THEY'RE the iconic figures of Australian folklore; bringing their stories to life required their modern-day equals, writes Grantlee Kieza.
SNOW is falling on the Gold Coast as a mob of wild horses charges across a vast mountainscape. Nostrils flared, manes swaying in the cold wind, they plunge down terrible descents and then bolt up the side of what Banjo Paterson once called “torn and rugged battlements”.
They race over rocks and stones across the roof of Australia and then, with a thunder of hooves, burst through clouds of fog that cover the high country with a ghostly translucence.
Suddenly, with the speed of a whip cracking, the wild horses explode through a curtain of mist into an arena just off the Pacific Motorway and charge around its inner perimeter.
In a great turbulent cacophony of cracking whips and shouting stockmen they gallop flat-out in front of chairs and tables where 1000 people will soon sit for the opening night of the stunning $4 million production of High Country Legends at the Australian Outback Spectacular.
Soon there will be horses dancing and jumping over fire, galloping past at top speed with young riders hanging off the side of their saddles and Roman riders galloping while standing astride two chargers.
This is a breathtaking production that celebrates the sort of country, the type of men, women and children, who inspired poets and writers such as Paterson to pen timeless stories of the Australian bush. Tales and verse about the women of the west, the fables of the bushmen Clancy of the Overflow and the Man From Snowy River, who loved hard riding, and of their stockhorses that sniffed the chase with delight. Men who, Paterson said, “bore the badge of gameness in bright and fiery eyes and the proud and lofty carriage of their heads”.
The Lovicks were definitely supporters of the Kelly Gang."
THERE is movement at Charlie Lovick’s station, because word has passed around that opening night is getting closer. Charlie has been bringing his passion for the high country to Australians for 47 years, and the Outback Spectacular promises to be more “spectacular” than ever before. Charlie and his neighbour in the Victorian mountains, Bruce McCormack, have been instrumental in shooting footage of cattle and brumbies being driven in the high country, that blends with the live action inside the Gold Coast arena. Bruce’s granddaughter Coby-Lee and Charlie’s daughter Kellie both have parts in the show.
Charlie Lovick could have stepped straight out of a Paterson poem, a burly, bearded horseman whose home in Merrijig, Victoria, is not far from the wild country around Stringybark Creek where Ned Kelly once shot three policemen who had been sent to bring him back dead or alive. Charlie has ridden the high country for almost all of his 64 years, starting out in nappies seated in front of his grandfather. His first memories are riding through the Victorian Alps, where Paterson said the hills were twice as steep and twice as rough as anywhere else, and where a horse’s hooves struck firelight from the flint stones every stride.
His home is nestled between the Great Dividing Range, where Mt Lovick is named after his pioneering family, and the Wombat Ranges, where the Kellys spent much of their time on the run.
“It’s recorded in the police files that the Lovicks were definitely supporters of the Kelly Gang,” Charlie says, “and thought to be of the criminal element.”
The family has been in Australia for seven generations, six of them in the high country.
Their Australian roots were planted by Thomas Lovick, a smuggler from Norwich, transported to Hobart on a convict ship in 1830. Three decades later his son William Mitchell Lovick, living in squalor in Melbourne, decided to move with his Irish-born wife to try prospecting on the Howqua River that runs through the Victorian Alps.
“He became one of the pioneers of the high country,” Charlie says.
“He didn’t make a fortune but he made enough to build the Merrijig Hotel in 1873. He then saved to buy some land for farming and his first three boys became the first mountain cattlemen in the area.”
The Lovick family became high country guides in the late 1800s when they started escorting intrepid skiers to the new snowfields of Mt Buller.
Charlie’s great-uncle Frank Lovick is something of a local legend himself, once driving a mob of cattle caught in early snow down a steep cleft in the mountains known as the Blowhole to save himself, his friend and his herd. Charlie’s father Jack was awarded a British Empire Medal for saving the lives of the many lost and injured amid the rugged snow-capped mountains.
In 1967 the Lovicks began offering horseback riding tours, and through this enterprise Charlie met film producers looking to make a quintessential Australian movie, coloured not by the red dust of the Outback but by the mountains and the mist.
It was to be called The Man From Snowy River and Charlie, the big bearded bushie, was given the grand title of “Master of Horse”. He appeared as one of the crack riders chasing the wild brumbies. His main role, though, was to bring the breathtaking riding of the mountain men to the screen.
