Despite advances in technology and safety, more stuntmen die or are injured on film sets than ever before. Penthouse speaks with seasoned vets and the new guard in Australia and America about life as a body for hire…

THE past few years have seen several high-profile accidents lead to injuries and deaths of stunt performers on films as varied as The Hangover Part II, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In early 2011, the Independent newspaper asked whether the profession required assessment, quoting an Equity (UK actors’ union) spokesperson who revealed that insurance claims from stunt accidents were rising. Downward pressure on film costs, the rise of automation and a culture of blame have all taken a toll.

Veteran British stunt coordinator, performer and second-unit director, Vic Armstrong, says that stunt work is no different to car racing or parachuting. The 65-year-old, best known for his work on many James Bond and the Indiana Jones films, says sometimes things just go wrong: “It doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault but there is an inherent risk in any stunt.”

But Armstrong is quick to point out that planning with safety in mind is the key to survival. “It should be a long and exciting life, but it shouldn’t be any more dangerous than any adventurous sport if you approach it correctly.”

The task of the stunt team is to make actions that look dangerous safe to execute, planning the set-up and logistics (stunt co-ordinator), dressing up to take the fall or bullet (stunt performer) and often directing the second unit; it involves a lot of waiting and armies of technicians to capture often a just few seconds of footage. It’s an evolving art.

In his book The True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Stuntman, Armstrong describes being asked to ride in a motorcycle sidecar for 1968’s Subterfuge, assuring the director he could even though he’d never used one in his life. Somehow, they muddled through and got the shot, but Armstrong says this would never happen with today’s endless red tape and clearances.

Australian stunt performers are determined to keep safety at the top of the priority list as well as fostering initiative to solve creative problems. Reg Roordink, stunt performer and safety supervisor on Romper Stomper and McLeod’s Daughters explains, “I never say ‘No we can’t’. It can all be done if we put the right procedures in place.”

“It’s when the output is taken away from the individual and put into so many other hands that things can go wrong, when you rely on technology more than your own spirit,” Page says.

“Physics don’t change and inertia, friction and momentum are the way we work out how a physical action will come out—that’s how we make it safe. What’s changed is that we’ve introduced so many other factors [that are] controlled by people whose arse isn’t on the line.”

And while it might be tempting to think that the stunt game is for young-uns while shuffling older performers out to pasture, guys of Page and Armstrong’s age and status have an ace up their sleeves that can help enforce the safety of the entire industry. “I’ve got to admit that I’m not physically as capable of really high-energy stuff as I was 30 years ago,” Page claims, “but experience replaces a lot of that energy so you don’t have to try as hard to get it right.

“The good thing about the aging process is that you never let go of the knowledge you’ve developed, so less is likely to go wrong.”

But the digital age means audiences are demanding ever-bigger thrills. Even Tom Cruise was prepared to dangle from straps halfway up Dubai’s 830-metre high Burj Khalifa tower. Each director wants to top the stunts filmed by the last one, but now that audiences are expecting feats of superhuman ability, are we asking too much of the men and women who have to deliver it on the screen?

New Zealand stunt artist and frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator, Zoe Bell, 33, has seen the limits of technology take over what the human body can do, and she believes we will always chase the extreme.

“Anything we feel like we don’t have a handle on, we’re going to create technology to push it a bit further,” claims Bell. “We’ve got CGI, so there’s lots of things you’re not going to use humans for because [the stunts] would probably kill us. We just want to see bigger and better stuff all the time. That’s just humanity, not the stunt industry alone.”

Safety concerns change within the stunt industry because the type of work changes with the tastes of filmgoers. As Bell explains: “I’m in the generation that started in the martial arts and wire-work era around the time of The Matrix; it was a more precision-based art. The older guys were from the era of westerns and cowboys and did a lot of horse riding, brawling and jumping-through stuff.

“The older guys were from the era of westerns
and did a lot of brawling and jumping through stuff”

Plus, if you go back that far in time, I simply wouldn’t have been allowed to do what I’m doing because I have boobs!,” she laughs.

However the stunt industry is shaping up, it seems Australia is where it’s at when it comes to safety and a workmanlike approach that consistently delivers great results. “I love working in the industry here,” says Page.

“We don’t have the big money America has, which is actually limiting for them because they automatically throw money and technology at a problem. In Australia, we come up with innovative ideas and we’ll always have an angle because we don’t have too much money.

