The View From Connor's Hill (17 page)

Times were good. Government agencies like the Lands Department, the Forestry Commission, and the government veterinarian and agricultural departments all expanded, and they encouraged the hard-working farmers to continue to intensify their farming methods. The farmers were the community leaders, the shire councillors, and the heads of committees, and they accumulated the wealth of the district.

Meanwhile, the Tambo River slowed, struggled, and stagnated into pools in the summer, and the numbers of willows along its banks were so dense that the river was no longer visible from the roads.

Then there were the local timber mills. As a young boy, I remember the two trucks that headed off into the bush and returned with their logs twice a day. They were slow and noisy, and were part of a small congregation of trucks that travelled the local roads. Laurie Boucher and Gordon Lucas were the two drivers. Between them, they carted enough logs for the mill to be able to operate and employ roughly 100 men.

I went for a ride with Gordon Lucas one day, up into the Nunyong Mountains. It was a slow, steep, winding road. At the landing, I sat and watched as Gordon's truck was loaded from a landing like a railway station platform. It took a lot of skill for the dozer driver to push the logs onto the trailer. Then we headed back down the mountain. A 44-gallon drum-full of water had been tied onto the rear of the load, which had a hose that allowed water to run onto the rear brakes of the trailer to stop them overheating. Looking out the window, all I could see was a cloud of steam rising above the trailer. Very slowly, the truck crawled back down to the open country.

Those two log trucks operated throughout the year unless they were snowed-out, or threatened by bushfires, or the roads became unusable due to the weather.

Then, almost overnight, towards the end of the 1950s there were bigger trucks, better equipment, and the industry not only felled more and more trees, but it became very mechanised. Technology not only saw the mill reduce its workforce dramatically; it found another demanding market called woodchips. The pristine bush I had enjoyed exploring in every direction as a youngster was now being logged at a very increased rate. The bush altered to a point where re-growth dominated the better logging areas. (On a recent drive up the Omeo Highway — now called the Great Alpine Way, I counted seventeen log trucks in the two-hour drive … All of us are accountable.)

I saw the beautiful Tambo River enter old age rapidly. There was to be no more paddling of boats in it, no swimming in large waterholes, no charging down the rapids. The Tambo was due for a pension.

chapter eight

Finding our way

DURING THE FIRST SCHOOL HOLIDAYS OF MY FINAL YEAR
, I faced a challenge. A fellow classmate, Tom Wilson (Shinga), and I were going to try to get our first-class Scout badge. I'd already passed the first-aid requirements, organised a Scout camp, learnt to navigate without a compass in both night and day, completed a 46-mile trek over Mount Nunyong, and passed three proficiency badges. All up, it had taken me two years to get to this stage. We were ready for the last step — a testing three-day trek, starting from a point in the bush that would most likely be unfamiliar to us. I say this because we would be blindfolded and then taken to an area several hours from Swifts Creek. On arrival at this spot, we'd be given minimal directions. Finally, left with a compass and an unmarked map, we'd be given three days to find our way back to a designated point. It would be a difficult test. Once started, along the way, we had to keep a journal describing the local bush and sightings of interest, and assessing how we were managing the journey. Both Shinga and I were really looking forward to the undertaking.

It was a Thursday night, just on dark. We met up outside the forestry building in Swifts Creek. An officer was going to take us … somewhere. With both of us blindfolded, we hopped into his Land Rover and he drove off. Roughly an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours, later, we stopped. It was dark when we removed our blindfolds and looked about. We were on a narrow dirt road in bush that hosted tall mountain-ash trees, or maybe woolly-butt trees — I couldn't tell in the dark. It wasn't that important … I thought I'd check it out in the morning.

The area was open bush, and the moon was just up. I looked in every direction, but couldn't recognise where we were. The forestry bloke gave us a scant map. It simply had a thin, black line that indicated where we had to trek. Along this line was the odd circle, which indicated knolls. Two short, parallel lines showed saddles. A circle inside a circle marked other prominent features. A cross in a circle indicated water locations. There was a small legend on the bottom of the tracing paper that explained the symbols and showed due north, but that was it.

