Running and shooting in the Nashos

ANY of you bloke readers ever spend time in National Service back in the 1950s ... you remember, the Nashos?
I did, in the first intake at Wacol in 1954. At 6ft high I was taller than most blokes from my home town, Maryborough, so they stuck me in an A Company platoon with tall blokes, mostly from north Queensland.
My brother, Marty, who was two years older than me, was also in A Company because he had been an apprentice carpenter and they used to delay their National Service call-up until after they had finished their apprenticeship.
That didn't apply to cadet journalists, though, and I was only in my second year cadetship when I was called up. I was 18.
A lot of the blokes were pretty apprehensive about going into Nashos but not me, because I had been in the cadets at St Brendan's College, Yeppoon, and even been to an army cadet camp outside Townsville ... a place in the scrub called Selime, I think, although I can't find it on the map today.
I didn't mind the cadets because we got to handle rifles - the great old SMLE .303. You see I was brought up with rifles. My old man, Martin, was an excellent rifleman, brought up on Vandyke, a cattle station outside Springsure. He was badly injured in the First World War when a bomb exploded near his trench in northern France.
So Marty and I spent all our school holidays at Vandyke shooting wild pigs and roos, as well as putting in long hours doing cattle station work. As soon as we were old enough we joined the Maryborough Rifle Club, in which  Dad was one of the top marksmen.
That is what I wanted to be in Nasho - a Marksman, because the top shooters in Nasho were presented with two  brass badges  of crossed rifles, each rifle about 5cm long, which they wore  on the sleeves of their  khaki army shirts . That's what I wanted,  to show the world what a great shot I was.
But it didn't turn out all that well because when we were given our .303s they were brand new weapons straight from the Lithgow (NSW) arms factory and were so soaked in oil and grease you could hardly hold them. Naturally we had to clean them but most blokes simply wiped the grease off with rags and let it go at that.
Not me, because I knew when the  woodwork heated up from the projectiles blasting through the metal barrel you would not be able to hold the rifle steady, even halfway through the shoot, and that would  bring your score tumbling down.
So I pulled my .303 to pieces and poured  boiling water - lots of boiling water - over all the woodwork, melting most of the grease out. I must have poured boiling water over the woodwork a dozen times over a couple of days until the wood was  nice and dry and easy to hold without slipping.
Naturally  I wouldn't get all the grease out but I reckoned it wouldn't get slippery until the shoot was just about over. From memory that was about 36 to 40 shots.
A few blokes asked me what I was doing, including a north Queensland Nasho who had been promoted to corporal a few days earlier.
Come the  shooting day we were transported to Redbank Rifle Range for the shoot. It was over three ranges, 600 yards, 500 yards and 300 yards, I think.
You would start firing  lying down at 600,  then after about 10 or 14 shots, run down to 500 where you would shoot from a one knee position and then run to 300 where you would shoot standing up.
I was to shoot in the second division but something strange happened. As we got out of the truck at the range, that northern corporal I mentioned stopped me and told me to give him my rifle. Why, I asked? He just said he wanted to look at it. I gave it to him and he turned to walk to the firing mounds.
I yelled at him to give my rifle back. He yelled back that he needed it because he had forgotten to bring his rifle. The rotten bastard then proceeded to the 600 yard mound with the first group of shooters and started firing. I was in the second group and  when he handed my rifle back it was starting to get slippery.
I was pretty bloody angry because there was no way I would get a good score with that rifle, particularly after I had fired a few shots and brought more oil and grease seeping out.
There was only one way out. We had been told if  anyone turned in a very bad score that day he would have to come back tomorrow and do it all over again. That was my only hope. So I fired at  other people's targets, over the top of targets and everywhere. Immediately the scores came through I was told I had to come back tomorrow and try again because my score was as bad as they had ever seen.
Next day, after spending hours pouring more boiling water over the woodwork, I ended up with my Marksman's Crossed Rifles with one of the highest scores of the intake.
Not only were those badges good to look at but they saved me from a rather tough time.
A few weeks later I was hitch-hiking to Brisbane on the Ipswich road. We weren't supposed to hitch-hike close to camp but who would see me in the late afternoon. Suddenly a flash sports car  pulled up near me and I hopped in.
"Don't you know the rules, soldier?" the driver demanded.
I looked at him and almost wet my pants when I saw his formal army uniform and large row of medals, then to his face and found I was sitting beside the Wacol commanding officer.
"I'm taking you to the Provos, private. You could be in a cell tonight."
Then he look at me angrily before turning the vehicle back on the road. But before we moved a couple of yards he pulled up and looked back at me, shifting his eyes down to my Marksman's crossed rifles.
"You're a Marksman, soldier?" he said and we started talking about shooting. He was also a rifle-range shooter and it turned out that he knew my old man, Martin, from range shooting - and things suddenly changed.
"Where are you off to in Brisbane?" he asked.
I told him. He said he'd drop me off there, but for God's sake don't go hitch-hiking in the camp area again.
I didn't.
Another funny thing happened at Wacol. Big brother Marty was a professional sprinter, and a good one at that. The year before Wacol he won the Hanlon Gift over 130 yards at the Exhibition Ground, worth 130 quid, which was a lot of money in those days.
So naturally he was selected to represent A company in the 100 yard sprint at the Battalion sports day.
He started training on the Battalion oval - in running spikes - which was very unusual in those days. You couldn't buy them but had to get them made in Melbourne.

