John + Alcohol = Disaster

We virtually went straight from Naked Under Capricorn to Fields of Fire III. I had a hand in writing the script for this one and I put in an alcoholic plot line with my character, Jacko. When Jacko loses his mate Bluey in a light-plane crash, he blames himself and starts drinking heavily. He starts losing friends including his girlfriend, played by Noni. Elsie, the pub owner, drags Jacko out of bed, shoves his head under a tap and gives it to him. She persuades Jacko to go on the wagon. This is one of my favourite scenes ever. Kris McQuade was dynamite. Jacko then falls off the wagon. This scene was the one and only time I stopped being John for a moment and became Jacko.

When I met Noni I was still smoking dope and drinking. I con­tinued to do both, leading to a couple of embarrassing drunken episodes. The drunkenness didn’t impress Noni. I can’t remember her ever getting legless. Tipsy at times, sure. When Noni was pregnant she kept herself in the peak of good health and put aside all bad habits, but I didn’t. I smoked a lot of dope. Noni became fed up with a partner who sat in a corner, blurry-eyed, talking shit and passing out. I’d work all day on the house and get ripped for the evening, as I was usually physically buggered. Add some THC and pass out. So I gave it away. I had no trouble, which really surprised me. I replaced it, however, with grog.

I started to have a few beers after working, and then I’d get my favourite red for the evening meal. Noni would have half a glass and I’d drink the rest. I wasn’t getting drunk, just glowing a little. But parties and get-togethers were a different story. I didn’t get into any fights (although I came close), but there were still plenty of arguments and inappropriate language and chandelier-hanging outrageousness. Something stopped me from any womanising. That something was Rosa. At heart, that’s what destroyed me in Rosa’s eyes, not realising then that the root of our problems was alcoholism.

A few people, including Noni, suggested I had a drinking problem. I thought they were being ridiculous – I was a long way from being even a heavy drinker. One person with experience of Alcoholics Anonymous told me, ‘It’s not about how much of it you drink, it’s what it does to you when you drink. I’m suggesting when you drink, you drink alcoholically.’ This kind of made sense. I ended up going to AA to shut Noni up, which was the wrong reason. It didn’t last long. I first went to AA in early 1988. I went to one meeting a week; you’re supposed to do ninety meetings in ninety days. I didn’t think I was alcoholic enough. I thought I was a ‘light alcoholic’, like a light beer, compared to most of the AA people.

I’d busted badly on Naked Under Capricorn. I had a week to go in Alice Springs. Noni had left for Sydney as she wasn’t needed. I got drunk at the bar with Gulpilil, and I woke up at sunrise in a disused drive-in, alone. Last I remembered I’d been in the bar. I’d made an arse of myself as usual.

I remained sober through Fields of Fire III until New Year’s Eve 1989. I went to an AA New Year’s Eve party. I didn’t know anyone very well, because I used to leave straight after the meetings. I was wandering around the party bored shitless, on my own. Suddenly I thought, This is bullshit. What am I doing here with all these holier-than-thou ex-pisspots? This is so fucking boring. I’m out of here. I drove to Katoomba and got rolling drunk at a street party. I drove home on the back roads. Noni wasn’t impressed.

In 1989 there was a downturn in the entertainment industry. There wasn’t a lot of work for anyone. Noni had Playschool and the occasional casual shift with ABC Radio 702. This kept us going for most of the year. I picked up a bit of building work renovating Nick A’Hearn and Joanne Samuels’s house around the corner. I’d met Jo on a TV show in 1974. My schoolmate Chris Cummings, who went to NIDA with me, scored a regular gig with Jo on a soapy called Class of ’74. Nick’s a filmmaker, and we made a terrific doco together about the Blue Mountains in 1989 called Spirit of the Mountains, with my blackfella mate Stevie Dodd as presenter. Apart from that, I finished off my house and looked after Charlie a fair bit.

Charlie was amazing. By the time he was two he could speak flawlessly. He was full-on: his energy was astounding and he was very bright. (I know parents say that but he was very bright.) He hardly slept. Every night you’d put him to sleep, and he’d wake at 1 a.m. ready to party. I’d calm him down, put him in the pram and give him a bottle, then slowly tilt the pram back and rock it gently. I’d start counting slowly back from 100. ‘Ten, nine, eight,’ very gently put the front wheels down, ‘seven, six, five,’ very slowly remove my hands from the handle, ‘four, three, two, one.’ I’d creep towards the bed. Waaaaahhh! ‘One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six…’

I bought an old house in Mount Victoria for $30,000. Part of the roof was burnt off and it was water damaged. I put the roof back on, repaired it, cleaned it, painted it, refurbished the kitchen and Dad rewired it. Sold it a year later for $80,000. I built a massive shed on my 60-acre property, as well as doing ongoing work at Nick’s house and finishing our house. I was doing all the things that strained my relationship with Rosa, all over again. I only stopped to sleep at night or to look after Charlie when Noni was working. And I wondered why she wasn’t happy.

Noni felt she was in a rut, and that Blackheath was too far away from where our industry was happening. We’d get more work if we lived in the city. I didn’t want to go. I’d just finished the house and now we were selling it? I lost that battle, and we headed to Sydney in late 1989. I had a Bedford truck at the time, so I saved a few bucks by doing my own move. Tommy Lewis was in town and he helped me pack the truck. We were all packed up and I made a cuppa before I left. I was coming back for another load the next day, so Tom stayed in the house. We were on the deck and a bird whistled. Tommy turned his ear towards it.

‘You hear that?’

‘What?’

‘That bird?’

‘Yeah.’

