Skip to Navigation | Skip to Content
TV Home
ABC1 Monday 6:30pm

Have Your Say


The end of Talking Heads
Thank you for your comments regarding the ABCTV Series Talking Heads series completion. It is indeed....
- Margot Phillipson

Add Comment
Read Comments


Screened: 28/09/2009 Jackie French

Jackie French (L)

Jackie French fled to the bush early in her life to get away from the human race. She found a passion for wombats, a supportive local community and a soul-mate.

PETER THOMPSON: Welcome to Talking Heads, which this week is packed with stories of wombats and DIY deodorant. Burke's Backyard boosted the popularity of author Jackie French with the gardening crowd.

JACKIE FRENCH: Can I offer you a mint julep?

PETER THOMPSON: And from her hidden bush property, Jackie has written widely on the joys of organic fruit and veg. Most of her 100-plus books, though, are for kids.

CHILDREN: I'm a wombat.



PETER THOMPSON: Including the top-selling Diary Of A Wombat. Jackie French, welcome.

JACKIE FRENCH: Thank you very much.

PETER THOMPSON: Tell us about Mothball, who... Mothball was the inspiration for your book, I understand, and still lives with you.

JACKIE FRENCH: Very definitely still lives with us. Wombats vary, just like human beings. Some are actually very sweet, nice, considerate wombats, but that isn't Mothball.

PETER THOMPSON: What's the difference between a nice and not-so-nice wombat?

JACKIE FRENCH: The number of teeth marks in your wrist and ankles. Also too, nice wombats don't go round urinating in the bowls of the baby wombats you're trying to feed.

PETER THOMPSON: Too much information.

JACKIE FRENCH: Yes, sorry about that.

PETER THOMPSON: That wombat has been an inspiration for you.

JACKIE FRENCH: She was, she was. I was on the phone to a very dear friend and explaining what the noise was in the background. Oh, that's just Mothball bashing up the garbage bin. That's just Mothball tearing up the doormat. Oh, that's just Mothball digging another hole through the back door. And suddenly, I realised I had the Diary Of A Wombat. I can't remember how many countries - 24, 25, 26 - it's been translated into. Even every few months now, another country picks it up.

PETER THOMPSON: There's a clue in all of this to actually what you did start writing, which wasn't about wombats, but about eco-friendly gardening, weed control.

JACKIE FRENCH: This is really what humans are. We forget that we are animals too. We are creatures of the land. When you spend years walking with an animal, you actually start to look at the way things really grow. I started to wonder why I kept on carting manure in the old green truck for orchards, but the fruit trees outside the orchards, the wild fruit trees, fruited year after year without human intervention and even the wild peach trees. I wondered why every weed, every pest on the Southern Tablelands stopped at my boundary fences. I wanted to show that alternatives actually work.

PETER THOMPSON: Now, very many of the people watching will be familiar with you though Burke's Backyard and they'll notice that you've shrunk quite a lot, but...

JACKIE FRENCH: That sounds like a really easy way to lose weight. Put out on line. Drench in cold water, yes. You will be two sizes smaller.

PETER THOMPSON: Your weight-loss programme's not to be recommended. We'll hold off on that and go into that a bit later. But we are going to watch some things from your famous television days. Are you telling the truth when you say you've not seen these before?

JACKIE FRENCH: No, I always knew that if I saw them, I would be so desperately embarrassed I would never, ever do it again. First of all, you flutter while you garden and you pick some pretty rose petals.

PETER THOMPSON: Being involved in a programme like Burke's Backyard, you reach millions of people. Did you have a message in mind?

JACKIE FRENCH: I think humanity is naturally fairly conservative. If this is the way that you have survived the sabre-toothed tiger yesterday, this is the way you're going to do it tomorrow, which is actually a fairly good evolutionary strategy. But it doesn't have to be like that. Whether it's building your own house, your own power system, your own deodorant. These may not be the alternatives that you choose, but there are many alternatives.

Basically my childhood was hell, but I knew there were other worlds. There were other worlds that I'd found in books. I remember reading The Magic Pudding and at the end of The Magic Pudding, they decide they're going to live in a house in a tree in a market garden with good conversation of an evening and I thought, yes, that's how I want to live. I was born in Sydney, but when I'd just turned three years old, my father was transferred up to Brisbane. I learned to read by my mother repeatedly reading to me. One of these wonderful parents who is prepared to read a single book over and over and over. I just loved Winnie The Pooh. Even back then, I loved the wittiness of the writing. Part of primary school was really difficult, because I'm dyslexic, but I was absolutely blessed with the most wonderful teacher called Miss Davies. She never made me think I was stupid. She recognised that I had a learning difficulty and at the end of every day, if the class had behaved, I was allowed to spend the last 20 minutes telling the class a story. My parents certainly should never have married. They were profoundly incompatible. It was my job to shield the younger kids from what was happening when the screaming got too bad. I think my parents formally divorced when I was about 12. One of the really difficult things, though, was a boyfriend of my mother's, an ex-prisoner, who moved into the house, and that did mean at age 15 I had to leave home.

