Echo Publishing 12 Northumberland Street, South Melbourne Victoria 3205 Australia www.echopublishing.com.au Part of the Bonnier Publishing Group www.bonnierpublishing.com 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 Twitter/Instagram: @echo_publishing Facebook: facebook.com/echopublishingAU A dazzling day for the rest of our lives No more dark night 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.