Jack of all Trades, Mistress of One [1 ed.] 9781742245737, 9781742233123

Citation preview

Grahame Bond was born in 1943. After attending Sydney University and receiving a degree in Architecture, he became a famous fat woman on Australian television. He has written musicals, worked as an actor and had a successful career in advertising.

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To Kate

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A NewSouth book Published by NewSouth Publishing University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA newsouthpublishing.com © Grahame Bond 2011 First published 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Bond, Grahame, 1943– Title: Jack of all trades, mistress of one/Grahame Bond. ISBN: 978 1 74223 312 3 (pbk.) Subjects: Bond, Grahame, 1943– Aunty Jack Show (Television program). Actors – Australia – Biography. Entertainers – Australia – Biography. Dewey Number: 791.092 Design Di Quick Cover design Xou Creative Cover image Australian Broadcasting Corporation Library Sales Printer Everbest All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard. This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Contents

The bit before the book Marrickville, 1943

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First hero 14 My imaginary family 16 Donald and Dickie Boy 20 Chesty, Hoot and Lulu 23 Braidwood, 1949

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Nanny, Fardie, Top and Needle 40 My father’s rabbits 44 School days, 1955

Make you a man 45 Farewell Uncle Jack 52

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Who’s afraid of Mr Woolf? 56 First love 59 Mr Pookalani and the dunny man 62 We were revolting 67

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I love a man in uniform 25 Mrs Lollback’s wicket 28 Only a heavyweight boxer 32 Smoking Harry 35

Tootie and the Kingsgrove slasher 73 Careers advisers 76 Girlie Glenn and builder boy 78 Meat art 83

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Architecture, 1961

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Sydney Uni Days 85 Sexadrine 86 Johnny, Mick and Mad Jack Big Bad Ron 91 Party crasher 93

The graduate, 1968

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Three in one 112 Man on the flying trapeze 115 Kos ’n’ Pete 118 Crossroads 121

Aunty

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ABC, 1971

The Missing Brick 96 Gestickulaten 97 Amateursville 104 Pushing the envelope 107

Almost going pro 126 ASIO and the Queen 129 Jingle jungle 133

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The family 138 Aunty ‘the onion’ 147 Elephanto reducioso 149 Logies 154 Lasse and the trout 155

My Horrible Anus Years, 1975

There is another business like showbiz 158 Altered states 164 The rise of Norman Gunston 165 Profiled 174 Wollongong the Brave 176

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No hero 180 The land of ‘was’ 191 What a prika 183 TAA the friendly way 196 So off it isn’t even on the air 187

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Boy’s Own M cBeth, 1978

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New team 199 Another agent? 201 BOMcB goes off 205 Fishing in America 208

Advertising, 1982

Angels at the opera 212 Copyright, right! 216 LA nights 218 Flight to G’dayland 222

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There’s no other store 226 Just Joe 228 Fuckin pears 230 The nothing network 233 Afletic music 235 The politics of stand-up 237

Amateur archaeology, 1996 Permission to fail 252 Reading backwards 254 Road to Damascus 256 Beastburger 260

Take a bow

251 Merry Christmas 262 Callithumpians revisited 263 Meeting my fenimist 266

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Acknowledgments

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Super salesman 239 Above, below and beyond 242 The great Virgin sacrifice 244 International Year of Political Correctness 246

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Beware the wounded satirist; you could become part of their repertoire. Mervyn Whipple

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The bit before the book This is my first book. I think? If you skipped the biog, then you’ll need to know that I completed a degree in Architecture. There’s an old joke around town that architects are ‘Jacks of all trades and masters of none’ because we have a smattering of many skills, but we’re not really masters of any one of them. The title Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One implies that I’ve dabbled in many different occupations. However, the one career that has always come back to haunt me is the role of Aunty Jack. I’ve never been able to escape her. I realise that she is my most popular creation, but something that started as a joke has dominated my life for the past 40 years. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she doesn’t end up on the front cover of this book, and if she’s made them use ‘Buy this book or I’ll rip yer bloody arms off!’, someone is going to die. I tried to kill her 30 years ago and she came back. I’ve even refused to appear as her, but when the money was right, she returned. She’s irrepressible. Aunty Jack is the mistress who controls my life, whether I like it or not. I suppose the joke is on me.

The bi t befor e the book

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It was 16 July 2008. I was 65 years old, an only child and an orphan. My mother, Lorna Teresa Bond, had just passed away; my father, James Henry Bond, had died 12 years earlier. After delivering the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, her doctor approached me and suggested that I might need some serious help. I thought she was referring to the quality of the eulogy. That’s all I needed, a critic at my mother’s funeral! In fact the doctor was recommending that I get some serious counselling, so I took her advice. It was the grief counsellor who encouraged me to write about my childhood in an attempt to unblock some of the problems I’d had back then. And so this book was born. My adventure begins in Marrickville.

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Marrickville, 1943 Mar r ic k v ille, 1943

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First hero When I was a small boy, the most famous person in Marrickville was Ernie McQuillan, Australia’s finest boxing trainer, and he just happened to live directly over the road from my place. Ernie was a hard man who trained even harder men. He was my first hero, although I don’t think he was a great fan of mine. That was probably because in Mr McQuillan’s backyard grew two of the most beautiful mulberry trees in the world, and I was a dedicated mulberry thief. On one raid too many, old Ernie caught me up his tree and, brandishing a cricket bat, chased me around his yard, screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘I’ll have your guts for garters you little bugger!’ He never caught me. Twenty years on, unbeknownst to me, the producers of The Aunty Jack Show chose McQuillan’s Boxing Gymnasium in Newtown as a location to shoot a segment for the show. The ABC had also organised for me, or should I say for Aunty Jack, to fight a few exhibition rounds with the Australian heavyweight and middleweight champion at the time, Tony Mundine (Anthony’s dad). On the day of the shoot, the ABC camera crew were all set up and ready to film, and the only area for me to change into costume was downstairs in the men’s locker room. I found myself stepping into the frock and putting on my wig watched by half a dozen hot, sweaty and heavily tattooed Tongan pugilists. After putting on the fat lady padding and the blue dress, I entered the shower area to find a mirror to adjust my wig and apply a little rouge and lipstick. It was at that point that I heard an excited Mr McQuillan enter the locker room, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Where’s that young Bondy? … Bondy, where are you, Bondy?’ So, fully frocked and partially made up, I stepped out from the shower recess and greeted him. Poor old Ernie stopped dead in his tracks, looked me up and down and said, ‘Fuck me dead! Bondy … tell me you’re earning a quid out of this.’ ‘I’m doing all right, Mr McQuillan,’ I said, blushing.

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‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’d bloody well want to, wouldn’t you?’ And that was as much of a conversation as I ever had with Mr McQuillan. It was a rich and colourful childhood in Marrickville. Our house was only a stone’s throw from the Undercliffe Bridge, which straddled the mighty Cooks River, gateway to Botany Bay. There were so many places for a young boy to amuse himself. Within a hundred metres lay a vacant allotment large enough for a major development, except for the sheer cliff that slashed through its middle and hovered over an immense sea of dense blackberry bushes. It was here on the vacant lot that I fought side by side with my Protestant comrades in their ongoing war with the Roman Catholic masses. For me it was a moral dilemma, because I had been christened Catholic. I came from what was called a mixed marriage. My mother Lorna Teresa Doyle obviously was Irish Catholic, while my father described himself as a Callithumpian. James Henry Bond chose not to belong to anything that was institutionalised. Looking back at what might have been, I thank my dear father for refusing to let me go to Saint Brigid’s Catholic school. I would hear him pleading with my mother: ‘Lorna, I don’t want to see our son beaten by those cruel Jesuits.’ So at my father’s insistence I went to a public school, where I was regularly beaten by those nice Protestants. Because I wasn’t receiving a formal Catholic school education, my mother insisted that I at least attend Mass on Sundays, followed by catechism classes afterwards. For me this was a major dilemma, because all my Catholic enemies had to do was to wait until Sunday, and then after religious class, they could bash the bejesus out of me. As my Catholic catechism coach, Brother Wayne, would say during indoctrination classes, ‘My boy, always remember, Roman Catholicism is the only true religion. The others do not have direct access to the Kingdom of Heaven!’ I think he was suggesting that the average God-fearing Protestant could never reach the Kingdom of Heaven and was thus doomed to an afterlife in Limbo. Of course Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews weren’t even on Brother Wayne’s radar. The contradiction was that my mother didn’t attend Mass. She was a

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non-practising Catholic (I did all the practising for her). But to confirm her faith and to get absolution we all had to eat fish on Friday (battered of course). The other six days of the week it was meat and two veg. The meat was either baked, burnt or fried and included a choice of chops, mince and chops, or steak, kidney and chops. The reason I fought against the Tykes was because my best friend Gary Lewis was a Protestant, and we were a team. The Protestant forces always took the high ground on the cliff tops looking down on the enemy. From our lofty perch we could hurl rocks down upon the evil Catholic hordes. Fighting from such a dominant position, we rarely lost a battle. On occasions the Catholics would resort to a rearguard action, climbing Mrs Headley’s fence and catching us unawares. Our only escape was to leap from the cliff into the wild blackberries. It would have been simpler to surrender rather than suffer the pain inflicted by the mass of thorns, but it was all terribly biblical. As a good Christian might say, I found myself in Limbo, between a rock and a hard place to strike a Tyke on the run.

My imaginary family In the years after World War Two I was far too young to understand my parents’ financial struggles.They’d made an enormous sacrifice and moved from Braidwood to the city in the hope of offering me a better future. To earn a little extra money my father worked overtime at Morton’s furniture factory in Dulwich Hill, while my mother, as well as working full-time at Marrickville Post Office, took a job at nights as a cleaner at the Marrickville brake lining factory. She described walking into the factory late at night, ‘the air was filled with white flakes, like dandelions floating on the breeze’. Her job was to vacuum up the loose asbestos. That’s the bad news. The good news … my dear mother lived to 98. With both parents working overtime I spent many a night alone in the house. This is when I believe I produced my first registered performance.

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We lived in a small two-bedroom semi-detached house with a long dark driveway up the side. Any sound coming from the passageway increased my anxiety. I was terrified of the dark and always imagined murderers lurking outside waiting for their chance to cut my guts out. I had a vivid imagination. So I used that imagination to create my absent family and I filled the house with an imaginary family to protect me. I would turn on the radio, switch on the lights in every room and, on hearing the slightest sound, I would run from one end of the house to the other pretending to be my parents. In the living room I might mimic my father by deepening my voice and saying, ‘Are you there, Lorna?’ Then I would run to the kitchen and mimic my mother: ‘I’m here, Henry!’ Next I’d imitate a dog barking, and run back to the living room and scream out in my father’s voice: ‘Grahame! Stop that flamin’ dog barking or I’ll have to get my shotgun and shoot the mongrel!’ I was convinced that the mention of the firearm would be a deterrent to any intruder, though I’m sure if there had have been anyone out there they would have pissed themselves listening to my pathetic performance. But for me, I had filled our house with the animals and parents who would protect me. I was comforted by my imaginary family. Those wonderful people Harry and Lorna were my real family. It was much later, when I began to dabble with fantasy imaginary families, that things became complicated. I began to build teams around myself, like the Aunty Jack team, the Flash Nick team, the Boy’s Own McBeth team. They became my extended family and the characters I created became my pretend siblings. I was desperate for brothers and sisters. The nearest person I had to a real sibling was Gary Lewis. We met at the age of three. On that fateful day in 1946, my mother accompanied me to the shops while I test-rode my brand new dinky, a small three-wheeler bike for littlies. Gary was playing on the footpath in front of his house on Illawarra Road and he must have blocked my way, because I rode my bike straight over him. We’ve been blood brothers ever since. Together we had a wondrous childhood. Every day after school we embarked on new and dangerous exploits. Even our mode of transport

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was an absolute adventure, laden with risk. My dear father had found a rusty old pushbike at the Marrickville rubbish tip, and to spruce it up, he’d painted it with lamp black so it looked like a bicycle version of a Stealth bomber. The bike was supposedly equipped with a brake system, where if you pedalled furiously backwards, the rear wheel would lock up and bring the bike to a screeching halt. Sadly, my back pedal brakes didn’t work as specified, so Dad invested in a pair of crepe-soled shoes for me instead: his idea was that I use my rubber soles as a primitive foot brake. Every day after school we would race all challengers along Livingstone Road at full pelt until we reached Hill Street (today there is a stop sign at this junction). Gary would sit side-saddle on the crossbar of the bike and steer, while I pedalled frantically. As we approached the treacherous crossroads, I would force the severely worn shoes onto the back tyre and shut my eyes as we raced out of control across the intersection, the smell of burning rubber filling our nostrils. We were rarely beaten. ——— Originally the area bordered by Illawarra Road and the Cooks River had been glorious marshland stretching all the way from Marrickville to Botany Bay. In the early 1930s Marrickville Council in its wisdom decided to divert the river using rubbish as landfill, which resulted in the area becoming a floodplain. Today this might be called land reclamation. In the early 1940s, the garbage landfill concept was expanded and the floodplain became the Marrickville Municipal Rubbish Tip. Suddenly we had an open garbage dump metres from private housing, and Gary and his parents lived directly opposite. What the council had approved was criminal, but for us kids it was a treasure trove of pickings: old toys, prams, comics, even beds. It was idyllic, except for the tons of rotting food and vegetable matter. On weekends we planned our grand adventures as we fossicked through the tip in the hope of finding a prized kapok mattress that we could dust off and launch onto the mighty Cooks River. As we rowed our

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soggy vessel towards the sea I would imagine I was my hero Errol Flynn and we were with Captain Blood and his fearless crew sailing the Spanish Main … in Marrickville. Our aim was always to get to Botany Bay. We never made it, though those mattresses filled with kapok stayed afloat for ages, until eventually they became waterlogged and sank. Nevertheless, we would paddle to the bitter end before abandoning ship and swimming for our lives. As well as excursions down the Limpopo (a.k.a. Cooks River), we were regularly involved in major naval battles fought further upriver, beneath the stink pipes. These giant metallic pipes ran all the way from Turrella to Undercliffe, bridging the Cooks River to eventually plunge into the Marrickville hillside. Gary and I imagined that these pipes were built before Australia was discovered. They were our very own aqueducts. To join our elite Stink Pipe Club, the initiation was to run at full pelt, barefoot, across the treacherous pipes high above the river, and live. The deep caverns in the cliff where the pipes entered the hillside were known as the Nuns’ Caves. This was where local teenagers received their sexual training. Inside the caves there were several foul-smelling mattresses which had absolutely no appeal to us as potential vessels because we’d seen the crimes committed on them. Gary and I would hide in the lantana and watch the absurd ritual of big boofy boys bouncing up and down on giggly girls who squealed a lot. We didn’t get it. Easily bored, we’d return to our adventures on the river. After all, we had battles to fight and villains to kill. Errol Flynn wouldn’t have wasted his time with giggling girls … At least, that’s what I thought at the time. In the late 1940s Marrickville Council made a momentous decision to remove the rubbish tip and rezone the area to become parkland. The plan was to move the tip to another suburb and create a landscaped masterpiece from the denuded garbage tip. To fashion the park, the Council simply reversed the technique used originally to reclaim the land. This time they brought in the bulldozers to scrape off the surface rubbish and truck it to Tempe. What was left was then covered with tons of mud and debris dredged from the bottom of ‘good old Cooksie’. The new parkland

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was now littered with old bits of broken shells from mussels, oysters and cockles. The area was aptly named Steel Park, where I played for West Marrickville primary school’s rugby league team. Steel Park by name and steel park by nature: the surface was punishing, uneven and dangerous. With so many objects protruding from the grass it was Tetanus City. We soon discovered that most opposing teams preferred to forfeit rather than compete on our playing field. We adapted. We discovered the magic of Coke (the drink, not the drug). Whatever they put in Coca Cola back then was the perfect cure-all. If a player was tackled and happened to smash his face on an exposed bed head, or ripped his leg open on protruding bed springs, then Coca Cola was the ultimate pain killer. It seemed to anaesthetise the entire body. Before each game we would drink at least three bottles of Coke each. Numbed and fearless, we were invincible.

Donald and Dickie Boy My favourite pet was my first dog Rusty. Rusty was a Pomeranian, a highly strung, fluffy little bloke who tragically died when I was about ten. My next dog was a scruffy mongrel, part wirehaired terrier, with big scratchy whiskers that made him look like a four-legged sea captain. Not being renowned for creating original pet names, this poor pup got lumbered with the name Rusty as well. Then there was my pet duck, Donald. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that he happened to have the same name as the Disney character. Dear Donald was given to me by an aunt who lived in Dapto and I carried my precious baby duckling all the way home in a little cardboard box on the train. He was a tiny yellow fluffy ball, and every day I (or mainly my mother) fed him milk and bread. After dining he would swim laps around Rusty’s water bowl. As time went by, Donald and Rusty the First became inseparable. I believe they fell in love, and at night they would sleep together beneath the privet hedge. Donald would rest his head and

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beak on the fluffy Pomeranian and use him as a pillow. He was an incredibly affectionate duck who adored my mother and would follow her, in tandem with the dog, up to the washing line where he’d squat and play with the pegs in the peg basket. It was a strange sight to see the three of them on their expedition up the yard. Mother, who always looked like someone in a hurry, was always closely followed by Rusty with his high mincing gait and Donald waddling as fast as his webbed feet could carry him. As Donald hurried to keep up, he could be heard constantly honking and quacking away to himself. Ultimately he grew into one huge healthy duck who managed to crap all over the backyard, the concrete paths, and all over my poor father’s workshop. One week before Christmas our next-door neighbour, a used-car salesman by the name of Arthur Slattery, offered to buy Donald from me. He proposed that I think of the money as a Christmas present. Being a greedy little toad, I accepted the offer and didn’t consider the consequences. To my horror, the next morning I woke to find a headless Donald strung from the peppercorn tree next door. Below the plucked duck sat poor Rusty, staring up at the lifeless body of his dear friend. That dog sat there for hours until the sun went down. Rusty died young, and I think it may have been from a broken heart. Artie, the eatee, was about as insensitive as I was and he informed me that Donald had been a big hit at their Christmas lunch. I still see this episode as my first crime against humanity. I didn’t eat poultry for years. I really was a terribly unimaginative child when it came to the naming of my pets. For example, I owned four budgerigars, and called each of them Dickie Boy. My mother loved and fed them all, and claimed that the last and supposedly the smartest, Dickie Boy Mark 4, could talk. I think she spent too much time with him. But I did notice that this tiny blue budgie never stopped mumbling to himself. My mother would suddenly stop everything and say, ‘Did you hear that? Dickie Boy just said, “Hello Dickie Boy!”’ He very well may have but I could never understand why my mother would teach a bird to say hello to itself. After tiring of talking budgies, I next became obsessed with breeding

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them. It wasn’t because I liked budgerigars – I saw them as a way of earning big money. I soon became a budding young budgie entrepreneur. To realise my dream, I involved my dear father, who spent countless weekends pouring a concrete slab and erecting a huge wire cage behind the garage to house the thousands of budgies I planned to breed. Like all business geniuses, I started small with four birds. Next I read a book on breeding and quickly learned that the females had brown blobs above their beaks (called the ‘cere’) while the males had exotic blue blobs. I soon realised why my enterprise wasn’t going anywhere – I had just purchased four females. I spent the last of my pocket money and invested in two blue-cered boys. The book also went on about a thing called ‘sex’, which didn’t make sense then and I must admit still remains a mystery to me. I believe my ignorance stemmed from the fact that my parents never told me the story of the birds and the budgies. Maybe it’s why I haven’t had children. Consequently the inmates of Aviary 331 Livingstone Road went wild, indulged in endless orgies, and after a very short time the cage was brimming with beaks, birdseed and baby budgies. Breeding was brisk. I could have been fined for overcrowding. There were birds of every hue and colour, common green budgies, yellow budgies, albino budgies, I even bred piebald blue-and-white flecked budgies. Business-wise, I’d entered the cute pet market a little too late and sadly the budgie boom was already waning. I can’t remember what happened to the hundreds of feathered friends I’d bred. Maybe one day my father discreetly left the aviary door open – I’m sure the budgie hordes were costing more to feed than the three of us. When the budgie market finally collapsed, I looked further afield and moved onto quails who, if you could believe it, were even faster breeders. This time I thought I’d hit the jackpot. If we couldn’t sell them as pets at least we could eat them. But as I only had chicken wire on the cage, the minute the babies hatched, they were so small they simply stepped straight through the chicken wire and suddenly I became quail-less. The end of another Bond enterprise. When the cicadas started their incessant drumming, that was the sign

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that summer had arrived. They seemed to know exactly when it was time for us to study for our exams, because that’s when the droning began. The noise may have been relentless, but it was also an exciting time to add to the insect collection. There was such a variety of these amazing winged creatures, everything from the common Green Grocers to Yellow Mondays, Floury Bakers, Brown Bakers, the uncommon Cherry Nose and the beautiful, but minuscule, Black Prince. I quickly learned to distinguish between the sexes. The males were the double drummers and the females were the ones to be wary of – they were known as the pissers. If you squeezed a female indelicately, she would immediately urinate all over you. Our most exciting find in the cicada world was the discovery of a rare Blue Cicada. To us, this was the Holy Grail of bugs. Rather than carry our prize home in a pocket and risk losing it, I chose to tether the tiny blue cicada to the neighbour’s peppercorn tree with a small piece of string, while Gary and I rushed off to find anyone to witness our great discovery. On returning with our mate Graham Gibson in tow, we were horrified to find our rare Blue halfway down the gullet of a greedy fat magpie. The poor little guy didn’t stand a chance.

Chesty, Hoot and Lulu It must have been compulsory after World War Two to hand out nicknames to all and sundry. My father Harry Bond’s moniker was Chesty, after the cartoon character Chesty Bond who appeared in The Sun newspaper. Of course that meant I became Young Chesty. Gary Lewis was dubbed Lulu after the comic ‘Little Lulu’, but it was a brave man who dared call him that, because for some reason the name set off a moment of madness in the boy. At the mention of the nickname, Gary would go ballistic and belt anyone who dared call him the ‘L … u … l … u’ name. Several foolhardy kids tried and suffered the consequences. The third member of our terrible trio was Graham Gibson. Graham

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was rarely called by his Christian name due to the fact that there wasn’t room for two Grahames in the group and as mine had an extra ‘e’, he had to change his. So we nicknamed him Hoot in honour of Hoot Gibson, the famous cowboy movie star. The Hoot moniker didn’t last long, because a major incident led Hoot to be re-christened. Graham Hoot Gibson arrived at school one morning complaining of stomach cramps. He suggested it might have been the particularly sour rhubarb that his mother had force-fed him the night before and foisted onto his breakfast cereal that very morning. Thirty minutes into the first lesson of the day, we all became aware of a dreadful stench permeating the classroom. Without so much as raising his hand to be excused, our mate Hoot leapt from his desk and dashed from the room, a thin stream of vermilion liquid running down his legs. And that is how Hoot Gibson became Rhubarb. ——— My parents didn’t have many possessions, but they did own an antique record player. It was the most enormous piece of equipment and took up almost an entire corner of our tiny lounge room. The ancient HMV Upright Grand was a hand-cranked, 78 rpm gramophone player. It looked like a small block of flats. Its ornate lid opened to reveal a red velvet turntable, and from the back of the player projected a large metallic trumpet, which hovered over the revolving turntable. The mechanism was controlled by a series of wind-up springs, which were operated by a small handle on the side of the gramophone player. The handle needed to be wound furiously when the record began slowing down to return the turntable to the correct speed. Our gramophone, however, had a few modern touches. For instance, there was a primitive dial where the speed could be adjusted from 0 to 100 revs per minute. The records of the time were called 78s because they were meant to be played at 78 rpm, but I chose to play my mum’s favourite Bing Crosby records at 100 rpm. It always got a lot of laughs from my mates, because Bing singing ‘White

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Christmas’ at top speed sounded like the Chipmunks, and they hadn’t been invented yet. I was way ahead of my time. My record collection comprised one comedy record, a heavy 12-inch vinyl disc (I loved it) called ‘Sunday Driving’ by a very young Jerry Lewis. I will never forget Jerry’s piercing high-pitched New York Bronx accent. I played it relentlessly until I finally wore out all the grooves. The unfortunate thing for my good friend Gary Lewis was that the names Gary and Jerry sounded very close. I should have learned from the Lulu experience. Gary had no sense of humour when it came to jokes about his name, and I still have the scars to prove it.

I love a man in uniform Maybe it was because I was a war baby, but I magically managed to avoid all forms of National Service. Born in 1943, I missed the call-up for military service in the 1950s by a single year, and by the late 1960s I was just one year too old to be part of the conscription lottery held for the Vietnam War. My only real taste of being in uniform was when I joined the First Marrickville Cub Scouts in 1951. I was eight years old when Mother took me to my first meeting at the Warren in Marrickville. It was quite appropriate for a bunch of young wolf cubs to congregate at a rabbit warren – after all, our motto was ‘good hunting’. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book had set the moral tone for the cub movement. The founder of the cubs and boy scouts was a Lord Robert Baden-Powell, who had received approval from Rudyard Kipling to use his Jungle Book storyline and characters as a structure for the shaping of young boys’ lives. If Kipling hadn’t agreed, I’d have had nowhere to go on Tuesday nights. My next hero arrived in the guise of a cub master by the name of Akela, Father Wolf – the leader of the pack. Later, when I became the leader of a group of Sixers, he gave me the name Brown Tip. Don’t ask.

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On that first night when Mother and I walked into the church hall at the Warren, I was surprised to see Mum swoon when she spied my new cub master. He was a particularly handsome young fellow, and my mother was absolutely convinced that he looked like Rock Hudson, who was an enormous matinee idol at the time. Akela was a tall, dark and handsome sod, well over six-feet tall, with black wavy hair, chiselled features and a rather heroic cleft chin. The power of suggestion is remarkable, and even I started to believe he was ‘Rock Hudson-esque’. I remember overhearing my mother discussing my cub master with Tootie Slattery, our next-door neighbour. Mum suggested to Tootie that young Akela was so attractive he could slip his boots under her side of the bed any time. In hindsight, I realise that Akela might have preferred to stick his boots under Dad’s side of the bed. By week two I had my brand-new uniform, which included long socks, dark blue serge shorts, a khaki shirt with epaulettes, and a small green cap with yellow piping. Akela had an assistant, a tubby young fellow who had taken the name Baloo the Bear. Baloo only seemed to attend meetings at the church, where he patiently taught us all the art of the Cub Salute, which resembled a peace sign before peace signs existed. The salute was simply two fingers separated and placed to the temples, accompanied by the words, ‘dib, dib, dob, dob’. As well as this gobbledegook, Baloo instructed us in the art of knot tying and we soon learned to tie slipknots, reef knots, granny knots and even double hitches. Each week Baloo made us recite the Cub Scout Law. I’ve never forgotten it: Cub Scouts are loyal and obedient Cub Scouts do not give in to themselves.

I’m afraid big boy Baloo always gave in, especially when it came to attending our weekend excursions. Maybe he had a body image problem, because he certainly didn’t accompany our fearless leader Akela, whose skinny-dipping episodes became cub scout legend. Our leader of the pack turned out to be quite the closet nudist, and I’m sure there

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were many other things in his closet that were also well and truly hidden. Water, for instance, seemed to have a profound effect on our Akela. Every time we went anywhere near it, he was bound to drop his pants. The mere glimpse of a beach had him instantly disrobing. As he’d charge toward the body of water, he could in one action strip off his shirt, drop his pants and at the same time scream instructions to the pack like, ‘Come on, lads, last one in is a sissy!’ I must admit, weekend jaunts with our leader of the pack were never boring. On most outings our little team would find ourselves either jumping into rivers or bounding into the surf, always in the nuddy. We all adored Akela – he was like a great big version of us. Our last grand adventure was hiking through the Royal National Park at Waterfall. Akela must have spotted a waterhole, because without warning he was off and running, disrobing as he went. As the naked giant reached the billabong, he leapt high into the air, screaming his all familiar war cry, ‘Last one in is a sissy!’ and as he reached his maximum height, he curled himself into a ball, preparing to bomb into the water. As he made impact, there was one almighty scream as his nether regions connected with a large submerged rock. Ten cub scouts stood by, gobsmacked, as our great leader sank to the muddy depths of the pond, clutching his damaged groin. This was the moment we had been waiting for, and all our training now came to the fore. Like clockwork, our little cub pack whipped into action. Carefully we lowered ourselves into the waterhole and dragged our huge nude Rock Hudson out of the sludge and lay him, bruised and swollen, on the embankment. Then with our penknives and a vague knowledge of knots, we managed to fashion a stretcher made from shirts and jackets, all held together with our neckerchiefs and our woggles – or were they toggles? Anyway, with an enormous effort my little band of Sixers, with their new leader, me, young Brown Tip, dragged poor old Blue Balls, still stark naked, almost two kilometres to the Ranger’s cottage, and wasn’t he surprised!

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Mrs Lollback’s wicket The asphalt road in front of our house made a great playground. Livingstone Road was where we local kids played our ‘test match’ cricket. The game was always Australia versus England. The telegraph pole in front of Mrs Lollback’s was the wicket, and the gutter on the other side of the road was the crease that we bowled from. The fast bowlers’ run-up was a convoluted affair. They began their run along the footpath and were then required to make a sudden hard left turn to deliver the ball from the gutter’s edge. It was always a miserable day for those who lost the toss of the coin, because it was compulsory for the losers to become the visiting English test team. This was definitely the poisoned chalice. No matter how fine your record might have been playing as an Australian, once labelled British, it seemed to guarantee losing. That was the sport played across the road. For games played along the road, we chose tennis. Playing doubles was particularly dangerous, because each team had to play with their backs to the traffic, and on a big point Gary and I were known to shriek a false alarm to our opponents like ‘Watch your back!’ ‘Sorry!’ It was always enough to distract them and give us the point. Because of the constant stream of traffic there was no net, just a thin chalk line drawn on the road. Tennis was my favourite, and each game played was a re-enactment of the Davis Cup. Gary and I always chose to be the Australian doubles champions Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall. I always wanted to be Lew Hoad. Lew was the classic Aussie hero – big, blond and handsome – but somehow Gary always managed to claim that role. He said it was because he was blond and I wasn’t. ——— My parents were both great lovers of live theatre. They didn’t go to Ibsen or Beckett, because they loved to laugh. So we went to the Tivoli, sat in

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the gods, and watched every vaudeville and pantomime show that came to town. From high up in the cheap seats, we looked almost directly down on top of every performer’s head. I loved the top of English comic Tommy Trinder’s head, but my favourite act was the great Australian comic George Wallace. George was a small plump man who wore illfitting suits and a hat turned up at the front. I adored him, even when he was upstaged by statuesque nudes who posed in the background with their strategically placed wispy feather fans and their matching diamante nipple covers. At my age, naked women did nothing for me. I only had eyes for George. George Wallace was truly the master of physical comedy, the slip, the trip, the tumble and the pratfall. He always made a spectacular entrance. I can still see him charging in from the wings of the theatre at top speed, tripping over his feet, flipping into the air and in the same movement sliding across the stage on his shoulder and ear with his legs at 90 degrees in the air. George would stay in this position until he eventually reached centre stage, and only then would he crumple into a heap at the base of the microphone. This was his signature – audiences expected it of him, and he always delivered, receiving massive applause. His timing was immaculate. Having arrived centre stage, George would dust himself off, apologise for his clumsiness, and commence a cheeky tap-dance routine where again, at the perfect moment, he would ankle tap himself and land flat on his face to even more hysterics from the crowd. George Wallace was adorable. As a child I was captivated by the control Wallace wielded over his audience. They loved him and he loved their adoration even more – even if it was for just that fleeting moment on stage. I think my decision was made way back then. Comedy appeared to be a very attractive occupation. I wanted to make people laugh too. It was also at the old Tivoli that I saw my first pantomime, Robin Hood, starring Buster Fiddes as the ugliest Dame imaginable. For starters, Buster on a good day had a face like a wrinkled sandshoe. Add to this picture his long bleached-blond hair, lacquered and combed straight up into the air, and you have a truly gruesome woman. He looked like he had just been

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electrocuted. Buster also brought a great madness to the stage, but more importantly, he was outrageously funny. My father loved comedy, but he loved sport even more. He was a great fan of the fight game and he introduced me to boxing. As our neighbour Ernie McQuillan was Australia’s premier boxing trainer, it was guaranteed that at some point during a street cricket game at least one of Ernie’s stable of stars would come to visit the old trainer. The fighter that we kids liked most of all was Don ‘Bronco’ Johnson. Don looked like a wild man with his long straggly hair, bushy sideburns and his huge drooping Zapata moustache. Don the Bronco was from up North Queensland way and dressed like an escapee from a wild west show. His uniform was a ten-gallon hat, loud embroidered cowboy shirt and ornately stitched western boots. He was a real crowd favourite, and on the surface appeared to be outlandish. But out of the ring he was a surprisingly shy and softly spoken man. However, when the Bronco entered the boxing ring, it was a different kettle of fish. When that bell rang he was like a bull with his balls in a brace, and Bronco would come out of his corner roaring at the top of his voice and swinging haymakers like a drunk after closing time. To the kids on the street, though, he was a gent. In fact Bronco Johnson was such a good bloke, he even agreed to play for the English cricket team when we could get no takers. That’s how decent he was. My first boxing hero was Jimmy Carruthers. Jimmy was Australia’s greatest bantamweight fighter and had travelled to South Africa to fight the world champion, Vic Toweel. Despite the rumour that he’d been fed a tapeworm by the South Africans, Carruthers managed to win on a points decision and returned to Oz with his new world championship belt and his worm. This was the era of rumours. Around this time it was also claimed that Phar Lap, our greatest racehorse, had been poisoned by the Americans. And of course the other big story was that Robert ‘Ming’ Menzies, the prime minister, had sold pig iron to the Japanese before World War Two. The last rumour was true. Anyway, I begged my father to take me out to the airport to welcome Jimmy Carruthers back onto Australian soil. So at age nine, there I was

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at Mascot Airport, acting like a mini band moll, waiting to get a glimpse of my Jim. I still have his autograph. Alas, my Jimmy wasn’t a hero of Mr McQuillan’s, because the McQuillan camp were training Jimmy’s next challenger, the American fighter Pappy Gault. With Ernie living directly opposite it was inevitable that I would meet Pappy Gault, and in the weeks running up to the fight I plotted ways of preventing the bout. Maybe I could challenge Pappy to a game of knuckles and damage his fists so badly he wouldn’t be able to fight. Or there was always the possibility that we could invite him to play a game of tennis and not warn him about the oncoming traffic. Inevitably I met my arch-enemy, and to my surprise Pappy was disarmingly charming. Of course a big plus was his American accent, and the fact that he claimed to know a Mouseketeer or two. Being a fickle little shit, I was totally won over by the smooth-talking Yank and I shifted camps, only to see my new boxing hero, Pappy, get totally demolished by my old boxing hero Jimmy. Of all the fighters I met at Livingstone Road, by far the best-dressed, the best-looking and the most generous was the middleweight Dave Stewart. Dave was a dashing figure and fought under the title of The Rainbow Kid. Our neighbourhood loved him. He was a real good bloke, and we kids all dropped our other heroes to devote our energies to The Kid. Enthusiastically we watched his career as he gradually crept up the rankings in the middleweight division. Then for no reason, Dave Stewart disappeared from the ring. It was years later that I heard rumours that he was serving jail time in New Zealand for rape. Maybe idols are just created to disappoint. You certainly can’t judge a boxer by his clothing. During those early years I remember sharing my bedroom with my great-uncle Ernie Dunshea. There was definitely a preponderance of Ernies in my life and even more Jacks. Uncle Ernie was my maternal grandmother’s brother, and he was my only real link to my boxing grandfather Bennie Doyle. They were brothers-in-law as well as good friends and had only lost contact during the Great War when Uncle Ernie went off to France to fight the Hun. Uncle Ernie was a great yarn spinner and he told wonderful stories of

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his time with my grandfather, giving me blow-by-blow descriptions of Bennie’s greatest fights. He would gladly talk on any subject except the War, which was taboo. Uncle Ernie was a big strapping man who was exceptionally kind and always produced a gift for me when he arrived back from the country. He must have lived in our house for three or four years because I became very used to the lovely old man in the single bed opposite who would tell me stories until I fell asleep. Then one night I heard my Uncle Ernie vomiting. I assumed it was the drink, but when I turned on the light the sight before me was horrific. The poor man was convulsing. I will always have the image with me – it was like a volcano of molten liquorice exploding from his mouth. He was haemorrhaging black blood, which poured onto the bed and gushed over the floor. As we didn’t have a phone or a car, and ambulances weren’t readily available, by the time a doctor arrived at our house it was too late. Sweet Uncle Ernie had gone.

Only a heavyweight boxer My parents were intensely secretive and sensitive folk. For example, in 1964 my mother informed me that they had never owned the house that we’d lived in for 20 years. She confessed that they had rented for all that time and explained that they were now a little concerned as the owners had given them only two weeks to vacate the premises. I was speechless. How had this happened? My mother apologised for never having told me about their situation, but she explained that they hadn’t wanted to bother me with the details. I would have been fine with the details had I been prepared, but suddenly to receive such information was devastating. This was a very difficult situation for all of us. I was halfway through an architecture degree and my father was two years away from retiring, which made him a particularly bad bank risk. I planned my strategy. The first move was to borrow a suit. Next, I had my Afro severely shorn. Now looking like an Engineering student, I was

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ready to approach the university branch of the Commonwealth Bank. Spruced and trimmed, I met with the bank manager, a Mr Brown. In just one week my parents and I had desperately searched Sydney for a property that we might afford, and remarkably found a house in Hurstville on the market for $14,000. It was a tiny one-bedroom fibro cottage but it was in our price range. I was absolutely honest with Mr Brown the bank manager. I told him that I was studying to be an architect and that my father was almost at retirement age. I also explained that I had very little money in his bank, but I hoped it would be possible for him stake me the sum of $14,000. The only question Mr Brown asked was, ‘Will you be a good architect?’ ‘I hope so,’ I replied. ‘God, so do I!’ he answered as he nervously approved the loan. Whatever happened to those bank managers? My parents weren’t business savvy or particularly worldly-wise, and as they grew older, the burden of responsibility for their care lay squarely on my shoulders. It’s one of the disadvantages of being an only child. Almost 30 years on, my mother produced another mind-boggler. In 2001 I had become interested in our family’s genealogy and I’d begun tracing my mother’s father, Bennie Doyle. The search showed that he married, in 1903, Isabella Dunshea, who tragically died in 1913 from tuberculosis. My biggest mistake was telling my mother that I had been having trouble pinpointing the exact date of her father’s death. She suddenly broke down and wailed, ‘Your father and I knew that you would find out.’ ‘Find out what?’ I begged. ‘That your grandfather killed himself.’ It was like a thunderbolt. ‘When did he kill himself?’ I asked. She hesitated, and with great difficulty said, ‘Your grandfather took his life in 1933.’ Took his life? I was staggered. This was the man I had idolised for as long as I could remember. Bennie was my hero, he’d been a challenger for the Australian heavyweight boxing title. I’d heard so many glowing

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reports of his prowess in the boxing ring, from grandfather Fardie to my great-uncle Ernie. Now after a small amount of probing I found out that my idol had killed himself with a double-barrelled shotgun. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I blurted. ‘We thought you were too sensitive!’ My mother had waited 58 years before revealing the truth. Maybe she thought I’d grown up by then. I was in absolute shock and couldn’t accept this explanation, but the more I delved into Bennie Doyle’s history, the more I discovered what a difficult life my grandfather had had. When his wife of five years contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and passed away, he was left with three small children. To earn extra money he worked as a shearer and fought bare-knuckle exhibition bouts around the country circuit. After a time he farmed out his children to various relatives. The two boys went to the Dunsheas, while my mother aged three was placed with her two maiden aunts in Katoomba. They subsequently caught the pneumonic flu brought back by the troops from World War One and both died. She was then placed with the very stern and very strict Grandma Dunshea, who also contacted the deadly flu and passed on. The beginnings to my mother’s life were incredibly insecure, being tragically separated from her parents and then her siblings at such an early age. When she finally met my father, she found a solid, gentle, honest soul, and she blossomed with that security. This made me all the more determined to discover more about my grandfather. I searched high and low and found clippings from the newspapers of the time. The early sporting writers were particularly erudite. In one article my grandfather is described as the very ‘Falstaffian’ Ben Doyle. It was said of him that ‘opponents could sink a punch a foot into Doyle’s stomach and he wouldn’t budge’. I now understand why my mother could never bear to watch boxing. To her, even the smell of salty water would bring back memories of her father soaking his hands in brine to toughen the skin on his knuckles before a big fight. We all hear about families having skeletons in the closet but this was

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one hell of a big skeleton. In retrospect my grandfather had all the symptoms of depression, but in those days it was probably explained away as ‘Irish melancholia’. I spent my childhood hearing stories of my grandfather from my great-uncle Ernie and they had an enormous impact on my life. What I find remarkable is that Uncle Ernie knew that my grandfather had killed himself, but it was never mentioned. It was all smoke and mirrors. The family must have made a pact. When I created the character of Aunty Jack, I chose to wear the golden boxing glove as homage to my grandfather.

Smoking Harry My father James Henry Bond, or Harry as he preferred to be called, was a man who did nothing quickly. When it came to eating a meal, he was so slow that by the time I had finished eating my dinner he was still halfway through his lunch. We were absolute opposites; where I wolfed down my food, bit my nails and fidgeted, my father always appeared calm and collected, like someone who had just completed a two-week stint in a Buddhist retreat. What appeared to some as my father being cool or even distant was in fact excruciating shyness, and I inherited my father’s shyness genes. I later discovered that once I was onstage, or in performance mode, I could conquer that fear. At the beginning, being on stage was a very safe place for me to be the person I wasn’t. ——— When I was about ten a distant aunt made me an offer that if I could stop biting my fingernails for six months, she would buy me a rubber Surfoplane for my birthday. How could I resist the challenge? So I refrained from nibbling my digits for an entire six months. When my birthday

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came around, Aunt Bessie conveniently forgot the promise. All she said when I presented my glorious new nails was, ‘See what you can do if you have willpower!’ Bugger her, I started chewing them right in front of her and I haven’t stopped since. Of course, there are side benefits, I believe the slivers of nail create a natural roughage which means I may never need to eat bran again. Plus think of the money I save on manicures. Nails were my vice, but nicotine was my father’s. At the end of each day, my father would relax in his favourite chair in front of our old upright coke heater with its little in-fill panels of mica. He would take out a small tin of tobacco, remove a few well-chosen strands of shredded leaf, and proceed to rub it gently between his palms to moisten it. Once lovingly rubbed, he would then proceed to meticulously roll and finally lick and seal the most elegant handmade cigarette seen this side of the southern suburbs. My father was always a perfectionist, and his roll-yourowns were small works of art. I began my smoking training at the age of eight, obviously trying to emulate my father. I thought it might relax me and stop me from destroying my nails but it just revved me up even more. Our gang had a secret cubby house hidden behind the impenetrable blackberry bushes that grew wild on the cliffs above Gary’s house. With no money to buy cigarettes, we had to improvise. For tobacco, we collected lantana leaves, and for cigarette paper, we made do with newspaper. Our ‘lantana specials’ may have looked disgusting, but they tasted even worse; it was like inhaling an incinerator. When we finally received pocket money, our gang moved on to tailormade cigarettes, and Capstan was our first real nicotine experience. We next moved on to Ardath Special Virginia cigarettes and finally graduated to Craven As. Both brands were what they called ‘cork tipped’; in other words, they had no filter. This was the pre-filter tip era, so one was constantly spitting out strands of loose tobacco. It was in our cubby house that we practised our smoking techniques. Gary had discovered the mysteries of smoking and insisted that real smokers inhaled the fumes directly into their lungs. He claimed this was what was called ‘the drawback’. My first experiment with the drawback should have turned me off

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the evil pegs forever. On my first attempt I honestly thought I was dying. After several inhalations I found myself coughing, choking and so dazed and nauseous I almost fell off the cliff. But in time I became used to the suffocating burning sensation, and once I had mastered the drawback, moved on to the more spectacularly theatrical Scottish drawback. Here, the smoke is not so much inhaled but allowed to drift up from the lips towards the nostrils, where it is then sniffed back in through the nose and recycled out through the mouth, only to be inhaled again through the nostrils, thus creating the sequence. The technique is similar to that of the bagpipe player who uses a circular breath to sustain the musical notes. Where the piper is recycling the same old air, the Scottish drawback exponent is reusing the same old cigarette fumes. It makes the nicotine go further. I believed this sexy technique would come in handy later in life to impress women. So I spent hours experimenting with advanced smoking techniques and every day before returning home, I would religiously take a fistful of peppercorn leaves, rub them onto my hands, and even go so far as to chew the peppercorns to remove the smell of tobacco from my breath. Before my dear mother passed away, I confessed to her that I had smoked cigarettes as a very young boy. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yes, I know, and you used to come home reeking of peppercorn!’ Don’t ever believe you can put anything past your mother. My father had been a 40-cigarettes-a-day man. Not one to be outdone in the cigarette smoking challenge, I took up the dreaded weed seriously at the age of 18 and managed to double my father’s intake, consuming over 80 cigarettes a day. It was easier for me to achieve these numbers because firstly, I had a higher metabolism rate than my father, and secondly, I was smoking tailor-mades. While at university I began smoking the very strong, very butch, unfiltered Senior Service whose pack bore a hirsute sailor on the front. The pack alone gave me the air of a macho military man and strangely the taste reminded me of the old lantana specials. However, Senior Service were a lot more expensive, probably because they didn’t use newspaper. Next I graduated to the even stronger American brand Chesterfield,

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while at the same time dabbling with pipes and cigars. Eventually I settled on smoking massive amounts of the cheaper, chemically altered Peter Stuyvesant. ‘London, Paris, New York, Marrickville.’ I felt I had ‘an international passport to smoking pleasure’. After smoking aggressively and excessively for 22 years, I decided in 1983 to sign up for the QUIT campaign. The program required each participant to keep a diary, where every day we were asked to register at what time and why we lit up. I was smoking so many cigarettes a day I almost developed RSI in my attempts to diarise my habit. By focusing on my addiction, I began to see a definite pattern emerge. For instance, I always craved a cigarette the moment I woke. Next there was the compulsory cigarette with coffee, and of course if the phone rang, I lit up. It seemed that I needed a cigarette in my hand to talk and I talked a lot. I could even hear myself smoking on my telephone answering machine. The message went like this: ‘Hi! This is Grahame Bond puff, I’m not here at the moment puff puff, but leave a message after the puff, beep, puff puff BEEP.’ At the end of the QUIT course, we were each asked to present a convincing argument as to why we had chosen to give up. I wrote, ‘If nicotine can’t be purchased from a pharmacy because it has been placed on the poisons list, then why is the government gladly accepting the enormous taxes paid by the tobacco companies and the purchasers? Is this not legalised genocide?’ I used my anger and became so obsessed with this conspiracy theory that I gave up the coffin nails on the day of my fortieth birthday. I went cold turkey and I can honestly say that I’ve never craved a cigarette since, which is strange for a man who was nicknamed ‘the human cigarette’. I got the name because I always had two cigarettes on the go: one in my mouth, and another ‘in waiting’ burning in the ashtray. It’s the only way to smoke that many cigarettes in a day.

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Nanny, Fardie, Top and Needle My paternal grandparents lived in Braidwood. We called my grandfather Fardie, while my grandmother was known as Nanny. Fardie was a small wiry man with a huge bushy moustache that hung over his top lip like a worn shaving brush, whereas my grandmother was a giant angry woman who had been crippled with arthritis for as long as I could remember. My Nanny was as helpless as a flyblown sheep in a paddock, only she was still alive … just. She spent her entire life in bed, while my little grandfather constantly fed, fetched, and emptied her potty. He either loved her very much, or he was scared to death of her. I was! Having worked hard as a labourer all of his life, Fardie was now working even harder as her carer. Their lives were difficult, made even harder by the pittance they received as a pension. Their home on the corner of Coghill and Monketee Streets was tiny. Fardie had bought the land at a bargain price because the area had been a swamp, so there was always a low damp mist around the house in the morning. Not good news for me, the budding asthmatic. Their bedroom always had the constant smell of urine and I recall as a small boy seeing how long I could hold my breath whenever I visited Nanny. If she asked me a question, I would answer her on the out breath, and then create an excuse to leave the room for a fresh lungful of air. Fardie was a tireless worker and had single-handedly built the family home from scraps of second-hand timber. The house was basically four rooms that had accommodated a family of six. It comprised two bedrooms, a sitting room and a living room with an open fireplace. A leanto kitchen was attached to the main house, and there was a small front veranda opening onto a garden of blackberries and stinging nettles. To seal the interior, Fardie had lined the walls with packing cases and covered them with cheap wallpaper. The floors were covered with old linoleum and thin scatter rugs. There was also a laundry-cum-washhouse and, of course, the long-drop outdoor dunny, right next to the gooseberry bush.

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My favourite hideout was the old ramshackle wood-shed that was filled with giant scythes, axes, draught-horse collars, reins, saddles, stirrups and lots of long sharp-toothed hand saws for tree felling. Directly out the back was a small orchard with the most delicious crabapples I have ever eaten. Every morning at sunrise my grandfather could be found sweeping, cleaning and whitewashing the fireplace in the living room – he never missed a day. Once the fire was lit, he would fill the cast iron kettle with icy fresh water pumped from the well out the back of the house and place it on the hearth. As soon as the kettle had boiled, he’d make a pot of fresh brewed tea, allow it to sit for one minute, then turn the pot twice clockwise. It was part of his daily routine. Fardie always drank his tea black with six sugars, a hangover from his days labouring on the roads. His next chore was to light the wood stove in the kitchen to prepare Nanny’s breakfast. Earlier, Fardie would have lit yet another fire under the copper in the outside laundry. After feeding and bathing my grandmother, he would take her soiled sheets and underwear, scrub them with carbolic soap, and douse them in the copper with the now boiling water. After stirring the garments by hand for a good ten minutes he would hoist them into concrete tubs to be drained. Finally the wet washing would be wound through the old hand mangle to remove any excess moisture and, if the weather was fine, the damp laundry was hung out in the orchard. In colder months sheets, shirts and socks were brought inside to be thawed out. I never saw my grandfather stop working. He was a tiny man in perpetual motion. By the time I woke, my grandfather had completed his chores and could be found shaving in the toasty warm kitchen, a small piece of broken mirror delicately balanced on the dresser. This practice was always performed using a lethal cut-throat razor which he constantly sharpened on a worn leather strop. Next, he would take the false teeth that he’d soaked overnight from an old jam jar, dip them into his hot black tea and insert them. Now with a face full of teeth, my grandfather looked 50 years younger.

