One man's alternate history of the great east coast
Australian winter of 2007…
I thank Nick Carroll for
establishing winter 2007 as a yard stick winter for East Coast
Australia. As an alternative history of the event
it was also the winter I established myself as prime bullshit
artiste in the TV production world as a second unit cameraman,
underwater.
It fits the genre of surfer scams to stay wet, an unexplored but
much discussed theme lately on the Grit.
Lot of surfers have worked in motion picture production, some,
like our own Chas Smith, above the line in doco-features like
Who is
JOB and Trouble
and many below the line.
My favourite big-wave stud
Brock Little was a below-the-line stunt cock. Second
unit, underwater, has been a haven for those who want to spend more
time in the water and get paid for it.
To avoid the heinous charge of self-aggrandisement, let’s just
say this story happened to someone else*, some thirty-something man
with a young family, living in a caravan park behind a primo north
coast point, which breaks that winter like it never has, before or
since.
Old mate, I’ll call him Shearer, wrangled a broadcast ready
camera via hire purchase and got the gig for a TV series shot in
the Byron Bay area.
A planned test shot was in jeopardy due to a small snag. No
underwater housing.
Shearer contacted George Greenough, his old neighbour and
pal, to ask for help. Greenough laughed and sent
Shearer to the hardware store for some hose clamp and to the tyre
place, for an old inner tube. The inner tube is cut, a piece of
plexiglass cut to fit then hose clamped around the edge. The back
of the tube is cinched shut with the camera inside. An instant
water housing with an agricultural aesthetic.
The planned first shoot is a stunt involving a sunken car in a
quarry simulating the point-of-view of a person committing suicide,
we’ll get to that in a minute. Obvs, Shearer will be in the car as
it sinks, with the camera.
The assistant director is nervous when Shearer shows up to the
test shoot with a camera in a tyre tube but the test shot passes
muster.
The planned first shoot is a stunt involving a sunken car in a
quarry simulating the point-of-view of a person committing suicide,
we’ll get to that in a minute. Obvs, Shearer will be in the car as
it sinks, with the camera.
A proper housing has to be constructed. With no budget to
purchase the housing Shearer must construct it, with assistance
from Greenough. A foam block is carved as a mould, the mould is
glassed, the foam block carved out. The back of the housing sanded
down flat, a fibreglass lip for the lens port created. Optical
glass cut by a pal, control arms and o-rings drilled and glued into
place. It’s easy if you know how.
And if you don’t, like Shearer, it’s panic inducing as the day
of the stunt looms.
It’s June, Carroll’s thirty-five days of wild surf is in full
swing.
Shearer attends a pre-production meeting with the director and
stunt co-ordinator. We are going to drop you off a tow truck into a
quarry, with you in the car, they say. You’ll sink to the bottom
etc etc. Shearer nods, yup, yup. And, of course, to satisfy
insurance requirements, the stunt co-ordinator says, we need your
open water diving certificate. Yup, yup.
Wait, Shearer has no diving tickets. No paper-work. Nothing.
On the way home he stops in Byron Bay, at a dive shop and says
he’s an open-water diver, got his tickets in Thailand and needs
some paper-work to do this stunt.
Can they give him some paper-work?
Of course, Shearer can do a fifteen-metre open-water dive
tomorrow and get a piece of paper says the dive shop
proprietor.
How hard, Shearer thinks, could a fifteen-metre open-water dive
be?
The next day, the day before the scheduled stunt, the housing is
incomplete, the dive is on and the surf is pumping.
It’s raining, Carroll’s muscular ENE swell is in full swing.
Shearer snaps a board, grabs another, snaps the legrope and
destroys another board on the rocks.
Drives to Byron Bay, in the rain, for the dive.
Have you scuba dived? You did a course and learnt the basics and
how things worked.
Shearer went straight over the side, in heavy swell,
at Julian Rocks, a
volcanic outcrop a couple of miles off Cape Byron for his first
attempt. It’s easy when you know how, but when water
pressure starts to increase breathing becomes more difficult.
When breathing becomes difficult, the mind starts to feels
stressed. That makes the heart-rate increase, and the demand for
breathing increase.
Shearer starts to panic.
The instructor taps him on the shoulder and points into the
gloom. A dark shape appears – shark. The grey nurse glides by as
docile as an aged Labrador and that enables the scam artist to
regain control of his heart-rate and breathing.
The dive is completed, the paper work signed.
The rain patters on the iron roof overnight. The front lens port
has to be sikaflexed onto the housing. Shearer is up in the dark
with a hair dryer trying to get the adhesive to set and hold.
Three hours later, the camera goes into the housing for the
first time, on set, at an abandoned quarry north of Byron Bay.
The rain has cleared, a low has moved out to sea, a wintry
offshore breeze whips across the quarry. The water is black and
cold.
Staggeringly quickly it fills with water and sinks. Shearer
feels the nose of the car hit the bottom of the quarry. It is cold
and darker than the darkest night. He waits. The pressure feels
comforting now. He feels no fear but only the brightest, lightest
happiness. He waits for the tap. There is no tap. Something is
happening.
Beside Shearer, in a small Japanese car with the backdoors
removed sits a professional diver. They are on the back of a
tilt-tray tow truck about to be dropped into the quarry. The car
will submerge, hit the bottom and Shearer will wait for a tap from
the diver, then they will exit the vehicle with oxygen hoses and
swim to the surface. Shearer hears it as blah, blah, blah, all he
cares about is whether the sikaflex will hold from the water
pressure at ten metres on the housing.
Roll camera! Crunk, crunk, crunk, thud, crash. The car is in the
water.
Staggeringly quickly it fills with water and sinks. Shearer
feels the nose of the car hit the bottom of the quarry. It is cold
and darker than the darkest night. He waits. The pressure feels
comforting now. He feels no fear but only the brightest, lightest
happiness. The red light is still on, the housing has held!
He waits for the tap. There is no tap. Something is happening.
The car is being winched back up. Twenty times the stunt is
repeated.
“We got the shot,” he says to the Director, “we got the
shot.”
What with the relief from getting the paper-work in order and
pulling the stunt shot off Shearer surfs the local point that
afternoon as a new swell raged in from the SE in a peculiar state
of ecstasy. The next day, sandwiched between surf sessions at
good-as-it-gets point surf he spends six hours at the bottom of a
pool filming an actress on a li-lo dropping a glass of champagne in
a moment of poignant melancholy.
The way that glass tumbled to the bottom, scattering the rays of
sunlight, he will never forget. I’m quite certain of that.
But still, six hours! You want to spend six hours at the bottom
of a pool? That’s a whole tide cycle.
I decided I didn’t like working below the line and quit the
industry by the summer of 2008.
All for a few perfect waves eh, Sammywaters?
*A first person account will be made available as part of the
memoir: Sanctimonious Derro.
