What it was like along the Way

I’ve been lucky because writing has always been my livelihood and also my hobby. But it wasn’t always easy, and this is how it began a long time ago.

Being a writer was regarded as an odd kind of job when I was growing up in Australia, and those who practiced it were classed as very odd people. When asked what you did for a living, if you said a writer, most people looked blank or sympathetic. Others thought the actors in radio made up the words. A few actors were happy to endorse this and agree with them!

In this very different world, I left school aged 16 because I wanted to be a jackeroo. Don’t ask me why, but I headed off to adventure in south west Queensland hoping to be Clancy of the Overflow. Somewhere along the way, I began to think I don’t want to do this at all— I want to be a writer. The owner of the sheep station who’d paid my fare wasn’t impressed, so I had to work for a few months to pay him back, then hitchhiked home to Sydney and told the family I’d sorted my life out at last. Never mind that I’d scraped through the intermediate certificate at school and failed English grammar: I would become a writer. I can still remember there was a really long silence. My father said I was raving mad, and sent me to see a psychiatrist.

My father was a suburban GP and the shrink was a colleague. I answered lots of his questions, after which he scratched his head, rang my dad and said: ‘He’s a determined young bugger. I think I’d let him get on with it.’ They both had a bit of a chortle and convinced themselves I’d fail at this strange ambition.

So I became a messenger boy at 2GB. I did aim higher, applying for a job as a copy boy at the Sydney Morning Herald, but was told they didn’t employ copy boys without a university degree. Whereas radio stations would take anyone, so they took me.

We still had family rows at home. My father wanted me to do something sensible, like work in a bank. In those distant days, of course, bank clerks had lifetime job security.

‘So, did I think,’ he asked me ‘that I’d have a lifetime job at Radio 2GB”?

‘Good God,’ I said, ‘I hope not’.

GB was the key station of the Macquarie network, and produced a huge amount of radio drama. The war years had stopped overseas shows being imported, and proved Australia could make its own programs. I used to arrive in the office at seven in the morning, then write scripts till work began at nine o’clock. My day was spent in running messages, then I’d go home and write some more. Most of my attempts at this time were exotic plots concerning eastern princesses or famous jewels that went missing—things I knew absolutely nothing about. I inundated the Macquarie script editor with these, until at last— in self defence I think, he said ‘Ok, we’ll give you a chance. But no turgid melodrama.’

They had a long running show called ‘Doctor Mac’. The editor said I could write one of these, and if they liked it they’d produce it. They couldn’t pay me as I was already being paid, running messages for thirty shillings a week. Anyway, I did write it and he said it was rubbish. Stubbornly I wrote another— this time it said I showed promise.

Promise is an exciting word to an almost seventeen year old, so I wrote yet another—and this time, probably out of exhaustion by now, he accepted it. I went home in the train so excited I forgot to get off at our station. A few weeks later to everyone’s amazement I had a short story published, and that was more-or-less the start of it.

I left 2GB to work as a freelance writer. Now and then things were tough so I’d take a part time job . . .but gradually I began to work full-time as a freelance for most of the major radio producers.

Radio, at that time, was the main way for a writer to earn a living. In the early nineteen fifties it was a thriving industry. There were at least ten production companies, of which Grace Gibson was the largest and the most successful. She was producing over fifty shows a week, both half hour dramas and long running serials. Actors were flat out rushing from one studio to another, playing three or four different roles each day, and for a writer by then there was as much work as we could handle.

But lots of work didn’t mean a full rich life. The rates of pay were abysmal. Ten pounds, twenty dollars in today’s money for a half hour drama! Later I reached the giddy heights of fifty dollars for a script, and was told I was pricing myself out of the market.

Also, though we tried to ignore it, there was an elephant in the room. Television was coming. We kept hearing how many American shows we’d be able to watch, and how we could never afford to make our own TV programs. Worse still, we were told we didn’t have any good actors or writers, and nobody would want to watch local drama. The people who had been given the television licenses were promulgating these views!

