The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  After being away eleven weeks on We of the Never Never, I arrived home at about 8pm. We lived about 2 kilometres from Church Point on the other side of the island, on top of the hill. I rang a mate who lived at the bottom of that hill to jump in the boat and come get me. He turned up and there was Georgie up at the bow, wagging her entire body.

  I said to my mate, ‘Thanks for bringing George.’

  ‘I didn’t. I was about to back out when this black shape jumped on board.’ She knew somehow.

  Australian dream

  I arrived at the director Jackie McKimmie’s house in Brisbane early evening. I was introduced to her husband, Chris, and her two teenage boys. Noni and Graeme Blundell joined us and we had a very pleasant meal together. We all got along famously.

  The film was about an average suburban housewife living with her husband, a butcher and a candidate for the up-coming election. The husband organises a birthday party–election party and I’m the lead singer of a hired band. The wife has fantasy dreams about me and the reality in the back of a car at the end is a disappointment. It wasn’t a bad film, but it didn’t do well.

  Noni and Graeme were great to work with: they were both fun and witty. We were all Leos, so it wasn’t dull. It felt good to be able to sink my teeth into this film after so long, literally, in the wilderness. It eased the weight on my mind somewhat, a distraction from the disintegration of my family.

  The last thing I wanted was another relationship. I just wanted to do my job and go home. After the first week, we all went to a restaurant together. We’d all had a few drinks and we walked back to Jackie’s. I was about to get in my car and head back to my motel when Noni suggested I’d had too much to drink. They offered to let me sleep on their couch; Noni was staying in their spare bedroom. They all went to bed and Noni made coffee. We were drinking coffee and Noni made advances towards me. I was taken aback: I really didn’t see this coming and I didn’t really want it at this stage. One thing led to another, but I have to say it was awkward on my part. I’d been separated from Rosa for eight months, but it was still awkward. Then I thought, Oh well, it’s fun. I’m not exactly cheating on anyone, why not have a fling. That’s all I thought it was and Noni felt the same.

  By mid-September the film was over and Georgie and I drove back to Mum and Dad’s in Sydney. It’s a ten-hour drive. I’d had the two-month sabbatical at Kyogle followed by a five-week distraction on the movie. The fling with Noni was interesting and fun, it took me away from the all-encompassing dark place my soul was sitting in. My baby was growing in my true love’s womb and I’d tried to detach and disappear from that. Fight or flight, that was me, and I’d been in flight mode for six months.

  I thought about that for ten hours. By the time I arrived in Sydney I was back in fight mode. I’d fight again to see if I could knock down the blockade and return to my family. I was such a bull-at-the-gate dickhead: no finesse, no understanding of the magnitude of the hurt that a deserted pregnant woman would be experiencing. I turned up to Rosa’s and she came to the front door, heavily pregnant and beautiful beyond words. I announced my prepared speech, concocted over many hours of driving south. It was the performance of a desperate man, no, boy. Rosa simply said no and shut the door on me. It would remain metaphorically shut for ten years.

  It was time to take care of business and move on. We sold the half-built house on the island to a good friend of ours for a song. I gave everything we had to Rosa and Zadia bar my clothes, car and tools. In those days it was simple if you were not contesting anything, so because of that we used the same solicitor to save money. I contacted Rosa and we went to the solicitor. I turned up at his office and Rosa was already there waiting. We did the deal, Rosa gave me very little eye contact and only spoke if she had to. That sealed it for me. I’d lost the love of my life.

  I mooned around my parents’ house and passed my time helping Dad put a big timber deck beside the pool. We had to secure the joists and the rail posts to a concrete slab before we could put the decking on.

  I had to go into town one day and Dad was on his own. Being an impatient bastard, he worked on his own. A ramset gun is basically a gun that fires nails into timber like a bullet. Dad had hold of a joist with one hand, the ramset in the other and he fired the nail that was supposed to go through the timber and into the concrete. It didn’t: it hit the concrete and bent the nail, which flew in Dad’s direction. He was crouched over and it hit him just above the knee and came out his upper thigh, just missing the family jewels. It hit the sternum bone in the middle of his chest. It stopped with the head of the nail protruding out of his skin. There was blood flowing everywhere.

