The story is simple enough. Three very different people — a doctor, a hippie, and a tender-hearted ex-con — all experience the same prophetic dream, in which the voice of a young girl calls to them from a river. Compelled to find the source of the voice, they meet each other beneath an enormous bridge one day. And here the film changes gear: the crew enters the action, and the actors step out of character. Sitting around a campfire, everyone drops acid and discusses how to finish the film. Conversations veer off; they talk about their own feelings and fears, about drugs and death and Krishnamurti, about their failed relationships, the beauty of misunderstanding, the beauty of creation, about their various attempts to let go of their own egos, the attempt to do away with the self and ‘to just get closer to the centre’. And yet, one of them says, ‘every time we try to adopt these sorts of concepts, like openness and liberation, it’s actually meaningless, because they’re only ideas in the head, and there’s such a huge gap between these ideological propositions and simply being able to live them’. It goes on like this for a very long time, aimlessly, like life. I loved it, actually, for a while. A wizard rows past in a boat. Some of them kick a football. There is no resolution. While they’re still talking, the camera finally moves away, past the band we can now see playing, lost in the music, in their skivvies and paisley suits, in hats and football jumpers, barefoot in the mud, stoned, beside a gigantic concrete pylon. The camera turns towards a toxic orange sun that’s sinking into the bay; orange light overwhelms the film stock itself, which seems to warp in a blizzard of colour. That’s the end. John Mosley praised the film’s ‘radical disenchantment with cinematic artifice’ and saw, in its liberation from repressive narrative structures, ‘a new medium for an authentic analysis of being itself’. David Stratton called it ‘silly and unintelligible, and of extremely limited interest’. Ghosts reached the final of the 1972 Benson & Hedges Awards at the Sydney Film Festival, and then disappeared.

It was only later that I realised that the bridge, where most of the action was filmed, was the Westgate Bridge, part of which had collapsed during its construction, the year before the film was made, killing thirty-five people, including Mike’s father, who was working below. The subsequent gas explosion ignited the river and sent mangled metal and mud flying in every direction. Men were killed in their tents while they ate their lunch. Men were burnt to death. Today, the bottom of this bridge is fenced off or leased by industrial manufacturing companies, and it would be difficult even to walk around there without being arrested, let alone to make a film in which everyone, including the crew, was on LSD.