Australian Penthouse

At 61 years old, the trademark golden mop is now infused with mercury, his face bears the striations of long-forgotten months in distant wildernesses, and he is slightly bemused at the idea that anyone could still be interested in anything he says or does.

Media-wary—for reasons which will be detailed later—yet unfailingly polite, Mangels says: “I have no idea why you are calling me. The days of being a celebrity as such are far behind me and I’m kind of taken aback that I am remembered at all.”

There is no malice in his tone. Rather, it’s one of a man who has his peace with the past and is living his present in quiet equanimity. Mostly, this involves surfing secret breaks “off the islands in the Pacific” and revegetating his property on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula.

A resurgence in attention is something that Alby will have to get used to, as Hollywood producer Paul Mason—whose credits include Lasse Hallstrom’s latest film Hachiko—recently signed a deal to document Mangels’ life story. And what a story it is. When he was eight, Alby’s Dutch parents migrated to South Australia and, by all accounts, his childhood was lived against the backdrop of the Murray River at Murraybridge.

At 23, Alby had an epiphany: there must be more to life than working as a brickie in Murraybridge. Consequently, in 1971, he and mate John Fields set off on what was supposed to be a one-off walkabout.

With a modest $400 in funds and a 16mm Bell and Howell film camera to capture their adventures, the exciting journey fomented a six-year odyssey which encompassed 56 countries across four continents. Along the way, Alby worked as a mechanic, a baker, a stockman, an unfeasibly large jockey, and an insurance salesman whose own life presented a level of risk that very few brokerages would be keen to accept.

The result was the 1977 film World Safari, the huge success of which took everybody but Mangels by surprise. Having conducted the equivalent of focus groups in schools, community halls and drive-ins, before the final product was edited, World Safari was a beguiling mix of natural wonder and ‘no-way-dude!’ moments.

“When you have six years of material to select from,” says Mangels, “chances are you will end up with a pretty dynamic product.” But there was more to the movie, which he notes, “was at one stage on at the same cinemas as Star Wars and Superman. My fondest memory of the time was that [the movie] was genuine family entertainment.

“Three generations would show up to the theatre and enjoy the film from start to finish. I don’t think you see that anymore. There was something in there for six-year-olds, 16-year-olds and 60-year-olds. I just don’t see products like that today.”

Part of World Safari‘s allure was the star’s recklessness. He exposed himself to a level of danger that khaki’d contemporaries such as Malcolm Douglas and the Leyland Brothers—not to mention antecedents such as Steve Irwin—would never consider.

Aside from the narrow escapes from both aggressive gorillas and aggressive guerrillas, Alby could always be relied upon to do himself a claret-spilling injury or three. So much so that his injuries provided fodder for running jokes with stand-up comics, who made much of the ‘mangle’ word play well into the mid-1990s.

Another special element in the Mangel mix was humour—some of it slapstick, much at Mangels’ expense. As if to suggest he didn’t take himself too seriously and didn’t mind looking silly. For example, this exchange from World Safari:
Alby: “What sort of fish is this?”
Islander: “Saltwater fish.”
Alby: “Where do you catch them?”
Islander: “Out of the sea.”

Then there were the ladies. Accompanying Alby on his escapades were women most Australian men could only dream of during their long and lonely suburban nights. While Alby was known to don a loincloth, these beauties featured in both precarious situations and the highest of high-cut bikinis.

Perhaps the most famous of his female counterparts was Sale of the Century bombshell Judy Green, who later suffered severe head injuries in a car accident with Mangels in South America. Then there was the equally striking Michelle Ells, Lucinda Dunn and Tina Dalton.

There was no doubt about it; by the time World Safari II was released in 1984, Alby Mangels was the man Aussie blokes wanted to be and women wanted to do.

Alby looks back on his image as a Don Juan De Speedo with a degree of wryness. “To say that my relationship with these girls was strictly professional would be untrue, but it wasn’t like I was trawling for women. These films took four or five years to make, and like any other bloke, I had relationships in those periods.”

He also admits that having his cohorts “prancing about with not much on” was by no means a happy coincidence, considering that half of his intended audience were men.

