Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There (22 page)

‘The dog’s pissing in it.’

‘What?’

I spun around in time to see Boston shaking off the last few drops on the rim of my upturned no-longer-smells-like-brand-new carbon-fibre helmet. That dog lets go like a racehorse. I spent an hour washing it out while Erwin got his bike out of storage mode. He kept laughing whenever the image of Boston popped into his head. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said repeatedly. ‘How’s your lid?’

I had finished handwashing the liner and scrubbing out the inside, but it didn’t really matter what or how much I tried. I slipped my head inside its superlight carbony Darth Vader slick cottonwool internals, and for a second everything was fine, like shoving your head into an Aston Martin’s glovebox, then finding a sodden nappy in the corner.

The day only got better. When we finally got Erwin’s bike started and it looked like we would actually go for a ride, it pelted down. So I decided to take his bike up the road for a wet spin, and promptly dropped it while turning into his driveway and broke the big toe on my right foot. Erwin was gracious about it; the bike, a three-year-old Harley VRod, was barely scratched but my foot was a mess.

Off to hospital, home with pain meds and the diagnosis that I would need foot surgery to fix the problem. I had to wait a few days before my appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon and, as things are in life, this was when I got the phone call from
National Geographic
telling me I’d been cast and the contract was on its way over. It arrived with a breakdown of the content of the series; it all looked full-on, with lots and lots of things involving a fully functioning and reliable big toe.

So then I went to see the surgeon and he got to the bit where they talk about recovery from the operation. ‘You’re going to be incapacitated and without normal mobility for three months, Paul, so if there’s any reason why you can’t do this, we can postpone the procedure until later.’ He chewed on the end of his pen and searched my face for any type of reaction.

‘Postpone for how long?’

‘Well, not more than six months, at the most.’

I explained my situation after which he gave me more drugs and showed me how to tape up my foot. He also gave me a special shoe insert that stopped my toe from moving too much and that was it.

I didn’t tell a soul at
National Geographic
about my toe, so a week later, script not yet memorised, toe throbbing in period-accurate boots, I emerged from a wardrobe trailer, dressed circa 1788 convict, into the middle of a packed Circular Quay at Sydney Harbour, completely unprepared.

1788—THE YEAR OF
MIGRATING
DANGEROUSLY

RUSSELL VINES WAS
the director. A big man, big and hairy in a nice way, he had lots and lots of experience filming hard, tough stuff on the fly. His last television directorial effort won awards and was the first series to cover on any level the stages of selection into the Special Air Service Regiment;
SAS
—
The Search For Warriors
would have been a difficult shoot for him and his crew. And of course all the guys on the crew had lots of experience; we were roughly around the same age too. Meanwhile I had bucketloads of dialogue to learn, lots of factoids to inject at appropriate moments, and the whole lot left my head like David Copperfield’s jet the moment the trailer door cracked sunlight onto my woolly and extremely itchy wardrobe ensemble.

‘Lovely, you look suitably hot and uncomfortable,’ Russell said, glancing up from his gear as he set up his shot.

This would be the first image in the
National Geographic
series
Australia—Life On The Edge
, seven one-hour episodes covering pivotal moments in our country’s history and starting with the big one, the arrival of the First Fleet into Sydney Cove. There were four presenters involved in the series, three of them wonderfully qualified, experienced around cameras and good-looking—Mat McLachlan (historian), Giovanna Fasanelli (marine scientist and submarine pilot), Andrew Bales (geologist)—and me (I don’t have a special talent, eating canapés perhaps, although I used to paint when I was an alcoholic). I realised I was the odd one out as soon as I started holding my gut in and couldn’t remember factoid number one, my name.

