murder one three

 Saw an Australian movie Wake in Fright a couple months ago.  Out in the outback is this city slicker teacher fella who was kind of Shanghaied into the gig and it will cost him a pretty penny to get out of it and away from the company of the outback oafs.  It's summer vacation when we see him and he is on his way back to Sydney and his very attractive blonde girlfriend, but somewhere along the line he gets into a coin flipping gambling game and makes enough dough to buy himself out of his fiscal slavery.  But then of course he goes back for more and losing everything he has.

To his surprise the oafs take him in.  They are a rough bunch and drink a ton, but they have a friendly nature.  To his surprise he rather likes them, they are kind of cool with their not giving a fuck about anything and getting drunk a lot and who doesn't like to drink a lot, and by the time he goes back to his schoolhouse he has become one of them and is happier in his skin.  

There is a big kangaroo hunt in the movie where maybe twenty kangaroos are slaughtered, the outback oafs drive out into the outback and freeze the poor creatures in their headlights and kill them until they get bored or run out of bullets and drive off leaving the dead animals on the ground.

The movie was made in 1971 before cgi and before there were rules about harming animals in movies.  The killing is real.  The filmmakers teamed up with a kangaroo hunting crew and got them a big spotlight to freeze the animals.  The idea being that these animals would be killed anyway so it's not like they are guilty of killing them, just taking advantage of the mayhem by filming it.

Things got out of hand, the hunters got drunk, they shot too many, shot them uncleanly, eventually the filmmakers had to pretend there was an electrical short in the spotlight just to get it to end.  https://the-take.com/read/in-awake-in-frighta-how-was-the-kangaroo-scene-filmed

It's a terrible thing but I watched it, and then since I watch my movies twice I watched it again.

So why am I even bringing it up?  Well in telling my story I was afraid people would get the idea that I was coming down on hunting, which I am not.  Beagles puts his deer in the freezer.  I love my Italian beefs and I know where it comes from.  It's in our human nature, which is something I want to get around to discussing later.

This story has been on my mind since I saw the movie and it's kind of illustrative of what Beagles-style hunting is not and I wanted to make that point, and I have the time and I love to write.