Young Tom Burlinson was to play the titular lead, and Charlie was tasked with teaching him to ride in the tradition of Paterson’s hero who “never shifted in his seat … it was grand to see that mountain horseman ride”.
BACK inside the Outback Spectacular Arena, the amplified voice of general manager Shane Phillips echoes around the walls as rehearsals go into overdrive.
Speckled horses fly past the facade of a mountain homestead, like they’re heading to the finish line at Eagle Farm, except their young female riders are hanging off the side of the galloping steeds with just one foot in the stirrups.
The beauty and the splendour of the production and the effects reminds onlookers of the sumptuous musical Phantom of the Opera, except this is done on a much grander scale with more than 70 horses, a herd of Hereford cattle, a donkey, a few dogs and a life-size mechanical elephant built by Academy Award winner John Cox. Country star and former Australian of the Year Lee Kernaghan, Christine Anu and John Foreman provide the music.
One of the great Aussie stories told is that of May Zinga Wirth, the little girl sold to the circus aged seven, who went on to dazzle crowds around the world as one of the great trick riders and contortionists of all time. The deeds of Tom Kruse, the mailman of the Birdsville Track, are celebrated, as is the legend of Clancy of the Overflow, a shearer and drover immortalised in Paterson’s poetry.
Outback Spectacular marketing brand manager Selena Lawson says the High Country Legends event is the most technically advanced production ever staged by the company, a “more spectacular Spectacular if you like”. Custom-designed special effects recreate fog, snow, fire and wind. A projection system featuring seven water screens or “rain curtains” turns the arena into a vast and ever-changing landscape.
The theatre bar for pre-show drinks is transformed into an old carnival showground.
The performance opens with an Aboriginal dance sequence on the rain curtain. Five thousand people a week are expected to watch — but not until the production is perfect.
WATCHING Phillips putting the animals and actors in place is Simon Wincer, one of Australia’s most celebrated film directors. At 71 he’s still as lean and wiry as the jockeys portrayed in two of his movies, Phar Lap and The Cup. The excitement of the production and the looming opening night on December 2 takes him back 32 years, to when he was one of the producers on The Man From Snowy River alongside Michael Edgley and Geoff Burrowes.
That movie catapulted Tom Burlinson into the spotlight, and Burlinson’s next movie Phar Lap catapulted Wincer into Hollywood. He was soon collecting an Emmy for the masterpiece that was Lonesome Dove, an epic western mini-series starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Anjelica Houston, Danny Glover, Chris Cooper, Steve Buscemi and Frederic Forrest. It paid homage to the same values of mateship, loyalty, determination and courage in the Old West espoused by the people of the Australian high country.
“I had horses from the time I was four years old,” Wincer says.
“I grew up next to the convent at Rose Bay in Sydney and I learned to ride at Bowral. My best mate and I adopted an old racehorse that lived at the convent and we would ride that horse every morning and afternoon.
“I’ve maintained that love of horses ever since.”
High Country Legends is the third show Wincer has written and directed for Outback Spectacular, and the most visually stunning.
He says The Man From Snowy River was a landmark film because people were used to seeing an image of Australia that was hot, dry and dusty, and now they were seeing that it was “green and mountainous and it had snow”.
“There is a great romance with the high country,” he says, “it is a wonderful part of the world, and I live not far from it in the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne.”
The seed of his new project germinated a couple of years ago while he was in Los Angeles previewing The Cup, an ode to another mighty horseman, Damien Oliver, who won the 2002 Melbourne Cup in tribute to his father and brother, who had both died in riding falls.
Wincer’s flight home was cancelled, so, holed up in an LA hotel room, he started jotting down ideas, and came up with two pages of a concept for a high country extravaganza. Since then he and Phillips have been fleshing out the story.
“We’re using very sophisticated lighting and special effects to produce the snow and the rain, the mist and fog,” he says.
“And we combine film on giant rain curtains with live action, so you have the effect of horses running across the high country and then running from the screens into the actual arena.
“It’s really quite stunning.”
Wincer directed location filming at Merrijig, in the old woolsheds at Jondaryan near Dalby, and at Lennox Head on the NSW north coast.
“I love making this show” he says. “It’s so exciting. Basically the production is driven by music and it’s all time coded, and that time coding cues the film sequences and the action — it’s not happening exactly as we want in rehearsals, but by opening night it will.”
John Ford was the western guy, you can be the large mammal guy.”
