How a Kiwi walked into a David Bowie video in outback Australia

Peter Griffin had been working all day, tailing lambs at a sheep and cattle station in Carinda, a small town in Australia’s outback. On his way home, he decided to call in at the local pub. It was the only watering hole for miles. The remote and dusty Carinda had a population of 40, give or take a few.

Griffin was 34 at the time. It was March 1983, and he recalled he couldn’t get in the door he normally used, so he went to the back door and saw lots of fog. He wondered what was going on.

‘‘There was David Bowie, leaning against the wall, playing his music with half the town in the pub dancing,’’ Griffin said.

The English rock star and his crew had travelled all the way from London to make the video for Let’s Dance, the title track from Bowie’s biggest-selling record.

Griffin said as soon as he saw him, he knew who he was.

‘‘I just walked in, got a beer.’’

Griffin was in the corner ‘‘when the bloke directing the video asked me if I wouldn’t mind just walking across [the bar] and playing pool’’.

With his moustache and red shirt, Griffin appeared three times in the video, sometimes just sipping his beer little more than a metre from Bowie.

But Griffin, now a truckie in Marlborough, wasn’t star-struck by the starman and his entourage.

‘‘It was just a country town, so I didn’t worry about it too much,’’ he said.

It would be another two years before Griffin would see the Let’s

Dance video, as he didn’t have a television in the outback.

And he didn’t keep the red T-shirt or anything like that. He remembered he got it from a tournament when he was training polo horses in Canberra.

And as Bowie constantly morphed into new personas, Griffin lived a varied life too.

Born in Akaroa, he played rugby, cricket, beat the Canterbury country backstroke champion in swimming, went pig hunting, deer stalking, car racing, boat racing, fishing.

He was 29 when he first moved to Australia in 1978 after his first marriage broke up.

There, he was a stockman, trained polo ponies, worked for a cleaning company, drove road trains, and started a fencing business. His 30-year career in Australia took him from east to west, including Karatha, 1500 kilometres up the coast from Perth.

‘‘It was just after category-5 cyclone John destroyed everything on the West Coast of Australia.

‘‘I went there for a fencing job on a million-hectare cattle station. It was meant to be a 12-month job, and I ended up doing it for about four years.’’

Griffin married a second time and had a son, Peter Alexander, or ‘‘PJ for Peter Junior’’, who still lives in

Western Australia. But he came back to New Zealand permanently, and alone, about 10 years ago.

‘‘I came home for a school reunion in 2011 and two months later for a rugby reunion.

‘‘I had a little car and I toured around the South Island again. And I thought ‘what the hell I am doing in Australia?’ We’ve only got two temperatures over there — hot and hotter!

‘‘Here [NZ] you can get it all in one day! So I’ve decided to come home again.’’

But it wasn’t just the weather that made him stay.

At the school reunion in 2011, he