The Land Rover's engine was still running, its headlights indicating a fork in the road about 50 yards further up. There was an old, yellow 44-gallon drum on the side of the road with a green BP symbol painted on the side. I was keen to get going. The forestry officer took out his compass, put the map on the vehicle bonnet, and orientated the map. He indicated where we were and the direction we would be going if, or when, we set off. He suggested we might want to walk a bit, as the night was still early and the moon would give us enough light to walk through the bush. We both agreed, and he indicated the mountain top we should head for. ‘Once you get up there, you'll be able to orientate the map and head off from there. It will take you a good three days to get out,' he added.

The bloke turned the Land Rover around and drove off. I folded the map and put it in my pocket. We headed directly for this mountain. It was high, and it would be easy to locate; roughly an hour, even quicker, we reckoned. That night, after a cuppa and a good yak, Shinga and I slept under our canvas sheets. Next morning we rose, had some bikkies and an orange for brekky, and packed up, ready to head off.

Then something happened that will always be out of the ordinary in my life. We spread out the map and positioned it using a compass. It was the first time we'd looked at it since the Land Rover had driven off. We started to plan our journey, but nothing was making sense. To the south there was supposed to be a long ridge with a high feature about two miles away — but there was no ridge. The predominant mountains marked were missing. This was confusing.

After 20 minutes, it became obvious that we had no idea where we were. Fortunately, we didn't panic. Shinga was a town kid — his parents owned the Caltex service station, and he wasn't a bushy like me. The only time he went into the bush was on Scout camps. But, like me, he'd passed all the necessary tests to get this far … except he'd done first aid, advanced knot tying, and cooking. None of this made me feel like a leader, or made Shinga feel inadequate — we simply sat and talked about what we should do. Our first plan was to get up as high as we could and see if there was anything we recognised, like a fire tower or a patch of cleared land. We set off, marking our trail. Half an hour later, we found what we thought was the highest point on the mountain, and we climbed a tree — but we recognised nothing. We returned to our camp site. No one had told us what to do if we were ever lost. All I knew was: stay where you are and light a fire; or, if you do head off, walk downhill, which will finally lead to a creek, meaning fresh water. Then light a fire and cover it with green branches. This would produce a lot of dense smoke. Or, alternatively, continue along the creek downstream — naturally, you'd eventually find a river, and most rivers are crossed by a road, which would have traffic …

Neither of these ideas I learnt in the Scouts — it was simply local knowledge. I shared this with Shinga, and, like me, he reckoned it all sounded a bit daunting. I didn't share with him the fact that up until I was about nine or ten I'd believed that getting into trouble, or getting lost while in the bush, could be solved simply by calling the Phantom. (For those who have no idea what I'm referring to,
The Phantom
was a comic book my father subscribed to for years; in it, the hero would magically appear whenever or wherever you called his name in the jungle.)

I repeat: remarkably, we didn't panic. We thought about returning to where we'd been dropped off on the road the night before; mind you, it was a narrow dirt road, and seemed to have been rarely used. We weren't even really sure where it was located. Nothing was making sense. Last night we'd both watched as the officer aligned the map and pointed which way we should head.

After a time we decided to try to find the road. Both of us roughly agreed on the direction we'd come up from the night before. If that failed, we'd head downhill until we found water, and light a fire on a high point somewhere. To our relief, we found a road. But was it the right road? Splitting up, we decided to walk along the road for half an hour each in the opposite direction, and then turn back and meet up.

Shinga found the 44-gallon drum about 20 minutes down the road. Almost three hours later, there we were, back where we started, trying to take back-bearings with a compass that matched the map. Thank God, the start-point on the map lined up with the major peaks that surrounded us. By now it was mid-afternoon, and it would be a long walk through the bush to our first guaranteed water. The other thing that we didn't talk about much, but I believe we both felt, was … what the hell had happened? What was going on? Was it safe to follow this map?