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I’m convinced Braidwood’s only dentist must have been a wealthy man, because my Nanny also had false teeth, as did my mother. Actually most people from that generation had taken the false teeth option. It was the fashion statement of the early twentieth century. At breakfast time, my job was to cut thick slices of fresh white bread from the tank loaf. Using a long-handled fork, I’d toast each chunk in front of the coals of the open fireplace. Once golden brown, Fardie applied generous slathers of home-made butter or dripping to the toast. He also prepared the most wonderful porridge, made from fluffy rolled oats. Somehow he managed to create a chewy, slightly burnt skin that peeled from the bottom of the saucepan. It was delicious, never too burnt, never too light, but always just right. This was the perfect porridge, always topped off with a dollop of butter and a generous heap of brown sugar, all drowned in unpasteurised milk, thick with fresh cream. Braidwood’s climate was extreme. This was the Southern Tablelands where in summer the days could be airless and stifling, and at night the temperature could drop to below zero. The room that was missing from Fardie’s house unfortunately was the bathroom, and I have hideous memories of bathing in a large metal tub filled with many kettles of boiling water. To my embarrassment I was made to take my bath at night in front of the roaring fire, in the company of my parents, my grandfather, and whoever decided to drop in for a quick cuppa. Fortunately this was before I became aware of my genitals, otherwise I might have developed a phobia. My grandparents’ nearest neighbours were an odd pair known as ‘the brothers Hassel’, Top and Needle. Where Top was tall, Needle was as thin as. I remember watching Top driving his horse and sulky along Monketee Street past my grandparents’ house. Top had just purchased a new kelpie pup. Now there is one thing that people in the country are renowned for, and that is having very little time for their working animals. I watched as the eager young pup weaved in and out, snapping at the wheels of the sulky as it slowly bumped along the dusty road. Without warning there was a terrible screech from the dog, and as I looked out of the window

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the wheels of the sulky rolled directly over the pup’s neck. As the dog lay twitching in the road, Top Hassel didn’t slow down or once look back, he just drove on. I distinctly heard him muttering, ‘You dopey mongrel, now I’ll have to get another one of you!’ They’re a harsh breed in the bush. Before my grandmother became totally immobile and required nursing, my grandfather had worked for the Tallaganda Shire Council, digging roads, planting trees and doing general labouring. Even at the age of 85, when he stayed with us in Marrickville, he still had the strength to dig a 6-foot deep hole with a pick axe and a mattock to put down a structural post for our dangerously leaning paling fence. Fardie was used to hard work and was addicted to it to the end. My grandfather was also a great storyteller and spun colourful yarns of his time working as a stagecoach driver with Cobb & Co, carrying passengers and goods from Tarago through Braidwood to Araluen. The journey was punishing and it took almost three days to travel 75 kilometres of some of the worst roads in the country. The final stretch was the perilously steep Clyde Mountain road winding down into the narrow Araluen Valley. It was a death-defying ride. As if driving the coach and four wasn’t dangerous enough, the most exciting stories were about the times he was held up by the most feared bushrangers in the Southern Highlands, the Clarke Brothers. Who just happened to be my Nanny’s first cousins. I suppose they preferred to keep crime in the family. These were the stories I grew up with. I was so impressed with Fardie’s yarns I later dedicated an entire TV series to them called Flash Nick from Jindavick. The show was about an Australian bushranger who dreamt of becoming a living legend and not a dead legend like Ned Kelly. He was the ultimate showman who realised that there was money to be made out of being a legend in his own lifetime and marketing his fictional fame. The show was strongly based on Fardie’s stories. However, while researching this book I went to Google to find out a little more about Cobb & Co and I calculated that my grandfather had to have been two years old when the Clarke Brothers held him up. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? My grandpa was a

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classic bull-artist. It must be in our genes. My mother’s father Bennie Doyle did indeed fight for the Australian heavyweight boxing crown against Dave Sands at the Sydney Stadium in 1915. He lost on a points decision. The Irish never lie.

My father’s rabbits 1949 was the year of the power strikes. Bunnerong Power House at La Perouse was the main supplier of energy to the Sydney electricity grid and in 1949 there was a stalemate between electricity workers and management. So the workers went out on strike and suddenly there were regular blackouts right across Sydney that continued for months. On many evenings I recall doing my homework by the light of a hurricane lamp. Without power, my father’s livelihood as a carpenter was not viable. To earn money he resorted to mowing lawns and doing odd jobs, but it was never enough. Dad became so desperate he went back to his home town, Braidwood, to find employment. At the time there was very little work in the country, but with the help of my cousin Keith and his hunting dogs, my father created his own industry. Keith Bond, who had just turned 15, owned two kangaroo dogs (a breed of greyhound). Prince and Trimmer were glorious animals, long, sleek, athletic beasts that were not only lightning fast, but capable of leaping a 6-foot paling fence without even breaking stride. But their greatest skill was their ability to hunt rabbits. Seven days a week, my father would assault the rabbit burrows of Braidwood. Of course the dogs did their fair share of the work, but the majority of rabbits were dug out by my father using only a shovel and a mattock. Shooting wasn’t an option, because it was expensive and the pelts could be damaged by the entry wound. So Dad dug out their entrances, while Cousin Keith filled in the exits. My father’s life in Braidwood was made even harder by the Arctic conditions. It was mid-winter and snow was thick on the ground. Trying to

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break up the frozen earth was like trying to dig up concrete. Even under these extreme conditions, he still managed to catch, skin and dress up to 1000 rabbits a week. He sold the pelts for a penny a piece and the meat for threepence a carcass. All the money went to my mother. It was our only income, and every week he’d send a couple of bunnies. That year we ate a lot of watery rabbit stew. I once saw an old photograph taken during my father’s time in Braidwood. It was a stark black-and-white image of a barbed wire fence slashing across the horizon of a snow-covered paddock. Hanging from the fence like grey socks on a washing line were hundreds of rabbit carcasses stretching as far as the eye could see. They were my father’s rabbits.

Make you a man The burning sensation in the pit of my stomach was something I couldn’t explain. It couldn’t have been an ulcer, I was only 12 years old. It may have had something to do with the holiday I was about to embark on. My school vacations had become recurring nightmares as every Christmas holiday my parents, in all good will, despatched me to Braidwood to stay with my Uncle Jack. My mother would take me to Central railway station to catch the Spirit of Progress, the train that would deliver me to Tarago, a small town just 48 kilometres north of Braidwood. It was a ritual. Each year as I was about to board the train, my mother would hand me a clean handkerchief with a few small coins neatly knotted in its corner. The handkerchief had several uses, and Mother would demonstrate how, by furling one corner of the handkerchief, it could be used when moistened with spittle to probe the corners of the eyes should they become filled with soot. This would only occur should I disobey her and stick my head out of the train window and become blinded by the particles of coal emitted by the filthy steam train. The knotted section of the handkerchief always contained a couple of shillings and a few pennies; this would be my

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pocket money for the next six weeks. I always bought something wicked to eat at Goulburn railway station just three and a half hours out of Sydney. My father warned me off eating railway pies – apparently the Goulburn pies were quickly heated up for the unsuspecting passengers. My father always said that his bank manager had a heart ‘as cold as a railway pie’: hot on the outside, ice in the middle. From Goulburn, it was only a short hop to Tarago, where I would be met by my wealthy Uncle Jack. As I neared Tarago the sickening sensation increased and it wasn’t from the pies – it was outright fear. For six years running I was sent by my parents to Braidwood where I would spend six weeks of my Christmas vacation with my uncle and aunt and their three children, supposedly experiencing the joys of country living. But from day one something felt wrong. Out the back of the homestead, beside the garage, Uncle Jack kept a scrawny brown kelpie chained to a peg driven into the ground. Whenever the dog saw anyone he’d start barking. He didn’t seem to have a name, or at least the only name I ever heard my uncle use was, ‘Shut up, yah mongrel.’ So everyone called him Yah Mongrel. He was such a lonely dog. I used to sneak out and try to pat him, and as I approached he’d wag his tail excitedly, begging for attention. But the minute I got too close, he would cower and back off, whining. That poor dog was doomed to spend his life chained to that peg, running round and round in circles, wearing an ever deepening track into the earth. Yah Mongrel never left that spot for as long as I was going to Braidwood; it must have been punishment for a crime committed in a past life. This was his hell on earth, and Braidwood was mine. In my first year, I was eager to experience life in the bush. But my uncle had other ideas. He made it clear from the start that he didn’t want me to become a soft city slicker like my father. Uncle Jack had never forgiven my father for choosing to live in the city. I think he saw him as a turncoat. Uncle Jack had a lot of prejudices about city folk, and seemed determined to show my father that he could make me into the ‘real man’ my father couldn’t.

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His biggest challenge was that he only had six weeks to turn a small city kid into a rugged bushman. He even prepared tests for me. This process started when I was eight and ended at 13 (for me 13 was a lucky number). Jack had married my father’s sister. I had always felt that my uncle was a jealous man. I think he might have had a crush on my mother – he had taken her out before she met my dad. It’s a convoluted theory, but why else would he have hated my father so much? The lesson for year one was self-defence. I was playing around the farm with my cousin and a couple of other boys when my uncle approached and asked, ‘Has your father ever taught you to fight?’ ‘No, Uncle Jack,’ I replied. ‘Well, I think a man needs to know how to protect himself.’ And with that Uncle Jack shouted orders to his private attack team. ‘I want you three to fight Grahame!’ And like obedient cattle dogs, the boys obeyed. The only experience I’d had with fighting was a few pushing matches in the playground at school. During the lunch break, my playmates and I would pretend to be our wrestling heroes and roll around on the asphalt embracing each other in Indian death locks. This had always been with children my own age. I’d never faced an older combatant. Uncle Jack’s nephew was at least four years older than me – he was already shaving. The boy appeared to be reasonably experienced, I could tell as he took the correct stance and put up his fists. I thought it was a game, and I innocently walked up to him and copped a punch to the nose. I saw stars, went weak at the knees and fell to the ground. This wasn’t like the school playground battles. I noticed that I was spilling blood, my blood. I had seen grown wrestlers bleed, but that was at the Sydney Stadium, where my father took me to see my heroes Mario Milano, Big Chief Little Wolf and the very glamorous Gorgeous George. They bled for their art. At least that’s what I believed. I discovered years later that it wasn’t their blood at all. In fact, each of them had a small capsule of red powder hidden in their tights which, when slapped to their foreheads and mixed with sweat, looked

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like blood. My father always reminded me of the many times I’d fainted at the sight of this fakery. In retrospect my heroes were all stout middleaged men who made a living rolling around in the ring and sweating a lot. While I lay stunned on the ground, my uncle berated me with my inadequacies. He was also insisting that I go on and fight the other two boys, but my short career as a pugilist was over. I stayed down for the count. As I sat up, broken and weeping, my uncle teased, ‘Your father didn’t teach you very well.’ ‘He didn’t ever teach me,’ I whimpered. ‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘You’ll never be as good as your grandfather!’ My uncle didn’t give up on his quest to make a fighting man of me. Forever the teacher, he found a punching bag for me to practise with. For convenience’s sake, Uncle Jack grabbed the pet poddy calf that I’d been feeding regularly with a bottle. He dragged it into the shed, hung it up by its back legs, slit its throat, split the stomach down the middle, and my job was to pull the skin away from the body by punching it off. ‘It’ll toughen your hands,’ he reckoned. The year after, it was shearing lessons. Uncle Jack always felt that I was never strong enough to work the presses in the shearing sheds with the men and the big boys. So I spent a lot of time without gloves picking up scraps of wool from the floor and placing it on the tables for the sorters. On one particularly miserable day, not many shearers turned up to the sheds. My uncle had a job for me. I was really excited when he handed me a pair of shears and took me out into the paddock. As we walked he pointed to a large lump in the distance. ‘That’s where we’re heading,’ he said. The first thing that hit me was a dreadful stench and I had a funny feeling where it was coming from. As we got closer I could see that the lump was a dead sheep. When we reached the rotting carcass, my uncle said, ‘You wanted to learn to shear? Well, here’s something to practise on!’ As I knelt down beside the dead ewe, a dozen botflies emerged from its rear end.

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‘We don’t waste wool here,’ he yelled. ‘If we can’t shear it, we pluck it off!’ And with that he grabbed a handful of wool and tore it from the rotting body. Suddenly the carcass opened up and a million maggots crawled out. I vomited. ‘Watch the bloody wool, Bondy, there’s a bagful in that one. We’re gonna have to toughen you up, young fella.’ He walked off and left me to my task. The remarkable thing about memory is how some traumatic events can be simply forgotten or repressed. For instance, five months after my holiday from hell, I’d have almost completely forgotten the worst of the experiences. By August, details were starting to blur. By October, I was beginning to look forward to a break from our poor little house in Marrickville, and when November came around, I was veritably itching to be on that train and on my way for another six weeks in Braidwood. It wasn’t until I reached Tarago railway station that it all flooded back to me, the nightmares, the mental torture, the constant teasing and belittling, the damage I was in for from another six weeks of boot camp, Uncle Jack-style. Another year on and by now I’d become quite hardened to the teasing and the tests. But this year Uncle Jack had made me a very special promise. I was particularly wary of Uncle Jack’s promises as they always had a sting in the tail. This time he had guaranteed that I would have a great adventure. So one morning I was woken at the ungodly hour of 4 a.m. I sat in the kitchen while Uncle Jack cooked what he called ‘the breakfast of champions’. (Lamb chops from a freshly slaughtered animal.) When I say he cooked the chops, they may as well have been placed over a couple of safety matches. Uncle Jack liked his meat rare, which meant he simply turned on the gas griller and waved the bloodied chops under it for about 15 seconds a side. The chops were then placed oozing onto our plates with a thick slice of fresh bread to absorb the blood. It was Jack’s belief that rare red meat could also ‘make a man of you’. I think he was even trying to make men of his daughters. Breakfast included black tea for Jack and warm creamy unpasteurised milk for me. The combination of the bloody meat and the warm milk was stomach churning. Outside the air was a bracing 5 degrees, and there was not a

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bird call to be heard. I’m sure their vocal cords hadn’t thawed. Off we went in Jack’s old jeep to his sheep station, 15 kilometres from town. I was made to sit in the back with the sheepdogs and constantly reminded that I was only there on the condition that I be quiet. After driving for half an hour into a densely wooded section of the property, Jack stopped and silently motioned that I should look to my right. There, just visible in the scrub, was a large mob of kangaroos peacefully grazing. Our vehicle was downwind, so they were totally oblivious to our presence. So this was the surprise. I’d never seen kangaroos in the wild before, and they were beautiful. Next, Jack produced two guns and asked me if I would like to have a shot. ‘Have you fired a gun before?’ I told him that I had a BB gun at home. ‘You sound like you know what you’re doing. Here! Have a go with this.’ The gun he handed me was very heavy, but I somehow managed to place the double-barrelled shotgun to my shoulder. I hadn’t a clue what I was meant to do. Next he showed me how to sight the target down the barrel. He then told me to aim at the nearest kangaroo. The roos were now totally aware of our presence, but for some inexplicable reason made no attempt to leave. They just stayed there, stock-still, upright, sniffing the breeze. Sitting ducks. It wasn’t fair. Jack decided to make a game of it, a sort of competition. He said he’d count to three and only then would we fire. There was no such thing as background checks. I trustingly took aim and on the count of three, our guns discharged. I must have pulled both triggers at once, because all hell broke loose and I was hurled backwards from the force of the explosion. Flat on my back, my ears rang and my shoulder felt like I had been kicked by a draught horse. The last thing I saw before I was so rudely catapulted through the air was a roo leap high as if it had been hit by a bus. Jack looked down at me and laughed. ‘You can’t shoot either!’ When I sat up, I could see a roo bleeding and twitching on the

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ground. It must have been a female because Jack walked straight over to it, reached into its pouch, and pulled out a tiny hairless baby joey. As if to make up for the cruel trick he’d played, he handed me the joey and said, ‘There you go young Bondy, something for you to play with. You can be his mother!’ I took the tiny pink baby roo from him and wrapped it in my jumper. Jack noticed that I was having trouble lifting my sweater over my head. ‘Give us a look at your shoulder, boy,’ he bellowed. I opened my shirt to expose a big red patch of skin on my right shoulder. He raised and lowered my arm a couple of times and gruffly said, ‘You’ll live. It doesn’t look like anything’s broken.’ For the rest of the vacation I fed the joey morning and night, beginning with a small eye dropper filled with milk and eventually graduating to a bottle and teat. Every night I put the little joey to sleep in an old rabbit skin turned inside out so the fur would feel like his mother’s pouch. He got stronger and became so tame that when I called ‘Joey!’ he would slip out of his artificial pouch, hop over to me and suck from the teat on the bottle. On my last day before returning to Sydney, I rushed into the backyard to say my sad farewells to young Joey. But this time when I called, he didn’t come. I searched everywhere and after almost an hour I gave up. When I returned to the homestead Uncle Jack was standing in the kitchen, a huge smile on his face. ‘You won’t find the little fellow out there!’ he said. ‘Has he run away?’ I asked. ‘No!’ Uncle Jack replied. ‘Well, where is he?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve got a little surprise for you, young man,’ he said. ‘Here’s something for you to take back to the city to remind you of your holiday.’ From behind his back he produced a small package. As I opened it, there wrapped in a piece of tissue was Joey’s tiny paw severed at the elbow, with a small metal ring attached. ‘It’s a lucky key ring!’ he said. ‘You know, they reckon a kangaroo paw’s much better luck than a bloody rabbit’s paw.’

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I cried. Uncle Jack seemed uncomfortable with any show of emotion and unsympathetically snapped, ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, there’s no way you could have taken a roo back to the city, they’re bloody wild animals. Anyway that key ring is something you can use!’ On the train journey home I threw the package out of the window at about Mittagong. As usual my mother was at the railway station to meet me, and as we travelled back to Marrickville on the tram, I was particularly silent. She seemed unaware of my mood and innocently asked me, ‘How was the holiday?’ ‘It was okay,’ I lied. My mother seemed satisfied with the response. ‘I suppose you can’t wait till next year?’ Every year I swore that I would tell my parents how much I hated going to Braidwood. Sadly back then, children didn’t share the truth with their parents, and they certainly didn’t criticise their relatives. It just wasn’t done. The year I turned 13 I was too sick to go to Braidwood. As I was the year after, and the year after that. I was a good actor. In fact I never went back to Uncle Jack’s farm.

Farewell Uncle Jack I next returned to Braidwood at age 14 to attend my grandmother’s funeral. It was a miserable day and the mist was up on the tableland. Rain was sweeping in and there was something quite eerie about the Braidwood cemetery. It sits at the south end of town, close to where two huge granite boulders flank the main street like grand matching headstones. But there was nothing grand about this country graveyard, or about the ceremony for that matter. All I can remember is lots of rain, cold and tears. As I hadn’t been close to my grandmother and as she was such a

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bully, I didn’t feel anything at the time. After the funeral, as is the tradition, there was a wake held at the Commercial Hotel on the main street. For whatever reason, my mother and father went back to Uncle Jack’s house, and I was taken to the pub by my cousin Jack Mundy. Jack had married my first cousin, Joyce Bond, who over the years had become enormously fat. She suffered from elephantiasis, and had legs like tree trunks and bye-byes that could kill a man if she flapped them. My mother politely explained away Joyce’s rare condition as ‘a glandular problem’. Joyce’s husband Jack, on the other hand, was a string-bean of a man with a splotch of red hair on top of his head, ears like a baby elephant and a neck four times longer than most humans, sporting the most spectacular Adam’s apple I’d ever seen. Cousin Jack was a professional horse breaker from Araluen. As my father would say, ‘There is not a horse in the land that could throw Jack Mundy!’ Jack’s hands were a tribute to his trade. Huge and badly scarred, they felt like overcooked T-bone steaks, wrinkled, gnarled and inedible. He looked like he’d stepped out of a Russell Drysdale painting, all tall and gangly with his checked shirt, riding boots and barbecued hands. He was the most roguish character I’d ever met, a drinker, a fighter and a born bullshitter. My cousin Jack was as funny as buggery, and being the bad arse of the family, he took great delight in getting me pissed at my Nanny’s wake. I’d only ever had the odd shandy, but by the time my parents and Uncle Jack arrived at the hotel, I was onto my fifth schooner. Everyone was cranky with me except Jack Mundy. Here I was, 14 years old and totally legless in front of the rellies. I know that Uncle Jack would have loved to have punished me, but I was free – he’d never have control over me again. Where Jack Mundy was my absolute hero, my Uncle Jack was a sworn enemy and I promised myself that one day he would suffer. Fifteen years on I was doing my first-ever press conference for the ABC, being interrogated by a group of journalists about the first episode of The Aunty Jack Show. I was totally inexperienced with the media and found myself being asked by a young gung-ho journalist where the idea for Aunty Jack had come from. Who was she based on? Was it anyone in

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particular? I explained that maybe subliminally the character was homage to my late grandfather, Bennie Doyle the boxer. The journo wasn’t satisfied and pressed further. Surely there was someone else it was based on? I could tell that he wasn’t going to give up until he got an answer. I eventually relented and admitted that there was an Uncle Jack. The journalist pounced. ‘Did he ever wear a dress?’ Had I heard him correctly? I pondered the question. ‘I don’t know. He might have,’ I replied. That news went straight back to Braidwood. My uncle may have spent six years trying to make me a man, but it only took me six seconds to turn him into a woman. I got him a beauty. Beware the wounded satirist; you could become part of their repertoire.

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Who’s afraid of Mr Woolf? Mr Sprott was my sixth-class teacher at Marrickville Primary. Good old Sprottso was a World War Two fighter pilot and had flown Kittyhawks in New Guinea with the RAAF. We heard lots of rip-roaring stories of the war in the Pacific which inspired us all to build model aeroplanes and decorate our classroom with them: Kittyhawks, Mustangs and more Kittyhawks covered the ceiling. The 1950s was the era when corporal punishment ruled supreme and Mr Sprott was a very handy man with the cane. He also had a peculiar way of dealing out punishment, especially if he couldn’t find a culprit. We called his method ‘Sprottso’s Justice’. If Mr Sprott couldn’t identify a guilty party, he would choose two random students and make them face one another with their palms outstretched. Next he would balance a piece of chalk between their fingertips, shut his eyes, raise the cane and say, ‘This magic cane will now punish the guilty party.’ With his eyes closed he would then lash out and strike the supposed guilty party. On rare occasions he’d hit the chalk and both parties were free to go. He was cruel, but fair. It was in Sprott’s class that I was encouraged to write my very first joke. We had to submit a composition on the subject ‘Bluebeard the Pirate’. My first paragraph read: ‘All hands were on deck while the captain with the big boots trod on them!’ It seemed funnier at the time. My parents weren’t a great help to me with my schooling as they’d both only achieved the equivalent of the Intermediate Certificate. I can’t remember at what stage it was in my primary school education, but I vaguely remember doing what was called an IQ test. I must have done well, because at the end of my primary education I was awarded dux of the school and given the choice of attending one of five selective schools: Sydney High, Sydney Tech, North Sydney High, Fort Street or Canterbury Boys’ High. I chose Canterbury because it was in the next suburb. Looking back, I’m a little disappointed that Canterbury Boys’ High

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was recommended to me as a selective school, because the ex-prime minister John Howard also attended. It obviously wasn’t terribly selective. On my first day at Canterbury High, I found myself allocated to class 1A. My subjects were Maths 1, Maths 2, Physics, Chemistry, English, German, French and Latin. The first class on day one was English. It went along smoothly. My next class was Latin, and I was truly excited waiting for the Latin master to arrive. Through the door walked a small angry man in a white dustcoat. He appeared to have no neck and his head and chin seemed to disappear into his shirt and tie. The master also wore a severe grey flat-top crew cut that made him look like a toothbrush on legs. This was Mr Woolf, my South African Latin master. When Woolf walked into the room our eyes locked. He was in a bad mood. Suddenly he pointed to me and screamed. ‘You the boy … up the beck, speaking 24 words to the dozen – come out heyar immediately.’ ‘Me sir?’ I asked. ‘Yes you … get heyar!’ he howled. ‘I want you to addrress the clawss end admit thet you awre rreely sorry for dissrrupting thim.’ ‘But I didn’t do anything, sir!’ ‘You’re making me verry unappy boy!’ he bellowed. I realise now that this was his technique for controlling schoolboys; choose a victim on day one, destroy him in front of the class and you have their undivided attention for the next five years. I made one last attempt. ‘I wasn’t talking, sir!’ Without warning, Woolf spun around and punched me in the face, knocking me to the floor. How many Uncle Jacks do you need in your life? Everything was a blur, but I could still hear that crazy old Afrikaaner ranting and screaming. He eventually grabbed my collar, dragged me out of the classroom and left me slumped in the corridor. I was discovered later by the deputy headmaster, Mr Barnett, who immediately took me to his office where the school nurse applied cold poultices to my already swollen face. The next day my parents were asked to attend a meeting with the

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headmaster, Mr E.R.S. Watson, and the careers adviser. My parents had no idea how to approach such a situation. They were not assertive by nature, and had only come to support me. Predictably the headmaster tried to smooth things over by suggesting that this was ‘just one of those unfortunate incidents’. Everything was resolved when our genius careers adviser came up with a new career path for me. He suggested to my parents that as there was obviously bad blood between Mr Woolf and myself (we’d only just met), it would seem preferable that we be kept apart. Trustingly, my parents agreed with the proposition; obviously they hadn’t seen the trap. Here was the catch: Mr Woolf taught Latin classes 1A, 1B and 1C. If I were to avoid him, I would have to be moved to class 1D where I would study General Mathematics, Woodwork, Metalwork and Technical Drawing. In a single day I was shunted from the A team to the D team. The course of my life had been radically changed forever. A single punch took away one future and set the course for another. Mr Woolf’s cowardly act denied me my rightful chance to reach my full potential. I think being physically abused by a teacher changed my attitude to authority forever, and probably explains my rebellious attitude. The cruelty I suffered at the hands of Uncle Jack only reinforced that conviction. I wonder, though, whether I would have taken the risks and pushed the limits as hard as I did without this impetus. I still get angry thinking about this, but I realise that if I hadn’t studied tech drawing and woodwork I may never have applied for Architecture, which ultimately provided me with the platform for a career in theatre. Many years later I met up with an old Cantabrian who informed me that Mr Woolf was dismissed from the school when it was discovered that he had falsified his teaching credentials. I have few fond memories of Canterbury Boys’ High. What I do clearly remember from that period is that every Saturday afternoon I would lie across our red Fler lounge, fill up on frankfurts and tomato sauce, drink litres of lemonade and eat packets of chocolate biscuits while watching Ringside with the Wrestlers and waiting for Johnny O’Keefe to appear on Six O’Clock Rock.

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First love My good friend Gary Lewis went to a different high school, which meant for the next five years we only saw each other for short periods after school and on weekends. Anyway, I’d been banned from the Lewis household after having carried out a musical experiment on Mrs Lewis’s precious pianola. Being an inquisitive young lad, I became curious about the mechanisms and the paper rolls of the pianola. After opening up the back of the piano, I discovered that the reason the pedals were pumped so furiously was to fill the bellows with air which was then forced through the perforated holes in the pianola paper roll, triggering the hammers inside the piano to strike the notes and chords. The budding scientist in me decided to add several new perforations to a particular roll. Unfortunately it was Gary’s mum’s favourite, ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’, which after my additions was unrecognisable and sounded like a few random notes accompanied by lots of heavy wheezing. I was banned for months. A pivotal moment in my life was when Gary’s mother bought him a brand new reel-to-reel tape recorder. Mrs Lewis issued specific instructions that I not be allowed to touch the equipment. The recorder was the latest technology with needles that swished backwards and forwards and dials that glowed green in the dark. It was a beautiful thing, but it was also very tempting for me to open up the back and check out the mechanics of this piece of space age equipment. But Gary’s friendship was more important to me, so I behaved and concentrated on the art of performing for the machine. I always looked forward to our recording sessions. For hours Gary and I would ad-lib endless sketch ideas, playing countless characters. Now with professional recording facilities, I soon began honing a stable of strange voices. This was the beginning of my radio acting days. After school we’d meet at Gary’s house, turn on the machine and disappear into a fantasy world of characters and situations. The first hurdle I had to get over was the shock of hearing my thin reedy voice squeaking from the speakers.

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I can’t remember any sketch in particular, but in retrospect I assume the material was a little like my first written joke – fairly paltry. But at the time we thought our material hilarious. Of course we were our only audience, except for poor Rhubarb who was nominated to be our first and only major critic. Rhubarb was only ever called in to offer an opinion when Gary and I thought we had created a masterpiece. Like most reviewers, he didn’t make many friends. Poor Rhubarb began his new career as a fearless commentator opining without fear or favour. His early work was savage, with little praise and much cruel and hurtful comment. But he soon learned that to criticise would mean banishment from the gang’s inner circle. Immediately his critiques mellowed, and our only feedback was now praise for our utter brilliance. ——— I was in my first year at high school when television reached our shores. It was launched on 9 September 1956. The host on that momentous occasion was Bruce Gyngell, David Gyngell’s talented father. To marvel at this new invention, my dad and I would walk down to our local electrical store on Marrickville Road and wait for the shopkeeper to turn on the lone TV set sitting in the window. Some nights we would stand on the pavement for hours staring through the shop window to view our favourite programs … without sound. We were never alone, there was always a small group of like-minded teleholics freezing on the footpath, mesmerised by this new beast. Our next-door neighbours were the Slatterys. I only knew them as Tootie and Artie, but they were the first in our street to purchase a television set. It was an HMV 21-inch and, as Tootie loved company, I was always welcome to come over whenever I pleased. So every night before dinner, I would jump the fence and together we would watch my favourite television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Like thousands of other hotblooded 13-year-old boys, I fell head over heels in love with Mouseketeer Numero Uno, Annette Funicello, sex-thimble extraordinaire.

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I’d never shown interest in girls before, but I became totally besotted with Annette. She was the first great love of my life. Annette Funicello was by far the most talented member of the Mouse Club. Not only could she sing, she could act, dance and, more importantly, she was the most beautiful girl in the world. What more could one want from a Mouseketeer? There weren’t girls like her at Canterbury Boys’ High, or for that matter at Canterbury Girls’ High. The only girls I’d ever met were schoolgirls, whereas Annette was different. She was a television star. In 1958 I heard rumours that the Mouseketeers were coming to Australia to perform in concert. Again I begged my parents to take me to Mascot airport where, with a little luck, I might get a glimpse of my Annette. I fantasised that we might accidently meet, at which point I would invite her for a row along the Cooks River on one of our cleaner mattresses. I can’t describe the disappointment I felt when I made my first sighting of Annette. I think Australia and Lapland must have been the last countries in the world to get television, because Channel Nine was definitely screening very old episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club. The Annette Funicello who strutted down the stairway onto the Mascot tarmac wasn’t the cute little girl I religiously watched on TV. This Annette was one giant-bosomed, incredibly curvaceous 19-year-old Italian sex bomb. All my dreams were shattered. I was a 13-year-old boy still in short pants and she was a big busty babe. I didn’t stand a chance, not unless she was a paedophile. It was a good lesson. I vowed that I would never ever have a television love affair again. It was too painful. My first real girlfriend was Jane, and our friendship began soon after Annette dumped me. I was holidaying with my parents at Umina on the Central Coast, and my good mate Gary Lewis and I were wandering around the town when we came upon a merry-go-round. Sitting on a flying horse was the most beautiful young girl. With her dark eyes and black hair in pigtails, she looked like an Indian squaw. For me it was love at first sight, and we remained together, true and devoted, for the next five years. It was a young Roman Catholic love affair – in other words, it was non-sexual. It was everything but.

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Jane was attending a Catholic girls’ school and the nuns had convinced her that even sexual thoughts were regarded as a mortal sin and could condemn her to a lifetime in the fires of Hell. This threat was definitely more effective than promoting prophylactics. Our relationship also catered for my close mates Gary and Rhubarb, who always accompanied us. So it was Jane and the three Tarzans. As Rhubarb had a car, we three would drive from Marrickville to Jane’s house in Granville. The four of us went everywhere together. At Christmas, Jane’s parents and mine would spend their holidays at Ocean Beach. The years my parents didn’t take holidays, I would travel up with Gary and Rhubarb and we would sleep on the beach down at the south end near Jane’s parents’ holiday home. Jane was a wonderful dancer. Parties were an excuse for us to jive the night away. We would go anywhere to show off our moves. We were like a mini floor show. I can recall us attending a dance at the Ocean Beach Surf Club in Umina. After finishing a very energetic jive routine, we were approached by one of the surf club members who I only knew as Spider. Spider was well out of his teens and seemed a little inebriated when he asked both of us to come outside, saying he wanted to show us something. Being a little innocent we both accompanied him down the stairs and out towards the beach. Once he had us slightly away from the surf club, he suddenly turned and smashed me in the face. This was my second king hit. I didn’t see it coming but I lay there stunned as Jane screamed and Spider lumbered off down the beach. This was one of the problems with being an extrovert on the dance floor. I think Spider may have been my first critic.

Mr Pookalani and the dunny man During my childhood days there were always street-sellers trading in everything from pegs to washing lines and even bottle-os who collected old bottles. There were also men who sold freshly killed rabbits door to

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door – the rabbitohs. Then there was the ice man who delivered large blocks of ice to our back door every three or four days to cool the ice chest. And of course as there were no such things as flush toilets, we had the dunny man who carried away the foul smelling night-soil from all of our outdoor conveniences. To differentiate themselves, each profession seemed to have their own distinctive cry. The rabbitohs’ was ‘Frishribbits sah!’ The bottle collector howled ‘Bottles sah!’, and thank God the night soil carrier didn’t have a call, because he arrived at four in the morning. Our dunny man didn’t need to announce he was in the area, we could smell him. Twice a week he could be heard whistling and stumbling down our driveway with a couple of dunny cans hoisted high on his shoulders. The whole disgusting mixture seemed to travel at exactly window height, which meant it naturally wafted into my bedroom. Bogger – or ‘The Sanitary Man’ as he preferred to be known – was a particularly jolly fellow who always whistled while he worked and rarely spilt a drop. Paperboys also had a language of their own. ‘Paper! Get your early morning paper!’ came out more like ‘Payup! Gitch yer early mornin’ payup!’ Always with an upward inflection on the last ‘payup!’ and all accompanied by brain-numbing blasts from their whistles. Back then everyone seemed to have a whistle; postmen used them, paperboys abused them, teachers on playground duty trilled them and football referees sent people off with them. If you give a young boy a whistle he’s going to abuse his power, and our paperboy was relentless. There were also a multitude of door-to-door salesmen. There were vacuum cleaner salesmen, Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen and, one day, even a music tuition salesman arrived at my parents’ door. After returning home from school I was informed by my mother that there was an opportunity for me to learn to play a musical instrument. Would I be interested? Of course I was interested. Gary’s parents had also been signed up by the very same salesman. We were given the choice of learning flute, saxophone, piano or guitar. Of course there was no question, we chose the guitar and our immediate plan was to start a band and quickly become rich and famous.

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I was literally jumping out of my skin on our first day at Beresford’s Guitar School on Illawarra Road, Marrickville. Before the lesson began, one by one each student was presented with a brand new guitar, a set of finger picks and a strange lump of metal. Ours was a large class, made up predominantly of teenage boys. I’ll never forget the impact the sight of our music teacher made. An enormously obese, dark-skinned man literally rolled into the room. He was not young, had wild frizzy grey hair and was dressed in a gaudy floral shirt accompanied by a type of wrap-around lap-lap. In his massive right hand he carried an exquisitely decorated guitar. This was our music master. As the giant slowly lowered himself onto an oversized reinforced chair, he turned to the class and said: ‘Aloha! My name is Ahlohilohi Pookalani,’ (try saying that out loud) ‘and welcome to lesson one. First, place your guitar on your lap. Then lay the steel,’ (the lump of metal) ‘across the strings of the guitar, and play along with me.’ He then proceeded to perform a slide guitar rendition of ‘Marianne’, a popular song in the music charts at the time. The lyrics were so bland they even tried rhyming ‘sand’ with ‘Marianne’d’. This crap was Number One in Australia for weeks. It was part of the calypso invasion. The music certainly wasn’t Hawaiian, but Mr Pookalani didn’t mind, he was rockin’ out on the old slide guitar, slurring and sliding the notes, creating something akin to the kind of music girls in grass skirts danced to. My parents had been conned. I’d been signed up for the next two years to learn the Hawaiian guitar. I didn’t want to become a Hawaiian, I wanted to be Elvis Presley. Girls weren’t going to swoon over me if I sat down on the stage with a guitar in my lap and sang ‘Wukanui Wukahoi’ or played some mushy Hawaiian love song. Not sexy! I should have been a wakeup when I spotted the sunset and palm fronds painted on my new guitar. Gary was mortified. He’d told everyone in the neighbourhood that we were going to start a rock’n’roll band. The dream was over, but as our parents had paid out so much money for our tuition, we were obliged to continue.

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Being a mercenary little shit, I convinced Gary that we should at least practise and enter The Amateur Hour with Terry Dear on 2UW. For what seemed like years we rehearsed every day, perfecting our version of Pat Boone’s big hit ‘In the Middle of an Island’. With great difficulty we attempted to turn Boone’s ballad into an exciting rock’n’roll number. Well, as rock’n’roll as you can be with Hawaiian guitars. Eventually after repeatedly recording and playing back the song on Gary’s tape machine, we came to the conclusion that we would never become rock royalty. We sounded just like a couple of young hula boys, singing and playing very badly. Stardom on 2UW was not to be. Even though I learned little about music from Mr Pookalani, the experience would eventually inspire me to write ‘The Colt from Snowy Aloha’ by Banjo ‘Wahanui’ Patterpuni for The Aunty Jack Show. The Colt from Snowy Aloha There was movement at the station Wuka nui wukahoi For the word had passed around Wuka nui wukahoi That the colt from old Aloha Hello hello helloha Had gone awah awah away He’d gone awah awah away And joined the wild bush brumbies Bumbu bumbu bumbies He was worth a thousand pounds A wound a wound a wound And all the crack wahinis Wahi wahi wahinis Had dug a luau in the ground Dug a luau in a ground They were going to hungi him Take it away wahinis

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BIG HULA DANCE FINISH: A weenie weenie weenie wicki A weenie weenie weenie wooh A weenie weenie weenie woohah A weenie weenie weenie pooh Akuni wuka hoi!

During the late 1940s and the 1950s my generation were condemned to listen to our parents’ music. The popular music of the time was absolutely middle-of-the-road, old-fashioned and punishingly bland, e.g. ‘Marianne’. The subject matter was always guaranteed to be squeakyclean and at worst cute, e.g. ‘Marianne’. The trash we were forced to suffer ranged from Patti Page’s country ballad ‘Changing Partners’ (which had nothing to do with wife swapping) to Perry Como (the poor man’s Bing Crosby) singing ‘Round and Round’, a song with possibly the decade’s most mind-numbing lyrics about wheels and life turning in circles. My mother seemed mesmerised by this mush and would walk around the house happily whistling the schlock hits of the day. She also had a very peculiar whistling technique. Instead of blowing out the notes, my mother somehow performed the process in reverse, which meant she would suck in the air to create the melody. The technique did have its drawbacks and sometimes she would hyperventilate and become quite faint. It may have been those very songs that caused my generation’s brain damage. Of course not to be outdone with the banal, there was also the very exotic calypso exponent, the Jamaican Harry Belafonte with his ‘Banana Boat Song’. Poor Mr Belafonte was obviously so impoverished he couldn’t afford buttons on his shirts, because they were always open all the way to his navel. I’ll never forget the eerie opening lines to his huge hit song – ‘Day-o!’ etc. – it gave me regular nightmares. We were immersed in what would later be known as ‘world music’. Right through the 1950s there was everything from mock West Indian to real foreign-language songs like the classic ‘Volare’, sung in Italian. Record companies hurled every type of music they could find at us.

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We must have been a test market of sorts, because we were fed every weird thing going. For the folk-song fancier, Burl Ives fitted the bill; old, fat and bearded, he sounded like he was either singing off-mike or someone was trying to thrust their fist down his throat while he sang ‘Mockingbird Hill’. Record companies also discovered the singing cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and the non-singing, non-talented cowboy Hopalong Cassidy, who performed at the Sydney Showground in front of thousands of people. I know because I was there. I can’t remember much more than a man in a white ten-gallon hat and shiny black clothes sitting astride a pure white steed called Trigger. I’m afraid with Hoppy you didn’t get much bang for your buck.

We were revolting In those dark days before the birth of rock’n’roll, my parents listened only to popular radio and those radio stations didn’t play jazz, and we certainly didn’t listen to classical music. The ABC was a bit too snooty for my parents. In fact ABC presenters sounded more British than the BBC. It was peculiar but the majority of media stars didn’t have Australian accents. This was part of the great cultural cringe. My parents owned two radios. In the kitchen Mum had a bakelite Kreisler Mantle Wireless that produced the strangest smells when the valves overheated. Poor Rusty always took the blame for the disgusting odour and was regularly sent packing to his kennel. On cold winter nights we would gather in the lounge room where the central feature was an enormous AWA Radiola. Dad would light the coke stove and we would listen to my father’s favourite quiz shows. I liked the serials Captain Silver and the Sea Hound and Superman, both voiced by Leonard Teale. Lying on the floor with my ear pressed as close as possible to the speaker, I would shut my eyes and enter the wonderful world of radio. My mother’s choice was the mystery serial When the Cat Scratches. Not

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only did I not understand it, but there was far too much kissing for my liking. Two quiz programs battled for audience supremacy. They were PickA-Box, hosted by American Bob Dyer, who sounded like Bill Clinton, and his major competitor, a Kiwi by the name of Jack Davies who presented Give It A Go. I still find it hard to believe that Jack Davies was a real Kiwi because he could say ‘six’ and not ‘sux’ and he didn’t strangle his i’s or e’s – in fact he sounded veritably mid-Pacific. Give It A Go was brought to us by Colgate-Palmolive. This was Australia in the ’40s and ’50s. Commercial radio had definite American overtones, while the ABC was dreadfully British and downright inaccessible to the working class. 1955 was the beginning of the great American entertainment invasion, and the only place for the American acts to appear was the old Sydney Stadium which had recently closed as a fight venue. Overnight it was transformed from a bloodhouse into Australia’s new home of popular culture. My parents spoilt me that year by taking me to see my comedy heroes, the great double act of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Even today I can visualise them standing on that tatty old stage with two microphones and no props, performing one of the most exquisitely written comedy routines of all time, ‘Who’s on First?’ This is the premise: Lou Costello is a peanut vendor asking the manager of a baseball team, Bud Abbott, if he knows the names of all his players. Abbott gives Costello the names of his first, second and third base players, explaining that ‘Who’ is on first base, ‘What’ is on second, and ‘I Don’t Know’ is on third. It is the classic misunderstanding set-up. Wikipedia claims that ‘Who’s on First?’ is a routine descended from several turn-of-the-century burlesque sketches, including ‘The Baker Scene’ (the shop is located on Watt Street) and the ‘Who Dyed’ sketch (the owner is Mr Who). Nothing is original; ideas seem to evolve and adapt to various eras. For instance, in the pilot of the TV series Flash Nick from Jindavick, I wrote a routine in homage to Abbott and Costello. There is a scene where John

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Meillon, playing Sergeant Carson, meets up with his Aboriginal tracker, After Dark. After Dark: Are you Sergeant Carson? Carson: Yes! After Dark: I’m called Afterdark. Carson: Bit early aren’t you? After Dark: No boss … I’m not early. But I thought you were called after dark? Carson: After Dark: I’m always called Afterdark, boss. But I’m sure they told me you’d be arriving after dark. Carson: After Dark: That’s right … I’m here, boss! But it’s afternoon. Carson: After Dark: Who’s Afternoon, boss?

For teenagers in those dark days there was very little in the way of music or fashion. Until one day in 1955, rock’n’roll arrived in the guise of the soundtrack to the feature film Blackboard Jungle. The movie starred Glenn Ford as a cranky old high school teacher and Sidney Poitier played a rebellious African-American student. The hit song from the movie was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets. The song itself only appeared in the end titles of the movie, but the audience reaction to it was phenomenal. Maybe it was the heady mix of music and student rebellion in the film, but that song single-handedly sparked a musical revolution worldwide. I don’t remember a thing about the plot or the movie. I can only remember us dancing to the music as we raged up and down the aisles at the local cinema like a tribe of banshees. Because our generation had been repressed for so long, we claimed rock’n’roll. It was our music and it was our escape from the tedium of our parents’ music. Once well-behaved war babies and boomers suddenly came under the spell of this new sound and we became part of a youth rebellion. The music stirred a primal urge and in our excitement to express ourselves, we acted like primitives, destroying everything around

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us, ripping up seats and smashing anything we could get our hands on. This was the beginning of the revolution. My generation now had our own songs and we no longer needed to suffer the mumblings of Bing Crosby or the saccharine sweetness of yucky Perry Como and Pat Boone. We had our own heroes: Bill Haley and the Comets. Admittedly Bill was an unlikely looking saviour, a pudgy middle-aged white jazz musician with a kiss curl and a wall eye. In fact he had the sex appeal of an aardvark, but nevertheless, girls screamed for him because … his music was sexy. I heard later that ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was originally a black R&B song, but in the 1950s black performers weren’t acceptable on US radio so Bill Haley lucked out with a world-wide hit. Where Bill Haley introduced gold Lurex to rock’n’roll and to my singing butcher Kev Kevanagh, Buddy Holly brought respectability to rock’n’roll by dressing like a young guitar-playing accountant. But the performer who really caught my ear was the deep growling voice of J.P. Richardson, The Big Bopper, with his comic gravelly bop version of ‘Chantilly Lace’. Aunty Jack must have been his love child because she sang just like The Bopper, only deeper. The next performer to impress me was the sensationally sexy Elvis Presley. Elvis the Pelvis showed us all the things he could do with his groin, and boy could he move those nether regions. He was dynamite. He sang like a black man and danced like a showgirl. Elvis was my generation’s first real superstar and they marketed him perfectly, producing Number One hit records, promoting live concerts and presenting a stack of box office hit movies. I’m convinced that Elvis’s 31 movies were all filmed over a long weekend on Paramount’s back lot. The films all had one thing in common: no plot. I imagine that this was the shooting schedule: Saturday before breakfast they produced a couple of fake palm trees and shot Blue Hawaii, Fun in Acapulco and Paradise Hawaiian Style. Next they hired a couple of racing cars and filmed Spinout and Speedway before morning tea. Then staying with the schedule, they fitted in Girls Girls Girls, The Trouble with Girls and Clambake before lunch. At least that’s what the end results looked like.

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When Elvis was drafted into the army and stationed in Germany, the turntables turned against America’s dominance of the music industry. None of us saw the possibility of an English music invasion. But The Beatles were just biding their time on the other side of the Atlantic, patiently waiting for an opportunity to take the crown from the King. When they arrived in America, the King was cactus. Presley never graced our shores, but the Beatles certainly did. In 1964 I saw them perform at the Sydney Stadium, the very same venue where I’d spent my childhood watching fat old wrestlers spill their fake blood over the canvas ring. The Stadium hadn’t changed much in all those years, it was still like a giant cattle barn, but they’d now added chicken wire to separate the bleachers from the pricey seats. What had changed, however, was that the boxing ring was now a revolving stage. So as the Beatles played, they were whisked round and round in circles until eventually the operator reversed the direction of the revolve to prevent the Fab Four from becoming dizzy. I was there, I saw them. I’ll never know what they sounded like because they were totally drowned out by the screaming females in the audience. However, I can say they did look very neat. Maybe they had attended the Buddy Holly School of Accountancy. A vivid memory from the Stadium during the 1960s rock era was the appearance of the outrageous British group The Small Faces. Steve Marriott was their lead singer (later to be replaced by Rod Stewart). The band were notoriously loud and Marriott offered a warning to the crowd at the beginning of the concert. These were his immortal words: ‘Any of youse cunts out there got weak hearts? Then youse can fuck off now!’ His statement must have offended the technician who worked the revolving stage, because he completely ignored all pleas from the band to reverse its direction. The Revolve Meister just left that revolve revolving until eventually the band became so entangled in their leads, they couldn’t move. The audience was in hysterics as they watched Marriott desperately skipping to avoid the strangling cables. Ultimately all the microphones and amplifiers came crashing down on top of the drummer, while

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guitarists dropped like flies. Marriott was the only musician not trapped and he quickly left the stage, abusing the audience for not being sympathetic to their dilemma. The Small Faces never returned to our fair shores. Bob Dylan risked the revolve in early ’66. The first half of the concert was Bob performing his folksy pieces on acoustic guitar. The second half was sensational – Dylan was joined by the amazing Robbie Robertson and The Band. Incredibly, after only a few numbers, huge pockets of the audience began to walk out. The folk purists were angry with Dylan for destroying his own songs. Others saw his switch to electric music as being the work of the Devil. Those who protested most seemed quite capable of crucifying poor Bob Zimmerman right there at Rushcutters Bay. I’m sure I recognised some of the dissenters as members of my local Christian Fellowship. Dylan’s crime was that he had dared to change. On Friday nights Gary and I regularly attended dancing lessons in a backyard garage in Earlwood. On these occasions we dressed in our weekend finery, me in my black pegged pants, ridiculous winklepicker shoes and my Mitchell blue topcoat. Gary, on the other hand, dressed in his much older brother’s hand-me-downs, looking like he’d stepped out of the Prohibition. The fashion colours of the day seemed to be dedicated to the musical heroes of the time, with shades like Presley pink, Sinatra red and Mitchell blue. Another exciting ensemble I wore included a Sinatra red shirt that I combined with my clashing Presley-pink-and-black-striped bobtail tie. I loved colour and my clothes were certainly bright. As a dancer I may have appeared exotic, but gauging by my failure to attract partners, I made a very poor peacock. A musical hero who definitely influenced my fashion tastes was the Canadian one-hit wonder Crash Craddock. Now Crash had only one hit in Australia, ‘Boom Boom Baby’, but it was enormous. Young Crash was a poor man’s version of the American superstar Bobby V who, although glamorous, was not exactly overflowing with talent. The British writer Nik Cohn (the father of rock criticism) in his classic history of pop music Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom said of the perfectly groomed Bobby V: ‘He was

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round and flawless like a billiard ball, but with no fucking talent.’ Sadly my Crash may have fallen into a similar category, but I was utterly blinded by his clothes and his groinular moves. Despite Crash’s mediocrity, a clever entrepreneur (probably Lee Gordon) signed up the young Canuck for a whistle-stop tour of Australia with only a single black-and-white video clip to promote him. I went. This was Crash’s first and last tour of Oz. ‘Boom Boom Baby’ was possibly the first music clip to appear on Australian television. It showed a very young Crash Craddock dancing coolly, his jet-black hair styled in a pompadour with a kiss curl on his forehead. His uniform was black pegged pants and regulation black loafers, topped off with a huge off-white furlneck sweater with a fine red stripe around the collar. Crash’s sweater was always worn with the sleeves pushed up. The open furl-neck collar was finished off with a gold chain, like a fob watch, holding it together. I had to have one, so my poor mother spent the next month knitting and then re-knitting the jumper until it reached my exact specifications. I can’t remember what type of wool she chose, but whatever it was, I’m sure they used it for next polar expedition. On several occasions when I danced wearing my highly prized Arctic fleece, I perspired so profusely that I passed out from dehydration. The things I did for art!

