Hoges, where the bloody hell are ya?
He might live in LA but Paul Hogan has decided it’s time he delivered his fellow Australians a history lesson via a new book
Paul Hogan has something he wants you all to know – and it’s important. In fact, there’s a whole lot he wants every schoolaged child and new Australian immigrant to know about the country they call home. A history lesson, you might say, is how the father of six and grandfather of 10 describes his new book, Australia According To Hoges, written by someone who lived it. Others might call it a love letter to the country that has his whole heart – in a very Paul Hogan kinda way, of course.
“I want people to learn the amazing history behind this amazing country because when I went to school, back in the dark ages, you never really got the history of Australia,” he says.
“History lessons meant learning about kings and queens of England or something.
“When you look at this country, it’s the fastest growing nation in history, easily.
“When you think I was born 80 years ago, and anyone I knew or met or a relative said they were 80 – that’s 160 years – so in just two lifetimes really, we went from being a penal colony to a proper nation.
“An amazing nation.
“People like the Egyptians and the Chinese and the Romans had thousands of years to get to where they are – and we had like a hundred to shoot past ’em.”
It’s evening in LA when the 83 year old answers the phone at his Venice Beach home, where he lives with his 24-year-old son, Chance. It’s a landline. He laughs – he does have a “cell phone” but it’s safely tucked away in a drawer somewhere, so not overly useful for the old timer, as he calls himself.
“I’m reasonable,” he answers when asked how he is. Just reasonable? Well he’s getting older, he can feel that. He turned 83 last week and after all those years, he can forget when it’s his birthday. Lucky for him, his “calendar keeper” son Scott will always ring to remind him.
But what he really wanted for his birthday was to come home to Australia.
“I’ve been homesick for years,” he says.
“I miss the people, the ambience – and there’s something you just can’t put your finger on, but there’s something about Australia that is friendlier and more laid-back.
“It never takes itself seriously – there’s no arrogance like there is in other places.
“I won’t be back until the end of November or December, but I do get back a couple of times a year.
“I’d rather be there, but I have my last child who is an American – he only has me, whereas my tribe at home, they’ve all got each other.”
He and his second wife, Crocodile Dundee co-star and love interest, Linda Kozlowski, first moved to America because her parents were ill. Not long after they did, Linda’s mother died of cancer.
“Then the years have slipped by, and I’m sort of stuck here,” Hogan says.
“I’ve got 10 grandchildren and they are all adults – but for Chance, the only family he’s got is me.
“All his grandparents died and so on.
“He loves coming to Australia too, but he’s an American.
“All is friends, his band, musician mates, girlfriends, everything – they’re all American.
“So I’m hanging in there a bit longer, but eventually I’ll get back.”
Hogan was a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge before rising to fame in the early ’70s with his comedy sketch program, The Paul Hogan Show, which ran for more than a decade.
In 1986, he starred in Crocodile Dundee, a film he conceived and co-wrote, which went on to become the most successful Australian film ever, firmly launching his international film career and winning him a Golden Globe. Part of the reason he’s desperate to come home is to be with the tribe of good people he’s collected over his very colourful lifetime, many of whom are celebrated in his book.
Not only does it teach how to speak “Strayan” with Aussie slang meanings scattered throughout – think “pants man”, “shitcan” or the delightfully descriptive “chunder” – it also shows the man Hoges is because of where he came from.
Growing up in Granville in Sydney’s west, sharing a room with his brother while his sister got her own, and being jealous of Tom Maudsley, the man next door because he had one of the first power mowers in the 1940s.
“If you’re lucky enough to live to be 80 like I have, you’ve seen history as it actually happened – the kid growing up with a bomb shelter in the back yard – Australia was at war,” he says. As a kid he was mischievous, getting into all sorts of trouble – and a bit “light-fingered” too. “I’d nick stuff from the house, or from shops, anywhere,” he writes in his book, and it continues: “I put it down to my convict heritage.
“You didn’t kick a ball with your dad in the 1940s or early 1950s – dads weren’t like that.
“You didn’t watch television with them either, because there wasn’t any.
“You made your own entertainment.
“When I wasn’t nicking stuff, I’d go with my mates down to the stormwater canal at Granville. Leading into the canal were all these concrete pipes that carried water there after rain. And every so often a rat would stick its nose out of one of these pipes to have a look.
“To a 10-year-old boy, this was an open invitation.
“All my mates had slingshots or catapults, and one of them who was rich had an air rifle.
“My mum and dad didn’t mind me going down to the canal to knock off rats … but they wouldn’t let me have any weapons.
“As the unarmed member of the group, I could only throw stones, and I became a really good shot.
“It was like going on safari, going down to the stormwater canal.
The best thing I ever did was go on television and do a very Australian thing of taking the mickey out of things.
