Still Riding on the Storm

by Robert G. Barrett

  The following day the wardrobe lady from the ABC rang me for my measurements and asked me would I throw some Levi shirts and my R.M. Williams riding boots in a bag and straight after that the production secretary rang to tell me I was to be at the ABC in Gore Hill at 8.30 a.m. and there would be a car and driver waiting to take me to Narromine. The movie was being shot at Trangie but we were all staying at Narromine.

  In the meantime, the whole script arrived and, while you didn’t have to be Sir Alec Guinness to do my part, I decided I might as well give the thing a read. Basically, the story behind the movie, Mail Order Bride, is as follows. Now, Kevin Saunders is an outback carpenter in his forties. He writes to several Filipino girls and eventually asks one called Ampy Cruz to come out to Australia and marry him.

  He takes her to live in his palatial mansion — a shit-pot caravan about as big as a shoe box in a hot, dusty, fly-blown town of 1000 people called Badgeiri in the outback of NSW.

  There’s only two things they don’t like in Badgeiri — racial prejudice and blacks — and when they meet Ampy they decide they don’t like Asians either. So, little Ampy’s stuck in the middle. The whites don’t really want her, the blacks aren’t all that keen on her either and she’s married to a drunken ocker who’s tight as a goldfish’s arse with money, hates kids, and a week after she’s there one of his mates tries to rape her. Welcome to Oz, Ampy.

  But Kevin’s not all that bad. Even though they have the wedding reception in the Badgeiri RSL — which turns into a drunken shitfight from which Kevin has to be carried home — and even though he likes to sit around all day whingeing and drinking piss, Kevin does have his tender moments. Seeing as Ampy never stops working and tries her hardest to please the whingeing big prick, he decides he’ll take her out to a real grouse restaurant for dinner. So he takes her to the local service station for a feed of greasy steak and chips covered in tomato sauce which nearly chokes her. Then, after drinking about nine dozen cans of Tooheys with his meal and burping and farting all night, he tells her he’s had such a wonderful time he’s going to bring her back there once a month and to hell with the expense. He’s sophistication-plus, our Kevin.

  Ampy wins out in the end, but what she has to go through! Drunkenness, attempted rape, fights, racial prejudice, violence, not to mention a rather large dose of culture shock … all pretty harrowing for her, to say the least. After reading the script, I was keen to go.

  I left Terrigal about 6.30 a.m., got to the ABC a little after eight and met my Commonwealth driver, Bill. He threw my bags in the boot of the Fairlane and about 30 minutes later we were on our way to the bush. As it happened, Bill and I had something in common: we were both ex-butchers and we both liked a drink and a punt so we stopped in every TAB and just about every pub between Sydney and Narromine. Nifty Nev got the last of my punting bank at Dubbo, where I would have liked to stop for a while just to look at the heads on the locals. There are some rippers there; they made me look like Rock Hudson. But we had to get cracking, so we jumped in the car, Bill put the pedal to the metal and we were in Narromine about 5 p.m.

  Most of the cast, the leads, directors and such, got billeted at The Peppercorn and The Country Club motels — the two classier ones in Narromine. I got the Narromine Hotel/Motel near the railway crossing at the end of town, under repair and on the wrong side of the tracks.

  But as it turned out, the hoey-moey was grouse. My room was big and comfortable, the publican was the friendliest little bloke you’d ever want to meet in your life, there was a terrific drop of Old on in the bar which was about 50 paces from my room and right next door was the TAB. I was like a Viking in Valhalla. And if that wasn’t enough, instead of having to muck around ordering and waiting for breakfast in the morning, you just went into this big, old country kitchen and helped yourself. Stacks of local bacon, free range eggs, fresh tomatoes, bread and coleslaw and beautiful fresh milk every morning. Cook your own and as much as you want.

  My driver had to return to Dubbo so I said goodbye, unpacked my gear and decided to go for a run and check out Narromine. I laced on the K26s, threw a sweat band round my head and trotted off. Five minutes later I was on the outskirts of town, another five minutes and I was over the Macquarie River, five minutes more and I was in the middle of nowhere wondering whether I’d cop a spear in the back or get attacked by dingoes, so I headed back. I did a few exercises in the back of the pub, then got cleaned up. It was only a plodding, wheezing 30-minute job but it was better than nothing.

