Nial was living in Cairns at the time and I got him a job with the grips for the duration of the film. It was great to work with my big mate for eight weeks. When Andrew’s boat sank to the bottom, Nial, being part fish, started diving down to retrieve the equipment. He seemed to be under for a long time and we were getting worried. Next thing it was like watching Godzilla emerge from Tokyo Bay. First his head broke the surface, followed by the rest of him. He came out carrying four car batteries, two in each hand.
The last two weeks of the film took me to Alice Springs for the first time. This extraordinary ancient land blew me away. I couldn’t take my eyes off the surroundings. I climbed to the top of the ranges and watched the full moon rise. Watching the shimmering orange full moon light up the rich red ranges would have to be my closest experience to dreaming in reality.
I was obsessed by it. Up the road from where we were staying was another crew on a show called The Last Frontier. They put on a barbecue for us. I was having a drink watching the sun go down over the MacDonnells when the wonderful Jack Thompson joined me.
I said to Jack, ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it, mate? So red, it’s like Mars.’
‘It might be Mars to you, J J, but it’s home to me.’
Ah, Jack, ever the poet. One of my hopes before I die is to do at least a scene with Jack. I haven’t had the opportunity yet.
I arrived back in Sydney in time to help Noni move to Melbourne. She’d been offered her first directing job on a telemovie for the ABC, so she’d need to be there for pre-production, production and post-production, about four months. I didn’t have any work for a while so it was an opportunity for us to get to know each other, really. So far things had been a bit haphazard with our different work schedules. It was a good time. She had her share of hassles with the film and I was a good sounding board for her and a shoulder to lean on when she needed it. I found the love and I felt comfortable with her. The closeness developed during that time. I found her a lovely house in Brighton near the beach. It became a little haven and the place for us to consolidate our relationship. I went to Sydney a fair bit to see my daughters and towards the end of Noni’s time with the movie, I picked up the role of a hunter in a kids’ miniseries, Dusty.
Apart from Blue Fin, all the kids’ stuff I’ve done has been mediocre at best. I’ve found it bland and banal, so I don’t have strong memories of it. Dusty was one of those. The director was hard work, which didn’t help. I got to ride a lot and work with Jane Menelaus, who played the female lead, and our characters had a thing goin’ on. She was great to work with, very funny, and she made the work bearable.
Noni and I moved back to Sydney. We’d made up our mind to get some property in the Blue Mountains. We found a tiny, run-down timber house in Blackheath with sweeping views to the 300-metre cliffs that supported the township of Shipley, sitting on the plateau. The property was on an acre, completely private, sweeping down a thick green lawn to the creek below. It only cost $30,000 but it needed major renovations and extensions. Over the next twelve months, I doubled the size of it. I added a living room, a massive main bedroom with a big ensuite bathroom and a dressing room. I doubled the size of the kitchen and the second bedroom and wrapped the front and one side with an expansive deck. Throw in a garage and a brick courtyard off the kitchen courtesy of brother Baz, and you’ve got a great home.
At this time I also found a 60-acre property not far away at Dargan. I owned a chunk of typical Blue Mountains, including the top of a mountain, 300-metre cliffs that stretched for nearly a kilometre and plunged down into the Hartley Valley, a creek that ran to the cliff and became a waterfall, caves in the cliffs with Aboriginal hand paintings, and endless views so far west you could see the outskirts of Perth on a clear day. And the price! Thirty thousand dollars, bargain. Noni and I had both gone through break-ups and we thought it’d be prudent to cover ourselves for worst-case scenarios.
We moved to our home in Blackheath. Within a few months the honeymoon was over. Reality had set in and the things that niggled each other started leading to the odd argument. Noni and I are both strong characters. We’re in many ways alike, I think: we’re both Leos, we’re both headstrong. I thought my ideas were clearly the most sensible and logical, and she felt exactly the same about hers. I was still at the stage in life where I’d think, She’s wrong, why can’t she see I’m right?
