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Copyright © John Jarratt, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First published 2015

Cover design by Philip Campbell Design Front cover photograph by Daniel Guerra Internal photographs courtesy the author Page design and typesetting by Shaun Jury

Printed in Australia at Griffi n Press Only wood grown from sustainable regrowth forests is used in the manufacture of paper found in this book.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Jarratt, John, author. Title: The bastard from the bush : an Australian life / John Jarratt. ISBN: 9781760067489 (paperback) ISBN: 9781760401016 (ePub) ISBN: 9781760401009 (mobi) Subjects: Jarratt, John. Actors—Australia—Biography. Dewey Number: 791.43092

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Contents

Wongawilli – Aboriginal word meaning Windy Hollow ...... 3 Island Bend ...... 43 Aramac ...... 67 The Jarratts hit the big smoke ...... 95 NIDA ...... 109 Finally! The lead role ...... 131 Reality check ...... 141 Little Boy Lost ...... 161 My addictions ...... 183 We of the Never Never ...... 185 The rebound ...... 203 John + Alcohol = Disaster ...... 233 Back to the city, again ...... 265 Wolf Creek ...... 289 The transition ...... 319 That’s it...... 335 Acknowledgements ...... 339 Filmography ...... 341

It was my first day at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), in early February 1971. I’d come straight down to Sydney (with the emphasis on straight) from Townsville. It was hot so I wore board shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of thongs. Everyone else was dressed to the nines; one even wore a full fur. I’d never met a homosexual before, a couple of suspects but not out-and-out real ones. I realised that, for the first time in my life, I was a minority. I was a heterosexual in what seemed to be a room full of sophisticated gays of both sexes. At the end of the speeches we were asked if there were any questions. Alan Ingram, a guy with ringlets in his long red hair, said, ‘Yes. Where’sss the boysss’ tooty?’ What was the son of a coalminer doing in this room?

1

Wongawilli – Aboriginal word meaning Windy Hollow

‘Wongawilli via Dapto’, that was my address. We didn’t have numbers on the miners cottages on ‘the Hill’ just below Wongawilli Colliery (est. 1916). We had electricity and the wireless, and an outside dunny, emptied by the dunny men once a week. Dad used to call the shit can ‘the chutney tin’. Tank water, no phone, no TV until 1957, and a fruit and vegie truck that came once a week. The houses were rough-as-guts shacks, which men with building skills had transformed into quaint cottages. Dad had those skills, thank Christ. Dad could do plumbing, wiring, building, concreting and welding, and he could pull a car apart and put it back together again. He wanted a caravan, so he built one. Every time Mum got pregnant, Dad built another room. I never met a carpenter, an electrician or a plumber when I was a kid. I was born in Wollongong Hospital at 3.30 a.m. on 5 August 1952. Dad came in later that morning, already pissed with a couple of drinking mates. I was breastfeeding at the time and Dad made some disgusting comment about breasts that made Mum cry. They all settled down and Mum said, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Dad looked at me. I was long, 21 inches long, and skinny and bluish. According to Dad, I looked like a skinned rabbit. After his ‘tit’ comment, he had enough sense to say, ‘Yes, he’s beautiful.’ Dad came to the hospital to take me and Mum home. I was dressed in some kind of little nightdress. Dad wanted to know why I was wearing a dress, and Mum tried to tell him that it was normal. He made Mum buy some flannelette material and she had to make me pyjamas. Dad never held me; he thought he’d break me. He never kissed or

3 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH hugged us, and as soon as we were old enough we were taught to shake hands. Bruce Robert Jarratt wasn’t brought up: ‘I was kicked in the guts and told to get up.’ His dad, John Robert Jarratt, started out as a drover, then became the first car mechanic in central Queensland. He later bought the Grand Hotel Hughenden (where Dad was born), moved to Townsville in the late 1920s and bought the Paragon Hotel at West End. Dad was raised by Aboriginal nannies while his parents worked full-time in the pub. Because of that, our family were never racist. Dad’s older brother, Brian, had the mental capacity of a three- year-old. He stayed with his family until he died in his late twenties. Dad learned to fight at an early age because of the taunting his brother copped. Dad was a tearaway and always in trouble, and his father used to give him hidings on a regular basis. ‘That’s the way it is, you bring boys up to become men.’ Dad carried that tradition with him when he raised us. ‘Never hit a woman, they don’t hand out medals for hitting women,’ but you could bash the living shit out of an eight-year-old. Dad was 5 foot 8 and he was 14 and a half stone (92 kg) of blood and muscle. He had a 34-inch waist, a 46-inch chest, biceps like tree trunks and an 18-inch neck. Never went to the gym. Dad’s father did all his own work around the pub and my dad had to work with him. He was a jack-of-all-trades and he taught Dad well: ‘had it drummed in to me before I could walk’. Dad’s grandfather was a bullocky. A long line of tough bastards from the bush. Dad rarely lost a fight and he had plenty. ‘I can’t box, but I can fuckin’ fight, I just wait for ’em to burr their knuckles up on my forehead, then I kill them.’ ‘I’ll give ya two hits start, I’ll tell you where you went wrong and then I’ll kill ya.’ He once said to a bloke he was about to fight out the back of the Dapto Hotel, ‘I hope you’re fair dinkum, mate, cause I like this kinda shit,’ and he did. One night shift way down underground, my old man fell asleep. The boys with him thought it’d be funny to tie him up and they did. Dad started bellowing like a bull. After a while one of them suggested they untie him. ‘I’m not gonna untie him.’ ‘Me neither.’

4 WONGAWILLI

‘Fucked if I will.’ They were all too scared in case the old man went berserk. On the cards, he had a rotten bad temper. So they left him there. Two hours later, he got free and his workmates were long gone.

I can’t remember much of my first four or five years on the planet. I only have anecdotes. My pop (Mum’s father) was living with us. He’d been booted out of Nanna’s house in Chippendale, Sydney, once his youngest, Joan, was old enough not to need fathering any more. The love in his marriage was long gone. He slept in a shed in the backyard and he was drunk most of the time. A quiet, unassuming drunk, an easygoing, funny little Irishman. Dad found him under a bridge with a bunch of pisspots and brought him home. My name is John William, after both grandfathers, and he called me John Willie. Mum and Dad would go out and he’d look after me. When they came home, my face would be covered in red. He only had one eye and had trouble seeing at night. He’d dip the dummy in strawberry jam and have trouble finding my mouth. Because of his sight, he would drop his trousers just outside our backyard dunny and back into it. One day, he let out a bloodcurdling yell. Dad, Mum and I raced out. He was standing there with his long johns around his ankles. ‘Bloody big snake!’ Dad went in to find an 8-foot diamond python wrapped around the toilet seat. I was about a year old. He brought the snake out and I grabbed hold of its tail and started sucking on it. Pop was from Sydney, born to Irish immigrants in Balmain. He started this silly game one night when I was about two. Mum was drying me after a bath and Pop grabbed me by the doodle and said, ‘Ding, ding, first stop, next driver.’ I don’t know what it means but it was said by the conductors on Sydney trams. This game got out of hand. Dad started doing it and I started doing it to Pop and Dad when they got out of the bath. We were in Farleys in Dapto. The supermarkets didn’t exist in 1954. You could buy just about anything in Farleys, from groceries

5 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH to hardware. Dad and Pop were over at the hardware section and Mum and I were at the groceries. I was holding Mum’s hand and we were standing beside a tall German man in rather baggy shorts. He mustn’t have had underpants on because I reached up his leg and grabbed his doodle. ‘Ding, ding, first stop, next driver!’ Mum was mortified. She looked at the German, lost for words. The grocer was doubled up on the counter in hysterics, my father was slapping the hardware counter laughing his guts up and my pop had fallen on the floor. The man said something in German, turned on his heel and walked out. For months afterwards, Mum and I would walk past the Dapto pub and locals would snigger, ‘Ding, ding, little fella, ding, ding.’

The memory I have of Pop is my first memory of anything. Pop loved fishing. Dad would drop him down to Shellharbour with his tent and camping gear, leave him there for a few days and come back and pick him up. Mum, my baby brother Brian and I came along. I remember Pop’s tent. The guide ropes were red and looked like my dressing-gown cord. Pop was standing beside the tent wearing a felt cap, his long-john undershirt and long trousers. The next thing I remember was being out in a boat with Dad and Pop. I had a blue cotton hat on. The wind blew it off my head and into the water. I became hysterical as it sank and disappeared. Mum said to me years later, ‘You remember that? You loved that hat. You were about two.’ That is my only memory of the first four years of my life. I can’t specifically remember Pop, but I know I loved him deeply. I still remember the strange confusion a four-year-old gets when trying to come to grips with their first death. They didn’t say he’d died, they just said he’d gone away for a long, long time. For a long, long time I thought I’d see my friend Pop again. Pop got bronchitis; he had it every winter for years. He smoked a lot as well. His regular doctor was away and he saw another doctor, Dr Finney. There was a flu going around. Dr Finney didn’t look up Pop’s history, just told him he had the flu. A fortnight later, Pop was in hospital dying of pneumonia. Mum came to see him. ‘See, I told

6 WONGAWILLI you the drink wouldn’t kill me, it’s the bloody cigarettes.’ Old people with pneumonia died in the fifties. When they buried Pop, he was only sixty-five. Dad went back to the coalmine, ‘the pit’ was what they called it. On his way home from the pit one afternoon, Dad dropped in to the doctor’s surgery. He asked to see Dr Finney. ‘Do you have an appointment?’ ‘Nah, this won’t take long.’ When Dr Finney came out, Dad said, ‘This is for Pop,’ and right- crossed the doc and knocked him out. In those days you literally took it on the chin if you deserved it. Nothing more was said. I remember Dr Finney, he used to be our doctor. Christmas holidays 1956, my memories begin. The John Jarratt that I know starts at four years and four months. We were going on holidays to Townsville, north Queensland. We drove north from Wongawilli in a brand-new FE Holden sedan. My first memory of the trip was my brother and I pushing our blow-up boogie boards around in shallow water at the inlet at Swansea, just south of Newcastle. Not terribly exciting reading, I know, but it’s the start of my bloody memories, all right! This trip was the most exciting event of my brief life. On the antiquated Pacific/Bruce Highway, we crossed rivers endlessly on car ferries. I never got over the wonderful experience of six big cars and a truck driving onto these punts and floating miraculously to the other side of the massive coastal rivers. The majesty of these rivers has never left me. Sometimes you’d float past a heavily wooded island that seemed so lonely and haunted. I’d imagine that no one had ever been on them because it was obvious that monsters lived inside the tangled mangroves, the thorny shrubs and the stunted gums. We’d set up camp every night, assembling the clumsy six-man canvas tent with its wooden poles and guide ropes. Brian was a couple of months off three, so he got to sit and watch. Mum and I had to hold the poles while Dad secured them. ‘Hold it straight, boy, hold it straight.’ ‘Don’t let it go, why did you let it go?’ ‘It’s not too bloody heavy, if you hold it straight it weighs nothin’!’

7 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

‘Why’d you let yours go, Helen? He doesn’t need bloody help, he just needs to listen!’ ‘What are you crying for, you big girl? I’ll give you something to bloody cry for!’ Whack, under the ear. My ears rang more often than a church bell. Every night we’d put up the tent; every night it’d be a nightmare. Dad rarely said sorry. He’d start crawling back into favour. ‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach, we’ll take a bag and Mum can collect shells, hey Chook?’ (his pet name for Mum). Apart from putting up the tent, our holiday was fantastic. We learned to live with Dad’s down side, which was a constant part of our upbringing. Townsville was magic. We spent it with the Sellers family. Big family. We stayed in the backyard at Grandma Sellers’ in the dreaded tent. At least it was up for a few days in a row. We went to Magnetic Island. This was the beginning of a love affair with possibly my favourite place on the planet. We have a great photo of Dad standing on one of the big round granite boulders on the island. He’s bare-chested, holding two pawpaws like breasts. Most of the time Dad was a very funny, witty, knockabout bloke. I remember going to the beach in Townsville for Christmas dinner. Heaps of people, men, women and kids, everywhere. As the sun was setting the men dragged this massive fishing net off the back of a truck. It seemed to my little eyes to be about 6 miles long. They waded out with one end of it, formed a massive semicircle and waded in again so that both ends of the net were on the beach, about 100 feet apart. They then started to haul the semicircle towards the beach. This required strength and patience. After an eternity, they pulled the net almost to the beach. There were fish jumping everywhere, it seemed like a million of them. What a great night. Our stomachs exploded with fish, watermelon and mangoes. God I love Queensland, up the Mighty Maroons.

During the war, Dad’s older sister June fell in love with a local boy from Townsville, Ben Sellers. The toughest, greatest man I’ve ever met. My father had absolute admiration for this man. He took Aunty June out on his motorbike, which had a sign on

8 WONGAWILLI it, Y Worry. Later on, that’s what he called his speedboat. Ben lived up to that name. He married June after the war. A couple of years later, he got a job driving his Bedford truck carrying coal for the coalmines, just south of Sydney. Dad followed and got a job at Wongawilli Colliery. Mum’s two brothers, Arthur and Charlie, followed us to Wongawilli. Arthur built a new house next door to Ben and June. Ben and June lived in the house below us. They had five kids: Tony, Greg, Fay, Kerry and Richard. Three older and two younger than me. Ben was tough, bright and had a great work ethic. His kids did well at school. He was very disciplined but didn’t seem to yell or hit anybody, unlike Dad. Ben and June were soulmates. My mum asked him how they seemed to get on so well. His answer: ‘I never tried to change her and she never tried to change me.’ So if you’re having marriage problems, you don’t need a self-help book, just remember Ben’s advice. Charlie, Mum’s eldest brother, was a bricklayer. He bought a block of land on the flat below the Hill, known as the Flat, surprisingly enough. He still lives there in a brick house he took thirty years to complete. He’s ninety-one and he’s fantastic. He was on the phone to Brian’s wife recently: ‘Still sexually active, not allowed to practise.’ I look like Uncle Charlie and I got my height from him. I’m a bit over 6 foot 1, he’s a bit under 6 foot and built. When my Uncle Arthur was fourteen, he was hit in the mouth with a cane by a Catholic brother. He ran to his sixteen-year-old brother Charlie with his gums bleeding. Charlie knocked the brother out. They had to lock the brother in a room so’s my Pop couldn’t kill him. They left St Benedict’s Chippendale and went to Forbes Street public. Uncle Arthur was the forces’ middleweight champion during the war. Charlie could beat him, Dad couldn’t, but more about that later. One night Dad got drunk and ended up in the lockup. He was horrid when he was drunk. Mum refused to have him released that night. Next morning he walked the 3 miles from Dapto to Wongawilli. Charlie knew about this and he caught Dad stomping past his house with a look to kill. He caught up with him. ‘Bruce . . .’ ‘Fuck off.’

