The Long Road to Overnight Success, page 2
When I came on the scene our house had three bedrooms with a large front garden and a truly gargantuan back garden. As a child I could only dream of kicking a footy the full length of it. As I got older that dream was easily accomplished, as it was really only about 30 metres long, but to me our yard was as wide as a suburb and the length of the earth. I still think of that back garden whenever I smell freshly cut grass in summer; maybe that’s because I believe for a kid, the best memories are made in summer.
Luckily I don’t have to rely on my memory to imagine the yard or the home, because Mum and my stepfather, David, still live there. David has worked with his hands all his life as a welder, a boilermaker and looking after the council’s parks and gardens, so he and my Uncle Len — Mum’s sister Val’s husband — worked together to extend the house when we outgrew it. I only realise now just how wonderful it is to be able to keep going through the front door of the house that has the stories and secrets of your youth buried in every layer of paint and every crack and stain. A house can eventually become a member of the family, and that particular house has seen me and my brother and sisters come, grow and go, and the coming and growing of all of our children.
Though that house was the centre of our world, we made other homes for ourselves. Clay, Kim and I would build a make-do house out in the back yard using blankets and cushions, a few sheets and some bits of timber against a tree. ‘We’re camping out tonight,’ we would tell Mum. To me it would feel as though we had spent the whole night out there, though the next morning Mum would assure me we had come back in at nine o’clock or so.
We three kids were quite a team. Clay was my big brother in every sense of the word. Number one, he’s older than me by seven years. Clay has always had the physique of my uncles, with broad shoulders a couple of axe handles across, and strong with it. I always wanted to be like my older brother, and I wanted to be his frame too. I used to try to eat more, and later do weights, to try to grow big and strong like Clay. It wasn’t until I was 21 that I started to bulk up, but Clay was always a big, bull-shouldered bloke. Because of that seven-year gap between us there was never any rivalry. We shared a room, which might have driven him mad at times but I loved it. I remember one night when I was a little kid I wet my bed and Clay let me sleep in his bed with him for the rest of the night. Not every brother would do that, I bet. If there was trouble, Clay would be standing beside you at the drop of a hat — even before the hat had left the hand that was dropping it. He has a big heart too, always willing to share knowledge and always there to back me up. And he is one person who is guaranteed to make me laugh pretty much every time I speak to him.
Kim and I have always shared a very special bond. We are only three years apart, and as kids we had that best-friend closeness. In our teenage years we used to go to nightclubs together with a bunch of our friends. I’d do Kim’s hair and help her choose her outfits and check her makeup. I’d do anything for Kim: if I was going to the shops I’d even buy her ladies’ products if she needed them. Kim has the spine of my Dad’s side of the family — in many ways she’s the toughest of us all — and she has my mum’s heart. Kim is a nurturer, and she is always the one that reminds me how proud she is of me. If I’m on television even for a moment, I’ll get a text saying, ‘just saw yr smiling face on TV’. She is one of earth’s angels, with a smile and a laugh that can infect a whole room. If joy was a virus, Kim would be incurable.
Natalie came along seven years after me and I always felt very protective of her. I felt that I had to play the big scary brother and look after this little blond-haired, beautiful girl, but it turns out Nat’s got a mind of her own and can look after herself. She’s forever got a smile on her face, which is just a natural product of her bubbly personality. I always referred to her as my little sister, but part of growing up is realising that you can stop being the big brother and become friends instead.
As a counterpoint to the serenity of my childhood, the acting bug took a bite out of me pretty young, leading to that first performance of mine in front of my parents and their friends. It was simple yet effective, involving nothing more than a bare bum, a flat surface and a bit of gas. My second public performance had a little more finesse to it. One year we trekked down to Phillip Island to see the penguin parade. It’s a marvel to see the wild penguins emerging from the sea like Ursula Andress in the Bond movie Dr. No. Then they waddle across the sand to their burrows, not at all like Ursula Andress. Families would throw their picnic rugs on a grassy hillside and sit themselves down with sandwiches and thermoses to watch the show. A park ranger would climb up a ladder to a timber box, grab a megaphone and announce, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes the penguin parade will start.’
