The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  The marketing and distributing of Aussie films is abysmal. An Aussie film has to be great to make it; if it’s merely good, it won’t. If I knew how to make a great film, I’d make one every day and I’d be worth billions. Nobody does, you’ve just got to go with a gut feeling.

  Shortly after Waiting I flew to Townsville for four days for the Town High twenty-year reunion with all my old mates. It was the usual affair: we went out together, told old stories, got drunk, went to bed, got up and did it again. On the Saturday night we went to a pub and danced to a red-hot rock ’n’ roll band. I was rolling drunk, and every one of our group left except me. I stayed until stumps at 2 a.m, then I stumbled back to a six-berth cabin we were staying in. I came in yelling for everyone to wake up and party. For some reason I singled out Rubin. He was reasonable with me at first but after a while he got shitty and told me to go to bed. I picked up a portable television and threw it at his head. Amazingly he caught it just before it hit him. Thank Christ, because it would have crunched his face in.

  When I woke I remembered what I’d done. I thought to myself, I could have killed him. It was worse than a king hit.

  It was 16 June. I gave up drinking that day and twenty-five years later I haven’t picked it up. It took me until I could have killed a mate, for absolutely no good reason, to stop. I apologised to Rubin, but he wasn’t impressed.

  Noni and I were not getting along, for many reasons that are private. If we didn’t have Charlie, I’m sure we would have moved on. I felt so guilty about Zadia and Ebony that I was hanging in there, desperately trying to find a path forward. I’d think of leaving and look into Charlie’s big blue eyes and I couldn’t leave him. I’d then look into Ebony’s big brown eyes for the fleeting times I had her and think, How could I have deserted her before she was even born? My world became all about my kids.

  I went to AA, for myself this time, on Thursday, 21 June 1990. I did ninety meetings in ninety days. I got friendly with a bloke called Davo, who’s still my mate today; we go to a lot of South Sydney matches together. I started hanging around after the meetings and talking, and I started to learn how to live. Slowly but surely, I learnt many things about myself and I started growing up.

  My worst enemy was to do everything all at once and want it all straight away. Building three houses at once, becoming a movie star, becoming Mr AA. I used to look at the differences and convince myself alcohol wasn’t the problem. It was suggested that I listen to the similarities instead of the differences, so immediately most people who shared had similarities. Suddenly, ‘Bloody hell, I am an alcoholic.’ It’s about getting mentally, physically and spiritually well. The ‘God’ word didn’t worry me: I’m willing to believe something is gonna happen when I die, my blackfella mates had taught me that, as have a few personal things that have happened to me on my journey. I learnt the AA prayer.

  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

  The courage to change the things I can

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  Things I cannot change…I can’t change Noni…change the things I can…I’ll leave Noni…yeah, yeah, that’s the difference.

  I left Noni and went to Mum and Dad’s. Noni was mortified. As Noni was doing all the work at the time, I didn’t have any money. I walked around the district checking out people’s fences. If they were stone or brick fences, I’d fix them with my brother Baz; if they were timber, I’d do them. I simply put a note in the letterboxes of about 100 houses. I got six great jobs out of it and about four months work. For the second half of 1990, I lived with my parents, fixed fences, went to AA meetings and concentrated on being a father to my three kids.

  Zadia was thirteen going on sixteen. Her Italian blood matured her into womanhood from the age of twelve. She was growing so tall so fast that she was screaming literally with growing pains, she’s 5 foot 10. When she was eleven she and her friend decided to run away. I got a phone call from Rosa that she was last seen getting a ticket to Central from Epping after school. The staff at Central went looking for her but couldn’t find her. We figured she might have been coming to me in Blackheath. Blue Mountains police were combing the trains but couldn’t find her. I waited for the 11 p.m. to come in to the station but she wasn’t on it.