By this time I was in my mid-twenties, happily married. One night I said to my wife, ‘Let’s go to England’.

‘Right’, she said, not one to ever mess about. ‘When?’

We had two children and couldn’t afford it, but by selling the car and both working flat out on scripts for a few months, we set sail in an Italian ship, in a cramped four berth cabin. Two small kids, aged five and two. No return fare. What if there was no work? How would we live? Our friends said we were mad. At times in the next two years we agreed with them.

But we knew the risks. We were young enough not to care, and too excited to listen to warnings. I have this belief that spur of the moment impulses shape our lives, and nothing we’ve done was more spur of the moment than this. It felt good to be going somewhere. I’d had some busy years writing and occasionally directing radio shows. I’d done a few prestige Sunday night Theatres, as well as starting shows called “Address Unknown” and “Famous Trials”, and thriller serials. But the sheer number of scripts we had to write to make a reasonable living had begun to feel like working on an assembly line. In other words it became like hack work. Quantity was somehow always more important than quality. The benchmark of real success at that time was the writer who could turn out the most serial scripts, and thus collect the biggest pay cheque. So it was time to leave, to have a go overseas and see what happened.

And what did happen? Not much at all for the first year. We couldn’t turn tail and come home, because we couldn’t afford to. We found it cheaper to live in places like Spain, where a house on the beach cost one pound a week. We were surviving—just—by me sending radio scripts back to Australia, but it was clearly not long term survival. Spain and radio scripts for home was not the answer.

We went back to London, found a cheap flat which was still possible in 1959. My wife typed Goon Show scripts for Spike Milligan, while I settled down to write television plays in the hope I could sell one. Through Spike I found an agent and wrote more plays. Still nothing happened. It was the middle of our second year by this time. The kids, aged six and three, amused themselves by establishing a cubby house beneath the table I worked on. By now I had a briefcase full of rejects, and we were really broke and wondering how to get home.

Then one astonishing day my agent rang and said: ‘You know that script that’s been rejected by just about everyone—well, I’ve just sold it to Granada television and they want to meet you.’

That afternoon she rang again in a state of high excitement to say that the BBC liked another of my plays and wanted to buy it. I still remember every moment of this fabulous day that changed our lives; I even remember the hangover after the celebration that followed.

And how lucky it was that Westpac, (then the Bank of New South Wales) had refused to lend us money to get home. Or that AMP would not advance me a cent on my life policy. Just imagine, if these august bodies had been helpful we’d have scuttled home and I’d have been bashing out radio scripts again. But they cut us adrift, told us we had no collateral, and I’m forever grateful that they were such bastards.

Soon it was the start of the sixties and a wonderful time to be in London. If I made a reputation it was in those exciting years of British television, with series for the BBC and ITV, then writing plays for Armchair Theatre and Play of the Week. That era of single TV dramas was the best period of television. Sadly, individual plays are now almost an extinct species, even sadder they were produced when TV was still in black and white, and few survive today on video tape.

Success with tv plays led me to feature films. In 1963 I met the actor Kenneth More, who asked me to write the screenplay of a film for him called The Comedy Man. It led to a lot of work in the next few years on films for MGM, Columbia, Paramount and Rank.

I wrote twelve screenplays for feature films. Some were good, some better forgotten. Among the near-misses, I think, was Age of Consent, directed by Michael Powell and starring James Mason. Helen Mirren was his co-star, in her first screen role. She was wonderful, but Mason adopted an Australian accent, which spoiled the film. I’d written an opening scene which would make it logical for him to use his own English accent, and he and I had met to discuss this. I believed I’d persuaded him his voice was unique, his strength as an actor. Like Richard Burton’s. But Michael Powell disagreed. When production began there was no money in the budget for the writer’s fare, so I was in London and Michael and James were in Brisbane. Between them they wrote a new opening, and Mason indulged his actor’s ego and played it ‘Aussie’. He was bloody awful, at least vocally, and when we met at a private screening in London arranged by Columbia Pictures, I said so. The various ‘suits’ who headed Columbia were rather put out, but Michael Powell chuckled and said, ‘Take no notice of Peter. It’s the usual screenwriter’s neurosis.’ They all laughed until I said: ‘I only have one other comment on the movie. You’ve misspelt my name, so you’ll have to redo the credits.’ That did shut them up.

