Keeping Jack Thompson alive in Arnhem Land

Updated

The twist of fate that helped rescue legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson as he juggled shooting his new film in the outback and end-stage kidney failure.

Jack Thompson's body is failing him.

The buffed and bronzed physique of one of Australia's legends of the screen — and the nation's first male centrefold — now requires medical intervention to keep going.

Not that this means Thompson is slowing down.

Aged 78, Thompson is working on what he considers to be one of the most important films of his 50-year career, shooting across remote Arnhem Land in gruelling conditions.

"What would I complain about?" he says, in that molten-honey voice so well-known to Australian audiences.

"I'm alive. I'm on the right side of the ground, as the old fella says! Take a look at where you are, take a look at how long you've been here and how long you might reasonably have ahead of you. Be here now. Enjoy this."

Thompson is undergoing thrice-weekly dialysis to treat kidney failure, a condition that crept up on him over the past two years due to prostate cancer, and for which there is no cure. Before he received treatment, he was days from death.

But a groundbreaking medical and dialysis service, the Northern Territory's Purple House, has allowed Thompson to receive his lifesaving blood treatment on the road — even in remote conditions.

And it closes the loop on the cause of Indigenous rights and recognition that Thompson has championed throughout his entire life.

Off the track and on the set

Thompson has made his career playing the quintessential Australian male. His broad portfolio spans five decades, from breakthrough television series Spyforce, to the rugged horseman in The Man From Snowy River; the fiery soldier in Breaker Morant or the well-intentioned father in The Sum of Us. Recent roles include Star Wars and Mystery Road.

His dedication to the craft has been the awe of other actors for decades.

"He's done close to 50 films, that's extremely unusual, but it speaks to the tenacity of the man," actor Sigrid Thornton tells Australian Story.

"He's just going to keep on doing this because it's his calling."

Now Thompson is on set filming the latest chapter in his filmography.

Cahill's Crossing in the Northern Territory is known for its harsh conditions: the extraordinary number of crocodiles that lurk menacingly on the road, and the regularity in which cars are swept away trying to cross it.

However, Thompson is not perturbed as he and his fellow actors cross the flooded causeway on their way to the township of Jabiru, in Kakadu.

"You do a sharp left at the first crocodile," he says, with that unmistakable deep laugh ringing through the four-wheel drive.

Thompson had just finished a long day of filming in 40-degree heat in the middle of a swamp in Kakadu National Park. He is busy making High Ground, a movie recreating the Indigenous resistance to white settlement set in 1936.

It's a film close to Thompson's heart. He spent seven years trying to get it off the ground, stressing the topic's importance in Australian history.

"The reason I wanted so badly to make this film was that it was an Indigenous story, and that's been a subject dear to my heart for a very long time," he says.

"It's a tale in which the Indigenous people are not the victims, they are the protagonists."

'A dialysed Jack or a dead Jack'

It's close to sunset, but Thompson's day is far from over. He has another five hours ahead of him. This time it's in a purple truck, hooked up to a machine cleaning his blood.

"I would finish the day of filming around six o'clock and go to dialysis," he says. "Finish about midnight, get to sleep about one [o'clock], get up again about five o'clock the next morning and back to filming. But I was a very happy man doing that."

Just over 12 months ago, Thompson was a dead man walking.

"I finally presented to the doctors at St Vincent's Hospital and they said, 'You're about 48 hours away from not waking up'," he says.

"That's very confronting."

Thompson admits he had ignored the symptoms for months, thinking it was just the signs of ageing.

But he was diagnosed with serious kidney disease. There was no option for a transplant.

"I never thought that end stage renal failure would have anything to do with me," he says. "I certainly didn't have a diet full of sugar. I exercised. I had a healthy diet. I was stunned. Here I am."

Thompson worried that his career might be over. While receiving news he would have to be dialysed three days a week for the rest of his life, his passion project High Ground had just been signed off.

"Inevitably I started to think about how this would affect the making of a film that I had been wanting to make for seven years," he says.

"The setting of the film is east Arnhem Land [and] there is no dialysis out there."

But there was no choice about the treatment. St Vincent's Hospital doctor Mark Penny says he told the actor: "We either have a dialysed Jack or we have a dead Jack. There is no middle ground on this."

1,500km away from dialysis

Luck was on Thompson's side and it came in the form of a big purple truck.

A nurse at the hospital heard of Thompson's plight and called in her friend, former St Vincent's Hospital nurse Sarah Brown, now the chief executive officer of Purple House.

The Alice Springs-based organisation operates the Purple Truck, a mobile dialysis unit brightly painted by the late Patrick Tjungurrayi and Ningura Napurrula, that travels across central Australia, allowing patients to receive treatment while they visit home.

"When I walked into the room in St Vinny's, Jack had just finished his first dialysis," Ms Brown says.

"He was looking quite unwell, and he looked really sad. There was this big man with this big personality and this huge life sitting in a hospital chair next to a hospital bed in a gown, looking crook.

"We were the only people in the country who could help Jack to do this. It just felt right."

But it meant extending the Purple Truck's services to a white man — the first non-Indigenous person to have been dialysed in the service — despite some "grumbles from unexpected parts".

"It came from non-Indigenous people," she says.

Irene Nungala is on the Purple House board that agreed to send the truck to Thompson.

She says his background supporting and championing Indigenous Australians was a factor in agreeing to his dialysis. She also wants High Ground to highlight the Aboriginal resistance to settlement on the national conscience.

"The story he was telling, we're going to help, we thought about it and said yes. We have to help him," Ms Nungala says.

From stockman to spokesman

Since he spent a year as the only white worker among a team of Indigenous stockman at 14 years old, Thompson has campaigned for Indigenous stories and respect.

In 1999, when the Northern Territory Government sought to scrap bilingual education, Thompson was a prominent voice condemning the move as "cultural genocide".

In this cause he met Yothu Yindi frontman and Indigenous rights activist Mandawuy Yunupingu. It was a partnership that developed into a deep friendship in which Thompson was adopted into the Yunipingu family and Yolngu clan as Jack Gulkala Thompson.

And when Yunupingu developed renal disease, Thompson saw him undergo dialysis.

"I saw him diminish really, but he chose to come off dialysis and to slowly pass away," he says. "That was his choice. It was a dignified choice."

Clancy of the Overflow on dialysis

Purple House's Sarah Brown says the team is proud to have been able to help Thompson — "part of our cultural heritage" — in this critical time of his life.

"It's an unlikely story, Clancy of the Overflow, having dialysis in Kakadu, in a truck owned and run by Aboriginal people from the desert, yeah that's pretty unlikely," she says.

Thompson knows how unlikely it is that he continues to make movies at his age and with his medical condition.

"You would put this in a movie, and they would say, 'No don't be silly Jack, that's very unlikely to happen all that'," Thompson says.

"But of course it has happened. It's wonderful.

"They have made it possible for my career to continue, when it very well could have come to a full stop right there."

Watch Australian Story's Back on Track on Youtube.

Credits

Producers: Kristy O'Brien, Ben Cheshire

Photography: Kristy O'Brien, IMDB, Australian Portrait Gallery, Purple House

Feature writer: Rosanne Barrett

Topics: liver-and-kidneys, actor, jabiru-0886, sydney-2000

First posted