  I had a Holden FJ panel van hotted up with one hell of a 186 donk. My mechanical genius Uncle John, husband of Mum’s sister Joan, had rebuilt it from the ground up. I left Blackheath at 11.10 and arrived at Central at 12.15. The thought of my daughter in the city at night completely freaked me out. The staff still hadn’t seen her. The bloke in charge called me irresponsible. He said he had a daughter of his own and that this would never happen with her. I told him I was too busy to punch his head in, but maybe some other time.

  I rang Noni, who told me that Katoomba police had Zadia. She’d been on the 11.30 train. It was just an adventure for her: she’d decided to come live with me and had brought her friend along for company. She took her time because she wanted to run around the city for a while on her own.

  When she was thirteen, she put pillows in her bed, escaped through the window and went to a party. We finally found her at Epping High School with a lot of eighteen-year-old boys. She had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The look on her face when she turned around and saw me was priceless.

  The weekends with my kids in 1990 were great. We spent them at my parents’. Mum and Dad spent a lot of time with my three kids, especially Zadia during the Rosa years and Charlie during the Noni years. Dad had become an old softie with my kids. He was like a clown to them; he teased them and played with them, lucky bastards. Zadia called him Grandfa because she couldn’t say Grandpa, so Grandfa it was.

  Noni talked me into going to marriage counselling, and our agent recommended an amazing woman. The combination of this and AA changed my life over the next few years. After a few sessions, Noni and I decided to give it another go. It worked a treat: the combination of AA and counselling gave us both new life skills and the next few years were probably our smoothest. I moved back in with Noni in late 1990. We’d just started on this new path, so the smooth period was still ahead of us. The enormous emotional combination of early AA and counselling, coupled with moving back in, were doing my head in. I became overwhelmed and went spiralling down. I had one AA phone number: ‘If you’re going to pick up a drink, ring first.’

  I rang Davo. ‘Davo, John the actor. I want a drink and I want to punch something, I don’t know which will happen first.’

  We arranged to meet at a cafe in ten minutes. Davo dropped what he was doing and came to help me. That’s what AA members do. I’ve done it myself. I’ve driven an hour at 1 a.m. to help someone.

  We had a long talk. Dave’s background is tougher than mine, and he’d failed AA a few times before his current sobriety, so he knew how the program worked. I’d done the ninety days and that was just about it. I didn’t have a sponsor, I wasn’t working the twelve steps and I wasn’t reading the Big Book. Dave suggested I see Ray (name changed for AA anonymity), who was my age, working-class and a knockabout. He became my sponsor.

  Revelations

  Ray and I talked a lot and drank a lot of coffee, my new drug of choice. I complained that I’d lost my daughters.

  ‘You know where they live?’

  ‘Yeah, Epping.’

  ‘Well, you know where they are – they’re not lost. Don’t be afraid to change, Johnny, don’t be afraid to grow up. You are responsible for you, nobody else. You deserve to be loved. Learn to love yourself and life will be grand. You’re sober and the good news is, you’ve got your life back. The bad news is, you’ve got your life back.’

  This was the beginning of a lifetime of hard work, necessary work if I was to experience enlightenment and therefore contentment. Ray and I figured out that every catalyst for the destruction of my relationship with Rosa was a drunken indiscretion. Each and every lewd, violent, outrageous, unacceptable act was a result of drunken­ness
. Since sobriety I haven’t been guilty of any of those things. I’m no saint, and I’ve continued to make huge mistakes, but mistakes, not offences or misdemeanours. I get up every day of my life and try to do the very best th­at I can and do nobody any harm, just for today, then I thank God for getting me through. That’s the AA secret: just for today, stay in the moment – you only have to not drink one day at a time. If I make a mistake, I apologise for it, try to learn from it and not repeat it. In my lifetime, others have treated me as if my mistakes were deliberate offences, the punishments far outweighing the crimes. Too much of this results in me removing myself from that particular person, which is not always easy with family complications thrown in. I always do the best I can with as much love as I can muster and try not to let the bastards get me down.

  A lot of my discussions with Ray were about getting along with my wife and finding a way to handle the tough times. I explained to Ray that one of my worst traits was losing my temper. I couldn’t help it; I’d inherited it from my father. Ray gave me one of the best pieces of advice ever, which became a life-changer for me.

