JAN 11
PILGRIMAGES are one of my
favourite things in the whole world. There were dozens of D H Lawrence
flavoured ones several years ago. Even in Australia you can go to Craig Street,
In Thirroul near Sydney, where Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, and lived with Frieda
for about six weeks near the roaring Pacific Ocean. The height of my passion
for Vincent Van Gogh occurred when I was in my early twenties. I met some
university students from Eindhoven in Holland at that time, and they took me to Nuenen, a little village where Van Gogh
grew up with this parents, and his father was the local pastor. Then there’s
Arles, a plethora of locations for various masterpieces, although the Yellow
House was bombed by the Nazis. One of the most beautiful places in the world,
for me, is the tiny village of Auvers-Sur-Oise, where you can see the fateful
wheatfields, the simple Gothic church in the famous painting with the purple
windows, and the humble graves, side by side by side, of Vincent Van Gogh and
Theo Van Gogh, both dead within a short space of time.
So this brings me to a
pilgrimage of a different kind, and no less rewarding, 62 kilometres from here,
called Braidwood, where I stayed for the whole day yesterday and could have
stayed for several more. It’s where my favourite Australian film was made: The
Year My Voice Broke (1987). Holding my MacBook Air, I had the film as it were
in my hand.
Upon arriving, heart
beating quickly, we found the church hall that appears at the mid-section of
the film. The characters go to the hall for a social evening of music and
dance. Danny meets Freya there. The Everly Brothers are making the joint jump
with ‘Temptation’ and Trevor arrives late and stuns the whole dance floor, and
trance-like they watch the young lovers leave. The film shows Danny’s arrival,
complete with a Marlon Brando impersonation, on the west side of the hall and
through the side entrance. I took photos at this point where Danny walks in.
The windows of the Anglican Church hall were opaque, but there was the tiniest
crack that offered me a singular, frustratingly hazy glimpse inside, that I
could compare to the vision in the film.
Then we ventured over to
the main street and found out that the café that Freya and her family own is
now a ‘Vinnies’ store. The interior of both shots are similar, and it was fun
to once again compare the vision of the film with the vision from current day
life. The white pillars for the building next door are the same, as are the
steps leading into the shop. Just a little further up the road is the newly
renovated building that is now a tourist office, but was then a picture theatre.
Here I could see the spot in which Danny queried the cinema owner about any
upcoming Brigitte Bardot films (’not that you’d be allowed into’), and where he
first gets bullied by the thugs, Pierdon and Malseed.
Across the road from the
cinema, one of my favourite scenes was enacted. Freya and Danny are outside, late
at night, watching the moths bump against the electric lights. According to
Freya, ‘the whole town’s out dreaming.’ They talk intimately of Mrs O’Neill’s
ghost and forcefields. It picks up on the gothic nature of the film. It was
amazing to be able to stand in that exact spot. Although the shop fronts are
newly painted, the posts sticking out of the ground are the same. Some of them
have little metal hooks on them.
Other highlights included having
a drink at the pub that is featured quite often in the film- except there has
been a lot of renovating here so it was hard to reconcile the images with that
of real life- and visiting the cemetery and the racecourse where Trevor breaks
the track record. Besides the hills scenes which serves as Danny and Freya’s
sanctuary- ‘Willy Hill’- the most difficult spot to find was the scene at the
waterhole where Trevor nearly ‘drowns’ Freya because the madman keeps her head
under the water too long. It was a fair way out of town, over Shoalwater Creek
at Bombay Bridge. If you ever go there, go completely over the bridge, and
there it is at the end of a short track on your right hand side. It’s a
beautiful spot of cool, fresh water and soft sand, and it looks exactly the
same in the film.
I could have lingered over
these spots in Braidwood forever. Before we left we had a quick look for ‘Willy
Hill’, to no avail, and had a chat with the daughter of the Braidwood Hotel.
She was only about 8 years old when the film crew landed on her parent’s
doorstep. Earlier on, in 1970, the pub played host to another film crew when
Mick Jagger’s ‘Ned Kelly’ came to town. Yes, Ben Mendelsohn and Mick Jagger in
the same pub, but at different times. The lovely town is steeped in history.
Old buildings, thick gutters and a wide, wide street. A perfect location for a
film set in the 1960’s.
