When driving into the wheat-belt town called Popanyinning, there is a roadside sign that reads:Popanyinning: hard to say, nice to stay. I consider the first part of the sign to be accurate. However, given that Popanyinning consists of four houses and a general store and is four hours inland from the most isolated city in the world, the second part may be a tad ambitious.
Still, it felt good to be on the road. I was riding shotgun in a white Toyota with my girlfriend and horse riding trainer Rachel House. At a corner store in a town larger than Popanyinning, we’d contemplated the dinner menu of chicken nuggets or hot chips and gone with hot chips. Now, the sun had set over the wheat fields and we had wound our windows up and were listening to feel-good eighties hits on a local radio station.
And then we went past the sign. It is, I believe, a good thing that somebody somewhere had decided to sit down and write something creative about Popanyinning, because, when cruising at a speed of ninety kilometers an hour in the dark, the four houses and general store are barely enough to slow you down, let alone alert you to the concept that what you had just passed through was, in fact, a town. We were on our way to a farm ten minutes north of Popanyinning for a spectacularly absurd reason. That is, I was going to ride a bull.
“Hey,” I said. “Wasn’t that Popanyinning?”
“Oh yeah, that means we must be pretty close to Kylie’s place,” Rachel replied.
I’d met Kylie three weeks earlier at a horse race in Bunbury. When competing at horse riding events in their adolescent years, Kylie and Rachel had been formidable foes. And now Kylie was a horse trainer. Kylie’s handshake was firm. She was blonde and tough. From a glance, you felt as if you could play the trombone off her rib cage. Somewhat anxious to introduce a conversation that could evoke her horse riding sensibilities, I told her about my ludicrous idea to become a professional bull rider.
“You’re gonna have to come up to Popanyinning and meet Roycie then,” she replied. “I reckon he might be able to rustle up a good bull for ya.”
And so it was that three weeks later Rachel and I cruised past Popanyinnig and turned off into a cattle farm run by Kylie and her husband Royce. Royce was about six two, wore a john deer cap with pride and was never far off a boisterous laugh. On the outside patio, sitting on a table underneath glowing Christmas lights and mosquitoes, we cracked beers and discussed my bull riding prospects. Royce was excited about the idea. Perhaps too excited.
A nineteen year old stable-hand called Ben introduced himself and joined us at the table. Coincidently, Ben had ridden bulls at Rodeo events in Perth and was keen to ride them again. And so it was set. Royce would draft out a group of bulls from the herd the following day and Ben and I would attempt to ride them in a cattle yard. Some of the details seemed a little hazy. I needed answers. What type of bulls? (Very wild ones). How wild where they? (They’ve never been ridden). And where do I run when I get bucked off? (Don’t worry mate, you’ll know where to run).
I was not the only one feeling anxious. Just before going to sleep, Rachel rolled over next to me and said: “You’re not seriously going to do this, are you?”

We woke like most that stay on a farm at Popanyinning – early. Kylie and Ben had been up since the crack of dawn. They’d been riding a group of young horses hard and fast, preparing them for a looming race. We borrowed Royce’s car and went for a quick scout around the farm to find them. Although we were not quite early or quick enough to catch them riding, we did manage to bog Royce’s car in the sand between two wheat fields. Ben pulled up thirty minutes later with a look of bemusement.
“No wonder you’re bogged, you haven’t even locked the wheel hubs.”
He locked the hubs and promptly drove the car out of the sand. We licked our hapless-out-of-town wounds and headed back to the homestead for sandwiches. Royce dropped by after lunch, pulling up briefly with his land cruiser still purring and his head out the window.
“I’ve rounded up more spectators for the bull ride,” he shouted. “Should be a hell of a show.”
For the first time since embarking on the trip, I felt genuinely nervous.
At five thirty we drove to the cattle yards. Royce had promised to soften the landing by spreading soft sand with his backhoe around the yard, but on inspection, it was quickly apparent that he has only dumped the sand over a small concrete shelf near the chutes. Apart from the sand covering the concrete shelf, the rest of the yard was hard dirt.
“Geez, Roycie, might be a bit of a hard landing,” Kylie observed dryly.
“Yeah well, I didn’t have time to shove sand around everywhere. Don’t worry, they’ll be right.”
Earlier, Ben and Royce had chosen the bulls we were to ride and drafted them into a smaller holding yard. I examined the bulls from a distance. There didn’t appear to be many smaller ones.
