I was sharing a flat at Tamarama in the early ’70s. Phil lived just across the road. He’d been down from Newcastle for a year or two, drove a sports car, did parts in TV commercials and appeared to be getting things together in the film industry. Phil’s flat was right on the beach and there was always a bevy of glamours hanging around outside — of which Phil married one. I went to his parties, he came to ours, we rode lids and skis and over the years Phil and I became pretty good mates.
I even let him talk me into buying a surfski off him.
Phil made Wavemaster skis and as well as being a hot salesman, he’s a hot ski rider too. But back to the swinging ’70s.
I arrived home from the pickle factory one afternoon and noticed Phil and this film crew zooming around Tamarama and Bronte in a black ’63 Chevy with a stack of nine-foot mals on the roof. Naturally I inquired what was going on.
Phil was shooting a movie. An action drama with a surfing theme, set in the ’60s. I was impressed. We all were. Hollywood had come to Tamarama. The boy from Newcastle had come good.
I watched the carryings-on over the weeks and one afternoon Phil walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Barrett. You can ride a surfboard all right?’ I nodded yes because then I could. ‘How would you like to come up to Catherine Hill Bay and be a stand-in for this actor in my movie?’
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘Mel Gibson. I just got him and another actor, Steve Bisley, straight out of NIDA. It’s their first gig.’
‘And this Gibson bloke can’t surf?’
‘Mate, he couldn’t wax a surfboard, let alone ride one. But he’s a hot actor and he’s got this something.’
I knew from inside sources that Phil’s movie was not only being shot on a shoestring, the budget was that skinny it could walk through a harp.
For me to take three days off from the pickle factory, plus petrol and expenses, it would probably cost me more than it would be worth. Still, there would have to be some sort of an earn there, and it could be fun. I thanked Phil and said I’d be in it for sure.
The following afternoon I was watching the filming. They wrapped, then the director, producer, actors and crew went into a huddle. There’d been an unexpected budget blowout and they didn’t have enough petrol to get to Catherine Hill Bay.
The huddle continued then Phil handed Gibson a length of hose and a plastic jerry-can and told him to go and milk a tank of gas from a car that had rolled over a cliff at Tamarama. And if Bisley wasn’t doing anything, he could give him a hand.
I figured if this was how Phil treated the leads, the stand-in’s earn would be very frugal indeed. Some bread and treacle, an IOU and he’d probably want to use my EH ute in a running gun battle. I thanked Phil all the same, but told him I couldn’t get the time off work.
While I was boning rumps and loins in Sydney, they got to Catherine Hill Bay. Ross Bailey, a.k.a. ‘The Nail’, doubled for Gibson in the surfing sequences. The whole thing fell into place.
The only mild blemish was when Bisley and Gibson decided to moon the Catholics having a full-on wedding at the local community hall.
If only the congregation and the blushing bride had known that the hairy white date going past in the window of the black ’63 Chevy belonged to Mel Gibson, they’d have been even more impressed.
Summer City premiered and we all went to see it, and it didn’t turn out half a bad flick either, becoming a cult film.
It’s got a punchy rock’n’roll soundtrack and the surfing scenes shot in Catherine Hill Bay almost 20 years ago, that I knocked back, are now classics. It’s definitely not Gone With The Wind and it never made the Cannes Film Festival, but what do you expect for $60,000? Yep, that’s how much it cost to make.
These days it would cost that just to keep Cher’s hairdresser on the set.
Gibson went on to become one of the highest-paid film stars in the world, Bisley is an accomplished actor who starred in one of Australia’s biggest grossing movies, The Big Steal.
The biggest rub is that Summer City is still selling all over the world. From Senegal to Saskatchewan, Los Angeles to London, people walk into video stores and see this Australian surfing drama with Gibson in it and think, ‘Hey! This’ll be all right’.
Phil’s still making movies, he’s now got a lovely family and lives in a beautiful house right on Narrabeen beach where he spends most of his time surfing one of the best breaks in Australia outside his back door.
