Everything you always wanted to know about The Flying Doctors. Dedicated to Lenore Smith and Christopher Stollery.
 

Chapter 8 - Maurie and Max

This chapter is part of the book The Inside Story by James Oram. It's a book about the actors of The Flying Doctors and it was published in 1990. You get to know a lot about the actors and about working for the most popular Australian TV series.
Only to obtain second hand via websites like E-bay these days.

Eels! They were everywhere – long ones, short ones, wriggly ones, floppy ones – all of them slippery and squirmy and all of them very much alive when they should have been dead!

‘The bloody things are alive!’ yelled Maurie from the middle of the stream. ‘You said they’d be dead!’

He swung on Max Cullen, swaying beside him and making strangling noises. ‘What are you laughing at, you mug?’

Before Max could say a word, his face went white and his body stiffened.

‘There’s one in me pocket,’ he said hoarsely. And it was Maurie’s turn to laugh.

And that was how two of Australia’s most famous character actors began their famous ‘Battle of the Eels’ for an episode of The Flying Doctors. It was supposed to be a simple story about publican Vic Buckley (Maurie) giving garage mechanic ‘Hurtle’ Morrison (Max) a lesson in eel catching, but it turned out to be a lesson in Murphy’s Law; everything that could go wrong did go wrong and actors and film crew dissolved into chaos. This is how it happened:

It was after dark at Coopers Crossing (Minyip) and, as usual, freezing cold. The last water scene, when Liz Burch and Andrew McFarlane were attacked in a dam by small, hungry yabbies, had cost hours in precious production time and the director prayed nothing would go wrong this time. The problem potential was much higher the second time around. The script called for Maurie to show Max the intricacies of catching eels. The stream had long been fished out, so the locals said, and one of the prop men had been despatched to the Melbourne fish markets for a couple of buckets of the slippery serpents. The idea was to empty them upstream so Max and Maurie could pluck them triumphantly from the water as they slid past. That was the idea.

Though they loved the bush for its pubs (especially the pubs), the people and the gum trees, Max and Maurie were very much city blokes and preferred their eels in creeks, where they belonged. The idea of actually grappling with one of the slimy creatures was something akin to hopping into a nest full of taipans. Catching dead eels was marginally better, but still pretty awful. What they should have done, like any sensible researchers, was to go to the local kids and ask them if there were any eels left in the creek. Such an obvious and mundane approach is below the dignity of big time research teams.

So Max and Maurie splashed into the centre of the creek. They were protected from the icy water by thigh-length wading boots, although, again somebody had failed to do their homework and by the time Max reached midstream he realised there was a large hole in one of the boots and not only was his right leg suddenly encased in a block of ice but the combination of the extra weight and the soft muddy bottom had virtually anchored him into the middle of the stream.

‘OK, give us some light,’ called the director and with hisses and pops the scene was bathed in a glare of arc lamps. A faint voice was heard upstream:

‘Will I chuck ‘em in now?’

‘Go for your life,’ yelled the director and Max and Maurie started scooping the water with nets and saying what the script called them to say. There were a couple of splashes upstream and Max looked up expectantly, as one espying distant eels.

‘I thought you said they were dead,’ he shouted.

‘Of course they’re bloody dead,’ the director shouted back. ‘You try sitting in a freezer for a couple of weeks and see how lively you end up.’

‘I still can’t see the bloody things,’ yelled Max, mollified.

‘Use your net! Use your bloody net!’

Max and Maurie started bailing out the creek with their nets and were rewarded at last with a couple of long, slim, shiny hose-like objects which turned out to be eels. And, yes, quite dead. Definitely eels without feel.

‘Got one!’ yelled Maurie.

‘Me too!’ yelled Max and they both dipped the nets in for another go. That’s when it happened.

As Maurie’s net came up he saw an eel that was quite definitely unthawed. This was an eel with plenty of feel, thrashing and wriggling all over the place and threatening to fly out of the net and doubtless sink its teeth into his throat. Not only that, he could feel the creatures squirming in the stream below him. Pictures of sea monsters dragging him into the bitter depths flashed through his mind. Eels, like spiders, have a funny place in the human imagination.

‘The bloody place is alive with the bastards!’ yelled Maurie and he ploughed towards the bank like a paddle steamer, thrashing and swearing at anything and everything.