I now believe that my interpretation of what’s right can be different to another’s interpretation of what’s right, and you sort it through discussion and compromise. It didn’t happen like that back then: we’d argue. Noni and I would have words, but I wouldn’t get to use mine. Noni has the ability to talk in very rapid paragraphs and I just couldn’t keep up, so I generally lost the argument. It was like a boxing match: she’d be punching my lights out with words for twelve rounds, and by the last round all I had left was a knockout punch, so I’d lose my temper and start yelling at her. But her knockout punch was just as savage as mine. She had a big voice and she’s a trained actor, so yelling was not a problem for her. She always gave as good as she got. I think we were our own worst enemies. I was thirty-four, she was thirty-three. We’re from the same generation of parents who felt from the neck up and suffered emotional immaturity. You’re only as good as your teachers, and sometimes you have to parent yourself. It’s what brought me undone with Rosa and it was bringing me undone again. In the long run, thanks to Noni, I sought counselling for our relationship and my addictions. It changed me for the better.
Fields of Fire for three years, yahoo!
In September 1986, I went to Yamba in northern New South Wales to play one of the leads, Jacko, in Fields of Fire, a miniseries about cane cutters in North Queensland in the thirties and forties. It rated its socks off in Australia and the UK, and we went on to do Fields of Fire II and III, so we went to Yamba every September for three years. We rechristened it ‘the annual holidays’. We were all given apartments overlooking the beach at Yamba. It’s a fantastic part of the world, at the mouth of the mighty Clarence River.
We had a ball making that show. Ollie Hall played Tiny, the leader of our gang. The bloke’s huge, he’d played front row for the Australian Wallabies. My nickname for him was Pantech. We’d go for a run on the beach and he was fit, kept up with the mob no trouble with the wind at his back. When we turned around and ran back into the wind, his massive frame was as hard to push through the wind as a pantech truck.
Harold Hopkins played Whacker, who ran the local pub. He was a country boy from Queensland, eight years my senior, a very fit outdoorsy kind of bloke who built his own home, loved the surf, loved his Rugby League and didn’t mind a joint. We got on like a house on fire and he soon became one of my best mates.
Kris McQuade played Elsie, the owner of the pub and the mother of two good-looking young daughters. Kris was a year ahead of me at NIDA, easily one of my favourite Australian actors. She’s a very earthy, gutsy woman and a good friend. It was an absolute pleasure to work with her.
I lived across from Ken Radley, who played one of our gang. We’re both coffee-holics. Every morning he’d perk up the brew and scream out from his balcony ‘Coffee’s up,’ and if we had the day off we’d top off the cuppa with a bit of weed.
I think I enjoyed this show so much because the blokes involved were ‘blokes’. Ken certainly was. They seemed to find all the top blokes in the acting arena and cast them in this miniseries, including Todd Boyce, who was a Yank playing a Pommie. He had great sense of humour and could handle the Yank jokes. When his character got killed in a plane crash, it helped that I liked him a lot, because it made it easy to play the grief.
Finally, the legend that is big, bad Roger Ward, the star of Ozploitation, Stone, Turkey Shoot and Mad Max, to name a few. Roger played the head of our rival gang, the bad guys. He’s larger than life and very funny. He was only fifty in those days and extremely fit. He was about fifteen years our senior and we’d tease him. If he crossed the road we’d race across, grab him by the
elbows and help him up the curb.
There were many great moments in the three years we did this series. These are my favourites. It was just on dark and Harold and I were in Ken Radley’s EH ute, driving back from a day’s shoot. We’d rolled up a big joint out of a large bag and we were passing it around. On the outskirts of town, the headlights of the car behind started flashing wildly. It was a white Commodore pursuit vehicle. We pulled over and Ken started to panic.
‘What’ll we do with the dope?’
‘Just give it here, Kenny, and we’ll shove it way under the seat. Calm down or we’re fucked.’
We looked back at the cop car. One big bloke was out heading our way and the other big bloke was leaning in talking on a handheld radio speaker. He put the speaker down and headed towards us.
‘Stay in the car, Kenny, and keep calm. Wind down your window.’
The big cop leaned in. It was Ollie Hall and the other cop was Roger Ward. The car was Ollie’s hotted-up Commodore. Bastards! We got them back.
