Love, Sweat and Tears

by Zelie Bullen

  He had taught me a few commands, such as ‘Toi!’ In Thai, this means ‘Back up’ or ‘Back off’. One day I had to say this to Siam, but she just looked at me and didn’t budge.

  I looked at Craig and he said, ‘Tell her again.’

  I said, ‘Toi . . . Please?’ Of course she ignored me.

  At that, Craig came over and growled, ‘Siam,’ and she obeyed straightaway. It was as though Dad had arrived home from work and was disciplining a naughty kid. She backed up immediately and then she looked at me, as though she was thinking, ‘I saw that you had to call him over.’ So that’s how it was for a time. I was totally in love with Bimbo, though, because Bimbo never tested me. She would come when she was called and would do anything I asked.

  I told Craig I would never ask an elephant to do something if I knew that they didn’t respect me. I was too scared of what they might do. He didn’t think much of that. ‘I don’t know what your problem is,’ he said. ‘If they don’t do what you ask, you growl at them and they behave themselves.’

  I thought, ‘I don’t want to growl at an elephant.’

  But even though it was difficult at times, it was an amazing experience and I knew how lucky I was to be having it. I was delighted when the elephants finally accepted me and let me into their group. It was an honour to be around those gigantic pachyderms that the whole world seems to love.

  Their life at Park Road was like a big holiday for them—they had huge paddocks with dams to swim in and endless supplies of grass and hay, plus a giant shed to sleep in at night. But you could see how much they loved travelling. As soon as they heard the elephant truck start up, they would come running across their paddock, trumpeting and hustling to be let through the gate to load up.

  The time for our departure came about quite quickly, and all of a sudden we were getting ready to leave. The elephants were being transported by Craig in the semi-trailer, and I was to drive on my own in the support truck, which carried all of the hay and equipment and also towed the ten-metre caravan. I hadn’t towed anything like that before, let alone over a distance of fourteen hundred kilometres.

  A few years back I’d got my truck licence and I had limited experience driving a truck. One time I was driving one of Wayne’s horse trucks and he said, ‘You don’t really have a truck licence, do you?’ That’s how good I wasn’t.

  There were too many things to organise before we left for me to get any practice in the truck, but Craig had showed me some of its little idiosyncrasies. He said ‘When you change gears, you have to pump the clutch twice, and it’s sticky in third gear.’ It had a double H pattern gearbox in reverse, and I knew that was a little bit funky. I hadn’t said a thing to him, for fear of sounding incompetent, but, as we drove out from Park Road, I think I was shaking. I told myself sternly, ‘Zelie, it’s a truck—how hard can it be?’

  We set off at four in the morning. I followed Craig out of Park Road and away we went. We had a fair bit of stopping and starting at the traffic lights through Sydney before we reached the freeway, but we went pretty well. At the first fuel stop, Craig asked me how I was going in the truck and I said, ‘OK. I think I’ve got the hang of it.’ He sort of smiled and gave me a hug.

  He didn’t say anything else to me about it at the time, but for years afterwards he told people how impressed he was that I had got into this great big truck with a gigantic caravan on the back and driven to Adelaide. I was so glad I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was, ‘What do you think you’re doing to me? You think I can just get in and drive that truck?!’ Instead I had fallen back on the words I had told myself many times growing up: ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ And thankfully, it all worked out fine.

  CHAPTER 34

  Education and welfare

  ‘It requires very little knowledge to care

  passionately about animals. It requires a great deal

  of understanding to care properly for them.’

  John Webster, Emeritus Professor, Bristol University UK

  Craig and I loved what we were doing; the elephants loved what they were doing; and so did the public who came to see the elephants—to stand near them and just watch for hours as these big gentle giants moved around, grazing and socialising. It was wonderful to see how everyone, from children to the elderly, responded to them. Sometimes people came up to us to say they remembered seeing the elephants with Craig’s dad or grandfather.

  I am always more than happy to answer questions anyone has about the animals. Soon after I began working with the elephants I started to carry around a little photo album with photos of them at Park Road—in their lush grassy paddocks, playing in the dam and rolling in the mud, and rubbing against the big trees, their own personal scratching posts.

  When the elephants are working and travelling we pull up every night at a designated circus ground allotted by the local councils or at friends’ country properties. Depending on where we stop for the night, the elephants can wander among the trees, have a dust bath, or swim in a lake or a dam. Although they love performing and the attention they receive from the public, their life is not simply being in the ring and then back in the truck. I explain to people that they love their life.

  On one trip, we called into Fred and Bert’s farm and let the elephants out in the front paddock which is heavily timbered and has a shallow dam. We laughed as the locals pulled over in amazement and came to see what was happening, including a team of shearers who had finished work for the day and who already had a couple of beers under their belt. One of them exclaimed that he’d heard about seeing pink elephants, but this was ridiculous.

  I got a lot of pleasure out of educating people about the elephants. Sometimes they would say things like, ‘They don’t look happy’ or ‘I don’t know how I feel about this’. Then I would tell them how I felt and what I knew; and, most importantly, what to observe in the elephants and how to read their emotions.