He probably thinks back on all those smartarse remarks we made when he was shooting that movie in Tamarama and more than likely loves them. It gives him something to laugh about when he’s walking down to the bank.
Phil is about to start shooting another movie near Noosa Heads with Linda Blair of The Exorcist fame called Fatal Bond. I pulled the old mate’s act out the other day and rang him to see if there was something there for me. I can run half-a-dozen words together when I need to.
Unfortunately no, Phil said, but he did say to ring a mate at Channel 10. They could use my head on Neighbours. Somebody knocked off their door-stop.
He’s not a bad bloke, is our Phil.
Oddly enough, he’s giving another Gibson his first gig in this movie — Donal Gibson.
That’s right. Mel’s little brother. I don’t know if he can act let alone whether he’s got ‘that something’.
But having knocked around with Phil Avalon, I just hope he knows what to do when the producer hands him a length of hose and an empty jerry-can. After all, it’s a lot further from Sydney to Noosa than it is to Catherine Hill Bay.
Once again the duck season is well and truly under way.
I’ve already said my piece on the duck season and got letters from duck hunters wanting to fill my arse with buckshot for my trouble — so I won’t dwell on a boring and distasteful subject.
Though I will say some of the hunters seemed to have brushed up their act a little this year. A few of those who just want to go and get a feed admit there is a majority of imbeciles running around full of piss shooting anything that moves.
Some others have admitted all that lead going into the wetlands is doing for the ecosystem what the RAF did for the highway system in Iraq, so I don’t think it would be too much to ask the munitions factories to change from leadshot to something less damaging to the environment.
I still reckon duck shooting with shotguns is about as much a sport as killing baby harp seals used to be.
And any of those hunters or spokesmen for the gun lobby who say it’s a quick and painless death … I’ll make you a deal. Fly over the wetlands in a hang-glider and let me blast you with a few rounds of 12 gauge and if it doesn’t hurt I’ll give you $1000.
I’ll also stick by my word and say that shotguns are a disgraceful and inhumane weapon and should be banned, even from the police, especially the TRG. Look what they did to that unfortunate Darren Brennan.
And in Sydney, a hard-working family of panel beaters were just going about their business and two creeps ran in armed with shotguns demanding money. The people had none at the time so as they left, the heroes let go a couple of shots. They didn’t kill anybody, but they managed to blind one of the family. Fun things, shotguns — aren’t they?
However, despite being a member of Greenpeace and a lover of birds and animals, I’m not one of those beansprout-eating, lefty peaceniks who are down on anything remotely to do with violence or a drop or two of blood.
There’s nothing wrong with guns. Guns are good. Guns are fun. Like the gun lobby says, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Of course, if people didn’t have any guns they wouldn’t be able to kill and if someone came at me with a gun or a knife I know what I’d take my chances against. The bottom line is, guns are deadly and they kill. They don’t make them to pour cappuccinos.
But there are thousands of them out there, bought, registered and paid for by citizens who have a right to use them — sports shooters.
These people are entitled to go out into
the countryside, enjoy the trees and serenity of nature and kill something. And if they’re not drunken weekend Rambos shooting anything that moves it’s quite all right.
And what’s the biggest problem facing farmers at the moment, besides banks, feral pigs and the stuffed wool and wheat yields? Another species introduced by our forebears — rabbits.
Evil, skulking, insidious, wife-stealing, backstabbing rabbits. These cute, cuddly little bastards are stuffing up the countryside at the rate of knots.
The cockies have poisoned them, dynamited them, bayoneted them and they still don’t know how many there are. Two hundred million was one count. That’s in NSW.
Actually, it’s no bloody joke. Ask any farmer. The bastards will devastate a hectare of prime grazing land in 48 hours. They’re %&$@! of things. Forget the Bible and Pontius Pilate. It was the Easter Bunny that shelved Jesus Christ. But how do we get rid of the floppy-eared, cotton-tailed little dropkicks?