Russell was supremely patient with me, as was the other director, Eliot Buchan; they knew exactly what to say and how to put me at ease. That’s hard as I’m easily distracted, especially when the first shoot is in the middle of Circular Quay during the morning peak-hour rush. They needed to fence off random people from walking into the shot, Russell and Eliot had this sixth sense, they would break from conversation, snap their gaze into the middle distance, look at a crew member and say, ‘Jeff, at your two o’clock,’ then straight back to the conversation. Jeff bolts off into the throng; he’s a guy on the crew whose job is to deal with ‘squeezers’. A squeezer is anyone in authority who will walk up to the crew regardless of what they’re doing and start demanding to see their varied forms of permission to film there, their insur–ance or safety or parking or lighting permit, or permit to be bald, or the official onsite filming authority that states that the filming can only be for fifteen minutes, in a southwesterly direction not to be panned up by more than 20 degrees, and everyone’s got to be dressed in blue. Shit like that, shit that had been signed off by the squeezer’s boss’s boss weeks earlier with a follow-up call, email, carrier pigeon sent that morning as a reminder. Squeezer control is a full-time gig.

I got nervous as Russell and Eliot began walking me through the first shot and I started to realise that lots of money was involved, that eight people on the crew and dozens of others representing harbour safety, the marine police and the council were all there watching, and the knock-on effect this had on all the ferries, tour boats and public transport that come and go from the epicentre of the harbour and were now on hold while we got this shot. In fact, the whole day was going to be spent collecting what would equate to somewhere around six to eight minutes of screen time on the final cut.

‘Right, so we’re going to be tracking from that boat there,’ Russell said, pointing at a special camera boat rig, then pointing out that he had a camera on top of the Harbour Bridge, another one on a special stick on the jetty, and one on a fucking helicopter as well.

‘Okay, then,’ my voice had turned into a nervous squeak.

Mat to my right was confidently nodding while the sound recordist Jason North was wiring me up and saw the shit I was packing. ‘Don’t worry, champ, you’ll piss this in,’ Mat said. I faked a smile and got nauseous.

In this scene, Mat and I, respectively dressed as 18th-century English ship’s officer and convict, had to row an equally period-accurate boat into the harbour, stopping as close as possible to the actual point where the real First Fleet rowed ashore. This involved getting the shot from multiple angles while we faultlessly rowed like the wind, avoiding the world’s second-largest cruise ship moored at the overseas passenger terminal. We were sitting next to each other with an oar each, rowing towards number 6 quay but not facing the direction we were going. ‘I’m fucked already.’ I looked at Mat who wasn’t even sweating yet.

‘Mate, stick to the dialogue,’ he said, laughing. ‘Whatever the fuck happens, just make sure we don’t row too close to that cruise liner, okay?’

Russell’s camera boat started to pull closer and he gave us some direction via a radio transmitter under our seat. ‘Guys, just make sure you don’t get too close to the liner.’ We nodded and I glanced over my shoulder to check; there was noise, lots of people cheering, and we looked up to see hundreds of silver-haired pensioners waving at us from several different decks way up in the air above us.

‘Stand by, camera rolling,’ said the voice under my seat, and then we rowed, big, steady, we-could-do-this-shit-for-a-living rowing. ‘That’s great, guys, keep going, Paul look over to your right at the Opera House, Mat at the Harbour Bridge, yes, perfect, we’re pulling back and coming around towards the front, just keep going, yes, oh, the light is perfect there, not too close to the . . . turn left, left, the other left, fuckin’ port, to port—’

Bang!
the hard metallic clang of wood into world’s second-largest cruise liner caused the pensioners to go into hyperdrive. Then we heard, ‘
Get that thing away from
my ship!
’ and Mat and I nearly capsized in shock as the booming voice of God came down over our heads and reverberated across Sydney Harbour.

‘And that’s the world’s second-largest penis speaking into the world’s second-largest loudspeaker,’ Mat said and grinned at me.

Woop woop woop!
We jumped again and spun around to see the water police beside us. ‘Gents, throw us your line there and we’ll give you a quick tow over to where you’re supposed to be,’ one of the water rats said.

I threw them our line and soon we were back in the right place and ready to do our dialogue. This involved me pulling out a painstakingly replicated copy of an early map from the time of the First Fleet, making sure we didn’t drift back for a second time into the second-largest penis. It worked, somehow, I have no idea how, and my brain regurgitated all my dialogue with no mistakes.

‘Got it, that’s perfect.’ Russell was happy.

