Highways and Byways by Jimmy Barnes review – compassionate collection from a master yarnsmith
After two years spent living in scummy hostels, Jimmy Barnes’s parents found a brick house on Heytesbury Road in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth West. They promised the kids a garden, perhaps a veggie patch, but like the marriage, that garden went to seed. His parents “found friends just like the ones they’d had back in Scotland” and the drinking and violence escalated.
Barnes’s life, six decades later, is a charmed one, and – against all odds – he’s learned to relax. He does pilates. He gardens. He has a book club. But although his latest collection of stories, Highways and Byways, contains many a rip-roarin’ tale, what also comes across loud and clear is a constant vigilance. Just like his garden, Barnes keeps his psyche well tended.
As recently as 2012, he was wasted in a plush hotel suite wrapping a cord around his neck, as detailed in his second memoir, Working Class Man (which won him [auto]biography of the year for the second year in a row). Now, as he writes in his fourth autobiographical book: “I’m still haunted by what happened at Heytesbury Road. I would love to break its spell and escape those painful recollections … But the memories, and the nightmares, still return.”
Picture his calendar in 2024, and it would seem as though Barnes has no intention of slowing down; his latest book release comes amid Cold Chisel’s Big Five-O tour, and the band’s new compilation album, 50 Years – The Best Of, has topped the Aria album chart.
But this collection of stories seems more reflective. Barnes zooms in on tales that have appeared in previous books (to be expected when you’ve written four memoirs in eight years, in addition to a co-authored autobiography in 2002), this time holding each gem up to the light for a more detailed inspection.
The singer’s ADHD means he only tends to write when injury or sickness floors him, and he wrote Highways and Byways when laid up for months after a deadly staph infection and open-heart surgery. He’s lost none of his raconteur’s flair, however. Short and sweet, many of these stories are bar-stool yarns, or dunny reads, if you’re the kind who has a bookshelf in the smallest room (no judgment), and they’re peppered with playlists.
Like any good yarnsmith, he’s a master of the one-liner. Of the Gold Coast in the 80s, he says: “You could get a suntan, learn to meditate and have your wallet stolen all on the same weekend.” On Chisel’s Don Walker writing his best songs while slogging up and down the nation’s highways: “You don’t think Houndog came to him after a short hop on a Learjet nibbling on crackers and caviar and sipping champagne, do you?” When he stays at a hotel chain co-founded by Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall: “To me, Simply Red owning hotels seemed like a great idea, because I fell asleep every time I listened to them.” And in a tale about his father being a sorcerer of sorts: “Dad had one final illusion to pull off. In a puff of Rothmans Plain cigarette smoke, he disappeared from our family home once and for all.”
But this is also a book soaked in compassion and non-judgment. In one of the short fiction stories among the nonfiction, titled Sacred Heart, lonely old Mary is yearning for human connection but is too slow in opening the safety lock on the front door to be able to even catch a glimpse of the grocery delivery boy. In Shirley Knott, about a drag queen in Darlinghurst, Barnes observes: “Country town prejudices had forced her to fight all her life. She had become hardened beyond belief by the time she learned to sew her own sequins on her first dress.”
Related: Jimmy Barnes confronts his demons: ‘For 40 years, I was drinking myself to death’
Barnes is a man to whom family is everything, which makes his reflections on his own childhood all the more pained. In trying to understand his parents’ frustrations, he considers: “I sometimes wondered if Dad championed all things Scottish to make my mother feel guilty for dragging him away from where he belonged, the only place where he’d felt any sense of self-worth. In Glasgow he was a champion. In Glasgow he was a hardman. In Glasgow he was feared. In Glasgow he could stand tall. Anywhere else, he couldn’t.”
Perhaps for a short while, Barnes might have been a chip off the old block. As he told the Guardian in 2020 about his early solo career: “For a long time, it was all about chart position. ‘If my record doesn’t come in at No 1, I’m a failure.’ I cared too much about what people thought of me.”
But Barnes is no has-been, no shoulda-woulda-coulda. And with this book already having debuted at the top of the autobiography and biography chart, he has nothing left to prove.
Highways and Byways: Tall Tales and Short Stories from the Long Way Round by Jimmy Barnes is published by HarperCollins Australia ($45)