“People think that’s bad, but the lack of money has made us come up with some truly great stuff.” Because more money attracts more interests, the U.S. industry has been left to drown in a sea of red tape.”

“We’ve always been conscious of safety,” Armstrong explains, “but nowadays it’s all about filling in forms and laying the blame on someone else and very little about being safer. I prefer the older days when it was more free-wheeling, but [excessive oversight] is just something that’s crept into the business, the same as it has in all our lives.”

Though Armstrong’s term “free-wheeling” may horrify modern bean counters, Page says it simply means we should focus not on less caution but caution where it counts. The stunt, he believes, should begin and end with the stunt artist, not the insurance assessors.

“You’re virtually instructed like a learner driver in some of the American car rolls, with big ramps and all the technology to back it up,” says Armstrong. “’Drive here, turn left there, push that button when you get to the yellow line and hang on’. Sure, you get a big result, but you’re not feeling it because it’s just not natural.

“In the old days, we’d go out there and roll cars, set ourselves alight and jump off buildings, and we knew that if we didn’t have our arse covered, we weren’t going to get through.”

When it came to the jaw-dropping Mad Max opening stunt, Page says the tiny crew built the ramp with timber, rocks and bricks found in a nearby paddock: “If it was an American film, there would have been engineers signing off on the ramp and it would have got so complex that little things would have gone wrong.

“We stuck that ramp together virtually with our finger in the air to feel where the wind was coming from. It was done on feel.”

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.

She was dressed like a Latina model headed for a relaxing vacation. Her tight white pants and high heels made the young beauty look taller than her 5’9″. Flying nonstop, her destination was unremarkable—Cancun. Travelling alone and first class made Maria about the least suspicious passenger in the terminal. But she was on a mission.

For US$1000, she had agreed to accompany a suitcase to Mexico. “You won’t have to touch the bag, drop it off or pick it up. You just fly.” Those had been the simple instructions from her boyfriend, Ariel, also a model, as he described the business deal.

On her return to Buenos Aires, Maria was promised another $4000—a small fortune in economically ravaged Argentina, especially for a youngster facing stiff odds in the highly competitive fashion industry. She had allegedly flown a dry run a few weeks earlier, without incident.

In minutes, Maria’s world fell apart. Airport police pulled her aside and began questioning her about the dozens of one-kilo packets of cocaine neatly wrapped in a towel inside her suitcase. The stash was worth approximately $4 million, according to estimates from the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration.

Maria cracked instantly, offering up an address in the chic Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. Argentine judge Marcelo Aguinsky ordered a raid that evening, and the police arrived to witness male and female models jumping off the second-storey balcony to escape.

Gustavo from Venezuela; Micaela from Argentina; and Ariel—Maria’s beau—who cracked his clavicle, pelvis and smacked his head in the mad scramble to evade the law.

At Pirovano Hospital, the models allegedly confessed that they had been sending a courier every day of the week—meaning that an avalanche of cocaine was on its way to Europe via Mexico. Where the coke came from and exactly where it ended up wasn’t their problem.

They had been tasked to come up with an entrepreneurial solution to transporting cocaine to Cancun. Their solution? Turn the normal concept of drug ‘mules’ on its arse.

This gang preferred to use ‘peacocks’, drug smugglers so hot and sexy that a border guard would be more likely to open a door for them than open their bags. The kind of women who instantly turn a man’s analytical brain to mush.

The gang’s leader was just such a female. A walking aphrodisiac of curves, attitude and cash, she was from Colombia and had an insider’s understanding of the cocaine industry, but no-one seemed to know her name.

Argentine detectives pressed her associates, but the beauty had covered her trail well. No-one could identify her. However, they all mentioned her passion for a white Pomeranian dog.

Police poured through airport records looking for a record of a passenger with a Pom. They hit the jackpot—on December 3, 2009, less than two weeks before Maria’s arrest, a Colombian woman named “Angie Sanselmente” (sic) had registered her dog and provided a hotel address.

Police stormed the room in question. They were too late—Sanclemente was gone. For the next four months, the once high-profile model—previously seen at beauty festivals in her homeland and in the social pages of Mexican magazines—went on the run.

Interpol issued an international warrant for her arrest but her lawyer stood firm, saying Angie needed to be granted the right to testify without going to prison pending trial.