  After a shave and a shower, I thought I’d hit the bar and sample the local brew and, if there were any sheilas around, let ’em know a handsome movie star was in town. There weren’t and nobody else was very impressed so I just sat there drinking. Three nice, cold ‘Lilly of Lagunas’ later, I thought I’d better get some food before everything closed up, so I walked to a take-away food bar I saw earlier and bought half a chicken and some tomatoes. Outside the shop I bumped into this young Aboriginal bloke.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ I said. ‘You don’t know where I can get a smoke ’round here do you?’

  ‘You wanna buy a stick, brudda?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty dollars, brudda.’

  ‘You got me, son.’

  He told me to wait there while he went home and got it. ‘Home’ turned out to be an old grey Valiant station wagon parked across the road. ‘Nice place you got there,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to call ’round one day, have a cup of tea and meet your family.’

  He gave me the stick in a brown paper bag. ‘Here you are, brudda, 20 bucks.’

  I gave him the rock lobster then went back to my room to check it out and put the food in the fridge. The stick was head and leaf but it was as big as a corn cob and kept me going for four days. Like my old grandma said, you gotta get up to get down.

  By the time I got back to the bar, a few of the crew and cast had started to drift in. The grips and props men were having a drink and I got to meet Robert Noble, who was to play the part of Donnie. Robert’s a hard-looking, nuggety sort of a bloke with a good sense of humour and we finished up fairly good mates on the job. I asked him if he was going to have a drink that night but evidently he’d had a big one the night before so he said he’d hit the sack early. But the boys in the crew said the catering girls were putting on a bit of a turn in their digs back at The Country Club. For a Wednesday night in downtown Narromine, it sounded all right to me.

  Everyone had been asked to take a bottle of champagne but getting a bottle of bubbly in Narromine is like trying to get a bacon roll in Tel Aviv. After rooting around like you wouldn’t believe, we finally got some off the manager of the motel. By the time we got inside though, everybody was just about knackered or, as they say in the ABC film department, shattered. I hung in there for a while, had a few drinks and got to meet some of the crew. They weren’t a bad bunch, most of them. A few others you couldn’t warm up to if you were cremated with them. By then, the champagne was starting to disappear quicker than lifeboats on the Titanic and the crew I came with wanted to get to bed so, rather than miss a lift home, I bailed out.

  I was still feeling pretty good and, you wouldn’t believe it, when we got back to the hoey-moey, the place was raging. The Doctor What’s Video Volley Ball Team were in there celebrating their win in the grand final and with them were the runners-up and a host of friends. I decided to get my camera, take some photos and join in the festivities. I was off my face, anyway.

  At first I thought they were the local first-grade rugby league team, broken noses, teeth missing, big hands, hairy backs (and that was just the women). But they were typical, easy-going country people, as pleased as punch at winning the grand final so I got right into the drink with them. I ended up dancing with this big country girl who was built like a Russian war memorial and after a few schooners, she was starting to breathe a bit heavy. I thought if she drags me back to my room and throws me up in the air, they’ll take me to the movie set tomorrow in a doggy bag! Luckily,
her brother was there to keep an eye on her and make sure no city slicker tried to remove her size 95 knickers so I was safe.

  By just after midnight, everyone was just about totalled, including the publican. It was a good night, I thought, and not a bad day all round, but we movie stars must get our beauty sleep, so like nine out of 10 Hollywood film stars I had a quick Palmolive soap facial and hit the blurt bag.

  When I got up around seven the next morning, I looked rougher than five miles off Sydney Heads and I had a hangover about the same size as the Israeli defence budget. I laced on my K26s, belted down two Codral Reds and a cup of black coffee and decided to try and run it out of me. It was pure agony but the air was cool and clean and even though when I got back my chest sounded like Gus Merzi tuning up his piano accordion, I did feel a little better. Another black coffee, a nice hot shower and I was starting to feel almost half alive. It wasn’t long before my appetite was up and it was time to sample my first country style breakfast.

