Home Truths: A Memoir

By David Williamson

The revealing and candid memoir of Australia's legendary playwright and screenwriter

The definitive memoir of David Williamson, author of iconic dramas such as The Removalists, The Club, Don's Party, Emerald City and Travelling North, as well as more than fifty other plays, explores the life of the writer and the true stories and real lives that inspired his works. A powerful force in theatre since the 1970s, Williamson's plays have uniquely explored the pulse of our Australianness.

After five decades of chronicling the blunders, mishaps and messes that he and his fellow Australians got themselves into, Williamson has penned his long-awaited memoir, Home Truths. It reveals the story of the man behind the work: how a childhood defined by marital discord sparked a lifelong fascination with the power of drama to explore emotional conflict; how a mechanical engineering student became our most successful playwright; the anxiety that plagued him as he crafted his plays; the joy of connecting with an audience and the enduring sting of the critics; and the great love story that defined his personal life.

Fearless, candid and witty, Williamson also writes about the plethora of odd, interesting, caustic and brilliant people – actors, directors, writers, theatre critics, politicians – who have intersected with his life and work: from a young Jacki Weaver and Chris Haywood in the first Sydney production of The Removalists in 1971 to Nicole Kidman on the brink of stardom in the 1988 feature film of Emerald City and lively dinners with political powerhouse Paul Keating; and from Graham Kennedy in the 1976 film version of Don's Party through eventful overseas travels with Gareth Evans, Peter Carey and Tim Winton to a West End production of Up for Grabs starring Madonna, and the satisfaction of seeing his sons Felix and Rory tread the boards in several of his own plays.

Praise for David Williamson:

'Australia's most enduringly popular social comedy writer … keenly observant and satirical.' The Sydney Morning Herald

'Williamson always keeps us engaged … his words weave a spellbinding course … testament to the power of [his] language.' The Daily Telegraph

'Our greatest dramatic entertainer.' Chris Boyd, Financial Review

'His genius has been to define for us, in advance of our own recognition, the qualities which make up the Australian character.' Katharine Brisbane, The Australian

'It would be impossible to fault Williamson for not being brutally honest.' Jasper Lindell, Canberra Times

'Known for his sharp wit, brutal dialogue and fierce politics, Williamson's book is savage, funny and tender in equal parts. It's also first-class eyewitness cultural history.' Filmink

'Home Truths unfurls a sweeping and surprising life. It is a potpourri of Australian middle-class mores, exiting cultural schisms in the nation's theatre fuelled by young men and women who would go on to change the face of stage and screen, the politics of the day, love trysts and betrayal, backstage drama, fame and financial success, family, enemies made and friends lost, marriage and divorce, all backdropped by Williamson's remarkable work.' Matthew Condon, The Australian

'... the overall momentum is powerfully sustained. Home Truths is as much a collective portrait as a self-portrait, and anyone who picks it up is likely to be carried on by the surge and the propulsion.' Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald

'Like so many of his plays, it is name-dropping, gossipy and wonderfully entertaining.' Susan Lever, Inside Story

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781460713167

David Williamson

David Williamson is one of Australia's best known and most widely performed playwrights and one of Australia's leading screenwriters. His dramas have been produced by all the major Australian theatre companies and have been translated into many languages and performed internationally. David has directed eight professional productions of his own work and written many radio dramas. He has also written (or co-written) scripts for fifteen feature films, including the original screenplays for Petersen, Eliza Fraser (starring Susannah York), Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously (both starring Mel Gibson), Phar Lap, and Balibo (with Robert Connolly). His movie adaptations of his own plays include The Removalists, Don's Party, The Club, Travelling North, Emerald City and Sanctuary, and for television he adapted The Department, The Perfectionist, A Dangerous Life and On the Beach, and wrote The Four Minute Mile.

Book preview

PREFACE

During my first days as an engineering student in Melbourne, I was waiting for the start of a lecture when two guys suddenly swept through the lecture hall doors, arguing in an animated undertone with copious hand gestures. I instantly wanted to know more about them. Who were they? What were their backgrounds? What were they fighting about? I felt a strong urge to sprint down the aisle and eavesdrop.

From as far back as I can remember, I was compulsively curious about other people’s lives. Although at dinner parties I was prone to giving the other guests the benefit of my opinions to the point where I was often kicked under the table by my first wife, I was never interested in broadcasting any of my own deeds or accomplishments. I knew them already. I wanted to hear about other lives, in particular their frustrations, exasperations – their conflicts with others and how they dealt with them. I loved the things I knew I wasn’t supposed to love: the character assassinations, the denunciations, and the dark humour that often arises when attempts to deal with our life crises are bungled. The whole messy canvas of our social life fascinated me. I realised that although in Anglo cultures gossip is frowned upon, it was in fact the very staple of social life, as it always has been wherever humans meet to pass the time of day.

This intense curiosity about what motivates people and how they behave as social beings eventually resulted in fifty-six plays, twenty screenplays and five television miniseries. At the age of seventy-eight, after fifty years of chronicling the lives, blunders, mishaps and messes that I and my fellow Australians got themselves into, I finally decided that that was enough. Best to stop while people were still coming to my plays in numbers, not to be staggering around aged ninety-eight wondering why the theatres weren’t full any more.

Twenty years ago a publisher asked whether I would be interested in writing a memoir. I refused on the grounds that other people’s lives were more interesting than mine. But in January 2020, after I had decided to retire, and without the pressure of constant work, I found that I did want to look back and remember those years and what I’d done with them. I wanted to be reminded of where all those stories had spung from, what I’d drawn from life and what was invented, and what they said about the Australia of the time.