World Safari II was such a massive hit that it outgrossed—on many levels—Ghostbusters on its Australian release. According to several accounts, it made Mangels wealthy enough to purchase a farm, a plane, a helicopter, a boat, and 80km of beachfront property on Eyre Peninsula, where he hoped to create a wildlife sanctuary.

The dizzying success of World Safari II was matched by the failure of its 1988 sequel. The formula just no longer worked, and despite an enormous marketing budget, Mangels lost the lot. It was at this point that his life began to resemble a country-and-western song. Hordes descended on Alby’s properties to buy a piece of the great man when he sold his assets—his ketch, Gretta Marie, was burnt and sunk; and his beloved dog Sam was shot.

When your trajectory is downward, there are usually a few resentful people who will gladly sink in the boot to help you on your way.

A cameraman who had not been paid after Mangels went bust told A Current Affair that in his quest for an action shot, Mangels threw his pooch from a moving vehicle, and that much of the ‘how-did-they-capture-that?’ dynamism of the World Safari franchise was staged. So comprehensive was the stitch-and-bitch segment that Mangels had women crossing streets to slap him.

Accepting that several storylines were massaged and incidents concocted, it is the accusations of animal cruelty that still sting to this day. “There’s just no way I would have done that to any animal,” Alby growls. “Let alone an animal I loved.

Besides, how could it be physically possible to throw a dog out of the back-seat window of a car while driving? The story just makes no sense, yet a lot of people believed it.” Remember: this from a man who once found a foal with a fly-blown hole in its neck in the outback, carried it all the way to the nearest farm, milked its mother by hand to bottle-feed the infant, then spent weeks nursing it back to health.

While flying over a flooded area of Western Australia, Mangels also spotted cattle and horses stranded on small islands created by the sudden deluge. With some already dead from starvation, he spent the next two days filling up a small borrowed aircraft with bales of hay and dropping it on the islands. In addition to this, Alby is a long-time patron of the Mountain Gorilla Survival Appeal.

This is also the man who, when his mate Piers Souter became a quadriplegic after falling from a jetty, created a wheelchair for him that won an Australian Design Award.

Penniless and disenchanted, Alby withdrew to the only home he had left: a caravan. Briefly contemplating a return to his bricklaying career, eventually he couldn’t deny his true nature and hit the road again with a camera in tow. Now a fairly low-key operator primarily supplying the American cable TV market, Mangels has
made more than 80 environmental documentaries.

Yet he still despairs for the future of our planet. “Yes, we are becoming more aware of humanity’s impact on everything from global warming to salinity,” he says. “But people just don’t realise how far gone the situation is. It’s not something that we need to tackle soon. Governments and individuals alike have to take action today or the wilderness areas I have spent my career filming simply won’t exist for people to experience anymore.”

Keeping a snake’s-belly profile following the collapse of his media empire, Alby went about his business in Australia and abroad, generating a spate of Elvis-like sightings which were lapped up by a public that still held a degree of fascination for him. Reports of Mangels travelling the west coast of South Africa in 1993 mingled with those of travellers seeing him scoffing a steak sandwich at the Port Wakefield Roadhouse on May 17, 1997.

When whispers of an unauthorised biography surfaced in 2007, Mangels decided that “enough crap” had been written about him, so he collaborated with Lynn Santer on the book Alby Mangels: Beyond World Safari (JoJo Publishing, RRP$34.95).

One gets the impression that he thought this would be the end of the fascination, and that he might be able to get on with a life of riding waves and producing small films in exotic locales. Never married, a black belt in tae kwan do and a two-time winner of the Australian Waterskiing Championships, Mangels is still the kind of man who many of us wish we could be; after being fêted and fucked over by the fickle creature that is fame, Alby radiates a sense of contentment. He’s obviously happy in who he is and what he does.

His opponent, Josh Shooter, is still in his street clothes—somewhat snug footy shorts and a singlet. He tugs on the singlet so frequently that it’s hard not to feel anxious when near him. Like a rubber band drawn to its limits, it seems plausible that Josh might snap at any moment.

