Lawrence Mooney

Pictured: Olive Mooney, Lawrence Mooney and Maggie Olive Constance Mooney

Lawrence Mooney traded his dreams of being a motor mechanic for the life of a performer – all thanks to his mum and a timely warning. His career has taken him from comedy clubs to radio studios and television screens. And now he has his own children, Lawrence looks forward to sharing his mother’s wisdom with them.

‘Make the bed and the whole house looks tidy.’ Wisdom from Mum.

Going back a long time, I said to her: ‘I want to act,’ and she told me: ‘Well, they’re not going to come looking for you.’ She was right about that.

I was a teenager – I think we were watching Lawrence of Arabia again – and I was like: ‘Yeah, that’s what I want to do. I want to be Peter O’Toole.’

I’d gone from wanting to be a motor mechanic for a long time – I was obsessed with cars – to wanting to be an actor, because my parents sat me down around at the age of eleven, and, I remember very specifically, said to me: ‘You are not going to be a motor mechanic.’

‘No?’

‘No. Because that’s not the life you want to live.’

My father was a mechanical engineer. He said: ‘It is cold, it’s dirty – you spend all of your life bending over or on your back.’

Mum said: ‘You’re not doing it.’

Dad said: ‘You know, you can become rich doing other things and then you can have as many cars as you want.’

It was like they were telling me: ‘We didn’t come to this country so you can, you know, not evolve.’

Not that I want to talk down being a motor mechanic – that was just their attitude. They were from Liverpool in England. They came out in 1958, and they thought I needed bigger dreams.

I became obsessed with being a cop for a while, too. I didn’t have a broad range. Mum and Dad didn’t put me off that idea, specifically. That one just kind of petered out, and then showbiz caught my imagination. And that was that.

Mum’s life philosophy when it came to a career was – and this might come from the fact that my parents lived through the war and were born during the Depression – ‘You can only get so far with a bag of clothes, but you can go as far as you like with a bag of money.’ She said: ‘Do whatever makes you happy in life but always make sure you’ve got a lot of money.’

My father was always very frugal. You know, squeeze that toothpaste tube until it’s got nothing left in it, then split it open and scrape out the rest. My mum’s response was kind of the opposite – never have an empty cupboard. Every shelf full, fridge full, wardrobe full – make sure you’ve got plenty of money to give yourself all the things you want.

I was never going to sing or dance. I wasn’t attracted to that kind of thing at all. And, to be honest, I could neither sing nor dance. So my mum said: ‘You’ve got to go to the local amateur theatre company,’ and I said: ‘Theatre? I want to do movies.’

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘this is how it is. All the greats – Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole – they all started on the stage and then graduated into films.’

That’s how, in my late teens, I headed to the local amateur theatre company, then onto fringe theatre in the city and it kind of just kept going from there. As a kid, I loved watching Dave Allen on TV but I didn’t know what to call that, you know. I didn’t know there was such a thing as comedy. That was another discovery.

I had two older siblings and I think parents often allow the youngest to do what they want. I was born into the privileged position of being the baby.

I’ve done a lot of stand-up about this where, you know, the oldest has a lot of expectations put on them and responsibility. They’re good solid people and then the middle child is the baby for a while but then they’re the middle child and they don’t want to follow the footsteps of the eldest, so they sort of fire off to the left somewhere and blaze their own trail and often go a bit crazy. I would say that’s a good description of our family. And my brother, the middle child, might be a bit crazy but middle children have a charisma all of their own. He’s an entrepreneur and employs forty-odd people and runs a big components company. Then there was me.

I did six years as a customs officer – I still had this thing for jobs in uniforms – and then I decided to go to South America. I trekked around there for six months with a friend, then came back gainfully unemployed, worked in the shipping industry for a while and then decided to quit and follow my dream. I didn’t actually go to drama school – at The National Theatre in St Kilda – until I was twenty-seven.

All the way through that I did itinerant labour, so I worked as a debt collector and a window cleaner. Those were my last real jobs before I got a break on Denise back in 1999. I think I clean a good window. In fact, I look at windows all the time and go: ‘Hey, good job.’

