by Zelie Bullen
After I had settled back at Maudsland Road and caught up with everyone, I made my way down to the Movie World studios to visit Brenton and his new assistant, Donna Wilson. I wasn’t sure how Donna would feel about me as Brenton’s former assistant, but she was so warm and friendly towards me that I could tell we were going to be friends, which was really nice.
She had done a fantastic job at raising the cubs, Indira, Shamarna and Koda. She was clearly very knowledgeable and passionate, to have spent all of those hours with them, and she is such a genuine, down-to-earth person.
In December 2001 I went to work on Steve Irwin’s movie The Crocodile Hunter to double his wife Terri. I wasn’t yet ready to head back to Mario’s and all of the associated stress that his place entailed, but I did plan to return there after Christmas, provided Mum’s health was OK.
We soon got the good news: the doctors were happy with the surgery; the cancer cells, which thankfully weren’t aggressive and hadn’t entered her bloodstream. Mum has been cancer-free ever since.
CHAPTER 30
Stafford
During one of our telephone conversations while I was in France, Craig had mentioned that his dad, Stafford, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His condition declined and he died in November, not long after my return. I had only met him a few times—when he brought the macaque monkeys and baboons up to the set of BeastMaster, and during the few times I had visited Park Road.
The first time I met him, I wasn’t allowed into the house without giving him a kiss first—‘All ladies who come to my house must give me a kiss,’ he informed me. I laughed and said, ‘Of course,’ and gave him a peck on the cheek. On that visit I also met his wife, Cleo. We all dined on one of Cleo’s sensational meals and were thoroughly entertained by Stafford’s stories of days gone by.
Walking around their house, I caught sight of a large photograph on the wall of Peggy, one of their elephants who had died several years earlier. Stafford came up behind me and said in a quiet voice, ‘She was a good elephant that.’ I asked him some questions about her and as he told me stories his eyes never left her picture. A tear rolled down his cheek as he said, ‘We will never have another one like her.’
Everyone who knew Peggy raves about that elephant—they told me she was one of a kind, closer than a family dog. At that time I didn’t know anything about elephants—how long they lived and how personable they can be, or how they relate with people—but I thought she must have been quite something, to move an old man to tears in front of a virtual stranger. It was a very touching experience. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about the family and their history with their animals.
At that point, all I knew was that they were a nice family who had a big property and lots of amazing animals. All four of the children—Mark, Sonya, Brenton and Craig—were involved with the animals. They grew up with them. I thought it was wonderful that the family still had many of the animals that they had kept during the decades of Bullen’s Circus and then running the African Lion Safari Parks, all of which had closed down many years before. Clearly there was enough work for both Brenton and Craig to remain in the industry.
When Stafford died, both Craig and Brenton called me. I decided to go to the funeral. The family had been good to me, and I felt honoured to have met Stafford. There was something about him, a certain grandeur, and he had worked his whole life with animals. Meeting him had felt a bit like meeting a mentor I hadn’t previously known about. I also wanted to be one more supportive person for the family, because I know how it feels to have support from others at a time of loss.
I expected to spend the day pretty much by myself, because I didn’t know many people there, but people were friendly and came up to talk to me. As it turned out, I met many of those people again in the years ahead. Craig hung around a bit, but I told him not to worry about me. I still didn’t know him very well and I thought surely there were others he needed to talk to.
There had been no physical contact between Craig and I at this stage, but there was obviously a strong chemistry between us that seemed to be getting stronger. I told him we were not going to happen—I liked him and clearly he liked me, but my reasons for not wanting to get involved remained. I wanted to stay friends with all of his family, and I was unimpressed by the fact that he had left his partner and their two children. I recalled the pain my father had caused by walking out of our lives.
Craig told me he would never walk out of his children’s lives. He pointed out that he was still deeply involved in his children’s lives, and his intention had never been to walk away from them. He was supporting them financially and saw them regularly as they were living at his house while he was living at his parents’ house, both of which were at Park Road. He told me he wanted to be the best dad he could be and that, if he was an angry, sad person he was not going to be the best. He told me, ‘I don’t want to stay in a relationship just because my children are there. That way, I would surely have unhappy children.’
In spite of these discussions, I told him yet again—we were just not going to happen.
CHAPTER 31
Of course you can stay
But, of course, it did happen. In December two of the stuntmen I’d worked with at Mario’s—gorgeous Cedric and voltige rider Eric—came for a visit. I spent Christmas with them and the Nicholls clan at Fred and Bert’s, and during that time Craig came down from Sydney. We all had an enjoyable few days riding horses around the Gundagai hills, and the French boys got to experience an Aussie summer in the bush. After Christmas, Eric, Cedric and I drove back to the Gold Coast.