“The only reason we don’t kick each other’s teeth in is because we want to do this five days a week,” says Shooter, the current Heavyweight Champion of local Victorian promotion New Age Wrestling (NAW). “It’s just all about business.”

NAW is just one of dozens of small wrestling promotions currently operating throughout Australia. It regularly stages shows at Melbourne community halls, RSL clubs and pubs. The average grappler can make around $100 per bout.

“A lot of guys understand that wrestling here is either a part-time or casual job, and they treat it as such,” says Mark Mercedes, co-promoter of NSW-based promotion IWA Pro-Wrestling. “But the guys who are more serious about it try to make money elsewhere.”

Mercedes is one of the few Australians in recent times to get anywhere near the big stages—and big money—of American wrestling. In the 1990s, he performed in front of tens of thousands of people on the same bills as US legends such as Hulk Hogan, Paul ‘Mr. Wonderful’ Orndorff and the Junkyard Dog. Mercedes tells us that timing is as vital as talent when it comes to finding fame in the USA, citing the career of Aussie wrestler Peter Stilsbury, aka Outback Jack, as an example.

“Back in the days of WCW [World Championship Wrestling] and Outback Jack, they were looking for very gimmicky wrestlers, and Outback Jack’s gimmick came with [the success of] Crocodile Dundee. It was the right place and the right time. When you’re trying to break overseas, unless you’re over there [in America], constantly in their face, it’s very easy to be forgotten.”

“WWE is not going to worry about going overseas and looking for talent when [it's] got so much happening in America,” says wrestling historian Barry York. “America’s population is more than 10 times ours, so it’s reasonable to think there is 10 times as many up-and-coming pro wrestlers there.

“And the Australian market isn’t that significant. If they had a guy who entered the ring with a slouch hat or a boomerang, it might make it a bit more interesting for an Australian audience, but they’re not going to stop watching if there’s no Australian in the WWE. So there’s no great economic incentive to recruit from the Australian talent pool, which must be very frustrating for locals.”

While the US is pro wrestling’s financial promised land, it’s not the only option for Aussie grapplers with international aspirations. New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is screened during primetime on Japan’s Asahi TV, is actually more popular with purists than the American product, mainly because it values athleticism over soap-opera acting skills.

Melbourne wrestler, Krackerjack, whose body looks like it’s been through a mincer thanks to the ultra-violent barbed-wire matches he’s been involved in, spent some time in Japan in 2005.

“Wrestling is a national pastime in Japan,” Krackerjack tells Penthouse. “It’s not as counter-cultural as it is in Australia. It’s been popular ever since the end of World War II, so [Japan] has its own legends of the business over there.

“They do shows that regularly draw 20,000 people and even the small independent shows I was working were getting 500 to 1000, and they were running those shows three or four times a week.”

Consequently, World Championship Wrestling Australia was established and shown on TV from 1964, taking wrestling to the mainstream. Ron Miller, who co-owned WCWA from 1976, says Channel Nine chose to drop wrestling from its schedule at the end of 1978, thanks in part to its interest in World Series Cricket.

This decision triggered local promotions to fold, and while some continued to stage events at small clubs in the 1980s, things were never the same again.

Back at the Maltese Cultural Centre, better known tonight as the ‘NAW Arena’, a colourful cast of oddballs make flamboyant entrances to the ring, accompanied by cheesy hard-rock theme music.

The two standouts tonight are Iron Horse Morrison, an Andre the Giant-type brute with the fluency of movement of a slasher-flick goon, and Mickey ‘Fantabulous’ Jackson, a showboating pretty boy who grabs a female audience member’s drink and erotically pours it all over himself as he climbs into the squared circle.

The hundred or so hardcore fans snap photos with everything from high-end SLRs to smartphones, and clearly enjoy themselves as they cheer on the heroes and heckle the villains. BIG Huss and Josh Shooter demonstrate athleticism and genuine technical skill befitting the main event, and the ebullient atmosphere of the crowd conveys that this evening has been a fun night out, and 15 bucks well spent.

While wrestling for the NAW won’t make these guys household names or wealthy superstars, they will keep competing for as long as they can, because while Australian wrestling may be down on the canvas, it’s not ready to tap out just yet…