalong. Among them was a very posh Pommy, mustering ‘for the experience, dear boy’. It came to the Pommy’s turn, and he sang ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’, which he pronounced poshly ‘give me your on-sa, do’ and one of my granddad’s mates whispered, ‘Hey Bob, what’s a ronsadoo?’
Longreach
Aramac High only went to Year Four, or Junior as it was known then, because most of the students left school then. Except me. Dad wouldn’t let me. Out of eight kids, I was the only one to kick on, which was funny, because I think I came seventh that year. I was sent to Longreach High. Longreach was west of Aramac. It was the biggest town in the district. Population around 4000, then and now. Famous for the founding years of Qantas and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.
Mum used to take me to Longreach High on Monday morning and pick me up Friday afternoon. I’d drive across and Mum drove back. It was 130 kilometres of dirt road. It took me an hour to drive there at 130 km per hour and it took Mum an hour and a half to drive back. Not bad for a sixteen-year-old.
During the week I stayed in the hostel with other outta-towner students. Girls on one side, boys on the other. Meal room, manager’s office and Mr and Mrs Arsehole’s lodgings in the middle. I had a love-hate relationship with this joint. Loved sneaking out at night onto the trampoline and getting intimate with the girls. Hated the Arseholes, especially the husband, he was about thirty and he was a Nazi. After about three months he hated my guts, and the feeling was mutual. Things came to a head one night in the meal room. I was laughing loudly at a mate’s joke. He told me not to laugh so loud and I argued with him that you couldn’t even laugh in this joint. He ordered me to stand up, so I did. He told me to stop smiling, so I smiled some more. He came over and threatened to wipe the smile off my face, and I dared him to try. He did, so I flattened him.
Mrs Arsehole went to ring my father and I went and waited for him at the fence outside. Dad turned up and went in to find out from the Arsehole what had happened. He came out with a big smile on his face and we went back to Aramac. He said to Mr Arsehole after finding out what went down, ‘ I’d like to smack you in the mouth for what you’ve done, but looks like a sixteen-year-old could do that.’ We laughed. ‘Fuckin’ smarmy cunt.’ It was the first time I’d heard Dad say ‘cunt’, not the last, of course.
Dad found a little cottage owned by a little old lady close to the school. There were two other rooms there occupied by girls. The old man must have known this. The best thing I ever did was punch Mr Arsehole. One of the girls went to my school. She was a year older than me, attractive, and loved getting into my bed. Once she brought her girlfriend home and they both got into my bed.
No girlfriend-boyfriend thing, purely let’s just have fun. Oh man, did I have fun. The other boarder was hot. She was early twenties, a working girl, very nice to me, friendly but very much out of my ballpark. She was very much in love with her big hairy boyfriend, who could’ve quite easily crushed me into dust. I could write a book about this wonderful six months of my life and call it Fifty Shades of Puberty, so I’ll let you imagine what happened. Here’s a hint, put ‘vivid’ in front of ‘imagination’.
By this stage I’d inadvertently started my acting training. I wasn’t interested in the educational side of school, I was interested in entertainment – getting laughs, flirting with girls, annoying teachers, entertaining the class. For the life of me I can’t remember why, but I put on a concert. My parents were naturals. In Wongawilli, Island Bend and Aramac they were the driving force for town reviews and concerts. They took a big part in writing the sketches and coming up with the songs. I was given a song in the Aramac review. They’d ‘localised’ the lyrics of ‘Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda’. One verse went like this:
Once there was a…
Lotta roos here
But the shooters
Are on the loose here.
I sang very innocently to a packed house:
Once there was a…
Lotta roos here
But the rooters
Are on the loose here.
In those days ‘to root’ was a very common phrase that meant ‘to fuck
’. I was fourteen at the time, and in those days the worst thing you could say to women or kids was ‘shit’. I was bright red with embarrassment and went home.
So I got material from Mum and Dad and put on a concert at Longreach High. I organised the whole thing and gave myself all the best parts. At the end of it, our headmaster Mr Bob Spearot came up to me.
‘You know, Jarratt, I thought all you were good for was disturbing the peace, but it turns out you could be an actor.’
Ding.
‘Don’t you have to be born in Hollywood to be an actor?’
‘Not at all, anyone can be an actor.’
The seed was sown. In 1978, I had the pleasure of Mr Spearot attending a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire for the Queensland Theatre Company. I played Stanley. He was proud of me. He was a lovely man. He’s either passed or he’s 120 by now.