For the pub scenes we drank a low-alcohol brew called Northern Light, which looked very much like full-strength. Ollie, being a big man, could hold his grog. We subtly put it out there that Kenny was one hell of a drinker. Ollie thought that was a joke, and he reckoned he could drink Ken under the table. We set up a drinking competition and we thought, why not do it on the pub set and have Harold serve the combatants with beer jugs. So Harold filled Ken’s with Northern Light and Ollie drank full-strength. Ollie became legless and Kenny pissed a lot and remained sober.
Ollie could hardly stand up but he was competitive. ‘Just one more, give us just one more, that’ll knock Ken over. Come on! One more.’
Laugh! I nearly wet myself.
It was very common for Italian migrants to head for sugar-cane country. There were three gangs involved: our gang, the bad gang and the Italian gang. The last consisted of two actors and ten extras from the district who were the real deal. These guys had came to Australia as young men in their twenties, as Rosa’s father had. They were now locals in their late forties and early fifties. The ten extras were fit blokes for their age. We were shooting all the cane- cutting sequences and it was a big day. Families turned up with picnic baskets and homemade wine to see their men cutting cane like the old days.
They lined up, spat on their hands and gripped their cane knives, ready to show their families their amazing cane-cutting abilities.
‘Camera’s rolling?’
‘Set.’
‘Sound?’
‘Speed.’
‘And action!’ Suddenly there’s sugar cane flying back at a rate of knots, each bloke trying to outdo the other. Mums and wives are smiling widely and clapping, kids are jumping up and down, the rest of us are watching in awe of these middle-aged cane-cutting machines.
The AD called ‘Cut!’ but they kept going. ‘Cut!’ – they keep going harder. ‘Cut, cut, cut!’ – they cut even harder! The AD worked it out. ‘Stop!’
They all stopped, exhausted. ‘Jesus Christ, we cutting, cutting, we too fuckin’ old for this shit, what you try to do, kill us?’
We did a sequence in which we burnt the cane. The drama was that our mate is caught in the fire and we know it. So we were to stand in front of the oncoming fire until it petered out at the edge of the crop, then we’d rush in looking for our mate. Now, a cane fire is spectacular and full-on. It’s only lit when there’s a wind to push it, so it’s over fairly fast.
We had cane experts with us on the fields. I went up and enquired, ‘Once the fire goes down, it’d happen that fast that the cane wouldn’t be hot, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘So the second the fire drops, we could run in, we’d know that, right?’
‘You would.’
‘Thanks.’
So the fire was raging towards us, and six of us were running up and down yelling out to our mate. The fire dropped and we were off, racing into the burnt cane. We went about 50 metres and we couldn’t breathe. There was no oxygen because it had all been burnt. We turned and ran back out. We cleared the cane and sucked in, desperate to breathe. The two cane experts were rolling around laughing their guts out.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘You didn’t ask!’
Very funny. Bastards.
Back to Blackheath for Christmas 1986. Dad retired at sixty and came to help me build the house. Noni and I were doing all right, so we could afford to pay him. He protested, so I told him that if he wouldn’t accept pay I didn’t want him to work. It panned out well, in that it gave him some extra cash and also gave me an opportunity to work with a much older and more mellow father. Jesus, he was a funny man. I had a few laughs with him that summer.
We were walking down the street to the Blackheath shops and there was a young woman in short shorts in front of us.
‘Look at that,’ he commented on her bouncing bum, ‘like two possums fighting in a paper bag!’
‘Jesus, Dad, you’re a dirty old man.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are, you’re old enough to be her father – grandfather, even.’
‘I’ll tell ya why I’m not a dirty old man. If you can still raise the sword, you’re still in the fight.’
I bought a two-door 1964 XP Falcon fitted with a V8. I’d always loved these cars and this was just what I was looking for.
I had it railed up from Melbourne and Dad went with me to pick it up. I’d forgotten my cheque book (no cards in those days), so Dad went to his bank on the way and drew out cash for me. It was in Sydney’s west. I stood outside waiting for the old man. He was sixty-five, but still hard-working and fit; he looked old because he was bald. Next minute he was yelling from inside the bank. I raced in and he was staring down three punks sitting in the bank.