Some GPS blokes in other companies saw him in the spikes and  made a few inquiries, found out he was a professional champion and had him banned from the sports day. You see, army sports were strictly amateur.
And who did they get to replace him in the sprint. Me of course because I was a pretty good rugby league winger and played for Wide Bay against France and New Zealand.
And who do you think won the sprint final? You guest it, little old humble me. I've still got the winning pennant with my name on it.
"Pte Kavanagh. L.F."
Another very funny thing happened at Wacol in the hut next to mine in A Company.  It contained a very big bully boy who thought nothing of pushing people around,  as well as  drinking  their softdrinks, eating their fruit or their sandwiches - anything they left on their beds or bed-side benches.
One day he picked up a soft drink bottle on a bloke's bed-side table and gulped it down, but not for long because he spurted it out all over the hut.
Then he punched the bloke on the chin, knocking him out.
Why? Because the bottle was full of piss.
Well, the whole hut was waiting for this and they all rushed at him and belted the daylights out of him.
And guess what? The big idiot didn't step out of line again. In fact he hardly spoke for the remaining three months.
Ah! Were they the good old days, or what?

Hugo, Heather and the crocs of Olive River

I've met some strange and interesting people travelling the world as a journalist over the years but right up there near the top of the list come this pair on a boat trip to Torres Strait in 1997, so read on:
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THE ageless watchers on the bank would have heard us puttering up river long before they spied Heather, Hugo and me stepping from the dinghy into the pitch-tar blackness of a Cape York Peninsula midnight.
We clattered about in muddy, knee-deep water dragging the ancient tinnie and its battered outboard up the bank from which, mere seconds before, the watchers had slid stealthily beneath the Olive River to do whatever it is crocodiles do when unaccustomed things go bump in their night.

For about 10 months of the year Hugo Julcher, 65, and Heather Schlaegl, 58, share that little section of Temple Bay, near the tip of Cape York, with about a dozen resident crocodiles and God only knows how many local snakes and transient sharks.

So my guess is that Heather and Hugo not only would have seen the two watchers on the bank in front of their shack as we approached out of the night but most likely would have known them by first name.

You see, their's is but a small, exclusive colony of crocodiles with almost daily eyeball-to-eyeball contact on the banks and in the water that rushes past their front door ... make that their front half door, because half a front door is all there is to this home away from home, probably the least luxurious shack I have encountered since visiting black townships in South Africa in apartheid days.

Most of the building material has come from combing the wide, white beaches within easy walking distance of that lonely shack about 180km south of the tip of Cape York. Material like the sail which makes up the eastern wall and the railway tarp that provides about half the roof, fishing net, the flotsam and jetsam, the odds and ends that have been turned into just about every stick of furniture in the place.
Sure, it doesn't sound much, but it's a dream home to this amazing couple, a 10-month-a-year haven from the rat race of Cairns where Heather owns a small block of units.
Maybe it was the excitement of coming home to this tiny, often damp outpost in the wilderness that caused them to overlook formal introductions between myself and the reptiles but they failed to mention them altogether as we disembarked.
Thus fortified by their lack of concern about deadly creatures of the night, I stumbled through the water, the mud, the bush and the blackness helping unload their meagre provisions.
This finished, we each had a can of beer to ward off the tropical swelter, I flashed off a few photos of them filling a chaff bag with black-lip oysters from the spot so recently vacated by their evil-eyed neighbours, and returned a mile out to sea to board my transport to Torres Strait, Jardine Shipping's mother ship, Torres Express.

It was only next day that a Torres Express crewman, who had been following our dinghy up the Olive the previous night with more stores, mentioned the crocodiles just a few metres from us which he had clearly seen in his spotlight. There was a torch in Hugo's tinnie but after about 20 years fishing and living around the Olive, he doesn't need spotlights, or any other new-fangled contraption for that matter, just his instincts.
Well, that's not entirely true. He and Heather have a generator that works a frig and a dim light. They also have a transistor radio which receives the ABC at night and first thing in the morning but not during the day.
As well, Hugo made a giant technological leap into the future this year when he purchased an EPIRB, an emergency radio beacon, which can beep out an SOS in case of an emergency.
Before this historic event, all emergencies at that Olive River outpost were tackled first-hand. That's the way they do it up that way. If you get crook you look after yourself until you get better ... if you get better.
Seven years ago I was swigging rum (medicinal purposes only, mind) with one of the Cape's pioneer cattlemen, the late Rod Heinemann, at his station, Bramwell, about 50 inaccessible kilometres west of Hugo's shack. Old Rod, well into his eighties then, mentioned one of his worst times on The Cape, being bitten by a redback spider out on the track with a mob of cattle and miles from anywhere.
"I was pretty crook and had to lie down for a fair while," said Rod as if he was yarning about the bloody weather. "But I came good in the end." Do they make 'em like that anymore, I wonder?
Hugo Julcher is of the same vanishing breed - tough, independent, adventurous. If you were around in post-war years you will remember the type. Thousands of them came out here after the second war from all over Europe seeking work but looking more for adventure.

They couldn't speak the lingo too well but they worked hard and played hard and won a lot of respect for that, as well as with their devil-may-care attitude and their mitts.

