Silver Wattle (50 page)

Timing was important on location because the weather could change in an instant. Once in the Grose Valley, Klara complained that her make-up was melting. We used the sun for our lighting and close-ups involved catching its rays with a mirror and reflecting them into the actor’s face. In her elaborate costume of tulle and sequins, Klara was uncomfortably hot. The rest of us were wilting also. Betty brought pannikins of water from the stream, but the drinks provided only temporary relief. Then, out of nowhere, a bracing wind began to blow and clouds loomed on the horizon. Streaks of lightning stabbed the sky. It was atmospheric and Hugh kept the camera rolling while Ranjana stood by his side holding an umbrella. I was torn between getting the shot and the safety of the cast and crew. Robert took over and moved the cast to a nearby cave, where he built a fire and Betty and Jimmy set about making billy tea. Robert was not as sharp as Freddy had been about what made a good story, but he was helpful in stepping in where he was needed.

I had worried about Hugh’s ability to handle the terrain with one leg, but I should have been concerned about myself. In the film, the boy’s wheelchair became a flying chariot. Hugh insisted we needed shots of the valley from the air.

A plane would not produce the floating effect Hugh was after so he contacted a mining company near the Ruined Castle to ask if we could use their flying fox cable mechanism to get a bird’s eye view of the chasm. Hugh was as stubborn as a donkey; it was the only explanation I could give for how he managed to persuade the supervisor to let a one-legged man and a woman use one of the flying foxes when workmen were forbidden from travelling on them due to safety regulations. The only restriction the supervisor put on us was that the trip be taken in clear weather.

I was horrified by Hugh’s suggestion that we risk our lives to get a ‘once in a lifetime’ shot of the valley. ‘If one of the cables break, we are going to plummet to our deaths,’ I told him.

‘If the cables can carry shale, they can carry us,’ he said, with such confidence I wondered if he had gone mad. And yet I must have been the one who had lost my sanity because in the end I did exactly what he told me to do.

‘We’ll put the director in first, then myself and the camera,’ Hugh told the workmen who had been assigned to help us by operating the flying fox. I was glad that we had told the others they would not be needed for this scene and could have the day off. The workmen helped me into the open-topped crate, which was nothing more than some pieces of hardwood nailed together. Hugh positioned himself with his leg in the crate and straddled the side so as to get an uninterrupted view of the gorge. My job was to hold on to his belt to stop him from falling because he needed both his hands to operate the camera and keep it steady. I was also supposed to take notes of the shots by leaning my notebook against his back and writing with my free hand. I had no idea how I was going to do that with my fingers trembling so violently.

Once I was in position, I felt like a circus escape artist about to be lowered into a pool of crocodiles. There was no backing out now. My mouth was dry and it hurt to swallow. From this great height the valley was silent. A wedge-tailed eagle circled the sky. I shivered when I realised that it was eye-level with me.

‘Hold on. Here she goes,’ called one of the workers, releasing the brake while the other two gave us a push off from the station. The crate jerked down the rocky slope towards the edge of the cliff. This is not so bad, I told myself, gazing out at the magnificent stretch of green. I leaned over Hugh’s shoulder and instructed him to film the tree tops.

While we travelled over the slope of the mountain, with the ground not too far from our feet, I felt calm enough to look at the station across the valley, where a handful of miners were waiting for us. I wished it were closer and prayed that it would not take us long to reach it. Then the crate passed over the edge of the plateau and the full expanse of the valley appeared below us. My stomach lurched with the sensation of falling. I tried to concentrate on note-taking but my hand dripped with sweat and smudged the letters.

‘You all right?’ Hugh called to me. I was glad he could not see my face. I took a gulp of air. This was not the place to panic. ‘I am fine,’ I answered.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Hugh muttered. ‘It’s like a dream.’

1…2…3…4…I counted in my head. I seized on the idea that if I kept counting in lots of one hundred it would only take ten lots before we reached the safety of the station. Then the unfathomable happened: the mechanism slowed down as we reached the halfway point. It creaked then came to a halt. The crate swung for a moment before stopping as well. I looked up. The pulley was stuck.

