When my compensation cut out I worked picking up glasses, DJ, barman or bummed around on the dole. My first writing gig was gag writing for DJ’s on a radio station in Sydney, 2SM. I never particularly fancied myself as an author, more a scriptwriter. So I went to an agent with my scripts. He said, ‘If you can write them, you can read them.’ He tipped me into all these TV commercials and bit parts in movies and TV. I had no intentions of being an actor, but my timing was good and I could run half-a-dozen words together, so I found acting a snack. I even got a letter from the producers of A Country Practice thanking me for the effort I put into one part that helped to establish a new character in the series. However, if you want to see me in action in two A Grade clunkers, hire Bullamakanka and The Empty Beach. Arguably the two worst movies ever made in the history of film. But the pay was good.

Around this time I got a settlement on my shoulder. It wasn’t much, but enough to help me borrow some money from the bank, so I got a house built on the Central Coast in NSW. All the inbreds on my father’s side of the family go back there to 1856 and I bought a block of land at Terrigal when it was cheap. I moved there with the intentions of kicking back and writing some short stories. Unfortunately, the builders sent me broke so I got work as a DJ in a bloodhouse in Gosford and in between Cyndy Lauper and Duran Duran stayed drunk and stoned five nights a week for almost a year. It was a horror show. I got the sack after a year then dried out and wrote a short story. 'You Wouldn’t Be Dead For Quids' was adapted from a one page story I wrote at the WEA called Norton’s Boots. A school teacher at Terrigal High checked it for me and I sold it to Australian Penthouse who renamed it 'A Hard Man'. I sold them some more short stories and finally brought out my first book of them in 1984 called You Wouldn’t Be Dead For Quids. I got no advance royalties. Nothing. All I got was stuffed around by publishers and sharks in the film industry and virtually starved trying to make it as writer. I worked as a kitchen hand, cleaned toilets, spent time in gaol cutting out parking fines before finishing up back on the dole. But somehow I kept going before getting my one break, writing a column for People magazine. Which is all explained in my book So What Do You Reckon? Now I’ve sold over a million books in Australia, Quids is in its fourteenth reprint and I’ll soon have fourteen books published. All from a one page short story I wrote at night school.

People often think I’m Les Norton. I’m not, although I’d certainly like to be. Les Norton is based on these QLD blokes I met in the meatworks at Ross River with this dry, outback sense of humour. And a gangster in Sydney called Richard Gabriel (Dick) Riley. He was the original, hard man and the best streetfighter in Sydney. He ran Kings Cross with Perce Galea, who I based Price Galese on. George Brennan and Eddie Salita are based on dealers who worked at the casinos. Billy Dunn based on a champion fighter of that time. Warren Edwards is based on a bloke I shared a house with in Bondi Junction who worked in advertising. Grungle is based on a dog called Pete. Although I’m not Les Norton, some of the stories in my books did happen to me and a lot of the places and characters are real. Like the farm in The Godson and the restaurant in Between The Devlin and The Deep Blue Seas and Hank, the ratty American in And De Fun Don’t Done, and Mick the Aussie cop in Mele Kalikimaka Mr. Walker.

Almost as many women read my books as men and there's a definitive reason why my books are so popular. They're very descriptive, easy to read, they're entertaining and, although they're full of sex and violence, I always put a humorous spin on it and also keep that humourous spin bubbling through the story. I also don't write to impress critics, other writers or the arts council. The only people I write to impress are the people that fork out their hard earned money to buy my books. They're the most important to me. Plus, I deliberately go out of my way to avoid political correctness and to antagonise the so called literary elite; the establishment. I know they hate the fact that a non academic, uneducated, loose cannon like me can sell so many books, and I have to confess: the smell of their arses burning mixed with the sweet smell of success is music to my nostrils. It's almost as good as not having to get up at five o'clock in the morning and bone forequarters out in a meatworks all day. Thanks.

Robert G. Barrett