It’s hard to interview someone when you can’t stop laughing. That might not sound very professional but when you’re interviewing William McInnes it goes with the territory.

McInnes, 60, is a celebrated actor and author who is as familiar as any family member. He’s the boy from Redcliffe who has immortalised the place in his books about Aussie language and culture and life in general.

His latest is titled Yeah, Nah!  and subtitled “a celebration of life and the words that make us who we are”.

I’m speaking to McInnes because he is doing a couple of sessions at Byron Writers Festival, which is on at Bangalow Showgrounds and other venues from August 9 to 11. This year’s festival features 160 writers and is a star-studded line-up – Trent Dalton, Richard Flanagan, Bryan Brown, Chigozie Obioma, Jane Harper, Melissa Lucashenko and many others.

Themed as From the Ground Up, this year’s festival is about “new life, new ideas and new possibilities”, according to incoming artistic director Jessica Alice.

“It’s where communities mobilise and movements are born,” Alice says. “This festival program explores our histories and the seeds of the futures that we begin to build today.”

Good luck keeping McInnes on topic or anywhere near it. He tends to have a rather individualistic style. Having moderated events with him in the past I can report that he won’t be wrangled. Anyway, he’s not even that fond of writers festivals.

“I don’t know why I do them,” he reflects in the middle of a make-up session  for NCIS: Sydney. which he is currently filming. “Oh, they’re alright, I guess. I’ve done Byron before and I used to like it. Bangalow is beautiful.”

As we chat, he’s obviously trying to convince himself he will have a good time. Certainly, his audiences will because he is a very entertaining man. His publicist at Hachette Australia tells me that every time she has a phone call with McInnes she ends up in stitches.

I try to keep it serious for a while but the conversation veers wildly and we end up talking about rugby league. McInnes grew up at Redcliffe, just north of Brisbane, and he is enjoying watching the progress of the Redcliffe Dolphins.

“I can send you a photo of me at the Words Out West festival, giving a keynote address wearing a Redcliffe Dolphins fin,” McInnes promises, before musing about the possibility of NRL referees giving after-match reports in Shakespearean language, an idea that breaks us both up. It’s pure Monty Python.

His sense of humour was developed by osmosis living in a house where the Aussie idiom was used liberally and in inventive ways. He has celebrated that in several books and does so again in his latest which, as well as being funny and perceptive, is also nostalgic and full of love for his parents and the Redcliffe of his childhood.

“Redcliffe is my Pilbara,” McInnes says. “I’m like Gina Rinehart, mining it for all it’s worth. I’ve been back recently and it has changed a lot but it’s still a little universe for me.”

Conversations from childhood pepper the text and his latest book is a kind of social, cultural and, at times, political history.

McInnes is as authentic in person or on the phone as he is on screen. He has been in iconic shows including A Country Practice, SeaChange, Blue Heelers, Kath & Kim and, more recently, in The Newsreader as larger-than-life TV boss Lindsay Cunningham in The Newsreader. In NCIS: Sydney he is AFP Forensic Pathologist Dr Roy Penrose.

It’s surprising McInnes went on with acting considering the sort of early critiques he got from his family. In an ABC interview he recalled how his mum had responded to seeing him in a theatrical version of Pride and Prejudice.

“My mother came to see it and thought I was like a block of housing commission flats,” he recalls. Ego deflation was readily served up in the McInnes household and it kept him grounded.

He has been described as “the Dylan Thomas of K-Mart”, which sounds strange but I can understand why he would be compared to the Welsh poet. In Thomas’s radio drama Under Milk Wood  an omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing town of Llareggub.

McInnes, who may or may not be omniscient, writes about Redcliffe in a similar way. His books form a sort of lighthearted homage to the place and its people and a little lost world.

But behind all the fun there is serious intent and much love. Plenty of laughs too.

I was once in conversation with him at Brisbane’s now defunct Irish Club and I made the mistake of wearing a black skivvy. He lampooned my pretentious fashion choice mercilessly, much to the amusement of everyone, including me in the end. Fellow panellists at Byron Writers Festival 2024 be warned.

Yeah, Nah!: A celebration of life and the words that make us who we are by William McInnes, Hachette Australia, $34.99

byronwritersfestival.com

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