by Zelie Bullen
Once I’d done this training I was graded as ‘Stunt Action Personnel’, which is similar to an apprenticeship. It allowed me to do bit parts, action roles and doubling roles for film and television. To be graded as a fully fledged ‘Stunt Actor’, you have to show competence in five areas of expertise—heights and body control, water, vehicles, animals and fire. As a child and teenager, I had only had exposure to animals and some limited gymnastics, but now I made the most of the opportunity that had presented itself and learnt everything I could in all those different areas. Many stunt roles include some acting, so I also took acting classes.
At the time, Mark Eady was a stuntman in the Western Action show. He’d started in the business as an actor, and had then decided to do a bit of stunt work to get more acting roles. I enrolled in one of his acting courses and it changed my life. I found myself out of my comfort zone several times. It was an interesting process that eventually led me to think, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ You might be embarrassed, but you learn it really doesn’t matter, because everyone else is in the same position.
People have often asked me how I had the courage to do certain things in my career or approach people at certain times. I simply say that sometimes it could be intimidating, embarrassing or even a bit weird, but I reminded myself that people don’t think any less of you in the end.
It had been great living with Jan and the girls, but I knew I couldn’t stay on their loungeroom floor forever and I also wanted to find somewhere with a bit more land so I could bring my mare Angel across from Perth. She was now pregnant, having jumped over two fences to visit a friend’s Arabian stallion. I started looking for a place with Melody Brutnall, a stuntwoman I was working with. We found a gorgeous rental property on two acres at Creekside Court in Worongary in the beautiful Gold Coast hinterland, about half an hour south down the Pacific Motorway from Movie World. It was a bit scary having to pay so much rent, but it was such a great house and location that we easily found people who wanted to move into the other two bedrooms. I had a home at last.
Life was so exciting; so many terrific things were happening. And then my heart well and truly went to another—I started going out with Grahame.
CHAPTER 9
Angel’s Halo
Grahame and I were the same age. He was in the Police Academy stunt team. We all found him hilarious, especially when there was a bit of a crowd and he was playing up to it. His dry sense of humour and perfect timing often had us all laughing out loud. As we laughed he would smile quietly, sitting back with his barrel chest softly chuffing as he held back his own laughter. It was his rugged good looks and humour that attracted me to him at first. And his walk—I loved his walk. He moved with purpose and energy, and the more I saw of him, the sexier I found him. I was in love, and it was wonderful to feel so complete again.
Once I got involved with Grahame, he moved into Creekside Court fairly quickly, as he had endured a volatile separation from his previous partner; she had cut up all his clothes, plus a couple of belts, and left them on the front lawn of the house they had shared.
Grahame wasn’t only cute, he was also very good at what he did, which always attracts me to someone. We had fun together and he was a fantastic help with my stunt training. I wasn’t particularly good at stunt or precision driving when we first met, but Grahame came along to my training sessions; he would egg me on and encourage me when I was learning something new. He sometimes drove alongside in another vehicle so I had someone to drive against. He also taught me about working with fire—he loved that area of stunt work—and with body control; we practised together daily on our mini trampoline.
But his real speciality was heights. He had very little fear of heights, and he used to goof around on high things, enjoying seeing people’s nervous reactions. I couldn’t watch. I often told him I didn’t like it, but he couldn’t understand why. To him it was no different to walking along the ground. He said that he never got to the edge of a building and experienced vertigo or a falling sensation—he felt perfectly safe.
Grahame had wanted to perform stunts ever since he was a kid. His photo albums were full of pictures of him trying to do daring things, like back flips on an old BMX bike or jumping out of a tree onto mattresses. At twenty-three, he had already worked on several movies and various television productions, and he had spent a lot of time and money on training. Collin Dragsbaek, my housemate Melody’s boyfriend, was our stunt trainer and one of Grahame’s best friends. He told me once that he had been very proud watching Grahame develop over the last couple of years and that he knew there would be much more to come. He felt Grahame had really made it. Collin and Melody eventually had a little boy together, but three years later Collin was killed performing a stunt in a high fall off a concrete wheat silo in the movie Love Serenade. It was a big shock to our close-knit stunt community.
