down under

I’ve bought quite a few pigs in pokes during my lifetime, but none was as spectacularly egregious as the circumstances that saw me ‘emigrate’ to Australia in March 1970. I’d been out of work since July the previous year, when I was sacked from my previous job after I wrecked a company car.

I spent the remainder of 1969 climbing, and it was during this period that I led my first extremely severe, a climb that I thought would be relatively straightforward but that turned out to be far harder than I’d expected. I also led my favourite rock climb, Kipling Groove on Gimmer Crag in Langdale, for the first time during this period.

Towards the end of the year, however, I thought that I’d better start looking for another job. One job advert that I replied to was for a geologist to work for a mining company in Australia. I should have smelled the proverbial rat when I discovered that the interview was to be conducted by a management company, and that rodent must have been even more painfully obvious when almost the entire interview devolved into a discussion of rock climbing!

Anyway, I was offered the job, and I travelled out to Australia as an ‘assisted passage’ migrant (yet another stinking rat!). When I arrived in Perth, having spent an hour or so in Zurich, Tehran, Karachi, Calcutta and Singapore en route—this was before wide-bodied jets, when passengers were disembarked into an airport’s transit lounge during any stopover—I was put up in a motel overnight before being flown to the Hamersley mountain range, where I knew in advance I’d be mapping iron ore deposits from a base in a mining camp out in the Bush. What I hadn’t been told in advance was that I’d be working 10 hours a day, six days a week. And that I’d be treated like shit!

After two months I’d had enough, so I quit. When I returned to Perth—nobody told me this in advance—I discovered that companies were crying out for geologists, and within a week I’d had several job offers. Not having any other criteria for evaluating these offers, I simply chose the company that offered the most money. Twice the salary of my first job in the country!

And I would be in charge, running a 16-man prospecting team looking for base metals, particularly nickel. I spent the next six months in a makeshift camp a few miles outside Laverton, a typical bush township. I didn’t own a camera in those days, but I’ve always had a strong visual memory, and even now, almost half a century later, I can still picture the entire scene. I hope that I can convey something of my experiences during this time, because I do have some very intense memories.

The first step in prospecting is to stake a claim. You’ve probably heard the phrase before, but you’ve probably never realized that, at least in Western Australia at the time, it was literally true. A single claim was restricted to 300 acres, and the idea was that if you wanted to register a claim, you had to hammer stakes into the ground at the corners of the claimed rectangle, with short, shallow trenches in the directions of the sides of the claim. If you wanted to claim more than 300 acres, then you had to stake multiple claims. Of course, I didn’t do any of the donkey work here. I merely decided, on the basis of the geological evidence, what to claim. My men did the hammering and digging.

I had two teams, each headed by a foreman. It wasn’t my decision who to designate as foremen—that was decided by the head office in Kalgoorlie—and two that I had foisted on me were absolute tossers, an assessment that I will elaborate on in due course. But first a few words about the environment in which I was operating.

The area in which I found myself was semi-arid, and the principal vegetation was mulga, a kind of dwarf tree about 3–4 metres high. The area was divided into paddocks by long lines of five-strand wire fences. It was, ostensibly, sheep country, but the stocking density was extremely low, not just because there wasn’t much for sheep to eat. They had to compete with kangaroos and large numbers of feral goats for the available forage.

Mentioning the wire fences reminds me that I frequently came across the carcasses of emus that had become trapped by the wires. I was reminded of the way professional wrestlers used to entangle their opponents in the ropes around the ring. An emu would come charging out of the scrub; its feet would pass between the two lowest wires, while its head would go through a higher gap. Its legs would thus become irretrievably stuck. I remember being warned once that if I ever came across a live emu in this predicament, I should leave it, because far from being grateful if I tried to free it, it would be likely to kick me to death. Sometimes, however, the emu would simply bounce off the fence and continue on its random way through the bush. And emus are only slightly smaller than ostriches, so they can run fast, and the bounce is therefore considerable. I described an alarming incident of this kind in Close Encounters.

The mulga was memorable for another reason: the wood of these trees is so hard that any splinters sticking up went right through the tyres of my Toyota Land Cruiser, and although at this remove from the experience I can’t be sure how often I had to repair yet another puncture, it seems like it was an almost daily occurrence.

Once a claim or block of claims had been established, the first step in any geological evaluation was to set out a baseline. This involved setting a wooden stake in the ground every 50 yards and clearing the intervening scrub so that you could see the last stake. One of my foremen knew how to use a theodolite, and the baselines established by his crew were always dead straight, but the other foreman couldn’t even use a prismatic compass, so his baselines zigzagged all over the place. In fact, if he was in charge of staking out a claim, the supposed rectangle was likely to be a highly irregular shape, which was blindingly obvious on the maps I drew from aerial photographs of the area.

The next step was the magnetometer survey, which was conducted at right angles from each stake on the baseline. Igneous rocks are classified according to their silica content, from acid to ultrabasic, with the latter having the lowest content. When such rocks cool, only some of the elements present—sodium, potassium, calcium and aluminium in the case of acid rocks; iron and magnesium in the case of basic and ultrabasic rocks—form part of the crystals of the principal rock-forming minerals. Any atoms of elements such as nickel, copper and lead that are present are too big to fit into the lattices of these minerals and so become concentrated as the magma crystallizes. If there is such a concentration, it will be revealed as a spike in magnetism.

