Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Article: Sunday Age, November 11th, 2007

In Movember, the mo maketh the man William McInnes
William McInnes

ONE Melbourne Cup some years ago I sat with my mother drinking too much champagne and backing not enough winners. It was fun. To a point. It was more like being at the football. My mother - like all of our family - loved yelling. Mostly she yelled at me.

I had for the sake of my acting career started to grow a moustache for a role as Robert Drewe's father in the miniseries of his memoir The Shark Net.

People would say hello and take in the sprinkling of hair on my upper lip. They were too polite to say anything but thankfully my mother took care of things.

"What does the boy look like?" She would boom. "It's like he's got an anchovy on his lip!"

She was matched by a man who owned the television network who sponsored the tent we sat yelling in.

"Jesus, Willy, don't tell me you've turned gay on us!"

"I'm growing it for a job I'm doing at the ABC," I said.

The magnate considered me.

"Things can't be that bad, mate."

"Do you mean the job at the ABC or the mo?"

The magnate blinked. "They're as bad as each other."

In the end my efforts came to no end. My head was shaved and so was my mo - it was deemed by the producer of The Shark Net as being characterless. Thanks very much.

I must admit that a part of me was let down. Perhaps it was growing up in the '70s , the decade when hairy was cool, when everyone who was cool had one, from opening bowlers and movie stars to the fellow down the road who could do trick dives off the end of the jetty. I even had a GI Joe doll who it was claimed had realistic face and chest hair, complete with kung fu hand grip.
Joe did look decidedly dodgy, and my mate Reg Worth and I would drape a fishing line down from my back veranda and place a wire coathanger on it so hairy Joe could be sent by flying fox down to the big gum tree in the backyard, providing a bearded target for Reg's air rifle.

Joe never flinched. My father though wasn't impressed. "Why do they have beards on this thing? It is a toy!"

He wasn't a fan of facial hair. "Never vote for fella with a beard or a mo. The bastard is either bald and making up for it or is hiding something!"

"Yes," echoed my mother.

What about Deakin? Or Lincoln?

"Just a fad!" Yelled my father, staring at GI Joe.

An old actor's trick is to grow a mo and beard when nothing else is happening in your career.

"Makes people think you're doing it for a job," a bearded acquaintance said to me with a wink at an awards ceremony. It was the year that the movie Ned Kelly was being shot, and every actor worth his salt was hairy.

I sadly was hairless on the melon. But now in November, , if you see a fella with a mo, give him a break, he hasn't got a stray anchovy on his lip. It's Movember, when men grow mos for charity.

So donate to the cause and remember the words of my father: "Never vote for a fella with a beard".

Article: Gold Coast Bulletin, November 24th, 2007

Well-Informed

SEACHANGE actor William McInnes will star in a new series about an
Australian Serious Crime Agency informant.

Filming for the Network 10 drama, aptly titled The Informant, has begun
in Sydney.

The series also stars Anita Hegh (Stingers), Colin Friels (BlackJack),
Stephen Curry (Secret Life of Us), Leeanna Walsman (Looking
for Alibrandi) and recent NIDA graduate Don Christopher.

Ex-A Country Practice star Matt Day has also returned for the series
after years in London.

McInnes stars as Richard Button, who helps the agency thwart extortion,
murder, fraud, terrorism, illegal gambling and drug dealing.

The criminals have no idea who he is and his children don't know about
his job either.

"We have the chance to tell a story which has never been told before
about a man responsible for putting away some of Australia's
most dangerous criminals,'' says executive producer Des Monaghan.

Article: Sydney Morning Herald, December 22nd, 2007

Beef sangers welcome where the people gather to give thanks
William McInnes

I spent an afternoon in Old Parliament House not so long ago and even though Canberra is one of those towns many love to roll their eyes at, I came away feeling vaguely uplifted.

The first time I visited Old Parliament House was after a week on a bus. It was during an educational school trip from Queensland to the Snowy Mountains.

We were supposed to meet our local member, a large, jolly chemist called Big John. My parents never voted for him as he was a Liberal, but they liked him all the same for he was large and jolly.