Grahame and I began to talk about getting married, but we were a bit unsure. A lot of the time we both thought we were too young to get married—we were just having too much fun being big kids. Then we’d say, ‘Well, we are twenty-three—we should probably get married. That’s when everyone gets married; better not leave it too much longer.’ But we could never quite make up our minds to do it.
We both wanted three kids, a horse, and a motorbike each. He had a really nice road bike and he wanted to get me one, but I was having way too much fun riding on the back of his. He was a talented motorbike rider and he was a show-off; I loved it and he knew I loved it.
We would sometimes go to work on his bike, me sitting on the back with my arms around his waist. At a set of traffic lights it wasn’t uncommon for him to tap me on my hand and say, ‘Hang on,’ from which I’d know we were about to go an impressive distance on the back wheel. That sort of thing was a thrill to both of us. We were young and ready for everything. I usually made a half-hearted effort to act responsibly, but he knew I adored and applauded his craziness. He wasn’t egotistical and he wasn’t big-headed—just a whole lot of fun.
Of course, it wasn’t always perfect—like any relationship, we had our ups and downs. He knew my opinion on alcohol and I hated it when he drank too much. He sometimes did stupid things when he was drunk, like hanging from the rafters by his toes, and he could become obnoxious and a smart-arse.
Early in our relationship, before he moved in with me, we almost split up. He had a couple of rostered days off and was going nightclubbing in Nerang with one of his housemates. I had work the following morning so I didn’t go.
He called at about two in the morning. When I answered the phone, half asleep, he said, ‘Hey, babe, it’s me.’ He was clearly drunk. I informed him that it was two in the morning and his response was, ‘Yep, yep, sorry about that. Anyway, can you come and get me?’ When I asked where he was, he said, ‘Oh, just at the lock-up.’
‘Where?’
‘Just the lock-up in Southport—you know, where police hold people until someone can come and get you.’
Now I was very awake. My heart was thumping. I thought he must have been beaten up, because I felt certain he couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. I asked him if he was OK.
‘Oh yeah, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I just had a little accident on my bike.’ I gasped. He went on, ‘But I’m fine. The police just brought me here because that’s what police do.’
I could feel the anger welling up inside me. ‘You were driving your motorbike while you were drunk?’
‘Yep,’ he admitted.
That was it. I let fly. ‘So you were riding drunk and you call me, when you know my sister was killed by a drunk driver.’
‘Yep, yep, sorry about that,’ he slurred in response. ‘Would you be able to come and get me?’
I tried to calm myself down. ‘Oh God, tell me what happened.’
‘Well, I didn’t do anything wrong. I went around a roundabout and this loser came around the corner in his SLR or something, completely on the wrong side of the road, and ran into me.’
&n
bsp; ‘That’s terrible.’
‘I know, I know, and then he got out of his car and ran off. So when the police arrived, I was the only idiot there, and they took me in. It wasn’t my fault; I’ve told them it wasn’t my fault. They have the rego of the car and everything.’
After I hung up on Grahame, I woke my housemate Tina and told her what was happening. She asked what I was going to do and I said, ‘I guess I’d better go and get him.’ She told me I was mad. As I left, she rolled over to go back to sleep.
When I arrived at the Southport lock-up forty-five minutes later, Grahame had fallen asleep. The police had to wake him up to get him out of the cell. I could hear him as they came down the corridor—he was being vile, obnoxious and arrogant to the police. When I looked through the reinforced window, I could see him staggering and pulling at the policemen, who each held him by an arm. I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’
When they finally made it through the door, he yelled out, ‘Let go of me!’
One policeman looked at me, shook his head and walked off; the other one looked at Grahame and said, ‘Sign here, cowboy.’