  ‘It’s your temper, why would you want to lose it? Next time you feel you’re going to lose your temper, remove yourself from the situation and don’t come back until you’ve calmed right down to “fuckin’ angry”!’

  I also stuck my nose into self-help books. Wayne Dyer taught me that it’s impossible to do something without a thought preceding it. That old chestnut ‘it was a reflex action, it’s not my fault’ is bullshit. I know, because I haven’t lost my temper once since Ray and Wayne taught me to make other choices.

  In early 1991, I finally got a job, a telemovie called Pirates Island. I had a lot of fun playing the villain captain of the pirates. The producer, Roger Mirams, embarrassed himself by showing me how I should act the part in front of everyone, because he wasn’t happy with my performance. Strange man, lucky I’ve got thick skin. I had a ball; one of my childhood fantasies came true. I had to clamber onto a tall ship (the Bounty) in the middle of Sydney Harbour, with a knife between my teeth. I came up over the side of the ship, grabbed the damsel (Beth Buchanan) and tied her to the main mast.

  The other memorable moment was a swordfight using actual sabres. This was a Spanish co-production and the lead was Sancho Gracia, a matinee idol from Spain. He didn’t arrive for another fortnight. Meanwhile Rangie, the stunt coordinator, taught me the sword fight. Gracia was a brilliant swordsman and he’d pick up in half a day what took me two weeks.

  The day of the sword fight arrived. The location was on the sand near the beach. We rehearsed and Sancho was full-on: he really knew what he was doing. We went for a take and he went berserk. He was fair dinkum; I was literally defending my life. Cut.

  ‘What the fuck were you doing? You went nuts, you’ve put dents on my blade, you could have killed me.’

  ‘No, no, no, you know what we are doing, you know when to block, I won’t kill you, we have to fight like men.’

  I went up to him and stood an inch from his face and said, ‘Okay, let’s go again, and if you cut me and I’m still upright, I’ll punch your fuckin’ face in, because that’s what I’m good at when I fight like a man.’

  Sancho went a little pale and Rangie stepped in. ‘Righto, let’s calm down. We’ve got the wide, let’s take it easy and shoot this in sections.’

  Back to the mountains

  Around about April, I went to Katoomba to see my dentist. Noni came with me. After the appointment we cruised around the mountains, had a great lunch and did a bit of sightseeing.

  After a while Noni said, ‘Why did we leave this place? It’s really beautiful up here.’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t want to leave. It was the Soothsayer’s idea, not mine…’

  ‘Let’s come back. You wanna look at some real estate?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Next minute we’re looking at rentals in real estate agents’ windows.

  ‘Why rent when you can buy?’ Noni said.

  This is what happens when you bring together two compulsive people with the same wants: immediate compulsive action. We went back to Sydney and put Narrabeen on the market. We wanted a quick sale so we sold it for what we’d paid for it a year earlier, even though it was much improved and we could have got more. We found a charming Federation house on three-quarters of an acre of beautiful established gardens. We got it cheap as the front verandahs had rotted away and the bathroom–laundry was a corrugated-iron lean-to. John the Builder to the rescue. Our fifth property in six years.

  We moved in and I started work straight away. It was the classic Federation design: front verandah, through the front door into the hall. Bedroom either side, into the lounge room, another bedroom on the left. Through to the kitchen on the right, sunroom on the left. Bathroom–laundry lean-to at the back. We gave a fresh coat of paint to the V-board internal walls, sanded the floors, put in new front steps, replaced the rotting verandah timbers and moved in.

  It was wonderful to be in a family home again. It’s a much healthier environment for personal growth to be in your space and not renting somebody else’s. Noni and I were trying to make this work and to an extent it was working. Try as we might, we didn’t seem to have the right chemistry, the right connectedness. Not like I had with Rosa. I knew that, but at the same time I had to remind myself that she was gone as my partner and I had to carve out a life without her. Maybe I could have done that, but every second weekend I’d go to Rosa’s to pick up my daughters. I couldn’t wait to get there and be in the same room as her for fifteen minutes. Rosa has always had a great sense of style, but she could have been sitting in a hessian sack and still been the most beautiful person in the world to me. I’d ask to use the bathroom and I’d stand there in among the soaps, moisturisers and perfumes to drink her in for a moment.