I reckon the NSW Government should legalise machine-guns. Now immediately those tofu-eating, pinko bleeding hearts will start jumping up and down saying we can’t have people running around with submachine-guns.
I’m not talking about Uzis, or AK–47s or Heckler and Koch MP5A2s. I’m talking .22 submachine-guns. Nothing more than a souped-up pea rifle. Over 50m they’d be flat out wounding, let alone killing, a human being.
But if 10,000 sports shooters had these .22s, not just fully automatic but rock’n’roll, the little grey bastards wouldn’t know what hit them. If those sports shooters didn’t eliminate the rabbit population in a year I reckon they’d about halve it.
I’ve thought of this sensational idea from all angles and I can’t see what’s to stop it. The guns would be licensed and accounted for in the proper manner from which the State Government and the police would make a nice profit.
Ecologically there are no problems. Don’t use lead. The CIA and Mossad have bullets made from various alloys which are environmentally friendly and look like mini-grenades going off when they hit you.
The farmers would be as happy as Larry because you’d be getting rid of the rabbits and, at the moment, our farmers need all the help they can get.
‘Ah, pigs,’ I hear someone say. Yes, feral pigs too, another introduced species which is also stuffing up the environment. Purists will say a .22 won’t stop a feral pig. One shot won’t, maybe.
But I don’t care if it’s the biggest, meanest #@*% of a pig in Australia. If he comes charging at me with his tusks flailing and three seconds later he’s got 10 bullets in his head, that would have to slow the bludger up considerably.
A few more shots would blow their heads to the wastelands of Krolnor where they would be eaten by the Scalebs.
As for messing up the landscape — pick out the best bits of rabbit, to be baked slowly with rosemary and white wine and basted with garlic butter. Exceedingly scrumptious. The rest, just dig a hole and toss it in with a few seeds or a sapling. Where once there were rabbits there would then be beautiful forests, all naturally fertilised.
Controlled by the police and the government, we’d have the biggest rabbit cull ever and everybody gets an earn — from the farmers to the munitions factories right along to the tourist trade.
Fly in all those gun crazy Seppos and boxheads, give ’em a .22 and 1000 rounds and let ’em go for their lives. They’d love it.
Is this idea any more stupid or heartbreaking than having to watch our farmers shoot their sheep? I can’t see an argument from anybody on this idea — from the greenies, through the government to the gun lobby.
It has to be better than a team of drunks running around with shotguns shooting swans and kookaburras.
And those sweet little bunnies with their cute little noses and cute little paws? They’d get, ‘Nyeh! What’s up doc?’ right up the khyber. From around 10,000 shooters. Anyway you like it baby. Fully automatic or rock’n’roll.
Okay, so I bag public servants every now and again, ones from the ABC and pen-pushers in government departments, on a terrific rort and still whingeing.
This doesn’t mean I’m crooked on public servants in general.
Do I ever bag customs officers, or people who work for the national parks and wildlife? They’re public servants.
And if I ever say anything bad about nurses you can break my typewriter over my big boofhead.
I more or less got confronted by a number of public servants the other day who recognised me through People.
They took me to task over some of my remarks about government workers, namely ambulance officers — ‘ambos’.
I bumped into them in a hotel in Sydney having a farewell drink for one who was retiring after 20 years on the job. There were about 12 of them, men and women. They lived and worked between Sydney and Newcastle.
So what do I know about ambos?
They revive junkies who have OD’d and they pull people out of wrecked cars. They go through a fair bit of trauma and see ghastly, horrible things that we, the general public, never see.
That’s about it.
Hah! That’s the easy part. These hard-working men and women are being driven mad by bureaucrats and imbecilic loafers, bludging their way through life on social security.
They witness rorts that cost taxpayers millions and put up with some of the greatest dills imaginable.
And the other good thing is, they can’t say a word about it or they get disciplined and possibly lose their job. It’s unreal. I’ll give you some examples.