The big smoke
I found Longreach High fairly uninspiring and I don’t have a great deal of memories of my time there. I know I wasted a lot of time and I failed Year 11. Mum and Dad decided I should repeat Year 11 in Townsville. I was to stay at Grandma Sellers’ beautiful Queenslander in Hermit Park. She was Uncle Ben’s mother. He was raised there, along with his four brothers and two sisters. So she was a sort of grandma-in-law. I loved her. She was an English rose, with a peaches-and-cream complexion. She must have been in her sixties, which seemed old to me. As I write this I’m sixty-two, scary! I stayed there for most of 1969. We got along famously.
I only crossed her once. I lied to her about the time I got home one night. I told her 12.30 a.m. but it was 4 a.m. and she knew it. She went me big time about never, ever lying to her again. She was one of those extremely rare rigorously honest people. I never lied to her again.
I was in Townsville, a city. This was like going to New York for me. Telephones, TV, movie theatres (more than one), supermarkets, traffic lights, airport, bitumen roads, live bands, dances in pubs every Saturday night, Magnetic Island, beaches, bikinis, women in miniskirts everywhere, Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin playing on 4TO 24/7.
I rode my bike to school, which was only a five-minute ride. I walked into Town High and leant up against a post, waiting for someone to come up and fight me. This was my eighth school, and I just wanted to get the ‘Welcome to Town High, dickbrain’ fight over and done with. So I leaned there looking as tough as I could, with my long skinny legs embarrassingly protruding from my shorts. I had a greasy Elvis do, and all the boys had dry hair coming down and across the forehead in what I came to know as a Beatles do.
Boys my age started arriving, a lot of them big and athletic. They looked at me quizzically and walked on. Then I saw why. This bloke walks in, he’s about 110 kg, and he was so broad I thought he was about 5 foot 11, turns out he’s 6 foot 2. If this is the guy who sorts out the newcomers, then they must all be dead and I was about to die. He walked past me, looked at me as if he’d just seen dogshit and walked on.
This was Nial Greaves, man mountain, who ran 100 yards in even time, started last and came through like a freight train to be first to hit the tape. He jumped 6 foot in the high jump, won the 50- and 100-metres freestyle, and played outside centre in our Rugby League team. He was like Mal Meninga, the massive iconic centre. Nial could have played for Australia. Why didn’t he? He was in the North Queensland Schoolboys versus the South Queensland Schoolboys. He broke through and the only thing between him and the tryline was his opposing centre, an average-sized teenager who had enough guts to tackle Nial front-on. He was carried off on a stretcher with a busted spleen. Nial hovered around the hospital, absolutely gutted at what had happened. He’s a gentle giant and it frightened him. The other thing that held him back was his weak ankles, which had to carry the weight of his massive legs. He’s also very modest, but he enjoys slapping me, so he’ll read this and inflict some pain for embarrassing him. It’s worth it. Needless to say, he’s a lifelong very close friend, thank Christ. So he didn’t try to kill me on day one. Nobody did, to my surprise.
So I kind of shrugged to myself and followed these big guys. We ended up at assembly and this friendly dude about my height and size (including the bony legs) put out his hand and introduced himself.
‘G’day, I’m Max. You’re new, eh?’
‘Yeah, I’m from central Queensland.’
‘Aw yeah, what class you in? I’m in subsenior.’
‘Me too.’
‘No worries, stick with me.’
I did stick with him and I still do, he’s one of my best mates. He later told me that everyone thought, Who’s the mean-lookin’ bastard with the Elvis do, what’s his problem?
The next two years, 1969 and 1970, were some of the best years of my life. I don’t have any schoolfriends from my previous seven schools. I have about a dozen really close friends all up, and seven of them are from Town High: Nial, Max, Herbie, Rubin, Denis, Billy and Geoffrey John, in no particular order. They’re the close ones, but the whole goddamn year was amazing. We have ten-year reunions and they are really wild weekends. We’re making them five-year reunions now because we’re in danger of dying these days.
