By Damien Murphy
The writer Bob Ellis recorded Australian life with satire, insight, vision and a recklessness that made him a darling to some, a danger to others.
Yet like many writers who had their season in the sun, Ellis struggled to convince a publisher to publish collected work.
Anne Brooksbank and Jack Ellis at the family home in Palm Beach.Credit: James Brickwood
That has changed with the publication on Monday of Bob Ellis: In His Own Words, a collection of his essays, speeches, diaries and scripts (some unpublished), compiled by his wife Anne Brooksbank.
"He would love this book. Its a real pity he had to die to get it," she said.
Bob Ellis at his Palm Beach home last year. Credit: Louise Kennerley
One of the most polarising of the Australian writers who roared out of the Sixties, Ellis died in April of neuroendocrine cancer. He was 73. He had announced his impending death on his blog, Table Talk, the previous July.
His final post, last Good Friday, mused on religion having no point: "It starts, like infancy, with a sense of obligation to our betters, and goes from there. It starts with our need to pay back. And what do we owe for being here? And if this is our obligation, what does it mean? Further questions on this might be asked in the course of the day."
Ellis grew to national prominence as the film reviewer for Nation Review, a weekly newspaper that championed political change as baby boomers moved into the workforce.
Ellis deployed a devastating satirical pen but did not confine himself to film, reporting on war, politics and culture, often in the third person, "Ellis does this, Ellis does that" and so introduced the writer as participant to Australian readers.
The collection of Ellis' writing was compiled by his wife Anne Brooksbank.
"To a certain extent I think everything he's written has been an autobiography," Jack Ellis, his son, said.
Ellis wrote more than 20 books, 55 screenplays, 200 poems, 500 political speeches and was famed as the co-writer of films such as Newsfront, Fatty Finn, Man of Flowers and Goodbye Paradise. He also wrote and directed the autobiographical Nostradamus Kid.
Most were written in the family home at Palm Beach, perched on a bluff overlooking the golf course towards Barrenjoey.
The house burnt down in 1993 and the family lost everything save for Jack's saxophone (and somebody even stole that later) but almost the complete Ellis was in storage in Mona Vale and survived.
Besides, Brooksbank knew her husband's words intimately.
They met in Melbourne in 1966 and for the rest of their lives together Ellis would write with a fountain pen (he only mastered the iPad towards the end) while Brooksbank typed his articles and manuscripts and kept copies of work published and unpublished.
"Of course Bob spent a lot of time seeing other people and talking to them. But he and I were here together nearly all the time ... as he said we spent more time together than almost all married couples. And we'd talk about things of course. Many things," she said.
The mainstream media turned from Ellis after celebrity undermined his literary self courtesy of the self-inflicted wounds of a libel case and a paternity case.
Jack Ellis said his father felt the sting of criticism.
"Particularly the attacks of the right because it would be deeply personal. But he kind of had the courage – sometimes it was misguided – to write about ideas that were more important than the public caning that they might get.
"Of course, he was died-in-the-wool committed to the Labor Party and the causes of the left. He regarded right-wing views as a type of ignorance and that once you travel and experience the rest of the world, it was very hard to come back and hold onto those views."
The extracts
Turnbull, The Dark Side, March 2016
A final piece on politics, written two weeks before Bob died, about Malcolm Turnbull, who he had known since Malcolm was 19.
What is Turnbull doing? His twinkling, kindly personality had conquered the middle ground, but lunatics seem to have taken over his mind. He needs a treasurer with gravitas but Morrison cannot say anything that is not a wrangling, hectic contradiction of what he said before. Will the GST go up? I said that? Only the Labor Party says that. Costello had a calm manner and an appearance of consistency. Frydenberg would have been fine, Sinodinos better. Yet Turnbull is stuck with the least convincing numbers man in twenty years. He is also stuck with an immigration minister who sends newborn children into hell for ninety years and is proud of his track record. Better lifelong exile on Nauru than drown at sea. This has put Turnbull on the Dark Side, in many views. How can a twinkling, humorous, kindly man do this to children?
It is hard to think of a Turnbull policy that is a good one. Gonski zilched. The ABC decimated. The best agricultural land gouged for minerals by the Chinese. The CSIRO abandoning climate change. He seems entrapped in ancient, Old Testament thinking while pretending to be a modern, moderate man. When his deeds are added up, who will forgive him? Who would he defeat in any contest with Xenophon? Turnbull no longer has a government. He has a shambles. Discuss.
