Brian Brown: “I found rejection very easy because I was a salesman” | Australian books

forRyan Brown gave a barely noticeable nod of welcome after I arrived by ferry to Balmain Pier, emerging from under the semicircular roof of the late 19th-century wooden shelter here, the last of its kind on Sydney Harbour.

“How are you?” he asks, his Australian accent yet familiar from his roles in more than 80 films and TV series.

The actor wears a straw hat and sunglasses with a waist-length jacket partially zipped against the rugged northwest in the late afternoon. He seems like a shadowy figure from his recent career as a writer of crime novels populated by cops, delinquents and drug peddlers.

“Get the phrase from here [to Cockatoo Island] “Sometimes and again when I have nothing to do,” he says after we pass the hundreds of donated books lining the walls of the shelter, which also serves as a street library.

Brown is a “little potter.” He would have coffee at various shops along these streets before sitting down at his desk between 11am and 1pm to write daily “for two hours, no more”. His second novel, The Hidden, just released, involves drug smuggling in regional Australia by motorcycle gangs, hidden cameras, and cockfights.

He insists he has no style – although he writes in choppy, neat sentences, with an emphasis on Strain’s vernacular. “For the past 50 years, I’ve been telling stories and working in film and television. I work with writers, and I also produce. So, maybe, that lends itself to how I see stories.” He was always curious about people, asking me about my start in journalism.

Given the windy day, we abandoned our mooted plan to walk along the water’s edge, and instead headed inland through narrow, steep streets past a mixture of weatherboards and two-storey Victorian brick terraces. Now a grandfather three times, Brown is not as tall as you might expect given his charismatic screen presence, but at 78, he is lean and fit thanks to stretching, bending and weight-resistance exercises every morning, having taken up Pilates for 10 years.

Brown is busy, and his next acting gig is always within sight. His latest feature film, The Travelers, which was shot in Western Australia, was released in cinemas in early October, reuniting him with director Bruce Beresford after more than 40 years of making Breaker Morant together. There are plans to produce a third series of the mystery comedy Darby and Joan, in which Brown will co-star with Greta Scacchi, with his wife Rachel Ward continuing to direct some episodes. “I don’t like the idea of ​​sitting down or stopping or anything else,” he says. “I don’t even think about not working, you know?”

Ward, who Brown met when they came together in the 1983 miniseries The Thorn Birds, spends most of her time in the Nambucca Valley, 500 kilometers north of here, having turned her investment in pig and cattle ownership into an exercise in regenerative agriculture.

However, Brown has no plans to go and live permanently in the Nambucca Valley himself. “I can’t,” he says. “Well, I mean, maybe one day, but I can’t 1764360615 Because I shoot.”

Nambucca is clearly the NSW north coast inspiration for The Hidden. Besides the weapons being smuggled, the community has meth, cola and heroin.

“It’s a work of fiction, of course, but you’d be dope if you didn’t know that drugs exist in the community,” he said in his calm, straightforward manner as we continued our puffy climb up MacDonald Street.

“There are a lot of people struggling with housing, struggling with jobs, and the struggles can sometimes lead to people saying: ‘I need some relief’ and the next moment they find themselves in something, and that can be a downward spiral.”

forRon, born in 1947, grew up with his sister in Banania, a south-western suburb of Sydney, and was raised by their mother Molly, with whom he sometimes accompanied her when she cleaned people’s homes. “She never envied them or anything like that, she always admired that people did things, but it never made her feel weak, you know?”

His father, Jack, a salesman, left the family when Brown was a young child, and the future actor only saw his father again a few times. As a child, he spun a false story that his father was killed in the war.

Maybe he was a storyteller of sorts, even if he never imagined himself being one at the time, I suggest after we sit on a park bench.

“Yes, maybe,” he smiles. “I didn’t want to tell the truth, I guess. I don’t know if I was ashamed or said, ‘I’m not going to tell people that I have a father who’s never home.’ So, the easiest thing was to say, ‘He’s not around,’ and [if they asked] ‘What happened?’ “Oh, he died in the war.”

Brown then explains how years later he had to correct an old friend about this lie. When he talks about this time in his upbringing, it sounds a little like he’s writing a plot point about a fictional character.

At the age of 20, Brown might have become a salesman himself had he not been invited to audition for an end-of-year review at the AMP insurance company where he had been working and studying to become an actuary for three years.

“I was involved in amateur theater for four years, until I went, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to go to England and become an actor,'” he recalls, frustrated that Australian theaters at the time preferred British and American plays to local stories anyway. “That goes back to my mom too. Like, ‘You bugger – you want to do it, do it right, get on a plane, go out there, knock on doors.'” I think I found rejection very easy because I was a salesman.

In 1972, Brown went to Britain and “became a bum” for two and a half years, eventually winning some roles at London’s National Theater in 1974, then returning to Australia for a holiday in 1975 to discover a new wave of Australian voices: David Williamson in theatre, for example, and Fred Schepisi, Philip Noyce and Bruce Beresford in film. Brown has worked in productions of all of them. This new wave brought Brown back to these shores for good.

The eccentric character of Fred in Beresford’s new film The Travelers was written specifically for Brown, but contains elements of Beresford’s father and his story, concerning the conflict that arises when an artist seeks to realize his creativity on international shores but is cut down in a long poppy shape by some upon his return to his hometown.

Whether he is interpreting a character written for him or writing a novel, Brown believes that everyone has a story, not least people from working-class communities like the one in which he grew up. “Some stories make you stand there with your mouth open at the struggle someone went through,” he says. “And they don’t necessarily see it as a story, because they see the story as someone who becomes a billionaire or a big pop star. They don’t see their own life as having value and respect, you know?”

A large, curly, light brown tusk drops a squeaky play ball at our feet. “Assistance Dog” is written on his vest. Brown seems annoyed by the waiting dog, so I throw his ball, which he immediately catches and runs back to, hoping it will be thrown again.

Now, as we head back down the street toward the dock, Brown marvels at this new vocation of writing stories. A production company has picked up an option on his previous novel, The Drowning, but he will not write the screenplay.

“I had nothing to do with it,” he insists of any screen adjustment. “I’ve been a producer, where I buy the rights to scripts, and then the writer wants to start putting his two cents in there and it’s a pain in the ass.”

Now Brown is content to enjoy interviewing audiences about his novels and film roles on his book tour, and is happy enough to have screenwriters go off on his own terms.

“I’m not going to be someone else’s pain in the ass.”