  Barry was living downstairs at the time.

  Dad called out, ‘Barry! Barry!’

  Baz ran down from the house.

  ‘I’ve shot myself with a ramset nail, ring an ambulance, don’t tell your mother.’

  The ambulance arrived and they tried to get him on a stretcher. He refused to stand up because he felt it would pull the nail head under his skin. So he walked to the ambulance in a hunched position.

  Dad was in with a doctor and a number of interns and they were struggling to remove the nail. By now my brother Brian was waiting just outside. Suddenly Dad’s booming voice thundered out.

  ‘Brian, Brian!’

  Brian raced in, spreading interns. He got to our father. ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Get those bloody pliers and pull this nail out, these blokes are too piss-weak to do it.’

  ‘We’ll handle this thank you, Mister Jarratt. Brian, we won’t need your help.’

  The doctor warned Dad that the hole in his leg would take a while to mend and it could get infected. He came back a week later and the doc couldn’t believe the improvement. ‘This is remarkable, what have you been doing?’

  ‘I pour peroxide down each end of the hole and I scrub each end with a scrubbing brush.’

  ‘Christ, man, doesn’t that burn?’

  ‘Too right, but if it’s not stingin’ it’s not healing.’

  I’d auditioned for the lead role in a musical The Sentimental Bloke at the Melbourne Theatre Company. My agent Bill rang me with the news that I’d got the part and he passed the phone to Noni, who was in his office at the time. She asked me how I was and if I would like to meet her for coffee. I agreed to meet her at Bondi Beach the next day.

  We had a coffee, followed by a walk along the coast path. It was very pleasant and it felt good to be alive for the first time in a long time. She told me she couldn’t get me out of her head and that she’d missed me. I told her I’d missed her too, and that I’d really enjoyed our time on the film.

  My conscience started talking to me. No, no, this is too soon…Don’t be silly, she’s really nice, you need this…But I’m fucked up…This will straighten you out, you’ve got to get on with your life.

  Noni and I started going steady. Yeah, ‘steady’ is a good word.

  I arrived in Melbourne in November to rehearse the play. I found a small house in Port Melbourne to rent. I hadn’t done a musical since The Fantastics at the Bondi Pav in 1974. This was a big production with difficult music. I had to learn a mountain of dialogue and it was poetry, rhyming couplets. I had 80 per cent of the words to learn. I had to be exact; you can’t improvise poetry. Graeme Blundell directed it and a bloke called Mike Bishop played Ginger Mick. Mike became one of my absolute best mates and I’m close to his family. I loved Mike’s father, Sid, and when my dad died, Sid became my surrogate father. We lost Sid in early 2015; he was ninety-four. There are absolutely no dads left in my life now. I’ve got a mum, and Rosa’s mother is my surrogate mum. I think she’ll outlive me.

  Noni had work of her own to do in Sydney. She turned up now and again, and she was very helpful with my lines. One day I was going through it with her and she suggested we take a break and walk down to the beach. On the way back she said, ‘Go through scene six.’

  ‘I haven’t got the script.’

  ‘Doesn’t
matter.’

  ‘If she’s the tart he needs then she’s his queen –’

  ‘The tart he wants.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She then did the whole verse. She’s got a photographic memory. She can tell you the meal she ate at a restaurant on 2 April 1979.

  We were about to face our first audience. We were only just ready by the skin of our teeth. For someone who’s tone-deaf, Blundell did a great job. We worked very hard on the drama. Blundell said incessantly, ‘If we don’t get the story right, all we’ve got is a bunch of songs.’ After all that, this was his comment to us just before we went on: ‘Forget everything I’ve said. Just face the front and go for the laughs.’ I’ve stolen that wonderful quotation from him. Any time some young kid asks me how to be an actor, that’s what I tell them. ‘Face the front and go for the laughs!’

  ‘Even if it’s a tragedy?’

  ‘Especially if it’s a tragedy.’

