Les Orgasmes de Ben Buckler

The Orgasms of Ben Buckler” is named as such because largely to a girl who I saw a lot of when I was growing up who lived there at Ben Buckler. 

“Ben Buckler” is the a nickname for the headland at Sydney's Bondi Beach. 

However, the reason for naming this "LES ORGASMES DE BEN BUCKLER” isn’t for reasons you’d immediately think. 

We were teenagers and she was walking past with a new boyfriend. I was sitting on the hill overlooking the beach at South Bondi in the evening, underage drinking, noticing the lights from commercial aeroplanes flashing across the water towards me. I’m happily weird now, but I was much weirder then. I pointed out to them, something that interested me ~ 

“Every flash of light from the planes heading south skip and reflect across the water directly into my eyes, not in any other way.” 

She laughed and stated very firmly “Of course it does, it has to” and left me to my drinking and thinking.  She wasn't going to ever dump her new boyfriend anyhow. So I just sat there, 16 years old'ish in 1983, unemployable and contemplating light.

“What could change that? it always flashes towards the viewer...How could it not be the case?” I pondered to myself. 

“What if those planes flew close to the speed of light, yet I could still see them as planes? Would the light from the plane lights coming through the air arrive more quickly than the same light from that plane reflecting and bouncing off the water?” 

Upon reflection, dear reader, you could immediately tell that this shaped brain was  also the very good reason I didn’t deserve to have a girlfriend. But I was incredibly poor too. And lacked any ambition to be part of society. What a catch. I didn't even tick a box that qualified me as a curious bit-of-rough before nice girls went off to marry nice boys.

Could barely afford film for the old manually adapted 35mm Olympus OM-10 camera I had either, so my necessary art form was writing drama because creativity and a pen was the cheapest form of expression available to me. 

I’d later become a rarely successful dramatist over time, but never developed this story which has stayed with me for over forty years. 

Perhaps because the story is better told with this photos rather than being confined to a theatre. I hope I've become a good enough photographer now to have done it justice. I invented a few attachments and techniques to get to these. These are those photographs more than 40 years in the making. And this is the story that I'd made up before these photos were finally taken.

Now I've taken the shots, I'm happy to share the short story with you here.

Naturally, the story I conceived involved a character sitting on the hill overlooking Bondi Beach towards Ben Buckler

At one point, the character notices the lights from the planes, and the lights from the headland where a once loved girl once lived. 

Oddly, the lights are no longer flashing towards the character as they had always done, as it had been pointed out in a recent remark. Instead, the lights seemed to flash differently. They were flashing slightly away and at something of an angle. 

They flashed only slightly off-course at first, but by the time the character leaves the beach with it’s view of the water, the lights from last plane coming in to land were no longer arriving normally, but were askew by at least a handspan when the characters arm was out-stretched. The character becomes perplexed, goes home, drinks, can’t sleep, heads back to the beach wondering. Was the character either dead, or maybe he was the only one left alive? Did others see the changes that were happening, or was this the way his life was going to be forever now? 

This character heads back to the beach. It’s completely quiet, nothing has changed. It’s too late for planes, too dark for moon-tanning. 

The character wanders onto the caramel shadowed sand, standing alone, the dim suburban house-lights and street lamps of Ben Buckler in view. 

As the character frustratedly yells“Nothing’s happening!” - at that very instant, the lights from the headland of Ben Buckler wrap around the character, encompassing the character’s field of vision, enveloping the character into a higher planes and ways of seeing. 

Thoughts became as beams of light. 

The skies becomes rivers. 

Sounds in the character’s mind become colours. 

Screaming guitar leads of colour joyed their streams across the sky unconfined. 

The character could see through the perception of all and any beings as simply as unblinking. All the character needs do is will it to happen. 

The Moon and Venus are as ribbon strings pinned above sunrise’s doorway. 

And the dim-lit houses and streets of Ben Buckler danced orgasmically until the dawn, seen through the orgasming eyes of all things, all things, living, ever lived, never lived and the nothingness that is neither yet and will also become all things.

The sun, as a black, black beacon rose, blacker than the night it had replaced. 

That ball of gas held together by its own gravity was taking back the light from the energy it had endowed our earth with each and every previous day.

And the black hole spun its orgasmic event horizons over where once there was daylight over the headland of Ben Buckler, undoing the time and space in which we thought we existed, but now never do, and to this new universe, never, ever did. "