‘Wait for me,’ yelled Max, panic-stricken at being left all alone in a stream of squirming sea monsters. The rest of the crew were no help. They were toppling amongst the lights and cameras shrieking with laughter and showing no signs of sympathy whatsoever. Max swore and turned to follow Maurie. That was when he discovered he couldn’t move. The weight of the water-filled wading boot had firmly anchored his leg in the soft mud and struggle as he might, it just wouldn’t budge. Then, horror of horrors, one of the eels discovered the hole in his wader, doubtless under the impression that this was a nice little cave to hide in until the mad beast above him stopped thrashing about and turning the quiet stream into a maelstrom. It popped in and started curling around Max’s leg for a bit of warmth.

‘Holy shit!’ shrieked Max. ‘I’ve got one in my pocket.’

This was too much. Maurie, white-faced and panting as he reached the shore, just collapsed in a choking heap. So did everyone else. Max, firmly anchored in midstream, spent the next five minutes hooting and roaring and threatening all sorts of horrible retribution on the film crew, Maurie, the eels and even the arc lamps. Eventually someone threw him a rope and Max managed to winch himself ashore. They peeled off their soaking clothes and squatted there slowly going blue with cold while the director kept telling them to ‘think hot!’

‘Hot my arse ... .’ yelled Maurie and joined Max in cursing the cold, cursing the director, cursing the Flying Doctor and most of all cursing the half-wit who decided there were no eels in the stream. Of course what nobody realised at the time was that most Australian inland streams have eels and can never be fished out because they do their spawning at sea and re-stock every year. You’d never know they were there, because they’ve become quite wary of humans over the years, but any bush kid will tell you all you need is a hook on the end of a long stick and a full moon. And there lay the answer. What got them all excited and rushing out of their holes in a feeding frenzy were the bright lights suddenly illuminating the dark. Like the world’s biggest full moon.

Maurie, a great raconteur in a land that breeds them by the bucket-load, told the story over a beer and added:

‘I was down at the creek a couple of days later and this city bloke arrived in a Landrover and asked one of the locals if he could drive across.

"No problems," said the local.

The city bloke took a good look at the creek again. It was still flowing pretty fast, and said, "You sure it’s not too deep?"

"No problems," said the local.

"How can you tell?" asked the city bloke.

"No problems," said the local. "It only comes half way up on me ducks."

Maurie cackled to himself.

‘He probably ended up like I did. Eel-hauled.’

Although the Max and Maurie team split up when Max quit the series, the main team, Maurie and his wife Val Jellay, remain its most enduring old troupers. But their partnership goes back a lot further. Last year they celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary, something of a record in the topsy-turvy world of show business, where marriages usually last until the next script. But after three decades of doing everything from vaudeville to The Flying Doctors, everyone agreed they were as much in love as ever.

Val first laid eyes on Maurie thirty-seven years ago. She was a producer with Sorlies Revue Company and Maurie auditioned with his ‘Skit and Skat’ comedy duo. Born into a travelling vaudeville family, he’d been in show business since the age of six when he made a stage appearance with his mother doing vaudeville, cabaret, pantomimes, musical comedies, drama, radio, television, movies – anything and everything that came along.

‘When we met he was wearing a zoot suit, a red hat, red shoes and a blacked face,’ Val later told Woman’s Day reporter Suzanne Monks. ‘I thought his music was great ... but, oh my, his jokes were bad! They’ve improved a lot since, I might add. We all used to go to the pub after the show. If there was a piano, Maurie would sit down and tinkle away and sing the blues.

‘I was fascinated by those clever fingers. Then one day I thought, "You’re not such a bad sort of fellow." I took a good look at him and thought, "You’ve got blue eyes and a nice smile. You’re not bad looking," Best of all, he was gentle and kind and so shy. Absolutely the shyest person I had met. I think I might just have changed that.’

Maurie had long fancied Val from a distance and they started courting, in the true old-fashioned sense of the word. Val said she’d be lucky to get a peck on the cheek when he took her out. He proposed one starry, moonlit night on a deserted beach and they’ve been inseparable every since – on and off stage – often appearing in double acts on stage together and separately in television appearances. For the past six years they have been the popular Coopers Crossing publicans, Vic and Nancy Buckley.

One of Australia’s most sought-after actors, Maurie managed to squeeze in The Flying Doctors between other jobs. ‘As a mini-series role it didn’t take up a great deal of time. But after it went to air they came along and said the response was so good that they were planning to turn it into a regular series and would Val and I be interested. Apparently the pub role had been written specifically with me in mind. Well, we’ve been there every since, in charge of the pub.’ It was a perfect piece of type-casting – in more ways than one. Maurie, a noted elbow bender, has only to walk through a pub door to make it look real. A couple of years ago he suffered a severe heart attack and had to drastically change his life-style – he was only allowed to drink light ale.