9 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

Charlie grabbed Dad firmly by the shoulder and spun him around. ‘If you ever lay a hand on my sister, I’ll rip your head off and shove it up your arse, got the message?’ I really didn’t think Dad ever would, but he did, once, many years later. He gave up alcohol in the same second and didn’t drink again, bar one little slip-up that led to nothing.

Wongawilli Primary, established in 1927, was a typical off-yellow weatherboard, one-teacher school, as seen in many small country towns. On my first day of school I remember walking in ahead of Mum and Brian, clutching my leather satchel like a scared old woman clutches her handbag. It was a strange mixture of elation and scared-shitlessness. I knew a lot of the kids. My older friend Elwyn Jordan and Raymond O’Hara, my age, were from the Hill. Still, I felt completely out of my depth and kind of not belonging, not good enough. I’ve always had this feeling that, on one hand, I’m the most amazing person who ever lived, maybe even the Messiah, and that I was going to be famous. In the next breath I’d feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet, that I was annoying, a fake, and that people were only friendly to me because they felt sorry for me. I don’t know why, because I can’t remember too much of my formative years, but I think I was an amazing little kid. I was full of wonderment; I was happy where I lived and who I lived with. We had the highest house on the Hill. Above it was the Illawarra escarpment, a bloody mountain range in my backyard. My brother and I could run through the thick bush at 100 miles per hour, screaming and laughing and grunting in our heaven on earth. Tiger snakes, red- bellied blacks, diamond pythons, carpet snakes, rabbits, bandicoots and wallabies were our mates, part of the bush furniture. Leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. To our knowledge, we never came close to being bitten. We loved the creek, flowing over big rocks, waterfalls, temperate rainforest. Big gum trees, bloody big gum trees. There was a flooded gum growing next to the creek which was the biggest in the district, I reckon, and not many knew about it. It’s probably still there. Brian

10 WONGAWILLI and I would hug it, talk to it. We called it ‘House’, ’cause we reckoned you could easily build an entire house out of it. Go to the front of our house and sit on the swing that Dad built (of course). You look down the hill over the rusty tin roofs of the miners cottages, across the Flat, past the gently rolling, emerald- green dairy farms to Dapto, 3 miles away. Beyond that, Lake Illawarra, then the pièce de résistance, the Pacific Ocean. My favourite view on the planet. I was born into this little piece of heaven on earth. A wide-eyed cherub, skipping through it literally chasing butterflies and singing back to the myriad birds. I know I was noisy: I loved being loud, I loved to sing, I got upset sometimes, I cried loudly and got angry, I carried on like a two-year-old when I was four. I was a long way from doing a thesis on proper childhood behaviour. The day arrived that I was old enough to be verbally abused and bashed by a 5-foot 8-inch hulk with a baritone voice that erupted like thunder and tasted like lava. I’m pretty sure I suddenly graduated to that when I was four. A degree I never studied for and absolutely didn’t deserve. How can you get burnt in heaven?

Burnt in heaven The only physical contact we had with Dad was a wrestle. Dad would roll off the lounge onto the carpet and announce, ‘Who wants to wrestle?’ Our eyes would light up and Brian and I would launch ourselves onto this hunk on the floor. Dad would immediately have Brian squashed in the scissor-leg hold and have me in a headlock. He’d slowly squeeze each of us until my head ached and Brian stopped breathing. ‘Do ya give up?’ ‘Nah.’ ‘Do you give up?’ ‘Nah.’ ‘Give up.’ ‘Naaaah.’ ‘Give up!’ ‘Yes, yes, yes!!’

11 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

‘What’s the Jarratt motto?’ ‘A Jarratt never gives up!’ ‘Too bloody right.’ The other one was ‘how to throw a punch’. Dad would get on his knees so that he was our height and hold his hands up, palms towards us. We’d have to punch his hands. ‘Left, left, left . . . right. Left, left, left . . . right. Keep your left leg forward, bounce on your knees and throw the punch straight. Lock the elbow, roll the shoulder.’ We could fight and we could take a hit. When the old man belted us, he’d always use his hands, nothing else. Callused hands like steel bands from years of hard labour and using heavy machinery in the black holes of black coal. Short, thick fingers like sausages would leave their imprints on the backs of our legs. ‘Why are you wearing long pants to school, John?’ ‘Mum forgot to wash my shorts.’ Mum forgot to wash our shorts a lot. I’m not scared of anybody. If someone wanted to fight me at school, I wouldn’t hesitate. Bang, bang, bang, all over. There were two reasons: a puny little kid was nothing compared to my father, and I had a chance to hit back and hurt someone else. So the poor little bastards I hit were Bruce substitutes. And years later, a cop, compared to my old man? Nothing. This is how my father prepared me for my first day at school. ‘If anyone frightens you or pushes you around, punch them straight in the nose.’ My father was called out of the pit that day and asked to come down and take control of his son, who was punching kids in the nose. Our teacher, Mr Higgins, never liked me. I wonder why? All I remember of Mr Higgins is being rapped across the knuckles a lot with the cane. I was left-handed, and the protocol in those days was to change you over to the right hand. Mr Higgins made me so ashamed of my left hand that I abandoned it. I’ve had to retrain my left hand in adulthood. I had big problems folding my arms because of this. In the afternoons we were asked to sit up straight and fold our arms. For the life of me, I found this very difficult, and he kept caning me for it. My mother became concerned and alarmed with Mr Higgins and finally convinced Dad to get me out of the

12 WONGAWILLI school. They sent me to Dapto Primary, where I stayed until we left Wongawilli.

My mother put up with a lot. She was one of the last generation of subservient women in Western society. In 1957, when Mum was twenty-six, Elvis was twenty-two and had already had six number ones including ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Hound Dog’. The pill was not far away. Mum would finally crawl out of her subservient cocoon twenty-four years later. Helen Catherine Cole was born on 12 March 1931. She was the youngest of five: Charlie, Arthur, Jim, Betty and Helen, in that order. Betty was two years older than Mum. Mum was really good- looking, but Betty was amazingly good-looking. Betty’s nickname was Spaghetti, as she was thin, and Mum’s was Scraggy Ag at home and Fly Poop Face at school, because she had freckles. Needless to say, she had a low opinion of herself, which was totally unfounded. (Have a look at the picture of her in the picture section and be amazed.) Until she was about thirty, Mum was very shy and very much a victim. Her mother, Emma, whom I knew as Nanna, was one tough bitch, hard as nails, heart of gold. A 5 foot 6, broad-shouldered, big- breasted country girl from Jembaicumbene, near Braidwood, New South Wales. She was in charge of 44 Edward Street, Chippendale. Everybody did what she told them, including Pop, who spent most of his life getting out of her way. Mum used to cop the back of the hairbrush across her back and around her head. When I was about eight, Nanna had an argument with a woman in Edward Street and gave her a belting. Like Mum, Nanna looked younger than her age. One night, in the early 1940s, Nanna was walking down a dark lane towards Edward Street. A man was following her. If she upped the pace, he upped the pace; if she slowed down, he slowed down. So she stopped and started talking to him. ‘G’day. Would you like to come to my house for a cup of tea?’ ‘What about your husband?’ ‘He left me. Just my kids at home, they’ll be upstairs asleep.’ ‘All right, then.’

13 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

They walked to Nanna’s house. Pop was away in the woolsheds. She invited the man into the kitchen. He sat at the table, she put the kettle on, then walked through to the lounge and yelled up the stairs. ‘Arthur, Charlie, get him! Kill the bastard.’ Charlie, twenty-one, and Arthur, nineteen, came roaring out of their bedrooms and down the stairs. The bloke started running for the front door, but Nanna shoved him onto his face in the hall. He scrambled to his feet and crashed out the door, closely followed by the two sons. They caught him halfway down the street, belted the living crap out of him and went back to ask Nanna why. Tough times when Mum was a kid: the Depression followed by World War II. By 1944, Mum’s three big brothers were at war, her five-year-old adopted little sister Joan was just starting school, and Nanna, Pop and Betty had jobs. When Mum was thirteen she had to leave school to become the housekeeper and look after Joan, who was actually her cousin. Cinderella of Chippendale. Mum’s brother Arthur and Dad met each other at the Air Force base in Dubbo during the war and became lifelong mates. They were mechanics working on fighter-plane engines. Dad was always in trouble: ‘I didn’t join up to call you “Sir”, mate, I joined to fight the fuckin’ Japs.’ Uncle Arthur took Dad to Edward Street in 1947. He clapped eyes on Mum and it was love at first sight. Mum was sixteen. Nanna clapped eyes on Dad and immediately thought he was ‘a mongrel’. He called her ‘the old battleaxe’ until the day she died. The only distinction between the two of them was their genitalia. She refused to go to their wedding two years later. Mum, my brothers and I were all victims. She saw in Bruce what she was used to: a protector and provider like her mother. That, unfortunately, is a clever disguise perfected by people who are actually controllers and insulators. You meet someone, they are perfect for you, they have everything you want and need for a contented life. Beside them walks a person who reminds you of your father or mother. You pick that one, throw him or her on your shoulders and carry that around for the next twenty or thirty years. And so, Mum graduated from Nanna’s child servant to Dad’s

14 WONGAWILLI adult servant. Sometimes he listened to her and agreed with her, but only if she was persistent – Dad didn’t discuss, he argued. If you said something was black he’d argue it was white. If you said it was white the following week, he’d say it was black. He was cerebrally very bright but an emotional infant. You never won an argument with him; he could justify anything or would belt you under the ear for being belligerent. I went to Dapto Primary a few months in to my kindergarten year. I established friendships with John Mayberry, Brian Beasley and George Dopper. They remained my friends for the next five years until I left for the Snowy Mountains. Brian became BB and I became J J and I remain so. My ears stuck out at right angles from my head, and so did Brian’s. Brian’s ears were small, so we were also Big Ears and Little Ears to those who wanted to tease us and risk a belt in the nose. Some creative bastard came up with ‘John Jarratt is a parrot sitting on a lump of carrot’, which I hated. I was pleased to get away from that rhyme when I moved to a new school when I was ten. A few weeks after starting there, ‘John Jarratt is a parrot sitting on a piece of carrot.’ Aaaah! I caught the bus to and from school. It dropped me at the bottom of the hill and I had to walk to the top of the hill with my schoolbag. It felt like Everest to my little legs. One week the fare went up a halfpenny. I told Dad and he just gave me the extra money. Idea! In one month the fare went up by threepence (a lot of money in 1957). One afternoon I came out of the shop just outside of school with a big bag of lollies and there, sitting on his motorbike, was Dadzilla. ‘Gimme them lollies, boy.’ He took them and threw them onto the bitumen and there was a spray of coloured candy all over the road. ‘Get on.’ I’d never been on a motorbike before, and the old man could ride it. He’d raced a Cammy Norton at Bathurst. In 1947 he had a WLA Harley painted iridescent green, with a chrome engine, luminous skulls on the mudguards and a leather buddy seat. Port and starboard lights illuminated the engine at night. Dad was a lad. The exhilaration of the ride made me forget I was in trouble. Ripping around corners and the deep throatiness of the engine added to the excitement. We came along the Flat at a hell of a pace

15 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH and the dark cloud of dread came over me as we rapidly approached our house. ‘Go to your room and wait for me’ is another way of saying to a six-year-old, ‘You are about to be tortured.’ Sitting in my room, a knot in my guts, both knees shaking up and down like pistons. Hands sweating and clasped in my crutch, squeezing my fingers, letting go, squeezing my fingers, letting go. Staring blankly at the floor, lips squeezed tightly. In he comes in his work clothes. He hasn’t washed the coaldust off yet, which makes him look even more horrendous. ‘Why did you steal off me, boy?’ ‘Sorry . . .’ ‘Sorry what?’ ‘Sorry, Dad.’ ‘I work my guts out five days a week, I dig bloody trenches on the bloody weekend and this is what you do, you dirty little bloody thief!’ He grabs me by the upper arm, pulls me upright as if I’m weightless and whacks me with his right hand. This man doesn’t have an arm, it’s a club with a hand on it. ‘Well bang you bang won’t bang bloody bang steal bang from me bang a-bloody-bang-gain, willya!’ BANG. ‘No, Daaad.’ ‘Nah dad nah dad.’ BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. Generally it would end with him throwing me away. I usually hit the wall. It was a fibro house and once, when he threw me into it, I cracked the wall. He withheld my pocket money until he could pay for a new sheet. He taught me a lot of lessons. I should be the best person in the world from what I learnt from his constant punishments. But he also taught me I was an idiot on a regular basis. ‘You’re an idiot! What are ya?’ ‘I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m an idiot, Dad.’ ‘You said it.’ I remember sitting in my room waiting for the belting, sometimes

16 WONGAWILLI with my brother, and I remember crying on my bed afterwards – not crying, heaving, sometimes with my brother heaving beside me. We usually had to stay in our bedroom until dinnertime, ‘to think about whatcha bloody done’. Brian was eighteen months younger than me. Brian has a softness about him; he was a sweet boy and he’s a sweet man. Not in a gay way, he’s built like Dad and he was runner-up in the Golden Gloves when he was fifteen. He’s all man, but he’s a wonderful man. Plaintively, ‘Yes, Dad, yes, Dad, sorry, Dad, yes, Dad . . .’, his big sad brown eyes, his quaking chin. Somehow, I didn’t know how Dad could hit him. I’d be sitting there aching all over, I’d look across at my little brother and my heart would ache much more. I wanted to kill my dad. Brian and I would stay awake at night figuring out how to kill him. Strange thing, I can remember the lead-up, I can remember afterwards but I can’t remember the beltings very clearly. I’ve blocked it out. Just an overall memory of it, nothing specific. Except once. I was in the garage and I’d done something wrong. The old man was about to belt me and something snapped inside me. I suddenly made a run for it and Dad chased me. I could hear him counting, ‘Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . . seventeen!’ He’d counted every step it took to catch me, dragged me back to the garage and whacked me seventeen times. ‘Now I’ll give ya your bloody hiding.’ I never ran away again. ‘Always tell the truth and you won’t get hurt.’ ‘I did it!’ . . . BANG. Dad taught me to be the greatest liar on earth. I think on average I’d tell four or five great lies and get out of trouble, then I’d get caught out and cop a hiding. Good odds. I didn’t like school, never did. I was constantly told by adults that schooldays were the best years of my life. Probably, but not the days at school. I’ve never been able to sit still, I still can’t. There is nothing more boring than sitting on your arse being told how to conjugate the verb, 7/10 plus 27/64 = who gives a fuck, Pi R squared, Attila the Hun was the ruler of the Hunnic Empire from 434 to 453, remember that for your history exam – why? I still don’t read books, it takes hours, I get bored, thank Christ for film and television. Good on you for reading this book, I wouldn’t.