Wincer left school in 1961 to become a stage hand at Channel 7, and before long was an accomplished television director on programs such as Division 4, Matlock Police, The Sullivans, Homicide, and Against the Wind. Cash and Company introduced him to the horse dramas that would occupy much of his career.
“I was just one of the producers on Snowy River but as soon as I directed Phar Lap — it was ‘boom’ and you get typecast over there in America,” he says.
“As soon as I did Free Willy about a whale, Disney offered me a film called Operation Dumbo Drop and the star was a big elephant. I said to the producer Bob Cort — this wonderful American guy — I said, ‘Bob, I’m a bit nervous about taking on this elephant movie. I’ve just done a movie with a whale — why do you want me to now do an elephant film?’
“Bob said: ‘Look at it this way Simon: John Ford was the western guy, you can be the large mammal guy.’ ”
CRAIG Bullen, laconic and laid-back with a suntanned face and a shock of silver hair, has been a large-mammal guy all his 51 years. He and his bubbly wife Zelie have just come back from 18 months in Western Australia working as trainers with Ashton’s Circus, and they are thrilled to be part of live theatre with the Spectacular team, given that most of their work these days is in movies overseas.
This is the first time they’ve been able to work near their home at Canungra, half an hour from the venue.
Three years ago they worked together on the World War I blockbuster War Horse for director Steven Spielberg, who said of their involvement: “All of the love that you put into your animals has come out on screen, on my screen, and it will be there forever.”
Horses are herd animals and want to look up to someone."
Craig’s grandfather, Alfred Percival Bullen, founded Bullen’s Circus in 1920 and it competed with Wirth’s, Perry’s, Sole Brothers and Ashton’s as Australia’s greatest attraction under the big top.
Zelie is training the white “Liberty” horses that run free in the show, and as a former stunt rider herself is helping the current generation of trick riders perform their astonishing routines.
They’re talking to me out back of the Outback arena, beside the stables where great silver horses doze beside giant Clydesdales, a donkey and some Hereford cattle.
“The secret of training horses is to realise that they are herd animals and want to look up to someone and to have strong leadership,” Craig says.
“Strong leadership gives them a sense of order. You have to treat them kindly and win their trust and convince them to do a routine, because it becomes something they want to do.”
Craig met Zelie when she was ankle-deep in elephant poo at Warner Bros Movie World, next door to the Outback arena. Things could only get better. They were both working on a TV series called BeastMaster and Craig had just travelled with his elephants from a circus at Charleville in southwestern Queensland to the Gold Coast.
He found Zelie cleaning out his truck.
“It was dark and I had no idea who she was because I couldn’t really see her,” he explains.
“I just knew there was someone in my truck shovelling out the crap. No one ever wants that job so I said, ‘Where do I get one of you from?’ ”
Not long after they first met, Zelie was given her first big break as an animal trainer. In a forerunner of her work on the High Country Legends show, she taught a white horse to do a Liberty routine, performing riderless, in the main arena at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.
Twelve years and an eight-year-old son named Colt later, they are among the most sought after people in the world in their field, having made movies around the globe. One of their favourites, Elephant Tales in 2006, took them to South Africa for four months to turn elephants, baboons, lions, chimpanzees and warthogs into movie stars.
All animal training is about getting inside the animal’s head."
The husband-and-wife team work on a three-month time frame for each horse, sometimes working with three or four horses at once.
“You start with the horse on a halter restrained,” Zelie says. “I’m training the horses here to work by themselves. There are four white horses to play the one silver brumby in this show, and I’m trying to create a dance effect, to get the horses to understand what you want.
“All animal training is about getting inside the animal’s head, getting it to understand what you want to achieve and trust you and to work within parameters — ‘no you’re not allowed to leave, you have to stay here and work with me’ — just like ‘now kids it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed’. Like kids, the horses have to be happy and have respect for you or it’s not going to work.”
Zelie says animals helped heal her soul after several gut-wrenching tragedies in her personal life, when many people close to her died in a short period of time. She spent years as a stuntwoman and was once a body double for Antonio Banderas in The Legend of Zorro. Although she has trained animals all her life she has learned from them as well: learned how to live in the moment and not look back.
“We are really honoured to be working with this show,” Zelie says. “The Outback Spectacular has become an Australian icon. The people here are passionate about animal welfare and getting above their benchmark for performance.”
