Hans on horror cruise ship fall, the trauma, therapy and the friendship that saved him
The beloved entertainer fell nearly four metres aboard a cruise ship. And only one person knew how serious the danger was.
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It’s odd to see Matt Gilbertson limping down Leigh St as we head to Shobosho for a catch-up lunch.
He normally moves with a grace that’s rare in a man of his height, a grace honed through years of dance training and untold hours on the boards as Hans, his “German” Boy Wonder persona that has made him one of the country’s most beloved variety entertainers and seen him perform around the globe.
“It still gets a little stiff when I’ve been driving or sitting for a while,” Gilbertson says of his right foot, the one he admits “basically exploded” when he stepped into an onstage hole that was never meant to be there while rehearsing for a show on a cruise ship off the coast of Turkey last year.
The fall fractured five vertebrae in Gilbertson’s back, as well as his coccyx, and shattered several bones in his foot.
It’s been a long, and at times arduous, road back, which involved a provincial Turkish hospital, a mercy dash to London, rehab, physio and even a psychologist.
“I had to go see a psychologist, and I’d never actually been to one before,” Gilbertson says. “I found it very … interesting.
“I thought it was going to be like Frasier. You lay on the couch, tell them your problem and they give you a solution. It wasn’t actually like that at all. Who would have thought?
“But it’s been really helpful. I was in tears for the whole first session, and she said, ‘I would be more worried if you weren’t like this.’ I think I needed to hear that.”
It’s a story you’re more likely to read about a footballer than a cabaret artist. Broken bones, rehab, the healing of both body and mind.
The doctors thought it could be at least a year before Hans – proper Hans, dancing while playing the piano-accordion and cracking jokes Hans – could ride again.
Now, just eight months on, Gilbertson is about to hit the highway in a big way, a huge national tour taking in capital cities, regional centres and even a few tiny back-of-Bourke town halls. He’ll also feature in the all-star cast celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Adelaide Festival Theatre.
Hans is back, baby, and he’s ready for the road. Let the Bavarian invasion begin.
“The last time I saw you I was on a scooter,” Gilbertson laughs in between ordering food and flirting with the waiter.
It’s true. Just getting around the house required him to use the wheeled contraption.
He couldn’t put weight on the shattered foot while the pins and rods were helping the bones knit back together. It’s not a natural state for a man whose shows included a stunt where he performed the splits between two chairs.
“Yes, well, I played a lot of Nintendo in those first few weeks at home,” he says.
It would have been easy to spiral into depression. It’s happened to plenty of others faced with similar scenarios.
But a strong support network, with his tight-knit family at its core, along with Gilbertson’s trademark wit kept the black dog at bay.
In fact such was the outpouring of sympathy from around the globe that even now, months on, Gilbertson is still replying to get well messages. “It was quite overwhelming,” he says.
“I’m still finding messages from people that I haven’t written back to. I was trying to get back to everyone, then the Queen died … I mean between that and what happened to me, it was a very bleak time for this country!”
Gilbertson isn’t 100 per cent just yet – he puts himself at around 70 per cent – but the pins are out, the back is feeling good and there’s a team of professionals getting him up to speed.
“My back is still painful,” he admits, “but that’s not so much from my injury as from my walking habits changing as my foot gets better.”
And there’s a lot to get better in that hoof. The human foot has 26 bones, linked by 33 joints and a complex array of ligaments and muscles.
“My mid foot, it basically exploded,” he says.
“That’s the thing with feet. If you break your leg, it’s one break. A foot is not so simple.
“So I go to rehab twice a week, and I go to a trainer. She’s got me on the reformer machine.
“Going down stairs is still really hard. I still have a bit to go. I can’t tap at the moment. My physio is setting goals now. The next thing I need to do is learn to jump again.”
Like all rehab, it’s a gradual and, at times, frustrating process. “I’m at the point now where I say, ‘Oh, things aren’t moving quickly enough’ because the leaps aren’t as big now. At first I was improving week to week, now it’s more month to month,” Gilbertson says.
“But it’s actually only been nine months since it happened, so I’m healing faster than I initially anticipated. Long term, I won’t really know the full impact for a couple of years.