‘My grandmother just died.’

‘What?’

‘My grandmother just died. Can I use your phone?’

‘Sure.’

Tom’s grandmother lived in Beswick in the Northern Territory. You could only get through on a satellite phone and he was having trouble. I left him with it and headed to Sydney. The next morning he rang me in tears. His grandmother had died when he’d said she did. He went to the bottom of Govetts Leap at daybreak with his didgeridoo and into the valley. He performed ceremony down there. He looked up and hovering above him were two wedge-tailed eagles, Tommy’s totem. I found that extraordinary, but he didn’t. He found it normal.

The smog hole down below

We moved into a four-bedroom rental in Neutral Bay. The rent was exorbitant and I wasn’t happy. Noni was invigorated and rubbing her hands together at the abundance of creative pursuits at her doorstep, rather than an hour and a half away in the backwoods. We made a decent profit with the rebuilt Blackheath house and I didn’t want it going out the door on rent, so I suggested we buy property. We looked around but we couldn’t afford a house, so I found a block of land in Narrabeen, Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

It was a large, steep block with views to the ocean from the top. It had an old fishing shack, a completely ant-eaten wreck with a collapsed roof. Noni was worried the access was too difficult. I reminded her it was just like the island, only you could actually drive a truck straight to it, not a problem. ‘John the Builder’. Would I ever wake up to myself?

There was no work for me and Noni was pulling as many episodes of Playschool as possible. Noni was in the pursuit of spiritual growth and a meaningful life, and I’m all for it, I’m still pursuing that now. She found this woman whom I called the Soothsayer. The Soothsayer resonated with Noni, and with me too, for a while.

They’d decided between them that our industry was in fatal decline and I had no future as an actor. It came to the Soothsayer that my ideal profession would be a postman on a pushbike. I heard what they said and immediately went to Narrabeen to demolish the shack, landscape the property and prepare the building site. My brothers, Peter Hehir and Steve Bisley helped me out at times. What with looking after Charlie while Noni worked, it took me about three months to prepare the block. We went for a kit house and we engaged a company to draw up the plans, visit the site and put the plans through council. We paid for that and put in a deposit towards materials. That took a few more months and more of the Blackheath profits. Then the company went bankrupt and we lost the lot.

I had my three kids together for the first time on Christmas night and Boxing Day 1989. It was so wonderful for me to sit at a table beside my three children that night. Charlie was two, Ebony, four, and Zadia, twelve. It was a pleasant, dreamy, completely contented Christmas.

There was no work on the horizon in 1990. Money was tight and TV networks stopped making miniseries, which were too expensive and not commercially successful enough. Treasurer Paul Keating was shown the budget of a high-budget film that had failed at the box office. At the time, government-backed films had a whopping 150 per cent tax concession for investors. It was a licence to easily raise money for films in the eighties, which is why, up until then, I’d never been out of work. Keating saw the above-the-line and the exorbitant fee the producers were paying themselves and said, ‘How long’s this been going on?’ It was put back to 100 per cent. I can’t mention the name of the film, let’s just say that it was Blah Blah ba Blah Blah, we rechristened it Blah Blah Fucks the Film Industry.

Keating and Phillip Adams went on to form the Film Finance Corporation. I think the FFC was weighed down with lawyers and executives. The only thing they knew about making films was what they saw during lunch on a set they’d been invited to. Maybe I’m being harsh, but too many film boards are bereft of film creatives. I know it should lean towards finance, but the funding-body creatives I’ve had to work with to get a film up have had very little feature-film experience. Too often they’ve made a couple of short films, an SBS doco and created a film festival. Festivals with titles like North Bondi Road Bus Shelter Short Film Festival. They’re not people who know enough about movies to make the right choices. Movies are at the top end of what we do. There’s no room for amateurs at this level. Too often the films receiving funding were coming-of-age films or happy little epics about smack freaks in the back streets of Melbourne. Too often too arthouse. The difference between commercial and arthouse films is that people want to see commercial films. Before the FFC was put together, we had blockbuster films like Crocodile Dundee and The Man from Snowy River. So that’s why I was out of work.

One film that did get up was Waiting, a Jackie McKimmie project. Jackie had written, directed and produced Australian Dream. Waiting was about a surrogate mother about to give birth, and all the people connected with the birth converge on a little country cottage. We’d known about this project when Noni was heavily pregnant with Charlie, so we’d filmed Noni two years earlier swimming with her preggy belly proudly exposed. It looked amazing in the film, and critics were bewildered by how it had been accomplished. I wasn’t in the film; I was there caring for Charlie full-time. He and I had a great time mucking around in the beautiful Hunter Valley every day. Waiting turned out to be a very good film; it deserved a better fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelations

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

‘You know where they live?’

‘Yeah, Epping.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the mountains

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

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

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

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

‘Yeah, sure.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My brother and I wanted to kill him.’

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

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

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

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

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

Thank God I’m an alcoholic in AA.

After the revelation with my boy self, the counsellor told me another wonderful thing. Your nemesis is a thirty-year-old intimi­dating coalminer from 1960, not the silly old bugger living at Elanora Heights. I forgave Dad and learnt to love him in his old age and concentrated on dealing with Bruce the coalminer.

Brian came to me with a problem around this time. He was working as a real estate agent, and a bloke had stood over him and berated him about being gazumped. Brian was in the right but he started shaking all over and became overwhelmed by the attack. Brian was 5 foot 9, 90-odd kilos, fit as, and amazing with his fists: he could have had this bloke for breakfast. I knew what this was about: it was the coalminer from 1960 coming back to haunt him. Brian got counselling advice and overcame the problem. He’s worked hard on bettering himself. He’s a wonderful man with a great outlook, and he’s a pleasure to be with. Lightning wit, funny, one of the funniest blokes I’ve ever met.