PETER THOMPSON: How hard is it for you to reflect back on childhood?

JACKIE FRENCH: I hadn't done it until a few weeks ago, when you asked me to do this. I'd almost felt as though my life had only begun when I went to the Araluen Valley.

PETER THOMPSON: You say your dad's parenting skills weren't all that good, nor were your mum's really.

JACKIE FRENCH: Ah, no, no, they weren't.

PETER THOMPSON: In a way, you became the surrogate mum.

JACKIE FRENCH: The surrogate protector any rate. But then, when my father left, my mother's ex-convict boyfriend moved in and things grew to a crisis. Particularly, after one attack when I hit him with a phone. Phone's were bigger in those days, and I think I broke his nose.

PETER THOMPSON: Why did you hit him with a phone?

JACKIE FRENCH: It was one of his repeated attempts to rape me.

PETER THOMPSON: There were always some people that were there to give you a hand.


PETER THOMPSON: Including a teacher, who, at that stage, could see that you were in crisis.

JACKIE FRENCH: There is no way that I have ever been able to thank her. At the time, I think I was actually too much in shock and too distressed to even think of thanking her. Her name was Mrs Pauley, she was my English teacher, Gillian Pauley. She had already started to give me books. She gave me all of her university textbooks. For the first time, I had books on anthropology, sociology, history textbooks. She would give me piles of books, every few days. I'm sure she started rummaging through other people's book collections. It was just this unlimited quantity of extraordinary books, but she found me crying after one English lesson, when I said, I have to... I don't know where I'm going, I have to leave home. And she just said, look, we've got a spare room if you ever need it. I didn't need it, but that gesture stayed with me for the rest of my life.

PETER THOMPSON: Next door to your house in Brisbane, lives Mr Dou.

JACKIE FRENCH: Ah yes, we're talking 59 Gallipoli Road. I always love the idea that I lived at Gallipoli Road. Next door was the last of the market gardeners, who had been there before. Mr Dou, retirement age, little Chinese man, in retrospect, probably the loneliest person. I never saw him with any other adult. He didn't speak English, but I spent hours with Mr Dou. He grew enough to make the moon cakes. He made his grain. He grew his rice. He grew his sugar. He grew his tobacco, which he dried on these great big lines. He dried his hops, everything, on what was regarded as a suburban block of land. And without thinking about it, I realised that the good life I'd seen in The Magic Pudding, was in a strange way, being lived next door. That garden was paradise.

I won a scholarship to go to the University of Queensland. Even though I had a scholarship, it didn't actually pay very much, so I had to do various jobs. Finally, I got a job working as an attendant and a cataloguer in the anthropology museum and my main job was to go through the effects of an old priest. He'd been working in the Northern Territory, and he'd collected the most extraordinary number of Indigenous artefacts and he'd left everything he owned to the museum. One of the items was an old tobacco tin and it was a tin of rain stones. Now, we were not supposed open it, but, of course, we opened it up. And three days later, Brisbane had the worst floods they ever had.

MAN: We're here, we're opposing what the Springboks stand for.

JACKIE FRENCH: I think by the time I was about 20, I didn't like human beings very much. I'd been bashed up by police in the Springbok demonstration. I'd heard police and politicians lie about the event. I assumed that most people in power were corrupt, venal and often dangerous. I really didn't want to be part of the human race and I wanted to be far away from it. I met my partner at the end of my first year at university. We moved down to Canberra in the early '70s for my partner to take up his job at the ANU. So, I came south with the idea of working just long enough to make enough money to buy some land of my own. As soon as I saw this place, I felt complete. It really was as though there was something missing and I never knew it had been. It wasn't till I'd been here about a year that I suddenly discovered this is where my family came from. Grandad called his last home Araluen. They told me they just found it in a list of Indigenous names. I never knew until came here that this was probably his heart's country too and he could never, ever forget it. The sun came out, there was a rainbow across the valley, the birds started singing and it was this true, kitsch, Walt Disney moment and I thought, I do not have to be hit over the head with a baseball bat - I have come home.

PETER THOMPSON: What were the practical consequences of finding this land for you, for your life as you were living it?

JACKIE FRENCH: There wasn't much money, but there was more money than I'd had before, but more importantly, there was a lot more to eat than ever before and the bush is a very, very generous place. There was enormous material to work with. There was stone to make roads out of, there was blackberry to actually mulch up for compost. There was stone to build a house from, there was wood to build a house from. Old bits of corrugated iron to build a chook house from. It was a life of sudden extraordinary joy and discovery. I would spend hours actually singing opera at top of my voice.