  Back in the real world I was trying to work myself out and find out what was acceptable. I was beginning to understand the power of acceptance. What is worthy of acceptance and what is unacceptable? There are a lot of grey areas and muddy waters between those to poles. For instance, being without Rosa was unacceptable and yet my big step was to accept that it was over, it was past. She was still there but she had shut the door and severed the connection.

  My sponsor said, ‘That’s past, you’ve gotta live in the present, the present is important. What’s present? Noni, Charlie, Zadia and Ebony, where you live, what you do and how you do it, now.’

  AA and counselling were opening my eyes to who I was beneath the surface. I’d been living on the surface since the first time Dad had belted me under the ear and called me an idiot. I’d thought I knew a lot, but now I was learning a lot and discovered I knew virtually nothing. I had a habit of saying ‘I know, I know.’ My sponsor would counter that with, ‘Well, good on you, I feel, I feel.’ I was taught not to blame, and to avoid pointing and saying the word ‘you’ during an argument. Instead of ‘You should’, say ‘May I suggest’ and ‘This worked for me, maybe it’ll work for you’, and ‘It’s only an opinion, if it works for you, take it’. Easy to say, extremely hard to implement. I’m still messing it up, I’m not that good, yet. I once met a Buddhist monk who said you have to have compassion for everyone. I told him about my worst enemy and asked how I could possibly have compassion for that person. What about the Chinese who had imprisoned him for fifteen years? He answered that they get the most compassion from him, every day. If only we could all aspire to get close to what this monk had, the planet would prosper and we’d have world peace.

  Noni and I kept up the counselling, as it seemed to be working for us. After about a year, the counsellor had a good understanding of my upbringing and the violent dysfunction with Dad. We were talking about it in depth and I was getting emotional.

  She asked, ‘How did you feel about him when you were a boy?’

  ‘My brother and I wanted to kill him.’

  She asked me to pick a cushion that represented Dad. There were a number of cushions to ch
oose from, different sizes and colours. I chose a small black one.

  ‘Now close your eyes and think about you and your father.’

  I closed my eyes and thought about it and started crushing the cushion with my hands. Then the strangest thing happened. I drew the cushion in to my chest and an incredibly real vision came to me. I was walking towards my dad’s workshop and Dad was there in his navy-blue work singlet, shorts and boots. He was in his thirties. He was yelling at an eight-year-old boy, who was me. I walked up to the old man and said, ‘You missed out.’ I turned my back on him and stood between him and the boy. I then walked up to my boy self, went on my knees and held him. My left arm was around his waist and my right hand was on the back of his neck. I could feel his hair, it felt absolutely present, vividly real. I said, ‘It’s all right, mate, it’s over, I’ll look after you from now on.’ I opened my eyes and cried like I’ve never cried before, from a very deep place.

  From that day on, I’ve been parenting myself. I realised I had the emotional maturity of a five-year-old and that’s being generous. Looking after myself for the last twenty-five years has taught me to love myself, not give myself a hard time and strive to be a proud, humble person. It’s been a long walk, but every time I fall, I make sure I get up and stumble along in a forward direction. AA, counselling and learning the tools to counsel myself and strive for personal growth, mentally, physically and spiritually, make me a better person every day, a day at a time.

  Here’s a good one. ‘Guilt and worry are a waste of time. If you’re guilty, you’re living in the past. If you worry, you’re living in the future. If you’re not worried or feeling guilty, guess what? You’re living in the present!’ Instead of guilt, feel remorse; instead of worry, make good plans. This approach has helped me get through the worst of times in the last thirty years. Some people don’t understand this saying, but after reading this, maybe you will.