Tootie and the Kingsgrove slasher My parents lived at 331 Livingstone Road Marrickville. Our next-door neighbours, Tootie and Artie Slattery, were relatives of a sort. Tootie was my mother’s cousin; she was an O’Toole and my mother was a Doyle. Tootie O’Toole and Lorna Teresa Doyle made up the bog Irish side of the family. The Slatterys’ house was by far the biggest in the district. It was rather ostentatious, a grand Californian-style stuccoed hacienda taking up almost four standard blocks. We lived in the small semi-detached next door. Arthur Slattery had found the house for my parents soon after I was

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born. Artie also owned a used-car salesroom in Dulwich Hill and was a Worshipful Master in the local Masons. Evidently when I was a tiny baby Artie Slattery was so besotted with me that on one occasion I disappeared from my crib, only to be returned to my hysterical mother hours later by Artie, who had secretly entered me in a beautiful baby contest in Strathfield. (Apparently I came fifth.) Artie was always entertaining his fellow Masons and he and Tootie held lots of grand soirees attended by hundreds of guests. My favourite party was when they hired a miniature railway that trundled and clanked around the giant peppercorn tree in their backyard. I spent the entire night sitting on the fence watching the guests ride the tiny train around the yard. We were never invited to attend, but Artie was always very kind to us because we were forever short of money. So he would pay my father to do odd jobs around the house, like mowing the lawns and washing his many cars. We didn’t own a car or a telephone. Making a phone call meant a 400metre walk to the public phone box. Then it was a matter of waiting in line while those ahead of us made their calls. As our local phone booth had no sound-proofing, I quickly became aware of all the neighbourhood gossip. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that my father eventually purchased a car. It was set up by Artie through his used car dealership. The vehicle was a 1930 A-Model Ford. It looked like a big butter box on wheels, high and square and complete with running boards. Today it would be regarded as a classic car. But back then I was far too self-conscious to be seen riding in it. On Sunday mornings when my poor father offered to take me to tennis lessons, I’d accept on condition that he drop me off several blocks from the tennis courts so that no one would see me exiting the ancient jalopy. My father, like many working folk back then, practised fuel economy: ‘Anything to save a few bob.’ When he approached the crest of a hill, Dad would accelerate, then, as he hit the brow, he would knock the car out of gear, switch off the engine and we would freewheel down the other side. It was a bit like the Disney Space Mountain ride, but with a 50 per

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cent chance of dying. My father had literally no control over the vehicle as it hurtled down the other side and he relied only on an ancient foot brake. Gary and I loved it, but it sent my dear mother prematurely grey. Dad always referred jokingly to his freewheeling technique as ‘angel gear’. I’m sure that was because it was only one step away from entering heaven. Because he took to driving so late in life, my father was quite a nervous driver, made even worse by my mother’s front-seat driving. I remember him becoming severely rattled on a 5-hour drive to Umina, 80 kilometres north of Sydney. Several of the larger hills beyond the Hawkesbury River were so steep, and the old blunderbuss was so gutless, that we all had to get out and push. My father was so embarrassed he sold the Ford the next day. To give you a clearer insight into my father’s make-up, he was christened James Henry Bond. His Christian name James had sat comfortably with him for 40 years. However, in the early 1950s when Ian Fleming’s 007 raised his ugly head, my father became so embarrassed by his name that he asked to be called Harry. It was not as interesting, but it was a more practical solution for such a shy soul. For nightlife in Marrickville I played A-grade tennis on Thursday nights in a mixed doubles competition. Mixed tennis meant that I got to play with girls at the Marrickville Park courts, which were over 2 kilometres from my home. When I say there was not a lot of nightlife, in the late 1950s things changed rapidly. Suddenly we had two maniacs terrorising the neighbourhood. One was known as the Kingsgrove Slasher, and his modus operandi was to merrily slash through ladies’ flyscreens and breathe heavily at their bedsides while he watched them sleep. He was no threat to me. The other villain was known only as The Mutilator. His calling card was the removal of young gentlemen’s genitals. He’d been as close as Surry Hills, admittedly a decent hike from Marrickville, but near enough to bother me of the vivid imagination. Now my mini-parts were precious to me, and obviously still growing, and I wanted them to stay that way. This possible threat made my 2-kilometre hike home along a very badly

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lit section of Livingstone Road a living nightmare. When tennis finished at 9 p.m. I would farewell the ladies and head off at breakneck speed, wielding my tennis racket over my head like a scimitar while screaming at the top of my lungs. I can report now that I am still in the possession of my nether regions, although I have come close to losing them on several other occasions when girlfriends have threatened to remove my oojars.

Careers advisers In my final year at Canterbury Boys’ High I was still in a quandary about what I should do after high school. I had no real ambition. I hadn’t joined any of the clubs or organisations at high school. I didn’t perform in the dramatic society, play in the chess club or belong to the Hikers for Jesus. I did have a short stint in the Air Force cadets, attending just one bivouac at Richmond Air Base, where for five days we were to be taught how to stalk, shoot and kill the enemy. I lasted three days. During that final year my parents and I were invited to attend careers night. The school had invited a number of old boys who were now practising professionals to explain their occupations and hopefully enthuse students to follow in their footsteps. My father was very keen for me to attend. On the night, our classrooms were transformed into display areas. Our English classroom was used to spruik medicine for the young doctors-to-be. The music room was wall-to-wall lawyers in very smart suits, and on it went. I certainly knew what I didn’t want to do. I had no intention of becoming a doctor because I couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and the thought of becoming a solicitor didn’t appeal either, as the idea of rote learning seemed too stifling. Finding a suitable career for me was beginning to look rather desperate as my father unsuccessfully wheeled me from room to room. In the medical showroom the poor young doctor who had volunteered his precious time began discussing the highlights of an appendix operation

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and I promptly fainted. The next room offered a dreary gentleman in the grey suit describing a typical day in the life of an accountant, summarily sending the room to sleep. The jolly and rotund engineer in Room 23 attempted to sell his profession with great gusto, but I knew I could never be an engineer – my liver would never take that amount of alcohol. Nothing seemed to appeal. Solicitors were just like accountants only with better suits. Doctors all seemed to have beautifully manicured hands, which wasn’t me because I bit my fingernails to the quick. And I certainly wasn’t going to be a scientist because lab coats always reminded me of Mr Woolf, my most hated Latin master. My father became extremely excited when he saw the sign saying ‘surveyor’. I didn’t know exactly what a surveyor did, but it seemed to be something that Dad fantasised about. The surveyor in Room 33 was a rugged outdoorsy type who spoke of the joys of camping in the great outdoors and spending long days with his trusty theodolite tucked under his arm, tramping through the wilderness. Dad was impressed because this appeared to be the only profession that didn’t require the wearing of a coat or tie. That appealed to my father. As for me, I’d been camping once and loathed it. Why would anyone choose to sleep on the ground and be uncomfortable when there were beds? Careers night was a dismal failure. Three schoolmates who had left Canterbury after completing their Intermediate Certificates had made wise careers choices. They’d become apprentice butchers and were now showing off their new-found wealth with their sporty cars and expensive clothing. Whereas I was still receiving pocket money from my parents. I could barely afford to buy a ticket to the movies let alone pay for a partner. The butcher boys had charisma (money and cars). Girls were impressed by ‘Maybe you’d like a lift home in my new Hillman Minx?’ My butcher boys were chick magnets. Butchery was becoming a very tempting proposition. So how did I ever end up studying architecture? During the mid-year school holiday my technical drawing teacher suggested I find work with an architectural firm. I applied to the offices of Whitehead and Payne and

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because of my five years of tech drawing, I got the job. I began working on the plans for the first major shopping centre in Australia, Roselands. There had been nothing quite like this scale of development before. I liked the people I worked with and they made me feel like I was part of the team. Architecture ticked all the boxes, so I applied for Sydney University and was accepted.

Girlie Glenn and builder boy After completing the Leaving Certificate and before starting university, my first paying job was working as a labourer on the construction of the Royal North Shore Hospital at St Leonards. I thought the experience might give me some extra background for the Architecture degree I was about to embark on. My father had a friend at his bowls club who happened to be a foreman in the building industry. His name was Brian D’Oliveira, a big shaggy-haired man with a ruddy face and crazy Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyeballs huge and scary. Socially he seemed a jolly man who loved a drink or three, but on the building site he was a ferocious and greatly feared employer. The first task given to me on day one was to assist in the pouring of the concrete slab for the fourth floor of the hospital. Occupational health and safety was non-existent in 1960, and all I was issued with was a pair of ill-fitting gumboots. As I wasn’t aware that I needed to bring work gloves, begrudgingly the site office supplied me with a thin cotton pair. I began the day in my newly acquired gumboots attempting to wheel heavy barrows of concrete along narrow timber planks set on top of the steel reinforcing rods. I was not terribly strong at the time and found myself incapable of controlling the speed and direction of the load, so when the wobbles set in, several barrowloads fell well short of their mark. After three failed attempts, I decided the solution was to increase the speed of the barrow delivery, my theory being that I wouldn’t tire

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as quickly. On my next attempt I got up such a head of steam I literally rocketed across the planks straight past the dumping zone. Not having the strength to stop the runaway wheelbarrow, I was forced to let it go, watching helplessly as the barrow and its contents flew over the edge of the building, dropping five floors to the ground. All I could hear were the screams of abuse from the concrete-spattered workers below. Luckily I didn’t kill anyone. It wasn’t long before I was taken off that task. By midday I was operating the vibrator. This obscene piece of equipment was used to compact the concrete mix and settle it down across the reinforcing rods. Trying to control the vibrator was like hanging on to the tail of a bucking electric eel. The constant vibrations shuddered through my body, almost rattling the fillings from my teeth. At this point my cotton gloves were completely soaked in concrete mix, and by the next day the lime additive had started to burn into my hands and fingers, raising small inflamed sores under the skin. It amazed me to think that people did this work every day of their lives. This experience certainly convinced me to continue with my education. The next day I arrived at the site to discover that I had been moved to yet another job. The formwork had now been prepared for the fifth floor columns, which were ready to receive their concrete motherload. My new job was to stand on the very top of the column to direct the crane so it could swing its hopper, filled with several tons of concrete, over to my position. Once the hopper was directly above my head, the real work began. Dangling five floors above the ground without a harness or hardhat, my instructions were simple: hold on to the reinforcing rods with one hand, while with my free hand guide the concrete from the hopper into the neck of the column. This was achieved by using a crudely shaped funnel made from a single sheet of corrugated iron, which rested on my chest and the top of the column formwork. The theory was that as the wet concrete hit the corrugated iron, it would slide down the primitive chute and magically deposit itself inside the column. I managed to get about 25 per cent of the concrete in. The rest was sprayed all over the lower floors and the foundations, creating more anger from the workers below.

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I lasted only one and a half columns. Eventually my right arm became so tired, I seriously thought of letting go and falling the 15 metres so I’d never have to come back to work. Of course being the new boy I was mercilessly teased. It seemed almost obligatory for builders to do this. I’m sure it was their equivalent of the fag system in college. Each day I was sent on a wild goose chase. First it was searching for the pot of striped paint, and of course there was the hysterically funny instruction to bring the carpenter his left-handed screwdriver. I didn’t have to worry about returning to the site on day three – my fate was sealed. During the lunch break on day two, the funniest labourer on the site suggested that I wash the foreman Mr D’Oliveira’s car, which I did … with the sand soap that he so generously provided. I don’t think D’Oliveira ever spoke to my father again. But it certainly made up my mind. I was going to design structures that other people could die building. Was this the way builders treated all new workers or did they just give me special attention because of my father’s connection to the foreman? For someone who had only worked for two days on the site, I’d made a lot of enemies. Manual labour is a tough testing ground for a young man and the disdain from my working brothers was palpable. The only person who ever showed any interest in me was old Glenn the crane driver, who in just a short time became my sympathetic ear and appeared to be the only person willing to spend any time with me. Old Glenn seemed genuinely interested in my thoughts, in my future and even in my relationships. He took a real shine to me. Glenn was terribly inquisitive and wanted to know everything about my home life. For instance, was I happy living with my parents? Like all teenagers, I told him it was difficult and honestly I would prefer to have my own place. We discussed everything, my dreams and aspirations, I even I confided in him that I hoped to go to university. Glenn was all ears. He even enquired about my parents’ financial status and asked whether they could afford to pay the university fees. Out of the blue … Glenn made a most generous offer. He proposed paying my way through uni, explaining that his crane-driving job was

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very well paid, plus he made extra money training and boarding greyhounds at his property in Toongabbie. Glenn projected wealth and suggested that if I was really unhappy living with my parents, I could come and live with him. So generous, and we’d only just met. During those conversations there were always lots of catcalls and comments from the other workers like, ‘Backs to the wall, Bondy!’ and ‘Look out for girlie Glenn!’ All these comments went straight over my head. I can’t really claim that Glenn was anything more than a kindly older man who preferred younger company. Nothing happened. I didn’t take up his offer, but it was interesting to observe the pack mentality. They’d singled me out for special treatment because I was young and inexperienced and obviously they weren’t afraid to make innuendos about one of their superiors. Old Glenn and I both found ourselves pigeon-holed and isolated. Ten years later I wrote the sketch ‘Len and Ron the Ordinary Labourers’ which was first performed in the revue Filth and eventually appeared in Series One of The Aunty Jack Show.

Scene: two workers stand at a bar in their work clothes. Foreman Len is slightly better dressed in clean overalls, while Ron, a labourer, is soiled and dusty, wearing a singlet, shorts and work boots. John Derum played Ron, I played Len. This piece is about the great Australian male pastime of the piss-take. On the surface the conversation between the two mates is open, but the messages beneath it are covertly aggressive. Over a few beers they begin the game. Ron (offence): I see … Well, all the blokes were talking about you behind your back yesterday, and they just thought it was pretty funny that their foreman was never seen out with members of the opposite sex. Len (defence): Did they think it was funny? The blokes don’t reckon I’m a bit … you know? Ron:

No no no … it just began one day when someone

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started jokin’ about the way you walk. Len:

What’s funny about the way I walk?

Ron:

Well, we all sort of cracked up when Spider Farrelly said, ‘There goes old Lenny mincing around the joint again …’

Len:

Spider didn’t say I was a sissy, did he?

Ron:

No, no, he didn’t say ‘sissy’ …

Len:

No, he wouldn’t!

Ron:

It was ‘fairy’, I think.

Len:

Spider called me a fairy?

Ron:

No! … Well yeah, sort of …

Len:

Did he call me that in front of all the fellas?

Ron:

Hmmmm … Listen, what are you getting upset about, Len? I’m drinking with you, aren’t I?

Len:

Yeah!

Ron:

… And not with the fellas. Right!

Len:

Right!

Ron:

Mate you know how blokes will be blokes?

Len: Yeah?



Ron:

Well … Spider’s probably over there right now saying ‘Backs to the wall Ron when you’re drinking with Linda the Feline Foreman.’

Len:

Linda the what?

Ron:

Didn’t you know? That’s what they all call you … Linda the Feline Foreman!

Ron departs, laughing maniacally at his own joke, leaving Len shellshocked and alone at the bar, aware of the other workers laughing at him.

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Meat art My father’s best mates were our local butchers, Bill and Freddie. Sometimes on the weekend they would invite my father and me to come with them to watch our beloved rugby league team, South Sydney, play at the Sydney Cricket Ground. As my father didn’t have a car, we would get a lift with the wealthy butcher boys. Again this profession was starting to look particularly attractive. I could see a definite correlation: meat meant money. Here I was at a crossroads, about to enter university to commence a 5-year Architecture degree, and I was still being tempted to go the way of the flesh. To celebrate my acceptance into first-year Architecture my parents put on a party. As usual Dad’s butcher mates turned up. I had a memorable conversation with Bill the Butcher, who for some inexplicable reason seemed miffed about me becoming an architect. Bill’s reactions were always over the top and out the back door. As my Dad would say, ‘I reckon Bill’s been on the turps tonight.’ Anyway, Bill had a bone to pick with me. ‘So you’re gonna be a uni student are you? I suppose next you’ll become a bloody vegetarian.’ I think Bill’s greatest fear was that one day the world would turn vego and he’d be out of a job. ‘You know, I could have been an artitet. Yeah, I was real arty when I was your age. Have you seen my shop windows? They’re pretty far out. See, I didn’t need to go to no uni to create them windows. I just went to tech for two years and learned about window displays and stuff. I done a year of fernery and a year of meat arrangements. I even painted my own Santa Clauses last year. I really love doin’ art and that, in fact I’m gettin’ very heavily into meat art. I’m even thinkin’ of trying some meat scupture. Next Christmas, I’m thinking of doin’ a portrait of Christ in the manger in tripe and olives.’ Ten years later my favourite character was the bodgie and meat artist extraordinaire Kev Kavanagh. The amazing thing was that nothing I wrote for Kev ever sounded as crazy as my Dad’s mate Bill, the mad Marrickville meatologist.

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architecture, 1961

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,

Sydney Uni Days On day one at Sydney University I discovered that I was the only bodgie in first-year Architecture. My uniform consisted of skin-tight silver-flecked pegged pants, needle sharp winklepickers and an oversized sloppy limegreen jumper, lovingly knitted by my mother. Add to this vision the heavily Brylcreemed sculpted hairstyle, immaculately groomed and shaped with the compulsory bug rake, and you had the beginnings of the young dead bodgie. I was Kev Kavanagh. I also quickly became aware of the different social strata within the Architecture Faculty. My first-year class was particularly top-heavy with the cream of ‘bright young things’ from the very best private schools. What was I doing there? This was like class warfare. When I arrived at university I didn’t just have a chip on my shoulder, I had chips on both shoulders and a couple on my head for good measure. Being the sensitive working-class lad that I was, I immediately took umbrage when Michael Day, a rather pompous, corduroy-clad Grammar boy, made a clever quip about my rocker hairstyle. Predictably, I did the honourable thing and challenged him to a fight. What I didn’t realise was that my antagonist was also a sensitive big lad who abhorred blood sports, so rather than contest me, he chose a school friend to be his deputy. Little did I know his friend had been the Grammar School boxing champion. The fight was short, sweet … and embarrassing. Once more I was left nursing a bloodied nose. I should have paid more attention to my Uncle Jack. Over the next three years I acquired fashionable tastes and quickly learned to sneer at my parents’ floral Axminster carpets and Fler furniture. I was now being trained to appreciate the finer things in design, like clinker bricks, bush-hammered timber and Marimekko prints. For my art studies I learned to copy the Masters with Lloyd Rees and in Architectural Design I aped my local heroes. My weakness was Architectural Science, which contained elements of

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Structural Engineering, thus requiring greater algebraic knowledge. But I’m afraid my mathematical skills were severely disadvantaged after my high school debacle with Mr Woolf when my curriculum was cruelly changed from Maths One and Two to General Maths. Where I excelled in art and design, I constantly struggled to keep up in the sciences. No wonder I had nightmares about my buildings falling over. In just two years I was a changed man. Gone was the pompadour, the pegged pants and the Presley purple ties. All had been replaced with ripple-soled brothel creepers (suede desert boots), cords, a duffel coat and a massive Afro hairdo.

Sexadrine My first sexual experience wasn’t exactly wonderful. She was a University of New South Wales student studying pharmacy. When we met, I was well aware that she was a lot more experienced than me. We only had sex on two occasions. Within weeks I was informed that she was pregnant to me and wanted an abortion. (I was green.) She demanded that I pay for it, which back then cost about $150. At this point I was in third-year Architecture, still living at home and penniless. To earn the money to pay for the abortion, I started working night shifts with a crazy mate called Bob Bice. We washed taxis from ten o’clock at night till six in the morning in the Legion Cab Depot in Foveaux Street, Surry Hills. It was monotonous work. There was a strict routine to the washing process, always beginning at the rear of the vehicle and washing up and onto the roof then down to the hub caps, finally lathering the bonnet and bumpers. It was like a time and motion study. The only variety came on Saturday nights, when Bob and I’d toss a coin to see which of us would clean up the vomit from the back seat of the cab. As well as washing taxis, we also worked as house painters at night. One evening we arrived in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, to decorate a very

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dilapidated top-floor apartment. On entering, we discovered an elderly man slumped over the kitchen sink dowsing his face with cold water. He’d been recently evicted so we could renovate. Looking bloodless and with skin the texture of wax, his pallor was only highlighted by the atrocious cheap red wig that sat on his head like a Heuga carpet tile at a rakish angle. We knew he was not well, so I rushed downstairs to call an ambulance while Bob sat with the old man running his wrists under the cold water. By the time I returned, the poor fellow had passed away. When the ambulance eventually arrived there was no team, only the driver, who asked for our assistance to carry the body from the apartment. We agreed but because the staircase was so narrow it was impossible to use the stretcher. Bob and I were forced carry the body while the ambulance officer gave us moral support and guidance. I’d assisted with the eviction of my first dead body. I worked at anything to earn extra money to pay for the termination. Although to stick with this work regime and attend university, I needed something to keep me awake during classes. My pharmacy lover willingly supplied the Benzedrine and Dexedrine that I would soon become addicted to. After finishing a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift at the Legion Taxi car wash, I would next head to the Wentworth Building at university. Breakfast was several cups of strong black coffee, half a packet of cigarettes and several amphetamines. In a state of euphoria I would then attend classes. Not surprisingly my erratic behaviour was noted by both tutors and year masters. It was near the end of that disastrous year when my parents informed me they were about to become homeless, so for me to remain full-time at university was not a viable proposition. On top of all that, my thirdyear master Ron Myer had taken an instant dislike to me (the pills didn’t help). I think he saw me as a troublemaker and I quickly became his whipping boy. The man was despicable. Also, I wasn’t getting much satisfaction studying Architecture any more. Something was missing. So it was a combination of all these things that drove me out of Sydney Uni and I spent the next year searching.

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Johnny, Mick and Mad Jack On my quest, I enrolled at the University of New South Wales to study Arts part-time, and chose History, Psychology and Philosophy. Who did I end up mixing with? University of New South Wales architecture students. I also took a day job (with an architect – it’s all I was trained for) to earn some money to help pay off the mortgage on my parents’ house. As their new home in Hurstville had only one bedroom I found myself residing on the roof of a building on the corner of Anzac Parade and Oxford Street in Taylor Square. My home was the lift motor room, three floors above a hamburger joint nicknamed the Chew and Spew. The cafe served the dodgiest food in Darlinghurst. Our building was directly opposite the law courts and I’m sure many a judge and jury member’s stomach suffered at the hands of the cuisine a` la Chew et Spew. Other victims would have included the entire student body of the East Sydney Tech Art School who also frequented the foul but cheap takeaway. I shared the lift motor room with a very eccentric and very generous Architecture student, ‘Mad’ Jack. I think they called him Mad Jack because he was mad. I first noticed that Jack had what was called hammer thumbs (enormous, hammer-like oversized digits) on each hand. According to superstition this was the sign of a murderer. Sharing my living quarters with a potential killer was a little nerve-racking at first, but never as stressful as a dialogue with Jack. Jack was veritably monosyllabic. When he conversed it was simply a series of grunts, with a few ‘bloody fuckin bloodies’ thrown in. Our shared home was a large tin shed built to protect the giant cogs and wheels that raised and lowered the building’s lift cage. Jack had cleverly managed to construct narrow beds either side of the mechanism. The worst feature was that in one corner of our already cramped motor room stood a large exhaust duct that continually belched fumes and fat from the hamburger hotplate three floors below. We both played guitar and were always threatening to start up a band,

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but as neither of us had the money to buy the necessary musical instruments, it never eventuated. Being the ingenious fellow that he was, Jack decided to build his own guitar. First he stripped a timber paling from a fence in Surry Hills, then drilled a hole in the base of the paling and inserted a guitar pickup. For tuning pegs he improvised with various pieces of scrap metal, drilling holes in them to receive the guitar strings. Next he added a few rusty old guitar strings, which he attached to roofing nails forming a makeshift bridge. It was a work of punk art, prepunk. He now had a working bass guitar. To test out his creation, and to annoy the hamburger proprietor downstairs, Jack placed a small pig nose amplifier into the exhaust duct and played his newly created bass guitar directly down the duct at full volume, blasting the hotplate below with music. I’m sure later that night the Chew and Spew cooked a dead horse as punishment. There was another major annoyance on the roof at Taylor Square. We were kept awake at night by the constant flashing of a large neon ‘Time for a Capstan’ sign which sat directly above our lift motor room. Each night the sign would relentlessly flicker its subliminal message to the surrounds. Fortunately, Mad Jack had a masterful knowledge of all things electric and managed to rewire the sign. Instead of the neon sign flashing on at 9 p.m. and finishing at 6 a.m., Jack re-programmed it to commence at 6 a.m. and complete its cycle by 9 p.m., just before bedtime. It took the neon sign experts months before they worked out what Jack had done. (By then we’d moved to more salubrious quarters – the prison cells on Bare Island at La Perouse.) One night in our motor room/boudoir, I could hear Jack muttering and mumbling ‘bloody fuckin bloody fuckin’, so I deduced that he was upset about something. It transpired that he had a final presentation to deliver the next morning to the new Professor of Architecture at New South Wales University, Professor George Molnar, and Jack hadn’t been able to start because he had nothing to draw on. As a joke, I offered him the wrapping paper from my fish and chips, which was coated in fresh salt and grease. Jack jumped at the offer, got down onto the floor, pulled out a few

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Pentel pens and within the hour had completed his project. The next day the rest of the final year students presented their pristine work. Of course Jack’s stood out, as it was the only presentation on greasy newspaper covered with Neolithic scribblings. Jack received a High Distinction. His professor decided it was a work of genius. Who else would have thought to present ‘The Redevelopment of the Fish Markets’ on fish and chip wrappings? Mad Jack did. Bloody fuckin brilliant! Three other archie students lived on the floor below, in veritable luxury. They were Johnny Allen, Mick Glasheen and, sometimes, Peter Kingston. Johnny and Mick had created their own idiosyncratic language. Where Jack’s was ‘bloody fuckin bloody’, their dialogue was quite distinctive in that it excluded all obscenities. To answer a question, they would simply reply with, ‘Yeah, well no, well yeah!’ Or sometimes it could be a variation on the theme and become ‘Yeah, yeah, no, no … uh huh – uh huh’ eventually resolving into their pie`ce de résistance, ‘Yeah, well no, well yeah!’ It was like overhearing one side of a telephone conversation where the listener is responding to the person on the other end of the line with well-placed ‘yeahs’, ‘nos’ and grunts of approval. So a dialogue with Johnny, Mick and Pete was like having a longdistance phone conversation with three people. On the other hand, a dialogue with Jack Myer was like conversing with a tramp with enlarged thumbs who said fuck a lot. Johnny, Mick, and Pete were also dedicated members of the Buckminster Fuller World Design Science Decade. Their lives were totally devoted to the man and his geodesic philosophies. Every now and then they would come out with Fullerisms like ‘Omni-lateral equilateral halo! Yeah, well no, well yeah!’ They knew what it meant, and were willing to extend their vocab for their hero Bucky. As well as being a pretend member of the Buckminster Fuller World Science Decade Club, I also dabbled with the famous director of happenings, Christo. Christo had come to Australia with a plan to create a major piece of living sculpture by wrapping up the entire coastline of Little Bay in plastic. I volunteered for four days and found myself climbing up and

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down 30- and 40-foot cliffs with pieces of white nylon cord clasped in my teeth. Fortunately I lived to tell the tale.

Big Bad Ron The full-time job I had was with architect Bill Reilly, who was designing the Sutherland Council Theatre. Bill Reilly was an odd character, enormously overweight with huge jowls that puffed and wobbled when he walked. He resembled a giant bullfrog in bow tie and braces. Bill also employed a University of New South Wales architecture student by the name of Ron Greenaway. Ron was a champion surf swimmer and I understood why Bill had chosen him, because they both had a common interest in surf lifesaving. But why Bill had employed a long-haired git like me was an absolute mystery. Although my real strength was drawing perspectives and presentations, and that’s what he needed. Ron Greenaway was an active member of the Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club and held both the Australian Junior and Open Surf Lifesaving Championships. He was a very big, powerful boy and I especially remember his deep gravelly voice. Maybe he’d swallowed too much salt water, because he sounded like Aunty Jack before Aunty Jack. Ron and I spent a lot of time working and socialising together with his mates and fellow architecture students, Peter Guard and Kevin Riggs. It was with this group that I experienced my first brush with the law. One Friday night we travelled to Kings Cross to hear Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs play at the Goldfish Bowl on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street (now the Crest Hotel). The ground floor of the building was a giant music venue. Ron had only come to hear Billy Thorpe sing one song, ‘Poison Ivy’. This was because Ron’s other great claim to fame was that he was also a star performer around the surf clubs with his version of ‘Poison Ivy’. Ron had kept the original melody but reworked the lyrics, and his version was entitled ‘Gonorrhoea’. On that particular night at the Goldfish Bowl, Ron stood at the front of the stage and shamelessly

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sang along with Billy Thorpe, performing his own surf club version. Ron only made it through the first verse before a group of local roughnecks, who obviously didn’t appreciate his singing, promptly smacked him over the head with a rubbish bin. Within seconds security was upon us and to pre-empt any violence inside the club, they ushered the four of us out through the rear exit into a very dark Victoria Street. Standing outside the venue we were understandably relieved and laughed about our close call. Our spirits were soon dashed, however, when 30 angry young thugs came around the corner, all keen and liquored up for a fight. Mathematics was never my strong suit, but with odds of 30 to four, I didn’t like our chances. Ron remained calm and thankfully took charge. He instructed us to each grab a ringleader, move them away from the mob, and then offer to fight them one-on-one. Ron’s plan was to reduce their numbers. He realised that if the mob got us down the lane, we were history. As I mentioned earlier Ron was an incredibly powerful man and he made the first move. Without warning he grabbed the biggest and most boisterous member of the gang, lifted him off his feet and back-slammed him into the wall. This had an immediate effect on the mob. The tables had turned, suddenly their brave commander found himself begging for mercy as big Ron smashed him into the brickwork, all the time shouting, ‘Just you and me mate, okay?’ It was all over in 30 seconds; the leader had been totally humiliated and wept openly in front of his gang. I was amazed at how well the technique worked. I didn’t have to lift a finger. As swiftly as they’d arrived, all the would-be warriors just as hastily retreated. Relieved to be out of my first all-in brawl, I found myself standing on the curb surveying the scene of what might have been, my arm gallantly thrown over the shoulder of my brother-in-arms, Kevin Riggs. Next I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see two large men in grey suits, wearing spivvy porkpie hats. The strangers roughly pushed Kevin and me up against the wall. My first thought was, ‘Not another fight?’ The mystery men then ordered us to follow them to their car. I protested and asked them for identification, but neither obliged. There wasn’t so much as an introduction. So against our will, Kevin and I were dragged

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along Victoria Street and forced into the back seat of a plain grey Holden parked in the middle of the road. We were then driven to Darlinghurst Police Station where the desk sergeant informed us that we would have to attend court and face charges, which he declined to detail. After being fingerprinted we were then placed into a holding cell. At four o’clock in the morning Ron Greenaway turned up with the money to bail us out. It wasn’t until we were leaving the police station that they informed us of the charges, which were drunk and disorderly behaviour and assault. This was a serious work of fiction, because having just come from work, Riggs and I were both neatly dressed in jacket and tie (regulation apparel for the 1960s), and as for being drunk, we’d only just arrived at the club. Obviously during our time in the lock-up the arresting officers had had time to do a bit of creative writing. Our innocence would all be made clear when we had our day in court.

Party crasher I was invited to a party in Lane Cove by my pharmacist lover. She seemed to know everyone there, so I spent most of the night drinking alone. By midnight everyone was well inebriated and my date had organised a lift for us with a friend. Little did I know that our driver was her exboyfriend, who was still hopelessly in love with her and had decided to kill himself and his ex-lover on the journey home. He’d just forgotten to mention his plan to the rest of his passengers. Driving down River Road in Longueville at 1 a.m., lover boy swung off the road and drove his VW beetle at 60 miles an hour into a brick wall. As we made contact everything seemed to travel in slow motion. I dived gracefully through the disintegrating windscreen, while lover boy smashed his ribs on the steering wheel and knocked out his front teeth at 10,000 frames a second. His suicide attempt had fortunately failed. Not so lucky was his front-seat passenger. This poor innocent suffered two shattered cheekbones, broken ribs and massive facial scarring.

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Sadly there weren’t such things as seatbelts back then and without them, bodies were hurled in all directions. The woman he planned to kill was the luckiest of us all; she only suffered some shock and the loss of a large clump of hair. When I regained consciousness, I found myself lying in the middle of the road. As I sat upright, I felt my tongue suddenly slip through a gap between my nose and a fragment of skin still holding my top lip together. We were all rushed to Royal North Shore Hospital where I received 20 stitches to my top lip, resulting in a rather ugly jagged scar. A combination of the accident and vanity were the real reasons that I chose to wear a moustache for the rest of my life. I have kept that area constantly covered with facial hair and only on rare occasions have I shaved it off. Without it, when I look in the mirror I’m not sure who I am. The most upsetting thing about that short-term relationship was when I was told by her girlfriends that my pharmacist was in fact pregnant to her suicidal boyfriend, the very same psychopath who tried to kill us all. Knowing her, I wasn’t at all surprised that they would have planned this set-up together. I was left embittered by the whole experience. My moustache is a reminder of the damage they caused. My relationships went in waves, because my next association was with a wonderful girl from Newcastle. Her name was Sally and I adored her. We had a lot in common: I was studying Arts while she studied Art at East Sydney Tech. We were very happy together for several years. It was through Sally that I met Peter Best. Peter was studying Arts at Sydney Uni. He wrote a regular column for Honi Soit called ‘Bestiality’ and also contributed to OZ magazine under a pseudonym. He’d adopted an alias because he worked part-time as a trainee airport and shipping roundsman for the ABC. As we had similar tastes in humour and music we got on famously. I never forgot the story he told me about the reporter who asked Frank Sinatra what else he did to make a living. The thought was planted and I used that idea years later. Peter and I were fearless back then and tended to dabble a lot with guerrilla theatre or street theatre. Living in Darlinghurst we often found

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ourselves walking along William Street late at night where we were regularly approached by the local prostitutes. Best and I would always ask them if they took student concession cards. Then run like hell. Being poor students we frequently travelled by bus and these were the early days of the experimental ‘one-man bus’ – or buses without conductors, which meant the driver collected the fares. A bus fare from the city to the university in the ’60s cost about sixpence one-way. As I said, Peter and I were always orchestrating scenarios to gauge public reaction. To test one of our theories we created a performance piece called ‘Don’t Judge a Book by its Haircut’. It worked like this: Peter would walk onto the bus and instead of handing a single sixpence to the driver, he’d pay the fare with 12 halfpenny pieces. The driver’s reaction was always one of unbridled fury as he’d hurl the bulky handful of coins into his coin tray. After the 12 halfpennies had been delivered by Peter, I would step up to the driver and hand him a single shilling piece and wait for my sixpence change. If life was fair, my change should have been a sixpenny piece, but of course the driver in high dudgeon would leap at the chance to get rid of the heavy halfpenny pieces to the man with the stupid hair. I would begrudgingly take the pile of coins and casually turn to the passenger standing directly behind me (my girlfriend Sally) and hand her the 12 coins, which she then innocently handed back to the driver. It was a test of human endurance. Best and I also had a piece that by today’s standards would be almost a criminal offence. Again it was designed for bus travel. We called this piece ‘How Dare You!’ We would pay our fares and then move to the very back of the bus, making every effort to appear unconnected. Next we would choose our target and sit either side of them across the back seat of the bus. After a few minutes, I would casually pick up the victim’s hand and place it on my knee, and then loudly complain about harassment. I would ask Peter, sitting on the other side of the victim, had he seen the passenger put their hand on my knee? By then the passenger would have removed their hand. Peter would claim that he hadn’t seen anything. Brazenly I would pick up the passenger’s hand again and place it firmly on

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my leg. Best, pretending to be shocked, would begin delivering a tirade, lecturing the victim and all those around us on the importance of personal space. On a good day we’d have the entire back of the bus involved, and on one occasion a passenger even threatened to call the police – not to arrest us, but to arrest the innocent party. In all those episodes I was never punched or slapped across the face. I suppose if you stay on the attack and appear to be righteous, you’re safe. The performance was about taking the high moral ground and never giving the victim a chance to explain or apologise. I think it’s a technique shock-jocks and politicians often use.

The Missing Brick Not long after my arrest I was approached by a couple of Ron’s University of New South Wales architecture mates, who invited me to contribute some sketches to their Architecture revue, which was to be simply called Brick. I had never written a comedy sketch before, so I prepared a script and nervously handed it to the producers. They read the material and admitted that they didn’t understand it. So they asked me to get up and show them how I imagined it would work. I’d had no experience on stage at school or at university, but when I finished reading my piece, they offered me a role in their revue. I was to perform my own sketch. The most bizarre thing about writing this book is seeing how so many things in my life fall into place. For instance, the sketch that I wrote for the revue was about … guess what? An Australian boxer, Rocky Gattellari, having his own Tonight Show. It was like a cross between The Godfather and The Mickey Mouse Club. What seemed absurd in 1965, a sportsman ineptly hosting his own TV show, is today a reality. When I stepped onto the stage as Rocky and got my first laugh, I instantly knew that this was where I belonged. My search was over – I’d found the missing brick.

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Gerstickulaten During my year off at the University of New South Wales I’d hatched a plan. I had no intention of practising as an architect, but nevertheless I returned to Sydney University to finish Architecture only because I saw it as an opportunity to set up a revue. But there was still the court case hanging over my head and I had to find a lawyer. Even though I was innocent, I chose not to confide in my parents, but instead received advice from a tutor who suggested approaching the Student Representative Council (SRC) for legal help. The SRC immediately organised a lawyer to represent us and, like manna from heaven, we were allocated the president of the SRC himself, one (later Justice) Michael Kirby. In court young Kirby was the master, erudite, waspish and incredibly funny. He looked at our case and came to the conclusion that the police were probably trying to keep up the number of arrests for the night to impress the Minister. His advice to us was to plead not guilty to the charges. He also seemed very keen, should we win, to press for false arrest. Our court appearance took place in the Liverpool Street courts before a stipendiary magistrate. Riggs and I were both cross-examined by the police prosecutor. When it was Kirby’s turn to question the police, he called on the senior arresting officer, Detective Sergeant McAfee. After making mincemeat of McAfee, Kirby next called on the junior constable. It was obvious that the police hadn’t had much time to rehearse their story, but they certainly had added a lot more colour to the incident than it deserved. Kirby’s cross-examination went a little like this, as I recall: Kirby:

Constable, could you please explain the circumstances leading up to the arrest?

Constable: It was a Friday night, around 10.30 p.m. Detective Sergeant McAfee and me were travelling in a north-easterly direction down Victoria Street, when suddenly I turn to McAfee and I say, ‘Detective Sergeant there appears to be a scuffle on the

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pavement!’ McAfee tells me to stop the car. So I immediately slammed my foot on the brake. Kirby interjects. Kirby:

Excuse me, constable, but braking suddenly in a busy street, isn’t that a dangerous thing to do? I assume you indicated?

The constable panics. Constable: Yes I did! No, I definitely remember making a hand signal as I gradually applied my foot to the brake … First question and Kirby has him on the run. Kirby:

But earlier Detective McAfee told me that you braked suddenly.

Constable: Did he? Kirby:

Yes … and he also said that you didn’t pull into the kerb.

Constable: What? Kirby:

Your sergeant said that the car was double-parked. Isn’t that also illegal?

The constable is now totally flustered. Obviously a tactic to confuse the junior burger. Kirby:

Could you please explain what happened next?

Constable: Okay … As we exited the vehicle, we observed the two gentlemen in question scuffling on the pavement. Bond was standing over Riggs saying, ‘You mongrel Riggs, I’ll kill you!’ Kirby:

Really? Go on.

Constable: Next we approached the suspects from behind, tapped them on the shoulder and said, ‘Gentlemen, come this way.’ Kirby:

So you said, ‘Come this way.’ Of course you were wearing uniforms?

Constable: No, we don’t wear uniforms, we’re Vice Squad. Kirby: But did you introduce yourselves as police officers?

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Constable: No! Kirby:

So the two young gentlemen had no idea who you were?

Constable (smugly): They knew who we were! Kirby:

Now you say you approached them from behind. How could that be?

Constable: They were standing with their backs to us. Kirby:

But you earlier stated that Bond was standing over Riggs saying, ‘You mongrel Riggs, I’ll kill you.’

Constable: That was before. Kirby: Before what? Constable: Before we tapped them on the shoulder. Kirby:

So you’re telling the court you saw two gentlemen fighting on a footpath, in a dimly lit street from a distance of 40 yards. And you recognised those two men to be my clients Messrs Bond and Riggs?

Constable: Yes I do! Kirby:

I see. So you then took them to your police car?

Constable: Yes we did. Kirby:

Did they complain or resist?

Constable (sniggering): Did they ever! Kirby:

I assume your police car had a sign on it?

Constable: No! We’re Vice Squad, we drive unmarked cars. Kirby:

I see. Your Honour, if you please, let me paint a picture for the court. We have two young gentlemen who have travelled to Kings Cross for an evening’s entertainment. As recorded they were both well dressed, and through circumstance find themselves standing in Victoria Street having just extricated

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themselves from what may have been a very ugly situation. The two gentlemen in question, Messrs Riggs and Bond, are both close personal friends. Without warning they are approached from behind by two strangers, wearing civilian clothes, who without notice, apprehend my clients but fail to inform them that they are under arrest. When my clients refuse to accompany them, the two gentlemen then proceed to drag them away. Earlier the constable at his own admission told us that he didn’t believe that it was necessary for them to introduce themselves as police officers. Under these circumstances can you not see why my clients would resist? They didn’t know that the two strangers who manhandled them were police officers. Even more bewildering, my clients were next dragged down Victoria Street and thrust into an unmarked car.

Your Honour, may I point out that this incident did occur in Kings Cross, which as we all know, is a notorious location. Why your Honour, these two young boys may have thought their assailants were (long pause) … anything.

Kirby leaves the thought hanging. Sniggers and laughter break out in the courtroom. The police prosecutor is out of his chair. Prosecutor: Your Honour, suggesting that members of our Vice Squad could be mistaken for deviants is an outrageous proposition. The stipendiary magistrate smiles.

Round One to Kirby, but there was more to come. As the case progressed, the prosecution could see their hopes of a victory starting to slip away, so the police prosecutor made a desperate attempt to humiliate the next witness for the defence. That person was Ron Greenaway, who appeared to be very nervous. The prosecution were now trying to wheedle their way out of any possible charges of false arrest.

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Prosecutor: Was it possible, Mr Greenaway, that what the police saw on that badly lit street was not a fight, but in fact they saw you gerstickulaten? (Pronounced geur-stick-yer-late-in.) As if he hasn’t heard the question Greenaway replies. Greenaway: Excuse me?

The police prosecutor can see a small victory here: the possibility of humiliating a uni student for his lack of vocabulary. Prosecutor: Mr Greenway, you’re a uni student, aren’t you? Greenaway: Yes. Prosecutor: And are you tellin’ me that you have never heard of the word gerstickulate? Before Greenaway can reply, like a matador Kirby leaps into the arena. Kirby:

Your Honour, the Oxford pronunciation of the word as I know it is to ‘gesticulate’ … and maybe Mr Greenaway hasn’t heard of it in the prosecutor’s form?

That was it. The prosecutor had been witness to Kirby’s demolition of both Vice Squad officers and he evidently wasn’t willing to chance his arm. He flashed a look to the magistrate, who was again smirking. He knew he’d lost, so he retreated with ‘No more questions, Your Honour.’ The case was thrown out of court, and for a mere 12 guineas each, the amazing Michael Kirby had cleared both our names. As we left the courtroom we were approached by Sergeant McAfee and his junior constable. McAfee fumed, ‘You and your smart fucking lawyer. Just remember one day we’ll get you bastards!’ When I mentioned the threat to Kirby, he seemed more than keen to proceed with charging both officers with false arrest, but at that stage I had made up my mind that this would be my first and last day in court. That was the good news. The bad news was when Kevin Riggs and I went to police headquarters with our signed affidavits from the court to have the records of our fingerprints destroyed. The desk sergeant retrieved

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the relevant copies from the files and we both ceremoniously tore our fingerprints up in front of him. As we left he called after us, ‘You don’t really think they’re the real ones, do you?’ He got us a beauty! I waited many years to extract my revenge on the police. In 1975 ABC’s Marius Webb offered Rory O’Donoghue, Garry McDonald and me a live radio comedy show on 2JJ (pre-Triple J), produced by Marius and Maurice Murphy. We called it Nude Radio. The nudity was fleeting – we only appeared naked once on-air for a publicity stunt – but our detractors, the righteous right, got in early and demanded that our show be banned because we dared to expose our naked selves on their radios. When we launched the show I had someone special in mind when Garry and I performed the segment ‘Crime Watch’. Garry played Constable Phil Nesbitt, a wimpy Infant Pedestrian Patrol Officer, while I appeared as his regular guest, Vice Squad celebrity Detective Sergeant Clive McAfee. A coincidence, perhaps? Or beware the wounded satirist? Each segment of ‘Crime Watch’ began with the nerdy Constable Phil telling soppy stories of his dull life on the infant pedestrian crossing, and in every episode, McAfee would rudely interrupt with a gross anecdote from the annals of Vice. These sketches went live to air. No scripts, no safety net. Phil:



Hello boys and girls, welcome to Crime Watch. Gosh, have I got some interesting stories this week about the naughty kiddies on my pedestrian crossing. Why only yesterday, a really disobedient little girl dropped her teddy bear on my crossing, and I said to her, ‘Don’t you stop to pick up the teddy bear, little girl! Leave that to your mummy, because you could be run over by a great big motor car.’

At this point McAfee would become bored with Phil’s limp stories and leap in with a Vice classic.

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Clive:

That reminds me of a totally naked prostitute we found collapsed on a pedestrian crossing last night. Kids, she was a stunner. Huge bazookas, no undies and –

Phil:

No, no, Clive I don’t think the boys and girls would be interested in that kind of thing.

Desperately trying to change the subject.

Did she by any chance have a teddy bear?

Clive:

No, but she had the cutest little beav–

Phil (interrupting): Thank you, Clive. Well, that’s the end of that segment boys and girls, and we’ll be back next week with more exciting new stories about infant pedestrian crossings.

Every week the unfortunate Constable Phil would make his pathetic attempts to present cute kiddie-friendly stories, only to be overridden by McAfee, a man bent on introducing children to the seamy side of Vice. McAfee never held back and always produced real police stories, like how to beat up a felon using only an iron bar and a telephone book. The good sergeant relished every moment as he vividly described to the kiddies that this was a very clever way to avoid leaving marks on a potential suspect. It was after the ‘iron bar’ episode that I received a phone call at the ABC Forbes Street studio. The caller was Detective Sergeant McAfee, who had been listening to the show from Darlinghurst Police Station, just around the corner from the studios. Again he threatened me: ‘Son, if you don’t stop using my fuckin name I am going to sue your arse off, you little prick.’ I tried to explain to the good Detective that I couldn’t stop performing ‘him’, because ‘he’ was one of the most popular characters in the show. I’ll never know what happened to McAfee – maybe he was shot or transferred – but there was never another whimper from Vice. I had my revenge.

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Amateursville While I was keen to set up a revue at Sydney Uni, I’d also returned because I felt obliged to complete Architecture for my parents’ sake; after all, they’d sacrificed so much. My father had given up the love of his life, cabinet-making, and taken up a job as a storeman and packer at Sydney University in the belief that I would receive free education if he was an employee. There were some benefits but not many. This time I intended to do a little bit of architecture and a lot more comedy. On my return I was shocked to find my avowed enemy, Ron Myer, now in the position of acting head of the department. This was the man who had been responsible for my leaving the university a year before. Predictably, he was totally opposed to a student revue. Myer threatened that any student who chose to become involved in the show would be failed. I ignored him. First I needed a director, so I approached Michael Day, my old nemesis who had commented so cruelly about my brylcreemed hairstyle five years before. Michael was very experienced and had written and directed for the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) working with the likes of Germaine Greer, John Bell, Ken Horler, Albie Thoms and Aggy Read. Next I sought out all the people I needed to produce a revue, writers in particular. Geoffrey Atherden, Tony Coote and John Ancher stepped forward and, surprisingly, one staff member: first-year master Ross Thorne offered his support and his filmic skills to the show. Ross and many students were brave enough to take on the acting head and we pressed on, despite the threats. The last process was to agree on a title for the show. The problem was we couldn’t decide, so there was a democratic vote and we came up with a massive compromise: the show was called The THE Revue or just plain THE.