Hugo hit Australia from Austria in the early '50s on a promise of work in his trade as a cabinet maker but it wasn't available when he arrived and that sort of sent him off on a tangent. Since then he's worked in every state at just about every job you care to name, including buffalo shooting in the Territory.

He even has a kindly cop to thank for dragging him out of a Melbourne gutter one time and sending him to a friend's farm up country to dry out. He still doesn't mind a drop in the morning, the afternoon and the night, but it gets awful dry on the Olive River when his meagre supply runs out after the first couple of weeks.
Supplies simply don't come in because there is no way to order them, so they take what will last longest when they catch the mother ship, Torres Express, on its first run of the prawning season from Cairns to York Island in Torres Strait.
When it has travelled close to 700km north from Cairns, Hugo and Heather climb into their loaded tinnie, day or night, rough or smooth, putter a mile or so from the mother ship across a dangerous bar, and hey presto! Their paradise opens up.
The crew in a following dinghy unloads the rest of their supplies and that's often the last they see of another soul for two or three months. About 10 months later they catch the Torres Express on its last run of the season and rejoin the rat race for Christmas.
Occasionally they have unannounced visits from passing fishermen, yachties and some of the strangest wanderers imaginable.
Several people in kayaks have dropped in on their circumnavigation of Australia. Others have come in on 14ft catamarans like the one I sail in Bribie Passage. I'm mildly adventurous, not raving bonkers, see.
A bloke wearing a sarong and calling himself "Victor the Nomad" sailed up the Olive some time ago in a most incredible craft on his way to New Guinea where, he told Heather, he "just wanted to love people".
Someone farther down the coast had given him a near-wrecked 12ft tinnie. He patched it up, found a piece of blue plastic tarp for a sail and headed north with no rudder or centreboard. The last Heather and Hugo saw he was sailing wonkily in the general direction of New Guinea. They believe we was taken into protective custody a little farther up the coast, somewhere about Thursday Island.
Another time a Yank calling himself "Friendly" wandered in off the beach. He was walking up the coast to Bamaga from who knows where.
"Everything he owned was in a small sugar bag," said Heather with the wide-eyed surprise you would expect from someone trying to explain away an elderly couple who live with crocodiles way up Cape York for the hell of it.
"He didn't have any food. He was living completely off the land. He said hello and had a bit of a talk then headed north along the beach."
As "Friendly" disappeared into the shimmering northern haze, life returned to workaday normality for Hugo and Heather on the Olive River. That includes a lot of time beach combing, looking for bush tucker, fishing and crabbing, although crabbing is a mite unconventional.
Crab pots and dillies are out because the crocs gobble 'em up getting at the bait or the crab. So Hugo sinks fish frames in shallow water near the bank and when the muddies appear for a feed he spears them.
And you won't believe what this incredible duo do with those delicious giant black-lip oysters. They use them for fish bait because they're tired of eating them.
"It's not hard to get tired of oysters if you eat too many," Hugo said. "But they're very good bait."They're tired of barramundi too. Just too many of the bloody things in the creek.
"I've gone right off barra," Hugo said. "Give me mangrove jack any day."

They have an amazing selection of bush tucker (pictured) in the district including fruit and nuts from a variety of natives like currajong, lillypilly, wild grapes, passionfruit and especially coconuts. They get the sweetest of fine honey by whipping grevillea blossoms on to plates. They also grow what vegetables they can.
Hugo has a great recipe for fish cakes mixed in with roughly grated fresh coconut. He also has some great recipes for the occasional feral pig he bowls over.
In fact, Heather and Hugo could probably teach the Bush Tucker Man a thing or two about scrub cuisine and thought they were about to be so invited when the man himself, Les Hiddins, turned up at Heather's Cairns units a couple of years ago.
But he was more interested in details of a RAAF fighter pilot who crashed his F18 just a couple of miles from their Olive River shack. Much, much earlier Heather and Hugo had given RAAF search parties information about a strange noise they heard at the time the plane went missing, but as is often the case, the advice appears to have been overlooked.
When the crash site was accidentally discovered a couple of years later it was just about where Heather and Hugo figured it would be.
They don't miss much, the people who live by their wits in the wilderness, and that particularly goes for what most of us regard as the comforts of home.
Maybe you'd like living in a colony of crocodiles where you get to know the neighbours on a first name basis. But think twice because it's like Hugo told me when inviting me to stay for a week or two - you don't have to be mad but it's an advantage.
The unusual pair aren't living with crocodiles these days because Heather died back in Cairns a few years after I met her, but Hugo kept going back to his lonely hut for several years. Then, in the early 2000s, he just disappeared from his lonely hut on the Olive River. There is no prize for guessing how he met his maker.

Rod Laver and the champions of tennis

A DISGRUNTLED newspaper reader sent in a letter to the editor the other day complaining about the way many top tennis players behave on court these days, and it put a big smile on me dial because I couldn't agree more.
Ya see I covered tennis for The Courier-Mail and international news agencies around the world for about 25 years in the '60s, '70s and early '80s before I moved on to column writing.
There were a couple of frowning, swearing, racquet-throwing dills around in those days but they were in the minority and never made it to the top.
Top players, mainly Aussies in those days, were really good blokes and sheilas.

