New doco by John Clarke’s daughter finally brings Fred Dagg home

“This is my dad,” says Lorin Clarke, in the opening scene of her new documentary Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke – an intimate portrait of the man behind New Zealand’s most famous pair of gumboots.

Lorin Clarke shared her dad with the world in life and in
death. She didn’t have a chance to tell her closest friends about John Clarke’s premature departure – a heart attack on a bush walk at the age of 68 – before the news leaked on Twitter (it was still called that in 2017).

Sir Sam Neill chokes up talking about his old university friend in Lorin’s documentary about her father, Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke, which opens nationwide on Boxing Day.

The 1990 black comedy the two men made together, Death in Brunswick, remains an absolute classic today and Clarke (sorry, Sam) steals every scene he’s in.

Lorin Clarke with the famous Fred Dagg gumboots, loaned to Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North for a special screening of the documentary in her father’s hometown.

The loss of the man Neill describes as once the most famous person in New Zealand, a phenomenon bigger than the Beatles, was something a lot of us took very personally.

As a kid in the 70s, I first knew John Clarke through a well-worn copy of Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits, apparently the biggest-selling debut album by a New Zealand artist until Lorde dropped Pure Heroine. We were still saying “that’ll be the phone” when we’d finally ditched our landline, five decades later.

I interviewed him once, after he moved to Australia in 1977 when his comic talent outgrew a country with only one television station and a broadcasting bureaucracy that didn’t always know what to make of him.

For all Clarke’s sublime silliness and Chaplinesque physical humour, it was never just about the laughs.

There was always a lot more to Fred Dagg than first met the eye.

In one of the legendary Fred Dagg skits that made him a household name, he questions a couple of “black sheep” on his Taihape farm as suspected overstayers – a swipe at the Government’s racially targeted dawn raids.

He went a step further in The Games, his mockumentary series on the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In one episode, a character called John Howard (the name of the Australian Prime Minister of the time) apologises to the nation’s indigenous people for generations of ill-treatment.

It would be another decade before an official government apology was made.

He must have copped some flak for that one. “His audience rose up in support,” says Lorin, on a video call from her home in Melbourne. “The powerful people were pretty annoyed.”

Lorin Clarke with proud father on the opening night of one of her plays 20 years ago.

Adding some nuance to the folklore surrounding her father was one of the reasons she decided to make the documentary in the first place. Behind the clownish tomfoolery, a sense of justice and “seeing the mismatch behind things” was always there in his work.

“I’ve been asked what it is about dad’s legacy that I wanted to protect, but it’s not so much about that,” she says. “When he died, his audience absolutely swallowed us whole with love. The connection they felt with him was pretty remarkable.”

We’re a nostalgic lot in New Zealand, but for the post-Dagg generations, Clarke was far more than the larrikin farmer who made him a comedy icon.

My son Flynn was in his late teens when Clarke died, studying philosophy at university as Clarke had once done. Sure, he knew The Gumboot Song, like any Kiwi kid, but Fred Dagg meant little to him.

Bryan Dawe and John Clarke’s political satire show, Clarke and Dawe, aired in Australia for almost 30 years.

He’d discovered the genius of Clarke through his acerbic skewering of political doublespeak in Clarke and Dawe, a TV news satire that was still going strong in Australia after almost 30 years.

The Front Fell Off – a mock interview about a tanker that had spilt 20,000 tonnes of oil into the sea off West Australia – has had more than 11 million views on YouTube.

Clarke’s death hit my son hard. At the time, Flynn didn’t have a high opinion of humanity generally (still doesn’t, to be fair) and now, the world had one less decent person in it.

“It was miserable because there wasn’t going to be any more of him, just a re-telling of the person rather than continuing to experience him,” he says.

“His witty, understated absurdity and cuttingly good satire were wonderfully insightful, and he always felt very authentic to me.”

Comedian John Clarke with his wife, Helen, who he met in London in the early 70s.

The eldest of two daughters, Lorin was born just a few weeks after her parents moved to Melbourne, where her mother, Helen, is from. So her dad is the only true-blue Kiwi in the family.

It was a time of reinvention for Clarke, who’d come to feel trapped by Fred and the Trevs, as all of his seven sons were named. After becoming such public property in New Zealand, it was also an opportunity to reclaim some privacy.

Still, he was a bit of a Dagg in Australia, too. Sometimes Lorin would walk past a window and hear him recording a radio interview in character, booming at the dogs and the kids to “get away outside!”

In truth, she says, the man and his creation were only one step removed. During filming for the documentary, she did a shoot at Te Papa, where Fred Dagg’s bucket hat, black singlet, baggy shorts and gumboots are on permanent display.

Comedian John Clarke as Fred Dagg in the 70s.

And here’s a story that didn’t make the final cut. An anxious flyer, Clarke rarely travelled by air, so one of the museum’s curators flew over to collect the outfit in person.

On her way back into New Zealand, she was stopped by biosecurity officers at customs. Dagg’s gumboots were full of mud and grass, because Clarke had been mowing the lawns in them the day before.

“So it was already part of who he was long before I came into the timeline,” says Lorin, who was the guest of honour at a special preview screening of the film in Palmerston North, her father’s hometown until he was sent off to boarding school at the age of 12.