Ben was first up. We cajoled one of the bulls from the yard up into the race and then into a crush (a cage used to restrain livestock). From this position, Ben tied his rope around the bull and then released it into the chutes. The bull did not appear happy and, once released from the crush, lurched itself out over the steel girders and roared.
“How ya doin’ now Sully?” Royce yelled, then released a manic laugh.
I wasn’t doing well. Photos taken later would reveal that I’d turned a shade of white. Ben did not seem perturbed by the look of a wild and powerful bull. He donned a helmet, put on a vest and climbed up in the chutes to attempt to sit on the back of it. There was something eerie about Ben’s unwavering approach. This was, after all, complete madness. I watch mesmerized as he wrapped his hand around the rope and nodded for Royce to open the chutes. When the chutes opened, the bull paused momentarily, as if to contemplate its sudden freedom. And then the bull went nuts. Ben rode out a few big bucks but was swiftly thrown off. Landing on his back, his leg became entangled with the rope tied around the bull and he was dragged along the dirt. For a few seconds I felt terrified but then his leg somehow untwined from rope and the bull went bucking wildly off to the other side of the yard.
Rachel was sitting on the cattle yard with a video camera in her hand. In Margaret River, I’d asked her to bring along a video camera and film the day and she’d reluctantly agreed.
“How ya feeling?” I asked her.
“I’m shaking,” she replied, and I felt the goose bumps on her leg. “You’re not seriously going to do this, are you?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll just throw me on a tame one.”
Ben did not seem too perturbed at being dragged five metres along the dirt by a wild animal. He had chosen the next bull for me, a Murray Grey, and was feverishly tying a rope around its girth. Although the bull was quite staunch, it seemed like the tamest of a wild bunch.
“How big is it?” I asked.
“Only ‘bout four hundred kilos.”
“Only?”
“Don’t worry mate. She’s half asleep, should be sweet.”
The bull walked into the chutes and waited patiently.
“Come on mate, up ya get,” Ben said to me.
I secured the helmet, put on the vest, and climbed up along the railing of the chutes wondering, not for the first time, about why on earth I was doing this. I lowered myself over the bull, gripped onto the bull handle and then Ben wrapped the rope around my hand. It was far too tight.
“Hang on, hang on a sec. This rope is wrapped too tightly around my hand.”
“Don’t worry about it. I bought this rope from Queensland. It’s got a safety release that will free your hand as soon as you let go of the rope. I promise ya.”
“So, what should I do when the bull starts bucking?”
“Just lean forward, grip with your legs and hold on.”
Right. I lowered my legs around the bull.
“Hang on mate, you don’t wanna do that.” Royce yelled. “That bull could crush your legs against the side of the chute in an instant.”
“So what do I do?”
“Just tell me when you want me to open the chute and then jump on the bull.”
Gotcha. The rope still felt too tight around my hand.
“Guys, there’s no way my hand is going to come free from this rope.”
“It will mate, there’s a safety latch, don’t worry about it.”
Rachel shouted out to loosen the rope from my hand but they reassured her that it was not too tight. There was nothing left to do but ride the bull. I knew that I couldn’t think about it for too long. It was now or never. I gave the nod to Royce and he opened the chutes.
The next few seconds were a blur. I don’t remember much except hitting the dirt. Relatively speaking, it felt like a clean dismount. The rope had untangled itself cleanly from my hand like Ben had said that it would. Kylie and Royce were cheering from the sidelines but for some reason I felt disappointed. I’d only stayed on a few seconds and it felt like I could have hung on longer.
Ben rode the next few bulls. They were mad and wild and bucked powerfully but he rode them well. He was staying on longer with each ride. The kid was hell bent on destruction. He really was a bit of a nutcase..
“Come on Sully. You gotta ride one more before we go home.”
I glanced up the race. There was only one bull left to ride. He was twice the size as the Murray grey and looked twice as fiery.
“There’s no way I’m going to jump on that thing.” I told him, but Ben tied the rope around the bull regardless.
“Come on mate,” he said to me when the bull was in the chute. “Just one more ride.”
Rachel confessed that she was freaking out and went to wait in the car.
“I’m just going to climb up and see how big he is, but I’m not committing myself to riding him,” I told Ben, and climbed up the chutes.
As soon as I had my legs remotely around the bull he began to tie my hand in to the handle.
