Greig Pickhaver shares the secrets of Bondi and the one that changed his life

The man behind sporting identity H.G. Nelson discovers hidden treasures at Australia’s most famous beach.

Moment in the sun: Greig Pickhaver delved into the secret history of Bondi for his SBS show, Secrets of our Cities. Picture: John Appleyaerd

Greig Pickhaver is swapping racing tips with the owner of Tucker cafe in Randwick (I surreptitiously make a note: Clearly Innocent, running in the Everest).

This is his local — he lives nearby and knows all the names of the staff, as well as many people who walk by.

Having listened to him since 1986 on radio calling the sporting shots as his alter-ego H.G. Nelson, with his great mate John Doyle as Rampaging Roy Slaven, it’s comforting that Pickhaver is just as you’d expect him to be. Affable, smart, funny, curious and totally up for a chat over lunch.

Greig Pickhaver (left) and John Doyle have been working together as Roy and H.G. for 30 years on radio and television.

In a career that has spanned TV, film, theatre, writing, directing and producing, his latest endeavour is SBS’s three-part series Secrets of our Cities, which delved into the backgrounds of Fremantle, Fitzroy and Bondi, from ancient times to the more recent past.

Some of Bondi’s secrets include Aboriginal engravings on North Bondi golf course; a 94-year-old car mechanic who made Spitfire parts during World War II; and the location of Australia’s first milk bar.

Greig Pickhaver in the Bondi episode of Secrets of our Cities.

“Because we’re Australian, we think we know what Bondi’s like, but you step across Campbell Parade and you’ve got no idea,” Pickhaver said. “I’ve lived around here for a long time, I’ve got a view of the beach, but I had no idea about the waves of Russian immigration, or that the first big apartment blocks were put there.”

Pickhaver is an obvious choice as the show’s narrator and presenter, being a history buff himself.

“I look for well-written books about any aspect of history — I’ll read almost anything,” he said.

Over a chicken and leek pie and coffee, his conversation ranges across Homer’s Odyssey, the Silk Road in China, the Vietnam War, and how Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings remind him of the inside of his mind.

At the beginning of Secrets of our Cities, Pickhaver sets out its underlying theme: “To understand our place in the world we need to understand our past.”

“If history doesn’t matter, what happens is you can be told anything and take it as fact.”

He believes this is crucial in the modern age of social media (Pickhaver only uses Twitter), fake news, information overload and short attention spans.

“People get told history doesn’t matter because this is this point here, but if history doesn’t matter, what happens is you can be told anything and take it as fact,” he said.

Pickhaver has a very personal take on this. Last year he appeared in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the show that excavates a person’s family history to uncover surprising revelations. In Pickhaver’s case, they were explosive.

Born in 1948, he grew up in Adelaide with four siblings. It was not a carefree childhood. His mother Beryl was distant and unhappy and his parents, though they lived together, appeared to live separate lives.

Greig Pickhaver as a child (second from right) with his family.

It had a profound effect on Pickhaver, who in retrospect is pretty sure he spent so much of his professional life playing someone else as a way to escape his earlier life.

The TV show revealed that after Beryl died in 1994, Pickhaver’s brother and sister-in-law found letters she had kept from a man who was killed in World War II. Judging by their contents, he was the love of her life.

It explained many things, including why she hated Anzac Day, but the letters were kept hidden from the rest of the family. Until last year.

Pickhaver said he was “really cross” with his brother and sister-in-law who, following the family tradition for secrecy, had decided not to tell anyone else about what they had found.

The show also revealed his great-grandfather was a criminal forger, who fled Victoria owing a lot of people a lot of money and ended up in Adelaide. It also confirmed what he had vaguely heard, that TV host Ian “Turps” Turpie was a direct relative.

H.G. Nelson, Ian Turpie, the Nissan Cedrics (Louise Anton and Danni'elle Gaha) and Roy Slaven in the Club Buggery Christmas Show in 1996.

Pickhaver is still coming to terms with this secret history.

“I’ve just realised the landscape’s so much more interesting than I thought it was — the landscape of my parents’ life, and my mum’s life in particular. I felt as though I misunderstood the mechanics when I was a child — I didn’t have a clue, why would you?” he said.

It also made him understand why he always felt like an outsider looking in.

“What’s interesting for me is to have this revelation about my past that I’m now wrestling with in the present, rather than trying to suppress it or ignore it or thinking there was something wrong.”

Long before these revelations, Pickhaver was determined to create a very different family life as a husband and father of two children, now grown up.

“If you don’t want to become like your parents, you have to find something else to do with your life,” he said.

Studying drama at university was the key for him, as much for learning about human behaviour as how to make a living in show business.

Pickhaver as H.G. Nelson and John Doyle as Roy Slaven in their TV comedy show Club Buggery.

Pickhaver’s earlier jobs included working as a roadie for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, producing Mental As Anything videos, and building an artificial reef out of tyres.

The turning point was meeting fellow comedian John Doyle in 1985, and a year later starting their 22-year run presenting Triple J’s This Sporting Life. They moved to Triple M in 2009, where they continue to ask the big questions on The Sporting Probe.

“When we started, we thought we’d last about six weeks, and then maybe six months. Never in our wildest imaginings did we think we’d last 20 years, and still have it going after 30,” Pickhaver said.

After all this time, he still gets a kick out of it.

“We take the trivial and make it serious and take the serious and make it trivial, so there’s this whole range of techniques we’ve developed to do it. It’s not ‘set and forget’ because you still have the bucket every week you have to fill, but you know where to find the stories, and you know what stories are going to work,” he said. “It’s incredibly rewarding.”

Roy and H.G. have called countless sporting events, including the Sydney Olympics in 2000 with their mascot Fatso the Wombat.

Recognised as often for his voice as his face, Pickhaver loves talking to strangers — anyone, really, from the guy at the petrol station to the family of four sitting in front of him on the plane.

These chats often produce gold for the weekly radio show — “You wouldn’t believe how much of the script and ideas come from those chance encounters” — and delivered one of his favourite moments while making Secrets of our City.

He was shooting a scene in Fremantle when a bloke wandered by and noticed the cameras.

“So he comes back and talks to me. He said, ‘I thought they were just filming an ordinary bloke, and then I realised they were filming an ordinary bloke.’”

Pickhaver laughs. “That’s the best thing anyone could possibly say.”

Secrets of our Cities is on SBS on Demand, sbs.com.au/ondemand. H.G. Nelson joins the Triple M Ashes commentary team live from the SCG, January 4-7.