Seizing fate, I once placed a personal ad in a magazine, trying to track down a nameless, attractive ride operator who’d swept into my town with a travelling carnival. I was 13 and desperate to escape. Just placing the ad let in a ray of light.
Isabel Darling, director of the feature-length documentary The Carnival, can relate. She followed Bells Family Carnival around Australia for seven years – but sometimes just turning up to film vignettes wasn’t enough.
“It’s a really appealing lifestyle,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I felt tempted to run away with them at times. I had my own things going on at certain periods while filming, and I’d think, ‘I really want to go with you to Darwin.’”
The Bells, now a sixth-generation travelling show family, have been touring Australia for a century, progressing from boxing tents to imported, top-of-the-range rides. Sometimes they do take lost souls under their wing and trundle them around the country – as long as they work hard enough.
The Carnival, which makes its world premiere at the Sydney film festival on Saturday, follows their patriarch, Elwin, his wife, Selina, and three of their kids: Leroy, who has broken free to live a “normal” life in the ’burbs; Ellie, who feels trapped since coming back from university and wonders how someone with her lifestyle will ever find a partner; and Roy, Elwin’s chip off the old block.
You might not have been to a Bells carnival, but you can picture it: a top-notch fun fair with all the usual trappings – loud music, fast food and faster rides. The Bells, who don’t have a house, are on the road the whole year, with their convoy of semi-trailers clocking up about 30,000km; the longest they stay in one place is six weeks, in Batemans Bay for a summer carnival.
It’s gruelling work, putting up and dismantling rides in all elements. Roy has earned responsibility his own ride, a business in its own right. Ellie manages the canteen. When Roy starts seeing Caitlin, a girl from another show family, and she becomes pregnant, she’s warmly welcomed and put to work at the ice cream stand. Show kids grow up fast, and having a baby reasonably young is a reason for celebration.
We first meet Roy as a 15-year-old on the receiving end of Elwin’s constant carping. Across the seven years of filming we watch as he gains autonomy and increasingly butts heads with his dad, in an age-old battle for independence. The speeches at Roy’s 21st birthday bash are pure family melodrama. Elwin praises Roy for being a good boy, unlike Leroy, who left to become an electrician. The brothers exchange loaded looks. Later, as the party rages on, Ellie observes: “Dad had to mention in his speech that I was single … but he’s the reason that I haven’t had a boyfriend!”
“The bigger story started to show itself as we filmed,” Darling says. “The family pressure, the Succession elements.”
Darling, who has previously made short films, approached the Bells when the carnival was in Batemans Bay, where she lives. “I was just really curious, having coffee with another film-maker and saying, ‘Who are they? Where do they go each year and where did they come from?’ We had no answers.”
Mustering up her courage, she walked into the camp and asked for the manager. That was Elwin – handsome as a rooster and as shouty as one, too, with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“I was scared of Elwin for a little while but you come to realise that they’re working in really dangerous environments,” Darling says. “They’ve got these massive trucks, these huge machines, and so many things can go wrong. Communication has to be loud and it has to be fast. He’s got a big soft heart underneath.”
Across filming, the Bells dealt with the black summer bushfires and the pandemic; Darling thinks they tolerated a crew for so long because they appreciated the interest in their culture. “They’ve got a rich family history and legacy that they want to preserve,” she says. Hence there’s the same kind of high expectations on the kids to step up that is common in longstanding farming families.
When Guardian Australia tracks down Roy, he is restlessly walking and talking through our video call, so that his face and hi-vis jacket are dizzyingly backlit by flashing lights. Asked where he is, he replies, perfectly pleasantly, “a shithole”. Later he apologises for simultaneously talking and taking a leak.
At 10, Roy was sent to board at Red Bend Catholic college in Forbes, in the central west of New South Wales. It’s a school attended by a lot of show kids, as well as farming kids – but it must have still felt like a risk for Elwin to send his children there. Leroy got such a taste of freedom that he never returned.
“Leroy’s become a mug, a local,” Roy says. “He’s gone and got a regular job. I was always gonna come back.”
He says the whole family was “taken aback” when they watched a screening of the film together in Bondi.
“We just thought there was some sheila following us around for seven years shooting stupid videos of us and interviewing us,” he says. “But it was pretty amazing. This film will be good because I’ve always wanted to break the stereotype Australia has of dirty carnies. We’re normal people. I probably work harder than most of the people that badmouth us.”
He gives an example. “We’ve been coming out to this town for nearly 100 years and the town council wouldn’t even let us camp at the showgrounds. But we’re putting money into their town.”
In the UK Showmen were recognised as both an occupation and an ethnicity in the 2021 national census, and that’s something Roy’s all for.
“I consider us a different race,” he says. “I saw an English school form where – like over here you get ‘Are you Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander?’ – it said at the bottom, ‘Are you a Traveller or a Gypsy?’ I thought it was pretty cool they recognised that.”
The adventure may be over for Darling but seven years of sleeping in caravans, campers and semi-trailer cabins while on set hasn’t abated her enthusiasm. And she’s still in regular contact with the Bells.
“My son, who’s 11, keeps asking if we’ll still see them and I say yeah, every year. We’ll have rides for life. They do feel like a part of me and my family now. We’re entwined.”
The Carnival is screening at Sydney film festival this weekend, with general release dates still to be announced
