Telling Tales (17 page)

Six weeks later,
They’re a Weird Mob
was completed. And no sooner was it finished than it was stuffed in a drawer and the author was off on a plane to Samoa, where his professional services were required. It was while he was away on this trip that his son John came across the manuscript and felt sure it was good enough to be published. John Junior knew a thing or two about the market for humour because he worked at a major television company producing light entertainment (and indeed would go on to be head of sit-coms for ABC). He duly sent the manuscript to the publishing house Angus & Robinson who admitted the book was laugh-out-loud funny but didn’t see it selling well. John felt sure that they were wrong, and submitted it to the next publisher on his list, Sam Ure Smith. Smith took the bait immediately and accepted the manuscript with relish. Naturally, Smith wanted to meet this comic genius Nino Culotta, but John, acting as agent, played for time by saying that the author was abroad. Which he was – in Samoa working as a pharmacist.

Happily, John Junior decided to come clean rather than get himself – and his father – involved in a pointless and potentially damaging fraud. He admitted to Smith that Culotta was in fact a middle-aged Australian eccentric and Smith cared not a jot. He still loved the book and knew that with the right sales and marketing strategy, readers would too.

So O’Grady’s debut was published
in absentia
and much to his surprise began to fly off the shelves. Posters emblazoned with ‘weird mob’ slogans and phrases were circulated; bookshops were given only a little stock at a time to create the impression of desirability; and through radio and newspaper marketing a combination of reviews and extracts made the whole Culotta phenomenon so popular that by the time John Senior came back to Australia, people were having ‘weird mob’ parties dressed as builders, and he was nothing short of a celebrity.

Of course many if not most of the 130,000 readers in the book’s first year must have believed it was written by a bemused Italian immigrant. (His jacket photograph had him sitting on a kerosene lamp with his back to the camera.) But because the publisher only let people believe that the author was the character Culotta, rather than explicitly telling them he was, nobody felt hard done by. And when newspapers finally made it common knowledge that Culotta was made-up, sales, according to John Junior, ‘skyrocketed’. And when John Senior stepped off the plane from Samoa wearing the grass and floral garb of that island and waving happily to the assembled press, his status as a lovable eccentric was confirmed. As his son says, ‘He didn’t pretend to live that existence. He thought it was a hoot!’

Perhaps it was this good-humoured, honest authorial attitude that ensured
They’re a Weird Mob
stayed in print constantly for nearly forty years and enabled its true author to give up being a pharmacist and write more books – some by Nino and some by himself.

However, as far back as 1958 O’Grady expressed a desire to leave Nino behind him, writing to John Junior that he had ‘no interest in Culotta any more . . . Mr Culotta has had his day. Let him die.’ He even held a mock funeral for him (albeit in a bar) in 1960. But his rejection of his alter ego was always complicated by an interest in where he could take him as a professional writer. In the same breath he would dismiss the idea of writing a magazine column as Nino and yet wonder, in a letter home from another trip to Samoa, whether ‘Nino’s wanderings in NZ and Samoa, presented in column-narrative form, for collection later into book form, [would] be of any use?’

Was O’Grady hoaxing for money and fame? Emphatically not, at first. But when a whole nation is bursting with love for a writer’s work and that love enables the writer to leave his day-job – and when nobody is accusing him of cheating or lying or pretending to be someone he’s not – that writer would hardly be human if he refused all of what was on offer. The Nino Culotta hoax, it would seem, is one which genuinely took on a life and momentum of its own, much to the surprise of its light-hearted perpetrator. And due to the affection with which he told his story and the refusal to take himself too seriously, O’Grady will go down in history as the eternal Good Bloke of Australian literary hoaxes.

