So there I was, sitting outside my humble digs at Terrigal, listening to my stomach rumbling and wondering why, even though I was an established Australian author with three bestsellers out that had sold 10,000 copies in Europe and had written feature articles for some of the best magazines in Australia, I was back on the dole and still driving a $400 car from the wreckers. I was always under the impression authors lived a jet-setting, romantic lifestyle and gained respect and admiration from all members of the community. I’ll bet Sidney Sheldon isn’t on the jam-roll and driving an old banger. Harold Robbins is married to an ex-Miss World and lives on a luxury cruiser in Monte Carlo. Even Colleen McCullough owns a huge home on Norfolk Island and drinks Chivas Regal by the case. They’re all millionaires. But the esteemed Robert G. Barrett? I’m flat out keeping the payments up on a weekender on the senile coast and I live a lifestyle equivalent to someone changing tyres at a bus-depot in Calcutta. Yet all my mates think I’m rich, got sheilas hurling pussy at me like javelins and I drive an old bomb for taxation purposes. Hah!
Which is probably why I get people coming up to see me all the time, telling me they’re going to write a book. Surfies, bikies, advertising people, musicians. Ex-cons, coppers, drug dealers, housewives, pimply faced wombats just out of school. All types. And they all want to get in on the ‘awthering’ rort. So, even though I don’t really know where to start, I thought I’d try and put this thing together so any budding Frederick Forsyths or Jackie Collinses out there will know just what to expect from writing in Australia.
In essence, the literary scene in Australia is one monstrous great wank. You reckon you’ve met some drop kicks? Write a book, get it published, sell the rights for a movie and you’ll meet drop kicks in technicolour, cinemascope and stereophonic sound, their heads that far up their arses, they’re watching TV through their ribs. They’ll rob you blind and use you up and they’ve got egos bigger than the left tit on the Statue of Liberty. I’m convinced if you took a sandwich into some publishers’ offices they’d take the filling, scrape off the butter and leave you with the dry bread. And the average Australian film producer would dump on your head and tell you it’s snowing, then act as if they’re doing you a favour by dumping on you. And before the crap had a chance to dry your publisher would be in wanting ten per cent of what the flies hadn’t eaten off your face.
As a profession, writing in Oz is more like a sideline, or something else to do instead of filling out the crossword puzzle in the Tele when you’re sitting on the brascoe.
Let’s have a look at the wanking side of it. Snobbery and elitism abound among authors and publishers in this country. There’s writers in Australia flat out selling 2000 books a year, yet they live quite comfortably on handouts from the Arts Council or literary grants: a glorified writer’s dole. They’ve got their little airy-fairy friends in the Arts Council wine-and-cheese set and they write the kind of Double Bay coffee shop crud these people like. They receive grant after grant to pen this shit so literary elitists can gush over it in front of the fire with their King Island brie and chardonnay and read things into it that the serfs can’t. And while these fatarsed Wallys and Wallerinas are hogging all the chops, up-and-coming writers with a bit more in their balls and ovaries than flat lemonade are being forced to give the game away.
In my opinion, you should, if you merit it, receive one grant. If you can’t hack it after that, piss your typewriter off and get a job driving a cab or working in a paint factory out at Toongabbie.
I applied for and received a literary grant of $8500, only because a mate of mine’s wife used to work in the department and told me how to word the application form. And I’d already had two books published.
Publishers love to wank even more than the authors. As much as they like getting the stuff out on the bookshelves and turning a dollar, they’re more interested in scoring points and showing their piddling little bit of authority and, of course, impressing the wine-and-cheese set.
I know my writing limitations. James Michener or Emile Zola I’m not. Who the best writer is in Australia I don’t know, but it’s definitely not me. But I’m the best thing that’s happened to Australian writing in 20 years, one interviewer told me. When it comes to writing ballsy, contemporary stories that tell it like it is with street humour, I can write rings around half these so-called Australian authors with their tweed coats and briar pipes in the top pocket.
And these ponces can’t get within streets of me for dialogue. Henry Lawson was the master of writing Australian dialogue and I’ve read and studied and maybe purloined enough of his style, the poor old bugger must roll over in his grave every time I have a new book or a short story out.