I scored another gig, which was exciting because they were few and far between. Noni was earning most of the money with her Playschool gigs and other bits and pieces. I’m a bit old school and feel uncomfortable if I’m not bringing in the bacon. It was Inspector Morse ‘Promised Land’, and I played the country copper out at Cowra. It was the basic whodunnit. I really can’t stand cop shows, there are so many of them and have been for as long as I can remember. Noni liked The Bill so I watched a few of those. If I have to watch I’d prefer Pommie to Yank. I never watch those, but I’m highly amused by the promos. What’s the latest, CSI Dubbo?

John Thaw and Kevin Whately were the stars. Thankfully, I did most of my work with Kevin. I couldn’t work out if John Thaw was shy or up himself. He didn’t talk to anyone, and I never saw him out and about. He was either in his trailer or in his hotel room. Not a bad actor, but I thought he was a bit samey. I enjoyed my time on it, working with a nice bunch of Aussie actors: Noah Taylor, Rhondda Findleton, Peter Browne and Max Phipps. My funniest memory was walking with Pete Browne to get a coffee. The cafe had a lot of lace on the windows, not a good sign, and it was run by a couple of big-bummed country girls in floral dresses. One was cooking and the other took our order. She had a pen and paper but she didn’t write it down – she yelled the orders back to the cook.

‘What would you like, love?’

‘Cappuccino, please.’

Back over her shoulder, ‘One cup of chino! Waddabout you, love?’

‘Yeah, I’ll have a cappuccino too, thanks.

‘Two cups of chino!’

Love being in the country.

There’s always the theatre, darling

With very little TV and film work happening, my agent tried to get me theatre work. I love theatre: I enjoy rehearsing and having the time to fully immerse myself in the story and the character. I think it’s important and it makes you a better actor. Moneywise, when you’ve got a mortgage and children, you’ll do anything except theatre because it’s all-encompassing, it gives you very little time to do anything else for at least three months and, most importantly, the pay is lousy. It doesn’t pay the bills. If you’re single, that’s less of a problem.

The first play I did was at the Opera House. It was by far the worst theatrical experience of my life. The director was a dictator: his way or the highway. His boyfriend, who was also the assistant director, took me aside and showed me how I should perform my role. I’d been in the biz for nearly twenty years, this boy had only done a handful of acting work and he was telling me how to act. I needed the work so I just bit my tongue and did what Blundell said: ‘Face the front and go for the laughs.’

The next play was Diving for Pearls with Robyn Nevin, Marshall Napier and Jenny Cronin. It was directed by Neil Armfield, the best director going around. It was a play about a working-class family in Wollongong. I could relate to that! The play was a hit, the performances were grand, but something strange happened to me. I lost confidence and I don’t think I was very good. The humbling experience of working on the previous play and the fact I wasn’t being offered any work at the time seemed to have undermined my confidence. Neil kept telling me I was fine, but I thought he was being nice. I got by.

My next play was back at Belvoir with Neil again, so he must have seen something in my dithering performance. This play was called Aftershocks, with Jeremy Sims and Lynette Curran. Jeremy Sims was brilliant and I really enjoyed his company on this gig. The play was a compilation of interviews with people who’d endured the Newcastle earthquake. It was a kind of documentary performed live on stage. It was a massive hit and I nailed it. The reviews were great and some very nice things were said about my performance. I didn’t feel at all uncomfortable and that was thanks to Neil’s faith in me. Neil said, ‘A classical role for you next.’ I’m still available, Neil.

I did four plays during those tough times. Dead Heart was a new play by Nicholas Parsons, about a hard-headed cop trying to keep an Indigenous settlement under control. It became about who was in control of whom and which side was racist. It’s a gripping, well-constructed, provocative, thoughtful piece. Bryan Brown had the film rights and later did the film version. I joked that I did Off-Broadway for Bryan.

NIDA had a professional program putting on new plays using pro actors with NIDA crew and facilities. The best part was that my mentor, John Clark, was directing. He’s a great director, his Oh! What a Lovely War was by far the best production in my time at NIDA. The brilliant casting included my mate from Never Never, Tommy Lewis, and the late great David Ngoombujarra. My character was complex and brutal, probably the gutsiest character so far in my career. I enjoyed playing that character and the rest of the cast were into it. Clarky got the whole thing singing. It was a great experience.

There were five blackfellas in the cast. Bob Maza and Tom Lewis didn’t drink. The three who did drink all went missing during rehearsal at one time or another without informing anyone. When they came back, each of them said they were sorry about going away, but they had to go to a funeral. When the third guy said this I asked, ‘How come the three of you who drink have all gone to funerals and the two who don’t drink haven’t been to funerals or missed a day?’ Long uncomfortable silence.

I did a few ‘guesties’ on TV series, just chasing a buck. The only formidable gig I had was a telemovie called Joh’s Jury about Joh Bjelke Petersen’s perjury trail. It was mainly shot in the jury room at a long table. The rehearsal was intense. We had to study the original transcripts and find out what our characters had to say. Then the writer would give us a guide, we’d run through it a few times, and when we were comfortable we’d film it wide open three times, trying to stick to the guidelines with a whole lot of ad lib thrown in. The writer would then go home, listen to it and try to write the script from it. It worked a treat. It was a horrific thing to try to shoot and record. Twelve seasoned performers all talking at once. In the end we’d shoot six people down one end of the table and then shoot the six at the other end. Sometimes you’d say half a line and mime the rest so as not to overlap another actor’s line. Complex, but interesting. No room for bludgers: you had to work hard for it.