He said to me, ‘You take those two and I’ll take the big bastard.’
I immediately played the game. ‘What the fuck’s going on with you dickheads?’
‘Nothin’.’
And they took off. It turns out that Dad had been lined up behind an old couple being served by a good-looking female teller. The punks were saying rude shit to her like, ‘I’d like to jump on her’ and ‘I’ll go sloppy second’. Dad had snarled, ‘Shut your filthy mouths or I’ll shut them for ya!’
‘Yeah, and I’ll punch ya fuckin’ head in, you baldy-headed old cunt.’
‘John!’
You’ve gotta hand it to the old bastard.
Around this time my one-year-old daughter Ebony had surgery on her eyes. She had turned eyes and they had to operate to straighten them, one of four operations she had. I met Rosa at the hospital. We had enough maturity to put our misgivings aside for the day to support each other and especially our daughter.
I knew exactly what they were going to do to her and it wasn’t pretty. We were walking in to surgery with her on a stretcher and I fell to bits. Every part of me didn’t want this fragile little baby to experience this. I felt powerless and I couldn’t bring myself to watch them anaesthetise her. Rosa was much stronger and went in without me. I don’t think this did anything to help our rocky relationship.
Whenever I picked Zadia up, we’d spend three or four hours down at the park or out and about with Ebony. I’d fitted a car seat for her. Rosa had as little to do with me as she could. It was tough, but we all kept on keeping on.
Things were still up and down with Noni. When things were good, they were very good: we had fun and laughs, we enjoyed a battle of the wits, one-upping each other. We had great meals together – she’s a great cook.
The good thing about the mountains is that it’s rarely too hot to have a fire in the evenings. One of the remnants of the original house was the open fireplace. We’d sit there over a nice bottle of wine, nattering away or listening to music, followed by a video movie. Just the two of us, living was easy. Then we’d have a blue and I’d run away. That was my defence mechanism: run away, hide, come back and wait for it to go away, keep the p
eace at all costs, resolve nothing. We had one hell of a blue one day and I thought, I don’t need this, I had this with my father, I had it with Rosa, now I’m having it with Noni. It’s me. I do this to people, obviously – I rub them up the wrong way. Do Noni a favour, she doesn’t need this, I don’t, it’s time to move on.
I did all this dialogue in my head over a long bushwalk. Noni had to go into town on the train at 1 p.m. I thought I’d get home after that, pack my bags and take flight. Noni must have sensed this. Georgie and I returned from the walk and she was on the couch red-eyed from crying. Two hours later I was willing to keep the peace and try again. That could be on my headstone: ‘He tried again and again and again.’
Noni told me she was unble to have children, which was fine with me. I definitely didn’t want any more. I was satisfied with my two daughters.
But in April 1987 Noni was pregnant. She travelled with me to do a telemovie in Darwin, followed by Fields of Fire II. She managed her pregnancy really well, and wasn’t all that sick from it. She got terrible eczema on her lower legs in Darwin but a specialist soon cured it, so apart from being a small woman with a big baby, she was okay.
We had a home birth and Charlie came into the world on 2 January 1988. It was a fairly straightforward labour – well, as straightforward as labour can be, it’s always wonderfully surreal. We had two midwives, and there was a funny exchange between them as Charlie was beginning to emerge.
‘Do you think he’s coming bum-first?’
Noni pushed and Charlie crowned. You could see his hair before he went back in.
‘Well, if he’s coming bum-first, he’s sure got a hairy arse!’
Our bedroom had large windows taking in the mountain views. Just before Charlie was born, the house was enshrouded in mist. All you could see out the windows was thick fog. As Charlie started to crown, there was thunder. He arrived on the bed, the midwife lifted him onto Noni, and I cut the cord. The cloud lifted and a flock of colourful butterflies flew up from the ground past our window, and in a matter of minutes the mist came in again. This kid had to be special. He’s twenty-seven now and believe me, he’s special and I’m blessed.
The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life Page 25