“On a good day we might get three rats each. I became such a good shot that it inspired me to write the scene in Crocodile Dundee where Mick hurls a can over a crowd to brain a robber.”
It also talks about his time working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge – they were the days, he says – yarns of him drinking and punting in Pyrmont pubs after work, and the fights they all got into. How he bought his first Holden for $300 in the 1960s – years after everyone else mind you – and only because of a footy injury while playing for the Sydney Harbour Bridge rugby league team.
“I went for a head-high tackle – I was going to take this guy’s melon off, but he dipped it at the wrong moment and headbutted my extended thumb, right on the end,” he writes.
“My thumb went like a spear into the rest of my hand.
“It hurt like hell but, in the finest Australian tradition, I managed to nurse it all weekend and bundy on at the bridge on Monday morning. I was sent to hospital and got pretty well my whole lower arm put in plaster and was off on compo for a few weeks.
“The guys all felt sorry for me and had a whiparound, raising about $300 and I spent it on my very first car – an old Holden, from 1950something.”
Hogan and his first wife Noelene Edwards got married “when they were kids” in 1958 and had five children.
They divorced in 1981 and remarried less than a year later, only to divorce again in 1986.
Four years later he married Kozlowski and they had Chance before divorcing in 2014.
Being Paul Hogan’s wives – or children for that matter – was tough for his family, he explains.
“They accepted it because they grew up with it, but it does change your life and it wasn’t easy for them – it was always a bit tough actually on my two ex-wives,” he says.
“They sort of had the same problem.
“They lost their identity. They became
‘Paul Hogan’s wife’.”
Today, he describes himself as a bit of a hermit. He still wears a mask if venturing out and about from his home – but it’s worked, because he’s yet to catch Covid.
“I had all the needles and everything and I believe in science – I didn’t catch it,” he says.
He rubbishes a recent story in the press about him putting a sign in his front yard warning the homeless to keep off his property, labelling it absolutely false.
“It was a made-up story – they put the sign up, took a photo of it and assumed it was me,” he says with disgust.
“It doesn’t even make sense because this isn’t even my house.
“As far as the homelessness goes, that never bothered me, nobody’s come into my place.
“If I was homeless I’d be on Venice Beach too – not on a freeway somewhere, I’d be camping on the beach.”
But don’t imagine him feet up, living large in a mansion on the water, he says – life for Hoges is much more “real” than that.
“I retired to my ‘mega mansion’, which is a two-bedroom house,” he says sarcastically.
“The block of land is nine metres wide – the whole block of land would fit on a tennis court.”
But he gets the game, and knows media attention comes as part and parcel with being in the public eye. “If you can’t stand the spotlight, don’t get up on stage,” he says.
“You’re gonna cop it, that’s just human nature but the biggest attraction of being here is that I can – like I did this morning – go for a walk on the beach, I put on a hat and nobody recognised me. “I can sort of live like a private citizen here.” Lately, grieving his dear friend Olivia NewtonJohn has also been hard.
“She was actually the nicest person I’ve ever met,” he says. “Even the last time I worked with her, we did a Dean Murphy film which people stayed away from – but even then, she was in pain while she was doing it. We didn’t know – she wouldn’t tell ya – but she couldn’t sit down because it was too painful.”
When he does make it home, his family is in Sydney and Queensland, and he says although Crocodile Dundee changed his life and presented him with challenges he never dreamed as that kid pegging rocks at rats in Granville – he wouldn’t change a thing.
“I guess if I hadn’t have done it, I would be living in Australia and retired – but the best thing I ever did was go on television and do a very Australian thing of taking the mickey out of things on behalf of the public,” he says.
“So it changed my life. And Dundee just made me spread the Australian colour around the world a bit more. Going from a bridge worker to being on television was a radical change, and I’m so glad I did it.”
He likes a swim in the ocean but the water’s too cold at Venice, and it’s closed four times a year because sewage has been pumped into it somewhere, he scoffs.
He’s got a couple of mates who live nearby, but nothing like he has back home.
“I’m terribly bored with my own company,” he admits.
But looking back, he’s pretty stoked with the way his life turned out. “I’m not allowed to complain,” he says. And he means it.
“I mean, I’ve just had the luckiest life. You’re talking to a man who actually danced with Princess Diana, who reached over to me and pulled the clip-on bow tie off my shirt and said, ‘Oh, look at that – they’re just like a real one.’
“I’m the luckiest man on the planet – and
I’m great at a name-drop.”
In December he’ll be home where he belongs to spend Christmas with his Aussie brood. And after that, well whatever happens, he’s happy.
“There’s an old saying that says turning 80 is not for sissies, and it’s not because all your parts start to fall apart,” he says.
“I’m just happy waking up in the morning.”
I miss the people, the ambience – there’s something about Australia that is friendlier and more laid-back