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The Architecture revues were never about architecture. Obviously with all that design talent available, sets, costumes and lighting were incredible. We specialised in observational fantasy, surreal visuals and the absurd. But most of all our shows were about rock’n’roll. The band that played in our first show was called Oak Apple Day. It contained one architecture student, his brother and a 16-year-old lead guitarist and singer by the name of Rory O’Donoghue. Little did we know that young Rory had more stage experience than all of us put together. He’d appeared in two professional musicals – at age 12 he played the Artful Dodger in Oliver and at 14 he’d starred in The Sound of Music. He was now 16 and working with a bunch of amateurs … but he gracefully never let us know. Around the same time, SUDS were ready to present their annual revue Down Among Angels, written by Mungo MacCallum and directed by Albie Thoms. Their revue was very heavily based on academic/literary humour, filled with sketches about Proust, Kafka and other great comic authors, plus endless topical send-ups of various lecturers within the Arts Faculty. Being bloody-minded, I decided to take SUDS head on and cheekily chose to open on the same night. THE was not only musically strong, but it was visually stunning. No one had seen anything like it before. Honi Soit said: ‘THE Revue, 1966 … The architects have quickly proven that they can do better [revue] than anyone else on campus.’ The attendance scores for opening night were: Architecture 600 paying customers, SUDS 14. They never recovered and neither did our acting head, who suddenly stopped acting up and was thankfully replaced by Professor Peter Johnson who, after having seen the first revue, became a staunch supporter of the exercise. He could see how the revue was a practical application of organisational and business skills. Also the revue’s success seriously increased the profile of our small faculty and gave him more leverage within the university. As time went by, Johnson became my strongest advocate. Sally and I were still living together and she’d also become involved in the revue as a go go dancer. But it was theatre that would be our downfall. I became so involved in my work, I began to neglect her. It’s tragic because I was very much in love with Sally and I think she was definitely

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someone I might have married. She was striking, talented, witty and solid as a rock. But I was so absorbed in my own self-importance, I became completely unaware of my inattention. Until one day Sally came to me and said, ‘I’ve met someone else and I’m moving in with him.’ When I asked why, she simply said, ‘He has time for me!’ It was a cruel lesson. I have to admit that I didn’t really learn from the break-up and I’m afraid my obsessive nature was responsible for many more relationship failures along the way. In 1967 Sal’s pal Peter Best won a Sun-Herald songwriting competition and was awarded a recording contract, which included a complimentary band to record the winning song. An amazing coincidence was that the band contracted to record Peter’s music was the very same band that I had used in the first Architecture revue – Oak Apple Day, comprising Rory O’Donoghue and the brothers Bellantonio. For many years Peter managed the group and they played only Peter Best originals. Being their manager, Peter eventually decided to change the name of the band to The POGS – an acronym for Peter’s Own Great Songs. I convinced him to write music for the 1967 revue, The New Bigger All Electric Polyunsaturated Enid Blyton Super Song Spectacular, or you’d all be eating with chopsticks if it wasn’t for my dad and Rudi Valli! With a real songwriter on board, all we needed now was a dedicated choreographer, and she materialised in the form of Anna Nygh. Over the next three years Anna would transform from a dancer to an actress and eventually she would become my lover. By late 1967 Peter had moved to Melbourne and made it big in the advertising jingle-writing scene. His first big job was an Ansett ANA jingle about Susan Jones, the loveliest air hostess that ever lived, sung by a little-known plumber’s apprentice, Johnny Farnham. When I approached Peter to write music for the next architecture revue, Drip Dry Dreams, he informed me that he was getting at least $800 per jingle. He asked me how many songs I might need for the show and I explained that I needed about five. He did a quick calculation and asked me if I had $4000 in the budget. We had a total budget of $0, so I was forced to write them myself. I suppose I should thank Peter.

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I was a very mediocre guitarist, and I certainly couldn’t read music, but Rory O’Donoghue could and we joined forces. I essentially became a songwriter because nobody ever told me I couldn’t do it. Peter Best went on to become an award-winning Australian film composer for movies such as Doing Time for Patsy Cline, Muriel’s Wedding, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Bliss and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. At the time he couldn’t read music either.

Pushing the envelope In 1967 I was elected president of the Sydney University Architecture Society (SUAS). At the end of my term there was a lot of money in the student coffers, thanks to the Enid Blyton Super Song Spectacular which did three sold-out performances in the 600-seat Union Theatre. Plus there was the Noddy Super Ball at the Paddington Town Hall, where I booked five bands to play a series of songs in unison. It also sold out. On the night of the Super Ball Rory was in charge of the music, and his band The POGS were featured high up on the Town Hall balcony. Rory opened the night by counting in the five bands, who all began playing Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’. They only managed to hold the tempo together for 30 seconds, and then slowly one by one the rhythm sections drifted out of sync. Some dragged, others raced to keep up. What we eventually heard was a hideous cacophony of five bands in search of a tempo. It was a brave but expensive experiment. In the end each band was given the opportunity to play one bracket each. At the AGM I put it to the student body that we vote on how to spend the $17,000 profit (today the value would be approximately $188,000 with inflation) sitting in the Society’s kitty. I suggested to the students that with our new-found fortune we might invest in a racehorse and a couple of greyhounds (all my interests of course), leaving us with ample funds to buy a house in the country and a small bus to get us there. They laughed at my proposal and I was voted out.

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I have no idea where the $17,000 went, apart from the $80 we spent on an Italian espresso machine which was placed in the Student Common Room. Other than that, I have heard no explanation of what happened to the remaining $16,920. 1967 was my final year at Sydney University. I had always been weak in the subject of Architectural Science, a fact that I was constantly reminded of by my new Architectural Science tutor, John Gero. Gero was all too aware of my terrible track record in the sciences and suggested that earlier teachers had been too soft on me. He assured me that under his tutelage, I would fail. For as long as I can remember I had sat for post exams, normally because of my lack of interest in the subject. I just couldn’t get excited about concrete slump tests or calculating the structural aggregate mix for concrete. For final-year students it was compulsory to submit an Architectural Science thesis of at least 50,000 words. The majority opted for urbane topics like ‘Plumbing Noises in Multi-Storey Buildings’ or ‘Designing Lift Motor Rooms for Health and Efficiency’. As there was nothing in the rules to specify that the science subject had to be architectural, I went a little outside the square and chose ‘Palmistry as a Form of Personality Assessment’. I was seriously aiming to correlate the lines on the hand to aspects of personality. I even received permission from the Callan Park Mental Hospital in Rozelle to obtain patients’ palm prints. My main premise was that a simian line found on the palm could suggest some form of mental illness. For example, a typical simian line is a single line which runs across the palm. The term ‘simian line’ originated from its resemblance to the palm creases found on the hands of primates. (Unfortunately I wasn’t aware at the time that the line was also well-known as a characteristic of Down Syndrome, a discovery by R.L. Down in 1906.) Finally the day came to present my thesis, and as I finished delivering my masterpiece, John Gero smugly declared, ‘Bond, you cannot argue logically about an illogical subject. It’s like trying to convince me that the world is flat!’ ‘But it is flat, isn’t it?’ I retorted.

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He failed me. Fortunately my new champion Professor Johnson came to my aid and passed on my thesis to the Arts Faculty for a second opinion. They believed it had merit. I passed. Years later Time magazine published a research article by a group of NewYork paediatricians who studied simian lines on the palms of newborn babies and found its correlation with intellectual disability. Another problem area for me was the History of Architecture. Mr Arthur Baldwinson was our lecturer and he was not what one would call a visionary teacher. Arthur’s lectures were dull and he drew heavily from a slide collection of his world travels. Plus his lectures comprised of huge excerpts from the prescribed texts. The last exam in my final year was the History of Architecture, and to this day I can’t explain my frame of mind at the time. Maybe it was the euphoria I felt when I realised I had just three more hours of exams to complete and then I’d be free. Nevertheless, after reading the first questions, I went AWOL. ‘Choose an example of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and discuss its spatial relationships.’ That pressed all my selfdestruct buttons. Immediately I saw the absurdity of asking students to critique architectural masterpieces. How could a student, in all honesty, express an opinion on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright? I hadn’t travelled out of the country, let alone visited any of his architectural sites. Of course I had been studious and could confidently quote verbatim from all the relevant reference texts on Lloyd Wright’s work. But what would that prove? The history teaching method suddenly seemed ridiculous, and I felt someone needed to know. So I spent the next three hours writing a very chatty paper for my History Master. I began: Dear Mr Baldwinson, As I don’t wish to bore you for the next three hours with my illinformed opinions on the modern Masters, or heaven forbid that I might throw back into your face your own measured opinions, I have decided to write about five little-known architects, creative giants who I know you won’t have heard of …

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I proceeded to invent five architects. It’s hazy. But one I remember was a Spaniard, Jim Cantilevra, a brave young Brutalist who, in the early twentieth century, experimented with what would later be known as the unsupported projection. All Cantilevra’s designs were later discovered to be inspired by his own bizarre profile. Young Jim Cantilevera had what today would be called a severe overhanging forehead. For years Jim had studied the giant brow that had shaded his pale blue eyes, and as a student of architecture he’d examined this unnatural outcrop from every angle. Then one day Jim had a brainwave. In a flash of inspiration he decided to design all his buildings in his own likeness. Was this the birth of Architectural Egotism? Architects had always been so humble. This man’s profile changed the face of architecture forever by creating what we know today as the cantilever, as distinct from the cantilevra. The dissertation was accompanied with diagrams and cross sections of Jim’s skull, comparing it to his work. My humour failed to touch a nerve … I failed. Again Professor Johnson came to the rescue. He called me into his office and explained how disappointed he was in my attitude and begged me to stop doing jokes. ‘Bond, save the gags for the stage.’ This of course meant that I would have to sit for a post in History. I sat. I behaved. I passed. Our graduation ceremony in 1968 was held at the Great Hall and my mother had made a deal with me. If I promised to get a haircut she would give me the money to buy my very first suit to wear at the ceremony. I agreed. My locks were shorn then I went straight into the city to the coolest and grooviest joint in town, the In Shop on the corner of George and Bridge Streets, and came home with a three-piece pin-striped suit that looked like something out of Al Capone’s Roaring Forties. My mother was mortified, and complained that the material was so thin it looked like it was made from rags. She was right. The suit lasted exactly one graduation ceremony, then fell apart on the bus trip home. It looked like a pin-striped chaff bag.

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Three in one The period after graduation was an exciting time. I was juggling three jobs at once. I took a part-time position as an architect with the Swiss mining company Nabalco, and at the same time set up a private practice with five of my fellow graduates, and worked at the uni. I was a busy boy. After the grief I’d caused as a student, I was amazed when Professor Peter Johnson offered me a position as a design tutor with the secondyear students. Looking back, it was a classic way of him taming the tiger: employ the problem. I took the bait and went across to the dark side, but I soon discovered that I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. My dilemma was that I had favourites, and they were the very few who showed any aesthetic talents. At the time I could never understand why anyone would let loose a bunch of people with architecture degrees who were guaranteed to create visual atrocities. After only a couple of months, I was convinced that the majority of students had chosen the wrong profession and should have become engineers or quantity surveyors. This was my first year working for the enemy. The next year I found myself tutoring a group of older students who had managed to sneak into university as a result of a year’s gap in the transition from the Leaving Certificate (attained after five years of high school) and the Higher School Certificate (which required six years). A quirk in the education system had allowed a window of opportunity for mature-aged students to gain entry to university. And here they were, all in my class. I had just turned 24 and I was now teaching people up to a decade older than myself. One such student was a 34-year-old ex-builder, married with three children, whose family had obviously made huge sacrifices to pay for his tertiary education. In the winter months of that year I proposed a project for my students to design a ski village. This involved an excursion to the Thredbo snowfields, where I had chosen a site to make the scheme more realistic. Too readily the year master and the other tutors approved my idea and

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seemed quite happy for me to take responsibility for chaperoning the 50-odd students. I organised a bus to take us for the three-day expedition to Jindabyne and on to Thredbo. I had no idea of what lay ahead of me. After only one hour on the bus, I noticed certain frictions and potentially ugly personality clashes, and by the time we reached Goulburn, only two hours out of Sydney, I saw half a dozen newly formed relationships blossom and quickly fade into oblivion in just 100 kilometres. It wasn’t until we arrived at the snowfields that the real problems began. On our first night, my 34-year-old builder became rolling drunk and proffered his undying love to a bewildered 17-year-old female student. The girl in question had no idea of how deeply the builder’s great affection ran for her. Confused, the poor child politely rejected her fellow student’s advances and suggested that he might return to his wife and children. This was not what Builder Boy wanted to hear, so he returned to his room and slashed his wrists with a hacksaw. I can only assume that all builders have hacksaws on hand, should they need to attempt suicide. This was only night one, and I found myself at Jindabyne Hospital waiting to see if my mature-age student would live. The next day I decided to brave the slopes. Marrickville boys don’t often get the opportunity to spend their winter months hanging out with the snow bunnies of Threaders. I was a ski virgin, so I didn’t possess all the trendy paraphernalia required for pre-ski and apre`s ski-wear. I simply donned a waterproofed blue boilersuit and hit the slopes. Unfortunately, the intense colour and my lack of style made me stand out like an unmasked oxywelder. I was seen by all and sundry crashing and falling from one learner slope to the next. After my battle with both skis and poles I gave up my dream of becoming a downhill racer and I also came very close to giving up the dream of academia. Two days a week I also worked as a design architect for the multinational Nabalco. The company had discovered bauxite on the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land and were creating an aluminium mining town from scratch. This was the single largest architectural project in Australia at the time, valued at over $300 million, and I was employed to work on the design of the pre-fabricated housing structures. The process was a

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little like assembling concrete Lego. Nabalco showed absolutely no environmental conscience, and although we architects protested, they still managed to strip the vegetation from all the sand dunes on the site. I’m convinced those dunes have now drifted as far as Alice Springs, and are probably still heading south. The Swiss had leased out every floor in Goldfields House at Circular Quay as their headquarters. Being a vertically integrated company, the structure worked like this: the Swiss engineers who made the major decisions were located on the upper floors, while directly below them were quantity surveyors, then surveyors; next were the builders; and then I think it was hairdressers, cleaners and finally the architects at the bottom of the food chain. Nothing for me was more frustrating than to go through the design process, then have a superior take my work up to the decision-makers on the upper floors and bring it back totally reworked. I became so bored with this company that I began experimenting with alcohol, and I became quite proficient at it. It began with regular lunchtime meetings in the basement of Goldfields House with Rory O’Donoghue. Our meeting place went by the name of the Island Trader, a pathetic faux Hawaiian paradise decorated with animal-skin drums, hula skirts and empty coconut shells hanging around the perimeter. I didn’t bother supping the exotic drinks on the menu like advocaat and cherry brandy with shards of pineapple and crushed nuts all topped off with a small colourful umbrella thrust into the mix. No! I chose the champagne cocktail – essentially a glass of cheap bubbly with a small cube of sugar inserted. This brew was both sweet and lethal. Once I’d completed my liquid lunch, I would then stagger back to the office and spend the rest of the afternoon either telling jokes or sleeping under my drawing board. I soon realised that I didn’t have a future as a practising architect, especially with this company. I expected that my behaviour might get me fired, but no such luck. I eventually had to resign. During the period at Nabalco I put on ten kilos.

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To fill in my spare time I was also involved in private practice with a group of my graduate mates.The company was called Bond, Korzeniewski, McClelland, Malone, Taussig and Zulaikha. We only lasted a week. Our receptionist had a nervous breakdown, she couldn’t remember who we were. That’s the joke version of our demise. The real reason the company folded was the difficulty of keeping together five young idealists and one running dog capitalist. Early on in the practice one of the partners brought in a large job, worth around $3 million. It was a design for a Gerry Harvey warehouse in Tempe. The death blow occurred when the partner who found the piece of business decided to take the job for himself. Naturally the partnership collapsed. As hectic as my life was, I still had time to do the odd performance.

Man on the flying trapeze After the success of the Architecture revues I was approached by Aggy Read, a producer from SUDS. Aggy had obviously forgiven me for going up against the SUDS revue and approached me to perform readings from the works of the Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The leap from Archie revue to Pe`re Ubu wasn’t so huge, and the shows were incredibly successful. Aggy next invited me to appear in the very traditional Victoriana, a Victorian music-hall show which was held each year at St Paul’s College, Sydney University. The regular cast was made up of SUDS players and included John Gaden, Arthur Dignam and Doctor Paul Thom. I suppose Aggy Read wanted me to add a touch of the plebeian to the program, because I was given all the popular Cockney numbers like ‘Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy’, ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’ and my big number, ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’. My first and only performance for Victoriana was in the college refectory, which was set up like a nineteenth-century banquet hall. Huge trestle tables ran the length of the room, butting hard up against the stage.

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Each table was laden with food and huge carafes of wine. The audience comprised an assortment of carousing, heavily intoxicated college boys. It was like a conservative Bacchanalian orgy populated by lobotomised rugger-buggers wearing jackets and ties. As most of the boarders were country cockies, there were more tweed and leather elbow patches than you could poke a stick at; it was their college uniform. This elite mob were obviously not going to be great lovers of things surreal or artistic. In fact I believe the combined IQ of the room on the night would have been lucky to have made 100. These were not modern young men; these were college students with their values locked into the turn-of-the-nineteenth century and lives that revolved around rugby, beer, more beer, more rugby and lots of talk about ‘rooting’. I’d had no experience of working a crowd like this. Revue audiences were generally polite and appreciative. But this was a drunken rabble, itching for a fight, and I was just the type of long-haired working-class git to give it to them. My first number, ‘Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy’, wasn’t exactly a showstopper and I finished to a round of mixed applause from those who still had command of their motor skills. The unseasoned drinkers had by now collapsed under their tables, while several comatose junior boarders lay face down, slowly drowning in their first course. By the time I entered to perform my second number, ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’, things were beginning to get out of control, despite the fact that the dean of the college and his wife were sitting in the audience. Being the new boy and having been given a certain amount of freedom, I decided to bring a few visual props into the act. In ‘Seaside’, I chose to introduce a large beach ball, which I planned to bounce off the walls and floor as I sang and danced. The choreography seemed to be working, in fact everything was going along swimmingly, as the song might suggest. The dean and his wife seemed to be enjoying their frontrow seats and even sang along. I became overconfident and decided that I’d drop kick the beach ball out into the audience. I misjudged badly, and the ball flew from my foot and struck the dean’s wife squarely in the face, knocking her backwards out of her chair.

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The fickleness of fame. One minute I was loved, the next I was dead meat. Every red-blooded drunk in the room wanted to strangle me. Hastily I edited the song and made a quick exit. The cast, aware of the problem, suggested that I call a taxi and escape before the lynch mob arrived. But I still had one more number to perform, my big showpiece ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’. As the next tenor proceeded to warble ‘Excelsior’, the college students drank more and more and became angrier and angrier as they watched the dean’s wife stretchered from the room. Backstage, I dressed in my striped tights and leopard skin underpants. It seemed imperative that I perform the song. After all, Aggy had gone to the trouble of organising a proper trapeze for me to swing out and over the audience. When the moment arrived, the MC, normally a jovial fellow, nervously introduced my number. The audience went deathly quiet, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the college First Fifteen slowly edging towards the stage. I signalled to my accompanist, and began. Once I was happy, But now I’m forlorn, Like an old coat That is tattered and torn …

‘We’ll give you torn,’ the front row forwards screamed as they moved through the crowd. Slightly flustered I continued. Left in this wide world To weep and to mourn Betrayed by a maid in her teens

By the time I’d finished the first verse I was retreating, my back pressed hard against the cold stone walls of the college refectory. Things were starting to look particularly ugly – this was not a forgiving audience. I looked to the exit where the stage manager was beckoning. Obviously my taxi had arrived. I needed a plan of escape, and my prop trapeze

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seemed to be the best option. In a moment of madness I decided to continue. With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I launched myself off the back wall, leapt high and grabbed the trapeze, swinging myself out and over the audience, still singing: Oh, he flies through the air With the greatest of ease The daring young man On the flying trapeze. Things weren’t looking good. Below me hands were reaching up to grab and strangle me. I sang on. His movements are graceful, All girls he does please And my love he has purloined away. To escape I needed a distraction, so on the next backswing I released my grip from the trapeze, expecting to land on the stage and dash to safety. But I misjudged and dropped short, landing full force onto the very end of a trestle table, which swung up like a fulcrum sending food, cutlery and wine skyward. Everything flew through the air with the greatest of ease and completely doused students and staff. Chaos reigned, but it was just the diversion I needed. As there’d be no encores, I made a hasty exit to the dressing room, where a small bag of my belongings was packed. Like a thief in the night, I fled the college.

Kos ’n’ Pete I first met Peter Weir through my flatmate, architecture student Kosta Akon. Kosta had been one of Peter’s close school friends at Scots College.

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They had a history of improv theatre too. Where Peter Best and I performed our street theatre on the buses, Peter Weir and Kosta Akon tested strangers to breaking point in the privacy of their own living room. One evening in early 1968 Peter Weir was visiting our apartment when an insurance salesman came knocking on our door. Once Pete and Kosta realised they had a door-to-door salesman, they went into a wellrehearsed routine. First Peter turned off all of the lights. The place was now dangerously dim. The salesman was led into the living room, and just as his eyes adjusted to the murkiness, he was suddenly confronted by me, looking like a giant white gollywog with a two-foot Afro. My only direction from Peter was to observe what developed, say nothing, and just stare intensely at the victim. It wasn’t long before the salesman went into his well-practised sales banter, although he appeared a little concerned that he couldn’t read his notes in the gloom. As he rolled out the benefits of his product, I watched Kosta slowly and subtly develop strange ticks that rapidly turned into larger, more erratic movements which only intensified until Kosta finally leapt from his chair, screamed once, then fell to the floor stone dead. The salesman looked panicked and turned to me for help, but before he could do anything, Kosta came back to life, dusted himself off and apologised to the man attempting to sell him life insurance. I didn’t say a word, I just stared. It was obvious that the salesman was becoming quite unnerved and he began looking for an escape route. If he was sweating now, things got worse. Out of the shadows of the corridor appeared a flickering light accompanied by strange guttural moanings. I turned to see Peter enter the darkened room, clutching a single candle that cast giant shadows around the room. If that wasn’t enough, Peter’s face was concealed behind a large fencing mask, and in his hand he held a long thin rapier that he swished menacingly. This was all too much for the salesman. He bounded from his chair and dashed from the building, leaving all his sales material behind. This was a well-practised routine that Pete and Kos had tried on everyone from Seventh Day Adventists to Mormons and even Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen. Basically anyone trying to push their wares onto to an

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unsuspecting public was fair game. Peter used a similar scenario of a lost soul wandering the corridors of a strange guesthouse carrying a candle and wearing a fencing mask in Homesdale, one of his first films. I appeared in several of Peter’s films. The first was for the Channel Seven Social Club. I think Peter managed to get a couple of hundred dollars from the Club’s funds to make the short film The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte. Peter began his career in television working as a cable puller (the person who lifts the heavy cables attached to the large unwieldy studio cameras) at Channel Seven, working on comedy programs such as The Mavis Bramston Show. He was constantly submitting scripts to the show but they were regularly rejected. The Mavis Bramston Show was supposedly home-grown, however a large percentage of sketches were bought from overseas. English programs tended to rule the airwaves, and even Bramston’s Australian cast was made up of Brits: Gordon Chater was English, Carol Raye was English, and Barry Creyton wasn’t English but wanted to be. Back then, to sound funny you put on an English accent. The principal performers always opened the Bramston show with the males dressed in neat suits and the women in cocktail dresses, all sitting on stools as they delivered clever but old-fashioned musical witticisms a` la Noel Coward. ‘Some day I’ll find you. Creep up behind you.’ Hysterical stuff like that. Peter’s and my meeting was serendipitous. We clicked immediately and started writing together. Sadly all of our early scripts were roundly rejected. For example, Bill Munro at the ABC was producing a series called Australia A to Z and asked us to submit material. Munro then gave us our first feedback informing us that one, our work wasn’t funny and two, we couldn’t write comedy. Nothing like constructive criticism. Peter and I eventually found an unusual mentor in the guise of actor Michael Pate, who had sought us out and genuinely tried to promote our work. Michael had been one of the few successful Aussie actors in Hollywood. Admittedly he often played Red Indians, but he was a lovely man and very helpful at the time. We had very few champions in those

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days, and it was at Michael’s insistence that we approached Channel Seven with our concepts. Again we were told that we couldn’t write and we weren’t funny. With this sort of feedback we were beginning to lose confidence. For the next year Peter and I were rejected by all comers in both radio and television, until one day we met the producers Cash-Harmon (who went on to create the enormously successful Number 96). American Don Cash invited Peter and me to come to their offices to discuss an idea for a situation comedy. When we arrived for the meeting our jaws almost hit the floor when there before us was the legendary British comic Tony Hancock sitting stony-faced in a corner of the office. It appeared that Hancock had burnt all his bridges in England. He’d lost the plot and fired his writers, Galton and Simpson, and was now in Australia attempting to rebuild his floundering career with a situation comedy. The Australian show was to be about an Englishman who spends his life at the cricket, sitting on The Hill at the Sydney Cricket Ground barracking for his beloved England and stirring the Aussies. The classic Pommy whinger. Peter and I were briefed by Don Cash and we began writing. I couldn’t believe we were writing jokes for one of our heroes. Two days later Cash called us with the dreadful news that Hancock had taken his own life. It was farewell, sad clown.

Crossroads I may have been a failed professional writer, but I was still highly involved with the Archie Revue. In 1969 we presented The Great Wall of Porridge. It was my second year tutoring and I knew this show would be my swansong. So I put it to the committee that we move out of the 600-seat Union Theatre, and try our luck in the biggest theatre in town, the 2500seat Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown. As I was working with Peter Weir at the time, I invited him and his

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cousin James Dellit to be guest stars in the revue. With Professor Johnson’s support, the majority of the faculty became involved in the production. Final-year students designed sets, third-year and fourth-year students created costumes and props, second-year students worked on poster designs, while the poor first years did all the dirty work, like building and painting. The scale of the Elizabethan Theatre was daunting, with its massive stage and its giant orchestra pit. I decided to fill that pit with a full-size above-ground swimming pool. This meant it had to be used, so I wrote a musical aqua ballet routine (a` la Esther Williams), which was choreographed by Anna Nygh and performed by the two of us. It was one thing to write a song and rehearse the routine in a faculty studio, but it was another to perform in a swimming pool that had been erected in a darkened theatre for five days. By opening night the temperature of the pool had dropped to a frigid 8 degrees Celsius. After a quick test of the pool at dress rehearsal, the routine was quickly re-choreographed and all the swimming was done on stage. The only time the pool was used was when a slightly inebriated student wearing a gorilla suit accidentally slipped and fell in. Fortunately he survived thanks to a very alert stage manager who dived into to rescue the waterlogged beast. To fill the enormous stage area the opening number had to be performed on a massive scale. It was a mediaeval musical piece with a cast of 60 singers and dancers. But the showstopper for the night was another giant musical extravaganza I wrote called ‘Belle Tambourine’. The story involved a simple country girl who travels to the city to join the Salvation Army band only to become a stripper for Jesus. The number included Belle the black angel (Anna) and 80 white angels dressed only in balls of cotton wool. The set was a masterpiece designed by a final-year student. The construction included two mediaeval turrets with ramparts and a drawbridge that folded down, straddling the swimming pool. On opening night Harry M. Miller and Jim Sharman (years later, producer and director of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar) came to see the show and Miller commented

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that the set alone would have cost $1 million to produce professionally. When I invited him backstage after the show he was impressed that the set was as perfectly finished backstage as it was out front to the audience. Those turrets weren’t simply facades, they were perfectly structured circular towers with small staircases inside. The set was an immaculate three-dimensional work, fantastically realised and, as the structure had to be solid, all those years of attending building construction classes came in handy because the platform that linked the two towers had to support Rory’s band of five musicians high above the drawbridge and pool. The structure was perfect. What I didn’t tell Harry Miller was how we guaranteed the generous donation of materials for the show. Essentially we sent out our best hustlers to all the major companies requesting materials such as paint, scaffolding, timber and canvas. For example, the company Dulux was asked to contribute 100 litres of paint to the cause. In return, they were offered a free ad in the revue program. However, if our acquisitions team were refused, the policy was to inform the product manager that we would next approach their major competitor, BALM Paints. It was also made clear to those unwilling to contribute that once we’d graduated, we would never use their product. The message was direct, succinct and amazingly effective. Today you could probably go to jail for this style of stand-over marketing. After the grand opening musical number with the cast of 60 dancers, one would assume the scale couldn’t be topped. However, Peter Weir and I wrote a sketch called ‘The Bank Robber’ which did manage to outdo the opening. The sketch involved a battle of wits between a bank robber and a wily bank teller, each attempting to one-up the other with their level of armed protection. Firstly the teller informs the bank robber that he is under surveillance and covered by four armed security officers, who appear on stage. The robber, not to be outdone, produces eight heavily armed felons in balaclavas to surround the security guards. The sketch gradually built to the absurd point where the teller finally calls on the Sydney University Army Regiment for support. On cue, an

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entire division of 100 soldiers in full uniform marches on stage, rifles at the ready, accompanied by a 20-piece Scottish pipe band, followed by two jeeps complete with machine-gun turrets. The culmination was the sound effects of an Air Force flyover and a submarine periscope rising up out of the swimming pool. Finally the robber admits defeat and surrenders. With the cast, crew and Army personnel, there were close to 200 people on stage. I haven’t had that luxury since. After the final performance of The Great Wall of Porridge, two older gentlemen from a group called PACT Folk approached me. They were Jack Mannix and Bob Allnutt. Both were impressed by the show and offered me the princely sum of $500 to put together a professional revue for PACT. I approached Peter Weir, Geoffrey Atherden, James Delitt, Geoff Malone, and Rory O’Donoghue and his band. They all agreed to be involved. Rehearsals were held at the old PACT Corn Exchange building in Sussex Street, near Darling Harbour. Architect Michael Day was meant to direct the PACT show, but as fate would have it he was offered work in London. So Geoffrey Atherden found himself lumbered with the thankless role of directing. Today Geoff has no regrets; he maintains the experience makes for great after-dinner conversation because he can now claim to be the only person in the world to have directed Peter Weir. The title for the new show was to be Balloon Dubloon, starring Val Faloon and Geoff Maloon. We convinced Geoff Malone to change his name to Maloon just so Balloon Dubloon, Val Faloon and Geoff Maloon rhymed. The other cast members were Peter Weir, James Dellit, myself, and Rory’s band Oak Apple Day. Our venue was the old Cell Block Theatre in East Sydney Tech, the site of the SUDS 1966 revue disaster. The show was successful and ran for five nights, thanks to a lot of help from my old architecture team who generously gave of their time and worked as ushers, builders, box office attendants and whatever it took to support our brave little venture. Denis O’Brien of The Bulletin reviewed Balloon Dubloon. The headline read ‘Villainy of the Absurd’:

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Balloon Dubloon was simple and surreal; fresh, brash, innocent, sophisticated, devilishly pointed, sympathetically gentle and extraordinarily funny, just because so much of it was unexpected.

On the last night at the Cell Block Theatre, a young Sydney director, John Tasker, arrived accompanied by Sir Robert Helpmann. Tasker was a controversial figure, regarded as the l’enfant terrible of Australian theatre. He had been responsible for directing the ground-breaking gay play Boys in the Band. Helpmann, on the other hand, had just been chosen as director of the 1970 Adelaide Festival and was in Sydney looking for new material. He’d already confirmed the Royal Shakespeare Company, which included Donald Sinden and Judi Dench, but his major coup had been convincing his good friend Rudolf Nureyev to perform. Helpmann’s only words to me on the night were, ‘I hope you can come to Adelaide. I believe the show is a bit ahead of its time, but I think you’ll handle the criticism.’ Excited about the offer to appear at the Festival, I thought it was only right to approach my employer, Professor Johnson. I put it to him that I’d need time off from tutoring to rehearse, travel and perform in Adelaide. Peter listened with great interest and finally said, ‘Grahame, I think you have to make up your mind. Do you want to be an academic or a thespian?’ I told him I couldn’t make up my mind. So he said, ‘Then I’ll make it up for you … you’re fired!’ This was the first positive decision I’d never made! Professor Johnson had always been a great champion of mine, and I’m sure he gave me the necessary nudge I needed to follow my new career. Next I had to break the news to my parents and tell them I was giving up architecture for a life in showbiz. They had made enormous sacrifices for me to attend university and I was feeling very guilty about my decision. When I told them, my mother was horrified but my dear dad comforted her. ‘Don’t worry Lorna,’ he said, ‘he’ll be good at whatever he does.’ Dad was a rock. With that kind of support I felt invincible. My father had given me the permission to fail and I certainly fulfilled that many times.

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I have never regretted studying architecture because I learned such a large range of skills from art, design and construction to science, engineering and business. It prepared me well for the paths I would choose in the future.

Almost going pro When Balloon Dubloon closed at the Cell Block, after repaying PACT their original $500 loan we made a tiny profit. With the cast, band and crew I sat down to discuss what to do with the money, which added up to the grand total of $214.80. Again I pushed for my bolshie dream of pooling the money and setting up a syndicate to buy a racehorse, but for a second time I was out-voted. They went for the cash. John Tasker took up the position of managing director of a large casting agency called CMA, a spin-off from the American behemoth MCA. The first three people on Tasker’s books were Peter Weir, actress Judy Morris and myself. Tasker in his new managerial position approached the ABC comedy department to see if they might be interested in a cheap pilot showcasing our material. The department was then controlled by Kiwi Alan Morris. Tasker chose Judy Morris (no relation) as our leading lady. Rory’s band remained the same and Peter Weir, James Dellit and I performed live to an audience in the round on the floor of Studio 21 at the ABC in Gore Hill. At the end of the half-hour live show, Alan Morris, the head of comedy, deigned to come down to the studio floor to inform us that the show was a wee bit undergraduate. I took exception to this and informed him that I was in fact a graduate. Public relations was never my strong suit. Bob Allnutt, the director of PACT Theatre who had originally given us the money to put on Balloon Dubloon, also worked as a television director at the ABC. In 1969 Allnutt approached Weir and me to write a Christmas special for the ABC Religious Department. As the Religious Department were the only people doing comedy at the ABC, we accepted the

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job. Allnut had a budget approved to produce a one-hour special and we wrote Man on a Green Bike, our first television show. Phillip Adams reviewed Man on a Green Bike for The Australian newspaper after the Christmas Day screening in 1969. He described it as: the most interesting thing to come out of the ABC this year … its humour, its music and its utter aliveness were of an order we haven’t previously seen on local television. If I had any awards, I’d shower them upon the youthful collaborators who made it.

God bless you, Phillip. Every clown needs a straight man, and I discovered that very early on when I worked opposite Peter Weir. Being onstage with Peter was like appearing with someone who’d recently escaped from an asylum. All his characters were incredibly bizarre, some demented, others weirdly eccentric. I felt at times that acting opposite Peter was like working with a cross between a retarded stork and a talking praying mantis, complete with twitches, ticks and deformities. But he was funny. John Tasker once described Peter’s performance as being like a young Danny Kaye on acid. Tasker had issues with Peter’s acting and became so divisive it seemed he was determined to break up our partnership. And he did. As Adelaide became more real, I wasn’t surprised when Peter approached me to let me know that he’d been offered a position at the Commonwealth Film Unit. I knew he wasn’t comfortable with John Tasker. Peter also felt that performing wasn’t financially stable enough for him and his wife. So he gave up the dream of becoming a starving actor and instead became a world-famous film director. I wonder if he regrets the move? I had lunch with Pete a couple of years back and we reminisced about the different directions we took back then. Peter admitted that on viewing the first series of Aunty Jack he was quite envious of the fun we were all having. All I said was, ‘Pete, if you’d stuck with us you might have been Norman Gunston!’

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Before we went to the 1970 Adelaide Festival we played a short season at the legendary Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney. Anna Nygh was a new addition to the cast. My first dilemma came when I was asked by management to rename the show. They didn’t like the name Balloon Dubloon. They believed that the title should mean something. I suggested that we use the same name that we were going to use at the Adelaide Festival, Drip Dry Dreams. But what was acceptable for Adelaide was apparently too risqué for Sydney. Management came up with their own cute compromise: Candy Striped Balloon. I knew it was bad luck to change the name of a boat, but what about a stage show? And Candy Striped Balloon was a shithouse name to boot. Paul Riomfalvy and Eric Duckworth were co-directors of the Phillip Street Theatre and the deal they’d stitched up with our director John Tasker went as follows: for my performers to be paid, the box office needed to earn more than $10,000 a week. And guess what? We never quite managed to achieve the magical figure, but were always a few hundred dollars short. This was the classic introduction to the entertainment industry. Welcome to showbiz! After playing to a week of reasonably full audiences I naively asked management, ‘How is it that we aren’t making money?’ The answer was shameful: ‘Your audiences were heavily papered!’ In other words they were claiming that 80 per cent of our audiences were free tickets. Try and disprove that! I also soon realised that my journey into professional theatre had drastically affected my popularity with the university students. As a student performer I had received glowing reviews from the uni newspaper Honi Soit. But now that I had moved into commercial theatre the knives were out. For this show uni magazine reviewers were uncharacteristically negative, complaining that the ticket prices had increased because of my huge pay packet. Little did they know that I was working for love. This was a no-win situation without a remedy. Rory and his musicians were paid every week because their union was particularly powerful, unlike Actors Equity who demanded that we sign up with them at the beginning of the run and then conveniently disappeared. Equity should cringe with shame for inducting us

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into their union and then deserting us. We never saw a penny from the production. Ray Taylor, theatre critic for The Australian, reviewed Candy Striped Balloon: I’ll give you 8 1/2 and a big hand for trying! Irrelevant to assert that it’s the funniest show to hit Sydney in a long time; there haven’t been any! How then does one define your comedy? You won’t catch me trying to do that, but I will say that it has a trace of the whimsical, the surreal, owes more than a modicum to the comic strip and is predominantly visual … Grahame Bond. Well you’re a weirdo aren’t you? The epicene, flip flopping strut; eccentric like some moustachioed and double jointed vamp of the twenties. A bit weak on line comedy because of that strangulated Australian voice but, all in all, the only real comic emergence this country has known since the genius of Barry Humphries. And … observe how that master corrals an audience!

Many years later when I worked with Jim Burnett, co-author of Boy’s Own McBeth, he aptly summarised the entertainment industry with this: ‘There is another business like show business, but in that business you have to change the sheets after each customer.’ How did he know?

ASIO and the Queen The next year we opened at the Adelaide Festival, minus Pete Weir. All the big names were there: the Warsaw Philharmonic; the Bartok String Quartet from Hungary; the English Opera Group and Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; the Royal Shakespeare Company; the Australian Ballet; the Georgian dancers; and, at the bottom of the barrel, was our little show,

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now renamed Drip Dry Dreams and placed in the Arts Theatre. During the first few days of rehearsals I was taken aside by one of the lighting technicians, who informed me that he had been ordered to report all my movements to ASIO. He explained that they already had a file on me as a ‘person of interest’. As the technician had earlier worked as a scientist at Australia’s top-secret Woomera Rocket Range, ASIO seemed concerned that I may attempt to squeeze secret information from him. Seriously! Little did they know that I had planned to tap into his knowledge and find out what colour lightening gels to use in a 10k spot to achieve better skin tones. Suddenly the surveillance all made sense. Four years earlier, I had chosen to march in Sydney’s first moratorium rally against the war in Vietnam. On the day of the rally there was an enormous police presence as 40,000 young protesters marched along George Street with banners waving, chanting ‘One … two … three … four … We don’t want your fucking war!’ At the end of the march the masses assembled at Sydney Town Hall for a peaceful demonstration, speeches and entertainment. Afterwards I was approached by a very polite, fresh-faced young gent carrying a portable tape recorder. He seemed friendly enough and invited me to make comment on the day’s march. I told him what I thought about Vietnam, and how I believed it was unfair to hold a lottery to send young people to fight a war that we should never have been involved in. He thanked me and left. Bob Ellis, who’d been standing nearby, said to me, ‘Mr Bond … why were we talking to that ASIO agent?’ Obviously that was the day my ASIO file was opened. My first recording deal. I took quite a pummelling from the Adelaide press. Helpmann wasn’t quite right when he said, ‘You’ll handle the criticism.’ I was savagely attacked – not for the humour, mainly for my hairstyle. I returned to Sydney to recover. That’s when I discovered that the remedy for a bruised ego was a constant source of chocolate biscuits, washed down with copious amounts of lemonade.

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——— 1970 was also the year that the British Royal Family chose to tour the country to celebrate the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s voyage up the east coast of Australia. I was surprised to receive an invitation from the New South Wales Arts Council requesting that I attend a function to be introduced to the Royal Family as one of two performers representing actors under 30. The other actor was John Krummel. I imagined a rather intimate gathering, just Krummel and myself sharing a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich with Her Majesty. What I wasn’t prepared for was the other 2000 under-30s who were also there to meet Her Highness. The venue chosen was the Trocadero, a huge barn of a place just slightly upmarket from the Sydney Abattoirs. The occasion was like a giant Noah’s Ark, with every occupation known to mankind on board. There were two of everything (two butchers, two nuns …) sportsmen and women of every hue and colour, singers, dancers, farmers, all under 30. And then there was Krummel and myself. On the day, Krummel was conservatively dressed, as were the other 1998 guests. On the other hand I had chosen to wear a three-piece cream suit, a yellow silk shirt with a black and yellow striped tie and corresponding black and yellow shoes. The final touch was a white fedora with a matching hatband, all sitting atop the biggest Afro in the Southern Hemisphere. I looked like a white Puerto Rican drug dealer. Princess Anne must have known something because she didn’t turn up on the day, but the rest of the gang were there: Liz, Phil and Charlie. I remember as a small child at primary school being dragged kicking and screaming to Centennial Park to stand for five hours in the blazing sun with 100,000 other kiddies just to wave my tiny flag to welcome our Queen to her Commonwealth holiday resort. After all that waiting I only managed to get a fleeting glimpse of her and her Greek hubby as they sped by standing in the back of a Land Rover, waving and

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looking down on their loyal subjects. It was punishingly hot, and I’m sure a lot of little children gave up their tiny lives for their monarch on that day. Back at the Trocadero, everyone had received a briefing before the presentation. We were instructed that should we meet any of the royals, one was to address the Queen as ‘Your Majesty’ firstly, and then if the conversation went any further, one could refer to her as ‘Ma’am’. As for the rest of the family, it was simply ‘G’day Your Royal Highnesses’. The venue was packed with the presentees standing up to ten deep. Krummel and I managed to urge our way to the front in the hope of glimpsing one of the magnificent threesome. On their arrival, the triumvirate split up, with the Queen covering the aisles dedicated to the arts, while Prince Philip seemed drawn more to the surf lifesaving contingents, who I could hear referring to him as ‘Your Mightiness’: ‘Yes, Your Mightiness. Yep, that is true, Your Mightiness.’ At one point Philip accidently walked into our aisle. I caught his eye and he merely gave my ensemble the once-over, snarled and moved off quickly to find more lifesavers. Charles, it seems, only had eyes for the young girls, and stopped constantly to take down phone numbers and addresses. As Krummel and I furtively spied on Charles, I heard a voice addressing us. ‘And what may I ask do you two represent?’ I turned to see who it was, and there before me stood a tiny Queen Elizabeth, a vision in pink, with a matching fluffy pillbox hat. My first impression was that she looked just like my Aunty Stella who lived in Willoughby. Her Majesty repeated the question. ‘And what may I ask do you two represent?’ I was a little stunned to meet the great ‘little’ lady and I stammered, ‘We’re but a small band of jugglers and actors, Your Majesty.’ She smiled. I forgot to mention that the venue was virtually swarming with media. There were microphones thrusting everywhere trying to capture a ‘Queenly’ moment. Her Majesty’s next question was really out of left field. She looked me up and down, stopped at my hair and asked, ‘Would

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you be appearing in Hair?’ ‘No ma’am,’ I replied. ‘I refused to take my clothes off.’ She smiled again. Seriously, who would want to be a Queen? Her innocent question was splashed across the front pages of all the trashy newspapers of Australia. Headlines screamed ‘Queen approves of nudity!’ Even the religious shock jock of the day, the Reverend Alan Walker, threatened to give up his loyalty to the royalty if it was true that his Queen approved of nudity. I felt sorry for her.

Jingle jungle I may have met the Queen, but I was ultimately penniless. I’d come the full circle, from having had two highly paying occupations and an indulgence. I’d now lost both my university tutorship and the architectural employment, and I was now firmly ensconced in my indulgence, showbiz, which wasn’t exactly paying its way. The next few years were financially difficult. In an attempt to make money Rory and I set up our songwriting business, O’Donoghue Bond Productions. We recorded a demonstration tape of our music and approached various advertising agencies with mocked-up commercials for a range of products. After a time work came our way, but not from advertising. Our first job was for the Commonwealth Film Unit. We were chosen to write the soundtrack for several anti-drug films. I think they assumed we knew something about the products. I suppose to public servants we looked like drug addicts, so ‘heavy drug music’ became our specialty. Next we performed in our first television commercial for the grand sum of $25 each. The client was Dolly magazine. We not only wrote the music but we appeared in the commercial as ‘the Dolly men’. With my $25 I bought a Fiat Bambino. It was my first vehicle and as I didn’t have a licence, Rory drove. As we made our way across the

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Harbour Bridge my Bambino unexpectedly blew up, and I was so pissed off I got out and left it there. I didn’t apply for a licence for the next 12 years. It was later in the year that I was offered another show back at the miserable Phillip Street Theatre, now renamed the Richbrooke after the wealthy owner’s wife, Brooke. The show was a comedy revue by John McKellar. John was famous for having written the hit Phillip Street revues of the 1960s. These legendary shows became vehicles for the likes of Gordon Chater, Ruth Cracknell, Jill Perryman, Barry Humphries, Reg Livermore, Carol Raye, Barry Creyton, John Meillon, June Salter and more. McKellar was an amazingly prolific writer – in fact he was Phillip Street’s only bankable writer. His most famous production was A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down. But it was now 1971 and times had changed. Audiences were looking for fresh material and new directions. The show McKellar had planned was called Filth. The theme was pollution and in 1971 the idea of polluting the planet was way ahead of its time. The cast was strong and included the very established Judi Farr, Noel Ferrier and Bunny Gibson, and a young brigade which included John Derum, Michael Caton and myself. The designer was Margaret Fink (later to produce My Brilliant Career with Judy Davis and Sam Neill). A lot of new faces were emerging in the 1970s and they would in time lead the next great push in Australian entertainment. I read McKellar’s script, and as I didn’t have an agent (Tasker never was my agent, he just thought he was), I personally approached McKellar to ask could I perhaps perform some of my own material as well as his. He very generously agreed. Here I was back in the same theatre where I’d been used and abused two years earlier, but now it was under new management and I was paid. This was the first money I’d earned in the entertainment industry. It had only taken two years. While I was dabbling in theatre, Peter Weir had begun to make movies and he approached me to play a lead role in Homesdale. Peter had written the storyline years before, and looking at it today, it was a forerunner of Fantasy Island without the dwarf. It featured a bizarre resort where guests

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lived out their private fantasies. I brought along a couple of my pals to the production: Geoff Malone, my old uni chum, and Kate Fitzpatrick. When Anna Nygh left for London I started looking for a new leading lady (not lover) and I’d seen Kate in The Legend of King O’Malley and she was brilliant. She got the female lead and Malone got the male lead. Rory and I wrote and performed the music, but without a music budget we were forced to beg and scrounge favours. I also co-produced the film with Richard Brennan. Homesdale was the first appearance of my butcher persona Kev Kavanagh. Others who worked on the film included the non-identical twins Hal and Jim McElroy, our location runners. They received the nickname ‘Bib ’n’ Bub the Gumnut Twins’. As runners their job was to pick up food, actors and drink and deliver them to the location. One of our special extras was a would-be filmmaker who worked as the secretary for Ubu Films; he got the role of The Monster because he was over 6 feet 4 inches tall. The young secretary’s name was Phil Noyce. The film was completed in 1971 and entered into the Benson & Hedges Short Film Festival Awards, held at the then Rose Bay Wintergarden. Peter and his wife were travelling overseas at the time on a government grant, so Richard Brennan and I were left to hustle the film. I remember the night that the festival finalists were screened. The principal judge on the panel was a Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski. The response from the audience to Homesdale was fantastic. Skolimowski, however, had different ideas. Before the $2000 award was handed out he declared that Peter Weir was too good for the festival and didn’t need the money – he must have found out that Peter’s father was a Vaucluse real estate agent. Skolimowski finally gave the award to what he believed was the second-best film in the competition, Brake Fluid. I’ve never heard of Skolimowski or the winning director since. At the end of the night I had to be restrained from killing the Polish prick. Kate Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, showed her disappointment by going to dinner with him. We phoned Peter in Paris and informed him of the film’s fate. It only

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convinced him to stay in Europe longer. He had commenced writing a new film which would eventually become The Cars That Ate Paris. After the film festival debacle, Brennan and I made contact with the general manager of Channel Seven, Bruce Gyngell, about running a latenight underground film festival. Gyngell went with the concept and bought the TV rights to Peter’s film for $7000.