17 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

I hate maths, I failed it regularly. I love building houses, I’ve built nine of my own. How did I work out measurements and angles? Easy, I loved building houses and the maths made sense. I’m still not good at it, but I get by. School is not for daydreamers and life-schemers. Most of the brainy bastards I knew ended up with good jobs in worthy establishments. Most of the tearaways and mad bastards I knew ended up owning the establishments. I was the type of student whose absence meant the teachers would be happy and the students sad. ‘Let me entertain you!’ Causing mayhem in class got me through: I was witty, I was funny, I could impersonate teachers, I went to school every day in search of laughs. Getting laughs is like healthy heroin. I try to get laughs most days, I haven’t changed. Hold your breath: this is what Dad and I and Brian have in common, we’re funny. When I was a kid, Dad wasn’t much fun when he was home. Life of the party when he was out, but death of the party at home. That slowly changed in our teenage years until finally we were big enough and ugly enough to tell him to go fuck himself. Dapto Primary is a dim, grey, boring memory. It was still an age when you’d get caned for the smallest misdemeanour, so you soon learnt to sit down, shut up, be bored to death until the most magical time on earth, 3 p.m. As I look back on my time at Dapto Primary, it seems fairly uneventful. There were a few highlights. In First Class there was this plump red-headed girl. One day she forgot to wear her knickers and we got onto it. George and I pulled her dress up around her ears. She started screaming and running around the playground. We followed her wherever she went. We got caned for that. A lot of migrant kids, part of the postwar immigration scheme, came to the school. When I was in Second Class a German girl came to the school who couldn’t speak English. We taught her that ‘get fucked’ meant ‘good morning’. We got caned for that. Brian and I got into quite a few fights. Dad drilled into us to never start a fight but to make sure you finished it. I never did, but I used to tease and verbally upset other boys until they hit me, then I’d belt them. We had a reputation, and after a while not many kids would

18 WONGAWILLI fight us. I started Fifth Class in 1962, when my brother Barry started kindergarten. He was six years younger. Typical Jarratt: Barry got into a fight. I knew nothing about it, he was down in the junior school. My teacher was Mr Eades, the headmaster. He called me to his office and said I was going to get six cuts of the cane for inciting my little brother to fight. I had nothing to do with it, but I got six. This wasn’t the first time Mr Eades had treated me badly. I told Dad about it and he shrugged and said I must have deserved it. Two years later I found out that Dad had got into an argument with Mr Eades at a Lions Club meeting. Dad had belted him from the hall into the foyer to the front steps. He’d right-hooked him and Mr Eades had cascaded down half a dozen concrete steps and been laid out at the bottom.

Sport was a big thing. I played cricket once, got hit in the mouth with a cork ball at silly mid-off and immediately joined the swimming team. I loved Rugby League, still do. Mum was raised in Chippendale, so because of that we’re South Sydney Rabbitohs. Dad was born and raised in Queensland, so it’s Queensland Maroons at Origin level. I played League but I was lousy at it. Too skinny for a forward, too slow for a back. I’m good at balance sports: biking and motorbiking, driving, horseriding, boxing, waterskiing, climbing and – my favourite – snow skiing. Dad was a great Rugby League player, born to be a second rower, and he was tough. Loved taking the opponents out. Stiff arm out of the scrum, not a problem. He ran flat out into the steel goalpost once and it didn’t knock him out, he was never knocked out: ‘My mother breastfed me until I was five, the doc reckons the bone in my forehead is much thicker than normal.’ I’ll drink to that. In 1959, I was playing League for the Dapto under-sevens at Port Kembla. The ground was in the middle of nowhere, overlooking the ocean. Between the footy field and the ocean was a sea of corrugated roofing iron. Under this iron lived Aboriginal people, many of them drunk and growling and screeching at each other. It was the first time I’d seen a drunken woman. It was so surreal it felt like a weird dream, a trip. Strange, black, dusty, bent people living in something that looked like the tip Dad took us to. I didn’t ask questions because

19 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

I somehow knew, even then, that nobody could give me an answer I’d understand. I still frequent the Illawarra district and I know there isn’t much of an Aboriginal presence. I wonder what happened to the corrugated-iron people.

Inside Only in the house to eat, watch TV, do homework or sleep. Mum was a typical Australian cook. Meat, three vegetables, Deb mashed potato (just add water to so-called potato in powder form) and dessert, or pud (short for pudding), as we called it. The meat was chops, sausages, rissoles, occasionally steak, fish fingers or canned fish. We couldn’t afford chicken (in the days before it was hormone- treated), we only had it at Christmas along with ham. The vegies were the usual – peas, beans, cabbage, cauliflower – boiled until limp and soggy. Salad came out of a tin, except for the lettuce. We used to joke that if Mum broke her wrist, we’d starve. Dessert was bread-and-butter pudding, jelly and cream or rice and milk, mainly. Mum learnt to cook one thing really well, which she learnt from Aunty Nell (Dad’s mother’s sister, who lived down the hill): lemon meringue pie. She’d make it occasionally, and it’s still my favourite. There were always leftovers. Mum wouldn’t throw anything out, a habit from the Depression years. It was always a relief to get a brand- new meal. ‘What’s for dinner?’ ‘Bread and duck under the table.’ ‘Eat up and shut up.’ Bang. ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’ Dad was a noisy eater; he ate like those Vikings you see in the movies. He’d take great chunks off his fork into his mouth and chomp away with his mouth open. He’d then lean across and clip you under the ear. ‘Eat with your bloody mouth closed!’ We got TV in 1957. First house on the hill. Initially, all we got was the ABC. My favourite shows were Mr Squiggle, Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men and the Friday-night and Sunday-night movies. Then WIN TV was established in March 1962. We had a year of commercial TV

20 WONGAWILLI before we headed further into the bush in ’63. My favourite WIN shows were Disneyland, The Honeymooners and The Twilight Zone. Sunday night was Disneyland at 6 p.m., followed by the movie. We used to have what we called ‘a party’. The party was a bowl of mixed lollies and chocolates each and watching TV. Dad did shift work at the mine. We loved afternoon shift and night shift. Dad wasn’t home afternoons or evenings, bliss. Mum would put out an alert that Dad was moving to day shift the following week. ‘Try to behave yourselves, don’t do anything stupid and don’t argue with each other.’ Believe me, we tried, but kids live in the moment. I’d steal Brian’s truck, he’d stomp on my foot, I’d choke him, he’d scream. ‘Go to your room and wait for me, both of ya.’ Homework was a nightmare. Dad was good at everything, I was good at nothing. It was different to a hiding but just as unbearable. Long division: ‘Four divided by twenty-five is . . . is . . . is . . . it’s zero, isn’t it, cause twenty-five doesn’t go into bloody four, does it . . . does it!’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t know? . . . Jesus Christ, you’re just as happy without a brain as the people who’s got ’em.’ This could go on for an hour or so. It felt like ten hours, punc- tuated with clips under the ear. I’d go to bed with my ear ringing. (PS I had to Google long division to write this paragraph.) Brian and I slept in the same bedroom. When we weren’t scheming Dad’s demise, Brian would tell the bedtime story, ‘The Adventures of Monkey Mick and George’. Brian told this story on a regular basis for a couple of years. Monkey Mick and George went all over the world and got into all sorts of bother. I loved those stories. Brian has a vivid imagination and a wonderful sense of humour.

My name was ‘Get Outside’ and Brian’s name was ‘You Too’ Home at 3.30, unpack your schoolbag. Mum would give us a glass of cordial and a biscuit of sorts. Vita-Weat and Vegemite was a favourite. ‘Did you wash your plate?’ ‘Yeah, Mum.’

21 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

‘Well, why are you screaming around in here? Get outside!’ To Brian, ‘You too.’ I loved getting out of that house, out of ‘the heat’ and back into ‘heaven’. We’d play cars, cowboys and Indians, wars, goodies and baddies, Rugby League, pretend fights, real fights. Dad got us a set of boxing gloves for Xmas. Brian and I went outside, put them on and punched piss and pickhandles out of each other. Dad came out, took one look at us, ripped our gloves off, laid them on the chopping block and chopped them to pieces with an axe. What was he expecting us to do, pat-a-cake? We loved playing TV shows like Cannonball.

Barrellin’ down the highway Wheelin’ right along Hear the tyres a-hummin’ Hummin’ out a song. The rumble of the diesel The shifting of the gears The rhythm when he’s rollin’ It’s music to his ears. Cannon . . . ba-a-a-a-all!!

Cannonball was a show about truckies. There was a rusted old wreck beside Dad’s garage. We got the steering wheel off, we’d sit on the roof with our feet on the bonnet and sing the Cannonball theme at the top of our lungs, followed by an action replay of the show we’d seen that week. Those were the general antics around the yard.

Mr Feigh’s Mr Feigh and his brother lived next door. I think they were in their late forties or fifties. They seemed old to me. Their tiny little shack was encased in a bamboo jungle. You’d walk up the narrow front path to his house with bamboo suffocating both sides of it. Past a gutted bus parked in the middle of it, which looked like a giant’s vase, there was so much bamboo growing through it. Out the back were Mr Feigh’s beehives, and we weren’t allowed

22 WONGAWILLI to go anywhere near them. So, one day we were playing with the beehives and the bees flew at us and stung us half to death. Brian and I were with our cousin Steven, who was Uncle Arthur’s son; they lived directly below us. We went screaming towards our house covered in bees and met Mum and Steven’s mum, Aunty Betty, racing towards our screams. They both had long hair and the thing I remember most was them pulling bees off us and putting them into their hair. Needless to say, lesson learnt. Mr Feigh’s shack was kind of magical. The outside of the house was yellowish, mildewed fibro that faded into the bamboo and a rusted tin skillion roof almost camouflaged by billions of bits of rotting vegetation. You walked up a few wooden steps to a porch. To the left was Mr Feigh’s bedroom. The front door took you into one big rustic room. There was a small wooden table with two wooden chairs, two dirty, dusty, ancient lounge chairs, a wireless, a food cupboard, a meat safe, a sink with a dish drainer beside it where they permanently left their cups, cutlery and dishes, all made of metal. There was a wood stove with pots and pans hanging above it, and a kerosene fridge. The bathroom was out the back and Mr Feigh’s brother’s bedroom was a tack-on to the side of the main room. I can’t remember Mr Feigh’s brother’s name. He hardly spoke, he kept to himself and hid in his bedroom most of the time. Mr Feigh was entirely the opposite. We loved spending time with Mr Feigh. We spent most of our time in his bedroom. I hasten to add, there was nothing untoward about him, in fact he always left his door open. Entering his bedroom was like opening a door to another house. It was clean and tidy, everything was in its place. An ornate rug on the floor, a single bed covered neatly with a woven quilt, curtains, paintings on the wall and a dark wooden lowboy. In pride of place was his large wooden desk. Three drawers down either side and a number of shelves above the back of the desk. Everything was in its place, and there was a lot of everything. Using a beautiful wind-up clock with roman numerals, Mr Feigh taught us how to tell the time. He was a patient, tolerant teacher and therefore a good one. He was one of the few people I’ve meet who’ve made me excited to learn. I could hardly wait to go to his place to

23 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH learn things. He told me something my dad and my teachers never said. ‘You’re a clever boy, you’re special, you’re gonna make the world sit up and take notice, mark my words.’ The only other person who told me that on a regular basis when I was a kid was my mother. Mr Feigh taught us how to read a compass. He had a magnificent oil-based liquid compass. He taught us how to write in running writing before the school did. He had a sleek fountain pen and his writing was a work of art. He let us use his old fountain pen, which was gold to us. We were using pens and inkwells at school. The biro was brand-new and hadn’t infiltrated the schools back then. One of my favourite pastimes with Mr Feigh was looking at his globe. We’d pick a country and he’d tell us what he knew about it. He was a great raconteur and he’d mesmerise us with his knowledge and his stories of great historical moments on planet Earth. He knew we’d get into trouble if we went home in the dark, so he’d say, ‘You’d better go home, it’s almost time for the Never Wassers to come out, and if they get you they’ll drag you into the bush and we’ll never see you again!’ I was scared stiff of the Never Wassers. Sometimes Brian and I would go up the mountain and lose track of time, so we’d end up coming home through the bush in the dark. We could hear Dad’s booming voice calling us to come home to get the shit beat out of us. But at the time I was more scared of the Never Wasser getting us and ripping us apart. We ran through the bush in the dark as if we were running on a footpath. We never got lost, knew it like the back of our hands. Mum and Dad didn’t like Mr Feigh because he befriended our kelpie dog, Nugget. He’d take him for walks down on the Flat and because of Nugget’s nature, he learnt to chase cars. A car ran over Nugget and Mum and Dad blamed Mr Feigh. Brian and I came home from school, I think we were about six and eight. Mum was sitting on the swing and invited us over to tell us something. ‘A terrible thing happened, Nugget chased a car and the car ran over him and now he’s in dog heaven.’ She wrapped her arms around both of us and she started to cry . . . a lot. That heaving, swelling, stormy thing hit my guts for the first time. My stomach was full of emptiness, the emptiness of having Nugget

24 WONGAWILLI drained out of it. My brain became full of it and the feeling rushed to my eyes like my brain had burst its banks. My eyes were like a spillway of tears and the sad emptiness in my guts made its way to my throat and roared out of my mouth with the wail that only comes from the depths of you. It’s deep inside you, it is you, it’s the pure heart and soul of you. I think that’s where your mind is, that’s where your soul is. I don’t know exactly where, but I know it’s there and I think it’s beyond the physical. Physicists grapple with it because they need a theory, some evidence and a reason. Humans can’t cope with the notion that something just is.

