Longtom: “I was a TV stunt cameraman thrown off a cliff, in car!”

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.