Luis Feliu
Popular Australian author Robert G Barrett, who died peacefully at his home in Terrigal last Thursday, based two of his crime-fiction novels on the north coast villages of Nimbin and Uki, which he enjoyed visiting many years ago.
Barrett, who died after a long battle with cancer, was a typical Aussie larrikin in both real life and in his alter-ego creation Les Norton, the adventure-seeking character of the two dozen books he wrote.
The former Bondi butcher introduced Norton in his 1984 novel You Wouldn’t Be Dead For Quids, a collection of short stories, and more than one million copies of his books sold over the next 28 years.
Two of those, Nigh Noon in Nimbin and The Godson were written after visiting the north coast in the early 1990s. The Godson had Les Norton playing minder to an English peer on the run from the IRA and was set in ‘Yuki’ in the Tweed Valley where they stayed on a ‘survivalist fortress’.
Many of the characters were based on real people, some of whom still live around Uki.
The ‘fortress’ was based on a Chowan Creek, Uki, property owned by Barrett’s friends from the old days in Bondi, and where he stayed during visits.
The property was formerly owned by the late Colonel David Hackworth, a highly decorated US soldier who served in Korea and Vietnam before settling in the Tweed after becoming an anti-nuclear activist.
When first built, the property, operating as a duck farm, included an underground bunker, later converted to a wine cellar, which featured in the novelist’s ‘shootout’ scene at the end of The Godson.
Well-known Aussie actor and comedian Graeme Blundell said in a recent obituary published in The Australian that Barrett’s ‘vulgar, coarse buffoonery was deceptively well crafted, as were his novels’.
Blundell said that once Barrett had ‘crashed into our lives, his contribution to the party was the Barrett home brew, a concoction of urban myths, shaggy dog stories, the street wit of the socially marginalised and the corrugated irony of traditional Australian humour’.
‘He became Australia’s king of popular fiction, even though he said his royalty cheques wouldn’t feed an Ethiopian apprentice jockey.’
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