Heart of the Nation: Port Douglas 4877

IT was just another day at the office for Gulliver Page when he put on a mask, snorkel, fins and skydiving gear, and leapt from a chopper.

skydive

IT was just another day at the office for Gulliver Page when he put on a mask, snorkel, fins and skydiving gear, and leapt from a chopper 5000ft over a sand quay off the coast of Port Douglas.

After landing in the drink, he jettisoned his parachute then swam down and put on scuba gear that was cached on the reef.

It sounds like the stuntman was shooting a Bond movie, but in fact he was making his own two-minute piece for the 1 Day in Paradise competition, in which Queensland tourism bodies gave GoPro cameras to 20 filmmakers and asked them to do something with the "wow" factor.

Page, 35, knows all about the "wow" factor. When he was growing up in Sydney's Avalon, his dad Grant - a pioneering stuntman - would hold a training session on the first Sunday of each month for the "stuntie" community. "It was a melting pot of knowledge and experience," says Page, who joined in from the age of 12. They'd do high falls from a tower onto an airbag, and practise "torches" - setting themselves on fire. They'd buy up cheap cars to practise drifts and slides, and at the end of the day would roll them until they were ruined - whereupon Page's stepdad Monty, an explosives expert, would blow them up. So that was a normal Sunday for him as a kid? "Yeah, pretty much," he says.

His first TV gig, at 13, was falling through a roof on Police Rescue. He's come a long way since then: his film credits include X Men Origins: Wolverine and Life of Pi. (Remember when Gerard Depardieu falls out of the boat? That was Page, wearing a "fat suit" and a prosthetic nose).

It's a precarious profession in Australia, he says - there are "big peaks and troughs" in the amount of work - but when things are quiet he no longer stresses, he just goes skydiving (his passion is skimming around the edges of clouds while wearing a wingsuit). He could really use the $75,000 prize in the short-film competition, but it'll be judged online, by viewers on YouTube, and he knows how fickle that can be. "It'll probably be won by someone fishing with their cat," he says.

Watch Gulliver Page wingsuit-flying around clouds in a video at theaustralian.com.au/magazine