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The family I was at Peter Weir’s house in Church Point and we were attempting to write up a few ideas for an ABC children’s radio pilot, planned to replace the beloved Argonaughts Club, a show that had begun back in 1933. We weren’t getting very far because we were constantly being interrupted by a couple of Peter’s young nephews. Having a reasonably short fuse, I finally exploded and roared: ‘If you don’t stop doing that I’m gonna come out there and rip yer bloody arms off!’ It worked: they were terrified. Peter was impressed. ‘Who was that?’ he asked. Without thinking, I replied, ‘That was Aunty Jack.’ Aunty Jack made her first appearance in that ABC children’s pilot in 1969. There she was at the start of the program threatening to leap through the radios of the kiddies of Australia and rip their tiny arms off. The head of Children’s Radio was horrified. The show was rejected. I don’t know if you could get away with those threats today … of course it might work on Taliban Television. In 1971 I met a young Australian television director by the name of Maurice Murphy. Murphy had an enormous amount of experience working in English television during the 1960s. At London Weekend Television (LWT) he’d directed Spike Milligan, the ground-breaking Michael Palin and Terry Jones series The Complete and Utter History of Britain (pre Monty Python), the long-running Doctor in the House series and later Ronnie Barker’s Hark at Barker and The Two Faces of Ronnie Barker. Murphy had left Australia to work at the BBC and was poached by Frank Muir, who offered him the position of directing a new sitcom for LWT, Doctor in the House. Frank Muir was then comedy consultant to LWT, who at the time were negotiating with America’s most successful comedy producer, Norman Lear. Lear was the man who took Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part and translated it into the huge American hit All in the Family, where Alf Garnett’s character became Archie Bunker. Lear

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then adapted Steptoe and Son and it became Sanford and Son. He simply bought the rights to the shows, tailored them to American tastes and made millions. Maurice tells a wonderful story of his early days at London Weekend during a rehearsal of Doctor in the House, when Frank Muir entered with Norman Lear. Maurice was sitting at the back of the studio and overheard Muir telling the American that he had chosen an Australian to direct the sitcom. Lear seemed surprised and asked, ‘Why in the hell would you choose an Australian to direct?’ Muir replied, ‘Because he doesn’t know what the rules are!’ Maurice Murphy never worked to rule. After several years in London, Murphy returned to Australia in 1970 to take up the position as the head of ABC Comedy, replacing His Kiwiness Alan Morris, who had returned to Nu Zuland to direct sheepdog trials, or maybe it was prime-time chicken sexing for NZBC. Murphy’s first job at the ABC was directing two Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Australian TV specials. I was always amazed by how much freedom I was given by the ABC. Little did I know about the dangerous game that Maurice Murphy was playing. Here I was, fresh out of university, thinking that I was the young anarchist, but here was Murphy in a hugely responsible position, within the most bureaucratic of all bureaucracies, delivering new concepts to television by sleight of hand. There aren’t many Maurice Murphys in this world and I was very lucky to have him on my side. From day one he told me, ‘Just write and do what you do, and some way I’ll get it onto television.’ I was so naïve, I thought this is what all producers did. They don’t, and I now know that without Murphy’s belief in both Aunty Jack and Norman Gunston, we may never have seen the light of day. When Murphy first commissioned me to write the Aunty Jack pilot, I remember saying to him that I couldn’t possibly play a woman because I had a moustache. He didn’t agree with me and the rest is history. In fact for the first series I shaved off my moustache so I could have the flexibility of playing moustache-less characters, and I had to glue on a

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moustache to play Aunty Jack. In the second series I regrew the mo, so every character I played had the same ‘lipbrow’. It was also in the second series that I stopped using my real hair for AJ. I used to pull the Afro into buns held tightly with elastic bands. This was until one day when, sitting in the make-up chair, Rory noticed that my scalp was starting to split apart from the constant pressure. From that day on I wore a wig. In 1972 Rory O’Donoghue, John Derum, Kate Fitzpatrick, Sharman Mellick (a young mime artist) and I appeared in a pilot episode of The Comedy Game called ‘Aunty Jack’s Travelling Show’. When Peter Weir left the team in 1970, Rory moved from the band to the stage and took over all Peter’s characters and made them uniquely his. We were confident with the material for the pilot because it had all been tested and refined on stage over the years, in the Architecture revues, Balloon Dubloon and Filth. Maurice Murphy was the final cog in the wheel. Not only did he produce and direct, he wrote material with me, and shaped and moulded the cast and show into its eventual form. Murphy was our guardian angel, and those of us who worked with him or for him should never forget that he gave us all a remarkable opportunity. Before we filmed the pilot, the design and wardrobe departments seemed a little put out when I presented them with detailed drawings of the characters and their costumes. I didn’t know the rules but being able to communicate visually would become an enormous asset. The Aunty Jack Show wasn’t just one style of comedy. We experimented and delved into all areas of humour – vaudeville, slapstick, verbal comedy, social comment, even whimsy and pathos. I believe the show’s uniqueness was its strong musical content, which accounted for almost 50 per cent of the show. The pilot was screened and we received over a thousand objections. Murphy was ecstatic. ‘A thousand objections, that’s fantastic!’ he raved. ‘If that many people hated it, imagine how many liked it.’ Where Maurice was overjoyed, I was mortified because I loathed criticism. But the criticism wasn’t about the program, it was about AJ using

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the word ‘bloody’. Remember, this was 1972. In 1972 the ABC was still leaning heavily towards London with its content. So I don’t think anyone was quite prepared for the Aunty Jack invasion. ‘So vulgar, so working-class and God help us she even says BLOODY!’ As my roots were in the working class, obviously the characters in the show tended to come from the exotic kingdoms of Wollongong and deepest darkest Dapto, the magical lands of mining and industry. Phillip Adams, who had always been a great champion of our early work, arranged to interview the cast and Maurice Murphy. We met for lunch at the tacky little motel standing directly opposite the ABC’s Gore Hill studios. It was during lunch that Adams observed the director of the ABC, Talbot Duckmanton, and several board members dining at a nearby table, all totally unaware of our presence. Phillip’s piece in The Australian was headlined ‘The Young Bulls and the Brahmans’: It is the day following the premiere of Aunty Jack and the production team and cast enter an eatery for some celebratory nosh. They are young, somewhat eccentric in appearance and aglow with talent. Whereupon a number of the ABC’s most burnished brass enter the establishment and sit nearby. They are middle-aged, conservative and aglow with power. Now, the Aunty Jack team has just produced an extraordinary program. Even its most ardent detractors would agree on that. Soon we critics will be crying hosanna and Eureka as we fall over ourselves to praise it. So you might expect one of the ABC’s hierarchy to wander over and say ‘Well done chaps,’ or at very least to acknowledge the team’s presence with a curt nod or a frosty smile. But they don’t. Instead they treat the team with utter ignorance, as if they were a group of Brahmans cold-shouldering some untouchable yobbos.

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Adams went on to suggest that as the older Brahmans happily grazed away in their safe pasture, at no stage were they aware of the young bulls in the next paddock who would cause them so much grief in the future. Murphy was already causing the ABC grief, because without any permission from the powers that be, he had begun production on the first series of The Aunty Jack Show. By the time we were on air, it was too late for the ABC to cancel. Maurice claimed that it was the children of the ABC hierarchy who kept our show on air. He convinced the board members that if they took our program off the air, their children would never forgive them. I think Maurice’s greatest attribute as a director was that he never lost sight of the joke. He was always focused on what was originally funny. Comics tend to get bored in rehearsals doing the same jokes over and over so they start to evolve and change them, but Murphy was always there to pull us back to the moment when the joke was at its funniest. In other words, he was the perfect audience. ——— In 1972 we filmed the first Aunty Jack series. The first person cast was the musically brilliant Rory O’Donoghue. His warm and adorable Thin Arthur became a hugely popular character in the show. All striped tights, braces and a dickie-front, the boy was semi-naked; no wonder women adored him. I was envious; my Aunty Jack didn’t appeal to women. I didn’t have groupies, except for the few male pensioners who hovered around the stage door hoping for a date. Rory was the first and, I believe, the most important member of the team. Ours has been a long and fruitful relationship. Dear Rory has shown me exemplary loyalty over the years, and has always been there for me, whether as a performer, a business partner or a friend. He was much more than a working partner. He was the younger sibling I’d never had. Not only was he remarkably gifted, but more importantly he was willing to take risks. I think our greatest moments in The

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Aunty Jack Show were as Neil and Errol, the two little philosophers who sat on the park bench and sang and played their thoughts to music. Their absurd but whimsical observations of life also reflected their genuine love and respect for one another. I think their rapport best mirrored Rory’s and mine. If Aunty Jack was the guts and balls of the show, then Neil and Errol were its humanity. When I look at the relationship between Aunty Jack and Thin Arthur I also realise that they also parallel elements of our personalities: me, the contradiction, the brash, aggressive and sentimental soul, and Rory the strong, supportive and honourable friend. Rors and I have never been what one would call ‘best friends’ in the traditional sense, meaning we don’t spend endless hours socialising. We’re more like family. When we work together it is always effective, efficient and most importantly fun. There has always been an innate understanding of how to perform with one voice – it’s almost as if we have an ability to second-guess one another. Of all the people I have worked with, Rory O’Donoghue has by far the most finely tuned emotional intelligence. Together we’ve worked on many musical ideas, from feature filmscores to musical theatre. Where Rory was a trained musician, I was totally intuitive. I once asked him if it would be a good idea for me to learn to read music. Rory’s answer was no, he thought the discipline might ruin what I did naturally. Rory is also the only person I know who can decipher my shorthand method of talking. When I become excited I tend to speak in non sequiturs and randomly jump from idea to idea, but in all the years we worked together, I have never seen him fazed by it, whereas I’ve seen many others become very frustrated with my creative shorthand. We started on this quest in 1966 and we still remain great friends. Another dear friend and honorary member of the original team was writer Geoffrey Atherden. His comedy writing still lives on as some of the strongest and most memorable material in The Aunty Jack Show. Geoff ultimately went on to become one of the country’s finest comedy writers,

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responsible for shows like Mother and Son, Grass Roots and the very early mockumentary BabaKiueria. If Rory’s and my connection was serendipitous, then so was my first meeting Geoff. Geoff was a year or two ahead of me in Architecture, and we lived not far from one another. He was from Bexley, I was from Marrickville, and as Geoff had a car, he’d sometimes drop me off on his way home. We spent many hours talking, laughing and telling stories in the front seat of his car, keeping the neighbours and my parents awake for hours. When I returned to Sydney University to start up the revue, Geoffrey Atherden was the first person I approached to write. His scripts stood head and shoulders above those of everyone else. He was a natural writer, but he waited for many years before he felt confident enough to give up his career in architecture and become a full-time writer. It’s probably because Geoff was there from the start that I feel the same strong connection to him that I feel for Rory. Again, we don’t see a lot of one another, but when we do meet, it’s as if time’s stood still. Our relationship has never changed; we still talk and dream like those keen young students who sat in the front seat of Geoff’s MG TF British racinggreen sports car. The next member of our cast was the fabulous Sandra McGregor (Flange Desire), a cross between Superwoman and Marilyn Monroe. Sandy was one of a kind and I think her uniqueness has never been matched in comedy in this country. She stood out far above all the other actresses who auditioned for The Aunty Jack Show. The audition piece I had created was designed to find someone who could perform as a ballerina to the music of Swan Lake and tell a joke at the same time. The challenge for the actress was to imagine herself dancing as a member of the chorus of cygnets, while surreptitiously telling the rest of the chorus a joke. We were becoming quite desperate, as no one had got anywhere near our expectations, when along came Sandra McGregor, who performed the entire piece on pointes and told a joke about a snake. She even used gestures from the original ballet choreography to extend the joke. By the end of her routine we were in hysterics and she got the job.

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Sandy certainly added a wonderful zaniness to the show. Her greatest comic asset was total unpredictability. No one could be quite sure whether Sandy would deliver what she gave in rehearsal, or whether she might spontaneously do something totally out of left field. I still believe that she is one of the truly original Australian comics. Add to this mix the wonderfully talented John Derum as the bumptious know-it-all Narrator Neville, complete with top hat and tails, and you had the Aunty Jack gang. John was a huge asset to the show, a fine character actor and a wonderful straight man, but at times he and I clashed. I first met Derum when I was cast in Filth at the Richbrooke Theatre. During the run of the revue our relationship became quite volatile. Despite the differences, I invited John to join us in the cast of Hamlet on Ice at the old Nimrod Theatre, where we spent three enjoyable months. Next I recommended Derum to Maurice Murphy for the Aunty Jack pilot. I needed him to balance the show. I still believe he’s the best straight man I’ve ever worked with. The edgy, aggressive nature of our personal relationship translated into some quite electric moments on the screen. I could never cruise when I appeared with him, he just made me work that much harder. Derum’s experience in the industry and his ability to underplay made him a giant asset. John was the good ship Aunty Jack’s anchor. As for me, I never imagined myself as an elderly woman in a dress. I was a mere slip of a lad. But here I was, discovering my inner fat woman. I called this technique ‘Method Pantomime Acting’. Donning the costume was strangely ritualistic. First I’d slip into my green and gold footy socks then step into my old tan workboots. Next they’d lace me into the foam fat suit (that increased my body temperature by a good 10 degrees – it was like performing in a sauna); then came the dress, the wig and granny glasses, and finally the golden glove. Once I put on that boxing glove the transformation was complete, I became ‘Yer old fat Aunty Jack’ and I really did feel ten feet tall. It’s strange… once you put on a boxing glove, it’s very tempting to use it and I’d constantly find myself punching people.

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I have to say there aren’t many benefits in playing elderly aunties, but one is that even today people stop me in the street and say, ‘Grahame, you haven’t aged a bit!’ Of course I haven’t aged – I was playing an 80-yearold woman for God’s sake! Series One was hardly a booming success and received mixed reviews. Nevertheless, there was talk of a second series. I only kept the nice reviews: Phillip Adams, The Australian: ‘an extraordinary program’; Sandra Dawson, The Australian: ‘one of the only pieces of television wit worth recalling’; Gavin Souter, the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘more original than Monty Python, and far more interesting musically, a great leap forward in television comedy’; Denis O’Brien, The Bulletin: ‘splendidly original and beautifully uncompromising’. It was between Series One and Series Two that John Derum informed us that he had been offered his own series on Channel Seven, The True Blue Show. Another dilemma. It was like the Peter Weir experience; again the team was breaking up. What happened next was serendipity. I met a young actor by the name of Garry McDonald at an audition for a radio commercial. We were both testing for the voice of the Peek Frean Pixie. Luckily neither of us got the commercial, but Garry generously offered me a lift. He owned a car. On the way home I mentioned Derum’s move to Seven and impetuously asked Garry would he be interested. He said yes, and the rest is history. They were fun days and he worked with us on Aunty Jack Series Two, Flash Nick from Jindavick and Wollongong the Brave. I’d seen Garry perform at NIDA and he’d made me laugh. He confessed to me that he had never seen The Aunty Jack Show, but he had read an interview with me and his first impression was that I was a wanker. The article he’d read was me talking about a character I played called Mervyn Whipple, Man of A Thousand Faces, who believed he could tell jokes by using only the 23 muscles in his face. Garry believed that I believed that I could tell jokes with the muscles of my face. This was a worry. Would we have to underline the jokes for him?

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Aunty ‘the onion’ While shooting The Aunty Jack Show pilot in 1972, I was approached by a young props buyer who asked whether I thought the pilot might go into a series. I told him there were no guarantees that it would go ahead. He then let me know that the Harley-Davidson I was riding was available for as little as $200. At the time I was performing and writing the show for the princely sum of $300 a week, so I told him I couldn’t really afford it. Next the wily props guy bought the bike himself and when the show went into series, he hired the bike to the ABC for $100 a day. He earned more money out of the show than I did, because I must have used the bike on at least 50 occasions. During the filming of the show at no point did I ever acquire a licence to drive a motor car, let alone obtain a permit to ride the powerful beast that was Aunty Jack’s big black Harley-Davidson. We shot the opening titles at the Kiama Blowhole, and this was the first time I’d ever ridden a motorbike. There I was, sitting on 1200cc of raw unadulterated power. A mechanic on the day gave me a quick rundown on the bike’s hand gears and he explained how they were similar to those of a car. This of course meant nothing to me because I couldn’t drive a car, let alone a motorbike. He also explained there was a thing called a foot clutch. Each time the Harley was used there was always a police presence at filming, either to close roads or direct traffic, and on every occasion the police asked me for permission for them to have a ride on my bike. Never once did they ask me to produce a licence. Rory was well aware of my lack of vehicular experience and despite this, managed to sit bravely in the side-car while Maurice Murphy gave me the final rundown on the line he wanted me to drive for the cameras. I was directed to come at full speed over a large hill to make our grand entrance. Once over the hill, I was then to travel across a rather rough and bumpy quarry, getting as close to the huge ocean swell as possible. The waves were crashing over a 20-foot-high cliff wall and spraying into the

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quarry. I told him I was cool. The clapper loader marked the first take ‘Scene one, take one’ and three cameras rolled to cover the action. However, just before Murphy called action, I stood up from the bike and yelled out, ‘Maurice, which one did he say was the brake again?’ Rory, who had been so calm until now, slowly eased himself from the side-car, turning a whiter shade of pale. ——— Between Series One and Two we filmed the musical special Aunty Jack Rox On. Special guests were Stevie Wright and George Young, ex Easybeats. Maurice was determined to create a memorable opening and he planned for Aunty Jack to enter the ABC car park at Gore Hill accompanied by a large entourage of bikers. To cast his bikers Maurice drove to the Vauxhall Inn in Parramatta, home of the Gypsy Jokers (one of the most fearsome bikie gangs in Australia) to ask if they would like to be in the show. When I first met the gang, I was horrified, but Murphy convinced me that they were all great fans of the show and were only too thrilled to ride with the Aunty Jack colours. When filming commenced, I could tell that the Jokers were more interested in my Harley than they were in my character. Thirty bikies assembled just off the Pacific Highway near the ABC’s Gore Hill studios. Several cameras were set up to film Aunty Jack riding at the head of the pack with the Gypsy Jokers in tight formation behind her. Maurice wanted to film the pack travelling through frame past the ABC sign. Maybe the bikers didn’t hear his directions, or perhaps they didn’t want to, because when we took off to film the establishing shot, as we reached the ABC sign, the only thing between us and the entrance to the ABC car park was a huge police presence and a concrete traffic island. Being on the opposite side of the road from the ABC was no deterrent to the Gypsy Jokers – they just made a hard right-hand turn and drove up and over the traffic island, across the Pacific Highway, totally ignoring the oncoming traffic and the police. They then proceeded directly into the

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car park. From that moment on, the shoot was bedlam. The director and the camera crew were safely set up on the roof of the ABC studios. But down at ground zero, anarchy reigned. Even Phil Ugly, the charismatic leader of the Jokers, was having trouble controlling his troops. There was one quite nasty rat-faced character who called himself the Jester and approached Rory and demanded his striped tights. Rat-face threatened that if Rory didn’t hand them over, he’d kill him. Next, just for fun, the Jester and Phil Ugly’s lieutenant, Haystack, a giant of a man who wore a Nazi helmet and a heavy military greatcoat over about four leather jackets, decided on a whim that it might be funny for them both to drive their motorbikes into the ABC foyer. They did and proceeded to terrorise every woman in sight. The large police contingent was suddenly nowhere to be seen, while the director and crew remained safely on the roof. That left Rory and myself to beg for some form of reason. Luckily Phil Ugly was a reasonable man and could see the error of his idiot children’s ways, so he drove into the foyer to bring them back. I did manage to speak to him later and he really was a very charming fellow. Sadly several weeks later I read that he had been shot and killed by a rival gang and, as in all gypsy funerals, Phil Ugly was buried standing up. Rory wasn’t the only one to receive a threat on the day. The giant Haystack suggested that if I didn’t let him ride my bike, he would recommend that I be the gang’s next ‘onion’ (i.e. a girl who agrees to have group sex with a gang). Aunty Jack was horrified. Every day of filming was fraught with danger. But the most risky experience was yet to come.

Elephanto reducioso I had written a sketch for Aunty Jack called ‘Dried Elephant Arrangements for Beginners or elephanto reducioso’. It was about the difficulty of keeping

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full-sized elephants as pets. Aunty Jack’s remedy was to invent a method of minimising the size of the standard elephant, thus making it possible to keep several of them as decorations on a small mantelpiece. AJ’s theory was that, ‘If you can place an elephant in a compound and keep it off liquid for 10 to 20 years, it’s amazing to see how much they shrink.’ She adds the disclaimer, ‘Kiddies remember, don’t ever spill your soft drink on them when they’re totally dehydrated because they may just swell up and crush you to death. Remember, elephants never forget. Especially when they’ve been off liquids for 20 years!’ Of course once a writer has written a sketch, it is then in the hands of the directors and producers who choose the location and, in this case, an available elephant. That’s how I found myself, early one morning, at Taronga Park Zoo dressed as Aunty Jack and working with a massive bull elephant. The ABC camera crew were all safely set up on a small hillock about 150 feet from the action, filming on a long lens. I’d rehearsed my dialogue and arranged all my props, which were made up of a box of small model elephants. There was also a table and chairs and a washing line with a range of boxing gloves hanging from it. At 8 a.m. Abu, a 5-tonne Indian elephant, was released from his compound and brought to the location by his trainer. Final make-up checks were done and wardrobe adjusted my padding. The elephant was in place and all was in readiness. Maybe it was because I chose to change my co-star’s name from Abu to Colin that got the relationship off on the wrong foot, because whatever could go wrong, went wrong. When the director called action, I was alone on set with a 5-tonne beast who was totally out of control. Without his trainer, Colin wandered aimlessly around the set creating havoc, upending tables and chairs, smashing props and constantly attempting to swallow my gold boxing glove … while I was still wearing it. I realised that Col was definitely a one-take elephant and had no intention of staying a moment longer than was necessary. It was sheer chaos. The camera may have been rolling, but there was

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no cameraman, because he was with the rest of the crew, rolling around on the grass in hysterics while I frantically tried to adapt the script, desperately ad-libbing as Colin rampaged around me. The potential danger of the situation didn’t enter my head. In fact, as the disaster unfolded, I became so manic that at one point I thrust my entire padded body aggressively into Colin’s face and verbally challenged him to a fight, finally resorting to punching him in the trunk, directly between the eyes. Only then did I hear the trainer calling to me from the safety of the grassy knoll. He was obviously buoyed by my apparent confidence and was now yelling directions like, ‘Tap him under his trunk and then grab onto it.’ Desperate for any form of guidance, I carried out the instruction and without warning Colin hoisted me off the ground with his trunk and hurled me onto his back. As I sat there straddling the beast, I looked down helplessly to see the entire crew, and now even the trainer, collapsed and pissing themselves with laughter. After what seemed like an eternity astride Colin, I eventually scrambled over his giant skull, grabbed onto his ears and slid down his trunk, hanging onto it like a drainpipe. When I reached the ground, the elephant trainer approached me. ‘Shit you’re game!’ he said. ‘Mate, that mongrel Abu, he’s a mad bugger. Did you know he broke his last trainer’s arm?’ ‘No?’ ‘Yeah!’ he said. ‘That bloody elephant must’ve hated Steve, cos when Steve was putting him back into his compound last month, Abu turns around, hooks his trunk round the bars on the elephant gate and slams it on Steve’s arm. Totally bloody mangled it. Steve reckons he won’t work with the bastard no more.’ This was definitely the briefing I needed to have had beforehand. But I’m afraid if I had, this bizarre sketch would never have happened. ———

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Something remarkable occurred at 11.59 and 30 seconds on the evening of Friday 28 February 1975. Aunty Jack, Thin Arthur and Kid Eager introduced colour television to Australia. It was unimaginable that the ABC would offer the Aunty Jack team the opportunity of introducing colour television, because they knew we never did what we were told. I can’t claim that what happened next was all my own anarchic vision, but the very naughty Maurice Murphy managed to produce a 5-minute segment beginning in black and white and changing after 3 minutes to colour at midnight. At least that’s what Maurice told Programming. Maurice did indeed produce the right length segment, he just misinformed the ABC when the change to colour would occur. What Maurice produced was a video where the changeover to colour occurred 2 minutes 30 seconds into the sketch and not 3 minutes. This meant that the ABC went to colour 30 seconds before midnight, beating all the commercial channels who played by the rules. An interesting postscript to the launch of colour: the ABC received a hundreds of calls from viewers complaining that they weren’t seeing any colour on their black and white sets. With a larger profile, thanks to the introduction of colour television, I was next offered a highly paid commercial for Trident Television, an English company who were about to launch a chain of colour television rental stores across the country. If truth be known, most performers would work for nothing. Money is rarely an imperative; the applause is reward enough. However, when it came to selling my creations to commercial enterprises, I wasn’t as generous. I sent Maurice Murphy in to negotiate with the advertising agency. His brief was to ask a ridiculous price for AJ, not to compromise and to leave the meeting with his dignity intact. If he left with dignity, it meant I also retained mine. I didn’t care whether I got the commercial or not. It’s a very strong position to bargain from; if you don’t care whether you get the job, you can ask any price, and I believed Aunty Jack was worth it. They agreed on the money! The advertising agency gave me total freedom to write the TV, the

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radio and a full colour 2-minute 35mm theatre ad. Maybe, as they say, time heals all wounds, or possibly I was losing my mind, because when it was suggested by the agency that it might be amusing for me to work with an elephant again, I agreed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my mate Colin (Abu) wasn’t available. The Zoo had certain rules about transporting their inmates to the outside world. So I left it up to the agency to find me a suitable elephant. Big mistake! The basic thrust of the commercial was Aunty Jack dismissing black and white television, while professing the joys of colour. The location was a giant excavation pit. On the edge of the pit two large television sets were placed side by side; one, an old black and white model, showed a scratchy fuzzy image, while the other television showed the very same image but in glorious colour. This was a brand new Trident colour TV. As Aunty Jack spruiks the benefits of colour, she suddenly becomes aware of an elephant sitting on a seat watching the colour television. Typically, AJ berates the beast and roars, ‘Colin, what are you doing watching colour television? Animals only see in black and white!’ With that she storms over to the seated elephant and thumps it in the stomach, knocking it to the ground with a single punch. The theatre commercial was shot exactly as I wrote it. Colin (this time a female by the name of Misha) did everything as directed. She sat on the seat with her front legs raised and her trunk extended skywards. I walked straight up to the great creature hovering over me and as gently as possible poked her in the stomach with my boxing glove. After several takes and much goading from the elephant trainer, as well as a lot of clever editing, Colin (Misha) lurched from her seat and hit the deck in a cloud of red dust. From that point on the rest of the shoot was a breeze. Misha had been hired from a local circus and after her big scene, her wrangler approached me to have a bit of a chat. He started with, ‘Did you know Misha killed her last trainer?’ This had to be a joke. ‘Did they tell you to wind me up?’ I asked. ‘No!’ he said. ‘I just thought you must have known that Misha has a really bad temper. She hates having to sit up like that. Last year when she

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was rehearsing sit-ups at the circus, she lost it, rolled off her stool and did a headstand on top of her trainer. She squashed him flat.’ ‘Nobody told me.’ ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘They probably didn’t want to upset you. Anyway, I think she must’ve liked you.’ I have never worked with elephants since.

Logies Ahhhhh, the bittersweet nature of comedy. In 1973 The Aunty Jack Show was nominated for a Logie Award. (For the uninitiated, a Logie is the Australian TV equivalent of the Uzbekistan Academy Awards.) Rory and I were flown to Melbourne for the presentation. We were seated at the main table, with the publishers of TV Week, Southdown Press, the sponsors of the Awards. Here I was, a young architect who’d recently arrived into the comedy scene. I’d completed my first television series on the ABC and unexpectedly it was up for a Logie. The state awards were presented first. There was a category for Best and Fairest Local Weather Presenter and one by one each state winner burst into tears, thanked their mothers, thanked their producers, and then thanked God for the award. There must have been something in the water. As the ceremony proceeded, I observed that celebrity after celebrity wept on cue after receiving their prized Logie. So when Bert Newton announced ‘The winner for Best TV Comedy is The Aunty Jack Show,’ I was astounded. You have to remember that I was new to all this and had no idea how seriously the industry took itself. As Rory and I made our way to the stage, we received our award from the special guest presenter Gina Lollobrigida. As I moved on I began to ‘tear up’, and by the time I got to the microphone I was veritably heaving with emotion.

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I began my acceptance speech with, ‘Winning this Logie,’ sniff, ‘is the most exciting thing to happen to me … today!’ Rory responded, ‘Oh yeah, what about the trip down in the plane?’ ‘No, he’s right,’ I agreed. ‘That was very exciting.’ Rory continued, ‘And the girls we met in the lift?’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let me rephrase that. Winning this Logie … is one of the most exciting things to happen to me … today!’ The audience laughed. But when I returned to our table, TV Week were furious. One of the publishers snapped at me, ‘You ungrateful shit. We’ve given you an award and this is the way you treat us. We’ll never write another article about you again.’ And they didn’t. They banned me. I tried to explain. I said, ‘Hang on guys, I’m a comic. I do jokes.’ Things changed from that day on and television was never as much fun.

Lasse and the trout In 1973 Maurice Murphy decided to enter The Aunty Jack Show into the Montreux World Television Festival, held each year in Switzerland. We both decided to attend. This was my first trip overseas and I flew via London. It took almost 38 hours to get to Switzerland. I think I must have caught the milk run. Once I arrived in Montreux I slept for two days. When I eventually got to the Festival it was exciting to see our little program presented for the first time with foreign subtitles. The most disappointing translation came from the French. They couldn’t even manage to get the name of the show right, and had translated the title as Tante Jacqueline. ‘Aunty’ was feminine, therefore the Christian name had to be feminine also. They absolutely refused to mix genders. After the show had been screened, we were approached by London Weekend Television, who seemed keen to take it to England. We were more interested in winning a prize at the time, and as I was sleeping with

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one of the judges, I had a fair idea of how we were faring in the voting. Early on she had informed me that there was a possibility of us picking up third prize. The panel were tossing up between a British production and an American production for the Golden Rose first prize. As the days went by, the decision-making became more convoluted. I was next informed that America and England had let it be known to the judging panel that neither party would be happy to accept second prize. Even with all this confusion, our show was still looking good for a Bronze Rose. This was until the Russians approached the panel and informed them that if they didn’t get a prize, they would take their borscht and walk. Shaken by the threat, the jury decided to invent a new award to appease the unhappy Russians and created ‘The Golden Rose of Montreux Black Comedy Award’, which the Ruskies gladly accepted. The funniest moment in the Russian show was a sketch with Marie Antoinette at the guillotine having her head removed, just so it could roll down a channel and knock over ten bowling pins. Hilarious Russian joke! With this kind of political foreplay, little old Australia was never going to be in the running for a guernsey, and we were soon bumped from the contest. With a style of diplomacy reminiscent of the United Nations, the World Jury decided to award the first prize to Sweden, a nice neutral country whose entry, The NSVIP’s (Not So Very Important People), was produced by the American Lee ‘These Boots Were Made for Walkin’ Hazlewood. This diplomatic masterstroke meant that the Americans and the English wouldn’t have their noses put out of joint. In this case both countries were awarded equal second and a nice little neutral country took out first. Everyone was happy but me. Once Murphy got wind that there was no prize in the offing, he left Switzerland and headed back to London. I stayed and after several days wandering lonely as a cloud that floats on high and lowly hill, and all at once I spied a crowd. Not exactly a crowd but two very bizarre Swedish comedians. I’d been sitting alone in a restaurant beside Lake Geneva, and had been waiting to be served for over an hour. The eatery claimed to serve fresh trout, and indeed the fish of the day could be seen swimming around in their fish tanks, completely oblivious to the fate that lay before

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them. The tanks were displayed on three walls, while the fourth wall was a glorious view directly over the lake and up to the snow-capped pinnacles. All very evocative, like an expensive postcard, but with no bloody service. As I twiddled my thumbs, hoping that a waiter might deign to serve me, two young Swedish gents approached my table and without saying a word joined me. I was only too pleased for the company, because this restaurant experience was turning into a marathon. There was absolutely no conversation to break the ice, just lots of nodding between myself and the other two who rattled on in Swedish (or was it Danish?). Of course I was immediately disadvantaged, being monolingual, but I did eventually pluck up the courage to introduce myself in English. The Swedes of course spoke perfect English, and informed me that they knew who I was, as they had seen The Aunty Jack Show the day before and wanted to let me know how much they had enjoyed it. The year before the two Swedes had won Best Comedy at the Festival. Their show was called The Magic Box and was produced for Swedish Radio, which in Sweden is what they call Swedish Television (only the Swedes know why). They were an odd-looking couple. The taller of the two, Lasse Åberg, was close to 6 feet 6 inches tall, incredibly thin, with lank long hair and a drooping Zapata moustache, while Ardy Strüwer was short, rotund and of Asian appearance. He was an Indonesian, born in Denmark. It seemed that ignoring restaurant patrons was a Swiss tradition. Lasse and Ardy were convinced that the quality of Swiss service equated to the length of one’s hair and, they assured me, given the length of mine, I would never be served. It was at this point that Lasse enquired if I had a pen. I always carried a pen or two with me, so I placed my collection on the table. Without hesitating, the Swedes snatched up my pens and Pentels and began illustrating their meal on the paper tablecloth provided. Lasse commenced by drawing a plate and then a knife and fork on the tablecloth. As he did so, Ardy sketched three-dimensional salt and pepper shakers and a rather ornate water jug. Lasse then studied the direction of the sun and

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proceeded to cast shadows of the illustrated utensils onto the tablecloth. With still no sign of a waitress, I decided to join in and sketched a wine glass for each of us. This was becoming like a game of chess. Ardy bounced off my idea and created a bottle of wine, even down to the detail of the cork lying beside the bottle. These weren’t just scribbles, they were richly rendered pen and ink drawings. For Lasse’s pièce de résistance, he illustrated a perfectly cooked trout on the plate he’d drawn. At this stage a waitress noticed the mayhem at table 23 and approached. Appearing mesmerised by the details on the tablecloth, she asked would we like to order. Lasse placed some Swiss francs in the waitress’s hand, then with a flourish, he stripped the paper cloth from the table, folded it carefully and placed it into his satchel. The Swedes saluted the stunned waitress and promptly exited the restaurant. From that day on we were like the Three Amigos. Inseparable! I discovered later that my Swedish pals were both highly acclaimed European artists. Lasse has several works hanging in the London Tate Gallery. When I eventually saw their television show months later, I was surprised at the freedom from censorship in Sweden. In one sketch, Sweden’s number one songbird was filmed singing her latest hit naked under a shower with the hosts of the show, Lasse and Ardy, also naked, scrubbing her back. I thought about asking the ABC, but I didn’t think Australia was ready for it.

There is another business like showbiz After the first series of The Aunty Jack Show we were approached by Picture Records, who had invented a process laminating a photograph into the clear vinyl surface of a record. It seemed like the right visual idea for an Aunty Jack single. Rory and I recorded ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’ at Col Joye’s studios in Glebe. Our engineer, Bruce Brown, had calculated a way of making Aunty Jack’s

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voice even deeper and more gravelly by using an octave dropper. Once complete, the record was rushed out to the market and within days it had shot to Number One on all the hit parades. Bob Rogers, who was 2UE’s top disc jockey at the time, once informed me that even though ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’ held the Number One position for 18 weeks in their charts, management still demanded that it not be played because of the use of the word ‘bloody’. The same applied to stations 2SM and 2UW. Imagine banning a song because of the word bloody. Today in rap it’s almost compulsory to have at least ten ‘fuckings’ per verse. Despite the bans, the single sold a record-breaking 250,000 copies. It wasn’t until we were 100,000 copies into our sales that we discovered our record label, Picture Records, was only a two-dollar shelf company set up in Brisbane. We soon realised we were about to see no money when the managing director of our fly-by-night record company explained to us that his factory had been flooded, he wasn’t insured, and there just wasn’t the money to pay us our royalties. We immediately removed the rights from Picture Records and renegotiated the re-release of our single with Polygram. We went on to sell another 150,000 copies. After we’d finished Series Two in 1974, with Polygram’s support we went back into the studio to record the album Aunty Jack Sings Wollongong. To promote the album we mounted a live stage show to tour Australia. The show was a rock’n’roll concert with sketches presenting all the characters from the TV show. We did a trial run in Wollongong to see if there was an audience out there for this type of show. And if there was, what in the hell were they like? The Wollongong show was an eye-opener. The fans ranged from the elderly to university students and children, plus a smattering of typical ABC weirdos. It’s scary when you actually meet your audience for the first time. The Wollongong patrons really got into the swing of the show and arrived wearing workboots, boilersuits and hard hats. It was the Wollongong concert that gave us the theme for our national tour. We re-titled the show Aunty Jack and the Gong in Bloody Concert and Maurice Murphy booked the biggest venues he could find across the

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length and breadth of Australia. It was risky, because no one had ever done anything like it before. The touring party included Rory, Garry and me, plus a five-piece band, two female backing singers, a stage manager, a props manager, two roadies, a sound engineer and a tour manager. We attempted to recreate the energy and the dynamic we had in the TV show and transfer that to the stage. At the beginning of the concert, as the lights in the auditorium slowly faded, the musicians appeared on stage wearing their regulation workboots, boilersuits and hard hats. One by one the band members religiously approached the bundy clock and registered their start-work time. Once bundied on, each player began their night’s work on their preferred instrument. They commenced in sequence. First the drummer would lay down a feel; next the bass would bundy on and start up, followed by rhythm guitar, then came the keyboard player and the back-up singers. Together they played the opening riff, all the time building an incredible sense of anticipation. On a darkened stage a pin spot would pick up Rory’s scantily clad Thin Arthur as he leapt from the wings onto the stage wearing only tights, dickie front and a straw boater and playing the most deafening guitar solo. It was a very hard entrance to top. Rory’s appearance was closely followed by Garry McDonald’s Kid Eager wailing away on harmonica, and finally my old fat Aunty Jack bounded onto stage threatening to remove everyone’s appendages. The national tour schedule was exhausting, performing in 28 concert halls over 31 days across Australia. The tour commenced in Newcastle, and to promote our opening concert we borrowed the giant boxing glove built by the ABC Props Department for the Aunty Jack Rox On special. It measured almost 20 metres in length and required a large pantechnicon to transport it to Newcastle for our first concert. The glove was parked outside the venue. After completing a successful concert we discovered to our surprise that our giant boxing glove had been dismantled and souvenired by the local university students. Our next stop was Brisbane, and from there it was a bus to the Gold Coast, followed by Tamworth, Armidale, Orange, Canberra, Wagga Wagga,

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Albury, Mildura, Shepparton, Bendigo and Ballarat. It was like the lyrics from ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’: I’ve been to Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, etc. And … Dapto, Dapto, Dapto and Wollongong We’ve been everywhere Even Dapto!

So sang the Farrelly Brothers. When we finally arrived in Melbourne we filmed both live concerts for our next series Wollongong the Brave at the Dallas Brooks Hall – and this was only halfway. From Melbourne we flew to Perth and then back to Adelaide. Our sound engineer was a Kiwi by the name of Wintanuki Wynyard. Win was a giant of a man and had earlier engineered the Aunty Jack Sings Wollongong album. When we mentioned that we were going on the road he jumped at the chance. The tour was punishing, covering all the capitals and provinces. It was basically a series of one-night stands: fly in, set up, perform, then go back to yet another forgettable hotel room. Our worst experience was in Adelaide. The crew had been incredibly well-behaved, but everyone was getting a bit testy with one another. The Adelaide hotel manager obviously had a problem with longhairs and constantly complained to our tour manager, threatening to call the police and have us evicted. On one occasion Rory and I were sharing the hotel lift with our Maori engineer Wintanuki, when the hotel manager entered the lift. He was a pompous little man and totally ignored our presence. After a long embarrassed silence Big Win turned to the manager and said, ‘Hey Bro, did you know that 20 years ago my people used to eat people like you?’

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The manager looked petrified, trapped in an elevator with one hungry Maori engineer. I’m sure that if our per diems hadn’t been so generous, Wintanuki may have dined on the gentleman’s arm. Hangi’d, of course. We were persecuted for no reason and Adelaide needed to pay for its sins. So we concocted a plan to revenge the unjust treatment dealt out to us by the hotel manager. It wasn’t until we arrived in Tasmania that I received my first urgent phone call from an apoplectic hotel manager. He begged to know what we had left in our rooms to create the atrocious smell. I didn’t bother to tell him that the day before we flew out of Adelaide we’d bought two kilos of green prawns and stuffed them into the curtain rods in each of our rooms. In Tasmania, we staged two concerts in Launceston and Hobart. I will never forget the Hobart ABC News debacle. They decided to interview the little-known Norman Gunston and innocently asked the face of Channel WOG4 whether he was excited about performing in Hobart for the first time. Garry, staying totally in character, agreed that yes, he was excited, but he wasn’t sure how many people would turn up and wondered whether in Tasmania you counted an audience by the number of bums on seats or the number of heads in the audience. That night we had a small house, because after Norman’s interview more than 50 per cent of our audience cancelled. Obviously Tasmanians couldn’t relate to Norman Gunston, although a lot of them looked like they had the same bloodlines. For a glorious finale, we returned to Sydney and staged four sold-out shows in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. It’s one of the highlights of my life. The reception we received was massive and we performed encore after encore to a rapt audience. After being on the road for a month my voice was pretty much the worse for wear. Having sung (bellowed) through 28 concerts in both Aunty’s rasping bass voice and then suddenly switching to Kev Kavanagh’s screechingly high vocals, I’d almost lost the ability to speak. Our roadies came to the rescue early on tour, convincing me that if I drank a couple of glasses of port before each show I would relieve the pain in my throat and smooth out my vocal chords. By the time we

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reached Sydney I was drinking a bottle of port a night and was well on the way to becoming a member of AA. The constant damage to my throat over the years was caused by performing a range of strange-voiced characters. For instance, on Nude Radio my Roger the Snail was so deep he was almost inaudible, whereas my Monster voice was so high even dogs couldn’t hear it. These absurd characters may have ruined my vocal chords, but they salvaged a boring reedy little voice and created one that now sounds like someone speaking off mike with their fingers up their nostrils. A hell of a way to add timbre to a voice. Later in my career I began having major throat problems. During rehearsals for the musical Captain Bloody in 1985, it reached a point where the right side of my throat was swelling up to the size of a tennis ball and I was finding it very difficult to swallow. Noel Ferrier was producing the show for the Elizabethan Theatre Company and recommended that I go and see a Macquarie Street ear, nose and throat specialist that the company used. The specialist examined my throat and informed me that I had several small calcium deposits blocking my saliva ducts and causing the swelling. His suggestion was an operation, explaining that he would have to cut out the stones, which meant there was about a ten per cent chance of damaging the nerves to my tongue, which could possibly leave me with a slight speech impediment. I told him that I’d prefer to seek an alternative cure. He laughed and smugly replied, ‘My friend, if somebody shoots you, don’t go to an acupuncturist!’ I then asked him how much he was charging. He informed me it was his standard fee of $150. I replied, ‘Then I think I can afford to tell you to get fucked!’ All my life I’d watched my parents grovel to doctors and tug the forelock to anyone who they believed was above their station. There was no way this smug prick was going to bully me. My parents were beautiful passive sheep who did exactly what everyone asked of them, without ever questioning. They respected authority, unlike me. I would often intervene to protect them, and they always begged me not to cause trouble. But I could never stand by and watch my parents be bullied.

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Altered states Many fans of our TV show obviously consumed drugs before and during the viewing of the program. Of course many of them assumed that for us to perform, we’d also have to be stoned. How wrong they were. I learned early that I was totally intolerant to any form of mind-altering substance. I could not relax, or cope, by taking any substance that caused me to lose control. Grass and hash made me dreadfully paranoid. Cocaine wasn’t my style either. There were three reasons I didn’t acquire a taste for cocaine and they were: one, it was expensive; two, it smelt like cat’s piss; and three, it seemed to make ordinary people act like dickheads. And I certainly couldn’t recommend Benzedrine, as it definitely affected my metabolism forever. I recall a night at Kosta’s when I’d smoked my first joint and I suddenly imagined that an argument with the dinner guests was about to ensue, so I made excuses to leave (I was also a catastrophist). I was convinced that the only way for me to avoid the approaching argument was to escape upstairs to my bedroom. Once in the bedroom I lay down because my heart was now palpitating furiously. During this anxiety attack, I also began hearing the siren of an ambulance in the distance, which totally convinced me that they were coming for me, because they knew I was having a heart attack. My imagination was working overtime. Maybe marijuana is for people who don’t have the ability to visualise? Another instance was when an old girlfriend offered me some Buddha grass. She thought that as we were having problems with our relationship, this might help us patch it up. It didn’t help – in fact, I began to hallucinate and became rampantly paranoid, believing that I’d been lured to her apartment to be stabbed to death. This thought was reinforced by the drama of the raging electrical storm outside and the constant reflection of lightning flashes off the carving knives in her kitchen. The combination of the storm and the repetitive flickering images of knives terrified me so much, I panicked and ran all the way from Bondi through the city, across the Harbour Bridge and finally arrived at Maurice Murphy’s

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house in Willoughby at seven in the morning, having run 16 kilometres through a ferocious electrical storm. When I arrived at Murphy’s doorstep, I was not only completely drenched but also totally non compos mentis. Straight away Maurice filled me up with orange juice in an attempt to slow down the hallucinations. I was hopelessly confused and couldn’t seem to differentiate between what was real and what was a figment of the imagination. I was having dreadful moments of existential angst and demanded that Maurice prove that I was really in his home. I seemed concerned that I might have conjured it, and him, up. So I begged him to tell me what he and I had written that day, believing that the correct answer would be proof that he existed. Maurice answered the question and I didn’t believe him anyway, because I claimed that I knew what his answer would be. In the end I convinced Maurice to drive me to Bondi to make sure that my friend was all right. This he did, and when I climbed up on the gas meter to look through the living room window, I had a strange flashback and I saw her still lying on the floor. When I asked Maurice to take a look, he couldn’t see a thing. Twelve hours later I was still hallucinating. Drugs were not my scene.

The rise of Norman Gunston When Garry Mc Donald joined the second series of Aunty Jack he injected a manic energy and enthusiasm into the show that was like a shot of adrenalin. He is a genuinely funny man on and off screen. When Gazza was around there were always lots of laughs and he fitted the show like a glove. But there was problem: as fine a comic as Garry was, he could never be accused of playing it straight, and I believe the show lost a huge dimension when John Derum went to Channel Seven. Without Derum, the second series for Garry, Rory and myself became more like ‘Three Clowns in Search of a Straight Man’, and comedy needs straight men. Despite all that, we still managed to win a Logie.

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Garry stayed on after the series and remained part of our team, appearing in everything from Flash Nick to the concerts, the album, Nude Radio and finally Wollongong the Brave. He really was a likeable bloke and Rory, Garry and I became very close. It was a little later when politics and money muddied the waters. Then it became complex. But that’s showbiz. ——— I think the most remarkable thing about that early period was the opportunity given to us all by Maurice Murphy, who was willing to fight the good fight and run interference with management just to get our shows on. Maurice did exactly the same for Norman Gunston – he even admits to using tears at the boardroom table to prevent the entire series from being shelved after a disastrous first episode. So now I’m going to attempt to explain the evolution of Norman Gunston. Garry McDonald had graduated from NIDA, so he was a trained actor. He was also a great ad-libber, but it seemed that he didn’t have the need or the drive to become a writer. He seemed quite content with projecting what others wrote. The original reporter character for the ‘What’s on in Wollongong’ segments of The Aunty Jack Show was written by a W. Skeltcher from Wollongong. Maurice and I were in London filming for Series Two when Skeltcher’s material was telexed to us. We received just six 30-second sketches. The idea for the segment ‘What’s on in Wollongong’ was to feature a TV reporter covering the highlights of life in Greater Wollongong. The material began with his coverage of a nude underwater leap frog competition in Lake Illawarra. Then there was the fabulous Bulli truck crash, where the driver finds himself trapped in his vehicle, which has come to rest between two family residences owned by the Smith family and the Ball family. The tag was, ’Luckily the driver was hauled out by the Smiths.’ Boom boom! And of course there was the legendary sketch where the reporter bears witness to hordes of lamingtons committing

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mass suicide off the Mount Ousley lookout. Murphy and I were both extremely impressed with W. Skeltcher’s short pieces. They were bizarre and wonderfully quirky. I wrote back immediately from London to say, ‘Mate I think your work is very funny, please send more.’ I received a brusque reply several days later. It simply said, ‘Don’t call me mate, mate, I’m not your mate, I’m a lady. Signed, Wendy Skeltcher.’ We never received another sketch from Wendy, nor did I ever hear from her again. What a loss to comedy, but well done, Wendy. On day one of rehearsals for Series Two, the cast and crew sat at a large table in the rehearsal studio while Murphy handed out the sketches that we would be performing in the first episode. Maurice Murphy and I had already mapped out the six episodes and we’d placed a single Skeltcher sketch into each show. Maurice knew how fond I was of the sketches, so he assumed that I would like to play the reporter. However my dance card was pretty full, performing in Aunty Jack, Kev Kavanagh, Neil and Errol and Len and Ron sketches, just for starters. As Garry was new and totally under-utilised, I suggested he play Skeltcher’s nameless reporter. Being the wonderfully creative comic that he is, Garry came back the next day with the character. His hair was combed over his bald spot, there were several pieces of toilet paper stuck to his chin covering mock shaving cuts, plus he feigned a shot jaw and spoke with a speech impediment. It was a great character. The name he gave to the reporter was Norman Gunston. Garry and I were always very competitive and at every opportunity we’d create characters and voices to make each other laugh. Norman Gunston was a brilliant creation, but where did it come from? Before we met, Garry had toured Australia with David Frost in a sketch show based on material from That Was the Week That Was. The other performer in the Frost show was the late and very funny John Hargreaves. In 1979 I had dinner with Hargreaves and he told me the hysterical story of the Frost tour. David Frost and the crew were flying across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide on TAA Airlines. Garry and John were sitting in economy class, while David Frost travelled in first class.

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Frost was evidently an absolute workaholic, and searched newspapers and magazines constantly while in transit for ideas to update the show. On this particular flight he had produced a pair of scissors and was cutting up and tearing out sections of newspaper and tossing the remnants into the aisle. Hargreaves described an air hostess approaching Frost. The woman had a shot jaw and a slight speech impediment. She chastised Frost, saying, ‘Mr Frost, I know you’re a very famous man, but I happen to be responsible for this aircraft and my passengers’ safety. So could you please pick up the material you have been casting into my aisle?’ Hargreaves swears that Frost said, ‘Give me your name!’ and she replied, ‘My name is Norma Gunston.’ Frost then informed Ms Gunston that he knew people in the airline, and he would make sure she was fired for impertinence. It was obviously a memorable confrontation, and for the rest of the tour everyone in the company performed their impression of the very feisty Norma Gunston, and that included David Frost. The interesting sideline to this story is that that airline hostess really did exist, and the fact that she never sued Garry or the ABC for defamation is remarkable. Like Wendy Skeltcher, Norma Gunston, air hostess extraordinaire, just disappeared from the face of the earth. God bless you Norma. ——— By the time we got to shooting the last episode of The Aunty Jack Show Series Two, I had become quite disenchanted with television and was very confused about my future. I wasn’t coping well with the constant criticism and the pressures that my new-found fame/infamy had delivered. Making the show was fun, but the comments hurt. It seems the more familiar the critics became with my work, the harsher the criticism. Some critics loved the second series, but others were not so kind. Here are a few of the bad reviews: Square Eye in The Mirror ‘couldn’t see the joke’; ‘contrived, unfunny’ said another critic. ‘Not as good as the first

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series,’ complained a third. The Sunday Mirror had a masked TV critic who went by the name of ‘Veritas, the critic who writes without fear or favour’. Veritas was probably our most ferocious detractor and constantly slammed AJ. His column was venomous. At an after-show party one night I was introduced to the man who hid behind the mask, one Kevin Sadlier. This was the day I learnt exactly how the television industry worked. I confronted Sadlier and demanded to know why he was so negative about our show. The cynical journalist replied, ‘So what do you want me to write? Mate, I’m only trying to sell newspapers. If I were to say that I liked your show, then there’d be no letters to the editor, so, I’m helping you get viewers.’ I don’t think I ever wanted to believe life worked like that. For me the writing was on the wall. I’d also come to the conclusion that there was nowhere to go with AJ’s character. She was just one joke: ‘Rip yer bloody arms off!’ I felt trapped, so I decided to kill her. Then I’d be free. So during the filming of the final closing credits, Aunty Jack dropped dead. The only problem was that I hadn’t informed anyone else of my decision. It was totally spontaneous. During the end titles, Aunty Jack had a heart attack. She roared, totally unscripted, ‘Oh me heart!’ clutched her chest, and slid down the wall, to finish slumped and dying on the floor. With her last breath she begged forgiveness from her audience for all the wicked things she’d said and done over the years. Murphy came down to the studio floor and asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him that I’d made up my mind Aunty Jack was finished. I think the smartest career move I ever made was to stop playing Aunty Jack at the height of her popularity. I wanted to move on. I was ready to change direction and experiment with new ideas. After the Series Two wrap party, Murphy suggested that I go away for a break to sort out what I wanted to do. I’d created a difficult situation as the ABC wanted more Aunty Jack shows. The ratings were building and a new audience had just discovered us. My crime seemed to be that I wanted to change. I was so over it, I couldn’t bear being in the same dress with her.