I had no idea where we were and, if asked, I would have guessed we were out behind the high plains in between Tom Groggin and Suggan Buggan — a vast area of country north-east of Swifts Creek, where the Murray River starts as the Indi, in the area of the Victoria–New South Wales border. It was more a hunch than a guess. This area was popular for its beauty, wilderness camping, and brumbies, or wild horses. I reckoned we could walk out in three, maybe four days, and probably be picked up at Bindi Station, where there was a phone. As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong — we were heading in the completely opposite direction and area. But I am way ahead of myself.

After leaving the road near the 44-gallon drum, we tramped off, a little dejected, and reached our first long ridge line by late afternoon. It was just on dark when we found the small creek. So far, so good — the map was correct. With our spirits lifted, we made a camp for the night and built a large camp fire. After a couple of hours, we were chatting away and starting to make fun of what had happened. We treated ourselves to twisters, which are a damper mix, rolled out on the canvas, twisted like a long snake around a stick, and toasted over coals. Once browned, we'd cover them with honey, which came in a tube … good stuff.

Looking at the map on the morning of the second day, we realised that we still had a very long way to go. We decided we would walk all day with little breaks, and try to reach a point that would get us back home late, we hoped, on the third day. We didn't want to have people worry about us, even though we knew we weren't lost — if the map was okay. It was apparent that we would be high up on a long mountain range most of the day, until finally dropping into a water point that night. We both wrote up our journals, and tidied our camp area. Then Shinga asked me something unusual: ‘Where'd you get the staff, Baz … with ya name on it, too?'

I enjoyed recalling the story.

About five o'clock, after a long uphill haul, we reached a peak that gave us a good view of the area. I couldn't believe it — we were well east to north-east of Mount Baldhead. The mountain boasts the birth of three streams — the Wentworth River, the Nicholson River, and the Haunted Stream. By reaching the next range of mountains, we would be on the Angoras … south-south-west of home, where Sheepstation Creek begins its rapid journey to the Tambo River. My guess as to where we were on that first day was completely wrong: I had put us 35 miles north of this point.

We pushed on. I knew that, if needed, we could walk all night and reach Sheepstation Creek. However, that was pointless, as we now believed we would be finished very late on the third day. That night we set up camp in the dark and hit the sack early.

So far, the trip had been through beautiful bush, and we'd seen the odd kangaroo and several echidnas. It was clean, open bush, most of which you could ride a horse through. One section, though, which had possibly been logged ten years earlier, was now nothing but tangled, thick bush and young saplings. This re-growth had replaced the original timber. A bushfire would have loved to get into there — it would be an inferno. However, if asked what the highlight of the trek had been so far, I would have said it was the sound of the birds from dawn to dark. Of an evening, is there anything better than a family of magpies up in a tree talking to one another? They chortle and gab away as if re-living the day's activities.

The other thing was that when I was walking, I just liked looking around me. My eyes were always on a constant scan — first, directly in front of me for snakes and the lie of the ground, and then at the horizon, scanning from left to right. Finally, I'd look up in the trees, where sometimes I'd discover eagle's nests, or see goannas and many types of birds. After that, I'd look back to the ground and so on. Sometimes, one of us would hold up a hand quietly, and the observer would point out the thing he'd spotted — a kangaroo, a deer, a wallaby, or a wombat — wobbling along. We would usually stop until it sensed our presence. It's odd how we thought filling in the journal would be a difficult task, but both of us wrote copious notes about all these kinds of experiences.

Today would be our last day. Already I'd worked out where we would turn left once we descended the Angoras. Then it would be a simple matter to head east along a low ridge, and wander up to Mount Flagstaff, from where you could see the town of Swifts Creek. We would then head for the forestry officer's house. We even talked of taking a short cut. However, Shinga reckoned if we ventured off the indicated track we might miss something that had been planned for us by the forestry officer. The officer would have known we'd cut straight for the finish point once we found our way, so Shinga reckoned he'd test us with the likes of an old bridge, or whatever. How shrewd — he was right.