My first night out was at a place called ‘the shack’. I went there with Denis. We lied to these two girls that we were eighteen and that my Monaro was getting a new paint job so we were stuck without a car. We must have been convincing because we managed to crack on to them. After we left the shack we walked through a park. Denis took his girl off into the bushes and I found a nest for my girl. I had to work really hard to encourage her to remove her clothing. I finally succeeded and we were about to make love when bloody Denis and his girl decided to come back. My girl totally freaked and started to dress. In my youthful frustration I tried to convince Denis to go away and my girl to continue. Not a snowflake’s chance in hell. You don’t impose such devastation on a sixteen-year-old. Talk about angry – I yelled at Denis all the way home. He was mightily repentant for his wrongdoing, but he couldn’t hide his ‘look of the nook’ glow. I talked to him through pursed lips for about a fortnight after that. I never got over it. I had a go at Denis about it for the umpteenth time only a week ago. He’ll never stop hearing about it.
School was cool. I was a very busy student. I would have had As for social integration, entertainment, witticism, impersonation, innuendo, double entendre, extracurricular activity (commonly known as wagging school), practical jokery, antagonism, pugilism…if they’d only been part of the curriculum. The list goes on, so you can see I didn’t have time for much else; when you throw in sport on top of that, well, there weren’t enough hours in the day. After school I had parties to organise. I liked to fill the weekend for my friends. I was very altruistic and magnanimous, in a selfish kind of way.
I was six months away from my seventeenth birthday and my driver’s licence. I was impatient to get it, of course, but Townsville was easy to get around. All you needed was a bike. People of all ages rode them, mainly schoolkids and old men for some reason. The old blokes of north Queensland in the 1960s seemed content with that. A front basket, a hessian bag sewn into the triangle centre frame, and a back rack. Amazing what they could carry. These were working-class blokes who would have been in their prime in the twenties and thirties; they’d probably never had a car.
When I was born, there were still plenty of communities that didn’t have electricity. Biros were a major modern advancement. We didn’t have a washing machine, we had to boil water to have a bath, diesel trains were new and there were still plenty of steam trains. Cars didn’t have seatbelts, indicators, aircon, heaters, radios, airbags, the list goes on. Television was absolutely mind-blowing. How did the picture come through the air and get into the TV in our lounge room? I still don’t know.
I feel very privileged to have arrived on the planet when I did. I’ve come from that world to this mind-boggling space-age computer world of today. In the 1980s I saw, for the first time, a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine in Melbourne. It had been sent five minutes earlier fr
om Perth. It blew my mind. What’s going on with iPhones and laptops these days is beyond my comprehension. I’m typing this book on one now; I just clicked ‘save’, it’s amazing. I love the techno age. I do my best, but I’ll always be a techno-peasant. Just when you get onto something, it’s superseded and you have to start again. It takes my kids five minutes to learn; it takes me five months if I’m lucky.
Magnetic Island – it just drags you to it
The most magical thing about Townsville for me is Magnetic Island. When I first went there as a four-year-old, it was like something out of a fantasy land. Maggy Island was formed 275 million years ago out of molten granite pushed to the surface by volcanic eruptions. Over millions of years this granite eroded to form massive, egg-shaped boulders or tors, some as big as houses and some perched precariously on top of others. In between the boulders grow hoop pines. This is what I love about the landscape of the island: it’s unique. Everywhere you look are these wonderful boulders with forests of native hoop pine growing out of them. To stand on an expansive Maggy Island beach, looking past a forest of coconut trees across sparkling coral sands to the headland of giant granite eggs, garnished with hoop pine, is probably the most beautiful natural wonder on the planet to me. Closely followed by Uluru and the Olgas. I like rocks.
The other wonderful thing is it’s the only Australian tropical island for me. It’s not resort-orientated like Hamilton or Dunk. It’s populated by weekenders. The original houses are fishing cottages. The pubs are like pubs. There are a couple of resorts, and Peppers sticks out like a sore thumb at the Nelly Bay wharf. There are a few in this section of the island. The bastards cut into my wonderful granite boulders to build one joint. Ugly as a hat full of arseholes, I reckon, and so do the locals.
A hell of a lot of our weekends were spent there. Nial’s mother, Betty, lived on Maggy full-time at Arcadia, she was a barmaid at the Picnic Bay pub. Nial used to stay with his grandparents in town during the week and spent most weekends on the island. We loved Betty, still do, she’s still with us and there’s plenty of life in the old girl yet. She’d look after us, feed us and have a beer with us in the evening. She’d drink us all under the table and pour us out the door to our sleeping quarters. We stayed in one of two places according to the weather. If it was fine, we’d stay at the Shifting Sands Motel, and if it was raining, we’d stay at Granite Lodge. If the rain was torrential we wouldn’t go to the island. We copped a couple of surprise storms, which meant we got flooded. It added to the adventure.
The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life Page 9