Because there were no sports-star managers around to protect the players from the press like they do today, most journalists got to be good friends with sportsmen and women, including the blokes and sheilas at the top - world champs in whatever sport you covered.

I still count the great Rod Laver and the late, great Lew Hoad as two of my best friends in sport and I also got on very well with Ken Rosewall and Frank Sedgman. Back in those days Rod and Lew didn't know each other because those were the days of world-wide amateur tennis and the small group of professionals run by Jack Kramer.
Whenever Rod or Lew came to Brisbane for their separate tennis tours we would end up in the back bar of The Royal. They would give me a call when The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail were housed in Queen Street, opposite the GPO, and we would slip into the back bar of the long-gone Royal Hotel for a grog or four.
In 1960, after four years on The Courier-Mail, mainly on police rounds, the sports department needed a bloke to assist the great Jack Reardon covering rugby league and they grabbed me out of police rounds because I had played rugby league for Wide Bay against France and New Zealand in the mid-fifties when I was a cadet journo on the Maryborough Chronicle.
I was also asked to cover tennis and that first year I met Laver, who at 20 had not won any major titles at that stage - but that was all about change. Rod was and is a great bloke, a real Queensland country boy even though he has lived in the US for many years.
I knew I would have to get to know him well if I was to get anywhere covering tennis, so I looked up his background and found that we had a lot in common. Like me, he was born in Rockhampton just five years after me. He had grown up on his dad's cattle station in the central west, not far from my uncle's cattle station, Vandyke, outside Sringsure, where I had spent all my holidays from a young age, mustering, fencing, boundary riding, branding, drafting and shooting - virtually the same as Rod. So we got on well from our first meeting talking about the central west, cattle, horses, rifles and shooting.
Whenever Rod returned to Brisbane from the amateur tennis tours we would end up at The Royal for you know what.
It was a watering hole for journalists, sportsmen and politicians.
In those days, tennis was angrily split in two - the amateurs, whose officials controlled all tournaments around the world, and the professionals, controlled by Kramer, who took his pros on world tours playing on rented amateur courts.
The top amateurs existed on reasonable contracts and travel expenses supplied by major sports goods companies and occasionally picked up mysterious brown paper bags after major tournament wins. Never did find out what was in those brown paper bags, but it didn't look like sandwiches.
But the main goal of most amateurs was to win a contract with Kramer and come into really big money.

Well, at the end of the year I first met Rod and started covering tennis, 1960, great things happened. Rod won his first major title, the Australian amateur singles at Milton, and that got Kramer very interested in this young red-headed Aussie. But Laver wasn't interested about turning pro because he was doing well as an amateur and didn't think he could match his school-day heroes like Hoad and Rosewall on the pro circuit.
So off he went on the amateur circuit in 1961 and won his first Wimbledon singles final. The big win made no difference to his quiet country attitude but boosted his confidence for big tournaments. So off he went again on his world tour in 1962 and what a year. He won the Australian, French, Wimbledon, US, Italian, German, Swiss, Dutch, Irish, Norwegian, British hardcourt and London grass court titles and the Grand Slam for the first time - only the second person in the game's long history at that stage.
That 1962 performance prompted Kramer to make a record pro circuit offer of $US110,000 - remember that was 50 years ago.
When Rod returned to Brisbane at the end of 1962 after his second Wimbledon win, we met at the Royal for you know what that night. But I still had a story to write so at closing time we purchased a couple of tall bottles of grog and went up next door to the sports department on the third floor where I finished the story and sat with Rod having a beer.
Around about midnight news came through on the teletype that US president, John F. Kennedy was threatening to bomb Cuba after its dictator, Fidel Castro, encouraged Russia to build army bases there so close to the US, which would certainly lead to a Third World War.

I thought about it for a couple of seconds then told Rod that if I was him I would contact Kramer immediately and accept his latest pro offer because international sport, including tennis, would be suspended if world war broke out.

Rod thought about it for a few minutes while he sipped a beer then said "Righto!"

So I rang Kramer's Australian rep, a Sydney lawyer, got him out of bed and told him Laver wanted to speak to him. And that was it. The contract was signed within days.

At that stage Rod didn't know Hoad and Rosewall and was very nervous about making his pro debut at Sydney's White City because he didn't think he could match his heroes. So he asked me could I go to Sydney with him for support. The Courier-Mail didn't fancy Kramer or pro tennis but when I told the great editor T.C. Bray what had happened, he told me The Courier-Mail would send me down to cover Laver's pro debut. That was January, 1963.

And that's what I did. But I have never seen a top sportsman as nervous as Rod was in those opening matches against Hoad, Rosewall and Sedgman. Hoad downed Laver in their first eight matches, and Rosewall won 11 of their first 13. But all that changed when Laver expelled his nerves over the next couple of months to become the greatest tennis player of all time.

I often see stories saying modern tennis stars have greater records of Grand Slam tournament wins than Laver. No way. Just remember that when Laver turned pro he was banned from all amateur tournaments around the world.

Have a look at his record: He won Wimbledon in 1961 and 1962. Was banned as a pro for the next seven years and when open tennis was introduced in 1968 returned to Wimbledon to win the singles that year and the next.

I have little doubt that if Wimbledon had been open when Rod turned pro he would have won the singles from 1961 to 1969 - nine years straight.

I've got a confession to make. I don't watch tennis any more and I doubt if any people of my age watch it either.

