Woomera (continued)
In the early days gangs of men were employed doing everything, they mostly lived in tents at Woomera West and were transported to work sites where a large tent would be set up for smoko and lunch breaks. As young children always hanging about to watch what was going on, and it would then become our job to rattle the can and yell out SMOKO at the top of your voice. You were a real hit with the workers. The work these men did was nothing short of amazing. By hand they dug all the footings for the buildings such as the flats, and the great sewage mains were hand dug, concrete mixing was by teams of men.
All the gravel used in Woomera was gathered from the Dongar by hand by teams of men working with a truck, a few sledge hammers and muscle power - crack the stone, lift into truck tray, when loaded take to government crusher. This was known as Cherry Picking. As children we did the same thing when it became time to put in the school oval . Our sports program was for a very long time cherry picking, picking up gibbers and piling them into heaps that would be then collected by department of works staff and taken away to be crushed into aggregate of different sizes for roads and concrete. By the next sports period a new crop of gibbers would have surfaced and it would be on again, eventually we won and had an oval to play sport on. Later it was grassed.
Xmas time or stand-down meant good pocket money could be made tendering private gardens that men in single accommodation had set up. I always had a job at Woomera West looking after (mainly watering) exotics, that is for Woomera at that era, fruits and flowers. A great bonus was that usually the fruit was ready for eating around that time. It was on the bike and out to the camp, do what was needed and back home. I was paid around 12 pounds for this contract.
I remember very clearly at school one day when a plume of smoke discoloured the sky. A very large portion of the tent accommodation had caught fire, I think that maybe two men perished.
The school playground was the eyes to the world. We would watch as vapour trails criss crossed the sky, parallel, diagonal or vertical and occasionally witness an intercept as a missile was launched and hit its target. This appeared to children to be happening directly above our heads but it was in fact 30-40 miles (48-64 km) away down range. Another great favourite was signalling to aircraft as they did circuits and bumps. We must have driven pilots and crew to distraction with our hand held mirrors but occasionally we would receive back, a flash of lights or a waggle of wings.
One very sad day we watched an aircraft in difficulty as it laboured across the sky trailing smoke and finally exploding into the ground near the ponds, killing the pilot. The next couple of days we could see lines of men walking the flight path searching for missing pieces of aircraft. Another great school pastime was to run into a wirlywind with a newspaper and let it go, then retire to watch your paper be borne aloft for thousands of feet before being disgorged and floating back to earth.
Joe Murray
E-mail: walkaboutjoe@hotmail.com
(20 November 2002)
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Memories of Woomera |
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