All the Burning Bridges

A thousand steps from the farm to the blue-black highway. A journey away from a paddock of sticks.

In the sequel to his highly acclaimed first memoir Stillways, Steve Bisley lands smack dab in the middle of Sydney. It’s 1967. High-waisted bell-bottom pants, paisley body shirts, velvet jackets, platform shoes and a lust for everything life has to offer him. And it offers him a lot. Till the day he auditions for the acting course at The National Institute of Dramatic Art and to his dismay is accepted, along with fellow classmates, Judy Davis and Mel Gibson.

Three years later, on their graduation day, Mel and Steve are cast in a film that will change their lives forever. The iconic Australian cult film Mad Max.

In this sensory and poetic memoir, actor Steve Bisley reflects on loving, losing, wrecking and running – the bridges burned – in the decades since hitchhiking away from the small family farm on the central coast of NSW in the 1960s