  Craig, who had put up with inexperienced people’s comments all of his life, would make me simultaneously laugh and cringe sometimes when he heard some concerned person say to me, ‘Those elephants don’t look happy.’ Craig would shout out, ‘Oh really? What do your elephants look like when they’re happy?’ In other words, if you don’t know elephant expressions and body language, then don’t pass judgement.

  The downside to being with the elephants was experiencing the animal rights extremists. It was a very steep learning curve. I had always thought, ‘Fair call—these are people who are concerned about animals and who are voicing their opinion.’ But when I saw first-hand how violent and abusive these people could be, I was astonished. Some of them weren’t interested in the truth or what more experienced people had to say about working with animals.

  If I got into a debate with them, I would sometimes say, ‘Yes, of course animals have emotions. But do you have a dog?’ And they’d come out with something like, ‘No, I don’t have a dog. Dogs should be running free—I don’t even think blind people should exploit dogs.’ When I heard that sort of thing, I thought ‘What planet are you from?’

  Circus carries with it an unjustified stigma, thanks to a mixture of bad publicity and a few bad eggs. While travelling overseas I have sometimes seen farm animals, performing animals and even pets living in inhumane conditions, and it’s broken my heart; I’ve wanted nothing more than to get those animals away from the people who are mistreating them or not providing adequate care, but I also know often the situations are complicated. In countries with low socio-economic status, many animals suffer from starvation, and/or lack of medical treatment. I know that not everyone in the world is innocent, but I sure know that the people who are innocent don’t deserve what they get from animal activisits!

  Many of the animal rights activists don’t have a real working relationship with animals; they appear to be more interested in causing economic damage, sensational headlines and misery than actually understanding the true relationship existing between humans and their animals. If animal rights
activists truly cared about animals, I believe they would focus on things like the cruelty to dogs in countries where they are beaten before being eaten, but they seem to be more interested in causing problems in industries where the animals are productive and happy.

  Through my work I know many people who own animals as companions or who depend on animals for their income; the vast majority of them put the welfare of their animals above their own. They will risk their lives in fires and floods to save their animals; they go without sleep to look after sick animals; they spend huge amounts of money to give their animals the best vet care—sometimes, even when they can’t afford to take proper care of themselves. All the farmers and horse breeders I know are dedicated to the welfare of their animals, because they get the best results from happy, contented animals. And because they care.

  Of course, there are animal rights activists and then there are animal welfare supporters. It was only relatively recently that I learnt the very important difference between ‘animal welfare’ and ‘animal rights’. People who love, care for and work with animals care deeply about animal welfare. Craig and I are animal welfare supporters, as are most people who love and adore their animals—they want their animals to live in fantastic conditions, they want their animals to be happy, they want them to look good. They won’t look good if they are badly treated.

  If you have a dog, you’ll know how excited it gets when you get home from work or school. To see that same excitement in an elephant is to me just the utmost pleasure, because of their grandeur and intelligence.

  The first time we came back to Park Road after being away for several months, the reception Craig received from the elephants made me cry. He didn’t think anything of it—he just said, ‘Hey there, girls,’ and hugged them, with his arm around one trunk and around another’s leg, while they were all ‘peeping’ (a noise they make through the end of their trunk, expressing comfort and happiness). It always amazes me how gentle they can be with their trunks; here they were caressing, encircling and smelling Craig with joy. It is just a beautiful thing. I am really grateful to have that knowledge of elephant behaviour, and how much they love their human family.

  CHAPTER 35

  The Man from Snowy River

  After the trip to Adelaide, we took the elephants back to Park Road for a well-deserved break. That was when Tony Jablonski got in touch with me. He was putting together a live show that was to tour around Australia; he wanted to know if I could train a liberty horse to rear for him and if I would trick ride in the show. I jumped at the chance.

  At the time, Craig wasn’t happy at Park Road. He had lived and worked out of that place all of his life. The more I got to know Craig, the more confused and frustrated I realised he was. Since Stafford had died his sons were trying to run the business and things had become messy. Brenton and Craig fought a lot. Craig had a lot of difficulty expressing his frustration. When he tried to communicate with any of his family, but particularly with Brenton, the conversation seemed to deteriorate into personal attacks on each other. I thought they were both beautiful people, and was really upset to see them so divided. Brenton was trying to be the man who organised the jobs and Craig felt like he was being treated as Brenton’s employee. When I took up Tony’s job offer, Craig decided to come with me.

  The Man from Snowy River Arena Spectacular took us all over Australia. Instead of camping and travelling with caravans as we had with the circus, we were accommodated in motel rooms and had the option of being flown between cities. Craig and I drove from place to place and stayed with our horses, the way I always like it.

  I had previously travelled in Craig’s domain, but now he was in somebody else’s travelling tour, and I was blown away by how handy he was. He drove trucks when others got tired; he had horses rugged and feeds ready by the time we’d changed out of our costumes; he would put his hand to anything, from helping backstage to being out front to giving constructive criticism. As always, he became indispensable and I loved him seeing me perform. I couldn’t have been happier to have had him by my side.