Meanwhile, Angie hid out in a Buenos Aires youth hostel, dyed her hair blonde and protested her innocence via Facebook, revealing her worry of going to prison in Argentina for fear of being raped because she was so beautiful.

“That’s ridiculous, we have special prisons for suspects, she would never end up in a common prison,” said an Argentine police investigator using the alias ‘Alberto Ramses’. When asked about Angie’s role in the cocaine-smuggling operation, Ramses explained: “The type of drug smugglers has changed radically here in recent years.

We used to see humble, dark-skinned Peruvians and Bolivians, now it is eastern European women and glamorous figures”.

While it was clear that someone was behind the operation, Sanclemente was telling Facebook friends, “I’m very sad and hurt by the bad information. I don’t know how the press can destroy an innocent person… I don’t want to go to jail, I don’t deserve it. I am innocent.”

She was also in contact with friends in Barranquilla, the Colombian port city where she’d begun her modelling career, one of whom revealed in an interview, “I heard from Angie… Right now she’s shocked and scared she will get arrested. She’s also afraid for her life because this is a big drug problem and the bad guys could harm her.”

It was Angie’s combination of brains, beauty and bravura that she’d used, at the age of 20, to snare one of South America’s most competitive beauty competitions—Miss Cafe Colombia.

With four years’ of runway experience, she was known in Barranquilla as a hardworking journalism student who also sold auto parts and had been helping pay half of her family’s rent since she was only 16.

She had no known connection to the Colombian coke world then, but after being crowned Reina Nacional del Café (Queen of Coffee), she was embroiled in scandal for a different reason.

All contestants are required to be single, never married and a virgin. It turned out that Angie failed on all counts. Days after she was crowned, her ex-husband was outed, along with their marriage certificate and details of other former boyfriends.

It’s likely that Sanclemente’s involvement in the drug world began, unwittingly, when she started entering beauty pageants.

Reason being that men involved in the cocaine trade go these pageants to buy women or pay off/threaten judges so that their favourites win. As Karl Penhaul, CNN reporter in Colombia, notes, women being bought by traffickers at the contests is “outrageously common”.

“The world of [fashion] was one of the first areas that the capos took over,” confirms Alonso Salazar, Secretary of Government for Medellin in Colombia. “Many of the beauty queens who in the past rose to fame on dirty money are today renowned models.”

In his recent book, Checkmate, Colombian Police General (retired) Rosso Jose Serrano describes the narcos as having an obsession with “blonde and voluptuous” women.

He also outlines the rules for being a narco girlfriend: “They should be beauty queens, models or university students. After the capos seduce them, they buy their freedom.

In these circles, it is acceptable to have many women, and none of them should be jealous of the others… In the Mafia there are things that must be sacrificed for money or for love.”

Following her dethroning, Sanclemente moved to Mexico where she found the yin to her yang—a madly rich Mexican man assumed to be a cocaine clearing house linked to the feared Gulf Cartel.

Nicknamed ‘El Monstruo’ due to his supposed ugliness, The Monster allegedly provided Sanclemente with enough cash and gifts that she was a regular on the VIP circuit, travelling to Panama, Santiago, Los Angeles, Spain and throughout Latin America.

As for the woman herself, with most of her acquaintances too afraid to speak, the majority of what we know comes from her posts on Facebook, hi5 and other internet sites… Angie describes her passion for DJ Tiësto, Madonna, Latino pop star Juanes and Bryan Adams.

She admits a soft spot for Tobey Maguire of Spider-Man fame, and her favourite book is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

While the press set about convicting her, one pal who rose to Angie’s defence was an old school friend, Luis Alfonso Passo, who stated that she was: “incapable of taking a gram of cocaine to their local nightclub on the corner”.

CNN‘s Penhaul disputed the notion of Sanclemente as ‘queen-pin’, suggesting, “Angie’s role would have been choosing the mules for the operation, not running the cartel.”

Furthermore, he claimed it was doubtful she had the contacts necessary to operate an ‘international trafficking gang’, given that she would have needed top Mexican cartel connections to be flying the drugs into Cancun in the first place.

It was estimated that paying off all of the right people at the airport—from those manning the check-in desk and scanner to the roaming security guards—would have cost a huge amount. Plus there was the cost of the cocaine and the payment for the bewitchingly attractive mule.

“I doubt that Angie was in charge of the operation,” confessed an Argentine police official. “This is a hard business, not really a place for women to be running the show. But might she have been in charge of recruiting the women and sending them to Cancun? Certainly.”

