Where's Larry?

Story by RICHARD GULLIATT (extract from the ‘Good Weekend’ magazine courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 5th 2000)

He’s rubbed noses with Inuit, danced barefoot through fire in Papua New Guinea and paddled a kayak 4,500 kilometres up the Australian coast on a whim. Just don’t call kayaker and filmmaker Larry Gray the new Crocodile Dundee.

As we drive to a café near his Sydney home, Larry Gray starts telling me a story which – like many Larry Gray stories – sounds at first like some shaggy-dog bush yarn concocted for the benefits of a credulous urban journo. It’s not the story of how Gray first visited Sydney as a teenager in a kayak and tried to camp by the Opera House. It’ s not the one about how an iceberg fell on him in the Arctic and left him stranded for four days in perilous sub-zero temperatures with only a handful of lentils to eat. Nor is it the one about how he sailed a bamboo raft through shark and crocodile infested waters in the Northern Territory in order to show some Aboriginal elders in Arnhem Land the electronic didgeridoo he had invented.

Nope, this is the story of how he and a friend paddled two fibreglass kayaks 4,500 kilometres from their home on the northern Victorian coast all the way up the eastern seaboard, past Brisbane, past Townsville and Cairns, making a left turn at the tip of Cape York into the Torres Strait, until they ended up on Thursday Island. During the epic six-month expedition they survived largely on the fruits of the sea and land and lived virtually without money.

“We had this idea, which was, Let’s just keep going”, says Gray, eyes lighting up at the memory of the harebrained journey. “We looked at the map and it was just this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful water all the way up the coast. And there’s no way better to explore coastline than sea kayak, because you can take them anywhere.” It was so good, he tells me, that he seriously thought about that extra 150km kilometres to Papua New Guinea. But it turned out that PNG would come later – which is how he came to dance barefoot through fire with the Baining tribesman and paddle across a boiling volcanic lake.

At 44, Gray is an acclaimed documentary-maker (he has an Emmy Award to his credit) whose most singular quality is his almost naïve reverence for the natural world. In his films, he paddles through remote wilderness areas like an excited kid in an adventure playground, befriending Inuit and Aborigines as if they were next-door neighbours. Even when he describes cross-country motorbiking – his great passion before he became an adventurer/filmmaker – he makes it sound akin to a Zen communion with nature.

“I used to love the G-forces,” he says of his days astride a 400 cc dirt bike. “I’m still into G-forces – I love rollerblading. Not just for exercising. I love… extreme stuff.” The thought of extreme G-forces seems to bring on a momentary reverie, which causes Gray to murmur audibly, “Mmmmmm.”

Boyish, sandy-haired and with the sturdy physique of someone who regularly pits himself against the elements, Gray is so close to an archetype of the genial Australian outdoorsman that I wondered on first meeting whether he was laying it on a bit thick. He can wax lyrical about the trance-like spell of the ocean tides and the mysterious practices of Papua New Guinea’s tribal sorcerers, but when I asked him how old he is, he seemed genuinely flummoxed and spent a good 30 seconds doing the arithmetic. Later, he confessed it was only in the past few years that he has become used to having haircuts and “wearing shoes and all that stuff”.

According to friends, however, none of this is contrived. “He has a sort of naïve fascination with the world that is completely genuine,” says friend and filmmaker Gary Steer. Gray’s partner and co-producer, Mary O’Malley, recalls that on their first date at a Kings Cross restaurant a few years ago, her new beau ended the meal by picking up the plate and licking it clean. As for his vagueness about times and dates, she has a ready explanation: “Larry reads time by the sun.”

O’Malley winces at the Crocodile Dundee comparisons people often make, but some of the stories about Gray’s younger days do read like comedy. In 1986, he was one of four Australian kayakers who retraced the path of a 1931 British expedition that travelled 1,000 kilometres down the east coast of Greenland. Upon arriving in London, the intrepid Australian explorers were guests of honour at a formal dinner held by the Austalian-British Society in an 18th century mansion. George Pompei, one of the kayakers on the trip, recalls that Gray looked with awe at the huge sculptured gardens surrounding the mansion, then turned to one of their terribly English hosts and exclaimed, “Wow – what a great backyard!”

For the first 40 years of his life, Gray lived in Mallacoota, a Victorian coastal town near the NSW border that is so isolated that it was only connected to the State electricity grid in the 1970s.

The son of a local builder, he was a natural tinkerer and explorer who built his first kayak as a teenager and paddled it up to Sydney, pulling into Circular Quay and camping the night with some winos near The Rocks. He became an Australian motocross title-holder, lived for a while on a boat (bought for $400) and made money leading kayaking expeditions around coastal inlets.

Gray still calls Mallacoota his “soul place”, and he’s almost evangelical about kayaks, which embody his ideal of self-suffient adventure: pack a tent and some provisions and take off into the sea. In the late 1970s, he sold his motorbike and, with the resulting $1,300, staged his six-month kayak journey up the east coast of Australia with fellow-Mallacootan Colin Russon.