  I was the only one in the kitchen and I ended up with a stack of food in front of me Evel Knievel couldn’t have jumped over. It took me an hour to eat it.

  After that massive bloat, I got the script and sat out in front of my room in the sun and read my lines. That only took about four seconds, so I just sat there reading the paper and dropping farts that sounded like a Salvation Army Band tuning up till the ABC driver called, then it was off to Trangie to shoot a few scenes.

  Trangie is about 100km west of Narromine at the end of a dead straight road. In the Aboriginal language, Trangie means a good place to have sex, which is appropriate as there’s not much else to do there. It’s one of the smallest towns I’ve seen. It makes Narromine look like Las Vegas. There’s a main street, two pubs, some shops and that’s it. They’ve got a single set of traffic lights and they change once a week. A bloke told me they had a boxing match there once and both fighters sat in the one corner.

  We got to the caravan park where the crew were all set up and I got to meet the rest of the cast. Charito Ortez, cast as Ampy, the Filipino bride, is one of the prettiest and sweetest little ladies I’ve come across in quite a while. As soon as this movie gets on TV, every mug in Australia will be on a jumbo jet heading for the Philippines to bring one back for himself. One scene, where I’m talking to Kevin outside the shower block, she steps out into the light wearing a flimsy nightie with nothing underneath and lets her hair fall down over her shoulders. I forgot all my lines and tried to bite a piece out of the wall.

  Ray Meagher’s a knockout as Kevin, her pisspot, outback carpenter husband. If you hated him in Breaker Morant, you’ll loathe him in this.

  Of course I’m not taking anything away from my performance as Keith, Kevin’s boofheaded mate from the caravan park who sprays beer all over the sheilas at the barbie and makes a complete Beecham’s Pill of himself every time he appears. I was absolutely brilliant. Before the movie was even released, I’d been nominated for best supporting wombat.

  Anyway, after a bit more shaking hands, back-slapping and bowing and scraping on my behalf, it was time for a bit of lunch, then down to work. The barbecue scene: 35 takes standing ’round a barbecue, talking shit and drinking piss in the sun. It was like Australia’s biggest beer commercial. Mojo would have signed us to lifetime contracts if they’d seen it.

  I’ve done four beer commercials. I did one in Brisbane, took me seven hours but at least I was in a bit of shade in a pub. But this scene was out in the sun and by far the most punishing. And for all those people wondering whether real beer is used in those scenes, of course it’s real beer, what do you think we are, a pack of bloody poofters?

  By five o’clock we were gone. I had my wobble boots on, Ray Meagher was walking around like he had an arrow sticking in his back and Robert Noble was saying his lines in Swahili. Luckily they called a halt for tea about quarter past five.

  Everybody had apricot chicken and apple strudel with ice-cream; I had half a gallon of black coffee and a laugh at the footpath. But the show had to go on and straight after tea we ripped into another five dozen cans. By 8 p.m. we were a mob of howling beasts. The girls in the scene had so much beer sprayed over them they looked like they’d been caught in a monsoon. But the directors said the scenes looked enormous and their opinions are the ones that count.

  We wrapped at 8.30 p.m. and were four shot birds. I can’t remember being driven back to Narromine until I was thrown out of the car like a bag of garbage outside my hotel where I crawled into the bar, bought a packet of corn chips, abused the publican like a good drunk should, then crawled to my room, flopped straight on the bed and passed out. I didn’t even bother about having a Palmolive soap facial: I figured I’d just have to wake looking ugly for a change.

  Considering how much booze I’d consumed the day before, when I woke up Friday morning about 6.30, I didn’t feel all that bad. Apart from my mouth tasting like a baboon’s armpit and feeling like they’d cut my tongue out and sewn one of B.O. Plenty’s socks in it, I was okay. I laced on my K26s and went for a jog. After a shower and another one of those country breakfasts where I did my best to send the publican broke, I was feeling so good, I would’ve fought any woman in Narromine under five foot three. Then the driver called ’round and it was off to beautiful downtown Trangie again. When we got there, everybody was looking all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so we got my first scenes over and done with pretty smartly. All I had to do was walk past Kevin’s caravan with my garbage bin, engage Kevin in conversation and at the same time hide the fact that I was perving on his wife. It was a snack. When it comes to being a sneak perv, there’s no one better than me in the whole bloody country.