Until her criminal controversy, Sanclemente was a woman on the rise, garnering magazine covers in Mexico and leaving a trail of starstruck men in her wake.

Her plastic surgery to nose, butt and breasts, and her liposuctioned curves, ties to The Monster and, inevitably, to drugs are all too common in Colombia.

Her life story is similar to Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso (“Without Tits there is No Paradise”), an enormously popular TV soap that chronicles stunning chicas, plastic surgeons and cocaine king-pins in plotlines reminiscent of Nip/Tuck meets The Godfather.

Unfortunately for Angie, she was arrested on May 26, while hiding out in a trendy suburb of Buenos Aires.

Her mother protested the former beauty queen’s innocence, telling reporters, “She is no drug trafficker, nor is she the queen of cocaine. There are bad intentions—a plot against her. She will prove her innocence.”

In September, Angie was transferred to a new prison after being assaulted and receiving death threats.

She was described by her mother as being suicidal. The degree of Sanclemente’s involvement in the clever courier system, if any, remains to be seen.

But for now, the drug lords will have to find another way to ship their illegal merchandise other than in the suitcase of a sexy and innocent-looking young woman.

Unfair competition

IN the past two years, Colombian investigators have been probing the links between drug bosses and second-tier beauty pageant Chica Med. Suspicions that king-pins were running the contest were confirmed when Yovanna Guzman, Miss Chica Med 2001, confessed all in an interview with Elenco magazine.

Guzman, a fair-haired fox, described being bought for a pile of luxuries that began with a Rolex, then progressed to cars and luxury apartments. For eight years, she was the secret lover of cocaine boss Wilber Varela.

Varela, a ruthless narco, was wanted for smuggling tonnes of cocaine into the US and for murdering his rivals. Guzman remembers him for delivering flowers but also warning shots for stepping out of line—like the time a gunman showed up at her apartment to shoot her in the leg. “He had two faces. I saw him so tender with the ones he loved, then you see the cartel killings. He always said he was the best of friends and the worst of enemies.”

Yovanna described to CNN the ‘golden cage’ in which she had lived—showered with luxuries, yet held as property by the cartel leader. “All those narcos care about is how big your breasts are. If they want you, the first thing they do is send you to their plastic surgeon to have silicone implants. But it’s them who decide how big you should be, not you.”

But as the chattering classes howled about what a disgrace it was, shock jocks grumbled about the neutering our iconic Aussie sense of humour. What changed so dramatically in such a short time?

From the 1808 Rum Rebellion until the football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars days of the 1970s, Australia enjoyed national representation by a very distinctive figure. He—no sexism intended, but it was almost always a male figure—was coarse, disrespectful, simple and funny. We’ve seen him epitomised in characters from sport (Shane Warne), politics (Bob Hawke), entertainment (Rodney Rude) and business (Kerry Packer).

He’s the larrikin, and he’s been a staple of Australian cultural life for a long time. Until now… Around the time we stopped hearing the phrase ‘lucky country’, we also adopted other models of national character besides the stoic, sardonic rural type with little time for hierarchical authority and a unique language to share his disdain for it.

When globalisation took hold in the ’80s, we wanted to see (and sell) ourselves as latte-quaffing sophisticates, particularly in the city-based hubs of media and social commentary.

It generated a unique social and cultural tension—even though we envied the urbane cool of New York or London, we kept contempt for ‘wankers’ dear to our hearts. Like the curmudgeonly grandparent we had to lock away during parties, we loved the larrikin even though we were a bit ashamed of him.

Just watch some of the movies from the New Wave era—where the blokes are all ockers, chasing beer and roots, their long-suffering women safely distanced from such behaviour by their British accents.

The larrikin might have thrived for so long in the pre-media age because of our healthy suspicion of authority, perhaps the cultural memory of a time when it transported our ancestors to far-flung, unforgiving penal colonies for inconsequential crimes.

Now, it seems the inner urbanite in our national character is winning. The onslaught of political correctness has taken its toll, and like the rest of the world we’ve been overrun by the unstoppable hegemony of American culture, tailored to appeal as much to a Yackandandah sheep farmer as it does a Hezbollah footsoldier in the Gaza Strip.

But there’s a class division in Australia like there is in Britain or anywhere else, and that’s the one between city and country. Though our national mythology is largely based around the bush, most Australians live in coastal capitals where we’re more familiar with rap music and broadband internet than billy tea.