  We went on and I was as nervous as a kitten. So was Mike Bishop. In the opening number Bish accidently thumped me a beauty above my right eye. He’s 6 foot 5. He nearly knocked me out, I was seeing stars, shaking my head and trying to sing the first song. Noni started scribbling on her program, Stop shaking your head. She didn’t know I’d been hit. We were in the wings and I said to the boys, ‘We’ll get them back in the Romeo and Juliet scene.’ We went on and I said a line that took us four pages ahead. We somehow got back to the speech before and I got to the same spot and did the same thing, putting us four pages ahead. I dropped the ball. The boys were trying to help, but I didn’t hear them. I looked at the stage floor in front of me and my arms were going up and down like a pleading Jewish merchant. I turned towards the back of the theatre and repeated the gestures. In my head I was saying, Why am I doing this, this is madness, If I was filming we’d do take 2. Please open up and swallow me, stage. Somehow we got back on track and we stumbled through the play. It was a disaster. I was sitting in the dressing room at the end of it, mortified. It went on to become a hit and I enjoyed every minute of it after the disastrous start.

  Separated before birth

  It was a fun summer, but I still didn’t feel right. As lovely as Noni was, she wasn’t Rosa about to give birth. That was where my head and heart stood. On 18 December Zadia called me. My daughter Ebony had arrived on planet Earth. Zadia said she was perfect. I held it together and cried after she hung up. I was doing the play at night so I didn’t see her until the Christmas break. I sent Rosa ten blood-red roses. There wasn’t a note, but she figured they were from me. When I turned up at Rosa’s house and knocked on the door, my eight-year-old angel opened the door with a heavenly smile. She was a bright girl, and she knew exactly what I was going through. She was being as kind and loving to me as she could possibly be. I entered the front door and took an immediate left turn into the bedroom. She took me over to the bassinet and there she was, my Ebony, another little dark beauty. She was sleeping. I lifted her gently into my arms and looked at her and looked and looked at her; her eyes slowly opened and she looked at me for the first time. I started to cry. I didn’t want to because my brave Zadia was using every essence of her eight-year-old body and soul to support me. I said I was sorry and I sat down and the tears kept coming. Nine months of bottled fatherly angst and guilt was pouring out of me as though from a broken dam.

  Zadia put her arm on my shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Pappa.’

  ‘She’s beautiful, she is so beautiful.’

  ‘She’s very beautiful.’

  I can’t tell you how long I stayed, but I don’t think it was long. I felt the whole thing was too tough for my little girl. Knowing Rosa was sitting somewhere in the house, probably not in a very good state under the circumstances, was agonising for me as well.

  When I was looking down at my baby daughter, I made an oath to myself: No matter what happens, I’m the only person in the world she’s ever going to call Daddy and I will be in her life every step of the way. Thirty years later, I’m the only one she calls Daddy. Dad mainly, Pappa sometimes and Daddy when she wants something. And she gets it! I call her Ebs most of the time, and Ebony when I want something. And I get it!

  I returned to Melbourne with Zadia to continue The Bloke musical. Noni was there. We had a few days before I had to go back to work, so we went down the Great Ocean Road for four days. Noni didn’t know this but I felt really weird. I so wanted it to be Zadia, Rosa and Ebony. I almost said to Noni, ‘This is not happening for me.’ She really loved me at the time and she made that very evident. I loved her too, but not like I loved Rosa. It was complicated. Zadia was there, the play was happening and Noni was about to fly to Hawaii to be interviewed for an American kids’ show. I went to the beach on my own, I found a private spot where no one could hear me and sang Phil Collins’s ‘Against All Odds’ at the top of my lungs over losing Rosa. Madness. I had a new girlfriend and I was singing my heart out because I’d lost the love of my life.

  The trip down the Great Ocean Road was wonderful. It’s a magnificent piece of Australia. If you haven’t done it, do it. It was summer and a great opportunity for Noni and Zadia to get to know each other. The three of us sitting in the cabin of my FJ ute driving past the Twelve Apostles, it doesn’t get more Australian than that.