I started reading my plays again after many years and found it was like reading them for the first time. I had little idea of what was coming next, and was pleased that the stories still held me. However, I was mortified to find that I had often been a little more honest about my faults and veered a little closer to actual events than I remembered.

Rereading my work also reminded me that important political and economic changes had happened during those years, and that these changes had been the background to the exploration of our social behaviour in my work. In fact on some occasions, when I was angered by the actions of those in power, the state of our nation had leapt to the foreground in such plays as Sons of Cain, Sanctuary, The Great Man, Top Silk, A Conversation, Influence, Crunch Time and Family Values.

I can’t make the claim that my plays charted the lives and times of all Australians – the characters in my plays were most often middle class and Anglo-Celtic – but the social changes our nation as a whole went through can be clearly seen.

By the time of my first plays, The Coming of Stork and Don’s Party, the rigid social conformity of the 1950s had been disrupted by the 1960s, which brought dreams, sadly short-lived and sometimes psychedelically aided, of peace, love and understanding, along with more sexual freedom and less repression and censorship. The disastrous male attempt to instigate sexual freedom in suburban Melbourne’s Lower Plenty can be clearly seen in the train wreck of Don’s Party.

The 1970s saw the flowering of feminist thought and action, whose effects are reflected in the newly assertive female characters in Third World Blues, A Handful of Friends and The Department. We also saw the coming of the first Labor government in more than twenty years. The Whitlam government had a genuinely leftist agenda and an independent foreign policy, and under its aegis there was a sudden flowering of Australian arts, achieved by creating the Australia Council and generously funding it to give substantial help to literature, music, art, film and drama. The fragile egos of these new-wave creators are on show in What If You Died Tomorrow?

Many artists thought that the arrival of Whitlam meant that the arts, in what had previously been a country that almost prided itself in its philistinism, were now at last a permanent national priority. They were wrong. The 1980s ushered in a neoliberal, free-market-worshipping, dog-eat-dog, greed-is-good world. Life all over the globe, including here, became tougher and more competitive for most, and has stayed that way ever since. The harshness of the life imposed on our working poor was personified by my character Zehra in Influence.

In the 1990s began the long ascendancy of globalisation, though there were causes for some optimism. Paul Keating delivered his stirring Redfern speech marking the fact that justice for our First Nations people would remain a strong cause, along with women’s rights, ethnic rights and gay and lesbian rights. For good or ill, identity politics became a dominating theme of Australian society. The premise that progressive ideologies can sometimes become strident and extreme is clear in my satire Dead White Males.

In the first ten years of the twenty-first century came the global financial crisis and the realisation that neoliberal politics, by minimising regulation and letting greed off the leash, had come within an ace of bankrupting the world. In the following decade it become obvious that the neoliberalism and globalisation beloved of the financial elites were increasingly delivering the wealth of the planet to a decreasing few. The toxic extremes of ruthless male business practices and male competitiveness are clear in When Dad Married Fury and Amigos.

The new century also brought long-sought reforms such as gay marriage, and in some states the right to voluntary assisted dying became a reality. In Crunch Time the cruelty of not permitting voluntary assisted dying is explored.

Then COVID-19 hit and the world floundered. Australia survived better than most countries because of our relative isolation and governments that were prepared to act hard and fast, but as the effects of climate change became increasingly apparent, we at last began to realise that our old lives of certainty and security could be gone forever. The conscious campaign of the right-wing media to minimise the dangers of climate change looms large in Happiness.

RELIVING IT ALL AGAIN REMINDED ME THAT BEING A SUCCESSFUL WRITER isn’t always an armchair ride. Someone described war as long stretches of boredom with moments of panic. For me writing was often long stretches of prolonged anxiety as I wrestled with the work, and then doubts and fears alternating with excitement as opening nights approached. I also vividly remembered the upside – the exhilaration and joy when I knew something I’d written was making a strong and visceral connection with my audience, and the shock – thankfully not too often – of realising it hadn’t.

The memoir has also allowed me to write about the plethora of odd, interesting, brilliant and decent people with whom my life has brought me into contact, as well as the vipers who have done their best to make my life hell and often succeeded.

Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to tell the story of my wife and family, who have become increasingly dear to me. Without my being honoured by their bonds of love and affection, mine would have been a hollow existence.

PART I

THE CLUB

Melbourne, 1942–1979

1

DRAMA FROM THE WORD GO

If I had been able to work out what was going on around me at about the time I was carried, newborn, into my new home in late February 1942, I would have sensed that I’d entered this world in interesting times.

I would have seen my father, Keith, stride in from work, face set in a deeply creased frown, take off his felt hat, loosen his tie and offer a cursory kiss to my anxious mother, who was busy packing suitcases. He would have hurried to the cabinet he had built himself, ripped open a drawer, taken out maps of remote forested regions in Victoria, strode into the kitchen, crossed the slightly worn linoleum kitchen floor, and studied them intently on the linoleum-topped kitchen table.

The nation, like my parents, was in the grip of panic. Five days before I was born the Japanese had bombed Darwin, and Australia had finally realised that far from being bandy-legged, badly trained and so shortsighted they couldn’t shoot straight, the Japanese were formidable conquerors on an inexorable march south. My father was looking for a new wilderness hideaway where his wife would be protected from defilement and his precious son from being skewered on a bayonet.