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I took Murphy’s advice and flew to Orpheus Island in the Whitsundays to consider my future. Did I even want to be on television? After a couple of days Maurice arrived to find out if I had made a decision. I explained that I wanted to move on to something else, and we discussed new directions. Murphy asked if I had other characters that I would like to develop. I personally loved Len and Ron, the testy builder’s labourers that I’d originally created back in 1971 for the show Filth. I put them forward. John Derum had originally played Ron, but as he had left the show Garry had taken over Derum’s role as the loud and abrasive Ron. With a free week and no interruptions, Murphy and I came up with a format for a tonight show to be hosted by the two Wollongong labourers. Earlier I mentioned how in 1965 Peter Best had told me the story of an idiot reporter he’d heard of in a press conference at Mascot Airport who had asked Frank Sinatra what he did for a living. Frank had replied that he was a singer, but the reporter wasn’t satisfied and asked, ‘Do you do anything else?’ Maybe he thought Frank had a milk run in his spare time. This story set the premise for the show. Murphy and I also believed that if someone like Don Lane could get a tonight show, anyone could. We imagined the labourers would make no attempt to adapt to television and would more than likely arrive dressed in overalls and workboots. In contrast, the guests on the show would be visiting celebrities, interviewed in tandem by their ill-informed hosts. Ron would be the loud-mouthed homophobic prankster, and his co-host Len, the aspirational pretentious worker whose role it was to play the apologist for Ron’s endless faux pas. As an example of the format, we imagined Sir Robert Helpmann as a guest, and we developed Len and Ron’s possible responses. The Ron character would obviously appear blindly ignorant of his guest’s background and have no idea of Helpmann’s achievements. Ron addresses Sir Robert as ‘Bobbie’, and attacks him for sounding ‘a bit plummy’. On the other hand, Len, always the fawning sycophant, would be a huge fan of Helpmann’s career, even admitting to having seen the film of the ballet Don Quixote.

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On hearing the word ballet, Ron’s character would attack all those who dared to watch anything as soppy and sissy as ballet. Ron confides in Helpmann that his mate Spider Farrelly and the workers on his building site refer to Len as being a bit of a ballet dancer, if Bob gets his drift. Ron’s explanation is accompanied by limp-wristed gestures for Helpmann’s benefit. The way we planned to play the interviews was along the lines of the good cop, bad cop routine. It was a classic ambush technique, using an ill-informed interviewer with an apologist to take the curse off it. I returned to Sydney, lost interest in the project and that tonight show never happened. ——— When Rory, Garry and I toured Australia with Aunty Jack ’n’ the Gong in Bloody Concert, we met a lot of our young fans and signed hundreds of autographs. A sad note was to see how hurt Garry was when the young audience ignored him. I became painfully aware of his dilemma. After the concerts I would suggest to the kids that they get Garry’s autograph as well. Their reply was always totally unforgiving: ‘We hate Kid Eager!’ or ‘Norman Gunston’s an idiot!’ To children, the show was absolutely black and white, it was all about good guys and bad guys. Not about how funny or talented Garry McDonald was. Kids only saw him as Aunty Jack’s enemy and the poor bugger suffered for it. There’s no thanks in playing the bad guy. When Garry had his opportunity with The Norman Gunston Show, it was very rewarding for him after all the harsh treatment from the young Aunty Jack fans. Garry could now bathe in the glow of his own admirers’ adulation. I think his reaction to those periods of being ignored was evident in Norman’s attitude to autograph hunters. Norman Gunston didn’t sign autographs, he produced a large rubber stamp and an ink pad and with as little emotion as possible he would furiously stamp his fans’ books and programs. A wonderfully cynical exercise.

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Garry was always an anxious person. On tour he regularly drank an antacid mixture before every performance, thus earning the nickname The Mylanta Kid. Unbeknownst to Garry, his next career move was just around the corner. A real opportunity to develop Norman Gunston came when we started Nude Radio on Double J in 1975. Presenting three hours of live radio every week became the perfect vehicle for Garry to expand and create a backstory for Norman Gunston. He always swore the pressure of live radio was responsible for his ulcers, but I’m sure Garry developed them a lot earlier. Nude Radio was basically three hours of ad lib comedy with music, where the three of us played a large assortment of characters. I’d made a conscious decision not to appear as Aunty Jack in the show; in fact, I played every other character in my repertoire but her. Where Aunty Jack was part of Wollongong royalty, Norman was a lowly TV reporter with WOG4. Garry quickly established that Norman lived several kilometres north of the Gong at Corrimal South, in Mrs Lewis’s boarding house. Over the 30-week stint, the character cultivated a taste for pineapple donuts and GI lime cordial, and it was on radio that he gradually developed his gormless TV reporting style, interviewing guests like Kev Kavanagh or Rory’s Dr Duncan Chambers. Garry’s next big step was when Gunston got his own tonight show. It became massively popular and the character achieved phenomenal success, so much so that Norman Gunston is still the only fictitious character ever to have won a Gold Logie. But nothing is forever and fame is very fickle. One never sees the car crash coming. I’d already had my three or four years of notoriety and was feeling pretty fragile, but my time was up. Garry was the next victim and he was going to pay a big price for success. He once told me a horror story of filming in Los Angeles. Norman was placed on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and told to ask black Americans the directions to Klu Klux Klan headquarters. I couldn’t imagine how nerve-racking this would have been. I asked Garry how was he able to do it. ‘That wasn’t me,’ he said, ‘that was Norman!’ I don’t think Garry’s

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anxiety was at all helped by the demands of his producer. But you have to remember that Garry was an actor – he was trained to take direction. Garry McDonald had several remarkable assets and one was the rare skill of instant recall. I observed him scan pages of script and memorise them in a matter of minutes. I was also impressed by how Garry retained the purity of the character of Norman Gunston, despite having different writers for Series One and Two. It was obvious to me that the Gunston character changed in attitude between series. Bill Harding’s Gunston was naïve and innocent. Harding’s scripts were crafted in such a way that Norman could blunder his way through an interview, constantly insult his guest, but take the curse off by apologising for his ineptness. Morris Gleitzman wrote the second series of Gunston and I believe his writing made Gunston appear way too smart and far too knowing. The writer does make a difference. I think Garry’s worst nightmare arrived when he chose to resurrect Norman on the Channel Seven network, sponsored by McDonald’s. Garry McDonald brought to you by McDonald’s – it was a marketer’s dream. The guerrilla tactics used by Gunston to interview the naïve and the gullible eventually backfired on him when the first guest on his first show, Shirley MacLaine, appeared to become incensed by a question, produced a fresh cream pie and hit Norman square in the face with it. This was a classic case of the ambusher ambushed. MacLaine knew the joke. She’d been briefed by her then-boyfriend Andrew Peacock. I’ll never forget the look of fear in Garry’s eyes as he wiped the cream from his face, desperately trying to think of a comeback line, but there wasn’t one. The eyes said it all. Norman was now the victim, because the world knew the joke. The thought that future guests were all capable of this anarchy must have horrified him. Garry became ill and couldn’t continue. The most dangerous thing about performing Norman Gunston was that if anything went wrong, Garry had no safety net. In fact he did, and I’ve always wondered why his producers at Channel Seven didn’t just stop the interview with MacLaine to protect their talent. As the show wasn’t live to air, why would you ever screen that disastrous interview, let alone run it in the opening show? But on the night, the cameras just

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kept rolling and Garry was hung out to dry. As a footnote to the Gunston story, in early 1998 Maurice Murphy visited London and was invited to a meeting of BBC comedy producers. When he entered the boardroom he was surprised to receive a standing ovation. They all congratulated him on the Gunston show, but the hot topic of conversation was, ‘When is the ABC going to sue the BBC for using the Gunston format for the Ali G Show?’ Maurice explained that if it was up to him, he would have sued them years ago, but there was nothing to fear from the ABC, as they would never get around to it. They were still in awe of the old ‘Beeb’. Comedy tends to go in cycles. To a young audience seeing Ali G for the first time and without any sense of history, the show would seem fresh and original. Today we call this ‘appropriation’, where you can take an existing concept, change a few elements and call it your own. I admit to many influences: Charlie Chaplin for mime and pathos, Spike Milligan for the surreal and the non sequitur, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore for their rich dialogue, Joseph Heller for the concept of illogical logic and definitely George Wallace for his silly dancing.

Profiled Back to Aunty Jack Series Two. As Garry was discovering his alter ego Norman Gunston, I was falling out of love with mine. Aunty Jack had become all-pervasive. Everywhere I went people wanted me to be her. So I gradually began to purge myself of the old girl and to try different things. I was also having to deal with the shock of success. What some might think was my best creation became an incredible burden. Aunty Jack was the 800-pound gorilla in the room that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge. It became absurd when press and radio were only interested in interviewing Aunty, not me. Some even requested that I put on the dress to appear on radio. There was a radio-jock at 2SM called Ian MacRae who made great

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mileage out of many interviews with Aunty Jack. It was clear her cult status helped to boost his ratings. When Rory and I went back to see MacRae to promote our next single by Kev Kavanagh and the Kavemen, he refused to play it, saying, ‘Come back again when you’re famous.’ I’ve never forgotten the slight. He became The Greaser, my DJ character on Nude Radio. One of the very difficult things about having supposed ‘celebrity’ thrust upon you is how easily it can become a trap. As expected the Logie was responsible for my increased profile. But I was still a uni student at heart and I wasn’t prepared for my new role. I was probably too cynical on one hand and too shy on the other to take it all seriously. The major disadvantage with being highly recognised is that you can no longer go places and remain anonymous. The freedom I once had to go anywhere was how I had sourced the characters I’d written about in the early days. That was when I was able to talk to people openly about their lives and interests. But once on television and with a publicity machine behind me, the rules changed. The public were now more interested in talking about Aunty Jack; my opinions no longer mattered. Grahame Bond didn’t exist because Aunty Jack had taken over my life. It was strange playing second fiddle to my own creation. My first unfortunate experience with my newly acquired notoriety occurred when I went alone to a wine bar in Randwick. It was midweek and there were not many people around. When I entered the establishment there were two young guys sitting at the bar. They recognised me and offered to buy me a drink. I reciprocated and as they drank on they told me how they loved Aunty Jack. They bragged how, on the weekend, they had gone to a drive-in theatre, met a guy who they thought was a homosexual and at the end of the film they’d caught him, slammed his hand in the door and driven away, trying to rip his bloody arm off. I was horrified and immediately left the premises. As I reached my car the very same fans jumped me and beat the crap out of me. Their parting comment said everything: they told me that there wouldn’t be too many people around who could say that they bashed up Aunty Jack. I’d lost my freedom. I now couldn’t go to the venues I normally

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frequented. I became paranoid and didn’t feel safe on my own. With a successful cult television show I also became popular with the social set and was invited to many dinner parties. Sadly their expectation was that as a comedian I should entertain the guests like some cheap jester. They always seemed disappointed. I think they expected a floorshow for the price of a meal and a glass of wine. It was demeaning. The ABC was only paying me $300 a show. The angst wasn’t worth it. In the end that’s why I killed Aunty Jack – because I found that I was losing myself to a fantasy character. Of course killing her didn’t help. It only created a bigger myth and I suppose because of my ambivalent nature she made endless comebacks over the next 20 years. Even though I swore I’d never play her again, time after time I brought her back for several reincarnations, each one more painful than the last. I was never happy revisiting her, because I didn’t enjoy playing the character anymore.

Wollongong the Brave There were four one-hour TV specials in the series Wollongong the Brave. We had already filmed the ‘Aunty Jack ’n’ the Gong’ special a year earlier when touring the live concerts. The other three specials were Kev Kavanagh in ‘Beyond the Infinite’, written by two of my architecture students, Tim Gooding and Peter Biscevcis; the Farrelly Brothers special ‘Three Men, a Sheep and their Music’ by Peter Best; and the last episode was a Norman Gunston special, ‘The Golden Weeks’, written by Bill Harding. We launched at the end of 1975 and suddenly I was back in the firing line, being attacked from all directions. I received particularly serious criticism from the Mayor of Wollongong (the late Frank Arkell). Arkell was so incensed by the show that he appeared on ABC TV to air his grievances. He believed that the program was in bad taste and should be banned. His argument was that we were showing Wollongong in a bad light. (I suggested he talk to our lighting director.)

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Mayor Arkell went so far as to call an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) of the Council to raise objections to the show. However, it had been noted by ABC researchers that on the day of the EGM, pollution levels in Wollongong were six times above the acceptable limit and there was absolutely no mention of this in the minutes of the meeting. This fact was put to Arkell in a live-to-air interview – a very embarrassing moment for the mouthpiece of the polluters. I had mixed emotions about Wollongong the Brave. The paradox was that without Aunty Jack the specials would never have been produced in the first place, but I made a conscious decision to delegate her to walk-on roles and a brief cameo in the end titles. I know it was perverse. What was I trying to do, humiliate her? I was torn because deep down I loved Aunty Jack. But I was gradually ridding myself of the beast. ——— Jock Veitch in the Sunday Telegraph reviewed Wollongong the Brave: Farewell, Aunty Jack. Grahame Bond obviously means it when he says that TV’s First Lady of mayhem will fade away ….Wollongong the Brave … not only faded out Aunty Jack, who had little more than a subliminal appearance, but also almost succeeded in fading out Grahame Bond himself, the erstwhile star of the series. When you consider that one of the first rules of show business is that you’ve got to be a big head to succeed and survive, this is a remarkable turn of events. But Grahame Bond hasn’t got a big head because he believes in a team effort, and has let his team partner Garry McDonald step into the limelight.

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Why did I choose Wollongong? As a young boy I’d travelled on the train to the south coast many times to visit my Uncle Laurie Bond and his family in Dapto. Uncle Laurie worked in the coal mines. Sometimes my Uncle Bill would drive us via the then treacherous Bulli Pass. I always loved arriving at the top of the Pass, just to take in the breathtaking views all the way down the south coast to Nowra. This was once the most pristine stretch of coastline imaginable, until one day BHP arrived and Wollongong and its environs changed. The Gong rapidly acquired a new smelted look with cobalt pools, slag heaps and glorious concrete pipes constantly pouring industrial waste into the surf. Rory and I wrote an anthem for the new Illawarra. Wollongong the Brave Raise your heads high See a burnt sienna sky Land so free of trees You may laugh Say we pong But to me it’s Wollongong Wollongong the Brave

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my horrible anus years, 1975 1971

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No hero We all have our highs and lows, but I think 1975 was my annus horribilis. In 1974 I met jazz saxophonist and arranger Geoff Oakes. Geoff had been playing in Reg Livermore’s show Betty Blockbuster at the Balmain Bijou. He’d also been part of the Aunty Jack band at our first live concert in Wollongong the year before. Oakes informed me that Opera Australia had approached Reg Livermore to direct a home-grown Australian rock opera, but Reg had knocked it back because he was too busy with his own shows. The reason the Australian Opera had commissioned a rock opera was because the Whitlam government had pressured them to broaden their horizons. The government even threatened to cut back funding should the opera company not spend some of their federal subsidy on presenting contemporary locally produced opera, as well as the European classics. To appease the federal government, the Australian Opera cynically commissioned their very own rock opera, Hero, written by Australian rock journalist Craig McGregor and folk poet Don Henderson. The music was written by British ’70s muso Poli Palmer. The story revolved around two brothers. The older brother is an ambitious politician with few followers, while his sibling is a successful rock star with a voice and the ear of the masses. The opera was loosely based on the Greek myth of Castor and Pollux. The only thing I remember from the script are these inimitable lines for the character of Hero: ‘Achilles was a bully. Ulysses was a thief. They were never noble. They were just hard to beat …’ It doesn’t quite scan, but then neither did the show. When I first read the treatment and heard the music, it didn’t appeal and I could see a fundamental flaw in the premise. However, as I wasn’t doing anything at the time I agreed to direct it, going totally against my instincts. Admittedly there was pressure from various quarters to make deadlines and I’m also afraid my ego got in the way. I really believed I could fix it. It was a good lesson. With hindsight I should have seen that if the structure doesn’t work, then all the patching and rewriting in the

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world will come to nought. I had assembled a wonderful support team, which included Geoffrey Atherden, my old architecture friend, who designed the sets and costumes; the late great Ross Coleman, who choreographed the jazz ballet ensemble; and Geoff Oakes, the musical director who managed to assemble ten of the finest jazz and rock musicians in the country. Next we cast ten hugely talented rock singers, while the opera company provided ten of their singers to play the Greek chorus. Sadly the opera company’s chorus added nothing to the production. They couldn’t sing to a rock beat and they couldn’t dance – they were like limpet mines stuck to the floor. Once I’d accepted the job I was tossed into the deep end. The scale of the undertaking was enormous and the time constraint was just five weeks’ rehearsal. The opera company’s priority seemed to be to get the show on as fast as possible and off even faster. I was given a very inexperienced producer, a small budget and little or no money for publicity. My first mistake was accepting the very short timeline to rehearse such a large untried piece. It was during rehearsals at the Sydney Opera House that I received a call from the security desk to inform me that there was someone at the front desk who wanted to see me and he had a gun. This was all I needed. When I reached the front desk there was Jim McNeil, ex-prisoner, now playwright, pissed and screaming that he wanted to see his wife Robyn Nevin and find out who she was having an affair with. He bragged that when he found out who it was, he was going to kill them. I told him that she was in Rehearsal Room 3, several rooms away from us and that if he chose to shoot her or her lover that was fine by me, just as long as it didn’t interrupt my rehearsal. My next mistake was allowing myself to be forced into using an unsuitable venue. There were enormous pressures applied by the opera company to present the opera within the financial year, which gave us very little notice to find an available theatre. Because of time constraints, we went into the Seymour Centre. Not the proscenium theatre, but the thrust stage, which meant no curtain, thus no set changes, and as these

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were the days before radio mikes, it was inevitable that the stage would be littered with cables. Without the possibility of any set changes, as a compromise I attempted to use lighting and smells to create the various location changes demanded by the script. This was where I first experimented with ‘smellorama’. I employed a chemical engineer to create various odours to stimulate the olfactory senses and evoke the smell of the setting. For example, in the outback scenes he created the smell of chaff, for the disco scenes there was a strong aroma of nicotine, while for the rock concert at the close of the opera he created the overpowering smell of alcohol. How does one create this olfactory effect during a performance? Well, I employed a little man to sit in the bowels of the basement beneath the stage, and on a cue from the stage manager, he would release the selected odour into the air-conditioning vents by sprinkling each labelled liquid sample into the ducting. On dress rehearsal night the smells were amazingly effective. When characters sang of their life in the country, there was suddenly the sweet whiff of fresh mown hay oozing from the air-con. The next tobacco effect was a little overpowering, as was the stale reek of alcohol in the closing concert scene. The mixture of odours was stomach-turning. Twenty-four hours later, on opening night, the previous evening’s smellorama’ experiment still permeated the space. Minutes before the audience entered, ushers were desperately spraying deodoriser, which only made it worse. The room now smelt like an alcoholic brothel in a hay field. Opera Australia threw our show on for two weeks, and then pulled it off. I was gutted. Craig McGregor needed someone to blame and I was the scapegoat. He was most upset by the cuts I’d made to his ridiculously long script. Even with my edits the play still ran over three hours. Except of course on opening night, when Geoff Oakes, the musical director, approached me minutes before the overture and said, ‘Mate, the problem with this show is it’s too bloody long!’ He then proceeded to count in every number in double time. Oakes managed to shave 25 minutes off the opera. Ideally I would have loved the show to be as short, but the music was so frenetic, there was no light and shade. Every song came

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in at the same tempo, even the slow ballads. After the curtain call, minus the curtain, I was ready to go backstage and strangle Oakes, but he beat me to it. As I entered the musicians’ dressing room, Oakes stood alone in the middle of the room and cried out, ‘Bondy, I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry!’ and with that he punched himself in the head and knocked himself out before my very eyes. After the closing night party, my sober friends prevented me from throttling the head of the opera company and they also saved me from Craig McGregor’s wrath. I made an immediate decision. I decided that Australia needed a rest from me, so I took off.

What a prika Escaping Sydney I flew to London and then made my way directly to Greece. For years my flatmate Kosta had suggested that I stay with his uncle and aunt, Theo Lambis and Thea Maro Coumbis, in the town of Akrata on the Peloponnese peninsula. On arrival at Athens airport I blithely stepped into a local taxi and said ‘Take me to Akrata.’ The driver’s reaction was odd, to say the least. He began shouting at the top of his voice and made a detour through the very heart of Athens where he performed about six circuits of Syntagma Square screaming to all the assembled cabbies, ‘I’m going to Akrata!’ It wasn’t long before I discovered that Akrata wasn’t a suburb of Athens at all; it was in fact a small village 150 kilometres away on the eastern shore of the Peloponnese. I think the driver thought all his Greek Easters had come at once. When I finally arrived later that night in my Athens taxi, I was observed by the entire village who sat dining in the town square, aghast at the extravagance of my grand entrance. Not a wise decision in a small town. Kosta’s mother and sister knew of my plans to visit Akrata and must have heard the commotion because they came running down the main street to welcome me with hugs and kisses. Little did I know that the

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young men of the village saw my arrival as some sort of threat to the advances they were making to Kosta’s sister, Bubba. What I also didn’t grasp was the incredible network of rumour and innuendo that travels so rapidly around small towns. By the next day the story had taken flight. The gossip was that I was Bubba’s jilted lover, a violent non-Greek who had chased her halfway round the world, and had now arrived uninvited in Akrata. The story painted me as a cad who seemed only interested in marrying Bubba for her prika. I know it sounds disgusting, but it’s Greek for ‘dowry’. Little did I know that my life and my genitals were in danger. I heard later that the young men of the village had planned to save Bubba from her ex-fiancé (me) by hanging me by my testicles with piano wire in the town square. Luckily the town didn’t have a piano. Totally unaware of the situation, I stayed on, ignorant of the dangers that lay before me. After a week of close escapes from the local netherregions lynch mob, Mrs Akon suggested that a change of scenery might be a healthy move, so she invited me to accompany her and her daughter to a performance at the magnificent amphitheatre at Epidaurus. From Akrata we drove south through Mycenae to Epidaurus. When we finally arrived, I was staggered at the scale of this 350 BC Hellenic masterpiece – 15,000 seats. It was more beautiful than I could ever have imagined, and I’d spent a lot of time imagining it as a student. I’d even written a paper on the theatre and here I was, about to witness a performance of Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians. We took our seats and as the play began the sun slowly disappeared behind the proscenium. Mrs Akon seemed bitterly disappointed when she realised that the play was in ancient Greek. Fortunately an usher sitting next to her had obviously seen the play many times, so had a good smattering of the ancient tongue. As the night wore on, the instant translations raced from our newfound friend, the usher, to Mrs Akon, who then passed on the knowledge to me and finally I delivered the translation to Bubba. The longer the translation went on, the more absurd it became. At one point Mrs Akon informed me that Xerxes was kissing his mother.

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‘I know!’ I said. ‘I can see!’ She paused and then started on a new tack. ‘It’s obvious that Xerxes loves his mother,’ she whispered. I agreed, and she seemed content … for the moment. Next she asked did I think her son Kosta loved her as much as Xerxes loved his mother? I avoided the question. Greek mothers tend to have very odd relationships with their sons. Mrs Akon was very taken by the way King Xerxes was willing to fight the Greeks and lay down his life for the love of his mother. She asked me if I thought Kosta would do the same for her. I was speechless, so she insisted that I pass on the question to her daughter, with a request for an immediate reply. By this stage I was becoming a little twitchy, but I tentatively forwarded the message. Bubba didn’t seem the least bit surprised. I could sense the patrons around us becoming increasingly agitated by our constant chatter. ‘Shhhh!’ was the chorus. ‘Sorry!’ The play by now was of no consequence and nothing was going to silence Mrs Akon. She wanted answers. ‘Ask Bubba if she thinks Kosta would fight a war for his mother.’ As quietly as possible I carried out my duty. Bubba’s answer was concise and to the point: ‘Tell Mum I think he would.’ I informed Mrs Akon and she exploded, ‘Bubba only thinks he would! Tell her she’s wrong! She doesn’t know Kosta. He doesn’t care enough to kill for his mother.’ The drama that was unfolding offstage was becoming more intense than the action onstage, plus ours had the added benefit of being in English. Believe me, three hours of ancient Greek theatre can been quite testing, but then so was the constant patter between mother and daughter. But it all helped to wile away the hours. As the performance reached its finale, I realised that everything I’d read about Epidaurus was true. I had clearly heard every spoken word. I didn’t understand it, but the experts were right: the acoustics in that theatre were perfect … for Ancient Greeks. The drama ended around midnight and the three of us found ourselves totally lost, having driven around in circles for almost an hour. We

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eventually went to the local police station in Nafplion. As my knowledge of Greek only extended to hello and you’re welcome – yassou and parakalo – I had little idea of what was being conspired between Mrs Akon and the police officer. Obviously a decision had been made by Mrs Akon to give up on the drive back to Akrata and her plan now was to find some form of cheap accommodation for the night. Surprisingly, the police officer remembered that he had a brother with a spare room. I later found out that all Greek police officers have brothers with spare rooms. That is how found we ourselves at two o’clock in the morning sharing a small bedroom in a tower in Nafplion. The women slept in a double bed, while I slept on the floor and had recurring nightmares about a young man in the Gulf of Corinth under attack from an army of Greeks bearing piano wire. When I woke the next morning, the room was empty. Mrs Akon and her daughter had showered and were already at breakfast with the police officer’s brother. As I entered the dining room I attempted a wellrehearsed ‘Kalimera’, which was met with a deathly silence. Unfazed I resorted to a brisk, ‘Good morning all’. Still nothing, though I did notice that the wife was rolling her eyes at her husband. The mood in the kitchen was very uncomfortable and the conversation carried on in Greek only. No one made any effort to translate. Several times I attempted to converse with the host family, until Mrs Akon snapped at me, ‘Gram, be quiet!’ Stunned, I looked to Bubba for support. She just blushed. The final humiliation came when I severely burned my lips with the scalding Greek coffee, and the family laughed. Even the 12-year-old daughter sniggered. Later that day, when Mrs Akon was having her afternoon siesta, Bubba explained the complexity of the situation. Because Nafplion was so close to her mother’s village, Mrs Akon was concerned that irreparable damage might be done to her honour should news filter back to Akrata that a widowed Greek mother and her unmarried daughter were sharing their bedroom with a stranger. A scandal like this could ruin her reputation forever. So to cover her tracks, Mrs Akon had created a masterful strategy to prevent the likelihood of ugly gossip and innuendo spreading further.

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She had told the unsuspecting host family that I was in fact her son … her poor simple son who, as a child, had been dropped on his head. Now, because of the accident, I spoke only very bad Greek and sometimes without any explanation English. She also confided that specialists couldn’t diagnose my condition and sadly had informed her that I would never recover. Apparently they bought it. News for those of you who have the fanciful idea that those weatherbeaten old Greek gents who sit outside tavernas and drink coffee are discussing deep and meaningful philosophy. Wrong! These senior citizens are joyously exchanging cheap gossip about who is sleeping with whom. ‘Tell me, Dimitri, is she not sleeping with his uncle’s brother?’ ‘This cannot be, young Zorba, for they say his uncle’s brother has left the donkey for the priest.’ When their conversations were translated for me, I was shattered. These old men weren’t emulating Socrates and Plato – they were more akin to Perez Hilton. After months of travelling overseas I returned to Sydney tanned, relaxed and itching to start a new project. I’d done a lot of soul searching and had finally managed to put the disaster that was Hero the rock opera well and truly behind me. My parents were at the airport to meet me and they were obviously excited to see their only child. The first thing my mother did was to rifle through her purse and produce a three-month-old newspaper clipping. The headline read ‘Grahame Bond’s Opera a Tragedy’. I was mortified. ‘Why are you showing me this?’ I asked. ‘But it’s such a lovely photo of you!’ I’m sure she hadn’t read the article, or maybe she was in denial too.

So off it isn’t even on the air I’d only been back a short time when I began planning a new series for the ABC called The Off Show. It was the old team of Murphy, Atherden,

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O’Donoghue and myself. The first episode was to be called ‘The Completely Off Show’. We received a fantastic script from Bill Harding, who had written the first series of The Norman Gunston Show. Bill had come up with an outrageous concept for a situation comedy called Leave it to Jesus, a modern Middle Eastern sitcom set in an apartment with wadi views. The plot revolved around an eight-year-old Christ child, his parents Mary and Joseph (the builder of synagogues) and Jesus’s faithful hound, Herod. Rory played the local Rabbi and I was the next-door neighbour, Fred of Arimathea. The show was played with broad American accents. Rory and I wrote the opening and closing title songs. The music was very much the ‘Glen Glen’ sound of the American sitcoms of the ’50s and ’60s, i.e. Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy. These were the lyrics to the opening: Vocal: Leave it to Jesus, Jesus is like any kid next door. Music under. Announcer (American): Leave it to Jesus, starring Cashel Robertson Swann as the Christ child, John Derum as Joseph, Robin Moase as Mary, Grahame Bond as Fred of Arimathea, and not forgetting Herod the Wonder Dog as himself. Vocal: Jesus is like any kid next door Tag But he’s different.

In Scene One, Jesus enters with Herod the Wonder Dog. Jesus is dressed in Bay City Rollers colours, clad entirely in tartan with matching cap and scarf. Jesus approaches mother Mary and asks ‘Mom can Herod and me go into the desert and read the parables?’ Joseph overhears and asks his wife’s son, ‘Jesus do you have to?’ Mary and Joseph also employ a black maid by the name of Rastette. The comedy conflict is between the maid and the young Christ child. On one occasion Rastette complains to mother Mary that if Jesus, or as

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she calls him, ‘The Spook’, keeps multiplying what’s in the refrigerator, someone else can clean up the mess. The closing titles were a Bay City Rollers version of ‘Away in a Manger’ played on electric guitars and bagpipes, all accompanied by images of the baby Jesus and Herod frolicking in the sand dunes. The sitcom was recorded in front of a live audience and was to be screened that night, and because Maurice Murphy had been replaced as head of comedy by the ex-head of features, the filming was kept under wraps. Taping finished at three o’clock in the afternoon and the live audience response was wonderful. Murphy allowed himself three hours to edit the program, then it was to go to air at 7.30. Between filming at 3 p.m. and the on-air time of 7.30 p.m., a lot happened. I first found out about management’s treachery when I was sitting in the foyer of the ABC with my mother and father waiting to watch the program go to air. ABC presenter Tony Eaton approached me in the foyer and handed me a written announcement he was about to deliver. It read, ‘The ABC wishes to announce that “The Completely Off Show” is, as advertised, completely off and will be replaced by the Irish Rovers.’ My mother was shocked. Her response was, ‘I’m going to put a piece of sticky tape over Channel Two and I am not going take it off until my son is back on the ABC.’ Tony Eaton laughed and went off to read the announcement. The viewer response was bizarre to say the least. Irate viewers began ringing in objecting to the show before it went to air. We even received criticism from someone who complained about Rory and I doing a bad impersonation of the Irish Rovers. The real heartbreak was that the show was not only banned from the airwaves, but tragically the entire 2-inch video tape that it was recorded on was wiped clean, which means there is no longer a record of the program. I think to any historian this would be regarded as criminal. When the press eventually discovered that the show had been erased,

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they asked for someone to speak on behalf of the program. Geoffrey Atherden volunteered. Geoff came up with a wonderful line for the press. He explained to journalists that the new head of comedy’s only experience with ABC television had been in the Features Department producing Bill Peach’s Australia. Geoff explained that the only reason the head of comedy had banned our show was that he wanted to call it Jesus’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’s’ Australia and his dilemma was that he didn’t know where to put the 12 apostrophes. I’d come the full circle. In 1969 I started with the ABC Religious Department and in 1976 I was banned for blasphemy. The ABC were even less amused with Episode Two of The Off Show entitled ‘Not as Off as Last Week, but Almost’. We decided to push the ABC’s limits. Halfway through the opening titles a special announcement was flashed across the screen. It read, ‘Australia mourns the loss of a leader!’ This was followed by the screening of Malcolm Fraser’s obituary. We discovered that obituaries were prepared and stored in the ABC library for all world leaders. These obituaries were all complete, minus the final funeral footage. We ran Fraser’s obit right up to where the funeral would have been and then cut back to me in the studio looking downcast, the giant super still reading, ‘Australia mourns the loss of a leader!’ All I said was, ‘No! Malcolm Fraser isn’t dead, but Australia certainly mourns the loss of a leader!’ Strangely this episode didn’t make it to air either, and the series was canned. It later returned in a sanitised version, where one of the f’s from Off was removed from the title, jokes were removed and it was rebadged The Of Show. Historically ‘Leave it to Jesus’ was written and produced four years before the Monty Python crew released one of the most successful comedy films ever, The Life of Brian, the story of the big grown-up Jesus. Maybe the ABC didn’t have the vision? An interesting footnote to the Malcolm Fraser obit show: from that year on I was regularly investigated by the Australian Taxation Office. An expensive joke.

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The land of ‘was’ After my demoralising experience with the opera Hero and then the debacle that was The Off Show, an offer arrived from Humphrey Barclay at London Weekend Television. Barclay had seen the Aunty Jack special at the Montreux Television Festival. He had also been Maurice’s producer on Doctor in the House and was now the head of light entertainment at LWT. He began discussions with Maurice in 1975 to bring Aunty Jack to England. The negotiations only took two years, but eventually we were on our way. Unfortunately Rory O’Donoghue wasn’t available as he had a very young family to look out for. I arrived in London in November 1977 and immediately looked up my only Aussie connection, Australian actor and comedian John Bluthal. I’d first worked with Bluthal when he joined the illustrious cast of Flash Nick from Jindavick, sharing the screen with the likes of John Meillon, John Ewart and Martin Harris. Bluthal was working with Spike Milligan at the BBC shooting a series called Four Seasons of Milligan and he kindly invited me to come in and watch them film the ‘Milligan in Spring’ episode. The series was directed by Ian MacNaughton, who also directed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Of course Bluthal had been a regular in nearly all of Milligan’s shows from Q1 on. Spike Milligan was an undisputed comic genius and had been one of my major influences. I had been a devout fan of The Goon Show and here I was about to see him perform live. The studio was packed and Bluthal had organised a front-row seat. The first two sketches were wonderful and Milligan was outrageously funny. But things changed. A two-handed sketch performed by Milligan and Bluthal didn’t seem to be getting the laughs. Spike became quite agitated and asked the audience would they laugh again if he could swap parts with Bluthal. The audience roared, thinking this was part of the show, but Spike was serious. He wanted to play Bluthal’s part. So without consulting the director, Milligan decided to perform the

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sketch the other way round. Of course this can’t work when filming television because everything is so precise. The cameramen have their shooting scripts with a shot sheet on each camera. That means Camera One knows that on a certain line of dialogue it’s their job to frame a close-up of Milligan, while Camera Two is moving in to pick up a mid-shot on Bluthal for the next line, etc. Upstairs in the control booth the director was totally unaware of Spike’s changes. When action was called, it was mayhem. Milligan’s anarchy threw the entire shooting schedule into chaos. Cameramen, lighting and sound didn’t know where they were meant to be, and the director didn’t know what was happening on the studio floor. When MacNaughton eventually came down to the studio floor and confronted Spike, it was quite an embarrassing moment and anything but a private conversation. Spike insisted that as he’d written the sketch, he had every right to play his character of choice. The director agreed with him, but suggested that it might have been better to have dealt with this at the rehearsal stage, rather than on the day of the shoot. Things became worse when Milligan broke down in tears and claimed that he was now humiliated because his mother was in the audience and anyway he really wanted to play Bluthal’s part because it was funnier than his. The filming of the episode was scheduled to take an hour as it was only a half-hour program, but it turned out to be almost three hours of tears and disagreements. At the end of the filming Spike was exhausted, the actors and crew had almost reached the end of their tethers, but still Spike railed against the director. At the end of the shoot Bluthal, who seemed totally unaffected by the drama, invited me to come back to his dressing room. From there he’d take me to meet Spike before our dinner. When I arrived at John’s room, I was surprised to find Spike Milligan slumped on the couch still weeping, and now constantly muttering to himself. Apparently his dressing room had been locked and he saw this as a conspiracy. Spike seriously believed that the cleaners were punishing him because they hated the show too. The only words I exchanged with Spike that evening were when he

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asked me, ‘Was the show as bad as it felt?’ I didn’t have time to think of a suitable answer and I replied, ‘It wasn’t that bad!’ Milligan again burst into tears, which obviously meant that dinner was off. Maurice Murphy and Geoffrey Atherden also came to London. Unfortunately when we all assembled, we discovered there had been a coup at LWT and our champion Humphrey Barclay had been bumped sideways. The new head of light entertainment was an outwardly gay Glaswegian by the name of David Bell. Our very first meeting was a rather confronting affair where Bell informed us in no mean terms that Aunty Jack wasn’t to his tastes, and he definitely wouldn’t have chosen our show had he been head of comedy at the time. Bell’s biggest concern was that he found Aunty Jack unsexy. However he must have found me attractive because 10 minutes into the meeting he had his hand on my knee, propositioning me with ‘I suppose a sauna bath would be out of the question?’ I told him that it certainly was, and he then informed me that if I thought things were difficult now, he could make them even more difficult. And he did. Every opportunity the Scottish producer got to be disruptive or destructive, he took. Even our attempts to cast a female were made impossible. Every woman we chose was rejected, his snide sexual insinuation being, ‘Well, we know why you want her in the show, don’t we?’ No one was safe from ‘old hot loins’. Bell seemed to have an acute case of satyriasis. Even Geoffrey Atherden was bait for the amorous Bell. Geoffrey arrived at a rehearsal one afternoon puffing and panting with the story that he had just been pursued around the boardroom table by our executive producer. When eventually the cast was set, David Bell had the final say on the female cast member. But it was when we finally got down to the subject of wardrobe that the real battles erupted. In a costume meeting David let me know that he thought Aunty Jack was a plain and unattractive drag queen. However, he confided that he found me to be a very appealing boy with exceptionally good legs, and he just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to show them off. Bell suggested that Aunty Jack wear something more glamorous, more revealing. What he had in mind was

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something like a fishtail frock with lots of sequins. Aunty Jack in sequins? I told him that he didn’t seem to understand the character: ‘Mate, Aunty Jack is like bag full of spuds. Don’t you get it?’ Bell retorted, ‘You Australians just don’t want to listen to anybody. I’m trying to be constructive. I know what works in England and I could make you a very famous English comic.’ I gently reminded him that I didn’t want to become an English comic because I was an Australian comic. For the next two months it was a battle royale, neither of us giving an inch. It all came down to the fact that David Bell hadn’t chosen our project. After all David Bell was the man famous for producing the very high camp Scottish Stanley Baxter Show, where every second sketch was drag. We were a match made in hell. These were not happy days for me, and I suffered lots of Antipodeanbashing. I even found the Brits I worked with condescending. A classic example of the British attitude towards Australians was an experience I had in a London cab, going from the television studios in South Bank to our rented apartment in Clapham Common. It was Christmas Eve and we’d been filming quite late. My driver wore a turban; he was possibly a Sikh but happened to have the broadest Cockney accent imaginable. ‘You’re an Aussie, aren’t you guv?’ I told him that he was correct. ‘Then why aren’t you back in Australia celebratin’ Christmas with a plum puddin’ on Bondi Beach?’ I explained that I was working at LWT. ‘What do you do?’ he asked. I informed him that I was performing in a television special. His first reaction was to accuse me of taking jobs from the Brits. ‘Since when do we employ Aussies to replace our British workers?’ I explained that I had in fact written the show and was probably responsible for employing at least 60 Britishers. He then demanded to know what the show was about. I told him it was a comedy. He laughed. ‘Are you telling me that you’re here appearing in a comedy show?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s what I’m doing.’

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‘What do you do, wear a red nose?’ Feeling he had me on the canvas, he went in for the kill. ‘My old son,’ he said, ‘telling me that you’re an Australian comic is like saying you’re the funniest fucking man in Greenland.’ When I finally arrived at my destination, I tipped him in Vietnamese dong. ——— After months of fighting a losing battle with David Bell, the project was finally completed. I wanted to call the special Not the Aunty Jack Show, but Bell insisted it be called The Little Big Show. David Bell finally told me that he had no intention of the show ever seeing the light of day because it didn’t reflect his concepts of comedy. I left him with this: ‘David, I may come from the Land of Oz, but you live in the Land of Was. You see … England was famous once, but it’s not any more. Get over it.’ I returned to Australia, took the phone off the hook and got out the chocolate biscuits and lemonade. It was my panacea. Six months into the healing period I received a call from London Weekend Television letting me know that the show had gone to air and had rated in the high 30s nationally – an excellent result. (Nationally meant England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) They then broached the subject of a possible return for another special. I explained that I had a terrible headache and I thought it might take a few years for me to recover. I have never spent time in London in all the years since. In fact I have flown into Heathrow and as quickly as possible flown out to other destinations. They’re bad memories I’ve never managed to shake off.

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TAA the friendly way During my time at LWT I met an Australian expatriate who had been a successful TV producer in London and was also a great fan of The Aunty Jack Show. He explained that he and his wife were intending to return to Australia with their children as he had a large corporate TV commercial to direct. Many months later on returning to Sydney, I was stunned to see the new enormously expensive TAA commercial with its very familiar soundtrack. It was simply the Aunty Jack theme, with new lyrics. I had no doubts about where the melody had come from, and immediately called my lawyer. He suggested that I employ a barrister proficient in copyright law and that we approach the advertising agency with the threat of placing an injunction on the advertisement until they replaced the offending melody. One love song sold to advertising was enough. Our barrister decided to employ a musicologist to analyse the similarities between the two pieces of music. Through the grapevine I heard that the agency and my friend the producer had briefed the songwriter, and his instructions were to create an anthem along the lines of ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’. Well he certainly stuck to their brief because the musicologist employed to analyse the differences between the two tracks came back with the finding that there was a one in one million possibility that the similarities between the melodies was an accident. He claimed the commercial was exactly the same tempo as ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’, the melodies were in the same key and the commercial tune followed our song note for note, changing only after the third bar. Of course today there are very strict laws in music about ‘passing off’. On our big day in court Rory and I sat in our barrister’s chambers waiting for instructions. Our lawyer returned from his meeting with the advertising agency’s legal team and informed us that they were threatening to sue if we slapped an injunction on their $5 million campaign. TAA claimed that if we lost the appeal, they would make us personally responsible for court and loss of campaign costs. Unveiled threats. My

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instructions to our lawyer were, ‘Tell them all to get stuffed.’ We were confident because we knew we hadn’t done anything wrong. Our ultimatum was delivered to the agency’s solicitor. They folded immediately and settled out of court. Our lawyer called me the next day and let me know that after cancelling the court appearance, he had delivered the papers to the judge who was to have presided over the case, only to discover that he was a huge fan of the show and was disappointed that we hadn’t appeared before him. I suppose that’s the gamble. I know that when a case is settled out of court, the successful party is not supposed to declare the settlement amount, and I have stuck to this by the letter of the law. However, in an interview on the ABC years later when asked about the case, I explained that I was not at liberty to divulge the settlement monies; however, I did mention that I’d called the new extension to my house ‘The TAA Wing’.

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New team After the London Weekend Television fiasco I spent much of my time perfecting a tan. Then as serendipity would have it another very important person arrived in my life: Jim Burnett. I’d already connected with the wonderfully witty and charming barrister Charles Waterstreet, and the three of us were about to embark on a new chapter. Maurice Murphy had returned from London and was now directing a sitcom in Melbourne for Channel Ten. It was based on an idea by Johnny Speight called The Tea Ladies. Maurice invited me to submit scripts for the show. It was very politically based so I though that Charlie would be a good asset, and I asked him if he’d be interested. We wrote a script together and were invited to Melbourne. This is where I met Jim Burnett who was the acting script editor on the series. Jimmy was a lovable rascal, a drummer, a jazz singer, a comedy writer and an electrician by trade. Jim was a ten-pound Pom who began working in Australian television as a drummer on The Graham Kennedy Show, in time graduating to the role of dancer/backing singer. His dancing was very suspect, and fortunately after submitting endless ideas to the producers, Jim became a full-time writer for Kennedy and Bert Newton, later moving on to The Don Lane Show. It was kismet when Jim and I met. We just clicked. It was a strange match: Jim with his wife and child and a mortgage to boot, and me, the bachelor around town. Despite these obvious differences, we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company and, more importantly, we made each other laugh. I don’t know what prompted me to bring up the idea, but I mentioned to Jim that I wanted to write a play called Boy’s Own McBeth. ‘What’s it about?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it’s a good title, isn’t it?’ Two years later, Boy’s Own McBeth hit the stage, but not without a lot of sweat and tears. Jim came to Sydney and we began. Neither of us had written anything longer than a 30-minute TV sitcom, and here we were naïvely launching into a full-length musical comedy.

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I was living in an old weatherboard house in Watsons Bay, and wasn’t exactly the best of hosts. On his first night Jim was allotted a bed in the spare room. The mattress looked like someone had been murdered on it. During the night there was a huge storm, and Jim woke me to complain about a leak in the ceiling that was dripping directly onto his bed. I provided him with an umbrella. When I woke the next morning there was Jim sound asleep with the opened umbrella clasped between his knees. Once our work began, the weeks stretched into months and, as I still had a healthy social life, sometimes we would write until midnight and then do the clubs and bars. My old flatmate Kosta and his partner Fairlie had earlier moved to Watsons Bay and I was now their next-door neighbour. Kosta tells of a distraught Jim coming over to their house after a 72-hour writing marathon. Jim was in tears, telling them that he couldn’t go on. The reason Boy’s Own McBeth was successful was because of the tremendous energy and dedication we both put into it. I know that Jim didn’t regret one day of our efforts, and neither did I. To produce something of quality, you must be prepared to suffer. For me, writing Boy’s Own McBeth was like therapy. My school memories had been a blur, in fact I had consciously obliterated them. On the positive side my traumatic school experience was one of the inspirations behind Boy’s Own McBeth. Performing the play was a great healing process for me. On stage I was reliving my school experience … not as the person I was at high school, but as the confident person I should have been. It was a catharsis. The story was about a 42-year-old schoolboy, Terry Shakespeare, who chose to remain at school forever rather than face the perils of the outside world. He did this by deliberately failing and had been at school for 36 years. In that time he’d married the tuckshop lady and sired twins. Strangely the plotline was diametrically opposed to the actual feelings I had for high school. I couldn’t wait to escape the place. Years later when I entered university, I became that self-confident student who rebelled against the system, questioned the rules and broke them just for the fun of it.

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After 18 months we had a complete musical – script, music and lyrics – yet no one seemed interested. I took the work to John Bell at the Nimrod Theatre where we had had such success with our panto version of Hamlet on Ice. Bell’s only comment was, ‘We don’t perform that roughhouse theatre any more.’ For a Shakespeare aficionado I found the comment strange, because I’m sure all Will’s comedies were presented very rough, and were full of audience participation. BOMcB lay fallow for a year.

Another agent? I’d managed to survive in the entertainment industry for almost a decade without an agent. But after completing BOMcB, I suddenly had friends and acquaintances pushing for me to find some form of personal management. This was a period in my life when I felt that management might take some of the pressure off. After a while I found it quite difficult to sell myself in the marketplace. I was now convinced that maybe a third party could alleviate the stress and I’d even convinced myself that it would be worth the 15 per cent management fee just to delegate those responsibilities. Several agents were recommended, and the one that seemed to stand out was a newcomer to the game. This appealed to me. I did have several reservations about this agent because in the past she had only managed models. Managing models can’t be terribly difficult;all you need to remember are their bra, dress and shoe sizes. But friends kept putting her name forward and her stable of actors and directors was definitely growing. As I didn’t wear a bra or women’s clothes anymore I figured I’d be easy to manage. I called her personally and made an appointment to meet the next day. I arrived at the agency with a copy of the script and a tape of the music. The agent seemed interested and was well aware of my earlier work and I was really impressed when she said she’d read the script that night and organised for me to come in for her feedback the next day.

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My fears were allayed – this woman was definitely proactive. I may have made a good decision. When I arrived at her office the next morning, the secretary ushered me into her rooms. My new agent was looking particularly chipper. ‘Dahrling …’ she gushed, ‘I loved the piece, it’s terribly funny and the music is just maaarvellous.’ This was exactly what I needed to hear, but not in that ridiculous voice. I suddenly felt vindicated, and could feel the weight of responsibility lifting from my shoulders. I’d discovered a new support system. She continued, ‘I’ve put on my thinking cap and I’ve worked out precisely how we are going to get your show on.’ This is why I needed an agent. I realised my friends had been right – I’d been missing that special someone to organise me, point me in the right direction and give me positive guidance. I was in seventh heaven. Next my saviour teasingly asked, ‘What do you think about us getting … Graeme Blundell to perform your show in Melbourne?’ It was like someone slamming my genitals in a drawer. My world collapsed. The new agent just didn’t get it. I hadn’t spent two years sweating over a musical to give it to Graeme Blundell to perform in Melbourne, and anyway Blundell didn’t sing. My response was immediate. I picked up the script and music and politely asked, ‘What was it like being my agent?’ It hadn’t even been 24 hours. My ex-agent looked stunned. I then curtsied, did a pirouette and danced out of the room singing ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’. It made for a good story and several years later I recounted the incident on the Australian version of The Michael Parkinson Show on Channel Ten. Not long after the Parkinson interview, I was attending a party at Margaret Fink’s house and I ran into my ex-agent, who was having a conversation with Charles Waterstreet. When I approached them, she let me know that she had seen the Parkinson interview and was horrified by the story I told of our brief management relationship. She made it clear that she intended to see her lawyer and sue me for defamation. Thankfully Charlie casually informed

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her that one could only sue a person for defamation if they were lying. Game, set and match. His advice saved her a lot of money in legal fees. The next incarnation of BOMcB was actually instigated by Charles Waterstreet. He invited me to play tennis, because he had a proposition he wanted to put to me regarding the play. Sadly since the personal management debacle the play had again been wallowing in limbo. Charlie’s idea was that we should play a game of tennis and if I won, he would provide 50 per cent of the money for the production. I don’t even think I won the match, but Charlie still agreed to put up 50 per cent of the budget. In those days he had far too much money. I was so relieved, but when I asked him where we would find the other 50 per cent, he told me that I was going to put it up. ‘Why me?’ I quibbled. ‘I prefer to see the people I invest in put their money where their mouth is.’ And so Dunsinane Enterprises was formed. Charlie and I had both been brought up Roman Catholic. Where he had experienced the full catastrophe, boarding at Waverley College, I had only had a smattering of weekend catch-up classes with the nuns and a bunch of cruel ill-informed brothers. We had another thing in common; we both had a special interest in gambling. My gambling fixation was manifested by my lack of acting work. I could explain my infatuation away as a quick replacement fix for the adrenaline buzz a performer feels when they step onstage. I think the sensation of watching the last furlong of a horse race as the pack dash to the finish line is the same kind of excitement an actor feels the moment the curtain is raised on opening night. Charlie and I would travel to Randwick racecourse every Saturday and each contribute $200 to a kitty. We would place half of the money on the first race, with the dream of a win and an even bigger kitty to place even larger bets later. This system rarely worked and Charlie and I would usually find ourselves with about $20 at the end of a meet. On those occasions our strategy was to place the remaining cash on the longest priced outsider in the last race in Brisbane. This was playing out our

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Catholic guilt – the odds of a 100-to-1 winner getting up in the last race were 10,000,000 to 1. For our sins we were guaranteed to find ourselves with no money for a taxi or even a bus fare, and our punishment was that we would have to walk home. A Catholic punter’s form of selfflagellation. During this period Charlie met Kate Fitzpatrick. From the minute they started dating it was pretty bloody. They had one thing in common – they were both Catholic – but there was little else. For instance Kate loved the company of superstars, whereas Charlie preferred tennis, gambling, alcohol and the company of vagabonds. Where Kate was the stage beauty, Charlie was the eminently eligible barrister, who out of court looked like an unmade bed. It seemed a strange relationship because they spent very little time together. Kate loved being a celebrity and she adored mixing with them. Charlie was a shy Albury boy who needed Dutch courage to approach women, so generally he was always pissed. Whenever we went to a bar, which was usually seven days a week, by 4 a.m. Charlie and I would be the last men standing and of course the last woman standing was the barmaid. So while Kate skipped the light fantastic with the likes of Jeremy Irons and Imran Khan, Charlie preferred the company of barmaids, which is fitting, because his family owned Waterstreet’s Hotel in Albury. I had known Kate for many years before I met Charlie and she was certainly one of Sydney’s most glamorous actresses. In fact I’d recommended her to Peter Weir for Homesdale. At the end of filming I found myself homeless, having been ejected from my digs in Cammeray where I had been living in a client’s property free of charge on the condition that as their architect I would draw up plans and supervise the renovations. After a period of one year the client, having seen no activity, gave me notice to vacate. Kate generously offered me a room at Jim Sharman’s house in Surry Hills where she was house-sitting at the time. I can remember early one morning coming downstairs to get a glass of water only to be confronted by Jerry Lewis sitting in the living room. I was too stunned to speak. Why didn’t I sing him a verse of ‘Sunday Driving’? Kate was incorrigible. If

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you read her kiss’n’tell book, Name Dropping, the parade of stars goes on ad infinitum. It appears that she’s gone out with everyone from Imran Khan to Genghis Khan. As I didn’t own a car, I always travelled in Charlie’s filthy beaten-up old Honda Civic. It was like being a passenger in a portable change room, with dirty towels, empty beer cans and dozens of pairs of running shoes and tennis racquets tossed across the back seat. Charlie’s humour was wonderfully dark. One night driving through Double Bay I was in the front seat with the beer cans while MP Jim Killen (a friend of Kate’s) was hunched in the back seat nursing a couple of racquets and Charlie’s sweaty tennis paraphernalia. Charlie turned to Jim and said, ‘You know, Jim, if we were all killed in a head-on collision right now, tomorrow’s headlines would probably read “Friends of Kate Fitzpatrick Die in Car Crash”.’