  He was the most impressive person I had ever been around, and I know that I wouldn’t be where I am today without Craig. You know the old saying, ‘Behind every good man there is a good woman’; well, with us the roles are reversed—he is the person who has helped me achieve everything I have in the last ten years. He is so quiet and unassuming, but I wish he could get more credit—and yet he doesn’t seem to crave that. I think he appreciates it when he is recognised, but he doesn’t seek it out.

  We worked with some great people on that show. In particular, it was terrific to catch up with Lee Kernaghan again. He is a lovely, unaffected person who exudes happiness. He is also a very talented and well-respected man, and has done lots of fantastic things for the music industry, giving pleasure to many through his music. Even though by now he had become a very successful country and western singer, he was still the same humble fun man I remembered from Movie World. His wife, Robyn, was pregnant at the time, and she still performed on keyboard and sang all the way through the Arena spectacular with Lee and the rest of the band.

  He composed a song for the show, about a guy who rescues a damsel in distress by jumping off his horse onto a team of runaway horses. The sequence was performed by the buckboard drivers (a buckboard is a long open carriage) and trick riding. The song was called ‘Snowy Mountains Buck Jump’, and we rode our horses back to front and stood in our saddles as he performed it.

  It was a load of fun to have such a fantastic guy on the team with us and to rekindle our old friendship.

  When we finished touring with Tony, Craig and I returned to Park Road and took the elephants on a run up the north coast of New South Wales with another circus for the school holidays. For the first time we had Craig’s two gorgeous kids with us. Nelson was six and Columbia was three, and they appeared to love being on tour as much as we did. They even performed as part of a whip-cracking act. Columbia was so adorable—she’d tell her dad to hurry up when he was getting ready for a show or she would be late for her performance.

  I loved traipsing around like a gypsy; I still love it. I love that you can set up somewhere and create a little township with the people you have been travelling with; and then soon you are all back on the road and setting up somewhere else, where there is a whole new world of people to entertain, who bring their own excitement and energy with them. Obviously there are times when it is difficult—for example in thunderstorms or hot, dry, dusty conditions, or when you’re not feeling like being on show. For plenty of people we know, their home is their truck or caravan and they wouldn’t have it any other way. For me, personally, I eventually like going back to my home, to the peace and privacy.

  When you’re working on a show, you don’t tend to watch the entire thing. Once the kids had finished performing and the elephant act was over, Craig would put the elephants away and the kids and I would go back to the caravan, which was parked alongside the tent.

  On one particularly wild and windy night, we were all back in the van and Nelson was looking out the window, because it was raining and blowing a gale. Then he suddenly called out, ‘Dad, the tent’s falling down!’

  Several of the Bullens had previously tried to explain to me the amount of pressure and responsibility you bear when you are the ‘tent boss’, meaning that you’re in charge of all the seating that has to be erected and the temporary structure that is raised over the top of it. If the seating or the tent were to collapse, many lives would be in peril. I hadn’t fully understood this responsibility until that night, when I witnessed a ‘blow-down’ on a sandy lot in a torrential gale.

  Hearing Nelson’s words, Craig and I rushed to the window and watched as part of the tent collapsed, and the other half flew up and exposed seating and people. Fortunately, before the collapse happened, the ringmaster had seen it starting to come away and calmly asked over the PA system for everyone to leave the tent as quickly as possible. No one was hurt.

&
nbsp; When we’d left the tent earlier, I’d seen one of the performers, a talented Moroccan tumbler and dog trainer, waiting backstage to perform an act with his dogs. Now, as the tent came down and the rain washed over them, I could hear him calling for his favourite kelpie cross. He loved that dog, and he kept screaming her name out into the storm; he had found all of the others, but she was still missing.

  Craig told me to keep the kids with me as he ran out to help unhook the canvas and to get it all back under control. They eventually found Mohammad’s dog, who was patiently waiting under a pile of canvas, but the memory of that poor man shrieking out for his dog still gives me goose bumps.

  CHAPTER 36

  Jim and Silvana

  Sled had contacted me about an animal movie possibly coming up in South Africa; however I didn’t want to get my hopes up, so I had put it out of my mind—sometimes movies come off and sometimes they don’t.

  Then, in May 2003, I received a call from Genevieve Hofmeyr, who was working as production manager with Lloyd Phillips, the producer, whom I had previously worked with in Namibia. She told me that Sled was off the movie, because of a disagreement between him and production, but was I still able to do the picture?

  I told her I’d have to think about it. I didn’t want to be disloyal to Sled, so I called him, but he was on a downer and wouldn’t come to the phone. Instead I spoke to him via Tamara, and let him know that I’d been approached to do the film. I heard him in the background telling her that I might as well go ahead. As a result, I took the job, but I now know he didn’t mean it and that he felt betrayed when I went. He hasn’t spoken to me since, and I miss him—I miss his fun.