  Back to Melbourne and back to work. Noni flew off to Hawaii and then back to Sydney. Zadia came to the theatre every night and, thankfully, loved it. Backstage people would dress her up and cover her in outrageous make-up. She loved watching the show from the wings. She knew all the songs and dance steps and wasn’t afraid to perform them. I thought, Oh no, don’t tell me we’ve got an actress. She could have been a great actress. When she was in her twenties I told her she’d be great at it. Her answer was, ‘Are you kidding? I’d rather put needles in my eyes!’ The best thing was the one-on-one time I had with Zads for three weeks. We both had rollerblades and we went everywhere. Port Melbourne and surrounds are relatively flat. We’d blade to the tram and go catch a movie or blade along the waterfront down to St Kilda. It was sad when she had to go home.

  Part of the deal with this play was a Victorian tour. It was a great play to tour. It’s a very ‘Australian’ piece. This was thirty years ago, so a lot of country folk were C J Dennis fans. I chose to stay in the pubs: such atmosphere and wonderful characters. They’re laid-back in the bush, ten o’clock closing unless something interesting’s going on. We’d sing and drink into the wee hours. A lot of these joints had an out-of-tune upright ‘goanna’ with a few stuck keys, but that didn’t stop our mob from tickling the ivories and belting out a tune.

  Donny Bridges is the other lifelong pal I got out of doing The Bloke. Donny has a beautiful wife called Jude. They are a magic couple: you just know some couples are there for life, and they are of this ilk. Early on in the tour Donny spotted a girl who did look a lot like Jude: nice figure, petite, dark brown hair. ‘That girl looks a lot like Jude,’ he said.

  Actors love a running gag. As the tour wore on, Donny would occasionally comment, ‘That girl looks a lot like Jude.’ They were looking less and less like Jude every day. We travelled up north, then back through the mallee and along the south coast to Melbourne, out towards Gippsland and back along the coast. Towards the end we were in a beer garden and in walked this 6-foot-2, glammed-up, platinum-blonde trannie. This was manna from heaven for Donny. ‘That woman looks a lot like Jude.’ The end of a great tour with the perfect gag – Donny couldn’t be happier.

  Straight from that tour back to Sydney. I went to see Zadia and Ebony, who was still too little to take anywhere. Zadia and I sat and held her. It was lovely, not as full-on emotionally as the first visit. From there I had about a week with Noni before I headed off for a film in Cairns. It was a very enjoyable time with Noni, doing the inner-city thing, going to shows and great restaurants. It felt like a romantic holiday after the marathon of The Bloke. We were still courting and it still felt new. I think we were cautious, as we’d both come out of previous relati
onships, although the difference was that she’d chosen to leave her relationship and I’d been kicked out of mine.

  Filming in the big north

  I arrived in Cairns to do Dark Age, a film about a rogue 25-foot crocodile. I played the lead character, a wildlife officer. This was before CGI. The crocodile was animatronic and it didn’t work. It cost $250,000 to build, which was a lot of money in 1986. The first fortnight we had to shoot around the croc because it wasn’t ready. The big day came: they brought out the croc (nicknamed Chris) and lowered it into the billabong. It started swimming snakelike straight away. We all cheered! Then the midsection started to sink, and you could hear the animatronics fusing. Finally it was just floating around. All you could see were its head and tail; the rest was underwater. Back to the drawing board.

  The art department came to the rescue. They built a very realistic crocodile head, and put two long wooden shovel handles inside it to open and shut the mouth. The diver who operated it had to hold their breath so you couldn’t see bubbles when the croc was snapping away. We called the croc head Christ (our saviour). Croc Christ never came good. Its mouth opened so slowly you could have a cut lunch while you waited. I kept saying to Arch Nicolson, the director, ‘It’s not too late, turn it into a comedy.’ This is Tarantino’s favourite Aussie film, and he has the only master print of it.

  There was a scene in which we were being towed through the water (it was supposed to be the croc towing our boat). Andrew Lesnie was in a 16-foot aluminium punt behind us and joined to us by a rope. He had a Panavision camera at the front, two lights, four batteries, himself and two assistants. The power of the two boats being pulled made Andrew’s punt nosedive and sink. David Gulpilil was sitting at the outboard. He jumped up and wrapped his arms around the film magazine on top of the camera. He held the camera and everything else above the waterline while an assistant released the safety cable. David then pulled the heavy camera on board our boat. The camera got wet but the film stock was saved. We joked he went to such lengths to save his close-ups.