A
NYONE WHO HAS
spent any time trawling secondhand bookshops in Britain or America will have come across Marlo Morgan’s 1990s bestseller
Mutant Message Down Under
. Its subtitle is ‘A Woman’s Journey into Dreamtime Australia’ and it has caused more offence and upset to the Aboriginal people than any other book before or since. The refusal of the author to admit that she invented the story of her walkabout with a lost tribe of nomads resulted in a delegation of Aborigine Elders seeking permission to fly to America to confront her and stop a blockbusting movie being made of her exploitative work. She did, eventually, apologize, but the million-dollar industry which had sprung up around her books in the States saw to it that her admission of guilt received hardly any publicity.

The story of Marlo Morgan began, like that of so many new-age attention-seekers, in a boring suburb. Born and raised in Idaho in the 1930s, she moved to Kansas, Missouri to become a wife and mother and work in a pharmacy. After twenty-five years of marriage, however, she got divorced and headed off to Australia for a trip of several months. It was there she became interested in the natural remedies and folk culture of the native population, and when she returned to America she gave up pharmacy work to become a peripatetic salesperson for a company specializing in tea-tree oil. After a while of giving potential clients the specified blurb about the products, her sales pitch for the Melaleuca brand of herbal remedies began to include a rather extraordinary story. She told people that when she was in Australia she had been kidnapped by a tribe of native people who had never seen a white person before, and over the course of a four-month trek across the parched country with them they taught her the secrets of health and wellbeing, curing her sore feet with tea-tree oil and coming to respect and even honour her as a member of their group. At some point she started to write this story down and sell it in pamphlet form along with her wares, at which point her company realized she was making unsubstantiated claims for their product (which is a natural antiseptic, not a mystical cure-all), and they – and the Missouri Department for Consumer Affairs – had to reprimand her.

But by this time she knew she was on to a good thing. It was 1990 and self-help books were flying off the shelves as fast as new-age remedies and healing aides, and the industry was no longer limited to the cash-rich, reason-poor burghers of California. She decided to make her tall tale into a full-length book, adding descriptions of the health and lifestyle secrets of her Aboriginal friends (who she called the ‘Real People’), and tried to get it published. Initially unsuccessful, she resourcefully went ahead and published her spiritual travelogue herself, enlisting the help of her children to illustrate and publicize the work. That was in 1991 and soon after it seemed her prayers had been answered when the publishing arm of a new-age centre in New Hampshire, the Stillpoint School of Advanced Energy Healing, bought the rights to her book for $2,500. Just days before the presses began to roll, however, Stillpoint decided to heed the warnings of the experts they had asked to look over the book for authenticity, and cancelled the whole project, selling back the rights to the author and reckoning they had escaped an embarrassing reputational crisis.

Across the country in California, however, an agent with her eye on the new-age dollar had heard about the book and, recently disappointed by having missed out on the chance to represent the author of
The Celestine Prophecy
, contacted Morgan with an offer. Now big money was being talked about, and with a bit of editing by one of her associates in the mainstream publishing world, Candice Fuhrman sold the manuscript to HarperCollins for an astonishing $1.7 million. To top it all off, United Artists bought the film rights and began a series of meetings to set up production.

Morgan’s cottage industry, based on the fanciful holiday myth of a middle-aged divorcee, was suddenly one of the hottest commodities in American media. And happily, on publication, the book proved to be every bit as successful amongst the snake-oil-hungry reading public as everyone had hoped. Those inspiring pep-talks the author had been giving to her tea-tree customers in Missouri had blossomed into full-blown lectures, where she spoke to hundreds at a time about her experiences as ‘walkabout woman’ and the marvellous truths she learned in the bush.

But while America was lapping up her spurious literary product, the book – although not published in Australia – had reached some key Aboriginal commentators in the southern hemisphere. Copies began to be circulated privately amongst writers and readers in indigenous communities and without exception everyone was utterly horrified. What they read in
Mutant Message
was a hotchpotch of offensive, ill-conceived lies – not even half-truths – based, seemingly, on a smattering of knowledge about Native Americans and a thorough grounding in
Crocodile Dundee
. On almost every page there were glaring inaccuracies, cruel misrepresentations and, it was widely claimed, out-and-out racism.