So I reckon I’ve got half an idea of what I’m doing, and seeing as my first book is in its fourth print you would think the publishers would leave well enough alone. But oh no. They hire these ponces called sub-editors to vet your stuff. Now I know every writer needs editing and all these dills are supposed to do is fix up any spelling, grammatical errors and punctuation and maybe make a suggestion or rearrange a word or two here and there. Maybe. But not these jerks in Australia. They’re all frustrated writers, hovering on the social scale somewhere between heroin dealers and parking police. They can’t for the life of them write a book themselves and they’re going to make sure nobody else can.
Then there’s the cultural cringe you have to put up with. I write contemporary Australiana. I’m certain that’s the country I’m living in and the people I meet talk that language. To the yuppies in the publishing game, however, this is referred to as ‘ocker’, the most detestable word I know. To them, anyone who doesn’t talk like Stuart Wagstaff and dress like Trent Nathan is an ocker.
Also, when I say my style of writing is off the wall and tells it like it is, it’s another way of saying it’s crude, racist and offensive. But I look at it this way: if you’re white, Australian and have an Anglo-Saxon name, you’re automatically branded a racist and are expected to appease and kiss the arse of every non-white in the world. And if you like to play a bit of hide-the-sausage with members of the opposite sex, it’s worse again. You’re a straight, a square or a chauvinist and should be castrated.
So seeing as you can’t win, why not lower your sights and give the lot a serve: poofs, dykes, wogs, reffos, dingbats, abos, yobbos. Fire from the hip, just keep the humour up and blow the lot out of the water. And if it offends, stiff shit. At least if you insult the lot of them, they can’t accuse you of being discriminatory.
It puts the publishers in a quandary though. They’ve got a bestselling writer on their hands, yet to keep in sweet with the wine-and-cheese set they’ve got to try and dissociate themselves from me and somehow, discreetly, publish my stuff at the same time. Which is why you never see a Les Norton book launch or too many posters around. It may possibly dawn on the publishers, next time they have to reprint one of my books, that there are a lot more people out there eating blade steak and drinking beer than what there are nibbling Danish blue vein and sipping chardonnay.
I wonder how many people out there have met a living, breathing Australian author. Apart from Colleen McCullough and Frank Hardy they’re about the most boring, self-opinionated people on God’s earth. They pontificate, strike poses and give away words like gold watches. If you asked an Australian author the time he/she would give you a philosophy on time, space and the universe. Time is of the essence. A clock ticks. A sun dial throws a shadow. Why? Sort of: I think, therefore I am. I strop myself, therefore I blow in my hand would be more like it.
Anyway, I imagine by now you’re starting to think, Christ! Can’t this fuckin’ Barrett whinge. He hates publishers, despises sub-editors and other writers give him the shits; as do film producers. He’s bleating about not making any money, his hair’s falling out and he can’t get a root. The literary scene’s one great lemon in general. Well, why bother? Is there anything about writing in Australia that has anything going for it?
Yes. It does have its moments.
When it finally dawns on you you’re not going to make any money and pea-brained yuppies are going to try and treat you like shit for your efforts, you have to find a laugh or some gratification somewhere or you’ll finish up either in Morisset or on an assault charge. It’s a good feeling when you’re sitting on the beach and you see someone reading one of your books and they’re laughing. You watch them for a while and when they’re about to leave you go up and ask them what they think of the book. They generally say, ‘It’s the grouse’ or, ‘Pretty good. Why?’ Then you tell them you’re the nut that wrote it. The initial look on their faces is worth a year’s royalties. Then you have a bit of a nag before writing something nice or funny in the front of the book. It’s a good vibe all round.
A schoolteacher asked me to give a lecture at one of the local high schools. She’d press-ganged the kids and about two hundred of them were reluctantly assembled in the school library. They’d been lectured before by some writers and were expecting another stodgy nerd in a tweed coat to come in and bore the tits off them for half an hour, when in rocks that cool swinger, Robert G. Barrett, in an Hawaiian shirt that loud I had to yell out to be heard over it, jeans, shades and briefcase full of tits and bums magazines I’d written for. And a grin on my face like a split in a watermelon.