Farms and fi elds All around us were dairy farms. The New South Wales South Coast is rolling green foothills from Wollongong to Bega. The countryside is emerald green, lush and beautiful. My favourite drive to this day is from the surf beaches and rugged rocks of Kiama south to the cottage shopping town of Berry, west through the rolling hills of Kangaroo Valley, up into the mountains past the spectacle of Fitzroy Falls, crashing over a 300-foot drop, then driving on into the Southern Highlands. Brian and I had to go for the milk once a week. We carried a large can with a lid on it and a thick wire handle. It was about twenty minutes there and back. Mr Smith would stop milking and attend to us straight away. He was a slow-walkin’, slow-talkin’ typical farmer. He had a son our age, Roderick, nice kid, we hung out with him at times. I loved the cows, big docile things, which would wander up of their own accord, shuffle into a stall, have their udders sucked by a machine, then walk off back into the paddock. Day in, day out. Contented, milk-giving tarts. The trip home was horrendous. Across a paddock for 300 yards, down to a dam with a willow tree beside it. We’d take a break there and swing on the tree branches. Up the hill to the beginning of the track through the bush, then take a break. Down the skinny bush track to a small creek. All the while constantly changing hands, as both were aching by now. Stop at the creek, drink water. Up from the creek another 200 yards. Find the road, walk up the hill past our

25 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH friend Elwin Jordan’s house, past the Davies’, past Mr Feigh’s and into our house, aaah. Mum felt sorry for us and it wasn’t long before milk was replaced with the powdered stuff. Tasted like shit, some of the best shit I’ve ever tasted. The paddocks down on the Flat were great. We’d ride our bikes. Our gang was Brian and me, cousin Steven, Elwin and Raymond O’Hara. There was a flock of geese, about thirty of them, which seemed to have the Flat to themselves. They’d hiss and peck at you. The thing was to ride through them and try to stay on the bike. If you fell off they’d jump on you and peck the living shit out of you. I can’t tell you how funny that was to witness. Out in the paddocks were a couple of great swimming holes we weren’t allowed to swim in. So we’d strip to our undies, have a swim and beat our undies on a rock until they dried. That seemed OK, but swimming naked was wrong, don’t ask me why. The creek was dammed and all sorts of birdlife lived on it. It was a good-sized dam, which we called ‘the Dam’. Our parents told us there were thousands of electric eels in there and if you swam in it, you’d get electrocuted and die. They were freaked out about us drowning, and it worked. The teenage boys like my cousins, Tony and Greg, used to make tin canoes. Ben and June’s boys were gods as far as we were concerned. The eldest, Tony, is still my hero. A sheet of roofing iron bashed flat, two pieces of four-by-two about 2 foot long. Bend both ends of the sheet up and nail it to the four-by-two. Get a kero camp stove, bust bits of bitumen off the Flat’s tar road, put it into a billy can. Melt it and caulk the gaps between the tin and the four-by-two and she’s ready to launch in the dam. Most of them sank and the boys would spent a lot of time recovering them. ‘Hey Tony, how come you’re not gettin’ electrocuted?’ ‘Cause we’re teenagers.’ ‘Aww.’ They were gods.

A slag heap is a massive black hill of coal waste that’s left after the coal is processed. We had two of these at the base of Wongawilli

26 WONGAWILLI

Colliery. The roofing sheet had multiple uses in those days. Bend one end up and you have a slag-heap sled. Add a piece of rope to hold onto and you’re ready to go. I dunno, they seemed 200 foot high to me. It was a hell of a ride. By the time you hit the bottom you were doing 600 miles per hour, easy. The trick was to roll off before you hit the bottom or you’d come to a crashing halt and you could cut yourself to ribbons on the jagged edges of the sled. Amazingly, I can’t remember any major accidents. At the bottom of the hill were the bunkers. They were massive, I’m guessing 200 foot high by 50 foot wide. They were storage tanks for coal. The coal would come down the mountain on a conveyor belt, which continued up to the top of the bunker and poured coal into the bunker, not unlike a wheat silo. They held enough coal to fill a coal train. The diesels would back the train under the bunker, through to a back line. Then the train would slowly shunt forward and coal would pour from under the bunker into the coal cars below. So the bunkers were big enough to fill a train. Unbeknown to our parents, our game was to ride the conveyor belt to the top of the bunker and jump off just where the coal spewed into the cavernous hold below. That was the only place to get off; there were steel walls either side of the belt all the way to the top. You only had a 2-foot gap to jump off onto the walkway. If you went in, instant death: if landing headfirst onto coal didn’t kill you, the coal coming off the conveyor belt would, and then you’d be buried in it. I’ve been there since and I can’t believe we did this on a regular basis, until we got caught. ‘Go to your room, both of ya, and wait for me.’ Got a good hiding, grounded for a month, and had to do jobs all day for four weekends. Still the best ride I’ve ever been on, it was worth it. It was inevitable that we’d get caught. The miners parked their cars close to the bunkers and clambered into this wonderful trolley that took them up the mountain to the mine. The trolley could take about thirty men at a time. It ran on rails and it was pulled slowly and gently up the mountain by a large cable. The engine powering the cable was up top, so you couldn’t hear anything as it glided up and

27 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH down between shifts. I never tired of watching this curved, metal- roofed caterpillar climb up through a corridor of majestic eucalypts. It’s hard to describe. It was a quiet, poetic symphony, if that makes sense. The miners would alight from the trolley and take their black visages to the shower block. As a coal-dust-covered crowd, they had a kind of zombie look about them. They’d come out the other end in clean shorts and shirts, and head for their cars. ‘Hey you boys, what are you doing on that bloody conveyor belt!’ Looking down on three Brylcreemed heads running towards us, with no way out. Sprung! We saw Superman crush coal into diamonds on TV. We stuck lumps of coal on the BHP railway track. The train crushed and popped the coal brilliantly, but no diamonds.

The Sellers Uncle Ben and Aunty June had five kids. Three older than me, Tony by seven years, Greg by five, Fay by three. Two younger: Kerry by two and Richard by six. Tony and Greg could do no wrong. When Mum and Dad needed babysitters, they’d usually oblige. Greg mainly. Greg has a genius IQ and he’s a bit eccentric in all the best ways. We used to call him ‘the Professor’. Tony is no dill, but Greg could help his older brother with maths. We had a ball when they looked after us. We’d play crazy games and sing songs like ‘She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain when She Comes’ and act it out or dance like lunatics. Dad could never help himself. He’d found two old pushbike frames at the tip. A size 20 for Brian and a size 24 for me. He was bringing them back to life at a mate’s place at the bottom of the hill. They were Christmas presents and we still believed in Santa. In early December, Dad took us down and showed us our bikes; they looked brand-new. He’d rebuilt them and spray-painted them. All that was left was to put stickers on and streamers off the handlebars. They looked like brand-new Ferraris to me. It was a strange mixture of exultation and What happened to Santa? Brian and I were five and seven. Tony was fourteen and he rode a 28-inch racing bike. He went to Dapto High and we went to Dapto Primary. It was Brian’s first year

28 WONGAWILLI at school and I was in Second Class. It was 3 miles to school, up and down hills all the way. We followed single file behind Tony. He was patient with us, but it must have been frustrating for him. I think for three years of riding, the only thing Tony said was, ‘Come on, hurry up.’ No gears in those days; poor Brian’s little five-year-old legs pumping diligently every day, trying to do his best for our hero. Six miles a day every schoolday was one hell of an achievement for little kids. One day we were pedalling past this paddock and there was a horse giving birth. We stopped and watched it. ‘We’ll be in trouble for being late, Tony.’ ‘It’ll be worth it, mate.’ And it was. The head hung out of the back of the mother for quite a while and then, clump, out it came and fell like jelly on the grass. It was then doused with fluid and afterbirth. The mother licked the foal continuously as it tried to find its feet. Finally the foal stood upright on shaky stick legs. It was a life leap for me, seeing a living thing arrive on the planet. Horrifying when Tony explained that we were born the same way. The visual I had of my mother entered my dreams at times, and I’ll leave that to your imagination. When I got to about nine, I was allowed to ride home by myself. Poor old Brian had to wait for Tony at the bus stop. My mate John Mayberry used to ride with me part of the way and peel off to his joint in the south of Dapto. John introduced me to the fine art of smoking. We used to buy a pack of Craven A 10s from this seedy bastard who didn’t care about our age. We’d ride just beyond the outskirts of town, drag our bikes off the road and into the bush and smoke till we choked. I smoked fairly steadily from then to my mid-teens, where I took it on with a vengeance. Tony was of average height and build. He looked more like a Jarratt than a Sellers; Greg was opposite. Tony had balls and he wouldn’t take shit from my old man. We had a ’38 Chev; it was Mum’s car. It had broken down just below our garage and Dad wanted all hands to push it about 20 feet uphill into the garage. A bunch of kids and teenagers helped push. Dad never gave instructions; he tended to yell abuse at our ‘pathetic’ efforts. Tony had had enough. He was about fifteen at the time.

29 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

‘Bugger this, mate, push it up your bloody self.’ He walked away and we all bravely did the same. The eruption from Dad had to be seen to be believed. This tree trunk of a man with steam coming out of his ears and flames spewing out his mouth pushed a ton of car single-handed, up the hill and into the garage. Tony reckons if it had been recorded, Dad would’ve ended up in the Guinness Book of Records. Uncle Ben was one tough coalminer. He got his hand caught in machinery and had four fingers cut off. He picked up the fingers, held them onto the stumps, walked out of the mine, went to hospital and became one of the first people in Australia to have fingers sewn back on. He lost two but the other two were successful. One evening around about 1960, all hell broke loose. Uncle Ben had his legs crushed between two coal cars deep inside the mine. The right leg was crushed beyond repair and had to be amputated just above the knee. The other one was nearly as bad and the doctors wanted to remove it. Uncle Ben refused and told them to do their best to fix it. They did, but only just. The leg caused him pain for the rest of his life. It was so badly bowed out, it looked like it would snap. My father worshipped Ben. He would often say he was the greatest man he’d ever met and I think he’s right. My father had a terrible temper and the emotional maturity of a gnat. But he loved us a million times more than himself. He would die for us in a nanosecond and nearly did once. That story will come later. He had a big heart, he cared, he gave and he’d do anything for anybody and often did. He carried a saying and I try to live by it. ‘Expect nothing from nobody and you’ll never be disappointed.’ (I know the double negative is wrong but ‘anybody’ doesn’t have the same punch.) He wasn’t a complete brute, by any means. He was a fucking bastard for the brutal punishments and verbal put-downs but, at the end of the day, he was a great man. These days he’d be jailed for what he did then, but he was a product of his time. He waited on Ben hand and foot. Was always at the hospital. When Ben came home, Dad carried him everywhere. He was in too much pain for a wheelchair, and a miners house on the side of a hill wasn’t exactly wheelchair-friendly. He finally mastered the crutches and eventually the artificial leg. Ben had a manual ’54 Pontiac. Dad

30 WONGAWILLI somehow converted it into an automatic of sorts so that Ben could drive it. We had that Irish tribal family thing going on, still do. Uncle Ben was given a job at the weigh station for the coal trucks. He started out as a truck driver, so at least he was hanging with his kind. He was a great mechanic. I have fond memories of him in his shorts sitting on the floor of his four-car garage. Leg off, stump hanging out, pulling a motor apart beside him on the garage floor. Fay’s a couple of years older than me. She was the product of a broken home, before June and Ben adopted her when she was about two. She’s a great girl: she could match it with the boys no trouble, she drove a car like a champion, and she wore Wongawilli like a glove. She once said something quite profound, something I’ve always wanted to put into a movie, and it said volumes about my uncle and aunty. When she was about ten, Fay came home from school, walked into the house and there was a strange man standing there with Ben and June. June said to Fay, ‘Fay, this is your dad.’ Fay stood and stared at this man and uttered the words, ‘No he’s not, he’s my father. That’s my dad there,’ and pointed to Uncle Ben. I don’t think ‘the father’ ever showed up again. One day I went flying down the hill from my house towards the Sellers’ house on my bike, not unusual. The brakes failed, unusual. I hit the bottom corner doing about 700 miles per hour. I flew off the road into the lantana and banged flat out into a wattle tree. My crutch slid along the top bar and my balls were crunched by the handlebar coupling. I was wailing in agony and limped back onto the road. Fay was the only one home. She came out to see what the fuss was about. She put her arm around me and asked me if I’d hurt my privates, as I had a firm grip of them. I told her I thought my balls were bleeding. She took me up to her kitchen and asked me to drop my pants. I refused. She very kindly and considerately talked me around. They weren’t bleeding, just very red and swollen. My penis was spared any pain, so the first sighting of it by a girl was not very impressive. Fay and I always have a chuckle about that on the odd occasion we bump into each other these days. She can dine out with ‘I once rubbed cream on John Jarratt’s balls!’