Big John the jolly chemist couldn't meet us for he had politician work to pursue. In his place was an immense tray of sandwiches. After a week on a bus we were slightly demented and to say that the tray was attacked was an understatement. A girl I was in love with went at it hardest.

She ate like a mad raptor. Seeing her at work on a rather angry-looking beef sandwich, I remembered how her mother's arms would wobble while on tuckshop duty. I put this out of my head and stole furtive looks as she burped her way around the Parliament on a guided tour.

At the end, as we stood by the doors, she staggered down the steps and across to the lawn and up-ended herself and the contents of her stomach across the grass. Democracy can be a heady thing.

On this recent trip I thought of that girl and wondered if she still liked beef sandwiches.

I drifted about looking at the portraits of the prime ministers and overheard some of the tour groups' efforts at understanding our history.

"Can you tell me who this might be?" asked a guide, pausing by a bust of Harold Holt.

"Sir Donald Bradman," came a voice from a little group of people old enough to have voted for Holt.

"No, not the Don," said the guide. "Although it might have been interesting on the Chinese sub if it had been him."

Billy McMahon looked almost sensible in his bronze form, so the sculptor had worked a minor miracle. Menzies looked suitably wise and owlish. Paul Keating was elegant in a grey suit, but his pale hands were clasped in a childlike way. He appeared surprisingly devoid of a chin and looking slightly embarrassed.

Mal Fraser's portrait showed him with his trousers hitched high - "a real choko Charlie", as my father would have said.

As high as they were hitched, they still ended up around his ankles in Memphis, and there has to be metaphor about a fall from power there that we can all appreciate.

I thought of my father as I walked about. He adored elections and politicians. He loved a fight and a debate. He would often say that Parliament was "the people's church" and "never take democracy for granted - never. Too many good people died giving it to you." Then he would invariably add: "And never vote for a bastard with a beard. They're hiding something." Well, obviously the founding fathers were up to something, for they nearly all had beards to a man, save for Edmund Barton.

I stood behind a couple who gazed up at Andrew Fisher in his morning coat. After a long while the woman said to her companion: "Another Queenslander."

"Hmm," the man intoned and then, "His hair is the same colour as Rudd's."

The woman nodded. "Queenslanders," she said.

Around the pillar was the man one of those Queenslanders had replaced. "Oh dear, look at him," said the woman as we all looked at John and Janette Howard. She said it with a tone one uses on seeing some poor half-silly cousin at a large family Christmas.

The Howards were dressed as if they were going to such a reunion and this provoked a shaking of the woman's head.

"Trust him. Everyone else is formal and he has to go 'neat casual'. It's like they're off at a buffet."

"Well, you voted for him."

"I don't care. Neat casual is inappropriate."

Eleven-and-a-half years as PM and your era is deemed Inappropriate Neat and Casual. And that's by people who voted for you.

I walked off and stood on the steps where Gough Whitlam spoke his famous words in 1975. Tea towels are sold with Whitlam and a bubble speaking those words. History on a tea towel. I looked down at the Aboriginal tent embassy and remembered seeing it the first time I came here, as the girl I loved hurled on the grass. A teacher told us why he thought indigenous people felt they must protest. Most of us pretended to listen and then the teacher said he wished they didn't have to protest, but at least it was sort of good that they could.

"Never take democracy for granted - too many good people died to give it to you," my father used to say.

Australia isn't perfect. It doesn't have to be, for it is the sum total of its people. We are all good and bad, eager and indifferent. Some of us don't care, some care too much, most of us go about our lives. Places such as Old Parliament House crystallise all of us as a nation. It is the people's church and I hope we long maintain the faith.

Article: Sydney Morning Herald, December 29th, 2007

It's a fundamental truth: fame, like toilet paper, is fleeting
William McInnes

There are some people, not many, but some, who think I am famous. The security guard at the local supermarket who always asks me what it was like to be on Cop Shop is one. He is a very old security guard. But still he always says hello and points me out to befuddled people in the supermarket.