“The larrikin evolved as a cultural point of reference through early twentieth-century texts like CJ Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke,” says Anthony Lambert, an expert in cultural identity at Macquarie University. “But the characters actually lived and worked in the city.”

But still, we’ve dropped the larrikin from the cultural consciousness of city living, haven’t we? “We may not associate larrikins with the city,” Lambert adds, “but it was the cheeky, relatively unsophisticated characters that shaped the local version of reality show The Apprentice, even though it was set in the boardrooms of the Sydney CBD.

Many urban Australians would suggest this framing of identity is fairly outdated, but I think ‘larrikinism’ is alive and well in the country and city.”

More interesting is the proposition that the larrikin might merely be an illusion, or at best a local version of a universal figure. Most countries or racial groups only gain a toehold in history after considerable hardship, and it’s human nature to respond with humour.

The very word ‘larrikin’ isn’t even Australian—it’s an old Irish word with the same root as ‘skylarking’. “I’m sure there are some parallels, analogues of larrikins in most cultures,” says broadcaster and intellectual Phillip Adams.

“Bob Hawke rolled up to me at some do and told me the one about the two corpses on the Hume Highway—one was a politician and the other was a kangaroo. The difference was there were skid marks before the kangaroo.

“At the time I thought it was wonderful, a larrikin Prime Minister telling a good Australian joke. But when I checked I found the original joke was about Route 66 and the corpse of a skunk. So it’s an illusion to think it’s exclusively Australian. We just claim it as our own.”

Adams thinks you only have to look as far as another people who thrived out of suffering as the early Australians did. “There’s a great similarity between the heavy irony of Australian humour and Jewish humour,” he says.

“The battering rural Australians have had is a bit like the sense of Jewish irony having to survive almost infinite problems with Yahweh [God]. It produced a similar comic attitude to expect the worst.”

Adams also points out that a lot of the larrikin’s trappings were extreme—and fictitious—satirical exaggerations. As the producer of 1972′s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, he remembers scriptwriter Barry Humphries’ motivations very well. “The film was an act of exorcism,” Adams recalls. “[Humphries] hated the ocker.”

The real division of larrikinism in Australia might not be between city and country, or rich and blue collar, but past versus future. Political sensitivity and a more sophisticated (and litigious) society have transformed the cultural landscape—maybe that’s why we love it when a subversive example of larrikin humour sneaks past the cultural gatekeepers, such as with The Chaser.

“The larrikin is never far away from the way Australians think about themselves,” says Macquarie’s Anthony Lambert. “You might also argue we’re so distant from such images—in the cities at least—we can laugh at them as lesser forms of ourselves.

“I have a feeling it’s a little of both. Most Australians want a foot in both camps, a claim to being ‘Aussie’ in a romantic, laid-back sense but not one that diminishes Australian-ness as something less than other developed countries.”

Of course, recent backlashes against larrikinism have proven what a different society we live in from when Hoges invited the world over for a shrimp on the barbie. When Tourism Australia—from advertising devised by Sydney agency M&C Saatchi—asked prospective visitors, “Where the bloody hell are you?”, the response ranged from a new cultural cringe at home to outrage overseas, the British government even banning the offending ads.

“Forget the crap you hear about why people visit Australia,” he says. “What they like most isn’t the Opera House or Uluru. They like Australians, and what they like about us is our character and irreverence, which was without doubt born out of the larrikin era.

“But let me remind you of another stereotype in our illustrious history—the wowser, sworn enemy of the larrikin. No fun. Serious. Probably religious. Anti everything. Well, they’re still lurking around and easily offended, it seems, by words like ‘bloody’.”

McFarlane adds that the renaissance of the wowser is manifesting itself in a ‘nanny state’ culture. “Frankly, we could run a profitable advertising agency just running TV commercials on what people can’t do, like gamble, drink too much or have unprotected sex—all of the stuff that the Australian larrikin once lived for.”

So maybe, even though we’ve stopped holding the larrikin up as a cultural figurehead for our values so visibly, we still love and try to adopt his irreverent attitudes to life. He was never much of a leader, anyway…

It’s a war that has raged for decades. It’s a conflict that has divided families and friends. Both sides have fired their heavy artillery, but neither has landed the killer blow. This is the battle between Ford and Holden. Now the motoring rivalry that helped define our nation enters its next phase with one manufacturer unleashing its most powerful vehicle while its foe has created its most advanced vehicle.