Grahame took the pen and signed with a big cross as if he was Zorro. He threw down the pen and went to walk off.
‘Yeah right, mate,’ the cop said. ‘Not so fast—sign it properly.’
Grahame said, ‘What? What?’, pretending he hadn’t heard.
The cop tried again. ‘Mate, we need your signature here or you’re not allowed to walk through those doors.’
‘That’s my signature,’ Grahame slurred.
The policeman leaned over and said slowly, ‘I need a signature—not a mark, a signature.’
‘That’s it, that’s it,’ Grahame kept repeating. He could hardly keep his eyes open. I was ready to punch him, but finally he signed and we got out of there.
As we drove along, I really told him off; but halfway through the lecture I realised that he was snoring in the seat next to me. He’d totally passed out. So I dropped him off at his mate’s place in Nerang.
On my way home I saw his motorbike on the side of the road, smashed up. By the time I got home it was about five in the morning. I woke up Tina again and asked her to go back there with me and help me lift his bike onto my ute, because I couldn’t lift it by myself. The whole way there, she was lecturing me about him being a loser and that, if I kept seeing him, she’d move out of the house. All I could say in return was ‘I know.’
We arrived back at the roundabout to find two guys already there in Iron Maiden T-shirts and with long greasy hair; they were lifting Grahame’s bike into the back of their ute. I stopped so I had my headlights on them, then got out and walked over towards them.
‘How you going there, fellas?’
‘Uh, hi,’ one of them replied.
‘That’s my boyfriend’s motorbike.’
‘Oh yeah, right,’ the talkative one responded. ‘We were just going to, um, take it down the copper shop.’
‘Oh right—that’s nice. But could you lift it onto my ute instead? That would be really great.’
So I had these two guys lift it onto the tray of my ute, much to Tina’s amusement. When we got back to my place, I backed up to a slope and Tina and I pulled it off the back and just threw it down, leaving it where it fell. By this time I was late for work and angry.
But of course he wormed his way back into my heart.
Grahame and I started to make a home together at Creekside Court. By then I had brought Angel over from Perth—I wasn’t going to let her become a mum without me. I had Snoopy Two with me, we had a cat one of my former housemates had left behind, and I now gave Grahame a pet lamb, which he called Bart.
Grahame was very excited about my love of animals. He didn’t ride horses and he didn’t know much about animals, but when he met me and we became so close, he wanted to know more. He totally adored Angel.
Because of his enthusiasm I decided to buy him a lamb for Christmas. I didn’t know how it would go down, so I didn’t give it to him right away. First of all, I presented him with just a baby’s bottle wrapped up—he was a bit confused by that! Next I gave him a big bag of powdered milk I’d got from the produce store. Finally, I took him outside to where Bart was sitting in a box with tinsel around his neck. Grahame totally loved it—he was blown away.
I was a little concerned about how a twenty-three-year-old stuntman would react to this gift, but he was like a little kid in a candy shop. He loved playing with that lamb, putting on stupid voices, rolling around on the grass with him. Of course, Bart soon grew into this huge sheep and became our yard mascot. He was a beautiful big fat thing who used to go everywhere, except onto our bed.
Bart was a character. He liked to chase people or head-butt them. He was playful, not wild or crazy, but the stories people told about Bart got bigger and more outrageous as time went on. Grahame loved it. It became a joke at work that we had an attack sheep.
On rostered days off together, I’d often go with Grahame out to Warwick on his bike so I could practise trick riding with Graham Heffernan. We’d met Heffo at Movie World when he was brought in to teach trick riding to some of the stunt people. He brought with him Elijah and Moses, his two paint horses (a solid stock-horse type with distinct brown and white pinto markings). We’d spent two weeks practising on them, and once again I thought, ‘This is for me!’ I remembered learning about vaulting all those years ago at the pony club. Now, with Heffo’s training, I was able to incorporate trick riding into my role as Calamity Jane in the Western Action stunt show. Trick riding can best be described as gymnastics on a fast-running horse. It orginated in America as a rodeo sport, where judges gave fifty per cent of the score based on how the rider performed and the degree of difficulty per trick, and the other fifty per cent of the score was based on how fast the horse ran.
