Book Review - That'd Be Right - SMH - August 25, 2008

That'd Be Right: A Fairly True History Of Modern Australia

Reviewed by Gary Maddox

William McInnes celebrates his home, warts and all.

WITH the memoir A Man's Got To Have A Hobby, William McInnes emerged as a talented writer of comic and touching stories about suburban Australian life.

He sketched his Brisbane childhood, dominated by an eccentric father, with the same kind of laconic decency he often brings to his other job - acting in Blue Heelers, SeaChange and Curtin on television, Look Both Ways and Kokoda on film and as himself on Australian Story.

After the novel Cricket Kings, McInnes has turned to more comic and touching suburban stories pegged to landmark moments in recent Australian history in That'd Be Right, which opens on the morning of the 1975 federal election that pitched Gough Whitlam against Malcolm Fraser.

With one eye on Ian Chappell's buccaneer batting against the West Indies quicks in Perth, the country is ready to vote. Posters of local candidates with mutton-chop sideburns and walrus moustaches adorn front yards, shop windows and telegraph poles.

The young McInnes is already politically aware enough to be suspicious of a friend's father who considers Whitlam a communist and Chappell crude.

"The government, which was the caretaker one headed by square-jawed Mal, was expected to romp it in against the government that had been headed by smirking Gough until he'd been sacked by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, a silly man who drank too much," he writes.
As that suggests, any thoughts from the book's subtitle that McInnes is taking history too seriously are quickly dispelled.

Reading That'd Be Right to understand the country's past is like dipping into Manning Clark for the jokes.

Still, there are reflections - mostly irreverent - on the political careers of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Hewson, John Howard, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd.

The country might have fallen for Hawke in early 1983 but to McInnes's dad, who features prominently again, he is Old Runty. On the soon-to-be PM's alleged sexiness, his mum declares: "Oh good God, him and his cackle … it'd be like a bit of slap and tickle with a rooster."

Aunty Rita is more dismissive: "No, thank you. He's too much like an old kelpie, all dick and bone."

McInnes sketches famous moments in Australian sport, including Stephen Holland swimming at the Montreal Olympics as the country's last hope for a gold medal, Rick McCosker batting heroically with a broken jaw at the Centenary Test, Australia II's victory in the America's Cup and Pat Rafter's first US Open win.

Along the way some good old-fashioned values are endorsed. Taking yourself too seriously, showboating, triumphalism, the lionising of Don Bradman, sport being turned into a spectator event, zealous entrepreneurs and Peroni activists get a pasting. A country is celebrated for all its flaws.

"Australia isn't perfect, it doesn't have to be for it is the sum total of its people," McInnes concludes. "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. That's it."

Big events weave in and out of the comic anecdotes and observations about how the country has changed. But the best parts of That'd Be Right are the small events, such as when the young McInnes pretends to mow the lawn of shortsighted Mrs Glazier, parties with a Georgian theatre company while an acting student in Perth, fills in as Santa Claus one Christmas and shares a communal moment in traffic while trying to coax the Australian tail-enders to an unlikely Test victory.

If you want stories about the author's career in film and TV, you'll have to wait. They must be destined for another memoir.

This one is a bit haphazard but, if you can forgive the shocking bias towards Queenslanders, it is another entertaining read.