31 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

Bruce plus alcohol equals arsehole When Dad got drunk he was outrageous. I’m the same. In five minutes, he could go from all-singing all-dancing, to womanising, to fighting. Mostly ending in violence. On many occasions, Mum got a lift home ahead of him, dragged us out of bed into the ’38 Chev and off to Sydney, if she felt like leaving him, or off to Kanahooka Point if she felt like waiting it out. It’s funny being a kid. I quite liked the adventure of going to Kanahooka Point, sleeping in the car and waking up to dawn coming up over Lake Illawarra. Mum was usually still awake in the driver’s seat, red-eyed from crying all night. Another weird thing, she always looked really beautiful at these times. Her sadness had a profound beauty about it. She was so sad, already my inadequacy as a man was rearing its ugly head. She needed protection and she had no one, not even me. She was protecting us. She didn’t have a selfish, domineering bone in her body. She couldn’t understand violence and yet she was subjected to it all her life. She’d say of Dad, ‘Why can’t he be nice?’ She’d watch some war happening on the news: ‘Why can’t they just be nice to each other?’ It was beyond her, she couldn’t understand it because she was the nicest person I’d ever meet. If nine out of ten people on this planet were like her, we’d be in heaven. If Mum decided to escape to Sydney on these occasions, it was because she intended to leave Dad. The only place she could go was Nanna’s. Her brothers and sisters had their own problems. Nanna was unbending. ‘I told you he was a mongrel. You wouldn’t bloody listen, you married him, you bore his children. That’s where you belong, not here. Don’t talk to me about drunks, your father was a useless drunk. But I made my bed and I did what was expected of me. Go home to your husband, where you belong.’ Mum had no way out, nowhere to go. People from the US had divorces and went to shrinks, but not Aussies. Driving back in the ’38 Chev to Wongawilli from one of these escapades, Mum lost the brakes going down a 5-mile hill into Wollongong called Mt Ousley. It was frightening, it was ‘we’re gonna die’ frightening. Mum wasn’t the greatest driver, and even good drivers would struggle with a ’38 Chev with no brakes. Mum was

32 WONGAWILLI chanting ‘We haven’t got any brakes’ over and over. Mount Ousley is a fairly straight road but it’s a steep grade. We were starting to go very fast, Mum was trying to drop it down a gear to slow the thing, and all we got was the crunching sound. The synchro in this old bus wasn’t good. The road was approaching a large cutting and there was a steep grassy hill to our left. I started screaming, ‘Go up the hill, Mum, go up the hill!’ and she did. We bounced and banged up that hill, and nearly went over the side; our heads were hitting the roof. Mum gripped onto the steering wheel like her life depended on it, and it did. She sprained her thumb and it blew up three times its size, but she hung in there and we stopped almost at the top. We were alive. Dad could see that his drinking could have inadvertently killed us. He swore he’d never drink again. He said that as regularly as he got drunk. He took the Chev off the road and gave it to the Sellers kids. The boys took the doors and roof off and turned it into a flat-trayed ute. In Wonga, as soon as your feet could touch the brake and the clutch, you drove. They painted the Chev bright yellow and wrote smart-arsed stuff all over it like ‘Rolls Canardly – rolls down a hill, can hardly get up the other side’. The adventures they got up to on this jalopy are a book in itself. They loved it when the brakes failed! Sometimes Dad would get home drunk ahead of Mum, or with her. Dad would also wake us up and put us in the car, except it was extremely frightening, especially because seconds before you were walking down the path in your PJs, you’d been sound asleep. One particular night, I think Tony must have been babysitting, because I can remember him and Uncle Ben trying to stop Dad driving away with us. I remember three different watches on these six wrists, which all seemed to have a violent hold of each other. Next thing, Dad smacked Uncle Ben in the mouth and it was on. Mum took the opportunity to get us out of the car. ‘Run down to Aunty June’s, quick, quick, run, run.’ Folklore has it that Aunty June had to be talked out of taking her brother’s head off with a shovel. She was only 4 foot 11 but she became 6 foot 4 if you hurt her Ben. It was good if Uncle Arthur was around on these occasions because he could take the old man. He was the Forces’ middleweight champion during the war, which was equivalent to Australian champion.

33 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

There was a barbecue at Uncle Arthur’s one afternoon. He lived just below us. Dad was full as a boot and he was trying to take Arthur’s car to get more booze. Arthur took the keys out of the ignition. Dad took umbrage at this and it was on. Like lightning, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Dad went down. Dad called Arthur ‘Mick’. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Mickey.’ Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Dad went down. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Mickey.’ This went on for half an hour. Dad looked like he’d been through a mincer. Arthur was only hitting him once at this stage, knockout blows, couldn’t knock him out. Dad would slowly get up, and through busted lips, ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Mickey.’ Arthur was crying in frustration, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bruce, stay down!’ There were many times Dad came home drunk. We’d see the headlights of his car illuminate the lounge room. ‘Quick, go to bed. If your father comes in, pretend to be asleep.’ Off we’d rush. Inevitably, soon after he got home, he’d start yelling at Mum and she’d start crying. Always in their bedroom, because Mum would race into her bed and pretend to be asleep too. God, he yelled loud. It always seemed he was ready to hit her, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d never forgotten Charlie’s threat to shove Dad’s head up his own arse. Arthur could beat Dad; Charlie could kill him. The upside was that the next day, Dad would be overly nice to Mum, who would barely look at him, never mind talk to him. Dad loved taking us to the beach or a river for the day, or camping. When he was desperately trying to get back in the good books by being extra nice, we revelled in it. It was so bloody good! We were such a happy family, swimming and surfing and jumping and splashing. How could such an intelligent man be so fucking stupid? ‘Why can’t he just be nice all the time?’ I know, Mum, I know.

Johnny Jarratt’s notorious Wongawilli moments The gastro When I was about six months old I got gastroenteritis. In those days it was suggested to give the patient flat lemonade. To flatten lemonade,

34 WONGAWILLI you add more sugar to the drink! We now know it’s not good to give a baby lemonade at the best of times. Within a week I wasn’t better and I looked like the starving African babies from the newsreels. Mum instinctively knew the doctors might kill me, and she wanted her mother. Nobody was on the phone in those days. We were a big extended working-class family, we were spread all over the country and not one of us was contactable by phone. If it was urgent, you’d go to the post office and send a telegram. It’d take a day to deliver and another day to get a reply. Mum wrapped me up in a bassinet and drove to Chippendale, Sydney. Nanna took one look at me and gave me a dose of castor oil. A few minutes later I cut loose and emptied my intestine from the stomach down. ‘You’re lucky the poor little bugger’s not dead . . . yet.’ Two more doses of castor oil and a few bottles of water taken slowly over about four hours and my Nanna had saved my life, no doubt. Give me an old Irish witch remedy any day.

Reppocgums When I was a kid, my dad taught me that police were called ‘reppocgums’. Mum and Dad were driving back from Nanna’s with Brian and me in the back. I was four and Brian was two. I don’t know the brand of car, but I remember it had running boards. Dad was speeding and a cop pulled him over. The cop put his foot up on the running board and rested his ticket book on his knee to write out Dad’s speeding fine. I poked my head out of the window and said, ‘Get your foot off my dad’s car, Mug Copper!’ The cop retorted, ‘I wonder who he learnt that from?’ He licked his pencil and threw the book at the old man. Mum was livid. ‘You don’t teach children to say “Mug Copper”. Never say that in front of them again.’ The old man was Irish and he hated coppers. When he was a young lout he used to slop them in the face with custard tarts when they were directing traffic. From then on, he taught us that police were called Reppocgums, Mug Copper backwards.

35 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

The pitchfork We were visiting Dad’s mate down at Gerringong near the beach. Mum, Dad and baby brother Barry were in the house, while Brian and I were messing around in a vegie garden in the backyard. Brian started teasing me, which was not unusual; that was basically our childhood relationship. Brian teased me, I’d lose my Bruce-like temper, he’d run, I’d catch him and belt the shit out of him, and Dad would belt the shit out of me. This was what Brian wanted and it made him happy. At least someone was happy. On this day he’d driven me so hard that I picked up a pitchfork. He teased me, I plunged the fork close to his feet, purposely just missing. The inevitable happened, I got his foot, the prong went through his plastic sandal, entered between the second and third toe and out his instep. I pulled it back out covered in blood. I went pale with shock and dread that Dad might literally kill me. I immediately begged Brian to say he accidentally jumped on it. I didn’t know if he’d heard me as he was screaming his head off. The adults arrived, they eventually calmed Brian down and they asked him what happened. He told them he’d accidentally jumped on it, and they bought it. I surprisingly wasn’t relieved. The turmoil of guilt and grief at what I’d done was immense, because at a base level, the love for my brother was, and still is, immense. I’m reliving it as I write it. I need a coffee. Brian was off school for a fortnight, and he nearly lost a toe. One morning Mum slammed my bedroom door into the wall. Through sleepy eyes I awoke to my worst nightmare. ‘You horrid boy, you horrid, horrid boy, how could you do that to your brother, you evil little pig. He just had a nightmare, he was yelling out, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, John, don’t stab me with the pitchfork.’ How could you? You’re gutless, you don’t deserve a family. Stay out of my sight.’ Slam. I sat there. I wanted to die. I didn’t care if I went to hell. My father spoke to me like that once a week. My mother never spoke to me like that before or since. My mother was an angel, she never put anyone down, and she would never hurt anyone unless they deserved it, unless they crossed her line. If she’d have stabbed her sister with a pitchfork at any age, she’d have taken her punishment. I failed in her

36 WONGAWILLI eyes, which hurt me more than all of the endless insults and bashings from my father put together. I’ve never got over it, and I think that’s healthy.

Smarties My cousin Larry is my mother’s sister Betty’s boy. He’s a year older than me and still one of my best mates, more of a brother than a cousin. Larry is one of those annoying bastards who take forever to eat or drink something. His family was visiting and we were off playing in a gutter near the house. I think there were four of us: Brian and I, and cousins Steven and Larry. We were each given a small box of Smarties. Three of us ate them in about two minutes. Twenty minutes later, Larry was still sucking the sugar off them one at a time and still had half a box left. I asked him for some and he, of course, said no. It eventually turned into an argument and I picked up a brick and threw it at Larry. I hit him hard, point-blank, just above his forehead. (He’s bald now and he can’t help pointing out the scar at family events.) Blood poured forth like I’d struck oil. Larry started screaming, adults ran out of our house and I ran downhill to the Sellers’. Dad yelled out to Tony and Greg to grab me. I eluded them and headed for my domain, the bush, with Tony and Greg in hot pursuit. I scrambled and weaved through the bush like some kind of animal. This was my backyard, this was my realm, this was my iPad, this was my Xbox. My body could do what kids’ thumbs can do today, and just as fast. Tony and Greg couldn’t catch me. I buried myself in a huge lantana patch. Tony started to talk to me, really kind and understanding words. Words saying I had to face up to what I’d done some time, it was no good running away, I had to say sorry to Larry. My hero, I remember thinking, ‘I wish he was my dad.’ He was already much more emotionally intelligent at fifteen than Dad would ever be. I came out, he put his arm on my shoulder as we walked back, and said, ‘You’ll probably get a good hiding when you get home, but, let’s face it, you deserve it. But it’ll only hurt for a little while. Larry’s head is gonna hurt for a long time.’

37 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

Wongawilli burns Just behind our house was the beginning of a eucalypt forest that stretched up and over the mountains and endless miles north and south. One day the Cleary Brothers unloaded two big bulldozers beside our house and went up behind us to build a firebreak. The break was about 100 foot wide and a half a mile long, behind the highest houses on the hill. After school we were allowed to get on the bulldozers, help drive them and knock down trees. (Who needs Disneyland?) That would never happen today. Dad took us down the mine a few times, riding conveyer belts to the face. That would never happen today, either. We weren’t allowed to go right to the face, that was too dangerous! There might be a cave-in. Dad lived through one, and had the black scars embedded in his bald head for the rest of his life. The firebreak was in place, and our backyard extended into what looked like no-man’s-land. The dozers pushed all the trees and vegetation to the uphill side of the firebreak. I found a box of matches. I went over the other side of the break to the dead, dried- out trees and vegetation. I lit matches and dropped them into the dead growth, little fires would start and I’d stomp around and put them out. The inevitable happened, this dried brush went up like a fireball and I had to jump clear. I remember just standing there looking at it slowly turn into a raging fire and thinking, I’m only eight, I don’t know what to do. I really, really wanted to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Eventually I turned around, went to my house and looked for somewhere to hide. I ended up under my parents’ bed. I crawled up to the head of the bed and got in the foetal position with my back to the wall. There were three suitcases under there, so I pulled them around me. The fire was huge. It extended the length of the firebreak, from one side of Wonga hill to the other. The forest above was on fire, and spot fires were springing up all around the houses. We were lucky not to lose any houses. They fought the fire all night and part of the next day. At the same time, the women and older kids were trying to find little Johnny Jarratt. On a number of occasions people looked under the bed, but they couldn’t see me hidden behind the suitcases. Everyone thought I’d been burnt to death, and my parents were

38 WONGAWILLI beside themselves. The roar, snap and crackle of the fire outside was freaking me out. All I could think of was that I was about to get the hiding of hidings. Compared to what I was gonna get, being nailed to a cross sounded like a better option. Someone found me (I can’t remember who). Mum and Dad came into the room. Mum grabbed me and hugged me and started wailing a river of relief. Dad just sat there beside us, saying nothing. His arms were locked straight and his hands were pushing forcefully into the mattress, his teeth were clenched and he was staring hard at the floor. I was looking at him with my head against Mum’s left breast, waiting for him to crucify me. Waiting for ‘Get into your room and wait for me.’ I kept looking at him and then he looked at me. His eyes puddled up and his chin quivered. He stood up and rushed out of the room. For the first time, I knew he really loved me, and it wasn’t the last.

All singing, all dancing After the war ended Dad got mixed up with a bohemian crowd from the North Shore in Sydney. He got a bit arty and ended up messing with theatre at the Independent in North Sydney. He landed the lead in a play called The Bullocky. He got great reviews. He was encouraged to kick on, to become an operatic baritone. He decided to go back to his country roots and took a job driving a bulldozer for ten times more money and never looked back. Mum was one of the best mezzo-sopranos I’ve ever heard. We played her singing ‘Ave Maria’ at her funeral and it was phenomenal. That weekend Susan Boyle was making headlines singing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Compared to Mum, Susan was doing just that, dreaming. My Uncle Charlie was one of the first in Australia to own an electric guitar and Uncle Arthur won endless karaoke competitions into his mid-eighties. We’re of southern Irish descent, on both sides; we sing, we dance, we perform. My cousin Patrick Phillips and I are the only pro actors in the extended family. We lost Wayne Jarratt to cancer in 1988. Wayne was at NIDA with Mel Gibson. A great loss.

39 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

My first public appearance was at the Wongawilli Hall in 1954. I got up on stage of my own volition and sang:

Put anuvver nickew In da nickewodean Aw I want is wubbin nue And music, music, music.

Everyone sang and danced at these events. ‘Sing us a song, ya bastard.’ Piano, piano accordion, drums, Uncle Charlie on banjo. Mum, Dad and Arthur were the headline singers and everyone had a ball, literally. The Wonga hall was huge to me, it was like Carnegie Hall. I’ve been back since; it’s tiny. Mum and Dad loved to dance. They were very good at it and they were always going to balls and dances. It’s where they fell in love: in Sydney dance halls in the mid-forties. A big part of our weekend was the Sunday drive. Lots of families did it. We’d drive down to Kiama for a surf, or up to a swimming hole on Mount Keira, or up to Nanna’s for the weekend. I never had a radio in a car until I owned one in 1969. No seatbelts. We’d stand up holding onto the back of the front bench seat and sing our guts out with Mum and Dad until we reached our destination. Did the same on the way back. I’m not a bad singer for an old bloke. Don’t believe me? Buy the StalkHer soundtrack.