“Hang on a sec, this is ridiculous. How big is this bull?”
“About six hundred and fifty kilos.”
“Does anybody ride a six hundred and fifty kilo bull on their second ride?”
“Of course not. But don’t worry about what anyone else does. It’s just about whether you can ride him, and I reckon you can.”
His words seemed to make sense. I felt my confidence lifting. How does a nineteen year old stable hand develop verbal skills that are far beyond any psychologist? But this was madness. The sun had set. I was not going to ride a six hundred and fifty kilo bull in the dark. I was not going to die on a remote wheat belt farm in Western Australia.
“Sorry guys, can’t do it.” I told them, and climbed down from the chutes.
“Stuff it. Chuck us your vest and helmet then. I’m going to ride him,” Ben proclaimed.
He jumped on the back of the bull and demanded that Royce open the chutes. Once the chutes were opened, the bull immediately turned 180 degrees and began running back up the race.
“Shit.”
Ben untwined his hand from the rope and jumped swiftly from the bull. His head narrowly missed slamming into a metal pole.
We decided to call it a day.
Back at the homestead, Royce conceded that it was probably a good idea, after all, that I’d decided not to ride the second bull.
“Otherwise, you’d still have your head bangin’ against that pole going “Shit what do I do now Ben?””
On the trip back to Margaret River I decided on the spot to give up drinking and join the local gym. I needed to be fit. I was going to give up drinking. Tomorrow, I’m going to start yoga……seriously.

My first ride on video

Ben’s first ride on video

I decided to become a professional bull rider in a bookshop. The bookshop is owned by my parents. After returning from a year on a pro surfing tour they told me of their plans to open it, and I agreed to help them get it started. My younger brother Ash, at the time English and Drama teacher in London, was also keen on the bookshop idea and came back to Australia to help.
The idea of the bookshop was to create a place where people felt comfortable. People could stay as long as they wanted. If they so desired, kids could spread out on the floor and flick through the most expensive hardback without fear of reprimand. Strangers were encouraged to talk to one another. It was a bold idea. Basically, my parents reasoned that if people were encouraged to wander, browse, chill out, chat and, most importantly, sit down on a couch and read a book without feeling pressure to buy, if every ounce of fiber of their being was gently massaged into a state of relaxed bliss, then, of course, the one thing they’d do was buy the book
To some extent this concept worked. But even in the early days, after returning from the surfing tour, as the bookshop idea was being concocted, I had a feeling about the kind of people the bookshop would attract. Before the first fence posts would be thrown into the back of my dad’s Ute and carted off to boost the shelves. Before the first wall was sanded back and painted. Before any accounts with publishers were established, I had little doubt that this bookshop would be shop 1, freak avenue, freaksville.
Margaret River already had its fair share of freaks. Three hours south of Perth it’s a great little town to escape to. If you’d had enough of society, if you prefer to hip in a civilization that hops, if you want to cash in your sanity chips and dislocate from the public’s perpetual poker play, then Margaret River’s not a bad place to go.
Somewhere between the yuppies, the wine connoisseurs, nestled snuggly amongst hippies, surfers and dissidents, and deemed harmless by the local council and police, the freaks enjoyed a blossoming existence in Margaret River. They were free to sway, stagger and shout abuse at publicans for closing the pubs too early, comfortable in attending local rallies, eager to mount free-wheeling conspiracy theories, happy to write slightly mad and mildly political letters to the local paper, content to busk badly on the main street, tickled pink to occasionally camp out in the wilderness and howl at the moon and, most essentially, they loved bookshops.
And so it was that the bookshop was opened and the freaks did come. Everyday brought a new stream of misfits, bohemians, poets, eccentrics, mavericks and weirdoes. Occasionally the oddballs were annoying, like when one persuaded a customer, right on the brink of a sale, not to buy the Woodwork 101 book and instead to source advice from a friend of his who was a tree logger, or when it took us two months to track down an obscure book on aliens from an equally obscure distributor in the U.K. and then, after it arrived in the shop, being told by the person who ordered it that it wasn’t quite the book he was looking for.
But on the whole we began to love everybody who entered the bookshop, especially the nutters. They provided the entertainment to spark up the slow days. Occasionally, like on a particularly sluggish Tuesday afternoon five months ago, I was hoping one would walk through the doors.