My opening address? ‘Hello, gang. What’s going down?’
The kids couldn’t believe it. Here was a bloke who would talk to them, not down to them. And he wasn’t up himself. Of course some of the young bucks in the audience tried to be a bit smart to impress their pimply faced girlfriends, but you could shoot them down in flames with one burst. It was easier than bashing up drunks. I felt like Don Rickles in his prime. The best part, though, was the twenty or so 17- and 16-year-old spunks squatting down in front of me with their school uniforms cut off above their knees. It didn’t take them long to twig why the eminent Robert G. Barrett’s eyes were starting to bulge and sweat was forming across his brow. So the filthy little hounds started spreading their lean, brown legs a little further. Next thing I knew I was barely a few feet away from twenty sets of different coloured knickers, with these grouse little teds blinking at me from behind them. My closing statement? ‘This face is leaving in five minutes. Anyone want to be on it?’
I get women ring me up pissed off because their boyfriends and husbands sit up in bed all night reading Les Norton and won’t turn the light off and grab them on the ted. I get other women ring me up, their boyfriends are jealous because they sit up all night reading Les Norton and won’t pay attention to them. Funny little incidents like these can make writing worthwhile. Plus you know that you’re doing your job. You’re making people laugh, you’re giving them enjoyment.
Even though I have done my best to discourage anyone out there from writing a book, I still imagine there would be enough sado-masochistic dills who are going to press on regardless and labour for months, possibly years, over a typewriter, pounding out that great Australian novel. Well, go for your life and the best of British to you. And now I’ll tell you what happens when your book is released.
I’ll dwell briefly on my first two books in ’85 and ’86. I wasn’t quite prepared for the media rattle and every show I went on I gave the kiss of death to — both Tony Murphy and John Singleton got the flick a week after interviewing me. I got dragged out to Channel Ten at sparrow fart to go on Good Morning Australia as a bit of cannon fodder, but I started to get a few laughs out of the crew and managed to get a better camera angle than Katrina Lee, so she shunted me pretty smartly so they could get the camera back on her. The whole time I was down there (six days for both) I slept on friends’ lounges and floors, eating counter-lunches and sandwiches.
So I thought, this time, fuck the publishers. They’re the ones making all the money, if they want me down there they can put me up in a reasonable motel and give me something half-decent to eat. I wrote and told them if this didn’t suit, do the publicity yourself. Or better still, get the sub-editor to do it. After all, it’s these geniuses that take the writer’s shit and turn it into a book. What did I have to lose? I wasn’t making any money and the expression, ‘nice guys finish last’, was coined especially for the Australian publishing industry. Reluctantly they agreed.
They booked me into a motel, a really nice one I might add, overlooking the Harbour at Darling Point. However, by my own stupid choice I picked one in Bondi Junction so I could have a drink with some old mates. It was the pits: hot, noisy and uncomfortable. The Malaysian government wouldn’t have put Barlow and Chambers in there. I booked out first thing Monday morning and arrived at the publishers with a hangover and three hours’ sleep.
You go into a boardroom with a phone and three-page itinerary of all the people you are going to see and who are going to ring you up. I barely had time for a cup of coffee and a handful of Codral Reds when Peter Wilson was on the phone from the Sun giving me the full-on Bryant Gumble, probing, in-depth interview. Then I was whipped across town to go live on-air (stinking of stale piss and BO) with Gordon Elliott on 2UE.
The publicist frowned because all I was wearing was a pair of tatty shorts and Mexican beer T-shirt. But who the fuck sees you on radio?
Gordon Elliott’s about seven feet tall, got a real deep voice and likes to brow-beat you. But I had a little something on Gordy baby, a movie called Bullamakanka, without doubt the lowest movie ever made in Australia. I had a part as the pig man only ’cause I needed the money. All the stars, however, Gordy baby included, tumbled into these cameo roles just to see their melons up on the silver screen. When the movie turned out to be the dog of the century, all the stars were ducking for cover at the mention of it and trying to get the thing destroyed. I casually mentioned this to Gordy before we went on air and he was as nice as pie to me and we did a pretty good interview.