Ya see the '60s and '70s were the golden days of sport, particular tennis when the champions were true gentlemen, the likes of which will never be seen again. I'm so glad I was there to experience the good old days of sport.

Mutiny on the bounty (of wild pigs)

MAYBE I've told you a couple of times before how lucky I was to have relatives on sheep and cattle stations in central western Queensland where I could spend all my holidays riding horses, mustering, fencing and everything country people do, as well as shooting wild pigs to help pay for my trip.

We used to get two shillings and sixpence (25 cents) bounty when we took the pig's snout and tail into the local shire council because wild pigs were, and are, a big problem in the bush.

After you killed the pig you would cut the tip of its snout off, then the tail, and thread the tail through one of the snout's nostrils. Back at the station homestead, in this case Vandyke, outside Springsure, you would dip the snouts and tails in arsenic to preserve them, and deliver them to the shire council for the 2/6 bounty when next in town.

Righto! Back in 1956 when I was married, I took my wife, Jan, to Vandyke for a holiday. She was a very good rifle-range shooter but had never been pig shooting, so she was in for a bit of a shock when the blood started flowing out pig shooting. With us this first day was my little cousin, Shane, about 8 or 9 years old at the time.

By the way, its worth mentioning that at this time Jan (pictured) was a top model in Brisbane after winning The Sunday Mail Sun Girl title, and with it a Holden Special sedan in the mid '50s. I risk being belted up for writing that because she hates me mentioning it these days ... but they're the facts ma'm, so check 'em out if you like.

Anyway, back at Vandyke in her sparkling blue Holden Special, we had driven to a beautiful, wide-open black soil plain about six miles from the homestead, when we encountered a big mob of pigs - a huge boar, a couple of big sows and about a dozen little piglets. Naturally, I bowled the boar over and while I was cutting off its snout and tail, young Shane, who was too young to use a rifle, was running down one of the piglets and started stabbing into its chest with a rusty old pocket-knife.

Unfortunately Jan had followed Shane as he caught the piglet and was standing, shocked, just a couple of metres from the stabbing Shane and the screaming, squealing piglet.

I trotted over to the pair, carrying the boar snout and tail which were dripping blood, snot and mud - and a few blow-flies. When Jan saw me coming, she screamed: "For God's sake, kill the poor little thing. Put it out of its misery right now."

Here was my opportunity to be the hero I always am, so I said to Jan: "Here, hold this will ya?"

She reached out her right hand and I plonked the pig snout in it, walked over to Shane and the piglet, and cut the poor thing's throat.

Then I turned to see Jan's reaction.

She was horrified, looking pale and shocked at the still bleeding but now definitely dead piglet.

I glanced at her right hand. The snout and tail were still there, with blood, snot and mud dripping through her dainty fingers.

I couldn't help it - I just burst out laughing seeing a dirty, bloody scene like that in the hand of a leading Queensland model and beauty queen.

Suddenly she turned to see what I was laughing at, saw me staring at her right hand laughing insanely, looked down at the bloody snout and tail and screamed, much louder than before.

Then she hurled the bloody snout and tail at me, hitting me fair in the kisser, which made me laugh even louder. I don't think I've ever laughed so much or louder, even at Laurel and Hardy picture shows.

Wait until I tell my uncles and aunts, cousins and stockmen mates about it back at the homestead. I'll be a bigger hero than I am right now, I told myself.

After I picked up the boar's snout and tail and cut the piglet's snout and tail off, we climbed back into the Holden, me in the passenger seat, Shane in the back, the pair of us still wetting our pants laughing, and Jan behind the steering wheel with a cruel look such as I'd never seen before.

Well, that's the way it is when you pull a mean trick over someone. It's crook for them but really great for you.

A couple of hundred yards from that scene we came to the River Paddock gate. Jan pulled up the Holden, I got out and opened the gate, still wetting my pants laughing and waiting for her to drive through so I could close the gate.

And she drove through with what appeared to be a slight smirk on her dial, which I thought was strange because it was my big joke putting the snout and tail in her hand.

Then it all fell into place because she drove through the gate and kept right on driving, leaving me with a six mile walk back to Vandyke homestead in the middle of summer. For some strange reason my smile disappeared - and it got worse.

Because when I finally arrived at Vandyke late that afternoon, the whole population was waiting outside the homestead killing themselves laughing at poor, stupid Lawrie who thought he was smart but was left for dead by his beautiful wife. My little cousin Shane had spilled the beans and I was no longer the laughing hero but the dumb cluck.

It took them weeks to stop laughing and me to stop frowning. It's been like that for the past 54 years.

Pigs will fry, but not this time

I'VE already described in an earlier blog my young days on my uncles' cattle stations in the central west out around Springsure and I can't emphasise what great days they were in the mid-40s to the mid-60s.

They might have been tough days on the stations with lots of work mustering cattle and sheep, drafting in the cattle yards, fencing, branding and cutting timber, but they were fantastic. Those holidays were mainly spent at my grandfather's property, Vandyke, outside Springsure, and a couple of other stations in Central Queensland.

There was always plenty of work on Vandyke (left), but there was also always time for shooting, mainly wild pigs and 'roos and the occasional dingo, and the local shire council bounties for those kills was always more than enough to cover the cost of the holiday.

Remember, those were the days when animals like those were considered pests.