ZELIE’S start in film began when she was raking up horse manure on a Don Johnson movie called In Pursuit of Honor, about US cavalrymen trying to stop the slaughter of obsolete horses. It was filmed in the Gold Coast hinterland and Zelie formed an enduring friendship with the lovely Heidi Mackay, who is training the red dog for the High Country Legends show. Heidi has worked at the Outback Spectacular since it opened eight years ago, and doubles as the workplace health and safety co-ordinator. With some death-defying stunts to oversee, she always has plenty to do. During her career she has trained tigers, eagles, horses, ferrets, rats, snakes, monkeys and elephants, and even the beagle for the Inspector Gadget movie.
Heidi is sitting in the stands at the arena with two chocolate kelpies watching Roman riders standing on the backs of two charging horses and practising their routines. She named her dogs “Oi” and “Red” so that when she called “Oi, Red’ they’d both come to her. As part of the show a red dog will run through the arena on his lonesome, working his way through the crowds of people before jumping into the back of a ute.
“This is just the rehearsal,” she says. “You never get bored doing this job.”
High Country Legends rehearsal
THERE are more than 70 horses involved in the production, all procured by the show’s Horse Master Tony Jablonski and his assistant Ben Rodgers. Ben received a pony as a christening present from his parents and, like many of the performers here, was on a horse before he could walk. He was the champion rider at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show at 17 and has since trained racehorses to win at both Ballina and the Gold Coast, while also riding trackwork. Riding two horses at once Roman style, though, is something that has not been seen on a racetrack since Caligula was punting.
Tony shows off some of the wagons, such as the Furphy’s water cart, he’s had recreated in exact detail for the performance.
Horses gallop so close the breeze ruffles your hair.”
He learned to ride at Smoky Dawson’s 11ha ranch in Sydney in 1961 at the age of five. Now he scours Australia looking for horses of the right colour, size and temperament, and for this show has recreated wagons and carts in exact period detail.
Smoky was a leading country music performer and friend of Tony’s granddad, and Tony’s early experiences with horses shaped his life. He left school at 16 and has been working in film and TV ever since. In 2000 he was the Horse Master for the opening ceremony at the Sydney Olympics, an awe-inspiring spectacle that featured 120 horses and 20 more in reserve galloping in formation. The worldwide acclaim for that performance inspired The Man From Snowy River: Arena Spectacular that toured Australian capital cities two years later.
In the audience at a performance at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre one night was John Menzies, who had come a long way since joining Sea World as a professional water skier in 1971. Menzies was now the group chief executive officer responsible for Warner Bros’ Gold Coast theme parks Movie World, Sea World and Wet ’n’ Wild.
Needless to say he was impressed by the dazzling displays of riding and thought a permanent theatre on the Gold Coast, celebrating Australia’s bush traditions, would be a winner.
The Outback Spectacular opened in 2006.
“We’re the most successful dinner show in Australia,” Tony says. “There are four kitchens here and they serve 1000 meals in eight and a half minutes while the show is on.
“It’s a fantastic family experience. You don’t even have to like horses to love this show, as horses gallop so close the breeze ruffles your hair.”
He says High Country Legends marks the pinnacle of his career, and the realisation of a dream to display Australia’s horse heritage in the most magnificent way possible.
BACK inside the arena, lead performer Graham Moore is rehearsing his final lines as the horses, riders, carts, utes and dogs find their positions on the red dirt that will become white snow on opening night.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we hope you enjoyed our celebration of the high country,” Moore bellows. “Thanks for coming and we’ll see you again.”
There’s a lot of hoopla as he signs off for the finale, but down amid the snow gums and mountain streams in Merrijig, Charlie Lovick quietly explains that he hopes all of Australia turns out to experience this showcase of the countryside he has loved all his life.
Charlie grew up to the smell of wood smoke on open campfires and billy tea and bread toasted against burning embers. He knows well the bite of early morning snow and the sound of hooves clattering over rocky hillsides.
His is a landscape of beauty and terror, one day so pretty and the next so perilous. He says High Country Legends conveys the sense of awe for the rugged mountains and the spirit of their people. He reckons over a dinner show like no other, audiences will get a taste of Australian life that will become an unforgettable experience.
“This mountain country is big and bold and there’s a sense of freedom out there in the high country snow,” he says. “It’s the last of our frontiers, always spectacular, always dangerous.
“I call this ‘my country’ — I know I don’t own it but it’s in my blood and it’s where my family will be forever. I’ve never lived anywhere else because once you’re connected to this country it never leaves you.”
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