To list every one of the errors in Morgan’s account would take up as many pages as are in her book, because almost every claim she makes about Aboriginal culture is unfounded. To name but a few, her ‘Real People’ are supposed to be nomadic, but they travel with an astonishing amount of paraphernalia such as cooking utensils and musical instruments. They have a designated tool maker and a counsellor called Secret Keeper who helps people with their emotional problems: anathema to a people for whom everyone is a tool maker and there is no therapy culture. They praise Morgan’s remarkable talent for self-sufficiency. They use the Native American phrase ‘the medicine of music’, the European concept of the composer, and eventually put on a Western-style concert for Morgan: none of the ritual ‘singing the country’ that Aboriginal culture is famous for. They call each other by clumsy made-up names rather than the authentic ‘skin’ or family names. They approach Morgan unbidden and are not afraid to whisk her off on walkabout with them nor instantly initiate her into their group, whereas in fact even indigenous groups who have known many white people are still slow to integrate with them. Finally, one of the nomads speculates that Morgan must be from ‘outer space’ – a phrase and a concept that no tribesperson who has never had contact with the white world would be able to enunciate.

Of course, Morgan’s get-out clause was her assertion that these people were a hidden, secret tribe who had escaped the attentions of the authorities and never been moved into reservations. So whenever anyone criticized her she merely responded that of course no one could verify her memoir – no one but her had ever known these people. But what about spinifex? Famously, that viciously spiny plant grows all over the dangerous ‘red centre’ of Australia and anyone claiming to have walked for months across the bush would necessarily know a thing or two about it. They would know, for example, that far from growing in an unbroken ‘lawn’, cutting your feet to shreds wherever you step, it grows in clumps surrounded by sand which are easy to circumnavigate. And then there is the highly secretive ceremonial artefact of which Morgan claimed first-hand knowledge, the bull-roarer: an instrument it is forbidden for women ever to hear. Apart from in the film
Crocodile Dundee
, that is . . . And how about the phone box that Morgan claims she chanced upon on her way out of the desert? It took a quarter, she said. But every Australian knows that in the 1980s you needed two coins to make a local call (let alone one to America). After making the call, she claims she used a telegraph office to have money wired to her – but there was no such thing in the area.

There was no good reason for her to lie about these elements of mainstream Australian life, so her fate as a fantasist seemed sealed. Just to make sure, however, a group of Noongah Elders organized a survey of all the people on the land she claimed to have travelled through. None of them knew anything of a group of sixty heavily-laden, concert-playing, white-woman-revering Aboriginals having passed by at any time in living memory – and with the deeply ingrained traditional law of always alerting others to your presence when crossing their land, they all agreed that these ‘lost people’ could not be Aboriginal at all.

Letters and papers were written but to no avail. In America, Morgan answered critics with accusations of racism, claiming that nobody black had ever criticized her worthy work, only bitter white people. Finally, determined to get an apology out of her, a group of Elders sought a grant from their government to make a trip to America to confront this woman who had belittled their precious culture and made them look stupid to millions of foreign readers. Lead by Robert Eggington, the coordinator of the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation, seven men arrived in America and arranged a press conference and a meeting with the team at Warner Brothers who were planning the
Mutant Message
film. Stating their case, they managed to get Morgan on a telephone conference call from New York and each man put to her their doubts about elements of her story. Quietly, she assured them that the matter of her official apology would be settled by her lawyers, who would forward them a written confession that the story was made-up. Those who heard the call say she seemed contrite and willing to make up for any hurt she had caused. Doubtless she had also been advised to avoid a PR disaster by placating this pesky delegation from the bush.

But the
Message
machine trundled on: reprints, lecture tours, an appearance on Oprah and new spin-off titles such as the spiral-bound
vade mecum, Making the Message Mine
. In 1997 a lecture tour to Japan was beset by PR problems when another band of visiting Aboriginal critics gained access to a talk in front of a thousand people in Kobe and protested using music and traditional cultural displays. Undeterred, readers still bought more and more copies of the book and a few months later HarperCollins sold its millionth copy.