Noah Taylor was playing a wheelchair-bound leftie and Malcolm Kennard was playing a right-wing prick. In Queensland they’ve got the Big everything: the Big Pineapple, the Big Cow and the Big Mower, to name a few. Noah was in full flight ad-libbing to Mal Kennard. ‘You know what’s gonna happen to you? They’re going to make a big statue of you and put it in front of Government House and call it the Big Arsehole.’

Raising kids

I was a little numb at this time and I don’t think I was very happy. I remember more about my kids. Zadia was in her mid-teens. Kids in their mid-teens don’t hang out with their parents, whether they’re living with them or not. I know: I’ve got four adult kids, they’re all different and they all disappeared at fourteen or fifteen and came back around about twenty. Girls go out of the house a lot; boys go into their bedrooms.

Zadia was a very bright, intuitive, talented, stable person, much more together and wise than I was. In some respects, she’s still ahead of me. She is now working with me and my film company. She’s more interested in the other side of the camera, but I keep writing her into small roles in my films because I know she can cut it.

Ebony was quiet and shy. She’d been staying over since she was three. When she was about five, I picked her up and she’d had a haircut and was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Rosa explained that she wanted to be a boy from now on and her name was Tom.

‘Ah…okay, well, let’s go, Tom. Have you got your bag?’ I thought, Ah well, every family has at least one fairy in the garden, this is ours, but it turned out to be a phase. She was well behaved at school, she was bright, she did well, she had friends. Then she became Teenage-asaurus Rex – stay tuned.

Charlie was born full-on and he’ll go out full-on. He knows two speeds: stop and flat-out. I love all my kids equally, including my grandkids; however, they are all wonderfully different. Charlie was always a handful, or as he describes it, ‘I was a pain in the arse.’ He wasn’t. A pain in the arse is part of it but overall I’d like to describe him as magnificently over the top. It started with not sleeping as a baby. From two this bright little bugger took the world on and his world at the time was me and Noni.

One night when Charlie was two and a half, I was away, and Noni couldn’t get him to sleep. Four hours of hell passed. Noni never hit Charlie; it would have been waste of time even if she did because he wouldn’t have felt it.

She went into Charlie’s bedroom and growled, ‘Now you’ve got a choice, you can go to sleep or you can carry on. If you carry on I will pull your pants down and smack your bum hard. So what are you going to do?’

‘Carry on.’

Noni went to the lounge, got in the foetal position and cried.

Charlie could climb to the tops of trees, ride his bike down hills at a thousand miles per hour when he was five, and build anything with Lego. Lego was overtaking the house, so I set up a massive space for him inside our roof we called Lego Land. Charlie gets obsessed with things. He’s always been large, loud and extremely funny; he has his mother’s razor-sharp wit. We never had to go to his school for any academic problems, but usually because he’d hit someone with a stick or something.

At home, if he didn’t get his own way he’d go nuts. He’d get violent, scream, swear or throw things around the room, and it could go on for quite some time. I used to pick him up and carry him to the front yard and he’d thump me all the way. I never let on that it hurt but it did, because I’d stupidly taught him how to throw a punch. He’s always been a strong, solid guy, and even as a young kid he was difficult to handle. I’d take him to the middle of the lawn and sit him down. Every time he got up I’d push him back down. After a while he’d sit there yelling, ripping clumps of grass out. Finally he’d stop and I’d take him back inside. My quest for tolerance and patience was fast-tracked by Charlie. When he was about eight, he ran screaming to the front of the house and I chased him. I came around the corner and he was standing there like a crazed animal holding a hose with a big metal spike hanging off the end. He took me by surprise and I leapt back. He yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Wuss!’ I love the big bastard, my God I love him.

Noni used to say he’d either become the boss of the Mafia or the boss of Microsoft. The Mafia are safe, not sure about Microsoft.

He’s a tough hombre. Ebony, Charlie and I were playing soccer in the backyard. Ebony was ten and Charlie, eight. The ball went up the bank and got stuck on a tree root. Ebony went for it and Charlie did his usual and challenged, pulled her back and got to the ball. The ball was stuck on a European wasps’ nest. He picked up the ball and the wasps attacked him. I told Ebs to go inside and I raced to Charlie. They were stinging him all over the face and arms. I dragged him towards the house and took wasps off him and put them in my hair, the same as Mum did when I was attacked by bees (they get tangled in the hair). The bloody wasps followed.

We shut the door on them and they were all over the outside windows. I took Charlie into the bathroom, shut the door and pulled more wasps off him; they’d gotten into his shirt. We counted twenty stings on his stomach alone. We got him into the car and he sat on Noni’s lap. He was in agony, but he wasn’t crying. Suddenly he yelled out ‘Shit!’ We didn’t allow him to swear, but I said, ‘Get it out, mate, get it out, swear, do what you like.’ When we finally got him in front of a doctor, the first thing the doc said was, ‘Aren’t you John and Noni from…’ Unbelievable!

Charlie has a strong constitution – a few dabs of calamine lotion and he was fine. I went home, put on overalls, a balaclava, boots, gloves, a hat. I went out with a drum of petrol and burnt the bastards. I dug the nest out with a pick and burnt them again, then I got the hose and drowned them. Finally I sat there for an hour insect-spraying the stragglers. Bastards.