His invasion fears weren’t totally fanciful. The Japanese high command knew that Australia was all but defenceless, with the bulk of our army fighting Rommel in the Middle East, so the Japanese navy had decided Port Stephens in New South Wales would be the point of entry before they swept north, west and south.

At the precise time my mother, Elvie, went into labour our prime minister John Curtin, knowing how desperate our situation was, was having a furious exchange of cables with Winston Churchill. Britain’s prime minister had demanded that the Australian 7th Division, at sea on the way home from the Middle East, be diverted to Burma to shore up the protection of India, a much brighter jewel in the British crown than Australia. Instead Curtin insisted our troops return home to defend their homeland.

Churchill was furious. In his mind Australia was a small but loyal part of the mighty British Empire on which the sun would never set, and Curtin’s refusal to bow to his demands amounted to insubordination. In a reference to our convict beginnings he is said to have muttered, ‘Bad stock, bad stock’, and he tried to reassure Curtin that if the Japanese did take Australia their success would be only temporary; the Allies would recapture it when Hitler was defeated.

Curtin wasn’t the least bit reassured, and insisted the troops remain on course for home. Churchill instructed the British Admiralty, still in nominal command of ships carrying Australian soldiers, to ignore Curtin and change course for Burma. Curtin countermanded the order, but four times Churchill overruled him. Finally, and with very bad grace, Churchill gave way and our troops sailed home safely.

After a heated debate among the Japanese high command, their navy’s plan to invade was overruled by the army, who knew they would now have to face the 7th Division and felt their supply lines were already stretched to the limit. So I slept on during our country’s worst existential threat. I had been spared the bayonet and my mother had avoided a possible fate worse than death.

My father suffered during the war years. Tall, strong and fit, he felt guilty that he wasn’t defending his country; he was a bank clerk and banking was a reserved occupation. In later years, still carrying that wartime guilt, he showed my younger brother, Peter, and me the letter rejecting his application to join the RAAF.

My arrival had a special poignancy for both my parents. Several years earlier their firstborn, Bruce, had died after just twenty-four hours, and this time my father nearly lost both his wife and me. In later years, whenever my mother felt I wasn’t appreciative enough of her sacrifices on my behalf, she would bring out her biggest blackmail howitzer to remind me grimly that while I was being born she’d suffered twenty-seven kidney fits and that the doctors had given her up for dead five times. The first time she said all this I was deeply chastened, but Mum used that weapon so frequently that it soon lost its impact.

IN MY WORK CRITICS HAVE OFTEN PICKED UP COMPETING IMPULSES: THE satirist’s need to lacerate and skewer but also the comedy writer’s hopes that conflicts can be resolved, compassion can prevail and peace can return to the world. I’m not cruel enough to be a vicious satirist or kind enough to write warm comedy. I inhabit the territory in between, which has always been fine by me and my audience, but has tended to irk some critics who have wanted me to be one or the other.

Early influences are crucial for anyone. I’m sure that in this mix the satirical impulse came from my mother and the impulse to forgive that’s inherent in comedy from Dad. In his relaxed moments he could roar with laughter at the absurdities of the world, whereas my mother’s happiest moments came when a foe had been vanquished.

NOBODY IS A PURE SAINT OR AN UNREDEEMED SINNER. WE’RE ALL written in shades of grey, but as a first approximation, my father was on the saint-ish end of the goodness scale, being mainly kind and gentle, while my mother was somewhere towards the other end, being more often than not a seething cauldron of hostility.

There were reasons for this. Brought up by struggling working-class parents at the height of the Depression in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, Elvie lived with the memory of having to stuff layers of newspapers between her blankets to keep her warm in winter. Her father, Fred Armstrong, was a blacksmith with a cheerfully roguish demeanour, whose eye for the ladies would have made him a marked man in this MeToo era. Fred’s wife, my grandmother Mary Armstrong, knowing her husband’s Lothario act was all bravado, got on with life in a cheerful and organised way. She was as smart as all get-out and a wonderful storyteller about her parents’ lives as pub owners, and if there’s a genetic component in my urge to tell stories it probably comes from her.

Elvie gave her parents’ battling resilience scant respect. She hated her early poverty, which remained as a nagging psychic sore, propelling her on a constant quest to distance herself from her humble origins. If she picked up the slightest hint she was being belittled she galloped out of the lists, jousting lance aimed right at the heart of her adversary.

In those days, when the vast majority of jobs for women were limited to nursing, working in a shop or primary school teaching, the most effective way to erase working-class origins was to ‘marry well’, preferably a doctor. Elvie fell short of this cherished ambition, which left her with a lifelong rage against those who succeeded. Doctors’ wives were right at the top of her hate list.

Marrying a middle-class bank clerk was at first a minor triumph for the girl from Brunswick, but as time wore on being stuck on a relatively lower rung of the social hierarchy became an enduring source of irritation, and my father paid the price. He didn’t earn enough money for the family to live comfortably unless my mother worked, and as a saleswoman in Myer department store her life was blighted by the fact that many of her customers were doctors’ wives. My mother could spot them at a hundred paces and it was almost more than she could bear to contemplate the indolent life of tennis, coffee and shopping these vile creatures enjoyed.

She probably would have died of boredom if she had been one of them, as idleness wasn’t her style. She was deeply competitive, with a strong urge to dominate any social arena she found herself in, and year after year she took pride in being her department’s top salesperson. She was skilled at layering a veneer of persuasive affability over her eternal flame of resentment and making the cash registers ring.