From the blog Bob Ellis Tabletalk, March 2016
Writer Bob Ellis at his Palm Beach in 1981.Credit: Paul Wright
My Sydney
The inner Sydney I knew when I came down on the old steam North Coast Mail to go to university is there no longer. The Sydney of the Hasty Tasty and Vadims and Lorenzinis and the Hotel Australia and the Bondi trams, I was too young and fierce and shy to appreciate then, and I mourn it now. Ancient Sydney, it will soon be known as. Like the foot-ruler and the pound, it will always be more real to me than the bland, glass-fronted fatuity that followed. But in these gleaming ruins there are a few pickings, and out of these I eke my present life.
My life slouches down two worlds, one green and watery and the other close and polluted. I love them both, according to their lights, as I do my family and my scabrous vagabond youth. They are what remains of the ancient bohemian Cross, and what still shines and dreams in the waters and forests of the northern peninsula.
In the Cross I can go at four a.m. to the Jaffle Joint and warmly breakfast on cremated cheese and bacon and be back in my tight little flat in time for Danger Man on Channel 9, my favourite program of all. In Palm Beach I can wake screaming at 3am to the rumble of possums across my tin roof, get up trembling, read a book until 5 ... and then watch Danger Man. In either place, my little son will wake me at 6, then I go back to sleep till 8 or 9. At which point I rise and begin to procrastinate writing. Procrastination takes up most of my day. Eventually I get bored into useful activity, and I write exceedingly fast and am always two days over the deadline. My editors, directors, producers and creditors hate me very much.
Palm Beach is the best place in the world to work. The prospects of water and sailboats and distant forests and winking lighthouse move me to easy eloquence, and my scripts are always 50 pages too long. I write in bed in a green sleeping-bag with a sharpened pencil, or with a typewriter on a desk overlooking a view. Like most people in Palm Beach, I overlook the best view in Australia. Like most people in Palm Beach, I will never leave, unless my little son gets killed on the roaring roadway underneath our cliff, or by a landslide, or by ticks or snakes. Or the possums increase my nightmares beyond endurance. It is hard to know what to do about possums: their hands and their eyes are so like human beings', but murder is much on my mind. They live in our roof and in certain seasons fornicate abrasively with screeches and thumps at hours more common in Kings Cross. They also live on our duck food, and therefore multiply exceedingly. Our two pet ducks stay awake all night too and hiss deafeningly at every form of life. I came to Palm Beach in quest of a good night's sleep. Perhaps there is no such thing.
Ellis at his home in Darling Point in 1973.Credit: Keith Byron
It is very quiet in the Cross, and sleep there is wonderful. So is drinking at the Strand and at the East Sydney with famous criminals and actors, and eating alone at Pinocchio's, while reading the Listener and Private Eye, the one dish that is not on the menu, their wonderful vegetarian pizza, as I have every week for seven years now; and script conferences over coffee at the Moka, and walks up and down the strip-club district among the whores – "No, thank you, ma'am" is the response I find they most appreciate – and brunch with ice water at the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar, out of whose windows it seems the Cross is still a beautiful place, and perhaps it is. Perhaps I am growing old. I was 37 on Thursday last, and Annie for my birthday gave me a kitchen implement, something she would not have dared when I was young and furious still, and she was not yet my wife.
I am frightened of too much happiness, like most writers, and so feel threatened by the Peninsula. With its barbecues and nudity and sailboats and restaurants and saunas and marijuana, I could be quite corrupted into pot-bellied contentment. I am even considering join- ing the golf club. I played golf once, in Lismore. Went round in 93. Nine holes. Kismet, however, is dealing with this dread possibility of happiness. Many film directors are moving into the neighbourhood, lowering property values and glaring at me across the supermarket ...
I detest the ticks. I hate the hard drugs and the mindless wagon loads of surfing hoodlums. I fear for my son in these musclebound and psychedelic acres. I groan up the stairs. I shiver in the gales. And yet I will not leave. I am in love with these cliffs and spinnakers and clean air, and Annie my wife, and my ducks and books and British magazines, my television that gets six channels and a dishwashing machine that cleanses as I sleep. I am a warily happy man, and here is my looked-for end ...
I am not the man I was, nor is Sydney the town. But I'll shuffle down the remainder of the century thankful that I knew her slightly when.
Letters to the Future (first published in Daily Mirror, May 1979)
Edited extracts from Bob Ellis: In His Own Words, edited by Anne Brooksbank. Black Inc Books, RRP $34.99.