  Seeing as I had four hours or so to kill before my next scene, I decided to go for a walk into Trangie and see what it was all about. In one word — nothing. The film crew hitting town was the biggest thing to happen since the locals saw their first automobile. In the middle of the main street, right outside the Trangie Hotel, the ABC props department had built an imitation war memorial for a scene in which the local black activists daub land rights slogans all over it. They’d done a truly amazing job so I got my camera out: it must have looked genuine because while I was standing there taking photos, the mayor came over and laid a wreath.

  Seeing it was right outside the pub I thought I’d better have a couple of beers so I went in and met the publican, an ex-Sydney detective named Bill Todd. I ended up having a few beers and yarning to him. I had to ask him if he wasn’t hiding from anybody because he chose to live in such a small town. He said he just preferred the quiet life and the unpolluted air. Bill reckoned the climate out there was that healthy they had to shoot a bloke to start the cemetery. While we were talking, I got to meet Clarry. Clarry’s the local Labor Party organiser. I don’t know whether news travels a little slowly out Trangie way, but Clarry was wearing a T-shirt that said GET RID OF MENZIES. I had two more beers, said goodbye and headed back to the caravan park.

  My timing was perfect as dinner was being served just as I got there. After a nice big Mexican feed, it was time to put on my jeans and riding boots and clomp up and down the shower block talking to Kevin while he waited for Ampy to come out. I managed to handle the clomping, waffle and dialogue without too much trouble, only being asked once not to stand so close to Charito and, before I knew it, I was wrapped and on my way back to Narromine looking forward to a big night out in town.

  After a shave, a shower and a piece off the corn cob, I thought I might venture up to the Friday night disco at the Narromine RSL. It was about 10 p.m. when I got there and the place was in full swing, $3 to get in and all the fights you’d want. It looked like a cross between a Burt Reynolds movie and the disco at the Last Chance Saloon. The DJ could well have been Wyatt Earp. There were blokes going over chairs and tables, flying out windows, foaming at the mouth and rolling around on the floor trying to bite each other’s face off. Right in the middle of this, like Custer at The Little Big Horn, was the ABC film crew. Naturally enough wh
en the locals sprung the ‘artsy fartsy mob of poofter bloody actors in their poofter bloody clothes’ in their midst, they were going to make things unbearable. So they were bumping into them, spilling beer over them, abusing them (me included), and the film guys were getting more than a bit horrified.

  I’d worked as a disc jockey at a certain hotel I won’t name, which used to be the roughest place on the Central Coast. I’d seen 10 fights a night, four nights a week for nearly a year so the sight of a few pints of blood amongst the beer and the broken glass didn’t really worry me, so long as it wasn’t mine.

  I had a ball drinking beer and dancing with all the local girls. There were plenty to go around and you reckon some of them couldn’t fight? I saw this wiry little redhead from Trangie knock a bloke out with the best left hook, right cross combination since Lionel Rose flattened Rocky Gattellari at Sydney Stadium.

  By then the film crew had seen enough so they decided to bolt. I stayed on for a while with a certain young lady from Trangie and the more beer I drank, the more she started to look like Diana Ross. Unfortunately I was forced to leave because I had to be ready by 6 a.m. the next day to get driven to Dubbo airport, where, with a bit of luck, there would be a seat waiting for me on the 7.30 a.m. flight to Sydney.

  The girl from the ABC was there at 6 a.m. sharp to take me to Dubbo airport. She told me on our arrival there was no guarantee I’d have a seat on the early plane but I was sweet on the 5 p.m. flight. I wasn’t really worried as there’s always stand-bys on domestic flights so I got my bags out of the car, said goodbye and fronted the desk clerk. That’s where I met Dubbo’s answer to Don Rickles.

  ‘G’day, mate. Have you got a reservation for R. Barrett?’ I asked.

  He looked at me, looked at my ticket and shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, ocker,’ he said, ‘but the Fokker’s chocka.’