Heffo had recently broken up with his wife and trick-riding partner, and he was keen to train someone else to perform with him. Whenever I could, I’d grab my trick-riding shoes and we’d head up to Heffo’s. Grahame would watch us train, or go for a ride on his bike while we practised. Heffo and I trained and talked.
He told me about a woman he considered a trick-riding legend—Connie Griffith. Connie was renowned for being the world’s most capable and athletic female trick rider. She had sufficient strength and skill to do many of the tricks that are usually only performed by men, and was able to perform many jaw-dropping tricks including ‘Under the belly’, when the rider leaves the saddle, climbs down one side of the horse’s body, goes underneath the galloping horse and climbs back up the other side. The ‘Billy Keen Drag’ showed her incredible strength. She would sit backwards and grab the back of the saddle, push into a handstand as the horse was galloping along, and while still holding onto the saddle, lower herself down behind the horse’s tail with her feet dragging in the sand, she then pulled herself back up with her stomach muscles and was again sitting back on the horse. She also performed the ‘Ted Elder Drag’, which was the same as the Billy Keen but went even further with the rider’s head going between the horse’s hind legs in the drag, with the use of extension ropes attached to the back of the saddle so she could be dragged further back. One of the most impressive tricks she performed was while in a full shoulder stand with her head on the horse’s neck and shoulder, she put the horse over a one-metre-high jump shaped like a half moon. She sounded awe-inspiring. I knew I wanted to meet her one day.
In July 1994, Angel gave birth to an adorable chestnut filly. She had a big blaze, like her mum, and she had white ‘lipstick’, which extended from her nose snip around her lips, including the corners of her mouth and under her chin. Grahame and I called her Angel’s Halo. With this beautiful new foal, our little family of animals was growing.
Grahame and I had a very nice little domestic life going on. On our rostered days off, we’d go and party in Surfers, or ride out to Heffo’s. It was the first time I had felt I had a routine and some kind of normality. We had our own little world,
we had our own dreams. We thought we’d live happily ever after together and be successful stunt people.
Even though we rented the house at Creekside Court, it felt very much like ours—our space, our animals, our adventure together. It was a really fun safe time, and I guess I felt the way everyone feels when they think they have found the person they want to spend their life with.
CHAPTER 10
Ocean Girl
Once I was graded a fully fledged Stunt Actor, I went to my first union meeting with Grahame. It was held in a large auditorium. At that stage, I didn’t really know anyone outside of Movie World. Chris Anderson, a well-respected stunt coordinator, was sitting just behind us with his assistant, Mitch Deans, both of whom would later become our good friends. We could hear Chris and Mitch speaking behind us and Grahame whispered to me that he thought they were talking about me.
Finally they leant over and introduced themselves. I was so excited to meet some actual stunt coordinators that I became giggly. I had quite long hair and Chris asked if I would mind cutting off a few inches. I didn’t understand why he was asking such a question but Grahame kept urging me, ‘Yes, yes! Say yes!’ Somewhat bewildered, I said yes, and Chris laughed and asked me to come to his office the following morning for a meeting. That was the beginning of my stunt career outside of Movie World and what a start it was.
My first job as a stunt performer was in a new Jonathan M. Shiff children’s television series, Ocean Girl, with the possibility of the role continuing for more than one season. I was to double the lead actor, fourteen-year-old Marzena Godecki, whose character could swim like a dolphin, powerfully and fast, and whose best friend was a humpback whale. It was to be shot out on the Great Barrier Reef at Port Douglas, near where Mum lived in Cairns, with some studio work in Melbourne.