Remembering George Wilson

I received some terribly sad news this week. a phone call from my distraught wife telling me that a great man had passed on. George William Wilson died on the 14th of May 2019 from a heart attack, there was no suffering. He was aged 64. I went to George's funeral on Monday the 20th. It was more of a celebration of a life lived than a mourning of a life lost. It was a great gathering of film crew, family, and friends, all there to remember and farewell a man who had boundless energy, skills and help to offer all those who knew him.

It made me realise that you never truly know a person until you have been to their funeral and listened to the story of a life lived, from the many perspectives of such varied times and places. George the Grip, George the concrete maker, George the gold miner, the digger driver, the hippy, the bush lawyer, boat captain, camera repair man, accountant and inventor, the self-taught engineer. Not to forget also father, grandfather, loving brother, son, and friend to many.

I was lucky enough to meet George at the beginning of my gripping career, when I was given to him as a project to make me into a more useful member of the team.

George was not sure what to make of his new charge. I was a 30-year-old chef with zero gripping skills. With a gentle mixture of club-handed sarcasm and a lot of patience, George managed to teach me enough to survive the first 3 or 4 years of a 15-year career, his practical skills were unmatched and his knowledge base was as deep as it was varied.

It was only at his funeral that I discovered from stories told by siblings of adventures and escapades that showed George’s penchant as an inventor began at an early age, as he rebuilt and designed bigger, faster, and wilder bikes sourced from dumps and garage sales. He learnt to weld at an age most kids would be learning how to fly a kite. He never courted trouble, only stumbling on it by accident and finding a way out of it with skill and logic.

George often found the line, blurred it a bit and occasionally crossed it, sometimes for his own advantage, sometimes in defense of another. This sense of justice served him well over the years, standing up for the underdog and working through many long paperwork battles to get the right thing over the line. Many would have buckled, not our George.

His determination to achieve a goal would lead him into many difficult and challenging business opportunities. Twenty-four and even 48-hour working days were not uncommon for George. He would take on projects others would deem impossible or incomprehensible. Tug boats were bought and repainted, mountains owned and sold, entire railways were lifted from the earth and trucked to yards to be sold and stacked and exchanged for more treasure. And everything was treasure to George. He would collect and forage and repurpose items that others would consider useless, he was a pioneer recycler, a keeper of things to be turned into other things and called upon in situations where no one else could find a solution. George always had a plan and would often invent something solely for the purpose of creating a fix for the unfixable.

His moods were legendary, some days a storm of discontent, others a wave of rebellious mischief. Food would help and a short nap after lunch would do the rest. At breakfast, George would carefully wrap a handful of sausages in tinfoil to be snacked on throughout the long film days on the cold snowy mountains. He needed to eat to maintain strength, the strength of an ox. If a bull had offered up a fight, my money was on George as the winner.

George is gone now, the last time I saw him he looked happy and content. I will remember him that way, his warm cheeky smile will live on in my mind. And if God and Heaven do indeed exist then there must have finally been a problem up there that no one else could fix. Rest In Peace, Bad Santa.