MINISTER’S HANDS ROSSCO’S CUSTOMERS IN FOR RUDE AWAKENINGS
ROLLINGSTONE’S R
Rossco Jessop is the rudest shopkeeper in Australia.
Don’t take my word for it, just ask Rossco. He’ll tell that, when comes to being rude, he rules the roost.
John Cleese, who, as Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, used to goose step in front of German visitors while he showed them to their rooms in his hotel, might have taken lessons from Rossco.
Even the famous Iranian Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, famous for telling customers who annoyed him for the slightest reason, “no soup for you”, might have signed up for a copy of Rossco’s yet-to-be-written epistle of rudeness, Pissing People off and Enjoying It.
True story. A posh tourist lady – we’ll call her Toorak Toni – came into the shop one morning looking for bread.
“I’m sorry Madam,” said Rossco. “But the bread truck from Townsville has broken down and there will be no deliveries until 9am.”
“That won’t do,” sniffed, plum in the mouth, Toorak Toni.
“Surely there must be somewhere else I can get bread.”
“The BP up on the highway sells bread.”
“You could have told me that before,” Toorak Toni cut in with a plummy hiss.
“But it won’t have any because it gets its bread from the same truck as us,” Rossco finished saying.
“Oh, this is just Hicksville, this place,” said Toorak Toni with a plummy snort, throwing her hands in the air.
By this time Rossco was in a dark place. A very dark place. But, as usual on the outside he was as polite as ever.
It was like he was explaining to a little girl that her puppy had died and gone to heaven. “Would you like to try Woolies?” he softly inquired.
“Oh, of course I do. Why didn’t you say that to start with. Where is it?”
“It’s just out the back,” said Rossco, pointing to the rear of his shop. “You’ll see it between Bunnings and Myers.”
Toorak Toni heads off towards the rear of Rossco’s shop.
Now, anyone who knows Rollingstone knows there’s nothing in the scrub between town and the Coral Sea except croc-infested swamps, feral pigs, wild dogs and southern bikie gangs guarding booby-trapped hooter crops.
It’s no country for old men and it’s no place for a woman dressed as though she’s about to go to lunch at Buckingham Palace.
Less than one minute later, Toorak Toni storms into the store, her
Rossco Jessop
The Soup Nazi
clothes covered in burrs and prickles. She strides over to Rossco and screams, “Sir, you are a complete d---head” before storming out.
Rossco rarely rewards himself, but on that occasion he gave himself a high five.
The story is not over.
A couple of hours later the manager from a nearby caravan park phoned Rossco to tell him that a sign had appeared on the van park’s notice board.
It read: “Do not shop at the Rollingstone store. He is the rudest shopkeeper in Australia.”
There’s more. A bloke came into Rossco’s shop one day and asked for 300 grams of ham.
Rossco sliced the ham, put it on the scales and said, “That’s 320 grams. That OK?”
The bloke said, “No, I said 300 grams. Give me 300 grams.”
So, Rossco removes a slice from the scales, weighs what’s left and says, “That’s 290 grams, that OK?”
The bloke says, “Are you a moron? I said 300 grams. Not 320 grams, not 290 grams, 300 grams. Is that so hard?”
If this bloke could have seen inside Rossco’s mind right then he would have seen bombs going off and people engaged in deadly hand-tohand combat with knives and clubs.
There would have been bears and tigers tearing annoying shop customers apart in the colosseum while the crowd bayed for blood.
But, being a true pro, Rossco maintained a dignified, grandfatherly demeanour on the outside.
Quietly, without any rush, he gathered up the ham on the scales and placed it on a rack in his fridge.
What are you doing moron? I want 300 grams of ham,” the angry, customer asked.
Rossco by now had crossed the Rubicon. His course was set.
Silence slid down like a curtain. Outside, a crow sitting in a dead tree sounded its “ark, ark, ark”.
It was High Noon in the Rollingstone store. Two men. Three hundred grams of ham.
The silence raged for a few more seconds. And then in a heavily accented imitation of the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, Rossco very quietly said those immortal lines, “No ham for you.”
Sometime later, a TV show did a story on the nation’s rudest shop keeper. It wasn’t Rossco.
Insulted, Rossco rang them up and gave them a piece of his mind, telling them he was the rudest because a lady staying at the local caravan park had already announced he was the best of the best.
So, if you want to be insulted by a pro, step inside the Rollingstone store.
Don’t be shy. Lead with your chin by asking for 279.3 grams of ham, nothing more, nothing less.
You won’t be disappointed.
It was a Cinderella story that could have been made for the big screen screen. Four strapping brothers, imported from the UK, lured by Oscar-winning movie star Russell Crowe to play for an iconic Australian rugby league club, the perennial battlers of the competition, the club diehard fan Crowe was desperate to save.
Mixed in with their working class backgrounds, the rough and ready cult of rugby league and images of big teary champion South Sydney signing Sam Burgess cuddling Crowe and paying tribute to a dead father, the Burgess brand was born.
Souths fans and the media were soon on board, peddling the dream as Crowe extended the working visa offered to Sam to include older Burgess brother Luke and younger twin brothers Tom and George.
Their mum Julie, a schoolteacher who had buried her husband Mark – her estranged husband as it would emerge later – when the boys were still teens, decided to follow her sons.
The Burgesses became one of Australia’s most adored and feted sporting families, a remarkable achievement in a nation of Chappells, Ellas, Waughs and Campbells.
But as with all Cinderella fairytales, the Burgess tale had a backstory far less glittering – though maybe more revealing – than the one projected by the South Sydney Rabbitohs public relations department.
Growing up in West Yorkshire, in northwest England, rugby league ruled the Burgess household.
As Julie worked as a teacher, her sons continued to climb the
footballing ranks.
Sam Burgess and Phoebe on their wedding day in 2015.
It was in their blood: their father Mark had played the sport.
“He was just an out and out frontrower,” Sam said of his dad.
“A big barrel. He was just under six foot, but square. Massive shoulders. Massive back and chest and shoulders and legs.”
When Sam was just 15 years old, his parents sat him and his brothers down to break the devastating news – Mark had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
“Me and my older brother went off and did some research on it,” Sam recalled. “We realised then that it was really serious but, as a kid of that age, I still didn’t really understand it. I didn’t know how quick it would all happen. I just figured that as time went by, he would be all right; he’d overcome it.”
The Burgess patriarch died in 2007, at the age of 45.
Mark and Julie’s marriage was by then over and she had found love with another, an Australian she’d met while visiting this country to play touch football as part of an English women’s team. The romance wouldn’t last – though Julie’s love for Australia lingered.
According to sources, she was always going to be easily seduced by Crowe when he made his offer to her son Sam in 2009, while Crowe was shooting Robin Hood on location in England.
AS SAM packed his bag and headed to Australia, Julie – the product of a broken home herself and let down by love repeatedly before her boys were raised – would teach her sons that romantic love might come and go, but bond to family must always be honoured.
In Australia, the Burgess boys were dazzled by what passes for Sydney society.
The media loved them on sight, so too nightclub proprietors who threw open their doors to the four strapping athletes, who had taken on the attitude of Crowe’s adopted Princeling sons with gusto. Savvy marketers and a changing parade of pretty models also hovered.
As “Big Sammy” dipped in and out of love affairs, Luke attached himself to one of the stars of Australia’s Next Top Model, Yolanda Hodgson, and the couple soon welcomed a daughter, Grace. The relationship wouldn’t last.
George would fall for lingerie model Joanna King, who he would marry in