Once a man approached me uncertainly after encountering the nice security guard and muttered in stilted English: "You ... the man ... there say you ... where is toilet ... paper? You please." I nodded and took the man down the aisle to the toilet paper.

And it's here that the question of fame is interesting. If you were really famous, would you want people pointing you out in the supermarket aisles as you debate whether you are going to be environmentally sound and buy recycled and unbleached toilet paper, or just let yourself go and indulge in a minor pleasure of purchasing soft as velvet two-ply white-as-snow toilet tissue?

Hmmmm.

I guess if you are really famous then you get someone else to go and rage about which toilet paper should be gracing your arse. But perhaps it's nice to go out shopping and drift through the aisles looking at stuff, having a chat to people. Perhaps really famous people wouldn't be able to do that. And if that were the case then why would you want to be famous? What is it about fame that drives people to seek it?

I was on a television series once that was basically all about being famous. Well, not exactly, but that was the end result of being on it. We all got a buzz out of being recognised in the street.

The most important day of the week was the rehearsal day. You'd be given your week's mail, your fan mail. People would sit around the set and go through this stuff like researchers seeking the truth in ancient manuscripts.

I hardly used to get any; a couple of loopy people from the back of beyond would write and invite me to go shooting - but really that was about it. What I did like to do was to write fan mail to my co-actors. At first it was a mild joke, but so seriously were these forms of correspondence taken that they soon became my main form of entertainment. They became so outrageously fawning and sycophantic that I was sure my co-workers would twig. Indeed, the letters all had the same postcode. But no, they would read these things and believe that some fan had written singing their praises.

Being famous blinds you. You live in a bubble. It is a part of the job you have, and so you have to believe it, to a certain extent. But the fact that otherwise sensible people who happen to be on the telly believe that small shrines are being built for them in Longreach, and that people come and pray beside them for healing, or that sailors in the Royal Australian Navy write your name on ballistic missiles as a form of love and devotion is something I think a little sad.

It is also terribly human. So don't feel sorry for the famous.

All of us live and die. All of us are on this earth for a finite time. Some try to cheat that mortality by seeking fame. It is encouraged, for famous people take us outside ourselves. They allow us to dally in another world. Even talking about the famous passes the time. What has Nicole had done? What has Russell done now? And is Hugh really that nice?

Fame is ostensibly an indication of success, of worth and importance. Even powerful people seem to like being famous. This is where fame is a bit weird. Because you are famous it doesn't mean you are worth any more than any other member of society. But just try to tell that to people on awards nights. You have an award, and a television camera and a microphone and you will have a truly accurate example of the pure stupidity and human silliness of being famous.

People who are about as functional as a two-dollar watch stand before us and lecture on how what they have done is important and meaningful, how they thank us for our support. They tell us little morality stories about who they are and how their success can inspire us all.

Being famous lets you hide your failures - your broken promises, your cheapness and inability to cope with life - by glorying in them and celebrating them in public.

I have worked with some of these types of people. And they are not bad people. Talented people, far more talented than me. But still just people - and that's too easy to forget. Fame is fleeting.

It's a fashion and nothing changes quicker than fashion.

So next time I'm in the local supermarket debating which toilet paper to buy and the friendly old security guard waves and points me out to puzzled shoppers who have no idea who I am, I know what to do. Walk over and say: "It's all right. I'm really not famous, but what do you want, environmentally safe and unbleached or soft, thick and white?"

Article: Sydney Morning Herald, January 5th, 2008

Beat the heat with Dustin, corn and a science experiment
William McInnes.

Dustin Hoffman didn't really seem to care, and who could blame him. It was hot outside and it was nice and cool inside the cinema. Still, the woman who I took to be the mother of the loud boy who threw popcorn at people in the cinema like confetti at a wedding thought that Dustin might.
"Stop it. Troy, STOP!"

The fact that she screamed it must have made some dent in Troy's desire to share his popcorn. "Yes ... he is mad ... now sit down, he's mad!" she pointed to Hoffman.