Penguins waddle to their own timetable, so there was usually a bit of a wait. All the kids would run down to the sand to play until the birds showed up. I’ve always loved building things, so I set myself to crafting a stunner of a sandcastle. Then another kid ran over and did what he loved best, which was kicking things down. I sat back on my heels and watched while he flattened my creation. Then I just started from scratch and built another sandcastle. Wouldn’t you know it: Billy the sandcastle bomber ran back across and flattened it. I just kept going and set up another castle. The sandcastle bomber would do another flyby and flatten my masterpiece. And another. Smash. And another.
Through it all, the crowds up on the hill started to watch our support act, and they became engrossed in the drama. I eventually got sick of Billy’s devastatingly effective flybys and decided to put a foot out on his approach, with spectacular results. He flew face first into the sand, putting an end to his bombing raid. At that point the crowd all cheered, applauded and yelled, ‘Good onya kid.’
I am reliably informed that after our spectacular matinee show the penguins were a bit of an anticlimax.
As kids we were always putting on a show. It probably happens less these days, but back then the neighbours would pop in and while the grownups were chatting, the kids would come up with some ideas for a show. Then we’d set up a makeshift stage using the opening between our kitchen and the lounge room as our theatre’s proscenium arch and perform for our captive audience.
That was just the way my family was. Dad wouldn’t call himself an actor, which is amusing in itself because he has appeared in a fair number of films now, but he has always been a performer and an entertainer. He did stand-up comedy when I was a kid and he was involved in sporting clubs where he’d get up and do a bit of a routine and have everyone in stitches. He was the funniest guy I knew, and he still is. With Dad and his brothers, normal conversations were like riddles, even when they weren’t trying to be funny. The family had a vernacular that was uniquely Australian: everything had a different name. You wouldn’t just go to the toilet, you were going to splash your boots. If something was a waste of time, Dad’s mum would say, ‘You might as well rub your arse with a brick.’
Mum has always been deeply involved in performance, too, and has taught calisthenics for more than 50 years. She set up the Avonde Calisthenics College back in the 1960s, so I grew up surrounded by performers and costumes and stage props. I’d come home after school and there would be girls getting private lessons in our house; on Wednesday nights there would be a group of ladies there meeting for calisthenics. Some of my mates found it fascinating, but it was nothing to me to come home and find girls in leotards dancing around our house.
The seed of entertainment was constantly being watered in our house. Someone was always doing something to amuse, or entertain, or scare someone else. When Kim had her friends over for a slumber party, Clay and I had to hand over our room to the girls, but we didn’t give it up without a fight. Clay was very inventive about it; he has always been good at setting up sound and visual effects, which is why no one was surprised when, later on, his journey to become a film director he worked on special effects for movies. He would rig up wires so that we could pull a string and cups would magically rattle in their cupboards, or hide a speaker in a wardrobe that would emit ghostly moaning sounds or spooky music. It never failed to work very satisfactorily. One time, a friend of Kim’s got so scared that she jumped off the top bunk to get away and landed fair and square on another girl’s head. To us boys that was gold, just hilarious.
Kim was very easy to scare, so she made a tempting target. If you tickled her, she could kick you to death without a worry, but if you scared her she would scream loud enough to scare the warts off a witch. Even in my teens I would still cook up ways to scare Kim. More than once I would be coming home from a nightclub or band practice at one in the morning, and as I walked up the driveway I would hear a car approaching. I could tell it was Kim’s little Datsun Stanza, and I’d think to myself, ‘How opportune.’ Off I would go and hide in a bush or behind the thick vine that ran beside the stairs to our front door. I’d wait quietly and as Kim walked up the stairs — bang, I would jump out in front of her, and she would shriek loud enough to wake the neighbourhood and kill a brown dog with shock while she was at it.