Hugh stopped filming and waved to the workers on the plateau. I could tell from their dumbfounded expressions that we were in trouble. What could anybody do to help us? We were dangling one thousand feet above the valley.

‘Sit down and hold on,’ Hugh told me. He secured the camera to the side of the crate with a piece of rope, grabbed the cable and stepped up onto the side of the crate. It dipped and the valley gaped below me. I clutched the sides but Hugh could not get the pulley unstuck fast enough and I began to slip. My vision turned white.

‘Keep your eyes closed and hold tight!’ Hugh shouted.

I found myself thinking about Freddy. ‘Adela, you can do it!’ he would have said.

Hugh managed to get the pulley unstuck. The crate returned to its upright position and he inched us along the length of cable towards the station. A few minutes later I was lifted out of the crate by the miners and placed on firm ground.

It was over an hour before the strength returned to my legs and I was able to walk with the others to the tramway that would take us back to the top of the gorge. I did not utter a sound. The minutes of stark, cold fear on the flying fox had taken my voice away. Hugh held my hand and asked me if I was all right. I was surprised that he was unaffected by what had happened, and even less by what
could
have happened.

‘It doesn’t serve me to ask what could have happened,’ Hugh said. ‘I did that for years over my leg. We got the shot we wanted and both of us are still here, right?’

Hugh’s words were not bravado. Once we were back at the mine, he laughed about the incident with the workers and shouted them beer and cigarettes.

As for me, whether we got the shot or not, I
was
affected by what had happened. I developed a terror of heights.

With the scenes at Springwood and Katoomba completed, we had only to film the final ones at Jenolan Caves, which we had chosen to represent our Valley of Darkness. The beauty of the caves was more spectacular than evil but with the right angles and filters, the cliff faces, cave openings and the surrounding bushland could be twisted into something menacing.

The first day of shooting, Hugh and I rose before dawn to film the wildlife for our Emerald Valley scenes. Ranjana was suffering a migraine and Esther came with us instead to take the continuity notes. I wondered how Esther felt about working with Hugh again. She behaved professionally if somewhat aloofly towards him. She has moved on, I thought. But whether that was good or bad, I did not know. I still thought she and Hugh would be good for each other.

The light was too dim for us to capture on film the ringtail possums scurrying to their dreys or the wombat who eyed us cautiously while rubbing himself against a tree. But when the sun broke the sky and the early morning light shimmered over the bush, we filmed rock wallabies bounding across a ridge; a flock of cockatoos swooping through the sky; and a family of kookaburras squatting together on a branch. In a fern gully we found a lyrebird scratching the scrub. He was a natural actor and broke into a song and dance, opening his magnificent feathered tail, the moment the camera started rolling. ‘The lyrebird is an unsurpassed mimic,’ Uncle Ota had once told me. ‘He can imitate not only the sounds of a cockatoo or wren but also of a train whistle or a howling dog.’ On our way back to the Blue Lake, Hugh found two koalas asleep in the fork of a gum tree and I directed him to film them from so many different angles that Esther was compelled to remind me that we had limited film stock.

We ate lunch with our actors and crew at Caves House before completing a battle scene at the Devil’s Coach House. Then we trekked through the bush towards McKeown’s Valley where we intended to film the final battle between the heroes and the evil spirits. We had left Jimmy and Betty behind at Caves House, with Ranjana and the children, to clean our camping and other equipment before we departed for Sydney the following day. We soon missed Betty’s remedies when we found ourselves covered in welts from stinging nettles. Although there were clouds in the sky, the light remained consistent and the shooting of the first scenes went smoothly. I was struck by the silence of the valley. There was not a bird or an insect to be heard.

The manager of Caves House had lent us some of the staff as extras in return for a film credit, and we had managed to recruit local farmhands and a pastoral family. Although that amounted to only twenty people with which to create a battle scene, Hugh and I used them ingeniously. We shot the actors in wooded areas rather than open ones so that the trees became characters in themselves. For the first scenes, I had the ‘good characters’ move towards the right, with the intention of re-costuming everyone as ‘evil beings’ and filming them moving towards the left. It was a trick Klara and I had observed in low-budget Westerns where the cowboys moved in one direction and the Indians, played by the same actors, moved in the other.