PETER THOMPSON: You were going to become an opera singer.

JACKIE FRENCH: Seriously, it was one option, till I became an asthmatic and in those days, you sang in clubs and I'm allergic to cigarette smoke and people smoked there. But I also discovered, actually, quite accidentally, that the wildlife accepted me if I sang. If you are belting out the Love Duet from La Boheme at the top of your voice and slightly out of tune, they know where you are and you are not going take them by surprise as you get nearer and nearer.

PETER THOMPSON: Just to contrast this life with what was happening before...


PETER THOMPSON: How did the Springboks' tour leave you washed up? Cos your dad had been involved in bringing the Springboks to Australia as an official of the rugby union.

JACKIE FRENCH: Yes, he had, he had. And, in fact, the Springboks had come a few years before, they'd actually had dinner at our place. He was staying with the Springboks in Brisbane at the Tower Mill. I was demonstrating outside. A lot of country police had been brought in. And a carload of very drunk police drove up. They got out and they tried to rape us. One of the boys was on the ground, a policeman was sitting on his back and he was just bashing his head against the floor like that. His name was Peter Beattie, later premier of Queensland. He was charged with resisting arrest, but the trial was delayed and delayed and delayed - we were supposed to be witnesses - and eventually dropped.

PETER THOMPSON: Psychologically, what did all this do to you?

JACKIE FRENCH: It's funny, Peter Beattie decided to change the system and I decided to go and live with wombats. I don't think I would have made the transition from amateur writer to professional if I hadn't been living in a shed with a baby. It sounds awful, but it wasn't. It was a time of extreme and wonderful freedom. Everyone had always told me as a child growing up, no, no, dear, you cannot make a living being a writer. But I was desperately broke. And a friend who was a freelance journalist suggested that I send in a couple of articles to magazines. So, I sat down and I wrote an article for the Canberra Times about lyrebirds. I wrote an article for Hobby Farmer. I wrote an article for Earth Garden Magazine and I wrote a story called Rain Stones and I sent it to Angus & Robertson because it began with A and they were the first in the phone book. We built the house from stone. When I say we, it was me, it was my ex-partner, but also too, it probably every friend we had. That was more or less what we did in those days. We took turns helping each other build our houses. There were two rooms. You went outside one room to get into the other. There was no bathroom, I was still washing outside. Then, I met Brian and things changed. I first met Brian on a visit to the Pot Belly Folk Club. We were on a mission to meet men and our intentions were strictly dishonourable. We ended up sitting at this big table and Brian was sitting at the table too. So, I asked everyone at the table if they'd like to come down and join in Christmas down here. And it was love at second sight.

PETER THOMPSON: Brian built that watermill that we saw there.

JACKIE FRENCH: He did. It took him three years.

PETER THOMPSON: Well, I'm not surprised. It's great waterwheel.

JACKIE FRENCH: Yes, foraging the raw materials. Everything in that is actually basically rubbish.

PETER THOMPSON: How are you getting on as a dyslexic, as a writer?

JACKIE FRENCH: Oh, it's wonderful. It's extraordinary. It means I can read and digest a couple of books a day. It means I can do an extraordinary amount of research. It means I work extremely quickly. It does mean I can juggle ideas very quickly. It does mean I cannot spell.

PETER THOMPSON: Spell-check can fix that.

JACKIE FRENCH: Not with how badly I spell. Not always.

PETER THOMPSON: Can't recognise anything like that word. It's got no idea, but it's only a machine.

JACKIE FRENCH: Improving your soul with compost, I think, is one of my favourites.

PETER THOMPSON: What about your editor? What's it like to be your editor?

JACKIE FRENCH: Tactful. Very, very tactful. She was the one who actually accepted Diary Of A Wombat. Now, look, everyone thought that Diary Of A Wombat was an impossible subject. Back then, you did not have books about talking animals. This was supposed to be a political no-no. This was also a book about a brown wombat in a black night. Now, that does not make a good picture book. And it is still just bouncing around the globe and the sales figures are just still growing exponentially and it's still not even in paperback. It's still selling too well in hardback. Come on. Bruiser, Bruiser, Bruiser. Come on. That's a good wombat.

This is Bruiser. He's not a great big hulking bruiser. The poor little thing was tiny, emaciated, incredibly badly wounded and very, very bruised. We're now feeding him and we're trying to teach him how to be a great big successful, tough wombat. I love wombats because they are so totally and absolutely not human and it is such an extraordinary thing to actually be able to live your life and observe a creature who thinks about the world in such a very, very different way. I think from the way Bruiser is looking that Mothball is about to arrive. Now, Mothball is the wombat from Diary Of A Wombat. But the way, Mothball just doesn't bite Bruiser, she'll bite me too. Ah, umph!

