BEFORE DAWN

The following week, I went up to Sydney with Chris Kennedy.

One night I attended a fashion parade in a circus tent. I’d dropped three red bennies and was drinking brandy. I got bored with the show and walked around outside the big top, listening to calliope music inside.

I saw acrobats and people in costumes, some haute couture fashion, others wearing clown outfits, or top hats and fairy wings. They carried fire torches as they danced past me into the big tents.

It was very dark away from the lights, and I saw an elephant way beyond the tents and caravans, surrounded by strewn bales of hay. I walked up to the huge elephant, and in the enormous blackness of it I could see its giant eye watching me.

I felt totally dwarfed as I touched its prickly hide. It was hard and warm and smelled of hay and faeces.

It stood there and we stared at each other for a while, the vast animal rocking slowly from side to side on its chain, then a voice called out, “You better look out mate…”

It was a guy with a rake pushing around hay in the dark, “She’s killed three men.”

I took my hand away and right then the elephant kicked me in the shin. I didn’t really feel a thing, and I backed away and walked across the football oval back into the city.

I ended up waking the next morning, alone in a hotel bed on Bondi Beach. The ceiling fan was on, and it fluttered around with a burst black balloon spinning off one propeller on a string. I had a bad limp as I got on a train and went back to Melbourne.

A little bloke from the country sat down next to me, carrying fishing rods and a large suitcase. He was obviously going fishing, and he offered me a beer.

I told him I didn’t have any money. He said, “No worries mate… I’m all prepared.”

He opened his suitcase, which was completely full of cans of beer. “”You’ve got to be ready for anything…” he said, “So you gotta bring what you need with you.”

A film shoot is like a big dangerous party on a circus train. It is a surreal super-natural thing and it can run off the rails at any moment, and circus people are always different. They can all do magic tricks and risky stunts and the train is always going on an exciting journey, but it's always going too damn slow or too fast otherwise.

The idea of making a film, "the thing itself", is like that huge black elephant that rocks from side to side as it stares into your soul, waiting for you to climb up and ride it one day. It can certainly lift you up and carry you, or it can crush you in a moment.

Years passed, and on subsequent crazy film projects and after more wild parties a few people actually died. They fell out of buildings, or had car accidents, or they died of a drug overdose or flung themselves into space on the end of a rope. 

It was very sad, and I missed far too many funerals. I guess that’s the real cost of guerrilla tactics. 

It's all about passionate obsession and lost opportunities, and sometimes you must retreat momentarily from the battle, skulk into the shadows and hide under a bush. 

You have to decide what your hoping for, then carefully take aim at the enemy and listen to the little voice inside your head that’s always whispering, “Keep shooting. Button on, and keep it on.”