Doctors’ wives remained the flintstones that ignited her rage. My brother and I soon worked out whether she’d had a one, two or three doctors’ wives day by her irritation level as she cooked our three-veg-and-two-chop dinner. ‘The thing I can’t stand about them,’ she muttered bitterly, ‘is their bloody airs and graces. They strut around like bloody Lady Muck!’

Whenever possible she made them pay for their arrogance. If any of them asked for a corset or a frock in a particular colour or size, she’d smile and say, ‘I’ll just go out the back and check, madam,’ then return in ten minutes still smiling, and lie, ‘Sorry, madam, but we appear to be right out of that size.’ Then, so she wouldn’t lose the sale, she’d ‘remember’ that the required garment might be among the new deliveries, and after keeping the poor woman waiting another five minutes, she’d emerge and make the sale.

After every new tale of triumph, my father’s brow would furrow.

‘You’ll get found out and sacked,’ he said.

‘They wouldn’t dare,’ she’d retort. ‘I’m their best bloody saleswoman.’

Barry Humphries and I once talked about our mothers at length during a dinner party. The parallels were uncanny. Barry’s mother, Louisa, the prototype of the wonderful Edna Everage, had also worked in sales in Myer, and she too had failed to marry a doctor, but she had done better than my mother, having married Eric, a master builder whose economic potential she had spotted as far back as Sunday school. Eric Humphries, being much better off than my father, had enabled Louisa to end up in solidly middle-class Camberwell, whereas my mother could only manage Bentleigh, which in those days was fringe middle class. Louisa was more sophisticated than my mother in asserting her social superiority, and according to her son she could deploy the condescending put-down to deadly effect. When some unfortunate made a social faux pas, she would say sorrowfully after they’d gone: ‘She does try hard.’ Or, ‘Some people find him annoying, but he’s a harmless enough little man.’ Dame Edna Everage uses the very same tactics.

For my future career, my mother was probably a big plus. She generated the never-ending drama that was the norm in our family life and made me acutely attuned to the ways in which language could be used to belittle, control and avenge, sometimes openly and directly, sometimes hidden beneath apparently normal conversations. I didn’t warm to her because of it and I never wanted to emulate her, and I avoid conflict if I possibly can, but I did become super-sensitive to the fact that language isn’t just a tool of communication, but a weapon. The Greeks knew that conflict is at the heart of all drama, and I absorbed that lesson long before I’d ever heard of them.

Unlike Elvie, who was naturally disposed to assume that everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, my father was essentially a good and tolerant human being. He thought most people were basically decent and he in turn, as I mentioned, was mostly gentle and kind: too kind, according to my mother. He was a virtuoso handyman whose skills extended to electronics and electrical goods, and, knowing this, relatives and distant friends would turn up in their cars for a ‘visit’ on weekends, unload yelling children to wreak havoc on the garden, and just before leaving would ‘remember’ that they had a radio or television set that wasn’t working, and ‘wondered’ whether Keith would have a look at it. He always did, usually paying for the replacement parts himself. My mother would be livid. ‘They’re just using you up!’ she’d declare. And of course they were, and my father knew it, but he liked to feel useful, and was more forgiving of these legions of fix-it-for-free friends than Elvie.

My brother, Peter, three years my junior, and I always knew that our father’s concern about us ran deeper than our mother’s. Elvie was quick to broadcast any successes we had if they boosted her status, but Dad was always there monitoring our hurts. He knew and understood that my greatest vulnerability growing up was my abnormal height.

Everyone understands that being very short is painful for young males, but it’s often assumed that being very tall is a boon. It isn’t. Not when you tower over everyone else in your form and you’re bombarded with such comments as, ‘What’s the weather like up there?’, or remarks from my parents’ friends that they would have to put a brick on my head if I grew any taller. Worst of all was the incessant schoolyard taunt, ‘Lanky Loo, six foot two, just escaped from the Melbourne Zoo.’

I was acutely and painfully self-conscious about my stature, to the point of having shortness fantasies, daydreaming that I was in a group of friends whose heads were on the same level as mine. I incessantly stopped and looked in shop windows hoping that there would eventually be a reflection that didn’t show my elongated gangly reality. It never happened. I tried to conceal my anguish but my father knew what I was going through. He’d been a very tall boy himself, growing to six foot four – three and a half inches shorter than I ended up, but very tall for his era.

Dad was never one to hug or express overt affection. It wasn’t something fathers did at the time, but Peter and I were never in any doubt of his love and care. Sometimes on the verge of sleep, right from my earliest years, I’d look across and he’d be there at the doorway watching quietly over my brother and me while our mother was on the phone bad-mouthing a social rival. His default position in life was always to believe the best of Peter and me, and we loved him for it.

He wasn’t perfect. He was stolidly conservative to the point of bigotry, and a great admirer of our pompous prime minister Bob Menzies, as well as the Queen and everything English, except their cricket team. His great hero was Winston Churchill. Being a middle-class Protestant, he felt there was no possible way for him to vote except for the Liberal Party.

To both my parents, the Labor Party was the refuge of Pope-loving Catholics and, in my mother’s words, ‘greasy men in overalls’. To vote for them was unthinkable. ‘Listen to that appalling Arthur Calwell,’ said my father. ‘He sounds like a crosscut saw, butchering the most beautiful and expressive language in the world.’ Given that my father didn’t speak any other language I didn’t see how he could be so sure about the superiority of the English tongue, but to keep the peace I nodded. By contrast my mother declared that Menzies, who to me sounded like a somnolent English aristocrat being slowly strangled, ‘enunciated beautifully’.

