Peter, let’s start with a bit about your history and joining the Ramblers.
Well, when you have kids and you’re doing a lot of overtime a work, you haven’t really got much time to be involved in outdoor activities. But when I retired, Ronda and I joined the Ramblers, this was around 2000-2002 and pretty quickly I joined the Committee.
Tell me a bit about your time on the Committee?
I think one of my first jobs was to organise the Christmas party, and after that they were looking for a Training Officer and asked me. I didn’t know anything about training and had little bush experience, so the Committee decided that I should join Search and Rescue to get some experience and knowledge about navigation and bush walking skills (see below).
In the early days we used to print the program and newsletter, and I remember Marion Francis, the editor, Chris English the activity manager and I plus most of the committee used to meet to put it together. I used to do the photos for the front page and we’d print the whole magazine and send it out to everybody. It took nearly a full day to put it all together.
My time as President was memorable, because we all got on really well. Committee members can have differences of opinion, but you can debate something without wanting to be the ruler. I think we were proud of the fact that the Ramblers increased in numbers, and we just all worked well together as a team. I was really pleased with fun on all the walks and we’d all take morning tea and have a cuppa.
Tell me about your Search and Rescue experience and training officer role?
While I was always an outdoors sort of person, I never had the time to really get into developing bush walking skills. Search and Rescue which was called BWRS taught me a great deal, and they never made me feel bad for not knowing too much about navigation etc. There were a lot of training days where we went out bush. Every year we used to search for the plane that got lost in the Barrington Tops in 1981. We then progressed to real search and rescues, including at Black Heath to look for a lost fellow, aged around 85 years of age. We did rescues in Bundanoon, the Blue Mountains, and the Snowies. That was a funny search, because a German couple got lost walking from Thredbo to Chimney Ridge, and they got parted, with the woman heading back to Thredbo and the husband was missing for two days! I didn’t take part in many helicopter rescues, but we were trained at Bankstown airport on how to get winched in and that sort of thing. The only time we were involved in a helicopter rescue with Police Rescue was in the vicinity of Cloudmaker where a man heading back from Kanangara to Katoomba fell over a waterfall and passed away. He was using a sketch map that only showed the peaks and not the contours. Our role was to set up a radio repeater station under the direction of an instructor until the main radio personnel arrived. After that we joined the search and we actually discovered an Aboriginal cave with sharpening tools inside that hadn’t been registered; that was a special experience.
So my experiences were mixed – it was sad when the rescues involved deceased persons and happy when people were found alive. A particular funny one involved the guy in the Snowy Mountains, who staggered out of the bush and walked towards one of the VRA vehicles and said I’m lost and they said, we know we’ve been looking for you for 2 days! One rescue involved a Mormon Elder who fell over a cliff about 80 metres and survived which was pretty amazing.
Keith Williams was one of the well-known and experienced search and rescue guys with Bushwalking NSW. We used to do a lot of joint exercises with SES and I remember one particular search down the Burrill Lake where a young boy walked off and was missing for a couple of days, I think. They thought he’d fallen in the lake, but he was hiding in a hollow log, and was eventually found by people ahead of us on horseback who were looking for him. They were quietly walking through the bush with their horses, and he stuck his head out of the hollow log he was hiding in. There were plenty of grown men and women who were crying with relief at finding that little boy.
As Training Officer with the Ramblers I started training people on compass skills and learning how to walk through the bush in a straight line using a compass, and general navigation skills. That came in handy on kayaking trips also and I developed my skills in these areas learning from other people. On a kayaking trip down on the Murray out from Renmark near Ghost Island is one example of the use of compass navigation skills. We turned off into a creek system which is known as the liquid labyrinth, because if you make a mistake, you can easily miss a creek entry, because it’s lined by trees and you can’t easily see it.
What were some of the activities and trips you went on?
Ronda and I did cycling, kayaking, walking – the whole lot. I went on my 1st paddle with David Gill, who lived on Brooks Creek just off Lake Illawarra and who had a spare kayak. I hopped in and did the usual wobbles etc like everyone does. But I loved it straight away. Ronda started paddling when Carol Sefton used to lead a lot of kayak trips in the early days.
When the kayaking started, it was on Mullet Creek, and members and others could come and see if they wanted to have a go at kayaking. We do used to do a paddle from Grace point to Audley which was only a 6k paddle and sometimes we’d have a sausage sizzle and wine for lunch. And then Jack Gal started paddling and really loved it and he started the Thursday morning paddles.
Regular Monday bike rides started later than other activities, and the main instigators were Flora, Barbara and Fred. As people improved in their bike riding skills we started Tuesday rides for some of the faster riders. We used to ride from the Albion Park roundabout to Barrack Point; Shoalhaven Heads area and around Killalea.
Joe Pike organised many trips to Lord Howe Island and I always did a movie of our trip to share our experiences with others. It’s funny looking back on them as we all had different coloured hair then!
I try my best to make people feel they’re included in the group. There’s nothing worse than feeling left out when you’re in a group One of the best that happened is we walked to Ruined Castle in the Blue Mountains and a fellow who was quite shy came up to me at the end of the walk and said, “thanks for making me feel part of the group”.
Can you recount some memorable trips?
Well, I can remember one walk with this fellow that owned a nursery at Helensburg, and he showed us the squeeze walk on the coastal track near Burning Palms. He took Sue Fisher, Chris English, myself and Ronda and others. You head up into the bush off track, and you find a real narrow squeeze point between two rocks that you can just squeeze through and end up back on Garrawarra Ridge. Well, it was my birthday, when we did this walk and Ronda decided she was going to bring a cake. When we got to a difficult part of the squeeze point Ronda fell over backwards and landed on her backpack, squashing the cake. We managed to put it back together and thoroughly enjoyed a crumb birthday cake with much laughter.