MAN: And it's now time for Aunty Jackie, Jackie French. And, I'm not going to tell you what she's doing, but she's dressing up and so are all the local neighbours.

JACKIE FRENCH: And every evening, when they came back all hot and sweaty... they had a lovely refreshing dip in a mountain stream.

Don Burke came down to do one of the celebrity garden episodes and apparently it had good ratings, so, he asked if I'd like to be a regular on Burke's Backyard.

And the beast will arrive from the sea and devour you all. The rest of the weekend, though, is going to be fine and mild with a gentle breeze.

PETER THOMPSON: This comes the the issue of you looking so much thinner than you did on Burke's Backyard.

JACKIE FRENCH: This is true, yes, yes.

PETER THOMPSON: So, what's the difference? What's the story?

JACKIE FRENCH: When you tell doctors, look, I'm only eating 660 calories a day, but I'm not losing weight, in fact, I'm putting on weight, they pat your hand and say, "Look now, dear, what's your weakness, chocolate biscuits?" And it's been about 31 years since I had a chocolate biscuit. I have always, I have always eaten... very, very well. About six years ago, I had a heart attack and suddenly, instead of saying, "Oh, it's muscular, dear, don't worry," they realised that there was a problem with my heart. Finally, someone did a blood test and discovered that I had a thyroid problem.

PETER THOMPSON: This was just missed?

JACKIE FRENCH: Yes, it was missed. Also the fact that from the age of 14, I was dizzy and fainting. From the age of 27, I would have chest pains. In retrospect, I had a heart defect.

PETER THOMPSON: What has this brush with mortality done for you in the way you see things?

JACKIE FRENCH: I'm lying in the emergency room and a chaplain approaching, a little bit warily, because I'd actually put down under religion, "non-specific" and she wasn't sure what that meant. And she asked me if there was anything that I felt I needed to do in my life, obviously thinking that this is what you ask people on emergency trolleys. And I realised I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted more. I wanted more lunchtime with friends, I wanted more wombats, I wanted more walking up the mountain in the morning, I wanted more tracking animals through the bush. I wanted more evenings sitting hand in hand with Brian, watching the moon rise over the ridges. I wanted more books. It is almost in the last three months, as though, I've only started to learn to write and know what actually writing a book means, as though I really am beginning all over again and I suddenly realise this is what it means create a book. It takes me at least three years to write a book, but because I write in many different genres, I'm always writing several different sorts of books at once. I'm usually called prolific. I really hate the word prolific. It sounds like I'm a Barbara Cartland with two secretaries scurrying after me as I write book after book after book. It doesn't work that way.

Brilliant! Absolutely wonderful, wonderful.

I get thousands of letters from kids and emails, but kids are always absolutely honest. They will never say they love your books, if they don't. "Afternoon. To Jackie French. I like the books that you write, but I haven't read them yet. From Renee." Oh, wait a minute, here's a gorgeous one. "Dear Jackie French, our teacher said we had to write to our favourite author. My favourite author is Roald Dahl, but he's dead, so I think I'll write to you." Yes, they are absolutely always totally honest. There is something very, very deep in the human psyche that loves growing and picking their own food and having the security that the earth will provide.

She has grown into a big wombat, hasn't she? I rather feel this is the lunchtime of life. I definitely have found the good life that was in The Magic Pudding. I live with wildlife because I think there a moral reason to share our life with other animals. But mostly, I think I do it for myself. There are, sometimes, just a few problems, though, sharing your life with nocturnal animals.

Go to sleep, you mangy marsupial!

PETER THOMPSON: When you think about the last few decades, has experience taught you that actually the notions you had about embracing self-sufficiency aren't really going to happen in suburban life?

JACKIE FRENCH: I don't think I was ever an advocate for total self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is actually a very, very selfish doctrine. I would much rather eat Matt's bread. I would much rather use someone else's pottery. I would rather buy someone else's very, very good handmade soap. If you make a product, if you buy it from friends, if you buy it in your local community, if you even buy it at a market, it means the your life suddenly has all these many, many layers. If you buy something in a supermarket, the last thing you want to do is remember the half hour you spent in the queue lugging the basket. For the last 20 years, I have assumed it's not going to happen, it wouldn't happen. Strangely enough, in the last two or three years, for the first time, I feel tomorrow has a very good chance of being extraordinarily good.

PETER THOMPSON: It's been a pleasure talking to you.

JACKIE FRENCH: It has been... enormously easier and far more joyous than I could ever expect.


JACKIE FRENCH: There were places that were closed and they're not closed anymore and for that, I really do thank you.