When Zadia was born I wanted her to have a brother or sister. It took Rosa another eight years. I would have preferred it to have happened earlier, but better late than never. Same with Charlie, I didn’t want him to be an only child. In mid-1993, Noni was pregnant and on 28 March 1994 William was born at home in Hazelbrook. He took his time. Halfway through, Charlie went to school and proudly announced that Noni had given birth to a beautiful girl. My beautiful boy arrived at about 1 p.m., I think. Picture-perfect with big green eyes.

The most heavenly part is their first year of pureness, the complete baby innocence. Everything about them is wondrous: the soft physical presence, the intoxicating smell, the shimmering aura. They are so pure you can almost see their soul. William was extraordinary. William is extraordinary.

I know nothing of the universe. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting around a speck that’s within a speck in the universe called the Milky Way. That speck would take 120 billion years to cross in a commercial jet. The entire universe is only 14 billion years old (according to our scientific specks!). So who am I to say there’s a God or not? I’d like to believe there is. I hope it doesn’t begin and end on this planet. Given that, maybe I took this journey with Noni to bring Charlie and William into the world. Put it this way, life without any of my kids would be insufferable. I really don’t think I’d cope. Thank Christ parents usually die before their kids.

All Men are Liars

Out of the blue I got a film that’s become a favourite. All Men are Liars is a comedy about the annual rock festival in the sugar-cane town of Warrandilla. I played Warrandilla’s king of rock ’n’ roll, Barry O’Brien (the names of my brothers, strangely enough). I was nominated for Best Actor. I didn’t win, but it was cool to be nominated.

It was very pleasant being in the tropics of north Queensland. I had Noni and all my kids with me in a great house at Mission Beach, the first time I had all four kids under the one roof. It was walking distance from the beach, which looked out to Dunk Island. This is the greenest part of Australia, dripping with tropical rainforests and bordered by the Great Dividing Range. Mount Bartle Frere, the highest mountain in Queensland, stood out like a beacon above the rest.

My wife in the film had to be Italian, and I suggested we use Carmen Tanti, who played the Pussy Cat in my first gig back in November 1973, The Owl and the Pussy Cat. She was also the wife of my mate from NIDA, Steve Thomas. Steve and his eleven-year-old son came up and stayed with Carmen at Mission Beach. She taught Ebony and Charlie tap-dancing in front of the cafe.

All Men are Liars opened the Sydney Film Festival in 1995. After the screening we all went for coffee and on that very night, Carmen got a terrible headache. She passed away nine months later due to a cancerous brain tumour. Steve tells me that he and his son can play the film whenever they want and watch the beautiful Carmen Tanti doing what she did best.

Australian artists

Due to an acute lack of work in the early nineties, I decided to form a film company with a bunch of actors and make my own films. I formed it in 1991, and by ’94 it was whittled down to Noni, Tony Barry and me. We had a great script by Andy Anderson called Flick of the Wrist, about a bikie who becomes a Grand Prix racing champion. The funding bodies loved it and sent me on an all-expenses-paid mission to LA in search of investors and a distribution deal. I had meetings with about twenty established studios and film companies, and the biggest bite was from Mel Gibson’s company Icon.

In March 1995 I went to LA for a month. I’d been to Europe and Asia, but this was my first trip to the States. It’s always a little surreal flying into a country for the first time. The first thing you see out of the plane window is Santa Catalina Island, developed into a tourist destination by Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate, in the 1920s. Then there’s LA, spread out just as you remember it from a million movies.

My mate Kevin Dobson picked me up, and I stayed with him and his family in Brentwood. He directed me in The Last Outlaw and a few other gigs. He was trying his luck in Hollywood. He took very good care of me and did so on a number of subsequent trips to LA. He can be a big surly bastard one minute and a funny teddy bear the next. I used to say to him, ‘You’re a cunt, Dobo, but you’re a nice cunt.’ He was also Noni’s first husband, but that never got in the way, we handled it with humour.

The meeting I was most excited about was with Icon. Before I left Australia I’d managed to meet with Bruce Davey, Mel’s right-hand man. Bruce started out as Mel’s accountant and became mine for a while. Bruce had a very positive response to Flick of the Wrist and got me a meeting with the development arm in LA. They were most enthusiastic and talked to me like it was going to happen. They set a few goals and we were to continue negotiations when I returned to Sydney. Mel was in the building and invited me to his office after my meeting. I opened the door and he hit me in the head with a huge mallet and scared the crap out of me. It was a weapon he’d used in the battle sequences of Braveheart. The very convincing-looking mallet head was made of foam, so it didn’t hurt at all. He’d had a lot of fun in post-production, busting watermelons and such to simulate the sound of a cracked skull. That’s why his nickname was Pus.

I returned to Australia and contacted Icon development. Unfortunately Braveheart had gone over budget and Icon had a cash-flow problem.

Tony Barry and I had spent two years on this project and to go back to square one again was too hard. I gave up trying to be a movie-maker. Middle East peace seems easier than getting a film up.

Better Homes and Gardens

Hazelbrook was my fifth house build. I’d found an effective way to build with great results was to use second-hand materials, which are generally superior to new ones. I’d figure out a materials list for what I was about to build, then I’d collect and stockpile until I had everything for the job. To match the rest of the Federation-style house, I needed to collect materials to build the huge living area, mostly from demo yards. I’d drive home very slowly, with an overloaded trailer. Someone demolishing a house just up the road at Lawson said I could have the floorboards if I pulled them up myself. Not a problem. Two days later, I had a shitload of floorboards for nothing.