Au revoir, Wongawilli I’ve lived in many places in my life. Wonga has a special significance and reverence; it’s spiritual. It’s kind of spooky to go there these days: all the houses have been demolished, only scraps remain. The remnants of our house are the concrete front steps and patio floor, and a rotting piece of wood that was our tree house. And what a grand treehouse it was. The massive gum spread into three main trunks, perfect for a treehouse. You entered via a 12-foot wooden ladder nestled into the base fork of the tree. It was triangular, the point to the back and the base to the front, giving us a panoramic view across Lake Illawarra to the ocean. It had half-walls, with the

40 WONGAWILLI top half of the walls fly-screened, and a skillion metal roof. Built by the old man, of course. We’d get a bunch of mates and we’d all stay the night up in the treehouse. The first time we did that, I was about eight. We stayed awake all night because we’d never seen daybreak. It happened so slowly, we were disappointed because we thought the ‘break’ bit was going to make a noise and bingo, we’d go from night to day in a bang. Watching dawn happen in the treehouse sang songs to my soul. It will stay with me forever.

41

Island Bend

Dad had climbed up through the ranks at the mine to become a deputy. He was in charge of the miners at the face. In the early sixties Dad took a course in concreting. He wanted to get a job in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, one of the biggest undertakings in Australian history. The idea was to build dams on the rivers coming off the Snowy Mountains and tunnel through the mountains to distribute water to irrigate the dry country to the west. Hydro-electric power stations were built below the dams at Guthega, Tumut, Blowering and Jindabyne. Dad graduated from his concreting course with flying colours. That, combined with his ability to tunnel into mountains in search of coal, got him a job on the Island Bend–Eucumbene tunnel. He was an overseer, which meant he was in charge of the gang at the rock face of the tunnel. The only position above him were the engineers. The tunnel was 13 miles long, from the Snowy River at Island Bend through the mountain range to Eucumbene. Construction on the tunnel began in 1961, and we arrived in Island Bend in March 1963. Funny, I can’t remember packing up and leaving Wongawilli at all and I can’t remember arriving in Island Bend. You’d think you’d remember stuff like that. My first memory is waking up one morning after a very cold night, I think it was only a couple of weeks after we arrived. All three of us slept in the one bedroom of our new two- bedroom house. Barry and I were in a double bunk and Brian slept under the window in a single. He woke us up looking out the window. ‘Hey, come and look at this – it’s snowing, it’s snowing.’ We looked out and there was about an inch of snow covering everything. Fluffy powder snow was drifting out of the clouds like God had ripped open a giant pillow. I think this was such a magnificent

43 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH early memory of Island Bend that the other stuff just faded out. I couldn’t believe the silence: no wind, just millions of big fluffy snowflakes. In an instant we were outside in the freezing cold, in our pyjamas and bare feet. We didn’t feel a thing except the sting of snowballs ricocheting off our cheeks and foreheads. The Snowy Mountains are far from the most spectacular mountain range in the world, but to my ten-year-old eyes, they were magnif- icent. Island Bend was way down in a massive valley carved by the Snowy River. Arcing up out of the valley to the north was Blue Cow Mountain, a forest of tall native gums stretching up its steep sides from the river, shrinking back to the stunted snow gums about 1000 feet up. These dwarfs of the eucalypt family crawled up another 1000 feet or so to the snowline, the point at which it’s too cold for even a gnarly snow gum to survive. The final 1000 feet was white with snow or green with snow grass in the summer. This great wall of Blue Cow stretched west of Island Bend about 15 miles all the way to the front door of Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest mountain at 7310 feet. When we looked west from Island Bend, pride of place at the top of the valley was Mount Townsend, Australia’s second highest by only 63 feet. A triangular, pure-white mountain that came to a pointed peak, picture-perfect, right in the middle of the vista. To a kid’s eyes, this was phenomenal. Island Bend township was a Snowy Mountains Scheme town. The wooden two-bedroom houses, designed to be demountable, were brought onto the site in modules. The town was demolished between 1966 and 1968 when the construction of the dam and the tunnel was completed. The houses were moved to the new township of Talbingo. I don’t know the population of the town. There must have been sixty or seventy houses, so that’s about 300 people. Most of the population were single men in the barracks just beyond the shops, mostly migrants from Europe escaping the aftermath of World War II. There could have been up to 1000. We were, after all, there to build a major dam and a tunnel under the mountain range. There was another little temporary township about a mile downhill on the banks of the Snowy River called Utah. A company called Utah Australia and Brown & Root Sudamericana was contracted to build

44 ISLAND BEND the tunnel. Full of Americans, of course. So maybe we had about 2000 people there, which is a sizeable small town. We weren’t allowed to go near the barracks. Sometimes the Yugoslavs would have knife fights over card games. Then they’d raffle their cars to pay gambling debts, and if that didn’t work they’d have another knife fight. Just below the barracks was the cinema, or ‘the pictures’, as it was known to Aussies then. We’d go every Saturday afternoon. One shilling to get in and threepence for a big bag of lollies. We’d watch the serial, the newsreel and the main feature, usually a John Wayne film. We didn’t have TV, so the newsreel was where I first saw the Beatles, and I remember the footage of President Kennedy getting shot. Big news then. We heard it first on the radio. I was walking home from school and Mrs Thompson was sitting out the front, crying. I asked if she was all right. She told me President Kennedy had been killed. That was the first time I’d ever heard about him. Mum and Dad would go to the pictures on Saturday night. I was eleven and old enough to babysit. Brian would tease me, I’d bash him up and threaten to bash him up again if he told on me. Barry, who was six, just looked on and enjoyed the entertainment.

Island Bend school Island Bend Primary School was built just below the town. A set of steps took you about 100 feet down to the dirt playground. Across from the playground stood the long, boomerang-shaped school building. It didn’t take long for me to get into the initiation fight with the allocated tough guy, I think his name was Stan. Again, nothing compared to Dadzilla at home. I won. Mr Darling was the headmaster. (I know! How did he live with that?) He was a great bloke and my teacher for two years. We were a combined Fifth and Sixth Class, only about fifteen of us all up. Mr Darling was the first teacher I’d meet who was human, like the rest of us. He didn’t talk like other teachers of the day. ‘Jarr-att, I am talking to you, yes you, am I mis-taken or are there other Jarr-atts in theee room? You will write down one hundred tiiimes, “I must pay attention at aall tiiimes.” Do I make myself cleeear?’

45 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH

‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yeeeees?!! Yes, sir.’ Mr Darling didn’t do that, he just talked and cracked jokes and made the subjects interesting. I looked forward to his classes, I didn’t realise there were interesting things to learn. My conclusion is that there are no uninteresting subjects, just uninteresting teachers. For the following two years I actually looked forward to going to school and, not surprisingly, I got into a lot less trouble there than at any other school. The first year I was in Island Bend, the snow cover was good. When there was snow on the ground, we’d ski to school, downhill all the way. At lunch we’d ski. Up the steps, five minutes of carrying your skis, down the hill in thirty seconds, back up the hill. Sneak your sandwiches into the class after lunch, take a bite when the teacher wasn’t looking, chew really slowly so you didn’t get sprung. Although I said a lot less trouble, there was still trouble to be had. I was party to two events that severely damaged the school. The first was just dumb. Brian and I and two of our mates were at the top of the hill looking down at the school. I noticed this big disc-shaped rock about 3 foot wide and about 6 inches thick, similar in shape and size to a truck tyre. We pushed it up onto its side, aimed it at the school and let it go. My God! It started rolling and picked up speed like you wouldn’t believe. All four of us were bug-eyed and crapping our pants. It was heading for a big log lying across its devastating path. ‘It’s gonna run into the log and stop!’ It hit the log and flew into the sky. On re-entry it came down on the other side of the log doing about 800 miles per hour. It bounced twice and flew into the weatherboard wall of Class 1 and 2. From the huge gaping hole it created you could see the rock demolishing the chairs and desks before coming to a stop at the teacher’s desk. It was lucky that nobody was killed. ‘Go to your room and wait for me.’ Big hiding, big hiding. Above the school, just above the playground, was a natural spring, always trickling out at a steady pace. I came up with the idea of building a dam. We made a relatively small one of mud, rocks and clay using our hands. It worked really well, and filled up in no time. The little dam was about 2 feet wide and 10 feet long. Eventually,

46 ISLAND BEND the spring water started trickling over the top, so we built a little spillway. Very quaint, if only we’d stopped there. A little further down, I worked out we could build a sizeable dam about 20 foot wide and not that high. Trouble was, we’d need more than hands, so we decided this was what we would do on Saturday. About five or six of us turned up with picks and shovels. I can’t remember all of them, but definitely Brian and I (we were as thick as thieves) and my best mate from Island Bend, Robert Hawkes. We’d watched how they were building Island Bend Dam: work the wall up either side of the flow and have a decent rock and big chunks of clay for the final plug. It took us all day. It was a magnificent wall, about 20 foot wide and a foot and a half high. As the night fell the dam was filling up slowly but beautifully. We reconvened about nine the next day. It was about three- quarters full, better than all expectations. The pond behind the dam wall had spread significantly, about 20 foot back and 40 to 50 foot wide. We decided to walk away and come back at around three, by which time it was almost full. We pulled the big rock out of the middle and let it go. We thought it would drift across the playground, past the school and off down the road on the other side. Whooosh, the water flew out of the small gap, quickly eroding about 3 foot of the wall on either side. The water just kept coming and coming. Just below the dam was a well-worn path leading across the playground to the school entrance. The path very quickly turned into a fast-running creek. It hit the front entrance like a tsunami, the wall of water splashing into the double door. It was surprising to see how much water went under the door and through the cracks. After the water finally escaped down the road on the other side of the school, we went up and peered through the windows. About 2 inches of water covered the floor of the entrance way. Just across from the entrance way were the toilets and the headmaster’s office. The toilets were fine; it was the headmaster’s carpeted office that gave us away. It was completely soaked, including some cardboard file boxes and paperwork stacked on the floor. Outside, the erosion to the pathway led even the worst detective to the cause of the problem. Overall, it turned out not too badly. Our parents were left out of

47 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH it and we only got two cuts of the cane each. Better than the six we got for the rock catastrophe. When the snow melted we turned our attention to hockey. Just above ‘our dam’ the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority had attempted to flatten out a playing area. It was about half the width and length of a regular hockey field, but we made do. After a while it all got a bit boring, so I suggested ‘no-rules hockey’ (although there were a couple – hockey 1, 2, 3 and out). We were swinging the hockey sticks well over our shoulders, like we were going for six in cricket, and if the other bloke was getting the better of you, just knock him arse over head. We were swinging, whacking, punching, pushing, clashing. Sometimes five or six of us around the ball all trying to hit it at once. As you can imagine, it didn’t end well. After a couple of weeks of bruising and cutting each other, one boy copped a hockey stick, full force, right across the forehead. It split his head from one side to the other. The amount of claret spurting out of his head was staggering. About fifteen of us got six of the best. We couldn’t care less, we were worried about our mate. I can’t remember his name. Stocky guy, dark features. If you ever run into a bloke like that in his sixties with a bloody big scar on his forehead, ask him if he’s from Island Bend.

Mucking about On the weekends, we’d go up to the shop first up. You could buy most weekly household needs from the shop. Had to; the nearest big shopping centre was Cooma, an hour’s drive away. It was the easiest shop to steal from if you had a good team of schoolboys on the job. We’d knock off a heap of lollies and chocolates and a packet of smokes and head for the Snowy River. Never got caught. We had a beautiful swimming hole. It looked like something from a Hollywood set. Rapids above the swimming hole squeezed into a waterfall about 3 foot high. We’d fly down the rapids getting bruised by the rocks underneath, go over the waterfall and drop into the swimming hole at a rate of knots. To one side was a rock about 6 foot high with a flat top. You could dive off it, but you had to dive well

48 ISLAND BEND out or you’d hit another rock just under the water and kill yourself. We came up with a better solution. We stole a wooden ladder from around the Island Bend Dam site. We took it to the swimming hole and placed it on top of the rock. We then found two humungous rocks. Six of us got around each one and somehow rolled them into place on the land end of the ladder to hold it down. Ta-da, a diving board, and it worked beautifully. Can’t tell you the fun we had. It was everything a boy is. I’ve been back to the Snowy River as an adult in summer. I waded in to my knees, and it was so cold my ankles immediately began to ache like you wouldn’t believe. How the hell I swam in it all day as a kid is beyond me. Our other main summer activity was trout fishing. I loved it then, but went off it as an adult. The best place to fish was where the river went from gentle rapids into an expanse of calm water. There was an island in the middle of the rapids, bordering on the calm expanse of the river. It was basically a massive rock with a couple of hardy shrubs growing out of it. This was where we fished. It was a beautiful day. I was sitting back with my brother, Robert Hawkes and my cousin Steven, who was visiting from Wollongong. Mum packed us a lunch, plus we had stolen chips, chocolates and smokes, and all’s right with the world. We’d pulled in a couple of fish using march flies, bloody big flies that sting you. There were hundreds of the bloody things; we’d all just sit in the yard after breakfast and catch a jarful. A skill I still have. We’d caught a couple of rainbow trout and we were sitting back sucking on a Craven A when we suddenly noticed the river getting noisy. We stood up and looked around and within thirty seconds the river was roaring and rising alarmingly. We quickly gathered our bags and fishing gear and tried to get to shore. I went first and in no time I was struggling to stop my legs from being washed downstream. I stepped back to the island and threw my gear on the rock. I attempted to cross again with my arms free. Already it had got worse and my bony little legs weren’t strong enough to cross. I struggled back to the rock and told the boys that we’d have to wait it out and hope someone came to help us. The rock was normally about 4 foot above the water. It was now about 2 foot and rising. The large expanse of water just downstream

