I've enjoyed Clint Eastwood movies. A superhero with the answers, double cool, self-sufficient, existing without society, without anyone's help, quiet, a man of few words, few ideas, but lots of action: this was the Eastwood persona. It was partly the real person too. Such was the character of Dirty Harry in the 1973 movie Magnum Force. With this movie Eastwood had become "the undisputed top movie star in the world."(1) As I read the book(1) I came to appreciate a man with some fine qualities and a man with his own particular weaknesses. He certainly did not enjoy his celebrity status. It made him uncomfortable.

In 1973 I had moved into a type of celebrity status in my own little world as a high school teacher in South Australia. It was a status I enjoyed as a teacher, off and on, until 1999. If a biography was ever to be written about my life it would reveal, as it did of Eastwood, a man of strengths and weaknesses. I found the celebrity status, the endless talking and listening both in schools and in my private life, wore me out by century's end. My persona, my personality, my road to success, was the opposite to Eastwood's: people in community, ideas and words, wall to wall for years. But the Aussi sense of humour, always slightly below the surface is, as Jerry Seinfeld noted, a very endearing quality.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to(1)Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, Robson Books, London, 1992, p.142; and (2) Jerry Seinfeld,"Enough Rope," 26/11/07, ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm.

You made your millions, Clint,
while I got through my career
after a somewhat shakey start.

Your quiet self, superhero persona,
man of action par excellence
took you to the top of the movie tree,
while this man of ideas and words,
endless words, produced poetry
and print with millions of phrases
and sentences on pages
and in relationships
enough to sink a ship--
Downunder in the Antipodes.

My ship's ballast,
the ballast of my creativity,
was not the great Hollywood engine,
but an emerging world religion,
the centre of a psych-intellectual
life which drove me, eventually,
it seems, to find poetry everywhere.

Ron Price
16 November 2001
(updated for Discovery Channel
29/11/07)