Troy looked up at Hoffman on the screen in a considered way, thought about life and then threw some popcorn up at him. "Troy!"

Nobody seemed to care really, least of all Hoffman, who hammed away merrily in a bizarre film about a toy shop. It was a family movie. That's why I, my daughter and two of her friends were here. Plus it was more than 40 degrees outside in Melbourne.

The film was secondary, everybody seemed to agree, even the actors. Led on by Troy's example, a couple of people started making plans for New Year's Eve.

"Well, why can't we just head off to the caravan park on New Year's Eve instead of Sunday?" asked a woman.

"Because Mum wants me to pick up Craig and the two cats," said the man.

Hoffman laughed in a supposedly endearing way as Natalie Portman and her eyeshadow stared back at a cute kid in the film. A pause, then the woman behind spoke. "Well, text her that Karen can pick up Craig and the cats ... "

"Karen?" said the man.

"Yeah, Karen is going down that way, get her to do it. That woman is a midget."

She was talking about Portman. She did look incredibly tiny. And the man agreed about Karen and Natalie.

"Karen. Good ... she is tiny. She's a bit odd ... like a science experiment."

There was silence and then Troy started running up and down the aisle two rows down. Nobody seemed to care. It was that floating period in all Australian cities between Christmas Day and New Year when time seems to expand and the temperature seems to soar.

Holiday time, it's 40 degrees and everybody is trying to get over Christmas gorging. It's cool and dark in the cinema, so nobody really cares. You can tell that by the films people make. Usually they are unremitting tripe with no point. Trying to find one that a "family" can enjoy is another thing. And what is a family movie? On a hot day you are governed by the nearest session time and the lowest movie rating. It was either this thing with Hoffman and Science Experiment Portman or Aliens Versus Predator: Requiem, which caught my eye because it was listed under the banner of "good-time, summertime movie fun!"

"What's it about?' said one of the kids in front of us to the teenage ticket collector.

In a breaking voice the teenager read out the synopsis. "Two of the greatest demons in movie history face off in a unique and originally exciting battle to the death." Summertime movie fun indeed. We ended up with Dustin.

But summertime movie fun isn't about original masterpieces. It's about making lots of money.

Maybe that's who decides what a family movie is - some person in an office who thinks more people will pay for more family combos.

A family movie seems to be a flick where only half the characters end up like chopped chicken livers and popcorn is shovelled down throats or thrown across the rows courtesy of Troy. In fact the movie trade seems to be a lot about making money from onselling and tie-ins.

The Sydney writer Ray Devitt told me once about going to a movie convention on the Gold Coast where a man stood at the podium and told the audience he had the cure for the ailing profits for the movies in Australia.

People leaned forward. What was the gleaming advice about the secret of filmmaking in Australia? The man declared that a new form of corn kernel had been developed that popped up into a fluffier more cost-effective product. "We use less but make more!" cried the Popcorn Movie Man. He received a standing ovation.

I thought of that man when I dropped my sunglasses and went down on my knees to find them. I peered under rows of comfy recliners. There was the trash and treasure of a day at the movies, all swept under the chairs. I groped and felt dropped drinks, melted choc tops and gooey crap I don't want to think about. I picked up my glasses and saw a lolly snake stuck on the lens.

I held the snake up to the flickering light. It seemed to look at me. The man behind got a text message. "Karen can do Craig."

Troy threw some more popcorn. "Troy!"

Nobody cared. Not the bloke who discovered the magic corn kernels and least of all me and Dustin and The Science Experiment. It was 40 degrees outside and it was cool in the cinema.

And my daughter and her friends were laughing. Life doesn't get much better.

Article: Herald Sun, January 9th, 2008

Leading a force for change

DON Hany is Zane Malik, East West 101's young Major Crime Squad detective
who also happens to be Muslim, living in a post-9/11 world.

Not only does he feel the pressure to prove himself over and over,
Malik also has a hunger for justice stemming from a crime against
his family many years ago.

