Every family has a claim to fame and ours is this: we're related to Nino Culotta. That counted for a lot as a child of the '70s and surpassed all other family feats, past and present, including a grandfather with a dozen published books and a great-grandfather (his father) who became a barrister in his 50s after being forced off the land due to drought with eight children and a piano.
It's 50 years since Nino Culotta published his rollicking bestseller They're A Weird Mob, about arriving from Italy on a ship and finding work as a brickies' labourer in Punchbowl, where he struggled to comprehend and eventually master the Aussie vernacular and ingratiate himself by bellowing, in a near perfect Aussie accent, "Howyergoinmateorright?"
But what I have never understood is how he got away with it. How did John O'Grady write a book pretending to be Nino Culotta when he was actually someone else entirely and still be warmly embraced, revered even, by the nation? Helen Darville was hammered 35 years later for wearing peasant blouses and feigning Ukrainian ancestry for her award-winning novel. James Frey was rebuked on Oprah for fabricating large parts of his memoir. And Norma Khouri was pilloried for not being a Jordanian woman who had witnessed honour killings, as she claimed in Forbidden Love.
So how come Uncle John pulled it off? That's my great-uncle John O'Grady, of 100 per cent Irish Catholic stock who fooled the entire country that he was a naive but lovable Italian immigrant who lobbed here with nothing but an English phrase book which bore no resemblance to the language being spoken around him in the pub at Kings Bloody Cross. He quickly learns that a "schooner" is not a sailing vessel and a "shout" doesn't mean to yell. Early reviews praise the "New Australian" for his "triumph over a strange and ridiculous tongue" and for "marching boldly but unassumingly into unfamiliar surroundings". Only, the surroundings were not unfamiliar, and there was nothing unassumed about it.
It's not like his deceit was premeditated. It happened by default. John O'Grady never set out to be an author but accepted his lot as a pharmacist until a bet with his younger brother, Frank (my grandfather), who had published several works of historical fiction, spurred him on.
John's son, also John O'Grady, recalls it well. "Every Sunday the family would gather at my grandparents' home at Bronte. One Sunday my Uncle Frank had a new book out and foolishly asked Da what he thought of it. My father used to refer to Frank's books as 'library novels', because they were researched in the library. Da said: 'Not much, and if I couldn't write a better book than that I'd give up.' So Frank bet him £10 that he couldn't write any sort of book and get it published. He said, 'I'll take the bet'."
John had written before - one-act plays for the Sydney Repertory Theatre, which he founded - but never a book. When he took time out from pharmacy to help a mate build a house at Punchbowl, it got him thinking.
"He was fascinated by the people he met on the building site - but couldn't understand the language," recalls John jnr. "They were speaking 'Australianese', as he used to call it. He thought the language was wonderful, but thought, 'If I can't understand it, what about these poor migrants? How do they understand it?' At the same time he'd been learning Italian from his barber, so that's where the idea for the book came from."
John O'Grady wrote They're a Weird Mob in six weeks before heading to Samoa as the Government Pharmacist and forgetting all about it.
"He said, 'toss this in a drawer until I get back'. He certainly didn't think it would get published. But I decided it was too good for that. I really did think it was very funny."
John Jr, who was working with Reg Grundy on Wheel of Fortune on 2CH, decided to act as his father's agent. After a rejection from Angus and Roberston, who suggested that "in spite of some very amusing incidents and a fine command of Australian slang, the story would not make a successful book", he sent the manuscript to the publisher Ure Smith, under the pseudonym of Nino Culotta.
Sam Ure Smith, now in his late 80s, gave the pages to his secretary, Janette Ven Brown, to read while at the hairdresser and will never forget her enthusiasm.
"She came rushing back to the office waving it in the air and said, 'You have to read this now'. So I started reading it on the train and I came back the next morning and said, 'You've picked a winner. It was plain good humour. Very Australian and entertaining. I thought, 'I'll be surprised if this doesn't sell like mad.' I rang John O'Grady, the agent, and said, 'I accept this for publication.'
"I didn't know quite what to tell Sam because he wanted to meet the author," recalls John. "I tried to fudge it but decided to let him in on the secret, that the writer was not Nino Culotta but my father. But Sam decided to leave it as it was. He thought the book would be more successful if people thought it was written by a 'New Australian', so we kept it between us."
Australians new and old lapped it up. It sold a record 130,000 copies in its first year, bragged Ure Smith in a brochure in 1958. "This averages at 3000 per week, 60 per hour and one every minute of the working day!"
My mother, Maggie, also recalls being sworn to secrecy about her uncle's nom de plume.
"I read Weird Mob as a nurse, laughing my head off in the hospital wards. Then I saw in the paper it was Uncle Jack and thought, 'Oh dear. It looks like it's out!'
"I started to get a bit nervous about how long we could keep this going," John explains. "Journalists wanted to talk to Nino Culotta. I kept putting them off, saying he was out of the country, which was technically true because my father was still in Samoa. But they were deeply suspicious.
"I cabled him and said we needed a photo for the book jacket, so he sent a photo of himself sitting on a kerosene tin with his back to the camera. But then a journalist looked up the public records and blew our cover. We were worried it might kill sales but it didn't. They went through the roof."
Sam Ure Smith recalls: "It was well liked by the bookshops and that makes a big difference. It just took off. Boom! It was my greatest success in publishing. We flew ahead after that."
They're a Weird Mob was serialised on radio and newspapers and there were "weird mob" parties across the country, with guests sporting blue singlets and work boots. When O'Grady returned to Australia a few months later, he had no idea of the hype.
"I cabled him to expect press at Mascot and he got off the plane wearing the regalia of a Samoan chief in grass skirt and headdress. The press loved him. We were booked to go straight to the ABC studios for an interview but by then he was officially outed."
John O'Grady himself hinted at fear of retribution for withholding his identity, writing in They're a Weird Mob: "My family name is something quite different, but I can't use it here. Because this little book is about Australians, and if they knew who wrote it, some of them might put bricks through my windows."
As to why his father was let off the hook, John says times were different. "It was a more innocent period. He didn't pretend to live that existence. He thought it was a great hoot."
He encouraged Australians to have a good laugh at themselves, while providing a walloping hint for the tens of thousands of "new Australians" who were gracing our shores: "Get yourself accepted as one of him and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed."
John O'Grady still has his father's first and only rejection letter framed on his wall. As the former head of situation comedy at the ABC, whose best-known success was Mother and Son, he says it is a reminder to never turn down a hit show. "I always got asked if I was that John O'Grady. My father loved it because he claimed credit for all the TV shows I did, except the ones he didn't like."
The book was reprinted every year for the next 38 years, and in 1966 was made into a hit film starring Italian actor Walter Chiari as Nino alongside Australian actors Chips Rafferty and John Meillon, with a cameo by Graham Kennedy.
John wrote 18 more books including a sequel to Weird Mob, and never went back to the pharmacy. Or Samoa. And yes, some time before he died in 1981, he collected on that £10 bet with my grandfather. Even though he owed him. Big time.
Jacinta Tynan is an author, columnist and a news presenter with Sky News.