‘I’m on the .09 (light beer), three a day. When I got the news it was the worst twenty minutes of my life. Apart from cutting out the beer, I had to cut out cigarettes, I had to cut out sex. Now I cut out paper dolls.’

It’s no great shakes for a publican with his fondness for the foaming brown. To Maurie, drinking is a culture, a way of life. Fifteen years ago he set up a Beer Drinkers’ Protection Society in Victoria after seven rises in the price of beer in a single year: ‘We have to stop the dog chasing its tail or we’ll all go broke. We have already got 600 members and we are going to petition the government and politicians. Beer is our national drink. You can’t drink water – fish fornicate in it.’

Although one of the country’s best known actors, Maurie never scored a starring role. Not that he minded. ‘Never be the bloody star because when you’re doing a show and assisting, if it all goes well, you can walk up to the lead and say: "Hey, we killed ‘em didn’t we?" If it doesn’t work, you can do the same thing – walk up and say: "Gee, what happened to you?" ‘

His broad Australian accent proved a handicap in the old days. He once told Jenny Brown of the Melbourne Age:

‘I always reckoned it wasn’t that I was too Australian, everyone else was too Pommified. They used to plum on through their lines and I’d say, "Howzat? Can you slip that one to me again?" These days it’s different, of course; now they need me for the resident mongrel. Not that I’m doing Ocker. I hate Ocker. [The term applies to over-emphasising the worst aspects of the Australian no-hoper.] I base my characters on people I’ve met, especially country people, who are real. There are so many different types that you could play on forever without running out. Those dead-set, fair dinkum people who would give you their last dina. They’re Aussies and I’m Aussie.’

If Maurie was typecast as a bush publican, there’s some of Hurtle Morrison, the Coopers Creek garage mechanic, in Max Cullen. Like Hurtle, Max could never pass up a chance to make a spare quid and after his stint on The Flying Doctors he thought he’d have a go at movie production, mainly because he’d bought the screen rights to David Williamson’s successful play, Sons of Cain, for a bottle of French champagne!

‘The most I’ve ever paid for film rights,’ he grumbled at the time. ‘My first movie only cost a dollar.’

A dry chap, Max – with or without champagne.

The movie coup of the decade followed a chance remark by Williamson’s agent that Sons of Cain was his only play not yet on film.

‘How much for the screen rights?’ quipped Max, about as financially equipped by buy movies as launch a raid on the Bank of England. Neither was to know Williamson had been so impressed with Max’s stage role as the hard-nosed reporter Kevin Cassidy that he had decided to give him a break.

‘Tell Lettuce Face he’s up for fifty bucks or a bottle of Bollinger,’ said the playwright. (During the play’s triumphant London season, a critic likened Max’s face to a ‘frenzied lettuce’. Bollinger was the champagne consumed so copiously in the play.)

‘Done!’ said Max and set about raising the finance, his backers doubtless hoping real life Max would make a better fist of things than the time Hurtle Morrison went into the home-brewing business and nearly poisoned half the population of Coopers Crossing!

The movie is plodding ahead but in the meantime he’s planning to return to London late this year with a new production of Ray Lawler’s Australian classic, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. He’ll be doing one of the two male leads as Barney, the sugar-cane cutter first played by Lawler himself and made internationally famous by John Mills in the movie version. It will be Max’s third London stage appearance; the second was another Williamson play, Emerald City in which he played Mike the conman.

Leading journalist Terry Blake once described Max as a limelighter who hated the limelight – one of Australia’s most seen and least known celebrities, from Hurtle Morrison to Chooka the Pom-stirring reporter in Bodyline (the highly successful mini-series about the 1931/32 England Ashes tour of Australia when Douglas Jardine’s infamous ‘leg theory’ tactics combined with fast bowler Harold Larwood’s deadly bouncers almost led to a breakdown in relations between the two countries).

They broke the mould with Max. Jack Nicholson perfected the manic eyes, Paul Hogan the dangerous grin. Max invented the quizzical grimace. His thinking was described as neither lateral nor vertical; it was everywhere. Having a conversation with him was hard work.

‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ asked Blake.

By the time he’d tortured his way through the remark’s inherent complexities, identified the pitfalls, lit his eyes with revelation and said:

‘Yeah.’ Blake was looking around nervously for the door.

An actor by whim as much as talent, Max also tried his hand at painting, cartooning, writing, directing, sculpting and music. He hated being interviewed. Apart from the intrusion, he had to come up with an answer. Usually, in what passed for ‘normal’ conversation, he could grapple with all the convolutions of a question until quizzical grimacing scared the questioner away or an association flickered on his mental screen. Then there’d be a disordered anecdote that might or might not provide an answer.