Dad was a Mason, which I found out at an early age after my curiosity was aroused when I saw him go out in the evening by himself dressed in a dinner suit and bowtie and carrying a mysterious satchel.

DAVID: Mum, where’s Dad going?

ELVIE: To his meeting.

DAVID: What meeting?

ELVIE: He’s a Mason.

DAVID: What do they do?

ELVIE: Wouldn’t have a clue. They swear an oath never to reveal their secrets and if they do they get taken to a beach at midnight and have their tongues ripped out.

That decided me that I was never going to become a Mason, but it didn’t take long for me to work out that their mission was to fight Catholics. They were convinced that Archbishop Mannix’s legions were taking over the police force and the public service and that their secret weapon was the extra tuition given to Catholic children on Saturday mornings.

This meant that we Masons had to counterpunch. After a Saturday morning of Masonic teaching to negate this Catholic perfidy, my parents followed up on Sunday by sending me to the nearest church to get some peace for an hour or two. It happened to be the Church of Christ, peopled by holy rollers who yelled ‘Hallelujah’ at unpredictable moments during the sermons.

The good thing about the rollers was that they didn’t have an obsession with sin. Unlike all my Catholic mates, scarred for life by scary tales of endless and infinite pain in the fires of hell, the rollers only had four short rules and heaven was assured. No dancing, as it promoted close bodily contact, no smoking, no drinking and no gambling.

Given that Catholics were the source of all evil, it was a mystery to me that after my Saturday morning Masonic classes and a lunch of tripe in a glue-like white sauce spattered with dollops of vivid blood-red tomato sauce, we’d leap in the old 1932 De Soto bequeathed to Dad by his father, Fred (both my grandfathers were named Fred) and drive off to fanatically cheer the family’s revered football team, the Collingwood Magpies, a tough Irish Catholic team from the most impoverished working-class suburb in Melbourne. For many years they had no Protestant players at all. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was well known that they were financed surreptitiously by the state’s most notorious criminal, supposedly devout Catholic John Wren, who made his money out of massive illegal gambling outlets. He also gave generously to the Catholic Church and regularly dined with Melbourne’s towering Archbishop Mannix.

None of this Catholic taint seemed to dampen the family’s enthusiasm. We’d park the car as close as we could to Victoria Park, Collingwood’s sacred home ground, my father would take a fruit box out of the back seat, as I was still short enough when I was very young to have to stand on it to see, and we’d make the long march to the ground. Such was my family’s fanaticism that brother Peter came in a pram in his early years.

The mystery of why a middle-class, Protestant, Liberal-voting family was devoted to the most Catholic team in the competition was revealed to me when Dad filled me in on the family history. Grandfather Fred Williamson had been the police sergeant in charge of the Collingwood police station for many years. It was a sought-after position, as many of John Wren’s illegal gambling parlours were in that part of Melbourne, and Wren spread quite a bit of money to all the policemen in the area to make sure that warnings were given well in advance of police raids. It was part of family folklore that Sergeant Fred Williamson was the only policeman not on the take in the precinct, but I’m not so sure.

Fred was in charge of organising the police presence at the matches played on the Collingwood home ground. His task was to quell the spectator punch-ups that happened most frequently when the working-class Magpies played the private-school establishment team, the Melbourne Demons. Magpie supporters yelled, ‘Kill the toffs!’ and Grandfather Fred and his boys had to quell the inevitable outbreak of class warfare.

Doing this, Fred came to know the members of the Collingwood team, whose players were superstars. Fred couldn’t help but be starstruck as he shook the hands of such sporting giants as the great Coventry brothers, Syd and Gordon, and was quick to boast to his mates that he was on speaking terms with every player in the greatest team of its era.

My father’s conversion to the Collingwood cause was instant and profound when Fred took him to the ground as a young kid and he shook hands with the game’s greatest-ever full forward, Dick Lee. It’s somehow heartening that one handshake at the right moment was enough to negate Masonic bigotry for the rest of my father’s life.

One of our family’s most sacred relics is a yellowing press report of the two most promising Collingwood recruits for 1927, right in the heyday of Magpie glory when they won four premierships in a row, a feat that’s never since been equalled. The two names are Dad’s, Keith Williamson, and Jack Regan. Jack Regan went on to become the game’s best ever fullback but Dad never quite made it. He had the talent but couldn’t push his way into the most star-studded team in the history of the game. His brother, Col, equally talented, moved on to star with St Kilda for twelve years, but my father wouldn’t countenance becoming a member of any team except his beloved Magpies, and he played the rest of his years as an outstanding amateur.

Sadly, Dad’s hope that I would one day be a Collingwood star didn’t happen, but in retrospect it was probably very lucky, as my Uncle Col, after twelve years in one of the toughest games in the world, hobbled around on wrecked knees for most of his adult life.

There was another side to my father that didn’t appear often, and when it did it totally surprised me. In retrospect it also made me feel proud. When I was five or six, we were just leaving the Collingwood ground after a match when a brawl erupted near us. Three beefy thugs started belting a smaller guy, and in a flash my father was in there, fists flying. The thugs turned and ran. The transformation of my father from placid suburban Keith to a frighteningly ferocious warrior was terrifying. I turned to Elvie, shaking. She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t like bullies,’ she said.