CHAPTER TWO
THE WONDER YEARS
I get such a great feeling from camping; give me a campfire and a foldout chair and I’m as happy as a cow in a village full of vegans. As far back as my small mind can remember, every holiday or long weekend my family and I would jump in a car and head to a camping spot or caravan park near some form of water, be it river, lake, bay or ocean.
I love being on the road. Nothing puts a smile on my dial faster than the words ‘road trip’. The other day, Mum and I started swapping some of our favourite memories of road trips. The first that came to mind was one in our old Mini at Easter. I was only three at the time, and Clay, Kim and I were all in the back ploughing through our chocolate eggs, at no risk of putting on weight or having our teeth rot due to the fact that we had more of the chocolate on our faces than we had in our mouths. The day was as hot as hell and we each had a pillow. A scuffle broke out and one of the feather-filled pillows burst.
The only form of air conditioning in the Mini was the windows-down option, so the cabin was instantly turned into one of those money booths you see on game shows, except it was feathers flying around, not cash — and we weren’t going to win anything. The only element of suspense was whether Dad was going to crash the car or throw us from it.
Dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked into the back to discover his three children now looked like oversized birds. Our faces were completely covered in feathers that had stuck to our chocolate-coated noggins.
For me, the real camping memories start four years after that with a trip to Ocean Grove, down on the coast of Victoria. We were walking distance to both the beach and the Barwon River, which is an ocean-fed river, so this spot had the best of everything. I spent so much time swimming there, I knew the fish and sharks by name. There were plenty of other kids too, and I remember meeting my first ‘holiday friend’, a young girl from another caravan, who I would play with. There are photos of me with this girl and most likely we played together every day we were at Ocean Grove, but I have no idea what her full name was or where she is today. All I know is that her name was Lisa, and I thought she was pretty wonderful.
Ocean Grove was our camping destination of choice for several years, then we made the big commitment: we took a permanent site at the Zeally Bay caravan park in Torquay on the surf coast of Victoria. If there’s one thing that is a constant in caravan parks other than caravans and tents, it’s kids cruising around on their bikes; it’s what you did, as much as breathing or eating or swimming. So one Christmas I took my new bike to Torquay. When I say ‘new’, strictly speaking not all of that bike was new: we didn’t have enough money for a whole new one. By this time my stepfather, David, was on the scene and he could fix anything, so he would take the bike into his shed filled with tools and make it pretty much as good as new.
It was a bike with one red Skyway Tuff 2 plastic rim at the rear. Tuff plastic rims were as cool at that time as The Fonz punching a jukebox to get it to play a song, which was very cool indeed. I got a new pair of handlebars and a new seat, which turned an old dragster into a pretty flash makeshift BMX. I would ride that BMX-lookalike around the caravan park all day almost every day.
Like any good caravan park, Zeally Bay had a recreation room, and in the rec room there were a few billiard tables and pinball machines such as the KISS, and computer games like Galaga, Space Invaders, all the classics. That’s where we used to hang out with our mates when we weren’t swimming or riding our bikes. The jukebox would play loud and in my mind the soundtrack of those times was just about all Mondo Rock songs: ‘Come Said the Boy’ and ‘Cool World’ are the two I remember best, with a little bit of The Angels thrown in for good measure — ‘Am I Ever Going To See Your Face Again’ and ‘Shadow Boxer’. Those songs played over and over on that jukebox, so now when I hear them I’m immediately back in Torquay, riding my bike around and watching Clayton and Kim hanging out with their friends in the rec room.
One time in the rec room there was a guy playing pool, and because Kim liked this guy, she was urging him on to win. Just as he was about to take a shot, she crouched down behind the pocket he was aiming at with her eyes in line with the top of the table and said, ‘Come on, try and sink it in here.’ I think this guy was quite keen on Kim too; trying hard to impress her, he gave the ball a good whack and it flew up over the pocket and cracked her right in the eye. Instead of black ball corner pocket, it was white ball in blackened eye socket.
