My life story by Henry J Macey (best e reader for manga .TXT) 📕

“We had better get straight to the point, my name is Red and I'm the tool pusher.  That in oil slang means the crew boss, you were hired to be a camp manager, but you misinterpreted the title.  We need someone to clean up, to help the cook and to go for stores. Besides that, you will be managing to do, one hundred and one other odd jobs around the camp. I take it that they did not explain all this back in Perth, well that’s the job on offer are you staying or going back.”  I looked at him a little deflated and answered,

“You must think I’m a right simpleton.  But I’m here now and it’s a long walk back to Perth, so if you’re game, I’ll stay.”

Two hours later, we were driving along the dirt main road that seemed to go on forever.  After about one hundred and twenty miles, we turned off the highway.  Then we headed east along a track, which had been made by the wheels of their four-wheel-drive vehicles.  This was my first experience of ‘going bush’, and I found that being in the vast outback was to my liking.

We headed out into the Great Sandy Desert for another sixty miles or so, before I saw in the distance, what looked like a black stick.  Red pointed to it saying, “That’s going to be your home for the next eight weeks.”  It was the rig, some fifteen miles away, and was the only thing to stand out in the almost flat landscape.  Mounted on a six-wheel truck, it was thirty feet high and used twenty-foot drill rods, to drill to a depth of one hundred feet.

This was a seismic survey crew.  A large square was marked out by a small bulldozer, and hundred-foot holes were drilled in each of the four corners.  A central hole of fifty feet was sunk, down which an instrumented capsule was lowered.  Dynamite charges were set off in the corner holes, the shock wave would travel through the ground.  Bouncing back from the rock formations, it would be recorded by the instruments in the survey van. They could tell what mineral or hopefully oil was in the ground, by the returning echo something like sonar I suppose.

My duties were quite simple; to help everyone.  I had to report to the tool pusher once a week, with a list of the stores we required for him to check. The cook was in the habit of ordering Brandy for cooking!  I would then drive into Broome, and give the list to the store manager to be filled.  I would load the dry goods in the Ute there and then, and he’d give me a key to the outside freezer.  I would pick up the frozen supplies, at two in the morning.  Until then I had the rest of the day to myself and could stay in the permanently booked room in the hotel.  All went well for a couple of weeks when one day I awoke to find the land-cruiser missing, together with the cook!  Red told me to get breakfast for the men; he was going after the cook.  He returned later that night with the land-cruiser in tow, but minus the cook.

We were told that he was in Broome Hospital, drunk as a skunk, and had alcohol poisoning.  Red turned to me and said, “You have just been promoted! You are now the cook.”  That meant I was now earning, one hundred and twenty dollars a week.  After five more sites were explored, we had finished the contract and packed up the gear.  We drove down to Port Headland where we parked the vehicles, then flew home to Perth.

Three weeks later, I was on my way to Exmouth.  We were to drill a well, just inland off Sharks Bay. Oil had been located offshore near a reef; the environmentalists didn’t want the reef disturbed.  The oil company had sent us here; they wanted to know if the oil find ran inshore.

The site was close to the water's edge, and this time we had a much bigger rig.  It stood on a platform attached to a sixty-foot trailer and was eighty feet tall.  All the machinery to run it together with the rods it used, were all on the trailer.  The crew was bigger as well; we ran three shifts around the clock.  I was here as the second cook, but in fact, I was the cook's helper.

On my off-duty time, I would go fishing in the clear shallow water.  Here, a coral reef runs from the beach out into the sea, and the fish could be seen swimming close to the shore. One day, while fishing I had almost lost all my hooks, so when my line got caught in the coral yet again, I waded out to retrieve the hook.  On returning to the beach, I was preparing to cast out again and saw two sharks swim close by.  Sod the hooks from now on! Then one day the tool pusher caught me welding some old metal fencing posts together, to make a tripod to support my fishing rod.

“Where did you learn to weld?” he asked.

“In the Navy, I was an engineer” I answered.

“You didn’t tell me you could weld, did you tell the Perth office?”

“No” was my reply.

“We have been trying to get a welder come fitter up here, and you have been here all the time.”  So now I was not only the cook, but welder and mechanic too, and with another increase in pay.  There was only one thing wrong with the job, Jane did not like to be left on her own for eight weeks at a time.  She made that quite clear, so after I returned from shark's bay I handed in my notice.