Not long afterwards, a local thug, several years older than I was, began ambushing me on the way to school. He had a lethal-looking bow and arrow which he pointed at my chest, bowstring drawn, at a range of inches, and demanded I give him my sixpence lunch money. When I handed it over he told me that if I told anyone the arrow would find its mark the next day.

After a week Dad noticed that I was abnormally hungry and miserable when I got home from school and ferreted the facts out of me. Furious, he got into our old De Soto and drove to the young thug’s house. I never saw my assailant again until I noticed his name in the Business Review Weekly Rich List fifty years later.

(I seem to have inherited a little of my father’s capacity for anger in the face of bastardry. Film director Bruce Beresford reports in his book Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This that at a New Year’s Eve party at our house in 2004, ‘my karaoke rendition of the Banana Boat Song ended when some local louts threw bottles over a fence. They landed dangerously among David’s guests. He immediately exploded and yelled to the louts to desist. If not, they were welcome to come in and fight him. Not one of them took up the challenge. David obviously has physical courage to match his moral and intellectual abilities. He was undeterred by the fact the louts next door must’ve been at least thirty years younger than him.’)

One of the deepest of the many lifelong subterranean resentments my mother harboured was the one she held against my father’s parents, Maud and police sergeant Fred. Later in life she told me why, and I used it in my play What If You Died Tomorrow? Irene is my fictional mother and I’m Andrew.

IRENE: They didn’t want me to marry him, you know.

ANDREW: Who?

IRENE: May and Andrew. They wouldn’t even visit our house. Bloody snobs. (Bitterly) May didn’t even come to Dad’s funeral. Over a hundred of his workmates came, but not May. Said she had a headache.

Maud might have been unimpressed by Elvie’s working-class parents, Fred and Mary, because she was a Gledhill, and the Gledhills had been very wealthy before being brought down by either a business turndown or, according to Elvie, a gambling habit. It’s more likely Maud believed that Deborah, her preferred candidate to be Keith’s wife, had been outmanoeuvred by the rat cunning of Elvie, giving Maud a distaste for the whole Armstrong clan.

There’s little doubt that her suspicions about my mother were well founded. My mother at twenty-one was the capable manager of a G.E. Adams cake shop in Elsternwick, across the road from the bank where Keith was working at the time. In those years before the war, G.E. Adams was an essential part of people’s lifestyles. Its bestseller was plain cake, a pale yellow, sugar-loaded, tooth-decaying delight, sliced off an immense flat slab the size of a cricket pitch and sold by the pound. Given this was apparently the staple diet of most Australians at the time, it’s no wonder we struggled against the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail.

Dad was on the bank’s relieving staff at that stage, travelling around covering for employees who were sick or on holidays, so he was only across the road for two weeks. Soon after Dad arrived a young blade at that branch who considered himself, in the words of my father, ‘a bit of a dasher’, told Dad there was a ‘great sort’ in the cake shop across the road, but she was a bit ‘full of herself’ and had rejected his overtures. He bet my father that he couldn’t get her to go out with him.

Keith at the time was engaged to Deborah, a pretty school teacher, but he was a handsome young chap in a sharp suit and fancied himself with the ladies. He accepted the challenge. He crossed the road and asked.

Elvie hesitated. She wanted to marry a doctor and he was only a bank teller. But handsome, single young doctors apparently didn’t eat much cake so she probably felt he’d do for the moment. When she found Dad was engaged, however, her ferocious competitive instincts kicked in and made her determined to see off her ‘mousy’ rival.

After Mum died, I found an old letter she wrote to Dad shortly after they got together. They had a weekend assignation in a country hotel and Mum said she was ‘really looking forward to obeying his orders again’. The thought of my father as sexually dominant and my mother as submissive was mind-boggling. If it ever happened, it was probably the only time she ever took orders in her life, but whatever the sexual games Elvie encouraged, they worked. Deborah was soon discarded, and my father was besotted with this apparently sexually adventurous free spirit. My Grandmother Maud saw through the cute candied surface to the killer beneath, but like most sons, and in what that letter suggested was a state of near-permanent sexual arousal, Dad ignored her warnings.

On the wedding day, the photos of my mother in her wedding gown show clearly why Dad was besotted. She was a beautiful and radiant-looking young woman. On her right is her bridesmaid, Phyllis, on her left her sister, my favourite aunt, Mavis. The background, her parents’ dilapidated Brunswick backyard, shows poignantly what she was running from.

Barry Humphries turned his mother into an international industry, whereas in my plays I only used my mother’s persona sparingly. However, in After the Ball I wrote a passage so close to the reality of my youth that it caused me an involuntary shudder when I reread it for this book. My mother is thinly disguised as Kate, my father as Ron, and I’m Stephen.

KATE: You don’t know what’s going on in the world, Ron. You sit reading your books and when you’re not doing that you’re out in your shed making useless furniture that nobody wants! Lucky I’ve got women friends or I’d go mad.

RON: I’ve never met a more intellectually stunted collection of misfits in my life. Sit through an evening of their conversation and you’d risk brain damage.

KATE: At least they have a conversation. The only time your lips move is when you’re reading.

STEPHEN: (watching television) Will you stop it, Mum, I’m trying to listen!

RON: Gossip is the only currency that interests your mother.

KATE: You can call it gossip. I call it taking an interest in things that move and breathe. All you ever do is read your books and glue your joints.

STEPHEN: (ashen, agitated) Mum!