Then there's his colleague, Sen-Det Ray Crowley (William McInnes),
a bitter man, weathered by a life in the police force and at odds
with his surroundings.

So far as McInnes is concerned, Ray seems a straight-down-the-line
kind of character, but demons from his past and personal life reveal
much more.

He plays a character consumed by his work but slowly being eaten away
by his resentment towards the outside world and deep-seated hatred
towards change and difference.

"He lives in the brotherhood of the police force and it's the only
real thing propping him up,'' McInnes says. "He enjoys his work,
but his personal life hasn't gone that well.

"He was born into a family that was the fourth generation of police,
so he's an old-style police officer. He's like a lot of Australians;
he admits not all Australians look the same, but the idea
of Australia is very homogenous.''

The concept behind East West 101 and the plight of the lead characters
was thoroughly checked, the series sparked by one real-life
cop's fight for acceptance.

After meeting an Egyptian detective in Sydney's police force, the
creators got a closer look at the ethnic challenges faced by officers
from multicultural backgrounds.

McInnes is careful to point out his character isn't a bigot, but represents
a very real portion of people who resist -- even fear --
change. For McInnes, this representation accounts for a large part
of the program's appeal.

"Not all Australians are actively racist, but they have a set view
of what Australia is, which usually is white, middle class,'' he
says.

"What this show is good at, and why I hope it works, is that it has
a brain behind it.''

Article: Sunday Age, 13th January, 2008

Dim sims, deep ends and Westie friends
Byline: William McInnes

THERE are many ways to spend Sunday morning in Melbourne. Sleep in. Go to the galleries. Read The Sunday Age. Sit in your favourite coffee shop doing whatever you do in your favourite coffee shop. Or you can spend it with the Footscray swimming club.

You walk past the woman with the water aerobics class who likes her music loud. Maybe the people in her class like it loud. Hopefully all the people in the pool complex like it loud because it's echoing around the Maribyrnong Aquatic Centre.

Across in the big spa and glass-walled steam room, people sit surrounded by bubbles and wispy jets of smoke. A kid told me once that these people looked like dim sims. Both steamed and fried. The image has never left me. The kid and I stared and burst out laughing. All those blank faces through the steam and bubbles. Then one winked and smiled. We laughed even more. Dim sims have not tasted the same since.

You walk on to the end of the pool to the big glass windows and a view stretching down the Maribyrnong River to the city of Melbourne. Here a group of families mill about on shallow concrete bleaches. Children giggle or sit with friends or cuddle under the wings of parents.

It's not a huge club and I suppose it's similar to many other swimming and sporting clubs across the city. But it represents something special. The western suburbs of Melbourne, and especially Footscray, come in for quite a bit of stick and sneer. It's as if the west is a lesser part of the city. You hear the jokes about moccy-wearing Westies and a host of other stereotypes that are tiresome, like most cliches.

The particular quality of the Footscray swimming club is the make- up of its members. Some seem to have been members since Adam was a lad. In tiny rooms there are club photos from years before. Black and white images of swimming galas in the 1930s and high divers arcing gracefully through the air above the waters of the Maribyrnong.

You can see Gordon, barrel-chested and smiling, with his arms folded and his hair Brylcreemed to within an inch of its life in a team photo from the 1950s, and then see him marching along the pool deck every Sunday. His hair is not as Brylcreemed these days, but he is still organising and smiling and encouraging. His encouragement is extended to kids who come from a rainbow of backgrounds. Some have been born in lands far across the seas, some are first-generation Australians, and some have ancestors who were on the First Fleet. Many follow different faiths but come together every Sunday at the club.

A little boy stands on the edge of the pool for his first swim, shaking with apprehension as he peers into the Deep End. But he needn't worry. Everybody shouts encouragement and as he splashes along two older kids keep watch and stroke with him. Amazingly, he beats them. A huge smile stretches across his face and he's cradled in the arms of a sporting club that can show the city a great deal about acceptance, tolerance and community friendship.

High on a hill above Melbourne is a jewel that shines as bright as that little boy's face. The Footscray swimming club.