I loved those country holidays and if my old man, Martin Kavanagh, hadn't met my mum after he returned from the First World War, I would have been a filthy rich cattle baron today.

He was the eldest of the Kavanagh kids on Vandyke when he went to war with the oldest of his younger brothers, and he was badly wounded by a mortar bomb blast on The Somme and spent almost two years in an English hospital recovering (Martin, pictured right, while recovering in England).

When he returned to Queensland he met mum, an Emerald publican's daughter, they got married and he decided to move into the hotel trade.

They were fantastic days with great people and plenty of cousins to play with. And those great days lasted until I was 30 ... at which age I discovered surfboards and gave up the Outback for surfing for the next 42 years. But that's another story.

Of course when I first went to Vandyke aged about 10, I was too young to be allowed to muck around with rifles and horses, so I used to spend a lot of my time helping my great old grandad with jobs around the homestead and nearby paddocks.

One of those jobs was cutting down bloody Noogoora burr, which was almost covering the beautiful black soil flats around the creeks on Vandyke. The burr was useless imported junk that grew wild out that way.
Right after early breakfast each day, Aunt Lyla would cut us some cornbeef sandwiches for lunch, we'd collect a couple of mattocks from the tool shed, and off we'd march along cattle pads into the Noogoora burr, which a lot of the time was as thick as a brick wall and grew well overhead. By that time grandad was too old for horse riding and mustering so he always made himself useful doing other jobs around the station and when he had some spare time it was off with his mattock to dig out Noogoora burr.
Looking back it was a pretty useless operation because the burr was growing much faster that the rate at which a couple of people could cut it. But it kept grandad busy and that was all that mattered.
Anyway, one day when we were cutting burr about two miles from the homestead, a bloody great big boar came screaming down the cattle pad we were cutting burr on. We heard it crushing through the burr and knew it was trouble, so my cousin and I climbed a small tree by the pad and looked down, only to see grandad straddling the cattle pad with his mattock held high over his head waiting for the pig to crash through the burr and charge him.

Out it came and grandad (left) let it have the mattock, which hit its outer rib cage and slid off. The pig kept on charging, hitting grandad's legs and knocked him over. Luckily its large tusks missed his upper leg and he was able to get back up almost immediately. The pig had swung around and came charging back, but this time wasn't so lucky because grandad's mattock came crashing down on its skull.
It staggered along the pad for a couple of yards and collapsed kicking and squealing.
Grandad whipped out his knife and cut its throat.
Boy! What an experience for a town boy that was. Grandad was a bit shaken but apart from a few cuts was OK. It was late morning so we decided to have dinner then and there. (By the way "lunch" was "dinner" in those days and "dinner" was "tea", back when I was a country kid.)
I cut the pig's snout and tail off, with grandad's permission, because I could get a 2/6 pest bounty from the local shire council for them.
As we were eating our sandwiches I started thinking what a great waste of food it would be to leave that pig lying there for the dingoes to eat when we could be eating it back at the homestead.

I said so to grandad. He thought about it for a while and then said with a smile:

"That's a great idea, young fella. Why don't you cut off a hind leg and take it back to Aunt Lyla?"

So I finished my sandwich, grabbed my rusty old pocket knife and walked over to the boar and started hacking away through the filthy thick skin. About 20 minutes later I had it off, looking like it had been hacked off with a stone axe and with blow flies attacking it like Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. I put it down on the black soil beside the cattle pad and grandad remarked with a genuine smile what a great prize it would be for Aunt Lyla.

So we got stuck into another four hours of cutting burr and started for home about sundown. By this time the leg was not only covered with blow flies but millions of ants were also chewing into it. I shook it heavily and got rid of some of them, then put it in a hessian bag and off we went on the way home, me with a great smile on my dial and a very happy heart.  

Getting back we sat on the bottom stairway under the high homestead taking off out boots with grandad telling me how proud Aunt Lyla (right) would be of me and that I should take the prize up to her by myself so I could get all the praise.

And that's what I did. Off came the bag and there was the leg still covered in flies and ants.

When I got to the kitchen door Aunt Lyla was mixing some food in a giant bowl over the old wood stove preparing tea for the homestead of about eight people. So I put the leg on the kitchen table among some other dishes of food, and said beaming: "Excuse me Aunty Lyla, but look what I've got you for tea."

She looked around at me pointing to the filthy pig's leg on the table, turned her eyes to the table and started screaming.
"Get that filthy thing out of here. Get it out of my kitchen. Get it out of the homestead." She was furious.
I was astounded. What was up with her?
But I picked it up and trudged, shocked, back down the stairs.
And down there I was in for another shock. Grandad had had a heart attack, or at least that's what I thought, because he was laying on the dirt at the bottom of the stairs. I dropped the leg and ran over to him.
"Grandad? Are you OK?" I cried.
He could hardly talk ... because he was wetting his pants laughing.
"Didn't she want it," he gulped. "Well! I'll be blowed and you went to so much trouble. Well, we'll just have to give it to the dogs.
And that's what I did.

And you know something? They enjoyed it just as much as grandad, and I would have too if Aunt Lyla hadn't been so bloody fussy.

Vandyke homestead in 2004

Great moments and guffaws at the Games

HAVING covered a few Olympic and Commonwealth Games around the world in the 1970s and '80s, I'm not a great fan of them anymore.