I was halfway through building the living room when Noni was offered a job hosting a new show called Better Homes and Gardens. It had cooking, gardening, decorating, consumer and DIY segments. They needed someone who could build and present to be the DIY presenter. Noni said, ‘I know one,’ and that’s how I got the gig. Noni thought it would be clever to co-host the show, do a lot of stuff in our house and give it a family feel. Not to get things done on the house – believe me, it didn’t work out that way. The tax department doesn’t allow that kind of freebie. The upside was being in the house with our boys every day; the downside was living on a film set.

If we hadn’t had our PA Linley Bettles organising the whole thing, it would have disintegrated very quickly. We met Linley when we were living in Sydney, when she was working for a friend of Noni’s. She was our kind of person and the three of us hit it off straight away. Linley could make anything run smoothly. She wanted to get her toe in the door of the entertainment biz, and this was her chance.

Better Homes and Gardens took care of the next four years of my life, 1995 to 1999. In the beginning they gave me a typical director for my segments. They’d hand me a script, which was as boring as batshit and as funny as a cup of cold sick. I threw the script away and ad-libbed my segments; I was always trying to make them funny. It’s called infotainment. On other similar shows, there was plenty of info but not much ’tainment. Noni and I knew that. Noni took over the script for the hostings we did, which were always brilliant, informative, entertaining and funny. We got off to a good set of ratings and critical approval. Before long we were the number-one info show and number four in the all-round ratings. At this stage I was enjoying the show. Because of the style I used, I got an old mate of mine, Alister Smart, to direct my segment. He was an actor, Playschool presenter and dramatic director. I’d worked with him on a telemovie and an episode of Blue Heelers in ’94. He allowed me to do my thing and helped me with it. He was far and away the best director I had during my time on the show. The other directors were all lacking performance expertise. This wasn’t a problem as Noni and I had twenty years of experience doing movies and TV dramas. There aren’t a lot of good directors, full stop. We’ve both had to direct ourselves and look after ourselves many times. The Better Homes directors knew how to put together a lifestyle segment, while Noni looked after the performance. I did the same unless I had Alister. Alister actually had trouble putting a segment together, because that was new to him. We all found a way to make it work and we ended up with the number-one show, picking up the Logie every year I was there, and I believe it still does.

Dad’s life goes from autumn to winter

In mid-1995 Baz and Dad were working on Dad’s house. We didn’t use concrete mixes; we mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow with a mattock. Dad always took the toughest way: if you helped him move a fridge he’d insist on carrying the heavy end, even though he was pushing seventy. He was mixing concrete in a barrow, full to the brim of course, and he had a massive stroke. He was sixty-nine. Dad’s parents both died in their fifties from high blood pressure, so our family is riddled with hypertension. I’ve got it and Dad had it worse. When Dad had the stroke he was a physically fit, hard-working old bastard. He had a 44-inch chest and a 34-inch waist (better than me, I’m 36). His downfall was bad habits and diet. He loved red meat and three veg, covered it with salt, ate all the fat off the meat, and always finished a meal with dessert, usually cheap ice cream and tinned peaches. In front of the TV he’d eat chocolate and half a kilo of peanuts washed down with tea and three spoons of sugar. He smoked.

He was numb down the left side. Things in the middle – nose, mouth and penis – weren’t numb; he was particularly happy about the penis. His mouth had drooped and his left hand was clenched. He could talk with a slur, but at this stage we didn’t know if he’d be able to walk. The doctor felt he was in a bad way and probably wouldn’t improve much. He was lucky to be alive. A week later the doc couldn’t believe what the old man was doing. They found him pulling the drip along with his right hand and dragging his left leg along like Quasimodo.

The nurse panicked. ‘Mister Jarratt, what do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m goun for a thyit, I dowanna thyit in the fuckin’ bed.’

The doc said, ‘He’s going to be all right. He’s very determined.’

Dad stayed numb down one side and suffered from fatigue from then on. He ended up walking with a slight limp, but he could use his left hand quite well and his speech recovered completely. He ended up driving again until the day he died, but it was a long, slow haul for the tenacious old bugger.

Dad finally came home from hospital. They had lousy neighbours on both sides, a madwoman on one side and a madman on the other. The madwoman would yell at them over her fence all the time. Mum ignored her, while Dad swore back at her. ‘Go bite yer arse, you stupid old bitch!’ She didn’t like Mum and she hated Dad with a vengeance. One day Dad parked across the road and he was about to cross when the woman next door drove off. He stopped and waited. She aimed the car at Dad and tried to run him over. He jumped back but she ran over his foot. He thumped the roof of her car as she passed. She slammed on the brakes and came back and yelled in Dad’s face. Dad’s foot was throbbing and he thought, I’ve gotta shut this woman’s flapping mouth. He gave her a short jab in the mouth. It shut her up, but it upset Dad no end. He couldn’t believe he’d punched a woman; it was against everything he stood for.

My brother Baz is a great musician. He’s written amazing songs and entertained all his life. He looks like a muso, with long wavy black hair and some kind of beard or moustache. He’d had enough. The woman was always working along our fence, looking for an argument. One day she was working away and Barry slowly emerged from below and looked at her across the fence.

‘Woman…woman, you may affect the old ones, woman, but you don’t affect the young ones. The young ones will get you, woman, we will get you, woman.’ Then he slowly slunk back down and out of view. It freaked her out, and we didn’t hear from her after that. Fight madness with madness.

The bloke on the other side was always whingeing and complaining about everything. He especially hated Barry’s band practice in the downstairs sandstone studio that he’d built and soundproofed. Dad continuously told him to bite his arse, too. Dad was struggling down the side steps using a walking stick, and Mum was with him trying to help. The bastard next door came to the fence and deliberately gave it to the old man because he was down.