KATE: (to Ron) You should have married your pathetic little teacher with the red hair. Deborah. You could have been two little mullygrubs together reading Winston Churchill in bed.

STEPHEN: Mum!

KATE: (to Stephen) Take his side as usual!

RON: Will you shut up, you stupid woman!

KATE: (to Stephen) See. Stupid, stupid. That’s all he ever calls me. (To Ron) I had to leave school at fourteen because my father lost his job, not because I was stupid. I was top of my class. Always! The only time I’ve been really stupid was the time I agreed to marry you. I was top of my class. Always!

RON: Fat lot of competition you would have had.

KATE: (to Stephen) See? Anyone born in Brunswick had to be stupid according to your father.

RON: The reason your father couldn’t get a job was that no one could ever get him out of the pub.

KATE: At least he had a bit of life in him – whenever your father opened his mouth the whole world yawned. And, my God, you inherited every last bit of his charisma.

This kind of exchange proved amusing to audiences but it wasn’t funny for me. Not when it happened day after day.

IN MY LATE TEENS I FELT A GROWING URGE TO UNDERSTAND THE ROOT causes of my parents’ conflict, and given that their incessant warfare was such a ubiquitous part of my young life, the causes of conflict in general. This broadened in my twenties to an obsessive need to understand more of the wellsprings of human behaviour. I confessed to this obsession in a successful application to begin a post-graduate Psychology MA (prelim) after my Engineering degree, and shortly after I finished what amounted to a four-year honours degree and had started on the MA, I found my ultimate arena for the study of human nature, the stage.

My psychology studies did steer me to a better understanding of my parents’ never-ending bickering. There are wide differences in individual temperaments, and Elvie was somewhere on the high end of the extrovert scale, craving social interaction and action. My father, by contrast, was an introvert, happy with his own company and preferring to be making furniture or, as time went on, practising his new love, electronic equipment, at which he became a near-genius. His creative wizardry, however, earned no kudos from my mother.

It was no use Dad suggesting to Elvie that she go and read a book, as her reading rarely got past the social pages of the Women’s Weekly. She had no interest in newspapers, which to her mind were just filled with ‘boring bloody politics’. My mother needed drama in her life and if there wasn’t any she’d create it. Getting my father to boiling point was the quickest way to engineer it.

One night after being unrelentingly goaded by my mother Dad exploded in rage. Mum ran off towards the laundry, apparently hugely upset. I was alarmed. It seemed like an end-of-marriage moment. When my father stormed off in the other direction, I headed to the laundry ready to try and comfort my mother. What I saw was totally, shockingly, unexpected. Elvie was chuckling happily to herself with a wide grin on her face. I retreated without her seeing me.

Many years later, on a visit, and after she’d had her usual three stiff brandies before the evening meal, I finally asked her what in the hell had been going on. ‘Life was boring as hell,’ she said. ‘I had to do something to liven things up.’ She became reflective and added, ‘But the sex was good afterwards.’

In After the Ball I created a moment that I wish had happened in real life. In the play Stephen is at his mother’s bedside while she is close to death.

(STEPHEN picks up a photo of his mother and father, hand in hand, looking young and happy.)

STEPHEN: I used to stare at this photo for hours when I was a kid. Trying to work out where it was taken so I could go and stand on the one spot on the face of this globe where you both, at least for an instant, seemed happy.

KATE: (indignant) We were! You don’t think we started out hating each other, for God’s sake. (Pause) I really loved him at the start.

That photo was real. I found it later in life and yes, I did stare at it, wanted to find out where it had been taken and go there. I’d like to think that what my fictional mother said was true. Sadly, I’ll never know.

A conversation that did happen between my father and me, which I also used in After the Ball, unfolded, to the best of my memory, as follows.

RON: Look, I’m sorry about your mother and I. There’s too much bad feeling for it to ever be lovey-dovey again, I’m afraid. At any rate it won’t be long now before she’s rid of me.

STEPHEN: Dad – are – you –

RON: Yes?

STEPHEN: Scared of dying?

RON: You’re joking. The arthritis in my back is so bad now that every single day of my life is agony. I wake up each morning praying that this day will be my last.

(STEPHEN puts his arm around his father’s shoulder, fighting the tears in his eyes.)

RON: When I die look in the inner flap of my wallet. You’ll understand things more then.

Peter and I did look in the inner flap when Dad died, and we saw a pretty young woman with a warm smile on her face. It was Deborah, the woman he knew he should have married, the woman my mother knew he regretted not marrying. Peter and I looked at each other. It was one of the saddest moments in our lives. Fifty-eight years of married hell, whose origins sheeted back to one small, fading photo.

Dad had had one opportunity to turn his life around. A friend with good business instincts suggested to him that they start an electrical goods store to cash in on the new television boom. His friend knew nothing about electronics, but was aware Dad was a whizz, and the business could repair radios and TVs as well as selling them. Dad thought long and hard, encouraged by Elvie, who saw herself as the wife of a future retailing colossus, but finally couldn’t face the risk. His friend went on to build a large chain of stores and become very wealthy.

Dad always regretted it. ‘Son,’ he said to me when I was about sixteen, ‘I’ve worked forty-seven years in the bank and hated every day of it. Find something you like doing. Don’t waste your life like I did.’ I took his advice, even though my final choice turned out to be a little more radical than my parents felt comfortable with.

My father was no entrepreneurial buccaneer but my lasting feeling for him, as the memories of parental warfare drift thankfully into the far past, is of his kindness. Here’s another passage from After the Ball stolen from life:

STEPHEN: You and Mum should never have got married.

