SIX FEET SIX IN HIS SOCKS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 20

SIX FEET SIX IN HIS SOCKS

He’s a good bloke, even though he’s a fair dinkum Aussie, and not a pigislander like you and me. As he nattered in his hotel room he stretched across the bed, the whole six feet six inches of him in his socks, which were tan-coloured. He couldn’t have taken his shoes off to keep the quilt clean because his plates hung down on to the floor almost, so. maybe: he just liked it that way, maybe ‘he just didn’t like being all togged up in his "groppy mocker,’ because he had his coat off and his tie off, too. He rolled his smokes, one after anothet, with thick tissues. CC°FN the course of my long and somewhat chequered career," said Chips Rafferty, "T’ve had forty-two jobs. I’ve been a signwriter, a goldminer, name any job on a cattle or sheep station and I’ve done it; I’ve been a sailor on a trading schooner Wp the Islands, I’ve worked on the radio, the films, the stage, T.V., I've been suckerbashin’ and I’ve .. ." "Yau’ve been what?" we asked, thinking maybe a sucker-basher was a sort of bluegum coshboy. "Not that kind of sucker," he said. "Sometimes trees start growing ‘little suckers down near the bottom: Now that’s not a good thing for atree to start doing, growing suckers near the bottom. So you bash the suckers off and ringbark the ‘diseased trees, which up and die. "Then on Darling Downs: once I had the job of keeping sheep away from a’

well during a drought. The owner was getting eaten off by rabbits and he poisoned the well so that when the rabbits came down to drink, which they don’t usually, but only in droughts, they died. Whew! You never smelt anything like it." He got off the bed, ambled across to the window and stood watching the traffic going up and down the street six stories below. "That’s quite a drop," he said. ° "What were you doing on the trading schooner-were you a deckhand?" He looked disgusted. "Me! No, I was the owner’s offsider. I did a bit of navigation. Where did we trade? Up the Arafura." ""The Arafura?" , He looked even more disgusted. "The Arafura Sea is through the ‘Torres Straits and between New Guinea and Australia-I hope you know where that a "We've heard tell," we said, "but how did you get into films?" "Now that’s the" craziest story you ever heard of," he said. "I lit out from my hometown in Broken Hill when I was 17 and knocked around for ten years. Finally I made Sydney, meaning to buy me a boat and sail on right round the world. But I didn’t have the dough. So instead I bought me a share in a small wine selling business. "Now, we had a Greek for a customer and he owned a restaurant. Then one day when I was thinking of going bush again, this Greek introduced me to the assistant casting director for the film Ants in Your Pants..They wanted some-

one long, like’ me, so I*got the job. Cobber, that part was»so small if you blinked you missed me. After that came Forty Thousand Horsemen, I had all sorts of plans, but war broke out and for my sins I did four and a half years in the Air Force." He took time off from working out his sins to play in The Rats of Tobruk, and then came The Overlanders, which really put Chips Rafferty .in the public eye. He played in several other films in Australia, England and the United States, and is now making films, of his own, Right»now,-he-is touring New: Zealand with his second, King ‘Coral Sea Thrée™of "his" radio features, "the BB€- programme Australian. Bush Ballads, and. the Australian productions, The Sundowner and Chips, have been broadcast here, ‘We talked about New Guinea ("If I was younger I’d go there and make a million"), his next film ("A group of people who go throtgh incredible adventures in New Guinea before they get what they want-and I’m not telling you what that is’), the cost of making films ("Cobber, you need hay!"), and going to the films ("I don’t go for pleasure- I keep saying to myself, ‘Now that’s a good shot,’ or ‘I wouldn’t have cut there,’ and when it’s all over I come out and wonder what. it was all about"). As we were leaving he told us about his shirts, "The laundry in Sydney didn’t get them to me in time and now I've got to write the wife telling her where to send them-woe is Chipsey." It seemed that even film stars have their troubles.