Sunday 26^th August

My brother Pete Harmsen has a very adventurous life as a weddings-parties-anything-adventure cameraman.  He goes all over the country filming a wide range of excitements.  Anything from, for example:

• White sliced bread on sale in CHICKENFEED
• Cricket
• Yacht races
• Wildlife

Filming the cricket is less exciting, you may be surprised to hear, than filming white sliced bread at CHICKENFEED.  (CHICKENFEED has to be in capitals because it is such a shouty shop.)  Pete likes the cricket, or rather, would like it if he were able to watch it.  But when filming, he is on one particular camera trained on one particular area of the field, and only galvanises into activity when the ball comes into his zone.  B-O-R-I-N-G.
 
Recently he has been in the Northern Territory.  He says this is the Land which Occupational Health and Safety Has Forgotten.  If you can do it late at night, in the dark, with a wild and dangerous animal involved – all the better!  (He speaks with some authority; a large snappy crocodile tried to climb into his lap one dark and perilous night when he and a film crew were out in a small tinny.) 

But his most scary moment came recently when he and the team were filming a Brahmin bull muster.  The bulls had been rounded up by helicopter and they were all herded into temporary pens.  One of them had got separated from the others, and it seemed to have temporarily given up the ghost.  It was very tired and was lying on the ground with its eyes nicely closed.  Pete watched cautiously with his camera carefully arranged on its sturdy tripod as the bull suddenly came to life and stood up.  Not happy Jan!  It turned to look at the men in the pen behind him and didn’t really like what he saw.  But then it turned to look at Pete and REALLY didn’t like what it saw!  It started to paw the ground in a most terrifying manner (I have watched film footage of the event on my iPhone and it was blood-curdling to watch – I am, with reason, very scared of bulls…) 

Pete’s “friends”, filming merrily all the while, called out to him to stay put and not to do anything which might aggravate his angry new enemy.  So he stood there and filmed while the bull charged at the fence, hooked it up with his big curved horns and – charged at Pete!  On Pete’s film you can hear a startled squawk and then see the trunk of a tall thin tree… On the other bit of film, taken by the rest of the crew, you can see Pete doing an Usain Bolt dash for the very thin spindly tree, which actually did a good job of saving his life.  He says he hid very gratefully behind the trunk, with nothing moving but his heart, hoping that if he couldn’t really see the bull – which, he says, plaintively, was about 17 times bigger than a human – it might just go away.  His tripod was smashed into many splintery pieces, but the helicopter came and swooped the bull off back to the herd. 

Pete’s colleagues were mightily amused and the bit of film has been happily travelling through cyberspace to delight many.  But Pete Headlam wasn’t in the least amused.  He has had close encounters with Brahmin bulls, and he says this was MUCH too close, and that Pete was very lucky to be fit and swift enough to escape.