Then it was off to the ABC. This time the publicist put her foot down and said I would definitely have to get changed to go on 2BL, and no arguing. I moodily capitulated, put on a pair of track-suit pants and sulked all the way to the station. They are rather pukka on the ABC. However, they do the best, most sober and intelligent interviews: and I’m the first to admit that getting a sober and intelligent interview out of me is a feat comparable to finding a cure for cancer or deciphering the Rosetta Stone.
This, too, was okay, then it was back to the publishers for an interview with some freelance journalist over lunch in an Italian restaurant. This was going down all right till I asked the bloke what he was before he got into journalism. He said he used to be a crown prosecutor. That is a giant step sideways, isn’t it? I wondered how many poor punters he’s sent down the river on pot charges and wished I’d had a couple of tabs of acid to drop in his cannelloni.
After that, it was back to the publishers and radio interviews till 5.30, when all the clan from the company lob in the boardroom for drinky poos and I get pissed on plonk, smile, sign books and meet all the reps that won’t replace my fuckin’ books in the shops.
Day two was non-stop interviews with radio stations all over Australia from Warragul to Townsville, and Perth to Deniliquin. They all ask the same questions and you’re trying to sound enthusiastic and chipper as you get asked for the 47th time, ‘And where did the character Les Norton come from?’ But the country DJs aren’t bad scouts and it costs nothing to be nice, plus I’ve got a lot of readers out in the bush and I have to stay sweet with them. I finished day two around six and that night got out on the piss with a couple of old mates.
We finished up in Bennies, this grouse little all-night bar just up from my motel, and I took two escorts back and charged it to the publishers; and a jolly good time was had by all, I can assure you. I got my bilges well and truly pumped out and not a drop of rusty water was left on my chest. Nonetheless, it was a very battered and tattered Robert G. Barrett who staggered into the boardroom the following morning for another day of radio interviews, coffee and chicken sandwiches made out of sponge rubber and shredded cardboard. But I soldiered on, and by 5.30 it was all over, and my brief three-day encounter with fame was well and truly behind me.
I managed to bugger up the evening though. Earlier, I had made arrangements to call round to this really good-looking Aboriginal actress Lydia Miller’s house in Glebe. I’d been in touch with her because the main story in my latest book concerns Aborigines and also I was thinking of giving part of my miserable royalties to this Aboriginal children’s mission: I might be a racist and a Nazi but I’m not real keen on seeing little Aboriginal kids going blind from trachoma, and every little bit helps. Lydia Miller, I might add, is dead-set glamour. Tall, willowy, with one of those chuckling sort of voices that sounds like water bubbling out of a spring. The idea had also entered my head that whilst acting the charitable, lovable author oozing charm and grace, one might never know one’s luck in the big city, especially around the Glebe area. So I frocked up in a grouse new shirt, squeezed my fat ‘comic cuts’ into a pair of designer jeans and, looking absolutely suavational, knocked on her door.
Straight away I was treated like visiting royalty. I guess there’s not too many people lately have got a kind word for our indigenous peoples. Sitting there, chatting away, bunging on my urbane sophistication, it didn’t take Lydia long to see that I was a pretty swivelised kind of guy, and let me tell you Playboy readers, RGB was going great guns.
If you’ve been up to Kings Cross lately you will have noticed all the Japanese take-away food shops. They’re everywhere. The food’s tasty enough, but it’s crammed full of monosodium glutamate, preservative, salt, fish sauce and other spices, and is about the worst shit you can eat. Anyway coming and going to my motel either pissed or hung over, I had been stuffing down heaps of this spicy Japanese crap, which has convinced me that what Australians they couldn’t kill during the Second World War they’re making up for now by poisoning with their rotten bloody food.
