‘What’s a wog?’ asked my seven-year-old, affectionately known as Hollywood because of the general feeling he’ll be in showbiz or in rehab by the time he’s twenty-one.
‘As in?’ I asked. Here’s a tip. If a kid wants to know what a word means, always ask the context. My ten-year-old sister once asked my mum what ‘ejaculated’ meant. After Mum had gone into extraordinary detail my sister still looked puzzled. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she said, picking up her book and reading aloud: ‘“‘Help! My dog’s been run over by a car!’ the man ejaculated.”’
‘Wog. As in Wogs out of Work,’ Hollywood said, as he read the back of an Acropolis Now DVD in a crowded video shop. The shop abruptly and predictably fell quiet as I sensitively attempted to define the word ‘wog’ complete withcultural nuances, anthropological exceptions and historical footnotes.
‘So what’s a skip, then?’
I explained that ‘skip’ is a name for Aussies and came from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
The kids were so enthralled by my description of the show (yes, boys, a talking kangaroo! Well not really talking, just making clicking noises that real kangaroos don’t even make. Remind me to tell you about Flipper and Mister Ed) they went to YouTube to check Skip out. Laughing like drains, they spluttered, ‘You never told us how funny it was. “Oh Sonny, you really are a dickhead, you know,”’ they repeated in a high-pitched, clipped English accent.
Dickhead? What?
They’d stumbled across a Fast Forward send-up of Skippy.
You know you’re an Australian icon when you’ve had the piss taken out of you. Which may explain why Skippy:
Australia’s First Superstar, a documentary about the dinky-di marsupial 007, is narrated by Magda Szubanski. We like our icons stirred, not shaken.
I was shocked when the documentary landed on my desk. Until then I thought Skippy was a documentary. But the shocks didn’t end there. There was more than one Skippy. SHOCK. She was a she not a he. SHOCK. Skippy was voiced over. SHOCK. To make Skip look as if she was talking they fed her rubber bands. SHOCK. To get her to turn her head they banged pots and pans. SHOCK. Skippy couldn’t really play drums, fly a helicopter or operate a two-way radio. SHOCK.
Sure, I watched Skippy, but I never loved it. Come to think of it, I didn’t even like it, but it was the ’70s and there was bugger-all to watch. Skippy was burnt into our collective psyches: the theme song, the chenille bedspreads, the lack of women, the grey scratchy bush and Sonny Hammond, the boy with a face pinched withthe pain of someone suffering impacted haemorrhoids.
Skippy attracted cameo appearances from the big fish in our small pond – John Laws, Jack Thompson, Frank Thring*. When Thring arrived on set and asked what was moving around in the hessian bag, he was told it was Skippy. Thring said, ‘If that’s the star’s dressing room, what’s mine like?’
* My two favourite Thring quotes are ‘Bring me another boy, this one split’ and, on the set of Ben-Hur, in reference to the actor playing Jesus, ‘Fuck, what a Christ and Christ, what a fuck.’