Storm Boy TERRY HAYES
AS ONE WHO WAS LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT HENRI SAFRAN’S STORM BOY WHEN I FIRST SAW IT FORTY YEARS AGO, UPON READING TERRY HAYES’ DIVERTING, ERUDITE AND SPLENDIDLY RESEARCHED ACCOUNT, I NOW FEEL IMPELLED TO WATCH IT AGAIN. THE FILM WAS HUGELY POPULAR AT THE TIME, AND HAYES HELPS US TO SEE WHY THIS WAS SO. NOT MANY PELICANS HAVE ACQUIRED STAR STATUS AS MR PERCIVAL HAS DONE, AND HAYES’ ACCOUNT PAYS CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THOSE COLLABORATORS – APART FROM THE FEATHERED ICON – RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FILM’S CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. IT MAY HAVE DELIGHTED CHILDREN, BUT ADULTS WERE CATERED FOR AS WELL.
Brian McFarlane, Series Editor
Substitute ‘film’ for ‘book’ and ‘pelican’ for ‘whale’, and you have something of both the media hype at the time of the making and screening of Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976) as well as the way in which memories of the film have lingered in a sort of collective Australian psyche: ‘It’s about this pelican.’
Not that any schoolchild of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly a South Australian one, would need reminding of Storm Boy or what it was about. To most schoolkids, Safran’s film was – according to media personality David Koch – the Harry Potter of its time. Something of an exaggeration, given Potter was a kid-generated cult, and Storm Boy, a triumph of astutely targeted educational packaging and marketing, but there’s some grain of truth there.
So back to ‘this pelican’ – or, rather, pelicans, since the Mr Percival of the film was a composite of three different pelicans, each with different skill sets and temperaments. Mike ‘Storm Boy’ Kingley himself, Greg Rowe, said: ‘One was better at certain tricks than the others. Birds can be temperamental and if one was grumpy they would use another one.’ Scriptwriter Sonia Borg described these ‘skill sets’ as a major determinant in her adaptation of Colin Thiele’s novella:
I met the animal trainer [Gordon Noble] on Storm Boy and we talked about what the pelicans would be able to do. This influenced what I put in the script. I think it’s better to restrict oneself and only write down what is possible, rather than ask for the impossible.
One thing pelicans will not do, however, is behave themselves at film premieres; as Noel Purdon recounts, ‘a plan to have them strolling elegantly in the foyer at the preview had to be dropped when the birds’ wild ways asserted themselves’ – ‘wild ways’ being, no doubt, a euphemism for another euphemism: ‘pelicans are not fastidious in their toilet habits’. Producer Matt Carroll, recalling the beach shack in which the pelicans were raised, put it more pungently: ‘It stank! Pelican shit smells like rotting fish.’
The pelicans’ habits, training and contrariness were the subject of constant media attention throughout filming. A double-page feature article in The Australian Women’s Weekly was entitled ‘Meet Dum Dum… Sandwich… and Carpenter… Stars of a New Film That Will Make Us All WATCH THE BIRDIES’. The actors and the location played second billing to the real, avian ‘stars’. The completion – and the success – of their training session was reported in The Advertiser; readers learned that the pelicans had been taught to ‘be near people, to respond to simple signals and fly off holding an object in their beaks’. This was quite an achievement, since ‘their fear of humans usually makes them vomit as soon as they are approached’ – not to mention the propensity for the young chicks being reared for the film to go into a sort of epileptic feeding frenzy, which made using food as an incentive and a reward problematic.
The birds’ waywardness was also featured in several media reports. Pelicans, readers discovered, have minds of their own. Dum Dum – the ‘trouble maker’ of the trio, it was reported – had flown off from his home base at the South Australian Film Corporation’s (SAFC) headquarters in Norwood to join a flock of pelicans at Goolwa. Previously, he had flown off and landed a ‘celebrity spot’ at a private party. On another occasion, he had gone walkabout in peak-period traffic. It could have been worse: Carroll recalled one instance on location when all three pelicans looked ready to take flight with their wild cousins. It was only quick thinking on the part of Noble that prevented this. He dispatched his dog to retrieve them, on the assumption that the wild birds would fly off and the trained pelicans, who had been imprinted at birth, would recognise the dog as their ‘mother’ (one of three, actually, the others being Noble and Rowe).
And one pelican’s waywardness could have led not only to the cancellation of the project, but also to a media ‘scandal’ rivalling politician Barnaby Joyce’s ‘jobs for the girlfriend’. A$20,000 into the expenditure of the allotted A$320,000 budget, one of the pelicans was refusing to play its part, and the SAFC board considered cutting its losses. The film was saved by the eminently sensible suggestion of new board appointee Enid Peleska, an English and drama teacher,