BOM cB goes off On 11 July 1979 BOMcB opened in the Kirk Gallery, an old run-down church on Cleveland Street, Surry Hills. We tried to create the feel of an authentic down-at-heel private school. The church hall was already equipped with pews and we simply added 100 well-worn school desks to the auditorium. The small hall behind the church was converted into a foyer-cum-tuckshop, manned by little ladies selling programs, scones, lamingtons and cups of tea. In fact the tuckshop did a roaring trade and probably made more profit than the show itself. Our usherettes wore their old school uniforms and escorted people to their desks on roller skates. The show was created on the smell of an oily rag. With just $15,000 and a lot of good will, we managed to get it up and running. My codirector Mark Gould and I put together an incredibly multi-skilled cast. Rory O’Donoghue agreed to perform and also took on the responsibilities of musical director. BOMcB first manifested itself as a small acoustic

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musical in that 200-seat church (fire trap) and it gradually evolved into a huge electric rock show eventually playing 1500-seat theatres right across Australia. The first production opened to wonderful reviews and packed audiences. It was a rip-roaring knockabout boys’ own tale and they loved it. It wasn’t long before audiences began turning up in their old school uniforms. In the very early weeks at the Kirk Gallery we received some glowing press. Our first review was from one of Australia’s most respected theatre critics, Philip Parsons, in Theatre Australia in 1979: In a bizarre send-up of the happiest days of your life, the authors have assembled a cast of swots, crawlers, stirrers and dunces into a pantomime which has taken the Australian public by storm, both for its outrageous antics and appealing music and, more seriously, its glimpse of the doubts and confusion which haunt the school-leaver.

The Sunday Telegraph called it ‘A combination of Welcome Back Kotter, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Shakespeare in rock’n’roll.’ The Bulletin compared it to ‘the Marx Brothers and the Goons’ and the Canberra Times said it was ‘explosively funny’. Another particularly favourable review appeared in International Variety, about a week after our opening. Early in the run I received correspondence from a Kenneth Waissman, a New York theatrical producer who had been impressed by the Variety review and requested that I send some more information on the show, including the script and music. I thought about it. The show was doing well. America was a long way away and the complexity of protecting intellectual property, i.e. copyright, in the States was difficult and expensive. The letter disappeared into the bottom drawer. Our little show became a cult hit and was so popular that we needed to look at transferring to a larger theatre. After three months at the Kirk Gallery we moved to the 800-seat Paris Theatre, an inner-city location brilliantly situated opposite Hyde Park. The Paris was a glorious art deco

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movie theatre which, during the early twentieth century, had been reworked by Walter Burley Griffin himself. When we moved in it was just a shell of a movie house with a shallow stage, no wings and no backstage. But it did have 800 beautiful padded seats. The single dressing room was a tiny space situated directly under the stage and felt more like a bomb shelter. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but it was our home for over 12 months. ———

My proud parents came to the opening night of BOMcB at the Paris. A well-known writer friend was seated next to my mum. After an expletive-ridden first half, the writer asked my mother how she felt about her son using four-letter words on stage. ‘He doesn’t mean to do it!’ she said. ‘Pardon?’ said the writer ‘The director makes him say it,’ my mother explained. ‘But he is the director!’ Annoyed, she retorted, ‘Well someone else makes him!’ Her boy could do no wrong. God knows how my poor mother deflected questions from her lady bowler friends about Aunty Jack. ‘Which one is your son again?’ ‘The one in the dress.’ ‘Heavens!’ I didn’t make it easy for them. ———

The new bigger rock version of BOMcB at the Paris held its own for six months, then audience numbers started to falter. Charlie and I were new to this game, but we soon learned that filling an 800-seat theatre after an already successful three-month run at the Kirk Gallery was difficult.

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So like the Persian carpet showrooms of today we invented the ongoing closing down sale. Every weekend we would place an ad in the newspaper which read, ‘Boy’s Own McBeth must close.’ We varied this with calls to action like ‘closing soon’, followed by the very urgent ‘closing very soon’. The trick was to never place the finish date in the ads. It worked for almost six months. We even boasted that the show was ‘Now in its Second Decade’ (a reference to the fact that we started in 1979 and it was now 1980). When the show eventually closed in November 1980 I was always surprised to see audiences still lined up outside the theatre on Saturday nights. Obviously they were consumers who had become immune to our lies in the media. ‘True non believers.’

Fishing in America The Kirk Gallery production of Boy’s Own McBeth closed around August 1979 and in the time before we were to open in November at the Paris Theatre I decided to investigate taking the show to the US. Jim begged me to look at the possibilities in London, but I still hadn’t recovered from the British experience of 1977. So I flew to America to see if I could find some interest there. I’d totally forgotten about the New York producer who had written to me, until I saw the Broadway production of Grease. I took one look at the program and immediately recognised his name: Kenneth Waissman of Waissman and Fox. Remember, I wasn’t a real thespian, I was an architect and I had no idea who was who in theatre. I went back to my hotel room, looked up the phone number of Waissman and Fox, and called. The secretary asked if Mr Waissman would know what I was calling about. I said, ‘Probably not, just tell him that I’m from Australia.’ Within seconds Waissman was on the phone. ‘I’ve only ever written to one Australian in my life, and that was about a musical. Was it you?’ He then asked me why I hadn’t sent him a copy of the script. I was

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honest and told him that I didn’t know who I could trust in America. He laughed. I let him know that I had a copy of the script with me. Next he asked how long I was intending to stay in New York. I told him that I would be leaving in two days. Again he laughed and said, ‘I suppose you expect me to meet with you today, read the script tonight and then tell you what I think of it tomorrow?’ ‘It’d be good if you could!’ I replied naïvely. He did a lot of ‘I don’t believe this’, all the time remaining totally charming. After lots of mutterings with his secretary, he invited me to come in that afternoon. With my little package of photographs of the cast, a copy of the album and the script I headed down Broadway towards their offices, just south of Times Square. I’ve always been prompt, in fact I think being half an hour early in New York looked a bit too keen, but it gave me plenty of extra time to get really nervous as I sat in the plush foyer of Waissman and Fox. Right on time, Mr Waissman ushered someone out from his office. He warmly welcomed me to New York, offered me a drink and made me feel very special. It’s something I really admire about the Americans – they’re willing to give you their time and treat you with dignity and respect just in case you have an idea that might make them a fortune. Kenneth made me feel very much at home and like a new-found fan he appeared to be fascinated as he perused the production shots from BOMcB. Again he reiterated that he didn’t normally assess new shows overnight, but in my case he would come back with an opinion the next day. I hoped he wasn’t going to suggest I get Graeme Blundell to do the show in Melbourne. The meeting finished and we had a pleasant chat about sharks and kangaroos. It was a very nerve-racking night. I’d suddenly found myself dealing with one of the biggest operators on Broadway. There was a lot riding on this next meeting. I didn’t happen to mention to Kenneth that I’d had several rather uneventful meetings with a couple of small-time offBroadway producers from the tiny WestBeth theatre. Frankly these two

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guys seemed to have less money to rub together than I did and that was very little. Early the next morning I was again sweating and twitching in the Waissman and Fox foyer. I must have been first off the rank, because alone Kenneth came bounding from his office, absolutely beaming. This was a good sign. As he put his arm around me and walked me into his office he said, ‘I’ve just finished reading it and I think the show is great and the music is terrific. It’s fresh, funky and rebellious and I get it. But there’s a problem.’ ‘What didn’t you like?’ I said defensively. ‘I liked everything about the show. But the problem is that you want to bring the Australian cast. Am I right?’ ‘That’s what I’d like to do.’ ‘Why?’ he probed. ‘Because my seven performers can sing, dance and play all the musical instruments. I have a seven-piece rock’n’roll band that can do it all.’ ‘Okay, I understand your loyalty. But here’s my first problem: the Musicians Union will claim that your seven musician-actors are putting seven American musicians out of work. Musical shows traditionally have pit orchestras.’ ‘But the show isn’t traditional.’ ‘I can also assure you US Immigration and Equity will demand that after three months your cast be replaced by an American cast, who may or may not be able to play the required musical instruments. Which means I’ll have to employ a pit orchestra.’ I was shattered and explained to Kenneth that it had been my dream to show to the world that Australia could produce a world-class musical. His reply was, ‘Are you doing this for nationalistic reasons or for money?’ That one had me stumped. I was spending Charlie’s and my money travelling the world trying to find a suitable producer to pick up our show and I was running out of both time and money quickly. Kenneth explained his vision of the show and its future as he saw it. ‘I haven’t had very long to think about this, Grahame, but my gut

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reaction is that with some tweaking the show could do very well here. But if I were to produce it, I would definitely need to make some changes.’ Not exactly what I wanted to hear. Obviously one of those changes would be that I wouldn’t be in it. Kenneth continued, ‘I‘d try for a multiracial cast. For instance your character might be the Irish rebel. The headmaster could be Scottish. For the twins, I’d look at a Puerto Rican for Dopey and his twin brother might be Chinese.’ It was a funny idea. ‘For the gay English master Mr Elston I’d try maybe an Italian stallion fighting his sexuality, and of course young Morrie McBeth would be Jewish and played by a woman. Finally I believe a white-bread Bostonian Republican would be perfect as Charles Hunt the school captain.’ I have to admit in hindsight it was a fantastic idea. Kenneth Waissman had just cast the show and made it totally multiracial. He had covered all the bases with his concept. With his casting Boy’s Own McBeth could have played almost anywhere in the world and the audiences would have immediately understood the stereotypes. But at that time I was totally blinded by my devotion to the Australian cast. After all, they’d been with me for close on two years. I have to admit it wasn’t just loyalty that affected my decision, I’m afraid my ego also got in the way. So I made an unconsidered decision, and said no to Kenneth Waissman. He didn’t seem surprised and wished me luck. So I left New York and continued to search for an American producer who would be brave enough to bring an all-Australian cast to the USA. I found that producer in Los Angeles on the way home. I don’t think brave was an apt description of him – I think ‘deluded’ would have been more appropriate. But I have to give credit to Kenneth Waissman, because everything he predicted that could go wrong, did go wrong – plus a lot more pitfalls that even he hadn’t seen.

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Angels at the opera I had only just returned from the States when I was invited to host a New Year’s Eve concert at the Sydney Opera House. The year was 1980. Of course the promoters didn’t want me to emcee the show, they wanted Aunty Jack. My gut reaction was to say no, but for whatever reason I accepted the offer, even though that little voice inside told me to walk away. I certainly didn’t do it for the money. What did I have to do? The brief was for Aunty Jack to introduce the acts on the night, deliver a couple of jokes and get off. It all sounded so simple. My writing partner Jim Burnett and I spent a few days preparing material. We had no idea what lay ahead of us. The line-up of performers looked very strong, and there were plenty of good young Australian bands. The highlight of the night was to be the appearance, directly after midnight, of Australia’s number one band, The Angels. Jim and I arrived at the Opera House at around 4 p.m. on that fateful day. There were already about 50,000 Angels’ fans jammed into the forecourt of the Opera House. An enormous stage had been erected high up on the podium, hovering over the sweeping staircases. It was a punishingly hot afternoon and the very young audience were already drinking heavily and screaming for The Angels. Not a good omen. By seven o’clock there were close to 150,000 people crammed into the surrounding areas. It was enormous. The audience spread as far as the eye could see, all the way back into the Botanical Gardens. I had never seen anything as huge in my life. If I was nervous beforehand, I was now catatonic. My greatest fear was having to open. I’d be the first person to confront the unruly mob and the drinkers in the forecourt weren’t helping because by now they were totally legless and the chant of ‘Angels! Angels!’ was unrelenting. I remember hearing the announcer desperately trying to introduce me over the thunderous rabble of the crowd. He finally got out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your host for tonight is Aunty Jack, and remember, if

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you don’t listen to her, she’s gonna come out there and rip your bloody arms off!’ I froze. That was my only line and someone else had delivered it, very badly. This wasn’t the start I’d imagined. Freaking out and frocked up, I made my entrance. The roar from the crowd was deafening, it felt veritably gladiatorial. The night was going to be a battle. First up I needed to quieten the masses so they could at least hear the jokes that I was furiously editing in my head. I can assure you stand-up comedy with 150,000 people is not a wise career choice. I can’t remember much of my opening routine and I certainly didn’t threaten the audience with ripping their bloody arms off. Frankly they terrified me. By nine o’clock the show had been going along relatively smoothly and the drunks down front were still howling for their beloved Angels. So when I introduced Rolf Harris, the vomitorium weren’t at all impressed. Rolf had obviously chosen to save his big hit ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’ for his closer and he started off with one of his cuter ballads, ‘Two Little Boys’. To show his marvellous versatility, Rolf bypassed the wobble board and accompanied himself on piano. I’m afraid the sweet refrains of ‘Two Little Boys’ were too much for the Angels contingent. Halfway through the song, almost in slow motion, a single beer can floated over the audience and landed smack on stage, just missing Rolf at the piano. Always the pro, Rolf stopped the performance, picked up the lone beer can, shook it a couple of times and said to the audience, ‘You mean buggers, it’s not even full!’ … Not a good idea, Rolf! He’d just started World War Three. This was a brazen challenge to the pissed masses, so as Rolf returned to the piano, a barrage of full beer cans rained down onto the stage. Unfortunately the snipers hadn’t perfected their distances, because Rolf escaped with his life. As for my own safety, I luckily had the fat lady padding on under the dress, which worked as a rather good rebound surface for the stray beer can that came my way. However, I was definitely going to be in trouble if they got in a head shot. The next act was Marcia Hines and Friends. Sadly, Marcia turned out

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to be a one-beer-can act. The moment the first can hit the stage, she thanked the audience and departed. Immediately the producers appeared out of nowhere, demanding that I go out and fill. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ they explained, ‘the next four acts have refused to go on!’ So for the next hour I tried desperately to expand my very flimsy material. We’d only really prepared short intros, but under the circumstances I needed a lot more material. I talked for what felt like hours, but fortunately I had Jim Burnett with me backstage. I think if I were going into war, then I couldn’t think of a better man than Jim to be at my side. He wasn’t flustered at all. Jim calmly suggested that I relax and try playing games with the audience. ‘Just have fun!’ he said, finishing his eighth scotch. I was so anxious I was willing to try anything. I went with the idea, and suggested to the rabble that we play a few party games to while away the hours before midnight. Those that could still stand sounded their approval. I began with I Spy With My Little Eye. It was certainly an interesting concept that I’m sure wasn’t designed to be played with 150,000 people. I began the game by looking up to the skies. I then looked down. I looked to the side and then I stared back up to the grid above my head which contained the spots and par cans. Finally I gave the clue: ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with L.’ Without missing a beat, the entire 150,000 screamed, ‘Lights!’ Bugger it. I was hoping to get at least 20 minutes out of this routine. ‘What are you, a pack of bloody intellectuals?’ I roared and then dashed to side of the stage for help only to find the producers again waiting in the wings. Surprise, surprise another two acts had pulled out, and again I was requested to fill. Jim’s suggestion was to try more kids’ games. So, I returned to my very own Gallipoli and asked the multitudes if they knew Hide and Seek. Enthusiastically they screamed yes, they did! That was a relief. So I explained my new rules. In my version I would turn my back to audience, count to a hundred and, in that time, they would all have the opportunity

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to go away and hide. When I reached a hundred, I would turn around, and hopefully they’d all be gone. I did suggest however that if I couldn’t find them, maybe we could all meet up some other day. That filled five minutes and I really did count to a hundred, very slowly. Each time I left the stage, there were more producers with more sad stories of acts unable to appear because of sudden deaths in the family, etc. ‘Bondy, you’ve gotta fill!’ became the catchphrase for the night. I begged for suggestions. Anything! They came up with this: ‘Perhaps you could get them to help you count down to midnight!’ Shit! Why hadn’t I thought of that? Okay, it was 10.30 now … so that meant only 90 minutes to go. I’m sure this particular audience would have loved counting along with me for an hour and a half. Fuck it. I was going to die! During my time on stage, I was witness to the most grotesque scenes below me. It was horrifying to watch the Angels fans who were now so pissed they were randomly hurling bottles and empty flagons of wine up into the air which eventually crashed down onto people’s skulls or shattered into lethal shards, slashing the feet of those too numb to know. The injuries were mounting, but it was so tightly packed in the forecourt, ambulance officers and volunteers couldn’t make their way in to evacuate the wounded. It was horrendous. Believe me, I delivered more padding that night than you’d find in a gridiron team’s locker room. But miraculously, 11.59 p.m. came around, and I was still alive. As is the tradition, at 11.59 we all counted down to midnight. Then as if they really cared for one another, full of piss and hypocrisy, the audience all held hands and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, while those clever enough to get a hand free still managed to lob missiles at the minor celebrities who dared to grace the stage. Once the formalities were over, it was time to introduce the act the majority of drunks had been waiting for. At approximately 12.05 p.m., onto the stage strutted Doc Neeson and The Angels. Those Angels fans that were still alive, or awake, went ballistic. The band plugged in and began that memorable thumping riff from their huge hit ‘Take A Long Line’.

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The audience were up and dancing and, in the case of the forecourt, blindly stumbling on the bodies of the fallen. The band were exquisitely tight and really starting to cook when suddenly the bass player Chris Bailey collected a full magnum of champagne directly between the eyes. He went down like a sack of potatoes. The rest of the band seemed mesmerised and kept playing, minus their bass player. Next the lead singer Doc Neeson stepped forward to the mike, sporting his trademark dinner suit and silk scarf, and just as he was about to deliver his opening vocals, smack, down he went, felled by a sniper with a full can of VB. I believe it was the shortest set the Angels ever performed. They didn’t even make eight bars. It was all over. I went back out and said ‘That’s it! Thank you very much, I hope we don’t meet again!’ The show was cancelled, and half of The Angels left courtesy of the New South Wales ambulance service. From that day on, outdoor concerts were banned at the Opera House for the next 20 years. I have tried to erase that night from my memory bank. Even today its ugliness in recall still horrifies me. It was a near-death experience, physically and career-wise. After downing several stiff drinks in the Green Room I exited the Opera House via the forecourt. The area was a disaster zone, still awash with the blood and vomit of the fallen angels … fans. Following this experience my New Year’s resolution that year was to never play Aunty Jack again. But I did! I wouldn’t trust me as far as I could throw me.

Copyright, right! Looking back on my Aunty Jack experience in England, all Londoners weren’t negative. Through Andy McKay, sax player for Roxy Music, I met Malcolm McLaren. (Andy arranged and Roxy Music recorded the songs for the LWT Little Big Show.) At the time, McLaren’s career was well and truly on the rise, after he had come up with the concept for the Sex Pistols. We started talking music and McLaren was enquiring about what

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I had done in Oz and what I intended to do in the future. After a few drinks I started to tell him about an idea I had for a musical set in Australia in the thirteenth century called The Boil of Cathar. McLaren immediately asked what sort of history we had in the 1400s. I explained that without a mediaeval history I had the poetic licence to create whatever I wanted. Aboriginal knights … gum trees and galvanised iron castles. McLaren interrupted me with, ‘Grahame, before you go any further, can I give you a bit of advice: an idea shared is an idea lost. Know what I mean?’ I think every young creative person should heed this lesson and be careful protecting their creativity. Over the course of my career a number of my ideas have mysteriously reappeared as other incarnations without my consent. I know that in the unscrupulous world of television, certain TV execs have been known to look at an idea, inform the writers that they have already been exploring the same concept, then pass it to their in-house writers to produce their very own version. Basically the writer has no comeback and they certainly can’t afford to sue a television channel because it all comes down to who has the deepest pockets. ——— In 1981 Rory and I wrote and produced the soundtrack for the feature film Fatty Finn, directed by Maurice Murphy. That year we won the Australian Film Institute Award for the Best Original Music Score for a Feature Film. Alas! Winning the award was like the kiss of death, because we were never offered another film score, ever. More to the point, the producer of the film assumed that having paid for the soundtrack he then had the right to release an album of our music without permission – an EP was released in conjunction with the film. Again we called our lawyer and the producers were informed to please ‘cease and desist’. The joys of copyright!

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LA nights Later in 1981 I arrived in Los Angeles with the Australian cast of Boy’s Own McBeth and found myself dealing with a lawyer for the East Coast Teamsters and our American producer, who claimed to have produced records for Jimi Hendrix and Three Dog Night. In Australia the production had the very down-at-heel feel of a struggling private boys’ school and to continue the school theme our usherettes wore their funky old school uniforms. Our American producer didn’t really get it. In the LA production the usherettes were all buxom Penthouse pets in skin-tight T-shirts. Our opening night party was held on the UCLA campus. The producer had chosen Alpha Beta Gamma Delta House as the venue. Somehow Paul Hogan and John Cornell were there on the opening night. They also came to the after-show bash. The fraternity boys, not to be left out, stood on the upper balcony of their frat house and urinated on the arriving guests. It was soooo LA. If our opening night party was forgettable, the following day was even more so. On the night of the party our public relations man was having too good a time. It may have been the white talcum powder he had caked around his nostrils that finished him off. He’d organised, through his promotions company, for me to appear the next morning on NBC’s Today Show. It had been confirmed earlier that night that our PR gentleman would organise a 6 a.m. wake-up call and pick me up at 6:45 to drive to the Burbank television studios. When I woke the next morning at 7.55 I realised that something was terribly wrong. When I called the PR company, there was no reply. I turned on my television to The Today Show only to watch anchor Jane Pauley snipe, ‘We don’t know who the Australian performer Grahame Bond thinks he is, but he obviously believes he is too important to appear on this show!’ This was my worst nightmare, it felt like déja` vu … a repeat of the ABC announcement for The Off Show, only this time Jane Pauley had stated on American national television that I was up myself.

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If that wasn’t bad enough, waiting on my doorstep the same morning was a lethal copy of the LA Times with a review of our opening night by the theatre critic Tom Malone. I have since heard him described as ‘The critic who writes without fear or talent’. The headline of his review read ‘Boy’s Own McBeth Antisemitic’. A review like this in LA was a disaster. I was catatonic. I hadn’t come all this way to see some potato-headed Mick – sorry, Irish do-gooder – crucify us at the first hurdle. My Jewish lawyer, Chester Ross, knew that this review was the kiss of death. Everyone could see the writing was on the wall; everyone but our fearless producer. He just didn’t get it. I think he truly believed that the entertainment industry in Los Angeles was still run by the mob. One of the few positive things to come out of my trip to LA was a chance meeting with writer-producer Steve Feke at the after-show party. Feke had attended the opening and approached me to say how much he had enjoyed the show. As our conversation continued, I discovered that Steve had written and produced the feature film When A Stranger Calls, a hugely successful thriller. The story is about a young babysitter who constantly receives mysterious phone calls during the night. Each time, the caller asks, ‘Have you checked the children?’ Eventually the babysitter calls the police, who then trace the call only to find that it is coming from the children’s upstairs bedroom. Later that night Feke got around to asking where the Australian cast and crew were staying. I explained that our accommodation was a series of apartments on Beverly Drive. I was floored when Steve Feke offered me the spare room in his Studio City house. This was an incredibly unexpected gesture. Australians certainly aren’t as trusting or as generous! My immediate thoughts were, Los Angeles, murder mystery writer, single … I told him that I was fine with my accommodation. Feke immediately read my reaction and said, ‘I think you misunderstand. Have you met my wife, Cristy?’ Like her husband, Cristy Feke was also insistent that I give up paying rent on the Beverly Hills apartment and stay with them and their daughter Priscilla in the family home. I pride myself on my good judgement, so I took the Fekes up on their

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offer. The day I arrived at their home with all my goods and chattels, Steve seemed strangely distant and I suddenly felt unsure about my decision to become the family lodger. Feke finally apologised for seeming distracted and explained that he urgently had to fly to San Francisco for a writing engagement and could be away for couple of weeks. I suggested putting off my stay, but he insisted that I move in. Just before Feke’s cab arrived, he took me aside. ‘My friend, if you lay just one finger on my wife or child, I’ll find you and I’ll kill you!’ Then he was gone. I had no right of reply and stood in the driveway nervously waving goodbye. So there we were, Cristy Feke and I, in our first awkward moments together. This poor woman knew absolutely nothing about me. On a whim her husband had dumped a total stranger in their house and run away. Maybe he was writing When A Stranger Stays? Only then did I come to the realisation that I knew absolutely nothing about either of them. After Steve’s departure, Cristy and I retired to the kitchen for coffee and I remember a moment when we both reached for the sugar bowl and our hands accidentally touched. We froze. I think I was more shocked than she was. Did she try to touch me? Maybe she was planning to phone Steve about molester boy? This was a very tense situation for both of us. The following days were excruciatingly uncomfortable. I had visions of being accused of sexual harassment by Mrs Feke and then eventually being tracked down and murdered by Mr Feke. Or maybe Mrs Feke was unhappy in her marriage and would ask me to dispose of her husband. I wasn’t a murderer, I was just an innocent Aussie lodging in Stress City. Anyway, those were my thoughts. God knows what Cristy was thinking. After two nerve-racking weeks Steve returned. He again took me aside and whispered, ‘Bond, if we end up with a bouncing baby kangaroo in the family, you’re dead meat!’ He thought it was hysterically funny. It was all a joke, but he hadn’t bothered tell his wife or myself. I ended up staying with the Fekes for almost four months and we became very dear friends. I can honestly say they are the most beautiful and generous people I have ever met.

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A few days after our disastrous opening at the Westwood Playhouse I received a phone call at the theatre from MTM Enterprises, a production company owned by Mary Tyler Moore. They asked whether I would be interested in auditioning for a pilot comedy television series. Someone from the company had seen the play and they were offering to send the script in the next couple of days. This was something positive for a change. I said yes. The script arrived, I read it, and it was absolute rubbish. The character they wanted me to read for was a detective/spy described by the writer as a ‘British’ James Bondish fop. The only thing I had in common with the character was the surname, so I called them back and told them that I wasn’t interested. When my American friends heard about me turning down an audition they were horrified that I’d said no to a major studio. This just wasn’t done in LA, but I wasn’t really interested in appearing in a load of old cobblers. Several years later I recognised the script. It was Remington Steele and the part I’d been asked to audition for went to a newcomer, Pierce Brosnan. Whenever I worked overseas for any period of time (nine months seemed to be my limit) I found myself becoming homesick. Anything could set me off: a smell, an image. I can remember one morning in London in 1977 sitting in my freezing little room listening to the BBC as they played a track of currawongs calling … I wept, it conjured up so many memories of home. The suffocating heat, the endless blue skies and the vast stillness of our great sweeping landscape. All this mixed in with the sounds of currawongs and their absurd warbling, like birds gargling with mouthwash. I always missed Australia. All of the time I worked at LWT I dreaded the thought of the show becoming successful because success would mean that I’d have to live in that shithouse. The same went for LA, but at least the people were nicer. During the run at the Westwood Playhouse my co-director Mark Gould mentioned that our LA stage manager, Joe, carried a gun. Joe claimed that he needed it on the nights they were paid. This should have alerted me to the sort of people I was dealing with. He didn’t trust the producer either. After BOMcB folded in LA, the producer and his lawyer suggested that

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the cast work as a support band for The Beach Boys. This was the old ‘work off the debt’ ploy. Our New York lawyer, Chester Ross, received correspondence soon after we closed which he claimed contained ‘unveiled threats’. Chester recommended that we all leave the country immediately. We took his advice, but unfortunately several actors hadn’t been paid their last week’s wage by the American production, so when they returned to Australia they proceeded to lodge a complaint with Australian Actors Equity. Equity decided in their wisdom that as they couldn’t prosecute the American producers, they’d make Charlie and me pay the actors. It was so unfair. We weren’t responsible for the American producer’s debt. But Equity’s threat was that if we refused to pay, they would never allow us to produce another thing in Australia. Where was the reciprocity? Equity had been letting any two-bit Yank rip money out of our country for years. They were jelly-backs. Dear Red Symons, who was part of the cast, phoned to explain that he had nothing to do with the actors’ demands. All he said was, ‘Thanks Bondy for giving me the opportunity of having a second shot at America. It didn’t work, but we tried.’ Red had an earlier unsuccessful attempt in the US with the band Skyhooks. In the end Charlie and I were responsible for paying those disenfranchised cast members $18,000. I’m afraid the Scottish play really did have a curse, even though it took a few years to come around and bite us on the arse.

Flight to G’dayland My return flight from Los Angeles to Sydney was eventful. As I stepped aboard the Qantas Jumbo I felt a great relief to be welcomed by a flight attendant saying, ‘G’day mate, welcome aboard!’ A huge weight lifted from my shoulders. I felt like I’d just stepped onto a piece of Australia

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and for the first time in months I felt safe. As I settled into my economy-class window seat, a hulk of a man sat down beside me, while his giant partner took the aisle seat, her bulk spilling across the row and into the aisle. They were Americans. As the big Jumbo prepared to taxi into its take-off position, the blob turned to me. ‘Excuse me sir, but do you find Jesus Christ to be your own personal saviour?’ Was I going to suffer 17 hours of Bible-bashing from this fat zealot? When the Rolls-Royce engines reached their maximum pitch, I slowly turned to my fellow passenger and simply said, ‘No spicka da Inglis!’ I didn’t hear another word from my neighbours and to keep up the façade I spent the next eight hours immersing myself in as many nonEnglish language movies as was humanly possible. It was all working until I was recognised by our Qantas co-pilot doing his constitutional. He and I had a short chat and I confided in him that I had a great fear of flying. I think it was this that prompted him to invite me to be his guest in the cockpit for the landing the next morning. The invitation was for me to come up as soon as I had finished breakfast, which was about 5.30 a.m. This would give me three-quarters of an hour in the cockpit with the crew before we touched down in Sydney. I thanked him for his generous offer and promised him that I’d be there. The next morning I was woken for breakfast around 5 a.m. I thought about the co-pilot’s kind offer, but as I wasn’t feeling particularly cheery and still a little fragile after my bruising experience in Los Angeles, I decided to remain in my economy-class window seat. I assumed that the flight crew wouldn’t miss my company and in fact thought that they must get quite bored having to entertain guests as they prepared for landing. I was just settling into watching yet another movie when an announcement blasted over the aircraft’s PA system in a mock Aunty Jack voice: ‘If Grahame Bond doesn’t get up to the flight deck immediately, we’ll have to come down there and rip his bloody arms off!’ In shock I leapt to my feet, straddled the sleeping blubber and raced down the aisle, through business class, and then up the spiral staircase to

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the top deck. As I arrived at the cockpit, the door to the flight deck opened and the Captain at the controls turned to me and said, ‘We thought that’d get you up here pretty fast!’ The announcement certainly worked for me, but God only knows what panic it set off with the rest of the passengers, especially the uninitiated Americans.

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There’s no other store Soon after returning home I received a telegram from Ian Kennon. It read, ‘Call me!’ Back in the 1970s Maurice Murphy and I had had many meetings with Ian Kennon, who was then the general manager of Channel Ten. Kennon was a hard-nosed salesman and I could tell that he hated Murphy’s two-bob English accent and my arty farty dress sense. So negotiations never really got off the ground. Years later he left Ten when Rupert Murdoch purchased it. Kennon was a tiny man and the joke about town was to stand on your tippy toes, raise one hand above your head, make a twisting motion and ask, ‘Who is this an impression of?’ The answer: ‘Ian Kennon trying to open a bottle of Galliano!’ Once out of television, Kennon decided to become a personal manager and started by handling John Laws and Bill Collins. Ian was a very unpredictable character. Out of the blue he approached me to join his stable. The first job he found me was a voiceover for Lotto as Aunty Jack. I was paid the massive sum of $10,000. God knows what he was paid. I thanked Kennon for the job and I never heard from him again until I received the ‘Call me!’ telegram. When I contacted him, he didn’t beat around the bush and asked me if I’d like to be the creative director of his advertising agency. I explained that I’d never been a creative director before. ‘Mate,’ he replied, ‘I’ve never owned an advertising agency before.’ He’d just bought his own agency, Thompson, White and Partners. They’d all left, so he was now all of them. I’d only been with the agency for a short time when Kennon walked into my office and said, ‘Bondy, can you come up with a bit of an idea for a David Jones campaign? We’re pitching for it next week.’ As an afterthought he added, ‘Oh yeah, write one of those jingles of yours for them.’ I was in a bit of a dilemma. I didn’t feel very confident about coming

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up with a great melody at such short notice, so I trawled through my back catalogue. A decade before I’d written two beautiful love songs for Anna Nygh after she left me to seek fame and fortune in England. She sailed away on the Oronsay. I missed her so much I wrote and recorded two songs that I thought might just woo her back. I never received a response, so in 1982 Anna’s first love song became ‘There’s no other store like David Jones’. After all, she had left me! They say when Anna returns to Australia and hears the jingle, she goes straight out … and shops at Myer. As it happens, the second farewell song I wrote for her became ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’. Anna may have broken my heart but she also made me a fortune. ‘Farewell’ sold over 250,000 copies. She certainly was my muse. To prepare for the David Jones pitch I recorded a demo track of the music, which was arranged by Red Symonds. Like ‘Farewell Aunty Jack’, it came out as a grand anthem. On the day of the pitch, Ian Kennon seemed quite nervous. The two David Jones heavyweights, Brian Walsh, the general manager and Dwayne McCulloch, creative director, had already seen several agencies before us. Kennon in his opening remarks made mention to Brian Walsh and the board that as well as me writing the creative, I was also an architect. To lighten the atmosphere I leant over to Walsh and said, ‘So if you need any renovations, maybe a new verandah? I’m available!’ Walsh laughed. Kennon paled. I took out my guitar and sang their anthem, and then played the fully produced recorded arrangement. There was no reaction. These people played their cards very close to their chests. I had prepared copies of the creative rationale, including a tape of the music, the artwork, the strap line etc. and I’d placed them all into large envelopes. When the pitch concluded, Kennon reminded me that I should pass out the envelopes. As I handed them to the members of the board, the GM looked a little puzzled and asked, ‘What’s in the envelope?’ I leaned across and whispered, ‘It’s the money!’ Outside, a very stressed Ian Kennon exploded.

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‘What the fuck do you think you were doing in there?’ ‘I was just trying to get people to relax.’ ‘Relax!’ Kennon screamed. ‘Your problem is you’re too fucking flippant!’ We won the account and funnily enough they’re still using the jingle to this day.

Just Joe To forget about the Boy’s Own McBeth Los Angeles debacle I totally immersed myself in advertising for the next year. Rory had a great take on my agency hours during my time at Kennon’s. He claims that in the beginning I started working nine to five, which soon became ten to four, then eleven to three, till finally I settled on twelve to two, which was lunch. Not long after I returned from America I received a phone call from our New York lawyer, Chester Ross. Dear Chester was very New York, very Jewish and very old. In fact he was like a guardian angel to Charlie and me, and when BOMcB failed he was incredibly fair with his charges, and very fatherly with his advice. Chester was calling to let me know that a good mate of his, Joe, was coming to Australia and could we look after him. Chester explained that his friend had been through an ugly divorce and wondered whether we might be able to introduce Joe to a few gals. It was the least we could do for Chester. A few weeks later Charlie received a message at his chambers from Joe to say that he was in town and staying at the Hilton Hotel. We decided we’d take him out for a meal. Charlie then went into overdrive and organised a blind date for Joe. We arrived at the Hilton in Charlie’s disgusting old Honda with Kate Fitzpatrick, myself and Joe’s blind date crammed into the backseat with Charlie’s dirty washing. Joe was a lot older than we expected – he was nearer to 60 – and extremely shy. Over dinner we managed to drag out of him that he

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worked in advertising. He and I had a brief discussion about various advertising accounts that we’d worked on, and Joe confessed to being a bit of a hack writer. He claimed that he mostly wrote swathes of copy and admitted that he preferred to write books. The question had to be asked, had he ever had anything published? ‘Yes,’ he said, he’d had one book published so far. ‘What was that?’ I asked. ‘Catch-22,’ he replied. ‘Have you read it?’ There was an embarrassed silence around the table. ‘Just Joe’ had suddenly become Joseph Heller, my hero. I was totally flummoxed and began babbling on about how his book had inspired Geoff Malone and me to write a sketch called ‘The Unknown Soldier’, which was in the 1967 Architecture revue. Malone and I played two returned soldiers: Soldier : Why are we marching today? Sergeant: We’re marching to honour the memory of the Unknown Soldier. Soldier : Really? Sergeant: Yeah … Did I ever tell you that I knew him? Soldier : Who? Sergeant: The unknown soldier. Soldier : You knew the unknown soldier? Sergeant: Yeah. We were very close friends. Soldier : What was his name? Sergeant: That’s just it, he didn’t have a name … Soldier : Didn’t he? Sergeant: No! That’s why we called him the unknown soldier … Soldier : But if he didn’t have a name … what did you call him? Sergeant: I didn’t call him anything! Soldier: Why? Sergeant: Because he was unknown … unknown soldiers don’t have names.

I performed the entire sketch for Heller. It was such a gauche thing to do

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and after I’d finished, Joe politely offered, ‘Hmmm … that sounds very interesting, Grahame.’ Even writing about it today I find excruciatingly embarrassing. Over dinner Charlie and Kate had yet another monumental argument and, as was normal, Kate left the restaurant in a huff. Later that night, in an attempt to apologise, Charlie (still inebriated) tried to climb up a garden trellis to get to Kate’s first-floor apartment. Unfortunately he slipped and fell a full three metres backwards into the garden. Joe Heller called the next morning to thank us for the evening and I let him know about Charlie’s fall from grace (Kate) and how he was now recovering in St Vincent’s Hospital with a broken vertebrae. Joe called the hospital and said to Charlie, ‘Hey Charlie, I hear that you tried to commit suicide last night.’ Charlie, never short of the quick comeback, said that he’d thought about suicide, but changed his mind halfway down.

Fuckin pears While working at Ian Kennon’s I was approached by another advertising agency, Magnus Nankervis and Curl, to appear in an Art Gallery of New South Wales commercial. The young account director for the agency was very upfront with me, explaining that I was in fact the third choice for the commercial. It appears that the Art Gallery trust members had been very keen to get Barry Humphries to present the commercial as Edna Everage. Unfortunately Neville Wran and the New South Wales government were not particularly fond of Barry’s right-wing leanings, so they recommended that the agency approach Paul Hogan to appear in the commercial – someone a little more working-class. Hogan was scotched immediately by the president of the gallery, Rupert Murdoch, who certainly didn’t want one of Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine stable promoting his Art Gallery of New South Wales. I was the compromise. Edmund Capon’s mob and Murdoch had

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obviously come to an agreement that Aunty Jack might be acceptable. After all, she was the perfect combination of Hogan’s butchness with a touch of Edna’s dress sense. The problem was, I didn’t want to do Aunty Jack any more, so I told them that I would appear in their commercial on the condition that I play my favourite character, creative meat artist and butcher extraordinaire, the mighty Kev Kavanagh. I think because of the deadlines they were all verging on panic, and quickly agreed. In my first meeting with Edmund Capon, the gallery’s director, I tried to explain to him why a butcher was the right character to promote his gallery. This wasn’t terribly successful. So I sat down and wrote the commercial there and then in his office and presented it to him. Credit to Capon, he immediately saw how Kev could cut through, and gave his approval. His only suggestion was that if I wanted to put another celebrity in the commercial (he obviously wasn’t confident about my profile) he could organise it. I was offered two gallery patrons, Dame Joan Sutherland or Gough Whitlam. I chose Comrade Gough and wrote a small scene for him. The commercial went like this: Kev Kavanagh enters the gallery wearing a gold lamé jacket, tight pegged pants and matching meat accessories, including a lamb chop brooch. He speaks directly to camera. Kev:

Eh! Eh! Peace, meat freaks, this is the mighty mighty Kev Kavanagh at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You know, I used to be quite ignorant about art, but since I’ve been comin’ here, I’ve got much more betterer. For instance, I now know that that’s a Picasso, and he’s cool, and over there’s Brett Whiteley and he’s mighty. Plus that big room in there is full of … primitive artifi … arti … archi … old things.

Kev walks through a forest of giant 3-metre high sculpted bronze pears. Kev: They’ve got everything here, paintin’s, drawin’s, even scupture.

Kev points to the giant pears.



And you should see the Archibald Prize.

Cut to Gough Whitlam looking at the prize winner.

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Kev enters the frame, sees Gough, curtsies in awe and tugs at his forelock. The final shot is Kev outside the gallery. He speaks to camera. Kev:

Anyway this is Kev Kavanagh at the Art Gallery of New South Wales sayin’ see you round like a Rubens. Eh! Eh!

Kev’s hand gestures suggest the curves of a Rubens nude.

Finally there was a strap line that was supered on the last frame of the commercial that said something like, ‘Come to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.’ The reaction to the commercial was amazing. People who’d never visited the gallery before streamed in. They were from all walks of life. It was an enormously successful exercise. Late one evening while walking alone down Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, I found myself having to manoeuvre my way around several large motorbikes parked up on the pavement outside a notorious bikie hangout. Without warning I was bailed up by three large bikies. The biggest and ugliest glared down on me and said, ‘G’day Kev!’ I froze. ‘You know that ad you’re in?’ ‘What, the Art Gallery ad?’ I said. ‘Yeah that’s the one! We’ve got a question. You know at the end when you say, “See you round like a Rubens”? What’s a Rubens?’ ‘It’s a sandwich, isn’t it?’ He seemed satisfied and turned to his two mates and said, ‘See, I told you it was a sandwich!’ One day being a smartarse was going to get me killed. I made to leave. ‘Hang on! There’s one more thing we want to know. Where are those fuckin pears?’ I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Listen Kev!’ he said. ‘Me and the gang drove all the way in from fuckin Leppington to see those fuckin pears, and guess what?’ ‘What?’ ‘They’re not fuckin there! You tell your mates at the Art Gallery they’d better put ’em back or we’ll sue the bastards for false fuckin advertising!’

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The next day I called Edmund Capon to find out the story behind the missing giant pears. He explained to me that the commercial had been so successful, they’d had to remove the pears to cope with the crowds. I told him that I had received feedback from several art lovers the night before who regarded the lack of pears as ‘false fuckin advertising’. Capon didn’t find it amusing. I’d certainly burnt that bridge, but there were more bridges to come. Later that year the commercial was nominated for a FACTS Award. I was invited. On the night it was announced that the Kev Kavanagh Art Gallery commercial had won a major award and the writers were invited to come to the stage. Writers? Could it have been a slip of the tongue? As I made my way to the stage I noticed that I was being followed by a strange little man. As we stood together on the stage, I politely asked, ‘What did you … umm?’ ‘I’m with the agency!’ he beamed. ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah!’ he said. ‘I wrote the strap line … Remember? “Come to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.”’ When I was eventually invited to speak, I knew I had just one more bridge to burn. I took the microphone and said ‘Firstly I’d like to give a big thank you to the judging panel for this prestigious award, and secondly let me just say what a wonderful surprise it’s been for me to meet my co-author for the very first time.’ Big laugh, but no more work from Magnus Nankervis and Curl.

The nothing network Like a good prize fighter, it’s important to know when to quit. Sounds simple, but again I was tempted by the lure of the comeback. I was already employed as creative director in Ian Kennon’s agency. But in 1982 I returned as Aunty Jack, this time on Kennon’s old stamping ground, Channel Ten, known now as the 0-10 Network. Jim Burnett and

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I wrote the special and we called it The Nothing Network Show, but 0-10 were a bit sensitive about the title. Our storyline was about a TV pirate who stole from the rich channels and gave to himself. Too close to the bone, perhaps? The network was not impressed by the premise and decided to go with The Grahame Bond Show. Catchy title. I wasn’t exactly at ease with this, so much so that I took almost 40 takes in my first attempt to introduce myself. All I had to say was, ‘Hello, I’m Grahame Bond and welcome to my show.’ I couldn’t do it. I had no disguise to hide behind. My problems were one, I couldn’t look straight down the barrel of the camera and say who I was, and two, stating that it was ‘my show’ sounded incredibly conceited. Characters are very comfortable facades to hide behind. In the end the show didn’t work; in fact not many ABC comedies survive the transition to commercial television. For the first time I felt stifled by the lack of freedom and the constant interference from commercial management. For instance, Jim Burnett and I had written a lovely sketch about the arrival of Kerry Packer’s new one-day cricket. It was about grown men playing professional cricket in brightly coloured pyjamas. We even suggested that Richie Benaud and the other commentators were all reading from the same script, except for Tony Greig who, being a South African, was a page ahead of the commentary. At one point Greig appears to be veritably psychic when he predicts outcomes paragraphs before they happen. Management were concerned and told us that they would prefer it if we didn’t do jokes about the cricket because of Kerry Packer’s and Rupert Murdoch’s agreement to protect each other’s image. So the cricket sketch required a complete rewrite. We substituted chess for cricket and had a sports pundit commentating on World Series Chess. Two players sat at a small table in the middle of the Sydney Cricket Ground at night and played chess under floodlights while an audience of four looked on. The two black-clad cheer squad members chanted in the emptiness, ‘Come on you black,’ while the two fans dressed in white clapped and sang in unison, ‘White white, white white white, white white white white, white white!’ Everything was a compromise.

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The next hurdle to overcome was Channel Ten’s associations with their sponsors. Jokes constantly had to be reworked because management were always nervous something may offend those who paid the advertising revenue. I should have learned my lessons years before, when I had talks with Channel Seven about swapping channels. I can remember attempting to describe to the Seven executives the historical heritage of the four major characters in The Aunty Jack Show. I portrayed Aunty Jack as a type of pantomime dame, Kid Eager as a cross between a circus clown and a pimply teenager, and Rory’s Thin Arthur along the lines of Scaramouche, the show’s commedia dell’arte character. I’m sure they thought commedia dell’arte was a funny flat white coffee.

Afletic music Rory and I wrote a lot of music for commercials during the 1960s and 1970s. One client we produced a lot of material for was the creative director of Foote Cone & Belding. He was a small balding Cockney gent who was particularly intense. Rory and I had written several jingles for his major client Kimberly-Clark. In fact we wrote and sang the very successful Kimbies jingle, where we sounded like a group of dribbling sixmonth-old babies. On this particular day, we were invited into the agency for what was called a confidential briefing. It was explained that this was a top-secret campaign and that we were not to divulge any information to anyone. The brief was that the music should sound ‘afletic’ (athletic), there were to be no lyrics, and they wanted it recorded ASAP. Two days later we were in the recording studio to put down the demo. We hired a drummer and Rory played bass. Once we’d laid the bed track, the plan was for Rory to next play the melody line on guitar. The creative director didn’t seem to quite understand how the recording process worked. Seated in the control booth with the engineer and myself, he

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kept asking, ‘Why can’t I hear no melody?’ ‘It’s because we haven’t recorded it yet,’ I informed him. When Rory finally played the melody on his guitar, the director listened to it once, then turned to me and said, ‘Does that sound afletic to you?’ What could I say? ‘We just tried to follow the brief,’ I said. Next he put on his creative hat and came up with a solution. ‘Can you hear where Rors is playing dumpity dumpity up up down? Ask him to play more like dumpity dumpity up up up.’ Rory was totally oblivious as to what was ensuing in the control room. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that if I opened the recording booth microphone and gave Rory the suggestion, he’d flip. ‘Why don’t you tell Rory your melodic ideas,’ I said. Unabashed, the little Pom grabbed the microphone and blurted out mid-take, ‘Rors, I’ve got a thought. You know that bit where you play dumpity dumpity up up down?’ Rory stopped playing and glared into the booth. ‘Well,’ the ad man continued ‘could you try playing more like, dumpity dumpity up up up?’ Rory was nonplussed. The engineer had stopped recording and Rors was desperately trying to restrain himself … but he lost it and came storming into the control room. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? What is all this Humpty Dumpty shit?’ The frustrated director’s inability to explain his musical insights was too much for him, so he turned on me. ‘I asked you two for afletic music. I’m sorry but somehow this music just doesn’t fucking say Kotex to me.’ Kotex! This explained all the secrecy. The agency had found out that new laws had been passed making it legal to advertise feminine hygiene products on television, and their client Kimberly-Clark wanted to get the jump on the tampon market. Rory and I took a break from writing jingles … for a long time.