RON: If I had my time over I suppose I’d have to do it again.

(STEPHEN looks at him in surprise. Ron explains.)

RON: I couldn’t bear to think of a world without you and your sister in it.

When I recall his words, I still feel the same wave of warmth and love I did at that time. But kindness cut no ice with my mother. For her, Dad was affable Jimmy Stewart when she needed Errol Flynn.

I can’t, however, lay all the blame for the family tensions on Elvie. Dad could be very hurtful to her. As the passage from After the Ball suggests, his main weapon of counterattack was to call Elvie stupid. This was a really bad move, as it triggered all that deep insecurity of the working-class girl from Brunswick. In fact my mother wasn’t stupid. She’d had only one year less schooling than Dad and had always done well in school. She wrote fluidly and well and her social antennae were finely honed and ever-vigilant. She could accurately pick up an adversary’s subtle attacks buried deep in the subtext of a conversation, something my well-meaning father would miss completely. And in her own cruel way, she was often blackly funny. She had a vitality and force field that made her endlessly interesting in a way that Dad could never be.

My mother’s need for social action found an outlet in our regular Saturday night parties. The guests were an assorted bunch of neighbours and workmates. My brother and I were always excited by the loud music, the laughter, the dancing and the clink of alcohol being poured. The best part was sneaking out of our bedroom to steal the cakes and sandwiches and lemonade arranged on the table and making it back to the bedroom before we were caught.

One night I came out of my bedroom and found my father in a passionate embrace with our street’s most voluptuous wife. Shocked, I retreated quickly before he saw me.

At the age of seven or so my chronic bronchitis got worse and the doctors recommended my mother take me up to stay in the warmer climate of Queensland for six months, staying with friends. I thrived in the tropical north and in six months was cured. On the long return journey to Melbourne I learned that my mother was no saint either. I used these moments of youthful shock in After the Ball, giving to my fictional sister, Judy, and to myself, as Stephen, moments that had happened to me.

JUDY: You really think our father was so wonderful?

STEPHEN: What?

JUDY: I ducked out of my bedroom to pinch some food, like we always did, and there he was in the kitchen with Claire, one hand on her bum, the other up her dress, and his –

STEPHEN: She was Mum’s bridesmaid.

JUDY: Not to mention best friend.

STEPHEN: Don’t think Mum was a paragon.

JUDY: Did you ever see her doing anything like that?

STEPHEN: (showing her a photo from an old album) This guy gave us a lift to Sydney when we were coming back from up north. We stopped overnight somewhere on the way.

JUDY: No woman could go to bed with someone that looked like that.

STEPHEN: He had a room next door to us. She snuggled close to him all next day.

Which in real life she did.

MY PARENTS’ HOME WASN’T EXACTLY THE LOCUS OF WILD LIFE IN suburbia, but although Melbourne in the 1950s is often described as the location of the dullest social behaviour in the history of our planet, the human tendency to misbehave still survived.

Our house in one of Melbourne’s then rapidly expanding outer suburbs, Bentleigh, was small by today’s McMansion standards, made of brick and, like all the houses in suburbia of that era, eyesore ugly. It wasn’t until the Pettit and Sevitt designs of the 1970s that a modest amount of aesthetic delight became a suburban possibility.

Our house had cream walls, a lino kitchen floor and polished wood floors covered with rugs in the living rooms and bedrooms. A huge, highly polished wooden dining table with intricate edging designs had been made, like many other items of our furniture, by my handyman father in his garage. This was a place where lathes whirred, mallets thudded, chisels gouged and weirdly shaped tools in their hundreds hung from the walls.

I had a visceral dislike of this man lair. The noise and the smell of glue were bad enough but it was the look of ferocious concentration on my father’s face as he wheedled blocks of wood into intricate shapes that warned me. What would be the sense of trying to master this arcane art, given the agonies it caused my father? The fact that this was what he loved doing above all else was totally lost on me.

Apart from my father’s handiwork there was little else of note in the house. There were no paintings on the walls and the shop-bought sofa was thin-legged and drab. But I remember our humble house as livable and cosy, and my father was immensely proud that he had ushered his family into the home-owning class before he had turned thirty.

One of my early memories is staring, puzzled, at a large polished wooden object that my father hadn’t made, which arrived and took pride of place in the living room, but seemed to have no use at all. My mother saw my puzzlement. ‘That’s for you,’ she said. It was the ultimate middle-class status adornment of the era: a piano. It had been decided that my long fingers plus this object were going to turn me into someone called Paderewski. Years later, when, after a very ordinary attempt at ‘Für Elise’, I managed to pass my fourth-grade piano exam by just one mark, my mother realised I had failed in yet another way to make her twenty-seven kidney fits pay dividends.

Our backyard, as was common, had a wire fence containing raucous and, to me, particularly stupid chickens who never seemed to learn that their loud cackles meant I’d soon be in to rob them of the eggs they had just laid. Nearer the house was the vegetable patch and scattered everywhere else were the fruit trees. Backyards in that era of meagre incomes were productive first, recreational second.

My favourite fruit tree was a giant quince. The fruit itself was a puzzle as it seemed to be inedible, but I remember the thrill of finally being able to climb high into the branches and spy on our next-door neighbours.

Our street was part of an Australia that was considerably more egalitarian than it is now. Living in that street we had a doctor, a plumber, a company director,