“I thought it would be a year before I’d perform again, but I’m at the point now where maybe if you didn’t know what had happened you might not even notice. If you looked carefully you might say, ‘Well actually …’, but I’ve worked out how to compensate in different ways. Not by getting funnier though, because how could I get any funnier. I don’t need the audience in an ambulance, Jesus!”
So how did it come to this?
To answer that question we have to cast our minds back to 2022 when Gilbertson, going against the advice of every showbiz critic ever, gave up his day job.
His role as a gossip writer for the Sunday Mail provided financial stability where performing couldn’t but he also knew he only had a small window of time to jump at every opportunity which came his way. And those opportunities were coming fast, thanks in part to stints on the hit TV show America’s Got Talent in 2018 and 2020, which exposed him to an international audience of millions.
So post-pandemic, as the world finally started to open up, Gilbertson decided to take the bull by the horns, log off from the daily grind and … hit the gay cruise circuit.
Yes, it’s a thing. A very big thing.
Floating towns with more blokes than a mid-sized Australian suburb, roaming the seven seas on a mission to have fun. These boats need entertainment, and they’re willing to pay for it. Not to mention that when you’re not performing you’re essentially being paid to go on holiday.
Not only that, but you’re allowed to bring a friend. On his first European cruise Gilbertson took Atilio, his hairdresser. A practical choice. On the second cruise, the ill-fated voyage, he took another friend – Adam Montagu.
Montagu just happens to be an associate professor of nursing and the director of the Adelaide Health Simulation unit at the University of Adelaide. It turned out – unfortunately – to have been an inspired choice.
Montagu stayed with Gilbertson the entire time he was in the Turkish hospital, overseeing his treatment, advocating for extra care, working the phones around the clock to get medical advice from contacts in Australia, and helping to organise transport to the UK.
“The accident happened on the 25th of August,” Gilbertson recalls. “The day before we were in Mykonos, and the day after – the 25th – we were off Bodrum in Turkey. I was rehearsing all day. I was meant to do two shows, the first one was at 7.30pm, and we got almost to the end … well. Let’s just say I didn’t see Turkey at all. I saw the roof of the ambulance, the roof of the hospital, the roof of the ambulance again and then the airport.”
The stage Gilbertson was performing on had sections that could rise and fall on hydraulics.
For some reason, part of that stage floor was down during the show and the performer stepped back into … nothing. The fall was somewhere between three-and-a-half and four metres – 12 to 13 feet in the old measure.
It broke five vertebrae and his coccyx, and shattered his right foot.
Ever the professional, Gilbertson actually attempted to crawl back on to stage, but soon realised that he was severely injured.
“I was just freaked out,” he said after arriving back in Adelaide from London.
“I knew my back was sore, and I knew something had happened to my foot. I thought it was just a broken foot, whatever that means.”
Of all the places to sustain a serious injury, Bodrum probably wouldn’t rank in the upper tier. A historic town on the Turkish Riviera, popular with Europeans looking for a warm, cheap holiday, the hospitals are more used to treating foreigners with severe sunburn and road rash from scooter stacks than a potentially life-changing spinal fracture.
Still, it’s any port in a storm so the captain headed to Bodrum to offload his injured Boy Wonder. It was when Gilbertson realised that the boat, and all 6000 people on board, were detouring to Turkey that he knew he’d seriously hurt himself.
“They put me on the spinal board,” he says. “I was worried about my foot, but they were more worried about my spine, which I guess you need to be.”
Clapped off the boat by hundreds of cruising wellwishers, Gilbertson was transferred to an ambulance and taken to the Bodrum American Hospital. With nothing but paracetamol and ice for his pain and forced to communicate with the nurses through a translation app on his phone, Gilbertson says the presence of Montagu was the one thing that gave him hope everything would be OK.
“Adam was staying in the room with me, changing my sheets, helping me go to the toilet,” Gilbertson says. “He had even brought his own oxygen monitor in case he’d gotten Covid and he was begging them to put me on oxygen because he could see my levels were falling.