While the actors were changing their costumes, I sat down on my stool to make notes on the scene descriptions. Hugh passed me to adjust one of the light reflectors. A flash of gold shot up from the grass. My heart leapt to my throat. ‘Snake!’ I cried.

The reptile flattened its head aggressively. Hugh turned but was too late. The snake struck his shin then disappeared in the grass.

‘Damn!’ Hugh swore, grabbing his leg. Klara was at his side in an instant.

‘Are you sure it was a snake?’ she asked me.

I nodded.

‘Look in the grass,’ she instructed the rest of us. ‘See what kind it was.’

While we were searching for the snake, Klara made Hugh sit down. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘At first I thought I’d trodden on a stick and it had whipped me.’

Robert lifted Hugh’s trouser leg to the place he had been bitten. I stopped to see what he was doing. I remembered when Klara and I used to walk in Thirroul she had told me that most snakebites through clothing resulted in scratches and not all bites injected venom. But I could see the two puncture marks from where I was standing, and that the wound was swollen. The snake had struck deeply.

‘Let’s hope it’s a black,’ whispered Uncle Ota, who was searching next to me. The black snake was venomous but not as deadly as the browns, copperheads, tigers and death adders. The snake I had seen had been gold.

I saw something slithering under a rock. I caught sight of the last part of its body. ‘Stripes,’ I said.

Klara and Robert tied Hugh’s belt as a tourniquet around his leg. I could tell my description was bad news because Klara turned pale.

‘A striped black snake then?’ Esther piped up. She knelt down beside Hugh.

I shook my head. The snake I had seen was striped like a tiger. Black snakes had red or yellow bellies but no stripes—Klara had told me that years ago. Then something in Esther’s eyes stopped me. The sign in Philip’s reception room flashed into my mind:
Your sickness can affect your personality or your personality can affect your sickness
.

Hugh broke into a sweat. Drops of moisture dripped down his forehead and cheeks. I prayed it was shock and not the poison.

‘God,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Am I going to die?’

‘No!’ Esther told him. ‘But it would have been better if the snake had bitten your other leg.’

Despite the gravity of the situation, Hugh managed to grin.

Klara told Uncle Ota to make a fire and heat up his pocket knife. She was going to cauterise the wound. Then she turned to Hugh. ‘You have got to stay still. You will be fine as long as you do what I tell you.’

Robert and Esther pushed down on Hugh’s shoulders while Uncle Ota held his leg. Could the mind defeat a deadly poison, I wondered. Esther had lied about the colour of the snake to trick Hugh. I had not heard of anyone surviving a bite from a deadly snake, especially not so far from a hospital.

‘Bloody hell!’ Hugh screamed when Klara pressed the heated knife into the wound. The air stank of singed flesh. Hugh’s speech was slurred and his eyes twitched. I fought back my tears. Surely he was not going to die!

‘We have to get him back to the hotel,’ Klara said. ‘Jimmy will know what to do next.’

‘But he can’t walk,’ said Esther. ‘We need to make him a stretcher.’

I admired how Esther was taking control of things. I was the director of the picture but I had no idea what to do.

When we arrived back at Caves House an hour later, Hugh was unconscious. We carried him to his room where Jimmy looked at the wound. ‘You’ve done all you can,’ he said to us. ‘It’s up to God now.’

Betty disappeared into the bush to collect medicinal berries and mud to use as a poultice against infection. ‘My people sit in the river before losing consciousness, but it’s too late now,’ she said.

Darkness was falling and there was no chance of travelling the treacherous winding road to fetch the nearest doctor. But as Jimmy had already told us, all that could be done for Hugh had been done. Esther stayed by Hugh’s side, checking his pulse every quarter of an hour and listening to his breathing. She was watching for signs of respiratory paralysis as desperately as we had searched for them in Thomas when he struggled with polio. ‘You’ll make it, Hugh,’ she kept telling him. ‘You’re strong.’

Sometimes his eyes would flutter open and I was sure he had heard what she said to him. I imagined Esther wished she could have been there for Louis when he was suffering on the battlefield.