Above and beyond black eyes, though, we made some good friends during our times at Torquay. And the ones we didn’t make, we brought with us. The Boseleys, for instance: they were our friends and neighbours, and most years they stayed at Torquay too. Ray Boseley and Clayton in particular were best mates, friends for life. Later they went through Swinburne Film and Television School together, but even back then they were making videos on a little 8mm camera. They’d plan and script these little comedy videos and film them throughout the year and even some at the caravan park, then they would set up a projector beside the caravan and all our friends would come and sit outside to watch the show. We’d plonk ourselves down on our deck chairs with blankets and drinks and nibbles and watch these little films on a bed sheet strung up as the screen. Many years later, when we watched the preview of Kenny, my mind took me back to those days at Torquay, watching Clay and Ray’s movies amongst the caravans.
When you’re a kid, there are certain times and places that are magic. They’re special, set apart. It might be a treehouse, or a friend’s back yard, or a particular holiday. For me there was a whole series of these special times and they mostly centred around one particular place: Moorabbee Lodge Caravan Park, at Lake Eppalock in country Victoria.
After four years or so of holidays at Torquay, Lake Eppalock became the new place we went to for the summer holidays. Every year we would spend school holidays there and the occasional long weekend. This place was heaven for me because there was just so much to do. I swam, waterskied, rode dirt bikes, played pinball, and just hung out with all the other kids. There was always a horde of us who came year after year and were firm friends for the duration of every holiday.
Moorabbee Lodge was all of my Christmases and Easters from the age of fourteen up until I was eighteen. As a kid you’ve got a heightened sense of excitement around those holidays; in fact, I still get that around holiday time, no matter what I have planned. But as a boy becoming a young man, those were the best days of my life. That was where I first started having mature conversations and relationships with girls — at least, I thought so. I was part of a tight group, about 25 of us, one of those groups where you have a girlfriend for a while and then you break up with her, then she ends up with one of your friends, and you end up with one of the other girls in the group. Inside this bubble of friendship, you all bounce around with one another.
There’s something special about going back to the same place for family holidays every year, too, especially if it is as magical as Lake Eppalock was to me. You build rituals around it. It all started well before we left home. Even as a kid, you knew you had to look the part, so in the lead-up to our holiday I would do weights to get in better shape, even though in those days I was boxing at my dad’s gym, so I was actually fairly lean and fit. Back then we weren’t afraid of the sun: we saw it as a friend that could make you browner and therefore more attractive, rather than an enemy that could burn you and cause you to leave the earth before your time. In the weeks before Christmas I would sit in our back garden in my shorts and slap on oceans of Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil until I smelt like a coconut plantation, to make sure I was brown before I got to the caravan park.
The body had to be brown but the hair needed sun streaks, so the other part of my ritual was to rub lemon juice through my hair to get some natural highlights going — if you consider rubbing a lemon on your head a natural act. I’d lie out on the trampoline in our back yard, baking in the sun while exuding the aroma of a tropical cocktail with my coconut-oiled body and my lemon-scented head.
Back then I had energy in seemingly endless supply, the sort of energy you would give anything to have as you get a little older. On a typical day I would get up in the morning, get straight on my dirt bike and go and ride that for hours; in the incredible heat and wearing all the padded gear, I’d be streaming with sweat the whole time.
I’ve ridden motorbikes all my life. By the time we started going to Moorabbee Lodge I had my own dirt bike, which I had saved up for with my paper-round money, doing odd jobs — anything to scrape together some extra dollars. After I’d been saving for a year, I had a little over $500 to put towards it. When a second-hand Yamaha YZ80H became available at a local motorbike shop for $700, Mum and David kicked in the extra couple of hundred dollars so I could get it. Everyone says a house will be your biggest purchase in life: I say frogbog. No purchase in my life has come within a wolf’s howl to me buying that bike. A house might have cost a whole lot more, but you couldn’t buy the way I felt buying that bike for all the beer in Belgium.