There was only one man in the crew who could be relied upon to use a magnetometer correctly, a Pom who was in the process of working his way around the world. Oddly enough, I met him again in Penrith a few months after I came home.

If there were any anomalies, then the next step was chemical analysis of the rocks. But there was a slight problem. The rocks were overlain by 100–120 feet of laterite, a form of hydrated iron oxide, so it was necessary to drill through this layer to obtain a suitable sample. We had our own driller and rig, but eventually there was so much drilling to be done that I needed help. I’d become friendly with a local sheep farmer who had fallen on hard times—not surprising given the hostile environment—and he had a truck-mounted auger drill. Just what I needed. Max was a really nice guy, and I remember funnelling more than A$1 million in his direction to complete this work. He was keen to learn, and I think that he may have started his own drilling company. He certainly used some of the proceeds from his work to buy a modern rig, which he had to employ someone else to operate.

The general routine was for the team to work ten days, then travel back to Kalgoorlie for four days of rest and recuperation. However, I spent the entire time that I worked there in the camp, because the Bush was more interesting than Kalgoorlie. However, this is the reason I eventually quit and decided to return to the UK. The incompetent foreman whom I described earlier had quit, and he was replaced by someone who actually knew his job. However, on one occasion, my Land Cruiser needed to be serviced, and I was given this guy’s Land Rover while the team were away. I’ve no idea why he did this, but he reported to my boss that I’d clocked several hundred miles on his vehicle during the four days he was away. I was ordered to come to Kalgoorlie to explain this apparent abuse of a company vehicle. The explanation was simple: on my ‘days off’, I still used to visit all our claims where drilling was being carried out every day. I didn’t need to justify it, so I resigned.

I also decided to return to the UK, prompted in part by letters from a friend in which he informed me about all the climbs he’d been doing in my absence. However, I still retain some fond memories of this period.

My favourite is probably about the feral goats I mentioned earlier. If a herd of billy goats was spotted in the area, I used to declare ‘down tools’. There would be 30–40 animals in a typical herd, and they all had long coats and horns with a horizontal span of more than three feet. The idea was to isolate an individual in your vehicle, chase it, leap out and grab it by the long hairs on its coat. That would make it stop momentarily, enough time to leap on and ride it as if it was a motorbike. It certainly made for a rough ride, and I remember that on one occasion one of my men was dragged through a thorn thicket, although all he sustained was a lot of scratches.

I also had a pet crow during my time in the camp. I’d taken him(?) from a nest while he was still a fledgling, and he relied on me for food. When he was hungry, he used to throw his head back, open his beak wide and cry “Fark! Fark!” I would insert a suitably sized piece of kangaroo meat, which he would swallow and again cry “Fark! Fark!” This would happen two or three times, but the next time he tried it, all that would come out was a plaintive squeak. He’d had enough but was too greedy to admit it. Naturally, I named him Fark, and he used to fly off with the wild crows when I wasn’t around. However, if he saw me ride into camp on my motorbike—I had one of these too—he would swoop down and perch on my shoulder. I do wish that I had a photo of that. Sadly, Fark was killed, eventually, by a feral cat, but I will never forget him.

Another bird that I cannot forget is the currawong. I don’t recall ever actually seeing one, but whenever I heard one calling nearby, I would stop what I was doing and find somewhere convenient to sit down. I would whistle a few notes, and the currawong would copy me. I would gradually increase the complexity of what I was whistling, and this remarkable bird never missed a note.

I also remember the corrugated bush roads. You’re probably familiar with corrugated iron and corrugated cardboard, but corrugated roads? I think that this was caused by the springiness of the suspensions of motor vehicles, which created a kind of differential erosion. The difference in height between the peaks and troughs could be as much as 6–8 inches, and the ‘wavelength’ was about 10 inches. Perhaps surprisingly, the only way to drive on such roads is at high speed, thus skimming across the top of the corrugations.

I haven’t mentioned the legendary flies of the Australian Outback (not such a fond memory). They were merely a bloody nuisance—as bad as people think they are—but there was one type, which resembled the British bluebottle, that laid live maggots, if not on carelessly exposed meat, then on the shit clinging to the long coats of sheep, which weren’t sheared very often. The maggots would eventually start eating into the unfortunate sheep. I hadn't heard about the flies before I travelled to Australia, but on the first day on my first job, I went to visit a percussion drilling rig and noticed them straight away. However, when I’d worked on oil rigs in the Sahara Desert in 1968, I recalled that when a rig moved to a new location, within a fortnight large numbers of flies appeared, presumably attracted by the water. I assumed a parallel, but boy was I wrong!

Do I have any regrets about my time working down under? Yes! I wish I’d kept a written record of the wildlife I saw. I used to describe the wildlife, mainly reptiles, in regular aerogrammes to my then girlfriend, but they are long lost.

I didn’t have a camera when I arrived in Australia, but I did have one when I departed. I bought a Minolta SLR in the duty-free shop in Fremantle before boarding a ship bound for Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. The cheapest option I could find for my return to the UK involved this ocean voyage, a flight to Athens, where two days of sightseeing was part of the package, and, finally, a flight to Gatwick Airport.

And that was my time ‘down under’, although Paula and I spent a couple of weeks with an Aussie friend in Queensland a few years ago.