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The politics of stand-up In the mid-1980s Sandy Gutman (aka Austen Tayshus) convinced me to try stand-up comedy. His argument was that as I’d done theatre, film, television, sitcom and cabaret, why wouldn’t I try stand-up? I must have had a massive memory lapse because how could I have forgotten the stand-up debacle that was New Year’s Eve with the Angels? But as I wasn’t doing anything at the time, I took up the challenge and wrote a semiautobiographical show called ‘Grahame Bond the Australien’. After just a few days of working alone on stage, I realised this was not going to be a picnic. I became so anxious that I enrolled in a transcendental meditation course. Each night I would sit downstairs in the Hip-Hop Club and meditate for 20 minutes before I dared face the audience. Even when it went well it felt awful. I didn’t enjoy it. I’d come full circle. My first experience on stage at university had been a revelation and I’d found the theatre to be an absolute haven of tranquillity. But with success came anxiety, because sadly for both the audience and myself the expectations had changed. Also with stand-up I no longer had characters to hide behind or costumes to disguise me. I was naked, attempting to play myself on stage, and I wasn’t very good at it. At the end of each night, after completing my act, I would have my main meal and quite a few drinks (I’ve never been able to eat before a show) then, as I didn’t have a car, I’d catch a taxi back to Watsons Bay at around 3 a.m. I always felt a little deflated after a night of stand-up. Add alcohol to that and you have a seriously miserable soul. Many a night my cab drivers would pull over and ask if I thought it was a wise decision to be going to the Gap (Sydney’s number one suicide location) at this ungodly hour. I always found it difficult to convince to them that I lived nearby. I’m sure they all checked the newspapers the next day to see if I’d jumped. At that time Australian stand-up comedy wasn’t like stand-up comedy anywhere else in the world. I believe that Rodney Rude changed the face

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of Australian stand-up when he became the compe`re at the first Comedy Store in Jameson Street, Sydney. Rodney had just returned from Canada, where he had had quite a few years’ experience in the game. In Sydney, Rude would introduce raw young comics trying out their material for the very first time, and as the compe`re he would sit in the audience and heckle the amateurs, encouraging the audience to join in. The amateurs were like cannon fodder and he was ruthless – he didn’t seem to care about the acts, he just wanted to get the laugh. That’s why I believe Australian stand-up comics from that generation became hardened to difficult audiences. This totally confrontational approach trained Australian audiences to be aggressive and disrespectful. I’ve seen a lot of stand-up comedy around the world and I can assure you there is nothing quite as gladiatorial as ours. This meant that Australian audiences expected all comics to come back with the quick one-liner when heckled. On my first attempt at stand-up I tried to explain to the audience that I only had one comeback and that was ‘fuck off’. However, over the two or three-year period that I performed stand-up I soon learned to cope with the drunks and aggressive hecklers. It’s called self-protection. If there was anyone disrupting the show, I would ask the spotlight operator to pick them out in the spot. I would then enter the audience, hand them the microphone and announce, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I realise that you’ve all paid your hard-earned money to come and see my show, but we’re very fortunate tonight because we seem to have found another comic, who is about to get up on stage and perform their own comedy routine.’ I would then sit back and let the audience demolish the troublemaker. It wasn’t always the drunks that got the treatment; some audience members jumped at the opportunity, believing they were funny. One hundred per cent died a death on stage; some cringed with embarrassment while others broke down in tears. It was a very effective way of letting it be known that I didn’t want to be messed with. I didn’t stay with stand-up comedy for long because I found it too lonely. I enjoyed working with a team. That’s why I was attracted to stage and television in the first place. Stand-up made me feel isolated and at

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odds with the audience. In retrospect it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done and it tested me right to the edge. The reason I dropped out of comedy in the late 1980s was because I became aware that humour was about to change forever with the gradual rise of political correctness. PC was like an unstoppable plague spreading through the entertainment industry. It was so all-pervasive, comedians had to stay within very tight guidelines. I went back to advertising.

Super salesman In 1986 a New Zealand advertising agency offered me a series of Toyota commercials. The ideas had been roughed out by the Wellington agency Colenso and the scripts were specifically for my butcher character, Kev Kavanagh. It was a two-day shoot and I’d been given an extra day to paraphrase the scripts and change the dialogue into Kev’s language. I had invented a Kev language which consisted of his own unique expressions like ‘See you round like a rissole’, ‘fanmazing’, ‘strewth a brick’, ‘Eh! Eh!’, ‘No hassle with the gristle’ and ‘Peace, meat freaks’. The commercial was a simple idea with Kev talking straight down the barrel of the camera, treating the lens as his best friend Brucey. As Kev was a 1960s rocker, the tagline for the commercial was ‘Toyota, real vans: that’s what they are, man!’ The commercials were filmed in Wellington and the director was Lee Tamahori, who went on to direct Once Were Warriors. I was given a lot of freedom and the ads turned out to be pretty funny. I returned to Australia. After a short time I began receiving phone calls from New Zealand media requesting interviews with Kev. Evidently the commercials had gone gangbusters, and Toyota NZ were over the moon. On top of all of that, the series started winning awards for the agency. Kev was now a Kiwi superstar. The next year New Zealand Broadcasting approached me to present a television series on TV2. At about the same time the Australian arm of the American advertising

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giant Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, who held the Toyota account in Australia and the US, suddenly had a brilliant idea. After viewing the NZ commercials, they approached me to appear in their Toyota commercials as – guess who? Kev Kavanagh! They thought it would be easier if I wrote the commercials with the idea that Kev would appear on screen with the face of Toyota, John ‘the Legend’ Laws. These commercials were also spectacularly successful and sold lots of boringly reliable Toyota Camrys. The agency and the client were thrilled. Next, the British giant Saatchi & Saatchi decided to acquire the worldwide Toyota account. Saatchis held the account in most countries except the United States and Australia. To control the account globally, Saatchis dipped into their piggy bank and bought Dancer Fitzgerald Sample outright. The American arm of Toyota accepted this outrageous ploy and quickly adapted to their new-look British advertisers with their fey English creatives and their droll English wit. But it wasn’t going to be as easy in Australia. The marketing director of Toyota, Bob Miller, wouldn’t have a bar of this outrageous takeover. He decided to put Saatchi & Saatchi on notice and, to show them he couldn’t be bought, he handed over 50 per cent of the business (worth close to $40 million) to the Australian-owned agency Mojo (Alan Morris and Alan Johnson). I believe the reason behind my sudden employment by Saatchi & Saatchi was to help stop the Toyota account from haemorrhaging and to quickly Australianise the image of their company. So in 1988 I was offered a job as a consultant to work on bedding down their very unpredictable client, Toyota. Saatchis’ CEO in Australia was a Cambridge don who not only had a ridiculously plummy voice but had the very bad habit of wearing grey shoes. Bob Miller liked the British about as much as he liked the Japanese. How he ever held onto his job I’ll never know. I think the Japanese just looked at the bottom line and wore the insults. I was still working at Saatchis when the New Zealand television series came through. Soon I was travelling to New Zealand three days a week

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and working at Saatchis four days. There was no such thing as a weekend. Maurice Murphy and Jim Burnett went in the advance party as the producers of the New Zealand show to search for local talent. The TV2 series was called Now is the Hour and a Half and we were commissioned to produce 20 two-hour shows. For their sins Maurice and Jim lived in Auckland for six months. Rory and I flew over on Thursday nights, were briefed on Friday, rehearsed Saturday and went live to air on Saturday night for two hours, then flew back to Sydney on Sunday morning. I’m sure that I didn’t endear myself to the Kiwis on the very first show when I explained to them that despite our close proximity and our many similarities, mysteriously our vowels remained miles apart. Where we Australians learned a-e-i-o-u, their vowels sounded more like a-e-uh-uhuh. It wasn’t one of my finest starts. The show involved mainly local musical and comic talents, but as we were the only show of our kind in NZ, we were also sought out by all the visiting overseas acts touring the Southern Hemisphere. It was the perfect promotional vehicle for them. The most exciting moment for me in the series was playing a duelling blues piece live with one of my musical heroes, B.B. King. When B.B. came into the studio and I attempted to explain to him that I would be playing an idiot butcher who would challenge him to a blues play-off, B.B. seemed fine. The only thing he wanted to know was what song we’d be playing. When I told him it was Kev’s composition, ‘Standin’ on the Corner Big Truck Comin’ Round the Bend’, he courteously replied ‘Man, I ain’t never heard that song, but if you can do it in the key of E … I’ll be cool.’ On the night he was just as charming and he politely answered all Kev’s stupid questions with wonderful humility and grace. But when we started to play ‘Big Truck’, B.B. took over and he just flew. His playing was wonderful to behold and when the band joined in I felt it was an opportune moment for me to take my guitar and my mediocre playing and exit stage right, leaving B.B. to do his thang. I had always heard rumours of an Australian comedian who was renowned for stealing material from overseas comics. I’d had no

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experience with him until I arrived in New Zealand. I always came into to the studio several hours before the show to watch the guests rehearse. On this particular day Jim Burnett called me aside and asked my opinion on this particular act. From the control booth I could see a well-known Australian comic on the studio floor rehearsing his routine for the cameras. Jim asked me if I recognised anything. I certainly did: he was doing my stand-up routine. There’s an unwritten law in comedy that if you want to use somebody else’s material, it’s a good idea to call them and ask for permission. He certainly hadn’t asked for my consent. So on the night of the show, as we went live to air, I came out to give the stand-up an introduction. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next act on the show is a great friend of mine from Australia. In fact he’s such a good mate I know he wouldn’t mind if I just did the first five minutes of his act.’ I then went ahead and performed my original piece. I could see him out of the corner my eye; he was sweating, and obviously trying to work out what in the hell he was going to do. I don’t think he ever borrowed again.

Above, below and beyond Back in Australia I was now a highly paid consultant for Saatchis. This is where another key character came into my life. His name was Robert Strohfeldt. Rob held a degree in pure and stat mathematics and had started his career in market research. He was now a Saatchis account director on Toyota. For whatever reason, someone made the decision that Strohfeldt and I should become a team and pitch for new business. We got on reasonably well and soon found ourselves sharing an office and travelling all over Australia writing and producing commercials for Toyota. Along the way we also picked up some new clients. It was a drunken night in Darwin when Strohfeldt suggested that he and I should set up our own agency. I would be the creative director and write the scripts and jingles, and he would be my partner and hustle the

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business. Strohfeldt put forward a very convincing argument simply by saying, ‘Why are we earning all this money for Saatchi & Saatchi when we could make that money for ourselves?’ I was at a bit of a loose end. I’d finished the New Zealand show. So, without thinking it through, I made another impetuous decision and said yes. That night we decided that our agency philosophy would be ‘above, below and beyond’. In other words we would work above the line, below the line and explore the lateral. Strohfeldt was a brilliant salesman and I would often overhear him pitching me to potential clients: ‘Sure, Y&R can write you a 30-second commercial, but Bondy has written 30-minute television shows, plays, even musicals, you name it.’ It must have worked, because within two years we had a staff of 28 and were billing close to $30 million. Advertising for me was simply role-playing, in this case playing the part of a creative director. I learned the lingo and instead of dealing with an audience, I dealt with clients. It was part entertainment, part business, but I never felt like I belonged. ——— In 1990 Strohfeldt and I left the comfortable surroundings of Saatchis, had cards printed, and set up our agency, Bond Strohfeldt, in a serviced office in Crows Nest. We rented a small room and shared a secretary who answered the phones for 20 other companies in the complex. We began the agency with two notepads, a couple of pencils and of course my faithful guitar. Within five days we were pitching for the Daihatsu account worth close to $8 million. The embarrassing thing was that we won the account. Understandably, our new client wanted to visit our offices and meet the rest of our staff, which of course was non-existent. I can’t remember what our excuse was, but it gave us a window of about four days to rent premises and hire the necessary staff. An $8 million account normally would need at least eight people to service it. By the next week we had moved into the top floor of a glamorous boathouse

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overlooking a marina in Kirribilli. Miraculously we managed to produce a fully functioning office with a staff of four, which included a new business partner, Philippa Nolan (who became my creative other half), an account director, an office manager and a secretary, all in four days. In the next two years we grew rapidly and in that short time picked up many blue-chip clients like Disney, Bridgestone, the Ritz-Carlton and Virgin. And we won an enormous federal government job, the United Nations-driven campaign for the International Year of the Family. We were winning plenty of business but not all of the clients were paying. When Strohfeldt showed me the figures they weren’t pretty. Daihatsu, our largest client, were treating us like a bank. Instead of paying within the normal 30 days, they were stringing us out to between 60 and 90 days and we were settling with our suppliers in 30 days. We might have been their bank but we weren’t imposing any late fees. This was impossible for a small growing agency; we needed the cash flow. Strohfeldt and I went to see Daihatsu’s management and complained about the lag in the payments. They patronisingly came back with, ‘We’re your biggest clients! What are you going to do, fire us?’ Two weeks later we were to submit all the creative work for the biggest launch in Daihatsu Australia’s history – the unveiling of the new Charade. On the day of the presentation we sent our office manager to the meeting with our letter of resignation. Daihatsu lasted another 10 years. From 1 April 2005 their new vehicle sales ceased in Australia. Most of the Japanese executives we dealt with are probably now sitting at what the Japanese call ‘the window seat’, which is where redundant workers sit looking out the window for the rest of their working lives.

The great Virgin sacrifice One of our most exciting projects was a campaign for the Virgin Megastore. I particularly liked them as a client because they were always willing

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to take risks and nine times out of ten those risks really paid off. Virgin had left Saatchis to come with us because they realised that they’d get better service from a small agency. Plus we had created an enormously successful campaign for them, The Great Virgin Sacrifice. A couple of weeks before Christmas we were called in to see Virgin’s MD. He had a problem. They had spent just about all of their advertising dollars and their biggest competition, HMV, were about to open a megastore directly opposite them in the Pitt Street Mall. HMV were already spending a fortune on radio, inviting everyone to their huge Christmas party opening. The event promised live bands playing in the Mall and big-name overseas pop stars appearing in-store. It was an all-out attack on Virgin’s supremacy. What could we do with so little money? This is when advertising became exciting for me. We had calculated that there was only enough to fund a single-day radio campaign across several stations. We committed ourselves to a think tank where the rule was, no matter how outrageous the suggestion, no one was allowed to say no. We eventually came up with the idea of running off the back of HMV’s advertising campaign, letting them spend the big dollars to promote the Christmas party, but we’d claim the day by having Virgin Santas roaming the Mall handing out Virgin Christmas show bags with free CDs and tapes, while HMV’s bands performed in the Mall. Most importantly, it was the radio commercial that was the clincher. It offered everything, but nothing. ‘Come into the Pitt Street Mall tomorrow morning for the great Virgin Christmas party. There’ll be bands,’ (not ours but HMV’s) ‘loads of pop stars,’ (passing through the Mall to the HMV store) ‘and free Virgin Christmas show bags.’ (That bit was true.) It was a terrible thing to do to the competition but it proved an enormous success. It was incredibly cost-effective and hugely profitable. On a sad note, the managing director of HMV had a heart attack on the day. Happily, he recovered. There is no love lost in war or advertising.

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International Year of Political Correctness The most difficult client I’ve ever had to deal with was the federal government. Bond Strohfeldt won the International Year of the Family (IYF) account, a United Nations initiative. For me this was something worthwhile, a real opportunity to touch people’s hearts rather than their wallets. We had flown to Canberra to pitch for the account. The Minister in charge of IYF was Senator Rosemary Crowley, a South Australian doctor who was answerable to the Minister for Health, Graham ‘Richo’ Richardson. There were a total of four agencies competing for the business and we were third in line to present. The pitching process was a shambles. Every time the Senate bells rang, the pollies rushed from the meeting room to vote or whatever they do in that red leather asylum. Eventually it was time to show our wares. I decided to get their attention immediately so I pulled out the guitar and explained to them that I thought ‘the family’ needed an anthem. I proceeded to play a melody very reminiscent of the Mojo agency’s Toohey’s commercial. To that melody I sang … I feel like a family, I feel like a family, I feel like a family or two. It certainly got their attention. Rosemary Crowley’s jaw almost hit the newly acquired $150,000 20-foot-long polished imported ash boardroom table. There was an embarrassed silence. No one quite knew where to look. I explained that I was joking; a relieved Crowley laughed. This of course was the sign that gave permission to her underlings and sycophants to show that they understood the joke too. They hooted from the shadows from where they sat. Obviously they were not important

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enough to join the big people’s table. Now that I had their interest, we proceeded. Quantitative research had shown that nine out of ten Australians, when asked what was their most precious asset, unprompted responded that their families were. This research became the basis of our brief. An important lesson I learned in advertising was to present a single-minded proposition that made a clear and unambiguous statement about the product. Our campaign for IYF was a positive call to action. Our proposition: ‘Treasure your most precious asset.’ The commercial was very simple. The soundtrack was a love song, sung to the family by a child. The images were animated so as to avoid any stereotyping. Our aim was to use emotion to touch people’s hearts and reinforce the strength of a united family. Of course the definition of the family unit had changed radically, so we were not just dealing with the nuclear family, but a much more diverse range: extended families, in vitros, culturally diverse and single parents. The child sang: Life is a breeze Under the family tree And the human race Would be a better place If we loved our family. The animated images were of a small lonely figure standing on a bare windy hill, pathetically watching tiny hearts blow past on the breeze. In desperation the little character reaches out to claim a heart of its own. Unsuccessful and at the point of giving up, a tiny heart arrives. The little figure caresses the heart and then gently plants it in the earth and from that heart grows a glorious tree. Atop a one-tree hill the lone character, elated, hugs the sturdy trunk of the growing tree. The tagline delivered at the end of the commercial was simply ‘Hold on to the family’. We won the pitch, and the politicians accepted the concept. Everything was signed off and we commenced animation. We then presented

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the final concept to potential sponsors, who all enthusiastically jumped on board, agreeing to put up the millions of dollars needed to buy the media space. The sponsors included Toyota, Qantas, Woolworths and Kellogg’s, who all could see the benefit of their product being associated with IYF. The feedback was very positive; they liked the commercial, so it was congratulations all round. It should have been simple, the guidelines were all there, but what we didn’t know was that after the commercial had been approved and produced, prime minister Paul Keating had chosen a working committee to steer IYF. The committee included Bettina Cass, Professor of Sociology at Sydney University; trade union boss Jennie George; and Catholic priest Father David Capo. Unbeknownst to us the new committee had rewritten the brief, and theirs was a different agenda. The committee’s direction had nothing to do with the original brief. They hadn’t been involved until now, and we were about to become their sacrificial lambs. The first meeting became an exercise in demolishing our ideas. I stood by as our creative work was deconstructed line by line. The first question from Bettina Cass was, ‘Why have you chosen animation?’ I explained that it was simply to avoid stereotypes. ‘Then why is the character blue?’ I held that we were attempting to be racially neutral and as could be seen, the character wasn’t black, yellow, red or white. Cass then informed me that the colour blue was for boys. I then informed her that if she looked closely she would see that the character was in fact blue and yellow. ‘Why is it blue and yellow?’ she asked. ‘Maybe it plays for Parramatta,’ I quipped, but they were not in the mood for levity. There was one public servant in the room whose only contribution to the meeting was to let me know, in the firmest manner, that as far as the committee was concerned, the blue character in the commercial was now as dead as the blue parrot in the Monty Python sketch. I think he thought with my history, I would only understand comedy analogies.

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It was now Jennie George’s turn. Jennie wanted me to explain why we had chosen a child to sing the jingle. I explained that this was an attempt to be gender neutral (ticking all the boxes). I asked whether she could tell if the vocalist was a boy or girl. She couldn’t. I had purposely chosen an eight-year-old girl with a beautiful, vulnerable voice. But Jennie wasn’t satisfied with my explanation and expressed her concern that choosing a child to sing the commercial could offend those families who can’t have children. I gave her 10 points for that one. Committee 10, Bond Strohfeldt 0. Jennie next informed us that she personally hated the use of the word ‘love’. I told her that I was sorry she felt that way about love but I couldn’t help with her problem. My partners laughed. Father Capo, obviously being of the persuasion of those who can’t have children, threw in his two cents’ worth. The man of God let it be known that he was most concerned that the word ‘family’ itself might be regarded as a cliché. I couldn’t see his problem, but I did recommend that he write to the United Nations as it was their baby, so to speak. In the meantime I offered him a compromise and suggested that that we change the name International Year of the Family to the International Year of a Group of People of No Particular Gender, Race or Religious Persuasion. He was not impressed. Jennie George had more issues. She was especially critical of the strap line ‘Hold onto the family’. Jennie let me know that she didn’t just dislike it, she hated it, just as she hated the thought of having to go back to her Rape Crisis Centre in Adelaide and explain to women who had been bashed by their spouses that they should ‘Hold on to their family’. How could she possibly ask them to stay with their abusers? I suggested that the line wasn’t meant to be taken literally. In fact, ‘Hold on to the family’ could be interpreted as offering an opportunity to seek support from the broadest meaning of the cliché-ridden word ‘family’. This included the extended family and friends, basically anywhere where a person could find … lov– sorry … shelter and support. I felt that the meeting was becoming absurd. This was political correctness at its worst. The committee requested that we drop ‘Hold onto the family’ and

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replace it with their line, ‘Let us look after families’. They believed it was the community’s responsibility to support dysfunctional families. So what was originally to be a celebration of the family was now about to become a plea for public support and assistance for the dysfunctional family. The committee had totally hijacked the United Nations’ agenda. I sought help from Graham Richardson. When I first met Richo at the initial launch of the IYF he bravely promised to protect the integrity of the campaign from outside interference. But like a good politician, he explained to me that it was now out of his hands as his fearless leader Paul Keating had appointed the committee. After hearing about the committee’s changes, the major sponsors pulled out, leaving only Kellogg’s. With only one sponsor there wasn’t enough money to make any real impact on television. The severely reworked campaign went ahead, wallowed on late-night television and finally drowned in its own juices. A simple idea had become overly complex. There were too many messages. I’d lost all creative control. The musicians and animators were forced to change everything they’d done. I’d learned a great lesson and that was that it’s very hard to buy a creative person’s passion, even for the money, and it’s especially hard when they don’t believe in the product anymore. The creative process can be very addictive but attempting to sell creativity to some clients can be very painful. It was all too hard.

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Permission to fail 1996 was a pivotal year for me. I was becoming very disillusioned with the advertising industry and our clients seemed to want more work for less money. Most of our larger clients were choosing to use the global commercials produced by their overseas partners rather than local creative work. On top of all that my relationship with Strohfeldt had become particularly shaky. We couldn’t seem to agree on anything. I had begun in advertising as a supplier, meaning I’d written music for commercials and I had never really become involved with the client. It was all at arm’s length. This was different. Now, with my own agency, I was totally accountable. Should any of my employees make a mistake, like placing the wrong price on a product, as a principal of the company, I had to wear the costs. Things started to break down badly and I wasn’t coping. On top of all of this I was working ridiculous hours and making very little money. Yes, we were billing $30 million on paper, but in the ensuing years we had reinvested all our profits into growing the agency, and that was after paying our large, highly salaried staff’s wages. The three partners agreed at the beginning to take a minimal wage of $40,000 a year until the company was stable. Not much of a reward for the risk, the hours and the effort. I certainly didn’t make my fortune from advertising, and after dealing with the committee for IYF I considered returning to the company of thespians. At least they were nicer people. That year my father passed away. I was devastated. Harry Bond had been my greatest support system. My father had given me the freedom to fail and it was his belief in me that taught me to believe in myself. On the morning of my father’s funeral my mother informed me that she wasn’t going to cry at the service. ‘Your father wouldn’t have wanted it, it’s not dignified.’ That day my mother received over a hundred guests offering their condolences and not once did she shed a tear. I think I wept for the congregation. You have to understand my mother wasn’t without

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feelings, she was just a woman of her generation. My father’s death had a huge impact on me and was the catalyst that would send me in a new direction. The loss was so profound that I walked out of my advertising career and for the next five years I pushed myself to the limit, taking on challenges like there was no tomorrow, exploring the unknown and travelling to difficult and dangerous locations like New Guinea, Syria, Vietnam and the mountains of Nepal. I suppose I was confronting my fears, and each adventure was like a test of my own mortality. The first thing I did was volunteer for an archaeological dig. I travelled to Cyprus where I worked for six weeks. What led me to archaeology? Maybe I was trying to understand death and the legacy for those who remain behind. Every day on that dig I was dredging up the past and considering the gift my father had left me. The site was in the small town of Paphos, the birthplace of Aphrodite. It sounded wonderfully romantic. However, Paphos in 1996 was a dump overrun by British tourists looking for a cheap holiday. Near our dig site was Aphrodite’s beach where, legend had it, young Aphrodite became so angry with her father Zeus that she tore off his genitals and threw them into the raging surf. That thought certainly put me off seafood for a while. Without realising it, I spent all that time in my trench digging and redigging my father’s grave. It was my way of purging the grief. I spent the next years excavating the past. I’d embarked on yet another direction, but this time I had no father to confide in. My next escape took me to Nepal, where I trekked the Annapurna Circuit, a two-week nightmare. I found myself sharing a tent with a young Brisbane bank manager whose hiking boots smelt so badly that I resorted to threatening him with murder if his footwear ever entered our tent. Walking at altitude was physically and mentally punishing. The highlight of the trip was camping on Kopra Ridge, 3880 metres above sea level. My excitement was shattered when we were hit by an enormous blizzard. At 3 a.m. I was visiting the less than sophisticated ablutions unit, a

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makeshift hole dug in the snow surrounded by a beach tent. When the first blast hit I found myself minus beach tent and sans hiking pants, my loins totally exposed to the elements. The temperature had dropped to minus 20 degrees and sections of my anatomy were not happy. By the time we walked out from the ridge, the sun was beginning to come up and we could see aircraft flying in the valleys below us. At the time I thought of this experience as quite a personal challenge, facing my fears, overcoming vertigo and confronting a severe blizzard at altitude. I was feeling very pleased with myself until I saw another trekking party rapidly approaching. To my amazement, at the head of the group was a young woman who appeared to have been affected by Thalidomide – she had no arms, only small sprouts coming from her shoulders. Without stocks to keep her balance, she strolled confidently towards us and, as I slowed, she easily overtook me and happily went on her way with her two Sherpas. Suddenly my ‘heroics’ paled into insignificance. My next adventure was a bike ride from Hanoi in the north of Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City, a distance of over 1000 kilometres. Most normal people would seriously prepare for a gruelling ride like this. But not I … I decided that the only preparation required was a couple of circuits of Centennial Park on a 12-speed mountain bike. Of course the reality was that after cycling the first 25 kilometres I thought my arse was going to fall off.

Reading backwards I enjoyed the company of archaeologists, so much so that I volunteered again, this time for a 1500 BC Middle Bronze Age dig in Pella, Jordan, with NEAF, the Near Eastern Archaeological Foundation. The Pella dig house was a stark compound and sat high on a desolate tell directly beside a cemetery. To the west across the Jordan Valley was Israel, so close it could almost be reached with a hand-held rocket

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launcher. The dig house was comfortable and came complete with hot and cold running scorpions. Showering in shoes was a necessity. The archaeologists were great company and made the volunteers feel very welcome. What I admired most about them was their passion and dedication to seeking answers. It certainly wasn’t for the money that they chose this profession – I’m sure it was the alcohol. After a hard day digging in the trenches you really needed a drink or ten. My understanding of archaeology, or at least my role in our trench, was to keep sweeping the dirt off the dirt and ensuring on windy days that our bit of dirt didn’t get too dirty. The archaeologists tended to refer to the dig holes as their ‘peepholes into history’, but I think the best description of the digging process was comparing archaeology to reading a novel backwards: you start on the back page and after reading it, you tear it out and proceed to remove each page until you reach the beginning. That’s the digging process; you arrive at a layer, record it, remove the surface contents and then continue digging backwards into history. During my month in Pella we made an excursion to the magnificent black basalt city of Umm Quais, better known as Gadara in the Bible. It was in Umm Quais that archaeologists found a gravestone dated 62 BC. The translated inscription read: Where you are, I once was. Where I am, you will be. You’re all dying. Was this a message from the grave? If it was, it certainly wasn’t my father’s sense of humour, but nevertheless this macabre joke resonated with me. Before leaving for Pella I was convinced by Maurice Murphy to take a video camera and record a diary of my experiences. I hired a small three-chip digital camera, but because of weight restrictions I decided not to take a tripod. Without a tripod I had to improvise by setting the camera up on tables and walls. I also worked out a way of walking and

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talking to the camera by using the wide-angle lens and holding it at arm’s length. For the first time I learned how to be me on camera. When I returned to Australia, we cut the footage together. I added a voice-over, titled the doco The Volunteer and sold it to Qantas who screened it inflight. This heralded the beginning of my one-man documentary-maker phase. Next I shot and presented the Global Explorer for Qantas, where I was given the choice of flying any route around the world. I chose to start in Dubbo and fly to Beijing, then London, Madrid, the Cayman Islands, New Orleans, Los Angeles and back to Sydney – all in 14 days. I had jetlag on my jetlag. I also filmed two documentaries in Papua New Guinea. The first was about the Malagan carvers of New Ireland. To view their work meant a hair-raising 30-kilometre boat trip out to the islands in a 3-metre tinny. It was worth it: the giant funeral totems were magnificent. Here I was after months of digging up graves, documenting memorials to exorcise the spirits of the dead. Why? My next doco was about a tribe of reformed New Guinea head-hunters called the Omie people, who also produced exquisite tapa art. I’ll never forget the feast these ex-cannibals put on for me in the village of Jaipa. I called it the ‘Night of the Leather Rooster’. They killed their only chicken just for me; it was like eating Steve Moneghetti.

Road to Damascus After I finished the dig in Pella I travelled south to the fabulous Nabataean city of Petra situated in a hidden valley in the south of Jordan. While walking through this incredible 100 BC city I met a Syrian by the name of Aladdin who was spruiking for business. He offered his services as a driver and as I just happened to have the address of a convent in Damascus that provided inexpensive accommodation, we agreed on a price and the next morning set off up the King’s Highway on the road to Damascus,

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400 kilometres to the north. Maybe I’d find some answers there. The convent was situated in the poorest part of Damascus and was run by a small group of French nuns. It came highly recommended by the archaeologists as it had the only known safe drinking water in town (a chilled bubbler). The accommodation was clean and simple, as was the breakfast, which consisted of a slice of toast with jam, no butter, and black coffee, no milk. After one of my many expeditions into the walled city of Damascus, the head nun, Sister Maria, approached me. She spoke little English and I had only three years of schoolboy French. From what I could decipher she was saying that someone from Channel Seven television had called and wanted me to call them back. As I couldn’t make a reverse charge call from the convent, I needed to find a hotel to phone Australia. It ended up costing me over $100 but I eventually got through to a producer who had been waiting for my call. That night there were several conversations with Channel Seven and Murdoch Magazines. This is a compilation … G’day Bondy, that frog bird that answered your phone sounded a bit of all right. She’s a nun! You’re kidding. So where are you again? I’m in Damascus. Oh yeah … where’s that? In Syria. (Pause) No worries! Anyway, I just wanted to check, you are an artitet aren’t you? Yes, I’m an architect … At least I was 30 years ago. Yeah that’ll do. Anyway we need a new renovation presenter for Better

Homes and Gardens. I don’t think I know the show? Really? It’s our very successful home improvement show with Noni Hazlehurst and John Jarratt.

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Oh, that show. Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a bit low-rent, isn’t it? Mate! It’s rating its arse off!

I have always had a problem saying no. Normally if I didn’t want to do something I always asked for an absurd amount of money to turn them off. The trouble with this ploy is it can easily backfire. If they decide to accept your price, then you’re buggered. With this situation I tried a new tack. I attempted to solve their existing problem. So what’s the problem with the presenter you have at the moment? He’s an architect, isn’t he? Yeah he is, but research says he comes across like a bit of a poof. So we’ve decided to give him the flick. Are you interested?

Charming. Did I really want to deal with these oafs? I stood firm. Well it’s a bit difficult mate … See I’m in Damascus. No, I meant when you come home. Would you like to be a presenter then?

He wasn’t giving up easily and I knew this phone call was costing me a fortune. I really don’t know. Look, when you come back, why not try it for a couple of weeks?

Did you notice that I didn’t ever use the word ‘no’ in that dialogue? I must learn to be more emphatic. I suppose that’s why performers pay agents their 15 per cent – just to say no for them. So I gave up entertainment and joined Better Homes and Gardens. Thirty years on I had come the full circle and returned to architecture. I was beginning to see the patterns in my life, the loops and layers that I’d built.

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When I arrived home from Syria at the end of 1996, the very next day I filmed my first story for Better Homes and Gardens. As they were on a tight deadline they faxed the script to me at Singapore Airport. I read it on the flight back and filmed the story the next day. It is still my favourite, about the construction of a straw bale house. Sadly the stories went downhill from there. You would assume that if you make the decision to employ an architect/comedian to present renovations then you would allow them to project some comedy into the program. But I soon discovered that the producers didn’t really want humour. As a young architect I’d experienced this dilemma of humour and architecture not mixing. It’s one of the reasons I gave it up. The project that tipped me over the edge was a small renovation. I’d recently graduated and the clients were a young married couple with a baby on the way. For such a tiny job we’d had far too many meetings, and the problems began when we started discussing kitchen cupboards. For no apparent reason the wife claimed that all architects were stupid. I have no idea what set her off. Next she became personal. ‘Grahame, I don’t understand what it is about you architects. Why can’t you think laterally? I mean with my bad back, why should I be crouching all the time trying to open lower cupboards? Surely there’s a solution?’ ‘Magnets could be the answer.’ I put it to her that if we were to insert magnets into the cupboard doors then, should she be willing, I could organise to have tiny magnets surgically implanted into her kneecaps. To open a cupboard door all she would need to do would be to place one of her recently magnetised kneecaps up against the cupboard and voila`, with a flourishing leg movement the door would magically open. It was at that point her husband realised that it was either fire me or lose his wife. I had a terrible bedside manner. That experience convinced me to give it all away. ——— a m ateur ar c haeology, 1996

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I felt like a fraud presenting Better Homes and Gardens. There I was, 30 years after the fact, acting the architect and passing on advice to people who were about to spend their life savings. Television presented me as some sort of magician who could complete a renovation in the blink of an eye. For instance, we’d film a renovation story over a six-month period, it would be tightly edited and the total segment would run for five minutes, max. To the audience at home it looked simple, and many the amateur home renovator may have launched off into their very own family nightmare. I forever feel guilty for the number of marriages I may have destroyed. To the victims, I apologise. What television producers never want you to see when they make feel-good reality television programs is the reality. I’d often commence stories with the happily married couple, some with the baby on the way, and ahead of them their dream renovation. On more than one occasion I found myself at the end of a story interviewing an embarrassed single partner. At other times I felt more like a marriage counsellor than an architect. Couples separated for a variety of reasons – the wife had run off with the bricklayer, the baby had had a nervous breakdown, or the pet dog had been accidentally cut in half by the tradesmen. None of this rich colour ever made it to the small screen.

Beastburger I’d been working for two years on Better Homes and Gardens when out of the blue my Los Angeles mate Steve Feke came back into the picture. Steve was writing and producing a television series for Alliance Atlantis, a Canadian cable TV company. The filming was to be at Warner Brothers Studios on the Gold Coast. Feke generously offered me a role in the series with the added promise of lots of fine meals and wine. How could I resist? BeastMaster was the story of a semi-naked man who had the rare ability

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to talk to wild animals. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but as I was doing something else that I didn’t want to do, I thought it might be a nice change. I was in one of those falling-into-the-next-moment kind of moods. My role was a character called the Ancient One, a crusty old warlock. So for the next three years I floated through television being an architecthandyman and a 400-year-old mediaeval magician. Shooting the first episode of BeastMaster and playing a 400-year-old, I required copious amounts of prosthetics applied to my face to age me. It took almost five hours to apply and three hours to remove. I took my friend Feke aside after the first day’s shoot and suggested that it may have been cheaper for him to employ a fucking glove puppet. The reason I no longer possess eyebrows is thanks to hours of having layers of rubber ripped from my face. It was like getting a Brazilian wax above the neck. These were the schizophrenic times. One day I would find myself standing on location wearing overalls and showing the public how to convert their toilet into a playroom, the next day I’d be at Warner Brothers Studios on the Gold Coast in full prosthetic makeup, a shoulder-length wig and glorious flowing robes sprouting the most unintelligible metaphysical gobbledygook known to mankind. How I learned the dialogue for BeastMaster, I’ll never know. I didn’t understand a word I was saying. Obviously the actors playing opposite me had no idea either. I know for a fact they just waited for a pause in the conversation and then delivered their lines. It’s interesting how art mimics life. In BeastMaster the basis of my character was that, like Merlin, my wizard had the ability to predict the future. He could do this because he was living his life backwards. So I began the series as a quadricentenarian, a 400-year-old, and travelled backwards in time until eventually I reached the age that I was, 58. After 22 episodes I passed through the 300s, 200s, 100s and finally hit my 50s, which became a quandary for the writers. Where could they go? It was obvious that my character had to disappear into a pile of dust, and I did.

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Merry Christmas It was 2001, two days before Christmas, and I was out shopping when I received a call on my mobile phone from a Better Homes and Gardens’ executive. This was the conversation, as I recall … G’day Bondy, can we talk? I’m a bit busy at the moment, I’m doing the Christmas shopping. Well I won’t take up your time then. I just wanted to let you know that we won’t be using you next year.

I have to say it was a shock. At least it wasn’t a text. These boys must have all attended the school of blunt. So is that it? I asked. Yep. No need to call the other presenters, they already know.

What a sensitive soul. Bondy, it’s just the role of the dice mate. Seven wanted some younger faces and you were just unlucky. It could easily have been Graham Ross, he’s close to your age.

On the one hand I felt incredibly relieved to be free of the show, but on the other I was smarting. There is very little dignity in being made superfluous. I hadn’t been enjoying the show for a long time and I’d done every renovation imaginable 20 times over. It got to the point where I was showing people how to climb up a ladder and remove leaves from their gutter or how to convert their bedroom cupboard into a family gym. I’m sure the audiences often wondered if they’d seen the story before. I know I did. Maybe our show was about rites of passage: an older audience dies from renovation-related injuries and miraculously a younger naïve audience replaces them.

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Callithumpians revisited It’s strange being a Grahame. It’s not a very interesting name and it never sat comfortably with me, although I’m very relaxed with the Bond bit. Even when I sign my name Grahame Bond it doesn’t quite look right. I prefer signing G.J. Bond. If I didn’t feel like a Grahame, I certainly didn’t feel like an architect. But then I didn’t spend much time practising architecture. Likewise I wasn’t very comfortable being called an actor, either. It was very confusing. I didn’t know where I belonged. All my life I’ve been in limbo; I haven’t belonged to any specific tribe. Architects thought of me as an actor, actors saw me as an architect, and as for advertising, I didn’t want to belong to that club anyway. So I wasn’t a member of anyone’s club. I was a Callithumpian, just like my Dad. All my life I’ve taken risks. I always found it thrilling to step into the unknown. It’s the danger that makes it exciting. If I were to create a graph of my life, it would clearly show the rollercoaster ride I took as I charged from huge successes to miserable failures. Some career decisions I’ve made were definitely premeditated, but the majority have been quite accidental. Sometimes not knowing where you’re heading can add spice to the ride. Looking back, my major regret is that I didn’t have children. As an only child I desperately wanted siblings. So the teams I built around me became my surrogate families, and the actors the brothers and sisters that I desperately missed. The reason I didn’t settle down and have children was that I never felt my lifestyle or relationships were stable enough. From my teenage years I lived the life of a gypsy, sleeping wherever I could lay my head, on floors, on lounges, in spare rooms. I had a bad case of wanderlust from the start. Several things drove me to adopt this particular lifestyle. One was a need to overcome my shyness and the other was to discover my limits. I was also driven by a strong sense of revenge, which may have been about proving something to Mr Woolf and my Uncle Jack, who had both damaged me badly. a m ateur ar c haeology, 1996

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Because I chose such a vagabond existence, I could never quite see myself earning a regular enough wage to provide for a family. It sounds selfish, but I just couldn’t visualise myself as a parent. My greatest fear was that I might fail as a father and as I was so insecure I didn’t want to inflict that on a child. It was terrifying. If I was to ever meet Miss Right, would she accept such a mess? For the past 45 years I’ve bounced through a number of careers, and I put that pinball lifestyle down to the fact that I had the attention span of a cocker spaniel. The longest I managed to stay in one profession was nine years. It became almost a predictable pattern that I would jump ship every few years: architecture 1961–70, Aunty Jack 1971–77 and Boy’s Own McBeth 1978–81, advertising 1982–84, stand-up/cabaret 1984–88, advertising 1988–96 and a mix of BHG and BeastMaster till 2001. I often reflect that my life has been like the cycle of the summer cicada that spends a large amount of its life underground, slowly evolving, until one day, when its shell has hardened, it escapes and flies free. The cicada has a short but exciting life in the sun and then dies. I have lived the cycle of the cicada, except I’m still alive and I’ve had not just one but four incarnations, some more successful than others. I love the fact that I have had the opportunity to constantly reinvent myself. As I couldn’t earn enough money as a performer, I had to have many strings to my bow. My first step into the abyss began when I gave up a safe career in architecture to take up a life as a thespian. It was dangerous move but I have no regrets. The move from architecture to theatre was inevitable, because in the theatre I suddenly had a ready-made family. The constant changes from occupation to occupation certainly meant that my life was never boring. I’ve had the most extraordinary life. A life so different to that of my parents, and a career which wouldn’t have been possible without their support and encouragement. After my mother’s death in 2008 I slid into a deep depression, but after some grief counselling, her passing has come to inspire me to look inside myself and produce this book. Mum was always a cheery soul and

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an optimist right to the end. On the day of her 98th birthday she was in palliative care and had been diagnosed with pneumonia. As ill as she was, and with no hope of recovery, we celebrated her birthday (Bastille Day) with French champagne and cake. She never lost her sense of humour because the next day she let me know that she was disappointed that her dear cousin Aunty Stella hadn’t called her on her birthday. ‘Mum, the reason Aunty Stella didn’t phone was probably because she passed away 25 years ago.’ My mother, as quick as a whip, replied, ‘Well I suppose that lets her off the hook then.’ She was sharp right to the end. My mother died six hours later. I loved her dearly and I miss her terribly. She was my sunshine. Today I’m also coming to terms with how it feels to be a senior citizen. Recently I appeared at a Theatresports fundraiser. My introduction was more than flattering, you might even say ingratiatingly glowing, but I felt like a museum piece dragged out of basement storage and put on show for the kiddies. So what have I got out of my successes in the entertainment industry? A lot of fond memories, and a few real enemies. I’m sure my successes were due to my willingness to take risks. I also had an absolute focus, which almost verged on obsession. I’m convinced my failures resulted from an inbuilt self-destruct button that I developed over the years. I’ve always had a perverse fear of success and have walked away from it many times. In the case of Aunty Jack my feelings were torn: on one hand she opened a lot of doors and on the other hand I shut most of them. I also managed to burn a lot of bridges. I couldn’t suffer fools, and I’m sad to say some of those fools eventually moved into very powerful positions. Everyone has successes and failures, but writing about my failures has been quite cleansing. Coping with success is relatively simple as long as you remain humble, but it’s inevitable that you are going to have a fall. In my early days I found public failure incredibly humiliating and confronting and I struggled to haul myself out of that hole on many occasions. Success wasn’t what I found the most rewarding. Rather, it was learning how to come back from the depths of defeat that proved to be my finest achievement.

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Life has always been a lot of contradictions. On one hand I wrote music for and even performed in commercials, but when it came to Aunty Jack I was particularly protective of the brand, and I still am. It’s a powerful trademark. Even today people still expect me to perform the character. It seems absurd so long after the fact. Most of the images and costumes from the 1970s are now in the National Film and Sound Archive (once the Hall of Anatomy) in Canberra. I’m just hoping that eventually I am not scheduled to be stuffed and mounted in a glass case next to Phar Lap.

Meeting my fenimist The majority of relationships I’ve had could only be described as empty. I don’t place the blame on my partners for the brevity of the liaisons; I really think I was pretty damaged goods and in no condition to become involved in a serious relationship anyway. Dudley Moore once came to see BOMcB and while we were having a few drinks after the show, he came up with a wonderful line that I felt aptly described what I had been going through. Dudley said, ‘My life has now become a series of meaningless one-night stands.’ My life was more like a succession of meaningless one-, two- and three-month stands. Except for Sally and Anna, who both ditched me. But what they all seemed to have in common was that they were women. And I was attracted to women. Over the ensuing years I spent brief times with an asthmatic architect, a chain-smoking jazz singer, a couple of mad models, a soapie star, a dancer, a doctor, and an American Penthouse pet. By 1999 I found myself 55 years old and never married. Was I doomed to become a lonely old  TV presenter? Things were so bad even I was starting to spread rumours about myself. But one fateful day I was attending an International No Diet Day luncheon organised by a public relations friend. After attending many of these events over the years, I found myself for the first time sitting next to a beautiful woman.

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I’m emphasising for the first time because I had always fantasised that one day I would accidentally be seated next to a beautiful woman who would become my life partner. Romantics are always disappointed; in reality these things never happen. The No Diet Day luncheon was a miracle. The woman seated next to me was fabulous, and she just happened to be at the function by sheer accident. Kate was representing the New South Wales Department for Women. My first impression was that she seemed slightly aloof (she was shy), so I attempted to make small talk – interest rates, the prime minister’s brain removal. The only personal information Kate offered up was that her son, a 10-year-old, had asked for his own credit card so that he could leave home. I immediately asked what her husband thought about that. She replied that she didn’t have a husband and was a single mother. I was now extremely interested. But there was a minor problem. The wonderful Kerri-Anne Kennerley was seated on my left. We’d known each other for many years and she was keeping up a conversation with me that I delicately tried to ignore. After much to-ing and fro-ing, changes of subject and interruptions, I eventually braved it and asked for Kate’s phone number. She claimed that she didn’t have a card (not a good sign) but a girlfriend who worked in the same department offered me her business card. I waited the regulation four days and called Kate to organise a lunch. On the day, I’d booked a secluded table in a corner, only to find us seated next to a large group of inebriated men-about-town who all happened to know me and constantly asked who was the sheila I was with. This day would become an anniversary: not only would it be the day of our first date, but also the day and month of our wedding seven years later. It was in 2006 when I joined my very first club and that was the First Husbands’ Club. I married very late in life, to a very understanding (she put up with this book) and very loving woman, and I have been blessed to have spent the past 12 years with Kate and my stepson Gene. My parents would be very proud. Now that I have my own real family, I don’t need imaginary families anymore.

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My gratitude goes to the many people who made my dreams possible. Gary Lewis, my oldest and dearest friend, who has always supported me unconditionally. He is also the most honourable person I know. Rory O’Donoghue, who has joined me on this adventure and has been like a brother. Professor Peter Johnson, who championed me through university and believed in me. The students and staff of Sydney University faculty of Architecture who contributed their talent and energies to make the Architecture revues the remarkable events they were. Kosta Akon and Fairlie Kingston, my first flatmates who were surrogate parents from 1968 to the mid-1980s. They fed and looked after me because basically I was hopeless. Geoffrey Atherden, a dear friend and a writer whose material always made me look good. Maurice Murphy, who took enormous risks to give me my first break into television and has always been there for me. We still continue the association. Jim Burnett, who gambled with a successful life in commercial television to play with me in the dangerous game of writing musicals. Charles Waterstreet, who made me put my money where my mouth was and helped make Boy’s Own McBeth a reality. Gwyn Perkins, who isn’t in the book. Mark Gould, co-director of Boy’s Own McBeth. I am eternally grateful to Mark who, in 1979, found a house that I could afford to buy. This gave me the security I’d never had. John Phillips, a generous friend who has provided sound financial advice over the years – skill that didn’t come naturally to me. Erin Crumlin and Valerie Rendle, for their professional help and advice. Kate’s family and in particular Jon and Derry Simonds for their support and feedback. Philippa Nolan, my ex-business partner, who began compiling my biography in 1996 and spent many months interviewing me and dredging up these memories. My dearly loved mum and dad, who will always be in my heart. And finally to my wonderful wife Kate, who has suggested, corrected, reworked, edited and nursed my fragile ego through this lengthy process. Thank you all.

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Acknowledgments Thanks to the following people for permission to quote copyright material: • • • •

Phillip Adams for his article ‘Young Bulls and the Brahmans’ in The Australian Bill Harding for segments from Leave it to Jesus Geoff Mack for the O’Donoghue–Bond adaptation of ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ Rory O’Donoghue for lyrics co-written with Grahame Bond: ‘Wollongong the Brave’ and ‘The Colt from Snowy Aloha’.

And thanks to the following for permission to use photographs: • Josh Vernon-Rogers – portrait of Grahame Bond • Garry Moeskops – Drip Dry Dreams Architecture revue • John Stewart – modelling with Anna Nygh • Christos Varvaressos – Kosta Akon, Fairlie Kingston, and ‘Back home and beaten by the Poms’ • National Film and Sound Archive – Michael: Three to Go, 1969. An Australian Commonwealth Film Unit Production. © National Film and Sound Archive of Australia – Film Australia Collection. • Jennifer Steele – Kate Fitzpatrick and Grahame images from Homesdale, © Jennifer Steele • ACP Library – The Bulletin: Hamlet on Ice, Dolly magazine, Red Symons and Grahame, and ‘Dressed for a Queen’ • Australian Broadcasting Corporation Library Sales – Man on a Green Bike, all Aunty Jack shows, Flash Nick from Jindavick, Wollongong the Brave, The Off Show, TV Times and Maurice Murphy images • Michael John Egan – Hamlet on Ice, Bondi Pavilion • ITV/London Weekend Television – Little Big Show images courtesy ITV/LWT • Mark Gould – Boy’s Own McBeth images

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• Network Ten – Parkinson, Aunty Jack in The Grahame Bond Show, and ‘The Bosun and Red Symons’ in The Grahame Bond Show • Juliet Bennett – AJ and Thin Arthur, ABC 75th Birthday Tour • Richard Michalak – Kate and Grahame, 2011. All other photographs are from Grahame Bond’s personal collection. Special thanks: Christopher Smyth, John Woodward, David Gillett, Robert Love, John Pinder, Caroline Stacey and Dean Ellis, Nuala Davis and Gene Alberts; and Phillipa McGuinness, Linda Funnell, Heather Champion, Di Quick, Emma Driver and all at NewSouth Publishing for their wonderful support and encouragement.

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