I’m not much of a partner: Paul Hogan on luck and love
Paul Hogan opens up on his two marriages, saying “I’m not much of a partner … they get sick of me”, his luck in love and family life, and that issue with the tax office.
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The hair is still Ghost Gum white, if a little thinner; the face (despite all those plastic surgery rumours) is older, and the voice is quieter, but it is still 100 per cent Paul Hogan — Hoges — sitting behind a desk and Zooming in from his home in Los Angeles.
“G’day”, the now 80-year-old says with the same grin that once invited the world to Australia with an, “I’ll slip another shrimp on the barbie for ya”, and the one that played across his face just before he uttered one of the most famous movie lines of all time: “That’s not a knife, this is a knife”.
And it’s also the smile that won the heart of a 19-year-old Noelene Edwards at Sydney’s Granville Olympic pool back in 1958.
Hogan revisits his first meeting with Noelene, who he would go on to marry and have five children with — as well as his second marriage to Crocodile Dundee co-star Linda Kowalski — in his upcoming autobiography The Tap-Dancing Knife Thrower: My Life Without the Boring Bits, out on October 29.
For Hoges, writing the book was an opportunity to “reflect on what a lucky bugger I’ve been” as well as redress what he sees as some wrongs — including his so-called abandonment of his “young” family after meeting, then marrying, Kowalski in 1990.
“When Noelene and I met we just hit it off, it was just your typical young love really.
“We fell for each other and so we got married pretty quickly at 19, which might seem ridiculous now but was the norm back then — there was something wrong with you if you weren’t married by the time you were 22 where I came from.
“We got married in Noelene’s parents backyard, and I was a Dad to my first son Brett by the time I was 20, and we had two more kids by the time I was 23, and I just loved every minute of it.
“We had five kids together while we were still kids ourselves really, but it never bothered me — I’d watch them play footy on a Saturday, then they’d watch me on a Sunday.”
What did bother Hogan — then and now — was the speculation that he walked away from his children after wedding Kowalski, with whom he has a son, Chance, now 21.
“When Noelene and I split we had already divorced once before (in 1981, and then finally in 1990). The picture that was painted was five little kids hanging on the back gate while their Dad walked away, crying for him to come home, but the truth was they were mostly grown-ups,” Hogan says.
“One was over in England playing footy, two of them were in Western Australia running a video business … it was ridiculous.
“When Linda and I got married, we all met up in London, and there was this photo of me leaving a hotel supposedly surrounded by my bodyguards.”
Hoges chuckles. “It wasn’t my bodyguards, it was three of my sons, we’d just been having a nice lunch together.”
Hoges says that with both Noelene Hogan and Kowalski (who have both since remarried) things “just wore out”.
“I’m not much of a partner”, he grins, “I’m good early on, but after 20 or 30 years or so they get sick of me.”
“But you don’t go around explaining what worked and what didn’t, you just get over it.
“It wasn’t bitter — well maybe Noelene might have been a little bitter at first because I did leave to be with someone else — but it wasn’t years of anger and fighting, there were no long drawn-out custody or money battles.
“When Linda remarried, there were all these stories about me being heartbroken and I’m sitting here reading them and thinking: ‘No I’m not’.
“We had a wonderful time together until we didn’t, and we remain really good friends.
“I see Linda and her husband Moulay (Moulay Hafid Baba), the three of us are friends; and I look at my marriages and think what a lucky man I am because I have six wonderful, healthy kids.
“A lot of people don’t get that, a lot of people go through awful health problems with their kids, and I don’t have that worry, which is the worst worry of all.”
Hogan says that while his children — who he has always kept out of the public eye — “for the most part” haven’t had to live in their father’s shadow, “years later, as adults, they’ve told me a few things.”
“One of told me that in primary school, their teacher said to them in front of the whole class: “Now listen, you’re not going to get any special treatment here”, and the little one’s response was, “Well, I already am, aren’t I?”
Hoges grins, a proud father all these years later, adding, “I can’t stand bullying, you know someone like that singling out a kid like that, or any sort of bullying at all really.”
His own singling out by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) earns an entry in Hogan’s book, with the comedian still smarting over what he sees as its unjust treatment of him.
The so-called “Project Wickenby” saw the ATO investigate Hogan’s taxes from 2006 to 2012, but eventually settle the case; while the The Australian Crime Commission (ACC) found no evidence of wrongdoing by Hogan and ended up paying his legal fees.
He states simply: “I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Wickenby clearly still rankles, particularly as Hogan outlines in his book, he always paid his taxes in Australia.
While his financial advisers urged him to obtain a Green Card, and thus play less tax in the United States, Hoges refused, explaining that he wanted to pay his tax in his homeland, the place where he grew up in a housing commission home, which had given him his first break, and which had brought him fame and fortune.
He felt it was only right, Hogan says in the book, that “my countrymen and women should share in it” — until changes in US residential and tax laws put an end to that.
“I’m probably the only person who’s made his money all around the world and brought it back into Australia just for the pleasure of paying tax on it,” he quips.
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“I paid my 48 per cent, or whatever it was, all through that period when the money was coming in from Dundee and Dundee II. My old employer, Kerry Packer, would spin in his
grave if he found that out. He wasn’t that keen on paying a cent more than he had to. ‘They’re not doing that good a job,’ he’d say.
“I’m not making out I’m a holy person or anything. Just grateful. I’m so lucky I was born an Australian. I’m an Australian by nature, and I really love the things we do.”
Hogan’s deep affection for Australia and its people is a continuing theme of his autobiography, his homesickness for the land of his birth writ large across it.
In both his book, and its companion podcast Evenin’ Viewers — out now — Hoges pledges to return home as soon as possible.
“I’ll see you soon”, he signs off from the Zoom call with the grin that launched an entire career, “here’s hoping.”
Originally published as I’m not much of a partner: Paul Hogan on luck and love