from the vault......
tom, sydney, 1985
justin, mark, boroslav, tom, Budapest, 1989
tom, byron bay, 1992
tom, byron bay, 2002
paul kennedy, ninbin rock, 2001
och aye, I remember him. He was 6 foot 9, as broad as a barn, had a great
shock of red hair and a long beard and said that he could tame Nimbin Rock. Yes, Kennedy, that
was his name, a great mountain of a man.
I saw it myself. I remember his crouching form as he kneeled as if in prayer to one of his heathen idols,
his face contorted in a great grimace of determination. A whole 20 minutes he kneeled there
behind the gum tree at the top of that cliff, his hulking grotesque form so still that he may have been
one of the great gnarled boulders himself, his great calloused hands wrapped inertly around
the rope.
I remember then as this great mass then suddenly came to life, his pulsating red glaring eyes piercing
through the cloudy booze-addled haze that his brain inhabited to see the azure water far far below.
His great leathery back then strained, veins popping on his gnarly fingers, as he pulled the rope tighter still.
Perfection was the only option for this jump, it being scores of feet to the small pool below. A mistake, a slight misjudgement
of timing would see his proud body cut to pieces on the incline of the razor sharp cliff awaiting him.
The rope groaned its acquiescence of his great hulking weight. He stepped back as far as possible to allow the greatest momentum,
and then he sprang, like a massive coil unleashed, his massive form carving a perfect arc through the tepid bush air.
A great silence fell over the bush at this spectacle. And then, for reasons only fathomable to this great tactician,
his little bony foot struck out like a cannon-fired cartoon character, to whack the passing, staining, tree trunk. Was it a final
statement of bravado? We will never know. His body at once transformed itself from it's perfectly crafted trajectory into a wild
frenzy of summersaults and contortions previosly unknown to all but the most perverse of fakirs. I remember it clearly,
as his great bald head smacked the granite-hard unyielding plate-glass of the water below, sending seismographs in Yokohama and
seagulls in Zaire into wild frenzies. I see it time and again in my nightmares, the eternity that his distended
grotesqueness spiralled uncontrollably through the air, only to crack open the onyx plain of black shiny water like a volvo meeting a crash-test
block of concrete.
Aye, we havn't seen the likes of him here since. People still talk of his bravery whilst at the doctor's that afternoon, coughing
up blood from his shattered lungs, if he could still get on the cones and lager that night. Yes, they said, we daresay you can.
moseby and zsolt, Lueneburg, 2001
hamburg, 2001
hamburg 2000
melbourne 1994
new york 2001
india 1993