“We worked so hard to show the ‘him’ in all of it. I love watching the film because I sit there and think to myself, ‘hi dad’. But I also wanted it to be the sort of story you could fall through as somebody who didn’t know who he was.”

Lorin Clarke looks beyond the folklore that surrounds her father in an intimate, funny and touching documentary, Not Only Fred Dagg but Also John Clarke. Photo / Johnny Nicolaidis

Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke had its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August (the title was shortened to But Also John Clarke for Australian audiences – apparently something to do with long titles being trickier to work with, rather than the Aussies having a short attention span).

After the first screening, a young usher from Scandinavia who’d never heard of Clarke came up to Lorin in tears.

“She said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with your dad as a comedian and it makes me miss my papa’. When you lose somebody, especially when it’s a shock, you want something to come out of it, so having people see that in it is a beautiful thing.”

NZ Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson pays tribute to John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg) and Footrot Flats creator Murray Ball, who died within weeks of each other in 2017.

A writer, performer and director in her own right, Lorin recalls her childhood as an unmitigated delight.

Clips from the countless home videos her father recorded of the family are sprinkled throughout the documentary, accompanied by his distinctive narration. “A lesser-spotted smart arse” is how he describes Lorin in one of them.

When her own two children were young, she’d escape the house to work in a shared office with her “Australian-ish” father, who covered the walls in maps of New Zealand and photographs of the countryside.

They spoke the same language, these two keen observers of life in all its ridiculous and exasperating glory. Lorin wrote, directed and narrated the award-winning radio fiction serial, The Fitzroy Diaries, and often something she’d said in conversation with her dad would end up on Clark and Dawe.

Lorin Clarke and her younger sister, Lucia, were born after their father moved to Australia in the late 70s.

However, despite unwavering support from both parents, finding her own voice wasn’t easy. For many years, Lorin kept her family connection on the down-low.

It wasn’t until 2023 that she “came out” with her memoir Would That Be Funny? about life growing up with her gregarious, anti-authoritarian father, art historian mother and little sister, Lucia.

“I was pretty shy about coming forward,” she says. “A lot of people didn’t know that we were related. So it was a huge decision to do the book and the film, and it was really only because of the absolute wealth of documentary material the family had.”

Clarke, who never threw out an envelope, left behind more than 200 boxes of work and correspondence. That proved invaluable, but the real gift was a document found on his computer a few days after his death, titled “For Lorin and Lucia”. Filled with musings and memories, it ran to some 60-70 pages.

“People sometimes ask me if I was surprised by anything in the making of the documentary, and because we talked about everything in our family, I wasn’t. The surprise for me was the day I found that document. It felt like he was talking to us.”

John Clarke shares a script with his granddaughter, one of Lorin’s two children. He died of a heart attack in 2017.

Lorin had also begun recording conversations with her father a few years earlier, because he showed a complete lack of interest in writing about his own life. They’d talked their way through to the year she was born when he died.

Clarke had a difficult childhood, in the shadow of his parents’ miserable marriage and a bullying father who constantly belittled him. With a remarkable lack of bitterness, he saw them as part of a generation traumatised by their wartime experiences.

It taught him, he says, to see the “twoness” of things – an ability he would later deploy so skilfully as a satirist – taking what was “nutritious” and discarding the rest.

After spending years at university, studying everything from law and economics to Italian, philosophy and quantitative analysis, he left without a single qualification but always considered it the most formative period in his life.

John Clarke plays a laconic gravedigger in Sam Neill’s 1990 black comedy Death in Brunswick, which features an unforgettable graveyard scene.

As well as generous doses of archival footage, the documentary features interviews with the likes of Stephen Fry (“absolutely original … an extraordinary man”), actor David Wenham (“your dad was probably the smartest and funniest man I have ever met”) and Ben Elton (“there was never any malice, even when he was putting the rapier in deep”).

Neill talks of his “immense kindness” and insatiable curiosity about the world around him. Comedian Rhys Darby describes Clarke as the opening act of the New Zealand comedy industry.

For Samoa-born actor, writer and director Oscar Kightley, Clarke was the first Kiwi who made him laugh. Now, as he puts it so beautifully on-screen, Lorin is bringing her father home.

John Clarke, still rocking a bucket hat, walking with daughter Lorin in East Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens.

“To me, the most interesting thing about his story isn’t that he’s funny or that he’s clever,” she says. “It’s how he got to be him and the decisions he made to get there.

“There’s a moment [in the documentary] where he says, ‘my audience backed me’. That was huge for him.

“So this is me trying to honour that for Kiwi audiences and also for the Kiwis who’ve never heard of him. You know how you all know about gumboots? This might be why.”

Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke opens on Boxing Day. In Clarke’s hometown of Palmerston, photographs of Fred Dagg and other history-making New Zealanders feature in a new exhibition, Out in the Field: Aotearoa Histories Through the Lens of Peter Bush, at Te Manawa Museum. As part of a fundraising campaign for the Peter Bush Archive, prints of selected Fred Dagg images can be ordered through temanawa.co.nz/shop.

Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.

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