“Norton looked at her. This is getting absolutely ridic, he thought. This sheila’s doing everything but send up smoke signals; and she’s a bloody good sort too. If I don’t make some sort of move she’ll either think I’m a bigger mug than what I look, or a poof. Bugger this. I’ll have to have a lash.”
As this passage from Robert G Barrett’s 1987 novel, The Boys from Binjiwunyawunya, makes clear, Barrett’s protagonist, Les Norton, is not exactly a nice bloke. By today’s standards, the hard-punching hero of a 20-book crime series by the late Australian author was sexist, homophobic and, if not outright racist, certainly not averse to racial stereotyping.
Hardly the kind of character that would make a home on modern Australian television, right?
Wrong. This week, the ABC announced that the copper-topped King’s Cross bouncer and amateur private investigator will be the primary character in a 10-part series, created by Morgan O’Neill (Drift, Solo), played by Home and Away alumnus Alexander Bertrand. Bertrand and will be joined by Rebel Wilson and David Wenham.
The question is, does the Australia of 2018 want Les Norton?
Les’s adventures began in 1985 with the publication of Barrett’s first novel, You Wouldn’t be Dead for Quids. Norton, a big, red-headed Queensland boy who’s handy with his fists, has to decamp for the big smoke after a pub brawl results in a run-in with the law and a possible murder charge. Hightailing it to Sydney, he soon lands a security gig at the Kelly Club, an illegal casino in King’s Cross, and doing “odd jobs” for the club’s owner, Price Galese. It’s not long before our simple but savvy hero is mixing it up with hitmen, strippers, drug dealers, and all the sleazy glamour that the Cross of the 80s had to offer.
The rough-hewn pleasures of Barrett’s comedic crime capers are readily apparent – they’re packed with action, sex, and larrikin humour, simply plotted and briskly paced. Barrett, who sadly passed away in 2012, had a finely tuned ear for colloquial dialogue and an eye for local colour and telling details. His books are resolutely, unapologetically Australian. His characters sound like people we know, and his settings, from the Cross to Bondi and beyond, are packed with authenticity – Barrett had been there, he’d seen that.
In Norton he had a hero pitched halfway between everyman and Superman. Not terribly well educated but certainly not dumb, Les is more than capable of punching his way out of any trouble he finds himself in – and he finds himself in a lot. He’s also handy with the ladies – every novel finds him with a new, very temporary, love interest, to leaven the frequent violence with some sex. Les’ appeal is that no matter the odds, he always comes out on top – in the end he’s smarter than the smarties, tougher than the toughies, and his simple moral code means he’s one of the good guys, even if his adventures inevitably lead him into less-than-legal territory. If he has a modern equivalent, it’s Lee Child’s road-tripping vigilante Jack Reacher, who shares Norton’s virility and indomitability.
Which all sounds great. However, Les is a product of both his times and Barrett’s imagination, and Barrett was a man who delighted in seeing “just how many politically correct dates I could put a rocket up”, as Graeme Blundell recounted in his obituary for the writer.
In practical 2018 terms, that means that a lot of Barrett’s humour, particularly from the early books, simply doesn’t fly in the current cultural climate.
Charitably – and charity is rarely extended when considering the motives of provocateurs – Barrett targeted anyone he considered self-important. Looked at now, his attitudes seem hopelessly reactionary. “If you’re a white Australian male,” he once said, “you’ve got to flagellate yourself with the worry beads for the Aborigines, for the Muslims, for the whatever.” This worldview inevitably found its way into his writing, and his characters frequently took aim at anyone who didn’t fit the mould of the straight, white Aussie bloke. Feminists were a favourite target, but anyone with a perceptible difference – gay, disabled, non-white – was liable to cop a serve.
So what does that mean for the incoming TV series?
The obvious answer would be for the writing team, which includes Christopher Lee (Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo), Samantha Winston (Wentworth), Shanti Gudgeon (Wolf Creek), Malcolm Knox (Romper Stomper), and Jessica Tuckwell, to quietly edit away the rougher elements of Barrett’s voice and Les’s personality to smooth his passage into a much more socially conscious TV landscape. But that could prove to be a delicate procedure: go too far and you risk alienating the Norton Army, the legion of staunch Barrett fans who comprise the books’ core fanbase – and, the producers presumably hope, that of the series.
On the other hand, the ABC must be hoping that the series will attract viewers in far greater numbers than the books did readers, and that might mean a whole new Les for a whole new century – never mind how ludicrous the notion of a woke country-bred head-cracker reads.
It’s a difficult needle to thread, but Screen Australia’s head of content, Sally Caplan, alludes to efforts already under way to make Les more presentable in the modern age, saying “the creative team have included a slew of new female roles to go head on with the male characters established in the books.”
Whether that’ll be enough remains to be seen.