Last year saw both Ford and Holden wheel out their biggest guns yet—the new FPV GT and the new HSV GTS E3, respectively. In the red corner is the HSV, and the first thing that strikes you is just how extreme the car looks. Some auto companies have spent millions of dollars on safety.

Volvo has poured plenty of cash into developing smart systems that can detect obstacles, such as pedestrians, and automatically stop the car to avoid a crash. HSV, on the other hand, has developed its own unique way to avoid hitting old ladies. Rumbling through the streets of Sydney, the bright yellow HSV GTS E3 sends people scurrying back from the curb as soon as it gets within earshot.

That grumble is thanks to the new bi-model exhaust that lets the 6.2-litre V8 roar. Add to that the snarling nostrils, outrageous flared guards and over-the-top black grille and there’s no questioning the latest HSV’s road presence. It doesn’t just say “Look at me!”, it says “Get out of my way!” Subtle isn’t a word in the vocabulary of the team at HSV HQ. And that’s a good thing.

It’s helped Holden build some of the most brilliant performance sedans, not just in Australia, but around the world. It was a HSV GTS that helped convince the bigwigs at General Motors in the USA that the Holden Commodore and Monaro were good enough for export.

In the UK, where the vehicles are sold under the Vauxhall badge, they are regularly compared with the more expensive German super sedans from Mercedes-AMG, BMW and Audi. For all the theatrics and seemingly simple design, HSV has developed some of the most technically advanced cars that money can buy.

The GTS already offers MRC (Magnetic Ride Control) and a state-of-the-art shock-absorber system borrowed from the iconic Chevrolet Corvette, but the E3 also packs HSV’s latest hi-tech toy: EDI (Enhanced Driver Interface). Basically, it’s a data-logging system similar to that found in modern racing cars.

It allows the driver to record and study everything from speed and revs to G-forces and the amount of slide through the corners. But the aggressive body kit and all the gizmos can’t hide the fact that HSV has lost power bragging rights to FPV. Ford’s new GT may not have so many clever toys, but it can lay claim to being the most powerful production car built in Australia today.

Its new supercharged 5.0-litre V8 pumps out 335kW, giving it a 10kW advantage over the Holden. FPV has ploughed all its development money into the new engine, mainly because its old 5.4-litre V8 was sent to the scrapheap after failing to pass strict new emission laws. While the basic 5.0-litre power plant comes from Ford America, the impressive supercharger is an all-Aussie addition.

It was developed in partnership with local engineering ace Ron Harrop, who has an extensive background in motorsport which includes driving for the Holden Dealer Team alongside the late, great Peter Brock.

The good news for FPV is that the new engine is awesome; it revs hard and pulls strongly. The bad news is that the engine is so powerful it overwhelms the rest of the car. The gearbox, clutch, brakes and steering just can’t keep up with all that grunt.

Which is the better car? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for, or what side of the battle lines you sit on. The Ford has the power advantage, but can’t make full use of it. Conversely, the Holden is technically brilliant and great fun to drive, but also confronting to look at.

The real winner, of course, is the car-buying public. With both sides desperate to constantly outdo each other, Holden and Ford have succeeded in pushing the design and performance of Australia’s iconic vehicles to new heights, to the benefit of all.

Born in England, Nigel gained a reputation as a skilled street fighter in post-WWII London and found himself in serious trouble when he stole a rival gang member’s girlfriend. Fearing for her 15-year-old son’s safety, Nigel’s mum sent him off to Australia in 1959, where he found work on a farm in Victoria. For the next four years, Mason travelled the country doing a variety of jobs: cutting timber and sugar cane, picking fruit, hunting kangaroos, and helping construct the Sydney-Melbourne standard gauge railway line.

Following a failed marriage, Nigel travelled to Bali with a couple of hippie mates in 1980 and liked it so much that he decided to stay. He fell in love with a local woman named Yanie and the couple tied the knot in 1985. Together they opened the successful Yanie’s Restaurant in Kuta, and went on to set up a popular tourism business called Bali Adventure Tours in 1990. Six years later, Mason stumbled upon nine elephants stranded in a dried-out rice paddy near the remote village of Taro. Unable to abandon the stricken creatures, he bought the land they were on and landscaped every centimetre of the 3.5 hectares until it bore no resemblance to its barren beginnings.

