Water Buffalo Run Loose on King Street

To all intents and purposes, it was just another ordinary morning in Newtown: bottle-necked traffic, bleary-eyed uni students clinging to coffee cups, wandering musicians who’d been heading home since late Friday night. And then, a couple of hours ago, two water buffaloes started running down King Street. Not just any old beasts taking a casual stroll looking for a spot of grass, but steaming angry ones.

Online speculation is rife. Was it a piece of Biennale performance art? A premature April Fool’s prank? A visit to Enmore’s Cow and Moon Cafe? Clive, an eyewitness in Sydney Park, told ABC Radio’s Linda Mottram that the beasts were fresh escapees from a film crew. “They were at a Samsung film shoot,” he said. “Everybody’s out with mobiles, trying to find them. I saw them heading towards King Street and they vanished ... they’re pretty angry apparently.”

Onlooker Abril Felman described the scene in Newtown to ABC Radio. “Everyone was on the street, just shocked, looking at these bulls running. It was crazy ... There was this jeep with filming equipment running behind them.”

Mystified and terrified spectators started calling the police, but not before the buffaloes managed to cover about 2 kilometres in a city-bound direction. On the corner of Carillon Avenue and Missenden Road, a NSW Fire and Rescue truck confronted them, unintentionally.

“One of our crews from Newtown was returning from an automatic fire alarm call,” spokesman Ian Krimmer explained to ABC Radio. “They were driving down Missenden road, turning into Carillon, when they were confronted with two water buffaloes ... They’ve taken the ladders off the fire trucks and used them as movable gates to corral the buffaloes into the front yard of a house ... I’ve been advised that the film crew in charge of the beasts is now taking care of them.”

Image by Abril Felman.