Why is that, you wonder? That's simple! Covering those Games was bloody hard work for a journalist - that is if you take your job seriously.

If you're serious about your job you just never get time off to have a decent look at the foreign cities and countries you are in.

The last Olympics I covered was in Los Angeles in 1984, just when portable computers were starting to come in. Mine was a dirty big machine with a tiny screen. It was so big it wouldn't fit in an aeroplane overhead locker nor could you slide it under your seat. So you had to make sure you got a seat beside the plane's door so you could rest it against that.

How did it work? Well, when you'd finished typing your story, you had to be near a telephone, force the phone's big round ear-piece and mouth-piece into two big round rubber containers on the machine, dial your office computer number back in Australia, press a couple of more buttons, cross your fingers and hope to hell it was working.

Before computers came in you had to ring through the local switchboard of whatever country you were in, hoping they could speak English, and read your story to a copytaker sitting at a typewriter in the office back home.

Ah! Those were the days - I think - or maybe they weren't.
But as hard as it was under the pressure of covering major sporting events, there were always some very interesting events away from the sport itself ... and always a few laughs.

One of the most interesting things I saw off the track and out of the pool happened at the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
As you know the Olympics opens with a local hero carrying the torch up to the Olympic flame and lighting it and someone saying:
"Let the Games begin."

Well, when the bloke carrying the torch ran into the packed Moscow stadium the first thought that crossed my mind, and the minds of the other 100,000 people in the stadium, was: How the bloody hell is that bloke going to get through the crowds of seated spectators right up there to light the Olympic flame about 100 metres up the packed stands to the highest point in the stadium?

The question became even more worrying as he ran around the track, holding the torch high, and everyone there looked for the way up to the main Olympic cauldron atop the stadium.

But about three-quarters of the way around the track he handed the torch to the final runner, who simply ran off the track and into the first row of spectators. It turned out they were special Russian spectators, who had many hours of training before the Games,  and they simply held stout boards above their heads and formed a beautifully steady and solid V-shaped path right up to the cauldron. Absolutely staggering!

The run up over the crowd was so steady you would swear the torch carrier had been running up a concrete staircase. It was amazing and sent the crowd into wild cheering. I don't often cheer, but I joined them.
Here is a Youtube clip of the famous run:

A couple of days before that amazing performance there was another very interesting off-track performance at a very angry press conference in a huge hall with about 1000 journalists packed in.

You probably recall that the Russians and the Yanks were at each others throats over a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the time and the Yanks had pulled out of the Moscow Olympics. US president Jimmy Carter simply told his Olympians they couldn't go and that was it because the government financed the whole Olympic trip.

Back home our prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, decided to follow Carter and announced Australia was also pulling out. Poor, silly, trouserless Mal didn't know that our Olympic movement was pretty rich and always provided the bulk of the Olympic money.

But Mal still announced that Australia would not be going because he was not going to give them any money ... about $40,000 of government funds. Of course Australia's Olympic costs would have been a lot, lot more than that. So our Olympians simply said "so long Mal" and took off for Moscow.

Anyway, as you can imagine, the Yanks sent a heap of journalists to cover the Games ... well, not only to cover the Games but to turn the heat up on the Kremlin.

So at that huge press conference, the Yank journos had found out that one of Russia's top women swimmers had simply disappeared off the face of the earth, and didn't they get stuck into the Russian Olympic organisers who were seated at a huge table on stage.

Things really heated up as the Yanks were standing up all over the hall yelling for a go at the four or five microphones that were being handed around by Russian staff. You had to get a mic to ask questions otherwise you couldn't be heard over the din. I hadn't seen a wild, wild press conference like it, and never have since.

They were mainly Yank reporters screaming for a microphone, then demanding what Russia had done to the poor, defenceless girl swimmer. Had they murdered her and where was her body?

But there was also a small Indian reporter on his feet, with arms waving and screaming for a mic. After about half an hour of mayhem, a microphone was finally handed to the screaming Indian.

He took it and with a tightly frowning face demanded:

"What has happened to our presents?"

The hall fell into deathly silence.

The MC on stage stood there blinking. "Vot do you mean ... presents?"

The Indian became more serious: "At all the Games I have covered the Olympic people always give visiting journalists presents to take home. But I have got nothing here. Where are our presents?"

The deadly serious, furious, screaming press conference started howling with laughter and that was the last we heard of the missing girl swimmer.

Actually, we finally did receive a present - a tiny stuffed Russian bear. I've still got it.

Stuart Buchanan - the light of Bustard Head

G'DAY, once again, people. Sorry for the lack of blogs over the last couple of months, but I've been away a bit and pretty busy, including my annual month-long stint caretaking Bustard Head Light Station for my old sailing and drinking mate, author and former lighthouse keeper Stuart Buchanan.

And the following blog is about that old mate and I'll tell you why in a minute.

Stuart is one of the toughest, most uncompromising blokes I've ever known.

We're good mates, but if we are stuck together on his yacht, Pluto, for more than a couple of weeks, then things could turn nasty.

If he wasn't such a tough nut the 152-year-old Bustard Head Light Station, between Bundaberg and Gladstone, would be no more.
Oh! Sure! The grand old lighthouse would be still standing on the point, flashing out its warning to passing ships. But the two cottages which held the lightkeepers, their wives and kids and helpers, and the four work sheds, would have been demolished and the grounds once again covered with scrub, unfortunately a lot of it not natural to that beautiful Aussie area.