They got the big sweeping visuals, the close-ups, the whole introduction to the series. After we climbed out of the boat and waited for the next location move, another chap appeared in front of Mat and I holding collapsible chairs with built-in shade and proceeded to ask us about food. ‘Hi, guys, I’m Bill, the runner. Coffee, sandwich, Danish, smoke, bacon-and-egg roll, newspaper, phone, whadya need?’ Mat and I exchanged blank looks. In front of us the crew were packing up what looked like half a tonne of gear into huge cases.

‘Hi, Bill,’ I began, ‘um, are we supposed to sit in the shade sipping a latte and watching them work?’ Behind Bill I could see one guy tightening his back brace, trucks were pulling up and everyone was talking into two-way headsets and phones at the same time with both hands full of gear.

‘Yup, you’re the talent, that’s the way it works.’

I was already backing my wet arse towards crisp canvas about to say, ‘Fair enough, Bill, I’ll have a double Macallan 18, no ice, a number five Montecristo and today’s
Sydney Morning Herald
, please, my good man,’ but Mat spoke first. ‘No, no, we’ll jump in and help,’ so we did.

The next location was just plain funny. After their research department had pinpointed as best they could the exact place where the First Fleet pitched their tents on the first night, we replicated that as well. As convict I prepared the first meal followed by the first spew. Considering the state of the food left onboard after almost a year at sea, you can imagine the choice was a bit rough. Dead weevils, rotten once-salted beef, pork or mutton, dried peas, flour, cornmeal and water all makes good glue but would’ve tasted like shit.

The governor chose this spot to make camp because there was a naturally occurring water source coming up through the ground on the western side of what is now Hyde Park. The water formed a natural channel to the cove down present-day Market and King streets in the city. There was a drought in 1789 so reservoirs or ‘tanks’ for storing the water were cut into the sandstone sides of the channel. Called Tank Stream, it was the new colony’s primary source of water for the next 40 years; as Sydney grew the stream became an open drain and by the 1930s it had turned into a stormwater drain. The whole great modern city now sits directly above Tank Stream, and it’s still there, still accessible in a section running a diagonal line near the corner of Pitt and Hunter streets. A 225-year-old time capsule preserved.

Russell and Eliot wandered over in the afternoon sun, so very casual, relaxed, all-in-a-day’s-work-and-shit; I was still trying to get my head around what they’d already achieved that morning. It wasn’t just Mat and I working that day, the other two presenters were filming with other crews as well. While we were rowing into that cruise liner, Giovanna was in a two-seater submarine looking at a Japanese mini-sub that came into Sydney Harbour during World War Two and Andrew was climbing over the Harbour Bridge. We’d also been told that at some point later in the day one of us was going to get strapped into a personal jet pack and sent into the harbour to fly about 8 metres in the air over the water. Tethered via a big hose connected to a powerful mobile floating pump, the presenter would literally fly about like Buzz Lightyear. I prayed it wouldn’t be me.

For this next shot, though, Mat and I walked down an alleyway following an official from Sydney Water to a nondescript recessed concrete stairway that ended at an ominous-looking steel and wood door. Mat and I were about to enter the bowels of the city. The Tank Stream had not been a sewer for a very long time, but what’s down there was far more terrifying than long gone poo. The squeezer ratio had doubled; Sydney Water were right on their game and very organised. We needed all kinds of permission and permits to get down there and it had to be ventilated for eight hours prior to our arrival. We entered a large room just below the surface with benches and rows of safety gear neatly hung on hooks in order of size. It was very nicely done, a bit
Better Homes
& Gardens
The Bunker Edition. After a detailed briefing from our guide and another one from Russell on the shots he wanted to get, we accessed the Tank Stream via a vertical shaft through a hatch inside a small room at one end of the bunker. ‘If there’s a sudden storm, this will fill up to the top in seconds, so we need to be ready,’ our guide reminded us.

It was a perfectly round tunnel, big enough to stand up in places, carved out by hand by convicts of the First Fleet, each individual tool strike leaving a pockmarked surface stretching into the black damp recesses beyond the reach of my torchlight. It was quiet down there, with a palpable sense of history. We moved slowly through the tunnel, following the trickle of clear water flowing down the centre. It was clean, there was no bad smell or debris, nothing offensive, until we got to the narrowest point at the end.