Mum allowed me to be a bit of an intellectual snob. My parents used to say: ‘Always hang out with people better than yourself.’

‘But what about them?’ I would say. ‘Will they want to hang out with me if they’re better than me?’

And Mum would say: ‘You know what I mean – aspire to be better than those around you, move yourself up.’

Mum was always about the finer things in life. She brought avocado into the house and cracked it open for the first time and we were all like: ‘What are these things? They taste like soap.’ It was weird.

I reckon that she wanted to go university and I think that getting married and then migrating cut those aspirations short. I think she was frustrated, but she worked in a professional position most of her life. She was the personnel manager for Adidas, which is what they called the human resources manager back then. And after fifteen years of doing that, she was fucked over – you can call it sex discrimination – and was replaced by a man who was paid twice the money. They changed the position title and doubled the wage – she knew it was happening.

Mum had been home with me full time until I was about eight. She loved being a mother – she just loved having three boys – but there came a point when she wanted to get back into it. And then, I think, the ambition to graduate burned in her all of her life. When she was finally finished with professional life she went to university, took up an Associate Diploma and finished with a BA. She went on to do honours in theology – she’s always been a devout Catholic. She got a job doing pastoral care work with her church and was employed until she was eighty, but then the axe fell again. Being laid off at the age of eighty isn’t exactly an insult – you’re eighty, go and do something else – but she took it terribly, personally. She doesn’t go easily, my mum – stubborn as fuck.

She would help people in palliative care organise the last weeks or months of their lives – whether it be six weeks or six months.

‘Do you want to throw all your photos in an album or clean out the second drawer? Or just pray and meditate everyday?’

Whenever I spoke to her, it was like: ‘So, Mum, what are you up to this week?’ And she’d say: ‘Well, I'm going to a funeral on Thursday and then I have another one coming up on Monday.’ She loved it. She loved helping families organise funerals and helping them through their grief. I think that part of it was that she lost her own mother when she was twelve. She died of an asthma attack when she was forty-four, leaving five kids behind.

It’s a massive thing to lose your mother, obviously. It affected everyone in the family and continues to have a lasting impact. It probably made her an anxious person. Of course, everyone is diagnosed with anxiety these days and we live in an anxious age. Apparently, we are making more decisions in a year than our grandparents made in a lifetime – or some shit like that. Everyone deals with things in their own way.

There are a few significant Olives in Australian history. Olive Pink was an anthropologist, and Olive Cotton was an amazing photographer – the female Max Dupain, but obviously has only gained the deserved recognition in more recent times. Then there’s Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend, and the myopic, buck-toothed Olive in On The Buses. I’m not sure she was a feminist.

Mum was always impatient for change and success. I think I would say that’s the main difference between men and women – and there is obviously a huge grey area at either pole – but men tend to be happy with the status quo and avoid changing, and women want to change everything. Let’s change the kitchen, the bathroom, let’s make this relationship better, let’s move, let’s change something. Mum always wanted change.

Mum and Dad had some friends who had come from a similar area in the UK and they were all intensely private people. They are, in fact, secretive, to a point. My parents were always saying things like:

‘Don’t tell people what you’re up to.’

‘Don’t reveal too much.’

‘Never discuss money.’

‘Never discuss your politics.’

‘Never say where you’re going.’

I don’t know where all that came from. I think that advice actually bears up to an extent, because there is not much to be gained by spilling your guts and telling your life story to every idiot. It’s a good idea to maintain that sense of self.

In comedy, I do none of that. I tell everyone everything – but I am an idiot.

Mum shakes her head. She can’t believe it. ‘What are you saying about us?’ She feels quite exposed by it. There’s a degree of pride, though, too. People at the parish will say: ‘I saw him on television,’ and she just raises her eyebrows and says: ‘What was he saying?’ I guess she enjoys the notoriety to an extent.