49 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH from us went from calm to boiling. The river was instantly in flood. Why? Guthega Dam had opened the floodgates to turn the massive turbines that make hydro-electricity. Millions of gallons of water were exiting the power plant and feeding the river. We were now all huddled on top of the rock, hoping it wouldn’t go under. It was late afternoon and we were scared stiff of being stuck out on the rock at night. It was possible to drive down to where we were, and luckily my dad put two and two together and came to our rescue. He knew they were going to start the hydro plant but he’d forgotten about it. When it was getting late and we hadn’t showed up, it clicked. He came to the riverbank, took one look at us on the rock and knew things could get fatal. He yelled out that he was going back up to town to get more help and equipment, and that he was going to ring Guthega and get them to turn the turbines off. It cost the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority thousands in lost electricity to have the plant turned off. However, it would take many hours for the river to go down and at that moment it was still rising. From then on I was fine. My old man was invincible; he’d get us off the rock. About half an hour later Dad was back with two Land Rovers, ropes and more manpower. The next trick was to throw a rope to us from the shore. He had to throw it about 30 feet. He tied a short length of heavy galvanised pipe to the end of the rope and started throwing it at us. It wasn’t easy: most of the early throws were falling short, a couple missed the mark, and finally, Dad did his nana. ‘Fuckin’ useless mongrel shit piece a fuckin’ rope!’ Throw. It hit the rock, the pipe nearly hit me in the head, but we managed to grab it. Dad got me to tie the rope around the top of the rock. ‘Use a bowline, don’t want the bloody thing to come undone.’ Not a problem, I was a Scout and Dad was Skipper, the Scoutmaster of the First Kosciuszko, the highest-altitude scout group in Australia. (More about that later.) Dad tied a short rope around his waist and onto the main rope for safety, and went into the rapids going arm over arm on the rope. The rapids were tearing at him, pushing him downstream. The rope became a tight V, and sometimes the water went over his head. He

50 ISLAND BEND ploughed on like a man possessed. He got to the island and got us to tie a safety rope to the main rope and took us across one at a time. He crossed the rapids eight times to get the four of us to safety. Other blokes offered to give him a spell, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I was the last to cross. I used both hands on the rope, Dad used one, and his other arm was around my waist. The strength of the man was amazing. I can still feel that arm; it was like being held by a boa constrictor. The force of the raging river was beyond belief: I don’t think I’ve been that frightened since, and I don’t frighten easily. By the time I crossed it was dark, which didn’t help. Thank Christ for Dadzilla. He was thirty-seven at the time.

Scouts and Rugby League All his life Dad was outdoorsy. As a kid he loved scouting, Rugby League and hitting people, and was much the same when he grew up. When we lived at Wongawilli he played first grade for Dapto and was the skipper for First Dapto Scout Group. Island Bend had a League team. Dad played in the second row. ‘Always played blindside, break from the scrum and stiff-arm the halfback coming around the blindside. Ref could never see it, no videos in those days, mate. Grab a handful of dirt, pack in the scrum, throw the dirt in the opposing hooker’s eyes, win the scrum!’ Two memories of the old man playing for Island Bend. Island Bend versus North Cooma. Brian and I come up with a phrase which we delivered in unison at the top of our voices: ‘Get stuffed, North Cooma!’ This is a polite way of saying ‘Get fucked’, however, it’s 1964 and we were still getting backhanders for saying ‘bugger’. This was outrageous for kids to scream out in those days. The whole crowd froze and looked directly at us. ‘Go to your room and wait for me.’ Dad came in and didn’t belt us straightaway. ‘Do you know what “get stuffed” means?’ ‘Yes . . .’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘It means get f-ed.’ ‘So you do know what it means?’

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‘Yes.’ We then got a hiding. Island Bend versus Jindabyne at Jindabyne. Around about September 1964; Dad’s last game of League. He was thirty-eight. Dad got crash-tackled by this big front-row forward. He got up gingerly with ‘a shirtfull of broken ribs’. He managed to pack into the scrum. Suddenly the scrum broke up and revealed Dad savagely kicking the big front-rower repeatedly in the shins. Dad had his arm around his ribs, and the front-rower thumped Dad in the face. This was what Dad wanted, so he kept kicking, the other bloke kept hitting, and they both got sent off. Dad knew he’d have to go off, so he took the front- rower with him. As they were walking off, the front-rower was yelling at Dad, wanting to fight him in the dressing sheds. Dad hit him with this beautiful line: ‘Somebody put a carrot in this donkey’s mouth.’

Dad loved fixing things and doing things with his hands; he was always hungry to learn things. From cabinet-making to building an entire house, plumbing, welding, stripping motors and putting them together again, concreting, bricklaying. He trained as an electrician. If he couldn’t find the right bolt he’d get the thread dies out and make one. He could do just about anything, the bastard. He loved Scouting, hiking, camping out, reading compasses, setting up the tents, ropes. He could do any knot, splice, you name it. Island Bend had Cubs, Scouts and Brownies. Dad was the ‘skipper’ of 1st Kosciuszko and Mum was Brown Owl for the Brownies. I joined the Scouts and Brian joined the Cubs. Dad treated me the same as the rest of the Scouts, nicely. Why couldn’t he do that at home? So, I loved the Scouts. We went to two jamborees (a great national gathering of Scout troops). In 1963 it was at Mount Canobolas near Orange, New South Wales. I can’t remember the jamboree at all, but I remember going to and from it. Dad scored an SMA flatbed truck with a canvas canopy. The Scout troop and all our camping gear went in the back and Dad and his mate went in the cab up front. That would never happen with today’s safety codes. We stopped off at Bathurst and I saw my first car race at Mount Panorama. It was a sports-car race. An E-type Jag won

52 ISLAND BEND it easily. Watching it go down Conrod Straight doing about 150 miles per hour was exhilarating. It’s an indelible memory. It was about a five-hour trip home. If we needed to piss we’d have to do it through a crack in the canvas. Everyone seemed to manage the task well. Not me. It was tough enough getting my puny boy dick through the crack. I was busting so the flow was substantial, and then the truck hit a bump. My dick slipped back inside and was spraying the canvas and splashing back onto equipment and boys. I was frantically trying to get it back to the crack, which made things worse. I was a very sad, isolated Scout that day. The Dandenong Jamboree was in 1964. I remember this one. A sea of canvas tents filled the beautiful parkland created in a valley in the Dandenong Ranges. There was lots of fun to be had with flying foxes, activities, hiking and competitions. At night all the Scouts, hundreds of them, would gather in an amphitheatre with a bonfire in the middle. We’d all sing songs in rounds, like:

Fire’s burning, fire’s burning Draw nearer, draw nearer. In the gloaming, in the gloaming (whatever that meant) Come sing and be merry.

Pretty wussy now, but I loved it at the time. Mark Jones could hypnotise people, especially Graeme Wright. We were all going by train in to Melbourne, and then down to St Kilda on the tram to Luna Park. Graeme was very popular and he was too tired to come with us because he’d been partying too hard. Mark hypnotised him to have lots of energy until he got back to the park. Suddenly Graeme was pumped and off we all went. When we got to Luna Park we did the Luna Park fun stuff, of course, but that’s not what I remember. I was twelve years old, and I’d recently started masturbating this hairless little todger of mine until it was swollen on one side. I was walking with my mates at Luna Park when this hot teenage girl walked up to me, reached down and gently squeezed my balls. It was the greatest sensation of my very short life thus far. I stood there ecstatic, frozen and gobsmacked. She walked on and I came out of my stupor.

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‘She just grabbed me by the balls, she just grabbed me by the balls.’ Timmy Thompson (our Fonz at the time) said, ‘I know, mate, she wants you. Go after her.’ I took off like a shot, but for the life of me I couldn’t find her, thank Christ. Because I know now she was just taking the micky. If I’d found her, she’d have demoralised me for sure. I could hardly wait to get back to camp and have a wank to a true fantasy. The minute we walked back into the park, the strangest thing happened. Graeme Wright suddenly ran out of energy and slumped onto the ground, and we had to carry him to his tent. Mark Jones had the power.

Scouts on skis Dad could stand up on skis and he’d mastered the snowplough. We were kids, so we could ski like champions in no time. One day the old man took the Scouts on a ski excursion. We were skiing the chair at Perisher. Dad managed to ski up and down, taking the safer slopes. Sometimes we’d have to wait for him for ten minutes at the bottom, no worries. The weather at Perisher can change almost instantly. A very dark snow cloud had come across. Dad was first in line and we were all behind him. He jumped on the chair and off he went. We were next, but the ‘towy’ wouldn’t let kids go up because there was a blizzard at the top. It took the old man two hours to get down. He got lost a couple of times and he fell over so much that he looked like the abominable snowman. ‘I couldn’t bloody see most of the bloody time.’ Ya gotta laugh!

The sensational sensation of skiing Did Dad buy us shiny new skis? Nah! He bought second-hand wooden skis from a ski-hire joint. He sanded them back, painted them all blue, put a black strip down the middle using electrical tape embalmed by painting the whole thing with two-part epoxy resin. He turned them over, sanded the underside back to the wood, added three coats

54 ISLAND BEND of epoxy resin and new runners. He reconditioned second-hand bindings, screwed them into place, fitted our second-hand ski boots to them. He handed them to us along with a bar of wax and Bob’s your sister’s aunt! We starting skiing at Smiggin Holes, a stone’s throw from Perisher. Nothing too steep or dangerous, a great place to learn. Brian and I managed to get up the T-bar after four hours on the beginners slope. We fell off at the top and got tangled up, but managed to slide to safety. We skied down very gingerly, falling over every 3 feet, and then I twisted my ankle badly, mainly because of my antiquated ski bindings and boots. They were pre-self-release. Thanks, Dad. I couldn’t ski for three weeks, by which time my brothers could ski rings around me. By the end of the season, we could ski as good as anybody. We were in the kids’ slalom races. Barry was five and he was a natural. By the end of the season, he was winning races in his age group. My brothers and I love skiing. It’s a lifetime love affair for us. When you have a great run down an exceptional slope on fresh snow, it’s the closest thing to flying without wings. You can be turning like a dancer at 50 miles per hour with the wind blowing with tremendous force up under your arms and past your face. No motor, no horse helping you go at a phenomenal speed, just you and your ability to make it happen. We did some crazy shit. There was a rock about 20 feet high. As kids, it wasn’t unusual for ten or so of us to ski off that rock one after the other, and we flew through the air like shot cannons. A few of us would crash, but somehow the next kid coming down would manage not to crash on top of you. I looked at that rock when I was twenty and I didn’t have the guts to go over it. My two brothers and I would play follow the leader. The leader changed with every run. When you were leader you’d try to find something scary to ski around or over. On one particular run I was third man, Brian was lead. There were two big rocks about 20 feet long with a gap between them that the T-bar tow went through. Brian turned into this gap and there were two people on the T-bar about to come into it. Brian and Barry got through safely and I came into the gap at the top end just as the T-bar was about to come into the

55 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH bottom end. It was like a train crash was about to happen. I was about to hit them, so I threw myself to the left as soon as I cleared the rock. My skis came last and clipped one of the skiers on the T-bar. My skis came off (I had a release pair now) and the skiers fell off the T-bar. I had one hell of a crash: I went into a snow gum and I thought I’d broken my shoulder. I collected my skis, and got called for everything by the skiers. I skied down to my brothers, who were waiting and laughing. I unclipped my skis and went over and belted Brian. We got banned from skiing for the rest of the day. Barry was the best skier, then came Brian, then me. Barry was skiing in the under-eight ski comp. They ran the age events in the morning and the open in the afternoon. The final race event for the year was held at Smiggins. It was a big day. The winners would be read out at a gala event at the hotel that night. Brian and I went up with Dad earlier in the day, and Mum followed with Barry. It was a bit icy and Mum slid off the road into about six feet of snow and it took a while to get her out. By the time they got to gin, Barry had missed his race and he was inconsolable. Dad tried to calm him down and suggested he ski in the open. Anyone could ski in the open; you didn’t have to be an adult. Barry was already famous for his skiing abilities. John D’Maginic, a wonderful skier and a great bloke, gave Barry the title of ‘The Mighty Atom’. He was only little, but boy, could he ski. He went in the open and chewed it up. They announced the winners that night. First was a tall, lanky guy from Europe who was a ski instructor, second was a bloke called Graeme Bookalil who trained Olympic hopefuls in downhill and slalom. Third was Barry Jarratt! They carried him shoulder-high to collect his trophy. A couple of years later, Barry was the only kid with enough guts to ski the Olympic Jump at Perisher. Just before he jumped he was in tears, he was so scared. He won every cup from under-thirteens down.

Life with Dad hadn’t changed. He was still yelling abuse, still hitting and still drinking. There were many instances and I don’t want to bore you with them. One stands out as different to the rest, it was so bizarre. He’d bought a run-down, four-berth wooden caravan from

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Uncle Ben. He virtually rebuilt it. He was having trouble with the frames for the cupboards and got me to give him a hand. He was building a corner piece close to floor level. There was a two-by-two corner post with two horizontal two-by-one pieces meeting on top of the post. So Dad had to hold those two pieces onto the post while I screwed a brass screw through them and into the post. Dad drilled a guide hole and wood-glued everything and held everything in place. The screw was very hard for a skinny twelve-year-old to screw in. It kept slipping out of the slot, and as it was brass, I was burring the slot up. Dad was yelling his guts out at me, which made it worse. The more I fucked up, the more enraged he became. He couldn’t let go or the whole thing would fall apart and he’d have to start again. He really wanted to hit me, but he couldn’t, so he leant forward and bit me! He drew blood and I squealed like a stuck pig. Mum came running out of the house. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ ‘I bit him.’ ‘You bit him?’ ‘All right, all right, we don’t want the whole bloody street to know.’ She said, ‘John, come inside,’ and to Dad, ‘You, stay outside.’ Dad had crossed the line and he knew it. It was a backhanded victory for me. I’d been bitten, but I kind of felt like Mum and I had won for a change. Dad’s drinking still reared its ugly head, until one horrendous night. Dad came home drunk and he was yelling at Mum in the lounge room. We were sent to our bedroom. Mum was in her early thirties now and she’d learnt to fight back. Dad had never laid a hand on Mum and Mum felt secure in that knowledge. So they were both yelling and Mum actually had the upper hand as she wasn’t in the wrong. Dad had lost it, and he was also losing the argument. So how did he react? He got angrier. By this stage we three boys were standing just outside the lounge- room door. Suddenly Dad started hitting Mum hard. I went to go into the room, and Barry and Brian held me back, so I started screaming, ‘Leave her alone!’ He stopped hitting and in the very same moment decided to quit drinking. Thank Christ for that!