The Elephant Safari Park was born that same year. Through rescue efforts and a world-class breeding program, the park’s elephant herd now numbers 30; three of which were born in 2009. “The baby elephants have become attractions in themselves,” says Nigel, “because unlike at the zoos in Sydney and Melbourne, you can actually interact with them here—touch them, feed them—it’s a very special experience.”
The park also boasts a five-star lodge, allowing visitors to eat and sleep amongst the huge animals and interact with them in a variety of ways during their visit.
“People meditate with the elephants, kiss them, and spend hours just sitting and watching them until dark,” says Mason.
“Every one of our 30 elephants has a different personality, so the diversity of those [human] interactions work just as well for them.”

“Outside our park, things are not too good for Sumatran elephants, as the jungles of Sumatra have been mostly destroyed,” Nigel explains. “Sadly, there is not much the average Aussie can do to change that. Corruption and greed are the great destroyers of Indonesia’s rainforests, and until that changes this situation will continue.”

Since 1985, almost half of Sumatra’s forests have been wiped out through logging or cleared to make way for crops, such as oil palm plantations. And since then, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the elephant population has declined by almost 85 per cent.
As the elephants’ natural habitat is reduced, they are forced to feed on the new plantations, much to the annoyance of local farmers. It’s not uncommon for elephants to be killed as common pests.

“When it comes to animal-related business in Indonesia, the animals take second place and are too often exploited and abused,” says Nigel. “Many Asians don’t have our love for animals because they are just too busy surviving.”

In 2002, Nigel Mason set about rescuing 10 distraught Sumatran elephants, including babies, from one of the camps. However, the massive operation, that was to feature a convoy of trucks and a 3000km journey across three islands, was scuttled when the Indonesian Government changed the law, effectively preventing the rescue from taking place. Just months later, some of the captive creatures died.

“Leaving Riski, a baby elephant that was stuck in the camp, is one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had,” sighs Nigel. “I knew it was going to die, and it did. So when our third baby elephant was born at the park two years ago, we named it Riski, after the one that was left behind.”

In a happy twist, a determined Mason returned to the same camp in 2005 and successfully saved 10 elephants. The devastation of the first failed mission and the subsequent white-knuckled attempt that lasted 100 hours is all captured in the documentary film Operation Jumbo, which has screened on the National Geographic Channel.

The Elephant Safari Park has now been open for 14 years and is regularly voted Bali’s number one must-see attraction.
Well-regarded travel website tripadvisor.com recently awarded the park a 4½ Star Certificate of Excellence, and it won the ‘Best Management’ gong at Indonesia’s 2010 environmental tourism awards. Fellow wildlife warrior, the late, great Steve Irwin, declared it the best elephant park he had ever seen.

As a flip side to the good work the park continues to do with animal conservation, it has also become a destination for the rich and famous; 2010 saw Julia Roberts, Tony Blair, Calvin Klein and Michael Franti visit. But despite the support of wealthy celebrities, Nigel says he receives the most consistent support from “good old Aussies”.

For example, what do the rightest of right-wing religious groups and the leftest of left-wing feminist collectives have in common? They are both virulently anti-porn. It’s a stand which bridges the most divergent of philosophies and factions, even within these polarised entities.

Sure, let’s bring out a line of G-strings and padded bras for tweens. Let’s have video games where 12-year-old boys blast the bejesus out of Taliban soldiers, but showing two people consensually pleasuring each other? That’s just plain wrong. Disgusting, even!

Such attitudes are the very definition of hypocrisy. Firstly, without porn, most of these naysayers wouldn’t be able to bolster their Andrea Dworkin/Germaine Greer/Betty Friedan collections via Amazon. In his new book, The Erotic Engine, author Patchen Barrs argues that porn was responsible for building the hidden infrastructure of the internet and that without it, cable television might not actually exist.

He also contends that had porn been legislated out of existence, e-commerce would be a shadow of its current status in terms of security and accessibility. What’s more, the video-streaming technology developed by and for porn has made cultural benchmarks such as YouTube and Skype reality.

Aside from the technical innovations it has fomented, porn has also exhibited a creativity which is routinely overlooked in the wider cultural landscape. Evidence is to be found in the humour and wordplay that litters X-rated catalogues. Sure, the net is teeming with compilations to cater to your every erotic whim, but with minimal effort you can also find chuckle-worthy titles with punning artistry that wouldn’t be out of place on The Simpsons. (A show which nodded in porn’s direction with its own Sperms Of Endearment spoof movie title.)