Dad died a long time ago – in 1987. I was twenty-two and mum was only fifty-five. He died of a heart attack out of the blue. He didn’t look unfit, but probably with the worry and stress of migrating and making sure his three boys got through – I think there is a lot of pressure on the male psyche in that regard.

I didn’t really know how to grieve – I was so busy with repressing most of my emotions. We were very protective of Mum. She went back to work but she was broken.

When I was little I had a hole in my ear drum and terrible abscesses – it was horrible pain – and Mum would spend hours with me at night singing hymns, which is a good way of soothing the soul, so I’ve got a lot of Catholic liturgy up my sleeve. There are lots of hymns that are imprinted on my middle ear.

Mum’s Catholicism is an intrinsic part of her, so I can’t say where the religion ends and the person begins. It’s just a part of her life. She wanted all of us to go to church every week and she was quietly keen for me to become a priest. I was into the magical thinking of it for a while, but it wasn’t a path I was ever going to take.

Her brand of religion is very much about her soul and, you know, prayer. And prayer by any other name is meditation, so maybe it was the most calming thing in her life too. I just think that she is probably an over-thinker. It made things a challenge, sometimes. You had to remind her – not everyone is against you, not everything is going to be a catastrophe, not everything has to be achieved now, so just chill the fuck out.

Her main lesson was to do whatever it takes in this life to make yourself happy, and if something isn’t working for you, cut it out. That was one of the negative things I picked up from my mother. If she didn’t like someone or didn’t like something, the axe would fall and that was it – done. She’s a put-down-the-phone-halfway-through-the-conversation kind of person.

Close the book on it.

She doesn’t reconcile.

The only person she reconciles with is God. She does not reconcile with anyone. If you have an argument with my mother, you’ve got to be prepared to do the making up or you’re done. Hard and fast.

In certain friendships and certain relationships with people, I have fallen into the trap of doing that, too. But I recognise that it’s not an adult way to conduct yourself, so I’m very conscious of it.

I think in every child-parent relationship, the child raises the parent to an extent and then sees what they don’t want – ‘I’m not doing that, that’s appalling.’ That’s when you start to find your own way.

Mum has sisters. There was one in Melbourne, one in Adelaide and then two siblings stayed in the UK. She never saw her sisters much – they were a feuding bunch. My brothers and I were conscious of that. We maintain contact, we maintain closeness and if there is a ripple or some kind of irritation we sort it out. Or, we just let a little bit of time sit and then make contact. My mum’s mum died when she was twelve and that changes everything forever; my brothers and I didn’t have to cope with such tectonic shifts and massive turbulence. You know, those rumbles in families where all the relationships start changing? In Mum’s family, those relationships all had fault lines – and big fault lines, too. And Mum is stubborn, so things don’t get sorted out.

‘No, I’m not calling her, why should I, she can call me.’ She’d say childish stuff that’s maybe frozen in amber from when her mum died. Losing your mum – what an awful thing to happen to a person.

I’d say: ‘Mum, it’s your sister – you know, there is not a huge amount of time left. Call her – maybe call her every day, it doesn’t matter who caused it.’

But she was always like: ‘She can call me if she’s that desperate.’ Oh man, she’s so steadfast. She’s almost soviet in her refusal to accept responsibility.

There was never any pressure to get married or have children. That question – ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ – was never asked of any of us. I can never remember that being asked.

Mum is crazy proud of us all and she is especially complimentary about the way I have raised my daughters. She talks about those girls with so much pride – they’re so kind, they communicate so beautifully, they’ve got great manners, they are so generous and sensitive about other people’s feelings. And most of those things that I’ve articulated – my mum would never see herself that way, and she’s all of those things.

Her grandmother role has been limited. She did a very interesting thing when we were leaving her to move out of home and that was reclaiming her life. She said: ‘You have no obligation to me – you don’t have to come around here and see me all the time, or call me all the time, just go on with your life. I’m your mum, but I don’t want to speak to you every day and I certainly don’t want you visiting me and bothering me all the time.’ Which was her way of saying: ‘You’re free.’