Stuart and his wife, Shirley, were lightkeepers there from 1974-1981 and grew to love the place. But when lighthouses became automatic in the 80s and stations were de-manned around Australia, something had to give. In the case of Bustard Head, it was theft and absolutely destructive vandalism that eventually destroyed the station.

The cottages and sheds were wrecked, with walls, roofs and floors smashed and anything of value, like the stainless steel guttering and beautiful rosewood doors, stolen. You see, it's not hard to act like an idiot in an isolated place like Bustard Head, which can only be reached by boat, helicopter or the LARCs of the excellent tourist trips of the 1770 Environmental Tours, which travel up from Town of 1770 several times a week.

Stuart and Shirley had seen the destruction growing as they sailed Pluto up the Queensland coast in the 90s, and by the late 1990s Stuart decided he was going to restore the station to its original condition even though authorities had decided to clear the station of the wreckage and leave it to nature to take over.

It took Stuart several years to fight bureaucrats and the system before he finally gained permission for restoration. When permission finally came it took him three years to rebuild the station to better than its former glory. He did it all for nothing, working daylight 'till dark seven days a week.
Shirley even put $130,000 of her own money into the restoration, which I believe she will never fully recover. Read Stuart's book, Light of Their Lives, if you want to see the full story of the trouble they had.

There was lots of volunteer help along the way, particularly by another former lightkeeper, Dudley Fulton (pictured wearing sunglass beside Stuart), who worked daylight to dark, seven days a week with Stuart for the last year of Stuart's three-year job.

But as I said Stuart is so tough and so uncompromising that many volunteers simply couldn't cop the discipline and took off after a couple of days.

I used to go up every couple of months for a week or two to help out. One time I got off the LARC only to find Stuart looking like a tired old man. He said he wasn't feeling well but was still working daylight to dark, seven days a week.
I made him get on the LARC and see a doctor back in Agnes Water. He returned with a packet of pills, said he had Ross River Fever, and kept on working.
How tough was he with the volunteers? One day, with just the two of us putting up fibro wall panels on opposite sides of the front cottage, I bent a nail on the fibro sheet which I was hammering on to a door frame. I swore, but it wouldn't matter because the bent nail would have been hidden forever once I put the architrave (the moulding board) over the fibro around the door frame. Hidden for-bloody-ever.
A few seconds later Stuart appeared.
"What were you swearing at?" he said.
"Nothing," said I. He looked around the fibro.
"You bent a nail," he said. "Get it out and straighten it."
"Like hell," said I. "It will be behind the architrave and hidden forever."
"Get it out," he demanded.
"Get stuffed," said I and stormed out into the front yard.
Stuart extracted the nail, straightened it out and hammered it back in.
I came back, hammered the architrave around the door frame and hid the formerly bent nail forever.

But if he wasn't like that Bustard Head would today have a lighthouse, but not a lighthouse station, which now attracts thousands of visitors a year via LARC.

He is a tough, tough bloke and no doubt that's what saved his life back in June this year.

I and my wife, Jan, had just arrived at the lightstation on June 2 to caretake the place for a month, as we do each year, when we got some very bad news from Brisbane.

The day before, Stuart had been working on Pluto in the Scarborough marina when he got a splitting headache, rang Shirley and said he could not drive home that night, but would sleep on the boat and be home in the morning. When he didn't call next day, Shirley rang the club and asked for someone to take a look for Stuart on Pluto.

They found him passed out in the cabin and very, very cold. He had had a stroke the night before. They thought he was dead.

He was rushed to Brisbane General Hospital where it was first thought there was no hope for his survival. But hours later there was a very slight improvement and it was decided to operate.

There followed many weeks of severe pain in intensive care and another operation, but he is making a slow - slow and painful - recovery, which I am sure would not be the case if Stuart Buchanan was not one very, very tough man.

His stroke left a big hole in the list of Bustard Head caretakers - mainly retired blokes like me and all volunteers - because Stuart and Shirley used to caretake for anything from three to four months a year.

It's not an easy job, particularly in summer when Stuart and Shirley used to caretake a lot of the time. There are a couple of hectares of lawn which need mowing, two cottages and four worksheds to maintain and a small cemetery to keep clean.

Part of the caretaker's job is to conduct tours through the great museum Stuart established in the front cottage (click on video above). 1770 Environmental Tours' LARCs usually bring tourists up three times a week, more in school holidays, and tourists pay $6 a head to be taken through the museum.

That's the only income the Bustard Head Lighthouse Association gets to maintain the whole station and under Stuart's astute - and tough - direction it just covers the annual costs.

As for Shirley's $130,000 loan to help the rebuilding program, after more than six years she's got a couple of thousand back. But I don't think any of us will be around to see the debt cleared.

In the meantime, Stuart continues to gradually improve. I take a bit of credit because, while he is totally off alcohol, I have a rum and beer for him every sundown, as we used to do on Pluto and at Bustard Head before he got crook.

But he frowns and still tells me to get stuffed whenever I mention my great generosity with the booze.

Anyway people, if you're ever up Town of 1770 way, you'd be mad to miss that Bustard Head trip.