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I often wonder if we’d stayed in Wongawilli, whether Dad would have hit Mum, knowing full well that her big brother Charlie would stick Dad’s head up his arse. Charlie would have got him, there’s no doubt about that. Life in Island Bend was a bit better with the old man off the sauce. I was still enjoying school and at the end of my final year in primary school, I came third in my class. It was the best I’d ever done, way better than my years at Dapto Primary.

The high school was in Cooma, 60 miles away. Twenty miles of it was driving down the mountains. The students were taken by bus every day, about a three-hour round trip. If you had a girlfriend, you’d sit up the back of the bus, arms and hands delving everywhere and a whole lotta kissing. I had the hots for this girl from Jindabyne. We got talking and things were going very well. I sat there one day and gingerly put my arm around her, and she snuggled in straight away. The boys noticed this and came over to encourage us to go up the back with the rest of the gropers. Like sheep, we did as we were told. We went up the back and sat down, I put my arm around her and we resumed the position. The boys stood around like petting instructors. ‘Put your hand on her tit.’ My girl just sat there cool as a cucumber. I slowly put my hand on her breast. She didn’t flinch. I cupped it and slowly squeezed it. It was fantastic. High school was okay. I thought I’d be in 1A, because I’d come third in my class. But that wasn’t taken into consideration. The whole of my Island Bend class went into 1B. This had a profound effect on me. I thought, I finally tried hard at school and they do this to me. What is the use of bloody trying? And I didn’t: I went back to jerking around and playing the class pain in the arse. At least I got laughs and I was popular. Dad thought the time I was spending on the bus was too much. I came home one day and he informed me that I was going to his old boarding school, All Souls School in Charters Towers, north Queensland. This was the most idiotic decision my father ever made. I could have gone to boarding school in Wagga, Canberra or even

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Sydney. But no, let’s get traditional and send the boy to Dad’s old school, 1500 miles away.

Arse Holes School Dad and I flew from Sydney to Townsville and then took a steam train to Charters Towers. Yup, diesel hadn’t made it that far in ’65. This was my first flight. We flew in a Viscount Electra, the pride of the fleet. I had a window seat. We flew above the clouds and I looked down on them for the first time. Big, fluffy cumulus clouds. ‘They look like the froth on a milkshake.’ ‘When you get to my age it’ll look like the froth on a beer.’ All Souls School. We were directed to the headmaster’s cottage. A tall, slim man with silver hair in a long black cassock greeted us with a posh accent. This was Brother Mattingly. He ran the joint with an iron fist and a smooth tongue. Two prefects were delegated to show us around. We dropped my bags near my allocated bed in the Grade 8 dorm and then I was taken up to my classroom and introduced to the class. I shook Dad’s hand. ‘All the best, son, see ya later.’ He turned on his heel and walked off with a complete lack of any sort of emotion that I could detect. I thought I’d feel relief that I finally could live without that cranky bastard, but instead I felt as lonely as hell and was sucking in tears. I realise now that in spite of everything, I loved the cranky bastard, and deep down in my subconscious I knew he loved me so much that he’d die for me. His problem was that he never really grew up, and what’s more, as bright as he was, he didn’t have a clue about emotions, didn’t know what to do with them, so he buried them. Except anger, because that’s manly, and humour, because that fed his large, very confident ego. I’m finding it hard to write about the boarding school as I hated the joint. I’ve managed to block it out of my life. I have a knack for that. If I don’t like someone or something, I delete them. I’m very much a don’t-look-back person. I’m not a great collector of memorabilia. If it wasn’t for my mother, I would have bugger-all of

59 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH my career photos from the seventies, eighties and nineties. Digital cameras and mobile phone cameras have taken over where she left off. So I’m sorry, dear reader, but I’m going to get through boarding school very smartly. I can’t tell you many positive things about it. I’ve always been a rebel, always told it like it is. Which is probably why I got into a lot of fights, arguments and trouble. The prefects took an instant dislike to me and I to them. I was a bit like Dad and his catchcry of ‘I joined the war to fight Japs, not to call you “Sir”.’ I felt the same way about prefects. In this school they were given far too much power. If they caught you with your socks down, you’d be on report, one hour pulling tussock grass out of acres of useless land belonging to the school. You’d finally get to the end of a 10-acre paddock and the grass had grown back at the other end, so back you’d go and start again. In the year and a half I was there, I never got a day off from report. Saturday meant hours of pulling grass. The prefects would stand around like jail screws, yelling, ‘Bend your backs!’ You couldn’t bend your knees, so they were fucking our backs up at an early age. The prefects liked to hit us. I’d smack them straight back, fair in the mouth or nose, knocked a few over. I was only thirteen. Always in trouble. Once I had the flu really badly and I was in sick bay most of the week, so for once I didn’t go on report. I remember standing there and not have my name read out. Next thing I was down by the tank stand with the nerds and fairies who were never on report. I was so happy. Next thing, ‘Wombat’ the school captain found me. ‘Jarratt, we made a mistake, you’ve got two reports.’ Bastard. We were woken by a horrid clanking bell at 6 a.m. Fifty boys would race naked to the showers (there were only three showers). Then to breakfast, followed by church for half an hour. After that, school until 3.30 p.m. One and a half hours of play (unless you had to train at some sport, Scouts or cadets). At 5 p.m. another half an hour of church. Dinner at 6 p.m. From 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. was homework, back in the classrooms. Lights out at 9.30 p.m. Week in, week out. Saturday on report, Sunday day leave, if you knew someone in Charters Towers to visit. I did!

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Nanna and Chook Hanafee – a beautiful old couple in their seventies. Dad used to go to their house twenty-three years earlier. They were friends of my grandfather from his days in Hughenden. I can’t remember what Chook used to do for a living, but he was definitely working-class. He was seventy-six and every Saturday he’d get on his pushbike, ride a couple of miles to an old people’s home and give the men a shave and a haircut with his hand shears. ‘Poor old buggers, can’t afford a haircut.’ He was an old bugger himself! I’d walk from the school to the Hanafees’. They had this beautiful low-set Queenslander hugged by huge mango trees and palms. The house had been made bigger by enclosing the three-sided verandah. Out the back, off the kitchen, Chook had built a covered outside area, typical of Queensland at the time. They tended to live in that area until the TV came on at about 5 p.m. Real down-home country folk, they only put their teeth in on special occasions. Nanna Hanafee was a plump woman, about 4 foot 10, salt of the earth, with a heart of gold. They were soulmates and a joy to be around. Nanna still cooked everything on a wood stove, and what a great cook she was. A massive plate of meat and veg, followed by a home- cooked dessert and a mug of tea. Then you’d sit around like a python that just ate a goat. By about 3 p.m. you’d have to make room and go to the toilet. Unfortunately, you couldn’t hang on until you got back to school and a flush toilet. The Hanafees’ toilet was a long-drop thunderbox model. Once you’d finished your business, you’d have to wipe your bum with newspaper strips, carefully prepared and hung on a nail by Chook. Chook loved to tell stories about the gold rush in Charters Towers. There were big sandy-coloured mullock heaps all around the town. They were the waste from the goldmines. The one outside the Hanafees’ house had a flat top. You’d climb about 20 feet to get there. It was so big that Chook and I could kick a football to each other. He was a fit old bastard. At four-thirty it was back to prison for six o’clock mass. We went to church fourteen times a week. The problem with an all-boys school is the testosterone. A bunch of boys between twelve and eighteen equals a whole lotta wankin’ goin’ on! After dinner a large bunch of us would go to sick bay. You’d rummage through a lot of cough medicine bottles to the one with

61 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH your name on it, take a huge swig and replace it. It had a substance called dextromethorphan in it, which was a sedative. Made you feel really cool, man. Next stop, the dunny block. There was a long queue to get into the toilets. There were about ten cubicles. When it was finally your turn, you’d go in, lock the door, have a wank and head up to the homework class. Nobody ever admitted to wanking, but we all did. Some kids would wait for an hour after lights out and have a wank when they thought we were all asleep. The guy next to me used to do that. His thing was humping his pillow. He’d start out quiet enough, but when he got close to climaxing he’d throw caution to the wind. His bed would clang and squeak and rattle to a point that you’d think it was about to collapse. I got sick of this waking me most nights, so I came up with a plan. I spread the word and when his bed started squeaking, we all crept quietly around the bed. ‘Hey, Smithy. Having a good time there?’ Poor old Smithy rolled over to see a sea of boys leering at him with stupid grins on their faces. He jumped out of bed (with no pants on) to fight me. Poor bastard lost out there, too. To top it off, the dorm master came out, grabbed us both by the ears, dragged us into his office and strapped us. Poor Smithy got it on his bare bum. All this talk of paedophilia that’s constantly raising its ugly head these days was carefully brushed under the carpet back then. Boarding schools attract these low-life mongrels. There were two boys in particular who were preyed upon by a maggot I’ll call Brother Pervert. Everyone knew he was sexually interfering with those boys. We all shrugged it off that they were nancy boys and that’s what they did. In retrospect, no matter whether they were nancy boys, no child deserves to have an adult prick shoved in their orifices. These childfuckers are supposed to be a step away from God, but instead they are indulging in the most evil act on the planet. It’s worse than adult rape or murder. It’s more evil than a suicide bomber. So what happened to Brother Pervert? One day he ran his hand up a boy’s shorts and the boy thumped him in the head. There was a hell of a to-do about it. Brother Pervert’s punishment was that he was sent to another school and told to behave himself. I’m a peaceful man and I try to be understanding of most things. If

62 ISLAND BEND someone needs to be removed from my circle for some reason, I try to move on and forget about them. But if I caught someone sexually abusing my child, I’d most probably kill him. It’s always a him, which makes you sad to be a man sometimes. I was sexually assaulted at that school. I was in the cadets. We were playing this cadet game called ‘ambush’. You had to creep up on other cadets and ambush them. I was allocated to an eighteen- year-old ‘sergeant’; he was a big lanky guy. He got me to hide with him behind a tree in the crevice of this mullock heap. He suggested we take a piss. I didn’t particularly want one but he insisted, saying he didn’t want me caught short in an hour’s time. So we both were standing there with our dicks out to take a piss. He reaches over and starts caressing my dick. I tried to take his hand away and he threw me down and started rubbing my genitals. It hurt like hell and it was not at all stimulating. He had his forearm over my throat and I couldn’t breathe properly. He kept saying, ‘Calm down, calm down, enjoy it, this is nice.’ He was way too strong for me; I was thirteen. I decided to just lie there and pretend I was enjoying it. Finally he let me go and tried to come on to me in a more sexual way. I pretended to respond, and as soon as I felt he was off-guard, I made a break. I was running, trying to pull my pants up and button them at the same time, because he’d managed to unbutton them. Thank Christ he didn’t chase me. He came up to me back at the school and threatened to break my arms and legs if I said anything. Years later, when I was eighteen and living in Townsville, I ran into this piece of shit in a pub. I walked up and said, ‘Remember me?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Jarratt,’ and he went white. Then I punched his fuckin’ head in. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to belt him. If I hadn’t, I may have turned into a shattered man over it, because it really screwed me up. I feel so sorry for those guys in their forties who haven’t got over some sexual monster priest tearing them apart physically and mentally as a child.

The teachers were a great bunch. My dorm teacher was weird. He was an ‘old boy’ of the school. At night he used to wander around

63 THE BASTARD FROM THE BUSH the beds after lights out and just stand beside your bed for ages. Sometimes he’d walk around with an obvious hard-on in his shorts. If you got into trouble you’d get the strap. Usually two hits across the arse with specially made straps. They were about 3 foot long and scalloped at the top to grip it properly. The end that struck your arse was double thickness with pennies stitched in for extra sting. The bruise on your arse had the round marks of the pennies. What possessed these motherfuckers to have things specially made up to belt boys with? The dorm master loved hitting you with these things more than twice. One Sunday morning we had inspection. Your little cupboard beside your bed had to be neat as a pin. Just before inspection I went to the loo. I came back and some bastard had turned my cupboard over, it was obvious. ‘Who turned your cupboard over, Jarratt?’ ‘I don’t know, sir.’ ‘Of course you know. If you don’t tell me, you will take his punishment.’ ‘I don’t know, sir.’ ‘You don’t know? Right, let’s count the articles on the floor, hmm, eleven items. Still won’t tell me who did it?’ ‘I don’t know, sir.’ ‘Into my office now!’ He always left the door open so the other kids could watch. ‘Bend over, Jarratt.’ He hit me on the arse eleven times. Fucking pervert. There must have been some good times but I can’t remember them. I know that some kids loved the joint, sporting and academia types. That place was like an alien planet to me. One great event I can remember was changing from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency. As the song went, ‘On the fourteenth of February 1966.’ New coins and small, strange ‘paper money’. Up until this point I’ve been writing in imperial measurements, but from here on I’ll go metric.

I was sitting out on the grass looking south towards Island Bend, feeling chronically homesick. I was planning to run away, which happened often at All Souls. Out of nowhere my pop started talking

64 ISLAND BEND to me, giving me advice. ‘Talk to your Mum and Dad and tell them you want to leave and come home.’ ‘I can’t. Dad’ll get mad at me and call me a girl.’ ‘You don’t know if you don’t try.’ This has never happened to me before or since. I swear he said it to me, I can hear it clear as day right now. I wasn’t even thinking about Pop, it just came out of the blue. It was August 1966 and my family had just moved to Aramac in central Queensland to be closer to All Souls School. Another frightening reason not to tell Dad I wanted to leave. He’d taken a lesser job as overseer for Aramac council, a big step down from being an inspector for the Snowy Mountains Scheme. My family drove up to the school and took me to Magnetic Island, off the coast of Townsville, for the August holiday. We went fishing off the rocks at Nelly Bay. Dad wasn’t with us, so I took the coward’s way out and told Mum I hated the school. Her mouth dropped open and she paused. I thought it was going badly. Finally she blurted out, ‘Why didn’t you say something? We thought you liked the school. I’ve been crying for a year and a half wanting you to come home.’ What! I’d been in hell for eighteen months and I didn’t have to be there? That was one hell of a way to learn to speak up. I have, ever since.

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