‘Why did you leave The Flying Doctors?’

‘Don’t know. It was a good-looking series. Shot on film, plenty of scenery, laconic humour, odd-looking characters.’

‘So why leave?’

‘Yeah. I think I didn’t want to do it any more. I think that’s what the idea was.’

‘You don’t know why?’

‘Yeah. I had a good idea why I didn’t want to do any more. I’d had enough of it.’

‘You’re sure now?’

‘Yeah. That’s probably pretty close.’

He nodded, as one having explained Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to a pretty dumb carrot. Newspaper morgues don’t have ‘in-depth’ interviews with Max Cullen.

Asked if he had any big names in mind for the movie, he said, with a deadpan look on his face:

‘How about Rebecca Gibney as the young inexperienced journalist?’

Had she been approached?

‘No.’

Why not?

‘She wouldn’t be right for the part.’

A desperate change of tack. Did he ever get stage fright?

‘Never. When I’m on stage I know exactly what I’ve got to say next. It’s a lot better than real life. I used to write ad-libs on the back of my hand so if I ran into someone on the street I’d have something to say. The worst thing about being on stage is forgetting your lines. Life, too.

The man’s agonising shyness could have anchored him in agoraphobia. Instead, he went about as public as you could get. Not sure which art would lead to his soul, he tried the lot. A true craftsman who couldn’t make up his mind which craft to be true to, Max became one of the top ten Australian actors; a reluctant darling of the theatrical set when he’d much prefer the following description by a colleague:

‘This bloke’s not some slack-jawed retard from the Coke commercial beefstakes. This bloke’s an actor’s actor. He does his homework and doesn’t stuff about. He brings paper people to life. You ever see a bigger bastard than that Quinn in Act of Betrayal? He’s a bloody genius to work with. He’s forgotten more than most of us will ever learn.’

Well, there’s no bitterness like show bitterness but Max would rather talk about the music teacher who taught him trumpet at the age of seventeen. ‘Man you’re a natural,’ said the teacher. Thirty years later Max went back and his old tutor recognised him. Far out, thought Max, after all those years. Next day the teacher said, ‘Now I know where I remember you from. You play Hurtle in The Flying Doctors.’

Some of Max’s feature film credits include Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career and Starstruck, John Duigan’s Dimboola and Sunday Too Far Away, Tom Jeffrey’s The Odd Angry Shot, Claude Whatham’s Hoodwink, Stephen Wallace’s Stir, Quentin Masters’ Midnite Spares, and Boundaries of the Heart with Wendy Hughes.

Among his television work are the mini-series The Scales of Justice, The Eureka Stockade, Act of Betrayal with Elliott Gould, and the series Rafferty’s Rules, A Country Practice and, of course, The Flying Doctors.

The Flying Doctors was something of a watershed in Max’s life. It led to a divorce from his second wife, actress Colleen Fitzpatrick, after fourteen years. Then media pressure killed off any chance of a relationship with co-star Liz Burch becoming more serious. The split with Colleen came just after they’d finished doing up their 140-year-old stone cottage in Sydney. Max’s comments were typical of him:

‘The only way you know you have a future is to leave a thing unfinished. If the renovations hadn’t been completed I’d still be laying bricks, and I suppose, we’d still be together. Now there’s no going back. All the mortar is in place.’

Then came the romance with Liz.

‘There was nothing deep between us, ever. I know it makes good copy, but we’re just good friends. The press hounded us for a while and I think that’s what finished us off. It became too public. We decided to call it a day. If it had been serious, there would have been hell to pay from Liz’ parents because I was still married. I still like her a lot. She’s very attractive and intelligent. A good catch for any man who isn’t boring, married or gay.’

Or an offbeat, brilliant actor.

But then The Flying Doctors always attracted the best of Australian talent – amongst them Lenore Smith as Sister Kate Wellings, Pat Evison as Violet Carnegie, Bruce Barry as George Baxter and Terry Gill as Sgt Carruthers. They’re not the supernovae, but they’re the back-bone of a series like this, the no-nonsense, highly experienced professionals who never miss a beat; the ones that the beginners come to for advice after their first nerve-racking day on the set.

Quick pick Chapter 4 Andrew McFarlane - Chapter 5 Robert Grubb - Chapter 6 Peter O' Brien, Brett Climo - Chapter 7 Liz Burch, Rebecca Gibney - Chapter 8 Maurie Fields, Max Cullen - Chapter 9 Lenore Smith

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Maurie

Max