“They’d put me on oxygen, then they’d turn it off and the levels would fall again. I don’t know why that was happening.
“Every time I asked for anything in the Turkish hospital the response was always, ‘We have to check with finance first’.”
For Montagu, the initial battle was getting the authorities on the cruise to take Gilbertson’s injuries seriously. “I’ve worked in emergency departments all my life, and one of the most common things we see in rural or remote places is that people get very focused on what we call a distracting injury,” he says.
“It was very hard for me to take leadership on that ship because I was his friend and they had no idea what my experience was.
“But it was clear to me as the ship sailed away from Bodrum that they thought his ankle was the issue, whereas I knew he’d fallen so far that everything was potentially an issue.”
Montagu told the ship’s captains that his friend needed a CAT scan and, probably, a surgeon. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
“There was another orthopaedic surgeon on board – a guest on the cruise – and they called him down,” he says. “He walked in and immediately said, ‘His ankle isn’t the issue, it’s everything else.’ Once two people had said that they realised the gravity of the situation and turned the ship around.”
Upon arrival at the hospital in Bodrum the ankle and foot again became the focus of the doctors’ attention, much to Montagu’s frustration. “I think it took me 24 hours to finally get him a CAT scan,” he says.
“I had a team of people in Adelaide – old colleagues of mine, emergency consultants from the Royal Adelaide – that I was sending images to, and that’s when they found that he had fractures in his back and that his lungs were in pretty bad shape.”
Montagu says he had three main roles during the ordeal: advocating for his mate’s treatment, keeping his mate in a good place mentally and, most frustratingly, negotiating with the health insurance providers.
“Their advice was that we were already in a centre of excellence and that’s where the operation should be done,” he says. “Advice that I was receiving from people back in Adelaide was that if they did the operation there he may never work again. It was one of the worst orthopaedic injuries they’d ever seen.
“They were recommending that he be moved to, at best, London, secondly to Paris and third – if we really couldn’t get out of Turkey – then at least to Istanbul.”
After two failed evacuations – once because the doctor withdrew Gilbertson’s permission to fly and once because of mechanical issues with the aeroplane, Montagu was able to breathe a sigh of relief knowing his friend was finally in London.
“I finally felt that he was in a safe place,” he says. “I did a lot to help in the acute phase, but the rest is down to some very talented surgeons and physios and Matt’s own tenacity and professionalism.”
Gilbertson, too, was pretty happy to be in Old Blighty.
“I just felt so grateful to be there,” he says. Orthopaedic surgeon Luckshmana “Lucky” Jeyaseelan was given the task of repairing Gilbertson’s shattered foot, inserting four metal plates and “about 20” screws over more than four hours to hold the broken bones in place.
“Apparently, as I was on the gas and going under, I said, ‘Oi, Lucky, don’t f —k this up,” Gilbertson recalls. Lucky didn’t f —k it up.
After some high-profile visits – TV stars David Koch, Natalie Barr and Angela Bishop included – and some gruelling early physio, Gilbertson was finally allowed to fly home to Australia after six weeks in the UK.
He hasn’t ruled out making a return to international cruises.
“I mean, it’s just the thrill of waking up in a different country every day,” he says. “But I don’t know. It won’t be happening this year, that’s for sure.”
Then there’s the matter of the legal issues and who’s responsible for compensating him for his injuries. Gilbertson is hesitant to talk about the situation on the record, saying only that it’s “an ongoing issue”.
In the meantime, he says he now has plenty of new material for his upcoming shows.
“I think working on that has actually helped me see the lighter side of it,” he says.
“I mean, there were funny things that happened along the way. Many funny things.
“But also having these shows to look forward to has been really good for me.”
Gilbertson says the dancing is improving every day, although he’s happy to be taking his backing dancers with him on this tour, and he’s even been told that the famous chair splits might be able to make a return down the track.
“It’s just wild to me that I might be able to do that again,” he says.
“In hindsight, I think I was really lucky.
“Lucky to have had Adam with me, lucky to have been able to get to London. And I just want to do what I’m able to do. I’m done with Nintendo. I’ve finished all of Mario Kart.” ■
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