I was sitting there in Ms Miller’s loungeroom acting the toff when the second cup of coffee hit the three days of MSG and preservative in my stomach. Next thing, my eyes are bulging, my stomach starts rumbling and I’m hiccuping and croaking like a bullfrog. It was a horrible sight. Ms Miller was looking at me strangely when I, like a perfect gentleman and commanding as much decorum as I could, said, ‘Would you excuse me for a moment.’ I then walked through the kitchen, out into her backyard, and spewed all over her garden. When I came back inside she looked at me like I was something left over from the previous week’s garbage strike and I knew exactly what she was thinking: pisspot! I was immediately shown the door, given back my book and told what I could do with my donations. I then drove off up Glebe Point Road in the rain with the imprint of Ms Miller’s size nine stamped on my backside. And so ended three days of promotion in. Sydney for Robert G. Barrett, international bestselling author and closet Casanova. I booked out the next morning and headed back to Terrigal and the peace and quiet of the senile coast.
The following day, the realisation that I’d spent every cracker I had and was stone, motherless broke dawned on me. I was literally down to a mintie wrapper and a patch on my tie. There was only one answer: down to the Department of Social Security and apply for the jam roll.
The girl in the dole office was most helpful and polite, but unfortunately it appeared I wasn’t eligible to join Keating’s army. I didn’t work for a boss and I didn’t own a business either. I didn’t get the sack from my last job and I didn’t quit because I didn’t have a job in the first place. It was a cross between limbo and Catch 22. Christ! This is gonna be nice, I thought.
‘You say you’re a writer, Mr Barrett,’ said the girl behind the desk. ‘What sort of books do you write?’
‘I write these Les Norton stories,’ I replied.
‘Les Norton?’ Her eyes lit up a little.
‘Yeah.’ So I told her the name of my first book.
‘I’ve read that,’ she said. So I told her the name of my second book. ‘I’ve read that too,’ she said quite enthusiastically.
She looked nice enough in a homely, plumpish sort of way, but even if she was a Les Norton punter she still seemed to have romance written all over her face. I tipped her to be a Mills and Boon, Victoria Holt freak.
‘Well, sweetheart,’ I said, tossing in a wink, ‘I hope you don’t want your money back, ’cause I wouldn’t be in here if I could give it to you.’
‘Oh no,’ she smiled, ‘I really like them. They’re great.’
I casually edged my writer’s left profile across the desk, gave her my humblest look, and slipped into a Jimmy Stewart drawl: ‘Aw waal, gee shucks, ma’am. That’s right nice of you.’
‘There is one thing though.’ Her eyes were definitely starting to swim a little now. ‘I enjoyed that love scene with Les and the schoolteacher from Grafton in your last book. But when are you going to find him a nice girl? When’s Les going to get married?’
As usual, my writer’s intuition was spot on. I knew she was a romantic. ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘in my latest book, Les meets a really lovely girl in Melbourne and gets quite serious about her on the beach, with the moonlight coming up over Port Phillip Bay.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was an orgy in a motel in St Kilda with three sheilas smoking hash and getting drunk on Jack Daniel’s. ‘I would have liked to have brought her into my next book. But (sniff … sniff …) there’s no money in writing so I’m going to hock my typewriter and get a job in a pickle factory.’
‘Oh dear, that’s no good.’ She looked at the little tear I’d managed to somehow squeeze out of the corner of my eye. ‘Look, I’m sure there must be something we can do here.’
She ripped up the form I’d just filled out and produced a form 57B, clause 243A or something, and the next thing I knew I was once again the oldest surfie dole-bludger in Australia. There’s nothing like a happy ending to a story, is there?
So there you have it. That’s the guts on the literary scene in Australia. I’m not trying to discourage anyone, I’m just being honest. And if you still want to write a book, go for your life and the very best of British to you. But in conclusion, and with all sincerity, I think I’d better offer you three really concrete pieces of advice.
Firstly, research your material and your characters well. Document the lot and make sure you can give your readers something to relate to. Secondly, don’t take too much shit from publishers. Remember, we’re the ones making them rich. And don’t let them get some toe-rag sub-editor to stuff up what you’ve written. You’re better off not getting published at all than to have some bored, frustrated writer clone your material into the kind of wet noodle garbage these know-nothing arseholes think is where it’s at. And thirdly and most importantly, if you are seriously thinking of making a living out of writing in Australia and want to live the high life of an ‘awther’, make sure the people in your local dole office read your books. And hope to Christ they like them.