Operating on the premise of giving an established film title a sexual twist—for example, Eat Pray Love might become Eat Spray Love—porn producers have long pumped out gems worthy of a Twitter trending topic. The list is endless, but a few personal favourites include: Lawrence of a Labia, Diddle Her on the Roof, On Golden
Blonde and Itty Bitty Gang Bang—the latter movie cast almost entirely with little people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these titles indicate a real knowledge of film history; a cultural awareness, if you will. Not content with merely punning on titles, a new wave of porn involves parodying entire TV shows.

American company New Sensations recently spoofed sitcom The Office with Ashlynn Brooke taking on the Ricky Gervais/Steve Carrell role. Complete with intentional slightly desperate attempts at comedy, “that’s what she said” gags and cinema verité-style photography, including bored looks direct to camera.

Not that such products haven’t long been in the cultural zeitgeist. Back in 2001, an episode of Friends featured Jennifer Aniston complaining to a hotel clerk that she had not, in fact, watched Dr Do-Me-A-Little in her room. Boy, did we laugh.

Not surprisingly, Friends is a natural candidate for porn parody. As is Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the actor paying tumescent homage to Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard in This Ain’t Star Trek commanding himself to: “Engorge!”

One of the spearheads behind the porn parody movement is Jeff Mullen, who writes and directs under the name Will Ryder. Geddit? Will. Ride. Her. Having produced his ‘Pound Town’ takes on such beloved sitcoms as Bewitched, The Cosby Show and a trio of Brady Bunch homages (the first of which was released in 2007), Mullen believes the genesis of the movement can be traced to a 2005 release entitled Britney Rears.

This mixture of referencing existing entertainment and hard-core porn proved such a hit that Mullen described the phenomenon to Newsweek as “a new gold rush”. (The interview itself an indicator of mainstream awareness.)

Taking the approach that it should be “more akin to making sitcoms as opposed to making porno”, Mullen’s send-up of The Cosby Show echoed in the minutest detail the interior of the Huxtable’s home, the dancing against an all-white background in the opening credits and generally had the characters spot-on.

One of the secrets to Mullen’s success lies in casting. For the role of Cliff Huxtable, he chose Thomas Ward, a Detroit comedian living in LA whose Bill Cosby impression is nothing short of uncanny. Ward doesn’t have sex in the film—he’s there solely to provide a sense of verisimilitude. For his time, Ward was paid as much
as any of the lead female performers who did have sex.

This is notable in that women in porn are generally remunerated to a greater degree than their male counterparts. But according to Mullen, an increasing number of ‘legitimate’ actors will be appearing in porn parodies in non-sexual roles.

Another aspect of porn production that parodies have challenged is the writing. Mullen asserts that if you’re going to parody a comedy, your script must measure up in the hilarity stakes—a feat he believes he achieved with his version of Married With Children. “That show is so damn funny. It’s just line, line, zinger, line, line, zinger. So we had to write it accordingly,” he told Newsweek, before going on to add that he’d be more insulted if a viewer didn’t find his movies funny than if they didn’t find them arousing. His dream project is a hard-core Mary Tyler Moore Show.

So far, the porn parody genre has protected itself from litigation by prefacing its titles with phrases such as “Not The…” and “This Ain’t…” and their targets seem boundless. Everything from Seinfeld to I Love Lucy is fair game, with the latter being shot in both colour and black-and-white, so you can make the experience
as authentic as you desire.

According to the producers, they have “no ‘splainin’ to do” to those who own the source material, and they have the budgets to ensure their spoofs look as accurate as the originals. However, 20th Century Fox did recently issue Digital Sin/New Sensations with a cease-and-desist order regarding its sexy version of The X-Files. Not the movie, just the name. It’s now titled, more clearly, The Sex Files: A Dark XXX Parody.

In matters pornographic, history suggests that where America goes, Australia will follow, and perhaps we’ll even have the market to sustain our own parodies. We’ve already had Crocodile Blondee, so why not King Wood Country? And while the thought of an X-rated Mother & Son is too awful to contemplate, who wouldn’t want to watch Toadfish give it to Mrs Mangle? It may not be a turn-on, but it would be funny. And that’s kind of the point.

Story: Denise Mooney