They all knew, you can bugger up a writer’s script, but to misspell his name on the credits is not allowed by the Writers Guild.

We stayed almost twenty years in England. Our two children grew up and were educated there. We bought a house with acreage in Surrey, and later I switched to writing stage plays. The most successful one was the very first, called Birds on the Wing, which in addition to its London production has played all over Europe, Canada and America. In 1972 it was the top grossing play in Western Europe, and is still in production in various parts of the world. I also adapted it into a BBC comedy series starring Richard Briers.

I grew to love the theatre. For the next five years I wrote a stage play every year. I liked being at rehearsals and going on tour with the cast to get the play right, and hopefully ending up in London’s West End. Because, if that happened, even a brief West End run, the rewards were considerable. Foreign rights, productions in Europe, a chance of Broadway, amateur rights, film rights: apart from blockbuster novels, or hugely inflated Los Angeles film payments (whether the film is made or not), there is nothing to compare with the return to a writer of a successful stage play.

In the early nineteen-seventies, we started to become homesick. Our children were growing up; our daughter married, and she and her English husband moved to Vancouver; our son, being aged two when we left Australia, organised himself a trip home, rang us (collect, of course), and said: ‘I love this place. I can’t imagine why you ever left it.’

He came home to spend a last English Christmas in 1974, collected his belongings, and flew back to Australia to live there. Six months later, missing both our children, we attempted to spend half the year in Sydney and the other half in England. It was a nice idea, but it didn’t work. Late in 1975, we had to make a decision about where to live, and decided we should come home to Australia. Much of this was to do with the Whitlam government’s arts policy, and the total change in the twenty years since the disinterest of the Menzies era. So it was hugely ironic that we two expatriates made our decision to come home on the morning of November 11th, 1975, and that same afternoon heard the news that Whitlam had been dismissed by the Governor General.

We had a moment of indecision. But we’d been away a large part of our lives. We had family here, and many friends. We’d begun to miss the beaches, the night sky where stars are brighter, and the sunlight which is warmer. In the end the tug of wanting to live here again prevailed.

I have often been asked in interviews, what happened? Why did I come home after all that success? Sometimes I gave the simplistic reply, there were stories and plays I wanted to write that could not be rewritten anywhere else. But it was deeper than that. Our generation felt this urge to go overseas, because there was so little regard for us here. We were not esteemed in our own country. After I achieved a measure of success in England, I could not believe the respect it accorded me there. It was so different to here, where we had been ignored, been told that overseas artists and writers were better— and some of us had set out to prove this was a myth, and felt we had managed to do so.

There was nothing left to prove. There was also this love of our own country. And a knowledge the climate had changed. Television and films were Australian now; no longer would the industry tolerate the making of a film as quintessentially Australian as ‘The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’, and have all four leads played by overseas actors. Added to this was my yearning to live here and write things ‘Australian’. The feeling was compounded because my son was living here and starting on his career as a journalist, and my daughter and her husband had decided to migrate here.

So we came home. Although I was only in my forties, I thought I might sink into quiet retirement, but the reverse happened. Since we returned to Australia, I’ve written twenty television mini-series, six tv films, three feature films, and nine published novels. It has given me some honours: four Awgie awards, a Logie, a Penguin, a Sammy, and a nomination for an International Emmy. In 1991, to my amazement, I also received an Order of Australia Medal, for ‘services to the Arts as a screenwriter.’

My old Dad, who wanted me to do something sensible and be a bank teller, would have been surprised.