On that Tuesday it had been all too mundane. The morning was busy but the pace had slowed considerably in the afternoon. It had been three months since I’d had the encounter with the man who’d claimed that we’d ordered not quite the right book on aliens, six months since I’d dragged a drunk poet from the pub across the road and pleaded with him to share his poetry with a young, attractive and slightly upper-class couple from England, and a year since I’d met two Danish girls in the shop, wrote their own itinerary of what to do in Margaret River, and then drank wine with them in the bookshop until three in the morning.
And so five months ago, on a dreary Tuesday afternoon, when the morning trade had not quite been busy and not quite been quiet, I was secretly hoping for an interesting or entertaining character to walk through the doors.
The next person to walk through the door was a cowboy. Initially, I wasn’t sure it was a cowboy of course. Although the man had a hat like a cowboy and had boots like a cowboy and wore a belt like a cowboy, who’s to say he hadn’t strolled in from an all night fancy dress party. Intrigued, I grabbed some books and inconspicuously walked past him, faking interest in putting books on the shelves while checking him out.
The man was big and burly, had square shoulders, a wide brimmed cowboy hat, leather boots and a relaxed demeanor. He was in the Australian history section and casually began flicking through a biography of CY O’Connor – who was famous for designing a pipeline that ran from Kalgoorlie to Perth over a hundred years ago.
I glanced at the man again and decided that he did not appear to have arrived from an all night party. The cowboy get-up was his choice and he wore it with pride. I walked back to the counter and spent a few moments hypothesizing about the best way to approach. Eventually, I decided to walk straight up to him.
“G’day. How ya’ goin’?”
He put the book down and looked up with a smile.
“I’m ok, how are you?”
He responded with an American accent. A shiver of excitement flushed through me. Is this guy really a fully bona fide cowboy?
“I’m good. So, how do you like Margaret River?”
“Oh, I love this little town.” he replied brightly.
He went back to reading the book on CY O’ Connor and I realized it was time to take a risk. My curiosity was burning. I just had to ask.
“Excuse me,” I said, “strange question I know, but have you ever ridden a bull?”
He put the book down, turned towards me and gave a chuckle.
“Well sure, I was always better on the broncos though.”
I couldn’t believe it. My excitement was bubbling hard. Of all the people to walk through the bookshop, a cowboy? This is Margaret River; there were thirty kilometers of world class waves and many talented surfers. There were over fifty vineyards and many talented wine makers. There were many farms and no doubt talented diary farmers. I had even occasionally met a person that could ride a horse, but I had never met anyone that had attempted to ride a bull. The act of riding of these wild beasts immediately struck me as courageous, mystifying and insane.
The cowboy showed me his belt which he’d won as part of the 1984 national rodeo bucking bronco championships in Texas. I promptly decided that I would not let him leave the shop. I excitedly called out to my dad, who was pricing books in the backroom, to come and meet him. For the next thirty minutes we peppered the cowboy with questions. Although he was a bucking bronco champion, we honed our questions about riding bulls.
To the best of his ability the cowboy explained what it felt like to get bucked off, he explained what it felt like to hang on. He explained that sometimes it was safer to ride an angry and more ferocious bull, because they’d buck you off well clear of their legs, and thus there would be less chance of getting stomped on. He talked about a position behind the bulls head which he referred to as “the no go zone” which “if you can, it’s good to stay well away from.”
We continued hounded him with questions. We wanted to know how long he’d been riding in rodeos. (Fifteen years, retired ten years ago). What was the scariest bull he’d ever ridden? (A bull called Mad Hatter) Had he ever been badly hurt? (Many broken bones, a fractured cheek bone and a punctured lung) What was he doing in Margaret River? (Just being a regular tourist.)
He answered each question thoughtfully, and then said:
“Well, it was lovely to meet you folks. If you ever come out to Texas be sure to look me up.”
We shook his hand and he smiled and made his way towards the door.
“Hang on a minute,” I shouted.
He turned around
“Do you reckon I could do it?”
“Do what?”
“Do you reckon I could ride a bull?”
It had been almost two years since I’d been on the professional surfing tour and I’d just come through a heavy summer of excess. I’d been drinking too much, eating too much and not exercising enough. Although relatively unfit compared to the other professional surfers, at my peak I’d weighed less than ninety kilos on the tour and now I was well up above ninety five. The cowboy looked me up and down. His face carried the hint of a smile.
“Hell boy,” he said finally, “you could try.”