Article - The Melbourne Age, August 6th, 2008

Boofhead with Brains
Michael Lallo
August 6, 2008

He takes politics and culture seriously, but with his own life, actor-turned-author William McInnes finds laughter is the best tonic.

IN HIS favourite Footscray cafe, just around the corner from his house, William McInnes is drinking tea and talking politics. It's a subject he's passionate about, yet he's surprisingly frugal with his opinions, lest he be seen as "having tickets" on himself. And if the conversation gets too heavy, he simply stops mid-sentence and cracks a joke.

"So far, I reckon Rudd is …" he starts, before trailing off and staring into his cup. After a couple of moments, he throws his head back and howls.

The other patrons turn and stare, but the waiters barely raise their eyebrows.

"Stephen Smith looks like a wolf," he continues. "It's like having a really polite wolfman as your foreign minister. He needs to get rid of that Eddie Munster haircut. I was watching Lateline last night and thinking, 'So that's what happened to Eddie Munster! He settled in Perth and became an MP.' "

McInnes is here to promote his third book, That'd Be Right, a part-memoir, part-modern Australian history that combines the milestones of local politics and sport with his own experiences. It sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence, but McInnes has managed to craft a personal, funny history without the egocentricity.

"It's basically just the history of a boofhead arsing around," he says. "It should be called The Life and Times of a Boofhead from Queensland."

McInnes is best known for playing larrikin cop Nick Schultz in Blue Heelers and the hunky Max Connors in SeaChange. He's unpretentious and proud of his working-class roots, and it's hard to think of a more quintessentially Aussie bloke.

But McInnes' brand of patriotism is more cerebral than most. He loves sport, for example, but abhors the idea that "real Australians" must share his obsession. And he's disappointed that feminism has fallen off the radar. Indeed, he sees a relationship between the two.

"We're increasingly relying on sport to define ourselves," he says. "And I think that rise of blokehood is in direct contrast to women being empowered. There seemed to be only a brief flutter of real feminism in the '70s, then it died out as quickly as it started. I still react to women who call themselves chicks and things like that bloody Nando's ad with the stripper. I won't go to Nando's because of that."

Even more infuriating was an incident involving an inflatable sex doll at the cricket, which McInnes recounts in his book. "The doll was bounced from group to group," he writes. "I looked at the doll. At how the crowd were 'giving her some'. Young men, quite a few of them as full as ticks, were thumping and kicking and pounding 'her' into the air … I felt uncomfortable, even ashamed. Of blokes. It was if every woman and little girl had been pushed aside and told, 'You don't belong.'

"This idea of 'being a bloke' — what does it mean?" McInnes continues. "Is it just about being some moron who eats pies and drinks beer?"

Clearly, it's a rhetorical question: McInnes is not about to tell other Aussie blokes what to do. Still, he wonders if he should be more like his late father, who "never hesitated to stand up and say, 'F--k, this isn't right.' "

Col McInnes, who made several unsuccessful runs as the Labor candidate for the federal Queensland seat of Redcliffe, features prominently in the book. His son obviously inherited his political sensibilities — "I'll vote Labor until they put me in the box," he says — but took longer to outgrow the knee-jerk aggressiveness his father despised. McInnes recalls boasting to him about telling Malcolm Fraser, whom he spotted in a local mall, that he wanted to cut his throat; his father, in response, was livid.

" 'What a bastard of a thing to do'," he said. " 'He at least stands up to get his head kicked in. But you, you pie-can, don't even know why you yell out, save for the fact you think it's funny.' "

McInnes learned his lesson. "I couldn't stand how people attacked John Howard personally and said that they hated him. How can you hate someone?"

Worried that the conversation is getting too serious, McInnes changes tack. Soon, we're discussing the time he published his own death notice in the local paper for a laugh; the absurdly sycophantic fake fan letters he wrote to his castmates, some of whom were vain enough to believe them; and how he would sneak up behind John Wood on a packed train and yell, "Look, everybody! It's John Wood from Blue Heelers!"

"You can't take yourself too seriously in this business," he says. "In fact, you can't take yourself too seriously in life. Because once you do, you're in trouble."