While I was in France, Fred and Bert had been looking after my two mares. I mentioned to Craig that I wanted to bring them back home, and rather than put them on a transporter for the thirteen-hundred-kilometre trip he suggested that he would drive back down to Gundagai, borrow Fred’s float and bring them up. I thanked him for his offer, but told him not to put himself out. He argued that he was owed a longer holiday and said that he had a mate on the Gold Coast he wanted to catch up with, and finally that he would like to stay on and see how Brenton was doing with the third series of BeastMaster. In the end, I gave in. It certainly would be good to have the horses back at my place, and it would be nice to see him, but I told him emphatically, ‘Don’t think anything is going to happen.’
He drove up from Gundagai on a hot summer’s day, and his LandCruiser ute kept overheating. Each time it broke down he’d call me and explain that he was waiting for it to cool down and they would be delayed. I am fairly sure the trip took him seventeen and a half hours; certainly, by the time he got to my house, I was more than impressed. I thought, ‘This guy has stamina!’ He had had to wait with his ute on the side of the road several times, but he’d looked after the horses and kept on coming.
There was a bunch of people at Maudsland Road when he arrived—Cedric and Eric, Lydia, and two other friends staying from overseas. We unloaded the horses, and they ran out across the paddock, bucking and squealing with their mates. I always love that part.
It was just on dusk, and everyone was making their way back to the house. Craig casually put his arm around me as we turned to go. He asked, ‘Is it alright if I go get my swag and stay here tonight?’
Without even thinking, I said ‘Of course you can stay here—you can stay in my bed.’
Shocked at myself, I stood with my eyebrows raised, just staring up at him. I thought, ‘What the hell?’ I must’ve sounded like such a tart!
He smiled, looked into my eyes and said, ‘Really?’
I said, ‘I feel like such an idiot,’ and he laughed.
He said, ‘Well, things are getting better.’ And that was the start of our relationship.
As it turned out, this was also the beginning of our working life together. For a year we would both travel back and forth between each other’s places, but I spent far more time in Sydney than he did on the Gold Coast because of his commitments to the family business, his children and his ani
mals.
Craig and I both worked with animals, but our backgrounds were very different. Craig had spent years working and touring with the elephants. He liked travelling with the circus, moving from town to town around Australia doing ‘one-nighters in the mud’, as he called them.
He described the circus life for me. You pull into a town and set up the housing for the animals; then, rain, hail or shine you put up the tent (or ‘the show’, as they call it), and put on a performance. That same night, everything is pulled down and packed away into trucks, except the animals, who are loaded the following morning, when everyone moves on.
The Bullens had always had elephants, and in the 1960s Stafford had imported four Thai elephants into Australia to join the rest of the Bullen elephant herd. Bimbo, Siam, Sabu and Burma had arrived when Craig was a toddler, so they are about the same age as Craig and have been a huge part of his life.
At first Stafford and his brother Ken looked after the elephants, but as the kids grew up, Mark became one of the key elephant handlers, and then Craig, who is ten years younger, followed in his footsteps. When Craig was fourteen he and Mark used to present them in the ring and care for them. Sometimes they had to go find the elephants, because they’d broken out of their paddock and made their way into someone’s award-winning garden or a sugar-cane field. It was a lot of responsibility for a teenager.
Craig’s high-school years were dominated by his work with his father and the animals. He was only fifteen years old when he fought off their only aggressive elephant, Burma, when she attacked and almost killed Mark. A few years later the Bullens gave Burma to Taronga Zoo, and she currently lives at Taronga Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo with two other retired elephants. All that experience matured Craig significantly. When I asked him about working with elephants, he told me that a massive part of their training is simply building mutual respect. Obviously, because of their size, if they won’t listen to you, you’re in trouble.
Eventually, Mark and Sonya moved on from the family business, for different reasons. At the age of twelve, Mark had started breeding Welsh mountain ponies and he is now one of the world’s most successful breeders. Sonya had worked with all the animals, especially the ponies and baboons, and had hand-raised the family’s pet chimpanzee. She then married Rick and had two kids, and she is now settled on the Gold Coast. By the time I met the Bullens, it was only Craig and Brenton who had continued to work with the family’s animals, taking on all the responsibilities that entailed.
When I first saw Craig around animals, I could see straightaway that he was very experienced and knowledgeable. As good and professional as Craig was, however, I felt that something was missing. I wasn’t convinced he really enjoyed being around the animals, and yet he told me he did. I remember thinking to myself, ‘If I can’t see it, how can he feel it?’ We talked about this a couple of times, but I’m sure he dismissed me as one of those bloody ‘horse-whisperer’ types.
Working with the animals had been his life and his job—along with fixing the water trough, repairing a fence, building a new trailer, changing an axle, repairing the plumbing or whatever else had to be done to keep the show on the road. There had been no time for stopping and smelling the roses or getting enjoyment from what he was doing.
I felt the animals were innocent victims in all of that. I used to say to him, ‘Wait, wait—let’s watch and see how the animals behave together,’ and he’d say, ‘What do you want to watch that for? We haven’t got time to do that.’
