A Job Less Ordinary

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 9, 2007

Owen Thomson

Not everyone chooses the traditional career path, writes Owen Thomson.

Conventional, everyday occupations are something for which we should all be grateful. After all, where would society be without a healthy complement of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers? Not to mention doctors, parking inspectors and hairdressers. Well, maybe not parking inspectors.

But not all successful career paths stem from the realms of the obvious. Many evolve as a result of someone falling into a niche area and discovering an aptitude for a job that most never even knew existed. Indeed, it's highly unlikely that those who constitute the ranks of condom testers, historical re-enactors, ice-cream production line quality controllers, stuntmen, lion tamers and bull semen technicians were steered towards their vocations via typical means.

"Not every single job is necessarily known to careers advisers," says Peter Krausz, national marketing officer for the Australian Association of Career Counsellors. "These very specialised sorts of areas don't tend to come up often because it's a friend of a friend or networking that gets the person employed in those particular jobs. There's often very limited opportunities, you have to have very specialised sorts of skills or knowledge or you have to be in the right place at the right time."

Lawrence Carmichael is one person with the type of job you're not likely to see advertised in the Saturday paper. One of only seven qualified fight directors in Australia, he's the expert brought in when a film, television or theatrical production calls for a staged fight between actors.

"I can teach people unarmed combat, knife fighting, rapier and dagger, heavy-sword fighting, sword and shield, sword and cloak, Japanese samurai sword fighting, low-level stunts, stick fighting, it really goes on and on," says Carmichael, who is currently working on the Shakespeare Globe Centre's production of Romeo and Juliet.

Now based in Sydney, the 33-year-old discovered his profession by accident while doing his acting degree at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

"Within the ensemble of actors in my class, they had a tendency to give me lots of weird stunts that I had to do on stage," he recalls. "They kept calling in these guys called fight directors who would teach me to do these big fights and wild stunts. It was so cool. They came in show after show because I kept being asked to do this stuff and they eventually said, 'Why don't you learn how to do this?"'

In the past 10 years, Carmichael has worked for every major theatre company in Sydney, including the Sydney Theatre Company and Opera Australia.

"One of the coolest things I ever did was for the [Song Company's theatre production] Venetian Carnival in 2003, where I choreographed a WWF-style fight that happened over four-part harmonies," he explains. "It started out with them sword fighting with these giant rubber fish and turned into a professional wrestling match while singing."

Of course, Carmichael doesn't hold the mortgage on unusual career choices. Matthew Favaloro is a Sydney-based clinical hypnotherapist who works alongside doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists to help people deal with issues such as anxiety, stress, sleep disorders and even smoking addiction.

"I got into hypnotherapy mainly because one of my friends was a hypnotherapist," Favaloro says. "Also, hypnotherapy seemed to have the effect of getting people through their problems very fast and that always appealed to me."

With two decades of experience under his belt, it's no surprise that the 50-year-old has had his fair share of fascinating cases.

"There was a time there [during the late 1990s] when people came claiming alien abduction and that's really, really interesting," he says. "For a while there I felt like I was part of the X-Files. I never proved or disproved alien abduction, but I worked the people through the trauma that they said they were experiencing."

Some career discoveries are more serendipitous than others. Having started out as a bull rider at age 16, Mick Johnson fell into the rodeo clown profession after filling in for an injured incumbent at Yass when he was 20. For much of the past 16 years, Johnson has risked life and limb as a protection clown, distracting angry, 1200-kilogram bulls from trampling their fallen riders.

"You have to get in between the bull and the rider when the rider comes off," says Johnson, 36. "You distract the bull and the bull chases you and the rider gets away. I've been hit many times. I did a 360 once. One bull got me under the leg and flipped me over. I gave away being a protection clown about three years ago. Now it's just comedy. I'm out there with a bull making the crowd laugh with a clown car that blows up and things like that."

Johnson says it takes a specific talent to be good at the job. "It takes a lot of stock sense, to be able to read what the bull's going to do before he actually does it," he explains.

"It's pretty hard to teach. Anyone silly enough can do it, but to do it properly you've sort of got to be a natural."

what the adviser says

A full-time careers counsellor for the past 26 years, Peter Krausz says he would never dissuade anyone from pursuing an unconventional career path.

"I always believe strongly in encouraging people and getting them to explore ideas in more detail," he says. "But what I do is put it into context. I'd say, 'Look that's fine, but check out these websites or have a look and see what the job opportunities are. See how likely you are to get into it. And have some other options.'

"I always encourage people to have at least three career options as stand-bys."

Crucially, Krausz says there's no definitive point at which a lofty ambition should be abandoned in favour of something more stable or realistic.

"See how it works in with your own life-plan in terms of family or in terms of finances or short- and long-term goals.

"I would never say to someone put an expiry date on your dream."

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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