‘You know why you are sick? Because your sons are parasites, they’re bleeding you to death!’

‘Get up the front! Get up the front, you piece of shit, I’m gonna knock your fuckin’ head off. It might fuckin’ kill me, but I’ll kill you first.’

Mum was screaming, ‘Bruce, Bruce, stop it, you’ll kill yourself, stop it!’

Dad wouldn’t let up and the gutless bastard from next door shat himself and ran inside.

‘Ya gutless fuckin’ mongrel bastard, get out here and put ya hands up, ya poofter!’

Mum got him inside and he was as sick as a dog. It took him a week to recover. Brian went next door and gave it to the bastard again, both barrels. My dad knew it would kill him to fight the prick, but he didn’t hesitate. You can have a go at an Irish Australian, but don’t, whatever you do, have a go at his family. Do I love my father? My bloody oath I do.

It was sad to see the old man lose his mojo, but life goes on. He got very depressed; Mum went through hell with his misery. He finally came to terms with it and got back to living the best he could. It softened him and he understood how lucky he was to have Mum still with him. Earlier in their marriage it had been touch-and-go. He always loved her deeply, but now he was voicing it; in fact it went the other way, he wouldn’t shut up about her.

‘Course I’m happy, why wouldn’t I be, I’ve got the most beautiful woman in the world!’

He was the same with us. ‘Bloody proud’ was his favourite platitude. The biggy happened about two years after the stroke. I knocked on the door and he opened it. He looked me in the eye and he said with a degree of difficulty, ‘I’m sorry about the way I treated you when you were kids. I had no right to belt you like I did or speak to you the way I did.’

I paused, completely taken aback. I expected more, I thought it was the beginning of a speech, but it wasn’t. We put our arms around each other and I hugged my father for the first and last time.

‘Who’s your favourite actor?’…John Hargreaves

Better Homes and Gardens was all-encompassing. In the five years I was involved, I managed only two other gigs, both in 1995. The first was a cough and a spit on Blue Murder, one of the world’s best TV shows of all time. Richard Roxburgh, one of the greatest actors going around, played Roger Rogerson.

Talking of great actors, it was John Hargreaves’s last gig. He played a lawyer and I was lucky enough to be involved in a scene with him. He was ravaged with AIDS. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a segment on Better Homes, an AIDS makeover, give my body a quick run over with a sander.’

We had a break in late 1995 so I was able to play a co-lead in the film of Dead Heart. Bryan Brown played the part I’d done in the theatre. It was shot on location in Alice Springs. The story lent itself brilliantly to film. The magic of black skin against red earth is a cameraman’s dream. Bryan played the hard-arsed cop brilliantly.

We had a lot of fun making that film. We did the tourist thing and chartered a plane to Uluru and drove out to a place called Glen Helen homestead and then to a magnificent gorge. We had plenty of fun back in the Alice as well. One night, Bryan put on a barbecue in the grounds of our hotel, just outside the main bar. We hung in until about 1 a.m. and Bryan, who’d had a few, thought it was time to turn in. He walked up a few steps to just outside the bar area. Standing there was a big bloke with a mop of red curly hair and a big bushy beard. He said to Bryan, ‘Bryan Brown, you’re even fuckin’ uglier off screen.’

Bryan stared daggers at him with those big eyes of his. ‘At least I’ll never be as ugly as you, ya cunt!’

I immediately slid up beside the redhead. If he even moved a muscle, I was going to plough my right fist into his ear. They kept up a staring contest for about 15 seconds, then the redhead thought better of it, grunted and went back into the bar.

‘You silly prick, Bryan, what if he was any good?’

‘She’s right, mate, you were there.’

He turned on his heel and went to bed.

We went back to Sydney and finished the film in the studio. Johnny Hargreaves was on his last legs in hospital. He was a close mate of Bryan’s and mine. Bryan had taken him in to his family and tried to make the time he had left as enjoyable as possible. We were going to see him in hospital after filming one night. We were told he was too sick to see us. We didn’t go and we missed out on seeing him before he passed. The sad thing is, they’d told him we were coming. He was excited that ‘the boys are comin’ to see me!’ and was very disappointed when we didn’t. If we had known, we would have stomped over people to see him. I was incredibly sad when I heard that.

His funeral knocked me over. I fell to bits. I was sitting next to Peter Weir, who was very kind to me that day. Bryan’s heartfelt eulogy just made it worse. John was fifty when he went. He was so full of life, so charismatic; he had hold of life with two hands and shook the shit out of it. Death wasn’t part of that man, death just didn’t fit and that made it harder to accept.

Boring Homes and Gardens

By the end of ’95 I was over Better Homes. It was same old, same old, week in, week out. The crew were great, everyone was fine, I was just bored and I stayed bored for four more years. If I did building work, I did it with a bloke I knew from Blackheath, Andy, a real bushy larrikin, good value on camera. He was wiry with a big bushy beard. Andy’s mate Mick, who did the metalwork, was a tough, quiet, unassuming little bushy bastard, but if you got him riled you were grabbing a snake by the head. My brother Barry did everything: masonry, stonework, bricks, blocks, concreting and landscaping.

My Greek mate Nikos, also a mountain man, did the cabinet­making and fine carpentry. He was so funny and he didn’t know it. He was always messing his English. For instance, he had to say, ‘I’ll get you in a headlock, John,’ but instead he said ‘lockhead’.

I said to him, ‘You know the Greeks invented concrete?’

‘True?’

‘Yeah, a bloke called Con from Crete.’

‘Yeah, that make sense.’

‘Nah, I’m joking.’

‘Joking, ha, fucking actor.’