He did like being around the animals. He much preferred that to fixing vehicles or building a fence; but he rarely got to enjoy the experience, because he was always in a hurry to get back to the neverending list of jobs to do. Consequently, I don’t think they enjoyed him all that much. Yet the elephants loved him—he had probably travelled with the elephants enough to enjoy their company and for them to enjoy his.
I remember one day that was quite a turning point in our relationship. I was staying at Park Road with Craig, and we were drenching some young camels that had rarely been touched by people before then. They were friendly, but they hadn’t been handled very much. They were being kept in a temporary holding yard, and before they were trucked to the old lion park they needed to be wormed.
Most of them we caught and wormed without much fuss. However, one runty young camel was being difficult. She kicked Craig when he tried to catch her; then they wrestled and she dragged him around. Finally she went quiet and he said, ‘Quick, bring the drench.’
I took the drench over to him. He treated the camel and was about to let her go, but I said, ‘Wait! What are you doing?’
‘It’s drenched, we can let her go,’ he said, looking at me in bemusement.
‘Didn’t you tell me this was a fairly unhandled camel?’ I said. ‘Just wait. Let’s be nice to her now—it doesn’t have to be just a big scary experience for her.’ Craig didn’t say anything, but we led her around for a bit, patted her, gave her some grain and then we let her go.
At that point we both realised that I was someone who was born to lie on the floor and roll around with a dog and cuddle my pony, while Craig was born and raised to work animals, and then to get on with it—there were always plenty of other things that still needed to be done.
I knew that this was just the way he had been brought up, but I also know you can do so much more with animals when you connect with them on an emotional level.
Those early days were an amazing time in both of our lives. I hadn’t been with Craig very long at all before I felt that I could marry him, and that scared me. I told him how I felt because I wanted him to know what an impact he was having on me, and I felt safe saying it because I knew he wasn’t the marrying type—he had never married before. He agreed that he didn’t like the thought of marriage.
Being around him I had also started to think I wanted to have kids. There was something about him that was making me rethink all the strict promises I’d made to myself after Grahame died, about not getting attached or having children. Craig was flattered when I told him, but at the time neither of us took these changes in me too seriously.
CHAPTER 32
Ned Kelly
In February 2002, Mark Eady contacted me. He had the entertainment contract to organise and choreograph a performance of the story of Ned Kelly at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney and he asked if I would work with him as a liberty horse trainer. To train a horse at liberty is to teach it to respond to verbal or visual cues without any direct contact, and it requires a lot of trust and respect between trainer and animal. I had trained liberty horses with both Sled and Bobby, and I jumped at the chance.
I was excited about the opportunity, but despite the adequate eight-week preparation time I soon became apprehensive. It would be the first time that I would be solely responsible for how a horse performed. I voiced my concerns about committing to the job to Sled; he said that he and his new girlfriend, Tamara, would come out from America for a couple of weeks to help. I was surprised and relieved by his offer.
I would need two white horses for the performance. I already owned a beautiful white Andalusian mare, J’adore, and I bought another white gelding out of my own funds. Split—so named because he had a split at the top of one of his ears, from an old injury—was trained for both riding and harness work (pulling a carriage). He had a lovely soft nature and was to be my back-up horse.
In early March Sled and Tamara turned up as promised. With his trademark sense of humour, Sled told me I was ready for this job, that I’d be fine and that I should look on the bright side—I could stuff it up as effectively as the next person! He spent most of the two weeks he was there laughing at me for being so stressed. He told me I would be alright—and I was.
The script called for the white horse to gallop unassisted through gunfire to the actor who was playing Ned, who would be standing in the middle of the show ring, a football arena which had been constructed for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
The show ended with
the boy who played the young Ned Kelly riding J’adore bareback into the centre of the ring, where he slid off. J’adore then lay down. The boy lay down next to her and the spotlight went out.
Each night there would be a hush, and then the crowd would erupt into applause. I was so proud of my two talented horses, but especially my kind-hearted J’adore.
My first independent liberty act, with my own beautiful horses, was a success.
CHAPTER 33
Travelling with elephants
The Bullens’ elephants were booked to go to Burtons Circus in Adelaide for the April school holidays and Craig invited me to go along. This was to be my first experience helping him with them in a circus environment.
Before we left, I learnt the basics of how to handle them, how to deal with the inter-elephant politics—who was fed where, who was loaded onto the truck first, all the important basics. I had been around the elephants a little bit before then but I hadn’t been responsible for getting them to do anything. Those elephants normally perform like clockwork, but they can still behave like naughty little kids if they think they’ll get away with it. You could almost see them thinking, ‘Aha, you’re new—I might just casually lift my back foot and lean it out towards you, or maybe swish you with my tail.’ Of course, I’d be thinking, ‘Is this elephant going to kick me?’
Whenever I felt uneasy I would ask Craig what I should do, but he was so used to being around them that it was difficult for him to understand my uncertainty. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Not everybody grew up with elephants.’