Next reunion 25-27 April 2003 |
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Approx 25 miles along the dirt, we had to pull over as the old FJ was overheating. I popped the bonnet and Tom pulled the radiator cap off too quickly and, whoosh, up it went. Luckily, he wasn’t burnt and fortunately all the gunk in the radiator and the cooling system was blasted out- should have got the radiator cleaned before we left Richmond - sigh…. After refilling the radiator with fresh water, we were back on the road again. We ripped through places such as Kimba, Wudinna, Poochera and onto Ceduna for some refreshments and fuel. At the Petrol station we asked the owner if he sold ice. “Yep.” he says. “Do you want block or crushed?”. I replied “We’ll have crushed, please”. He comes out with a big block of ice in a hessian bag resting on his shoulder. I thinks to myself “That ain’t crushed ice - that’s a block”. Before I have time to start bitching, he grabs hold of the neck of the bag, and in a quick circular motion, smashes the bag onto the concrete driveway. “There you go.” he says to me, “Crushed ice”.!! I button my lip and poured the crushed ice into our eskies.
Back on the road. The masking tape job we had carried out on the vehicle was good in theory but useless in practice. I hadn’t realised that the floor of the FJ was pocked with small rust holes so that, every time we drove over a patch of bulldust, it was like a hundred little atomic bombs of bulldust going off in the car.
We soon realized that it was much more comfortable and cooler to partly lower the rear windows to get some airflow through the car and blow some of the bulldust away. When travelling on the old, dirt road I discovered that the best time to travel on it was just after the grader has been through - the road was in better nick after being graded. When we travelled on the road in 1964, I’m unsure when it had last been graded as the general condition of the road was bloody awful.
Interesting story about the grading team - the job was a bit like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge - once you finished painting it you started all over again. There were 3 graders in a team and each towed a caravan behind them. The 3 graders were spaced apart - approx 100 meters between each grader. The first grader occupied the left-hand side of the road, the next one the middle and the third grader tarted up the right-hand side. They graded/scraped all day and pulled over at night. I can recall at least one other support vehicle accompanying the team which was the fuel tanker. A lonely, dusty existence but these blokes never had to drive through peak-hour traffic to work - they were always at work.!! The famous Len Beadell in his books, describes similar activities when he and his team created the Gunbarrel Highway as part of the rocket testing in the late-50’s. The Poms were based at Woomera and were conducting flight tests of their rockets (were they called Blue Steel???). After the fuse was lit, it’d blast off and land somewhere in remote Western Australia hopefully at the end of Len’s road but not on his head!!.
The Nullarbor is comprised mainly of limestone which can be a mongrel to drive on. Long stretches of corrugations meant that we had to travel at sufficient speed to get on top of the corrugations but not too fast as to prevent a quick stop when we came across huge potholes or the numerous cattle-grids. Even though we had good (for those days) tyres on the car and even with the superb braking ability of the FJ, we made quite a few panic-stricken emergency trips into the bush on the side of the road. It sure gets the adrenalin rushing through the body. We never flipped the FJ but she rocked-and-rolled a couple of times (please don’t let my mum read this yarn).
The road also had huge patches of bulldust - sometimes it was like driving into a rainstorm - the dust would fly up in front of the vehicle and we couldn’t see a bloody thing. We’d hope like hell that there was nobody coming the other way”.
Ted’s story continues next issue
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