She had obviously seen that mother’s claim on children and the guilt that it can cause, and was determined not to let it happen to us. She didn’t want a part of it, and she didn’t want to be some doting, babysitting grandmother, so she was more like: ‘I want to see my grandkids, but, you know, all in good time – they’ve got their own lives to lead as well.’

I speak to her weekly, and I see her biweekly or monthly. And Mum’s fine with that. She has never come to see stand-up at a pub or club. She doesn’t do pubs or comedy clubs – she thinks they’re common.

And that is a word that my Mum would use. ‘Don’t be common.’

Jesus – common?

She’s always come to the Comedy Festival shows because the festival is a different thing. It’s more of a theatrical landscape and fits in with her feeling of what isn’t common. I know she’s seen me on TV but she doesn’t stop everything to watch every time. She’s definitely no scrapbook-keeper.

She has led a very independent life. I admire that.

Her attitude is: ‘I’ve made my decisions, you make your decisions and we’re all fine with that.’ To an extent, that sounds kind of cold, but I think that it’s actually a brave and realistic thing to do because the alternative is that we can emotionally manipulate each other until the end.

The result is that I don’t feel like there’s that reciprocity required. She has truly set me free – we can actually love unconditionally. It’s an incredibly fabulous way to be.

She’s also taught me that confronting a situation is probably the best way to go, rather than putting up with it. By her own philosophy, she’s taught me not to put up with her bullshit, though her ways are brutal. She’s got the stomach for it – I think I’m a little more conciliatory.

If it’s not working for you, change it – or get out. I’ve done that in my own relationships. I’ll bear up for a while but if it’s not getting better then, you know.

Mum was always of the opinion that relationships are meant to make life better. They’re not meant to be painful torturous things that put people in conflict. I know I’m not the easiest person to have a relationship with and I think that that’s very good advice.

There was no lack of discipline in our household. It was the good old-fashioned 1960s and 1970s, where you would occasionally get whacked. If there was an injustice against one of her children, though, it was heartening to watch her fly at teachers or whoever was responsible – in her way. There were no expletives, no raised voice – she’d just coldly look into their eyes and say: ‘That’s not going to happen again, you understand what I’m saying?’ and we’d be standing beside her, like: ‘Our mum is the shit, yeah.’

My brother and I used to walk ourselves home from school together and then let ourselves in. Wednesdays was spaghetti bol night and so she taught us how to make spaghetti bolognese. She also taught us how to do the washing up, put on a load of washing, hang it out, iron straight, vacuum. That was another thing – we are all domestically equipped. We are three boys who live in very tidy houses. There’s never clothes or towels on the floor – ‘Towels don’t go on the floor!’ We are all probably a little uptight domestically. Because we were taught: that’s the way to do it.

I think, to an extent, the modern man has been a massive beneficiary of feminism because we’ve learned to spend more time with our children, look after our health, talk about our sex lives, examine our inner feelings and our attitudes towards women. Yes, Mum would identify as a feminist – absolutely. And she was a massive fan of Germaine Greer.

Another great lesson my mother gave me? Because I’m in a second relationship and I was discussing having a child with my wife, Mum told me: ‘There’s always room for a baby,’ and that’s a very nice Catholic opinion to have.

I was scared and anxious about the whole thing playing out again like the first time around, and so she made me answer this question: ‘What kind of man would deny a woman the right to have a baby?’

I went: ‘Is the answer a weak man?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is the correct answer – so what do you want to be?’

‘Not a weak man.’

‘Yes.’

And she’s right. If you don’t want a child and your partner does, then get out of the relationship. Don’t convince somebody not to have a child.

So that’s it – that’s Olive in a nutshell.

A terrible thing I remember is Mum threatening us with: ‘One day I’ll put my coat on…’ Mind you, she was raising three boys and it was a bit of a shit fight at times – she’d say: ‘I’ll put my coat on, walk through that door and I won’t be coming back.’

That deeply affected me and I’d look at my brothers and they would be like: ‘Don’t worry, she won’t be going anywhere.’