The Greenland expedition in 1986 was his first taste of adventure filmmaking – he helped devise camera housings on the kayaks so that a film crew could record the trip for the ABC. Despite a near-death accident when he was trapped under a disintegrating iceberg, Gray developed a lifelong passion for the country and its Inuit, from whom he has learned much about kayaking.

“It was just incredible how he could strike up friendships with the Inuit people,” say George Pompei, recalling the trip. “Larry has an almost boyish inquisitiveness: he loves to learn, he loves to fit in, and that seems to give him an extraordinary rapport with indigenous people of all kinds. A lot of the bush and kayaking skills he’s learned have come from them.”

Back in Mallacoota, Gray designed his own customised kayak, the Pittarak, which is now commercially manufactured. He also raised development money from Film Victoria to finance a couple of kayaking trips through Papua New Guinea, where he shot his own footage to make a demo-reel that got him through the doors of the Seven Network. The eventual result was Islands of Fire and Magic, a one hour documentary directed by Gary Steer, in which Gray led a team of kayakers on a 2,000 kilometre journey through the remote northern islands of PNG, startling the local tribesman along the way by performing a fire dance and paddling his kayak across a boiling volcanic lake.

Mary O’Malley was the publicist on the film and ended up sharing her flat in Bondi with Gray, thus beginning one of 1994’s more unlikely romances. O’Malley had just spent seven years working as a jounalist in Hong Kong and was so petrified of the ocean that she couldn’t even bring herself to put on a snorkel in the shower. But the way she describes it, Gray’s un-citified ways had a certain undeniable attraction.

“We would go camping in these beautiful remote wilderness spots,” she says, “and Larry would go diving for mussels and come back and cook them on the fire. We would spend the day prising oysters of rocks and then tie a rope to a bottle of champagne and trail it in the water to cool it down. We’d go kayaking, swimming with seals – a lot of things I had never done before.”

“I wanted to show her the amazing world under the water with a mask and snorkel, because that would be a great starting point for going on adventures together,” recalls Gray. “But I couldn’t for the life of me get her into wearing a mask underwater. So I introduced her to the idea of having a shower with the mask on.”

Within a year, O’Malley found herself socialising with Inuit on the Greenland icecap as her new partner went kayaking through icefloes. Gray had found out that Eric Phillips, an Australian adventurer, was going to trek across Greenland with two friends and arranged to join the trip as a cameraman. He and O’Malley lined up financing from the ABC network in the United States for a film, Chasing the Midnight Sun, which was directed by Michael Balson. The film has since been screened around the world and led to Gray and co-cameraman Wade Fairley winning an Emmy award, the most prestigious television prize in the US, for electronic camera work.

From their small flat near Bondi, O’Malley and Gray now run Primal Vision Productions, the company that turns their wilderness wanderings into documentary films. In 1996, they drove up to Yirrkala, an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, bearing two unusual objects: one was a bamboo raft Gray had designed, modelled on the vessels of the Macassan traders of South-East Asia; the other was an electric didgeridoo he had invented in his spare room in Sydney.

The idea was that they would sail the craft – complete with sleeping hut – around the croc-infested waters of Arnhem Land until they got to Elcho Island, where Gray would demonstrate his “cyber-didge” to the tribal elders of the Yolngu people and, he hoped, get their seal of approval. Which is pretty much what happened, as captured in the television documentary Journey Between Worlds. Its Rousseau–like depiction of Aborigines living in a tropical idyll, far from the interference of white society, mirrors Gray’s ideal of man and nature in harmony.
“The New Guineans, the Aborigines – they are keepers of the planet,” he says. “They have a deep spiritual understanding of the world that we skip over. I get that feeling when I am kayaking and I’m looking at the horizon and the sky and the water – on a long trip, you start to get in harmony with it. The colour of the clouds will tell you there’s shoal water ahead; you’ll see a green look about them that tells you perhaps there is an island over the horizon. If you were in a powerboat, you would be going too fast to see it. Their world is a slow world, but it is actually a timeless world. It’s another way of seeing time.”

Not that he hasn’t adjusted to urban life. “I like Sydney – I like the speed of it,” he says cheerfully as we hurtle through the eastern suburbs in his car one afternoon, a driving display that shows his love of G-forces hasn’t waned in the urban environment. He and O’Malley are planning a series of documentaries that could take them back to Greenland, Mallacoota and the south coast of NSW over the next few years. Meanwhile, he’s working on his latest invention, a cockroach catcher that he assures me would radically transform Sydney’s ecosystem – if he could only get it patented.

Recently, Gray found out that a kayak-maker had stolen his Pittarak design and was making cheap unauthorised copies, so he got Consumer Affairs to shut the operation down. “I’ve been ripped off before,” he admits. “People think I’m from the country and try to take advantage of that. But I’m not any more – I’m from the city now, so I’m getting streetwise.”