‘Bells,’ as we all called them, was a large concern running a trucking section that was split into four parts.  Local! Long-distance! Low loaders and Mining.  They also had plant machinery of all kinds, from road making to mining equipment.  Large twin-engine scrapers, bulldozers, and graders right down to jackhammers.  They also had a large staff of maintenance mechanics. 

They also ran most of the mining camps, supplying men equipment and living accommodation, cooks and kitchens.  Their mining operations were varied, consisting of limestone, copper, gold, salt, and black sand.  The biggest, however, was iron-ore, with two manganese mines, one at Meekatharra, and the other at woody woody. You won’t find that one on the map; it is above Marble bar.  Four hundred miles inland from Port headland, I know I spent a month there.  Why Woody Woody? I don't know! There wasn't a tree in sight.  The iron ore mines were Mt Newman, (otherwise, know as Mt Whale Back).  Mt Tom Price = (Hill 52), and Paraburdoo = (Hill 54), you will hear more of these mines as you read on into this book.

I joined Bell’s in 1969 having finished with G, S, 1.  I walked into Bell’s transport office and spoke to Owen Jones.  (He assured me he was not Welsh.)  He told me that they had just advertised for drivers, it was to be in the paper at the weekend.  But as I was there he would give me a test; he called one of the drivers to take me out. 

He then asked; have you driven a Mack before? I replied I have never seen one, let alone driven one.  He laughed and told Tony to see if I could drive.  The old B600 & R600 together with the earlier forward control F600 Mack’s had two gearboxes each with its own lever.  The main had five forward gears and one reverse.  The ‘joey’ box had four gears.  For everyone in the main, you changed four in the ‘joey’.  This gave you twenty forward gears and four reverse gears.

Have you ever heard Beethoven’s fifth, played on a gearbox?  Well, you would have that day, I was hopeless.  When we returned to the yard, Tony told Owen I could drive an artic, but the gearbox had me beat.  Owen said I would get used to it in time, and said I had the job.  I would be driving English built Foden, with an English gearbox on local tipper work.

I started the next Monday on quarry work, running limestone within a hundred-mile radius of Perth.  I found it hot and dusty work in that old Foden, you had to drive with the windows open and a handkerchief over your mouth.  I had been on the job for about five weeks when I was asked if I would like to go onto the long-distance side of the firm. I said I would love to; a week later I was given my first run.

I was to take a six-wheel Mack tipper, plus a super lift-tipping trailer to Mt Tom Price.  On the way, I was to drop off some equipment at Meekatharra.  Then on to Mt Newman, to deliver a Ute.  When I arrived at Tom Price, I would fly home on a company plane.

When the truck was loaded, I asked the yard foreman.  A very helpful chap called Bert Hughes, (by the way, did you see that program about young orphans from England, being sent to Australia, well, he was one of those lads!) “How do I get to Meekatharra?”  He pointed to the front gate, and said: “go through those and turn right, now on your way.”  One of the drivers told me to run out to Midland turn north and take the inland road, which was the great northern highway.  So off I trundled and did what he had said.  I had been driving for three hours and thought I must be near it by now.  The signs told me I was on the right road, but not how far it was.  I was approaching a place called Wubin; here the road turned sharp right. The road straight on was the inland road to Geraldton.

On the junction there was a cafe owned by a Scotsman, so the cafe was obviously called Jocks.  I pulled over for a break, while I was ordering I asked him how much further to Meeka.  He looked at me and said, “First time up here?” I nodded and answered “yes,” while picking up my tea and sandwich.  He smiled at me saying not far to go now, only about three hundred miles.  From Wubin to Meeka, the road changed.  It had a strip of asphalt ten feet wide, with dirt sides of about twelve feet.  If you met someone coming the other way, you went halfway off the asphalt to allow the oncoming vehicle to pass.  In two or three places, there were many miles of just dirt road.

Panes Find is in an area where gold had been found, and it is in the middle of no-where.  The pub is on the side of the road, acts as a landmark for it’s the only building to be seen.  If you walk into the bush you will find many small diggings, just holes in the ground with wooden tripods over them.

It was late when I arrived there