Bryan Brown: Sweet success for a boy who didn’t ‘get’ the written word

Actor Bryan Brown grew up in housing commission near Sydney’s Bankstown, but ‘no way did I grow up in poverty’.

Bryan Brown says words have been his life. Picture: Tim Bauer

Actor Bryan Brown grew up in housing commission near Sydney’s Bankstown, but “no way did I grow up in poverty”.

“I was loved like you wouldn’t believe,” the 74-year-old actor says. “I was educated, I was fed, I had a warm house, I missed out on nothing.

“My mum struggled like hell, but I missed out on nothing.”

That includes the most nourishing of all childhood offerings: books.

“We didn’t have a bookshelf, but Mum had an old chest, for Golden Books,” Brown says. At some point, he received a giftset of bound “classics” such as Treasure Island, meaning it wasn’t for lack of exposure that Brown, as a boy, just didn’t “get” reading.

“I went to the local Catholic school, and we had teachers who were basically trying to deal with 35 smart arse young boys who couldn’t wait to go out to football practice,” he says. “Reading wasn’t a big thing. I was good with numbers, and I went to work at AMP, and in those days, the big companies had clubs – car club, ballroom dancing, anything – and they had a drama club.”

He joined. It changed his life. He became … well, he became Bryan Brown. A man most comfortable on the stage. At age 25, he decided to chance his hand and bought a ticket to London. At the airport, he found a copy of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and he decided to get it “because it was about Indians”.

Literature had arrived in his life. “I loved it. I loved it. It opened the world to me in a way I had no idea a book could open the world,” he said. “And now I’ve spent 45 years with the written word, books, and scripts and plays. Pretty much, words have been my life.”

Now he’s produced a book of his own: short stories, some of them based on people he once knew, some imagined.

“One I actually wrote years ago,” Brown says. He ran it past his agent, with the idea of maybe turning it into a film. The agent said: “Well, there’s one thing we know you can write. And I was very surprised by that. Hearing those words? You can write? I loved hearing those words.”

He kept going until he had a few more. “The whole idea of turning them into a book came from (journalist) Jenny Byrne who said, these stories are good, Bryan, they’ve got to be published,” he says. “And then she told publisher Richard Walsh (from Allen & Unwin) and he read them and he said, I think we’ll publish them.”

And so the book, Sweet Jimmy, came out this week.

“I got a copy the other day, and I said to Rachel (wife Rachel Ward), look at this. How silly is this? It says it’s mine. I’ve written the book. I mean, like, it’s actually I’ve written a book,” Brown says.

He had so been looking forward to seeing it on the shelves, and to meeting you, the readers. He’s annoyed at having all his promotional events cancelled.

“I was looking forward to meeting people who had read the ­stories,” he says. “I hope people will still read them. And maybe people will still want to chat to me, when we all get out of this.”

Read a review of Bryan Brown’s first collection of short stories, Sweet Jimmy, in the books pages of Review today.