Unlike other similar shows, I didn’t pretend I could do everything. I’d work with these guys on camera. I can’t lay bricks, so my brother and I would find comedy with that. Barry’s a natural; he could have been an actor, same with Brian.

There was a show on TV called Club Buggery, starring Roy Slaven and H G Nelson, over-the-top sports commentators played by John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver. I loved them and never missed a show, so when I was asked to be a guest on Club Buggery I was over the moon. They interviewed me with great comic prowess. The secret with these shows is not to try to be funny and chances are you will be. If you try too hard they’ll eat you for breakfast. A couple of weeks later, they had Shirley Strachan on the show; he did the DIY for Our House on Channel Nine. Out of nowhere, he started having a go at me.

‘The actor, he’s not even qualified, he can’t even sharpen his carpenter’s pencil. They’re not his hands on camera, they’re other people’s hands.’

‘Are you talking about Johnny Jarratt?’

‘Yeah.’

’You wanna do a cubby build-off with him on the show?’

‘Sure!’

I was seething. This bugger was jealous because we were out-rating them. This industry is too small for any of us to have a go at each other.

The producers of the show rang me. ‘Do you want to do a cubby build-off with Shirl?’

Roy and HG are more sports-orientated, so I said, ‘I choose boxing. I’ll do three three-minute rounds with Shirl on the show.’

He declined, unfortunately.

Shortly after that, Nikos and I built a gazebo at his place in Springwood. As Shirl was the lead singer for Skyhooks, I did a very interesting closer.

‘Seeing as we’ve built a gazebo, I think it only fitting we have a quartet playing. Nikos will be the conductor.’ I handed a carpenter’s pencil to Nikos, who was dressed in a tuxedo.

‘Here’s my carefully sharpened carpenter’s pencil baton.’

I then leapt onto the deck of the gazebo, microphone in hand, backed by a four-piece rock band and sang…

If you’ve got to build a gazebo

You’ve gotta do it right

I’ve built it with my own two hands

And I think it’s dynamite.

Gazebo is not a dirty word

Gazebo is not a dirty word.

I’m told Shirl took it in good spirits and sang ‘Gazebo’ on the Our House set. Shirl sadly lost his life in a plane crash in 2001. I never met him but I was a fan, and I thought he was very good on Our House. They always started their show with ‘Welcome to Our House.’ When I built an outside dunny on our show, I opened the dunny door and said, ‘Welcome to outhouse.’

They had every reason to be jealous, I suppose. We knocked them off the perch and kept winning the Logie. Channel Nine was determined to knock us off the perch. They paid good bucks for the highly anticipated Superman TV series from the States, and they decided to put Superman up against us. At the Logies that year, we won again. Noni did the big speech thanking everyone, and when she finished I leaned in to the mike and said, ‘What’s the difference between kryptonite and Better Homes and Gardens? Nothing, they’re both killing Superman.’ I was Seven owner Kerry Stokes’s best mate that night.

In the snow with my bros

In August 1996, Brian, Baz and I went on a ‘mongrel weekend’ to Mount Hotham. We stayed Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in a caravan at Harrietville. We drove down on Friday and returned to Sydney on Monday. My brothers and I are close. We’re a close family. Barry and Brian lived at Epping for most of their twenties. When Dad went to Elanora Heights they went three ways in the building. Upstairs he built two two-bedroom flats and downstairs was a one-bedroom flat. Brian lived there on and off for fifteen years and Barry similarly for twenty. I lived nearby except for five years all up in the mountains. I have many, many stories about me and my brothers; I’ve had to steer away from many of them or this book would fill a shelf on its own. I could write a book just about them. This is just one of the gems.

We drove down in Brian’s Fairlane, a nice roomy V8. The boot was so big that all our skis fitted in. When we got to Harrietville, it was pissing down with sleet, almost snow, so we knew we’d be on fresh snow up at Hotham. We drove up and it was still snowing, so we had to put the chains on. Hotham is different to most ski fields: the resort is at the top and you ski down from there. We parked the car and kitted up in a full-on blizzard; you could hardly see 2 feet in front of you. Hotham was almost empty because of it, so we had the slopes to ourselves. We were in fresh-snow heaven. Each time we skied down we’d take it in turns to lead, so every third run you’d ski blind. That just added to the mad Irish in our blood. We skied the same chair most of the day as we’d figured out a good run. We were having a bit of a yarn, as you do.

‘Hey, we’re all pretty Aussie, eh, all fairly ocker?’ I said. ‘So Brian, you’re a bit of a yuppie, so you’d be a yupker. Baz, you’re a bit of a hippie, so you’d be a hipker.’

They were pretty quiet and didn’t think it was that funny, so to break the awkward silence I said, ‘What do you think I am?’

Without hesitation and without missing a beat, they both said in unison, ‘You’re a cunt.’ I nearly wet myself.

It snowed continuously until about three, when the cloud cleared. For another two hours we skied with full vision on virgin snow, heaven. We fell into the pub around 6 p.m. for dinner, completely, happily buggered. My brothers washed it all down with quite a few beers; I had my fair share of lemon, lime and bitters. We dragged ourselves to our car at about nine. Our car was the only one in the car park. It was completely covered in windswept ice. All the locks were covered in thick ice.

We had a brainwave. Brian was average height and heavy, I was tall and heavy and Barry was short and light. We were all full of liquid, so Brian pissed on the boot lock, I pissed on the door lock and Barry got on the bonnet and pissed on the windscreen. We unlocked the boot, put the skis in, unlocked the doors and we were in. We put the heater on and off we went. We could see where we were going; it stank a bit, though.