Underbelly 6 by John Silvester

Author:John Silvester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime
ISBN: 9781742699363
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

EVER since he’d been a little boy in the Sydney suburb of Graystanes, the Dragsbaeks’ little boy had been fascinated by heights. When his mother wasn’t looking he used to sneak into the back yard to climb a gum tree, perch on a lower limb and jump off.

One day his father bought a truckload of sand for concreting, and it was dumped under the tree. Collin worked out that if he landed in the sloping pile he wouldn’t hurt himself. He started to jump from the higher branches. The good feeling he got never left him.

While his schoolmates played football and cricket, the boy with no brothers devised his own thrills – with skateboards and bikes, ropes and ladders. He graduated to the motorbike after the family moved to Cairns, but it wasn’t until they moved again – to Brisbane in the late 1970s – that he took up high falls in earnest.

The Dragsbaeks bought a two-acre property at Camira in Brisbane’s outer suburbs. Collin, by this time about 20, begged foam landing mats from a mattress-making company, rigged them up under a tree at the back of the block with a 10-metre ladder. Then he started training.

Each morning before breakfast he’d do practice falls. He honed his repertoire so he could fall in any position – face down, running in the air, or swan diving – then flick over with split-second timing to land spreadeagled on his back, right on target.

Already known as a stunt driver, he started to get falling parts in films, and a reputation to go with it. In industry jargon, if he took a gig the producers could be sure he’d ‘nail it’ in one take. He was to become one of the best high-fallers in the Australian film industry.

But Dragsbaek had more than the right stuff, according to those who knew and admired him. In a business of doers, he was also a thinker. Some would-be stunt actors were reckless, but Collin taught them that mere willingness to suffer injury did not make anyone a professional ‘stuntie’. He applied his quiet intelligence to calculating risks, then minimising them. And, unusual in a jealous industry, he shared his hard-won knowledge unselfishly.

On evenings and weekends he ran stunt schools, instilling proven routines that ensured the most spectacular stunts could be done safely. He ran ‘driving days’ with cars and motorbikes, ‘fire days’, and ‘high-fall days’. And despite suggestions that he capitalise on his ability to teach, he refused to charge his pupils more than $5 a session. He didn’t want to make money, he told his bemused parents; he wanted to help others, and he wanted to make the industry safer.

No matter what the stunt, Dragsbaek insisted that learners master safe techniques perfectly before moving on to a higher level. Evel Knievel might boast that he’d broken all his bones, he used to say, ‘but I’d rather boast I haven’t broken any’.

By the mid-1990s he was fielding calls from British and American stunt actors who’d heard

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