Jimmy Barnes"My parents didn't beat us, right... But every time they hit each other — every time my dad punched my mum in the face, he might as well have been throwing us across the room or hittin' us with a baseball bat, because it did as much damage."
Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes is a heavy read. "It was certainly cathartic," Barnes admits of the writing process, "but, I mean, literally every time I wrote a paragraph I'd feel as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, you know?... But you've gotta remember… most of the stuff in this book I had never spoken to anybody about. Anybody. [Not] my siblings, certainly not my wife or my kids. And then, on top of that, there was stuff in this book that I'd completely wiped from my memory... And I honestly believe there's still stuff that's blocked there."
"Most of the stuff in this book I had never spoken to anybody about. Anybody. [Not] my siblings, certainly not my wife or my kids."
We wonder whether he's considered hypnotherapy. "I see a therapist once a week," Barnes reveals, "and I've spoken to him and he said, 'Look, dude, I think there's something more still there.' But, you know, he said it comes out when you're ready to deal with it." Barnes laughs, as if demonstrating how instrumental humour has been to him over the years as a coping mechanism. "And I guess I was ready to deal with all this stuff right now. And literally I do feel like a better person for getting it out and I do feel like, you know, better prepared to deal with the issues around it at this point in my life."
Barnes chose not to consult with his siblings while writing this book, because he "didn't want to be influenced by other people's interpretations". "My brothers and sisters and I were in the same room while mum and dad fought and we've all seen it differently," he points out. "This had to be the book from my perspective and it had to be from my experience."
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
After Barnes finished writing Working Class Boy, however, his publishers recommended he check in with his siblings to let them know they feature quite heavily throughout its pages. "I remember I rang, like, John [Swan], my brother, who'd been very supportive and who's like my hero, you know? I rang up John and I said, 'Hey, John, I've put this in the book,' and he went, 'It never happened.' And I went, 'What are you talking about? I was there!' And he was like, 'Yeah, it never happened,' and this was an incident about him and my sister fightin' when they were 12 or something and he's going, 'I've never raised my hands to a woman.' And I'm going, 'John, you were kids!'... and he's going, 'Nope, never happened.' I went, 'Alright, John, I'll take that out then. Okay? Okay?' Then I said, 'Okay, what about when we were in gangs when we were teenagers,' he said, 'I was never in a gang.'"
Barnes then stresses, "He's since read it and he's sort of come around a bit more, but basically it was confronting for him to read this stuff about himself... because it's so against his principles as an adult now, you know?"
Another of his siblings who features throughout his memoir is Linda, one of his older sisters. "So I ring Linda, you know - I'm in a bad mood by this point, I'm thinkin', 'Oh, it's gonna be like John, she's gonna say nothin' happened,' and I ring Linda and I told her some of these horrible bits that were written about what we went through and she went, 'Absolutely, that was right,' and I said, 'Oh, good, really?' and I told her more and she went, 'Well actually, it's worse than that!' [laughs]. And in the end, she's read the book now and she said to me, she said, 'Jim, I've wanted to write this book for, you know, 50 years.' And she said, 'It has been killing me'. My sister she's in a wheelchair, she's had drug problems and alcohol problems... She was damaged, you know, from day one, the poor thing. She's wanted to write this and then she said, 'Everything that you've written in the book, I think you're being nice. I think it's actually worse than it was'."
Of those family members who have read the book, Barnes tells, "My wife and, like, my kids and that all read it and said, 'Oh, we're so sorry it was so bad,' and I said, 'Look, guys, I have sugarcoated it a bit, because I didn't want people to think I was makin' it up'... So I think the reality of the book is as much as I could let out at the moment, but there is more."