Doctors make appointments for ambulances to take people to their surgeries or to see specialists — they’re too lazy to get off their arses and catch a taxi or get on a bus or train. Half the time there’s bugger-all wrong with them.
On the way back from the specialist or doctor these ‘cripples’ will put it on the ambos to wait while they go and do their shopping.
They’ll get called out to a housing commission home where a woman’s about to have a baby. They arrive to find three cars in the driveway. If they ask why couldn’t the family take her to the hospital, the woman will say: ‘Me ‘usband’s asleep, me son’s gone round to ’is girlfriend’s house and me daughter’s got to go to the ’airdresser.’
They’ll get a call, ‘man with lacerated hand’ or ‘woman with severe abdominal pains’.
Lacerated hand turns out to be some egg with a scratch on his finger that barely needs a Band-aid. When they ask why they couldn’t fix it themselves, it’s: ‘I didn’t have no Band-aids. But don’t worry mate, I’m on social security.’
Severe abdominal pains turns out to be an 18-stone drunken heap of a sheila who’s come home from the RSL convinced she’s got food poisoning. So mum rings an ambulance.
The ambos arrive just as a little head pops out and mother who called the ambulance is now a granny.
They’re that stupid they didn’t even know she was pregnant. But it’s okay, they’re on social security.
These pensioners and the like are convinced they have a God-given right for an ambulance to be at their disposal 24 hours a day.
People in minor car accidents with not a scratch on them and the ambos have to more or less con them into signing a ‘refuse transport’ form so they can get to some bloke bleeding to death in an industrial accident.
The ambos can’t refuse anybody, even when it’s blatantly clear there’s not a thing wrong with them.
And if they so much as say a word or finally blow up and tell some bludger to wake up, they’ll get a complaint against them and have to front their superior for disciplinary action.
The superior, I might add, is a dead-set public servant who should spend time out in the trenches with the troops.
These dedicated men and women are being stuffed around by bludgers who get everything given to them on a plate. It’s the ambos vs the imbos.
Of course, the job does have its droll moments. Like the time a call for severe burns turns out to be a smoker sitting on the pan in his outhouse. The pan had just been empt
ied and the dill forgot he’d washed it out with kero. After he’d finished having a dump and reading the paper, he dropped his cigarette butt in the pan and almost blew his nuts off.
You want burns? I’ll give you burns. A truck overturns just past Newcastle and bursts into flames. An off-duty cop pulls the driver out — he’s got third-degree burns.
When the ambos arrive the driver’s not in any pain because all his nerve endings are seared away.
He says, ‘I feel like a barbecued sausage’. He looks it too.
He’s got about an hour to go. There’s nothing the ambos can do but talk to him and tell him he’s gonna be okay.
If he’s lucky he’ll get a doctor who’ll just OD him on morphine. That’s before they cut him open so all the gasses and body fluids can run out and he doesn’t literally explode when everything inside him shuts down from the severity of his burns.
They get called to a house where grown-ups were having a bit of a party and now the ambos have to try to resuscitate three two-year-olds who have drowned in the pool. But it’s too late. They can live with it, but they’re not allowed to talk about it.
Pulling injured people and mutilated corpses out of cars. How about crawling in and getting them out from underneath trains? If they’re not under the wheels they’re spread about half a kilometre along the track.
People think ambos live for the buzz of screaming down the road, sirens wailing, lights flashing, forcing cars to the side of the road. Then when they arrive, after risking their lives and those of other drivers on the road, they find some bum on social security who needs a Band-aid on his finger.
It’s not that long ago that they didn’t have two in an ambulance and one person had to do all the work. And even now, when they get back to the station they can’t ring home to see if the kids got home from school all right or to say they’re okay or they might be home late because the government won’t put a phone in the station. Not even a blue payphone which costs a lousy $200.
Yet various ministers, whom we won’t name, don’t mind spending millions on consultants, on doing up their offices or on flying around the world. Isn’t saving just one life worth $200?
So What Do You Reckon? Page 14