Gordon Wooton was just 16 when he signed on in 1958 to join a small but resolute gang tasked with building hundreds of kilometres of outback roads into the middle of nowhere.
They worked from Blanchwater to Mt Hopeless then the Cobler Sand Hills then following the Strzelecki Creek to Innamincka ending up in the Cooper Basin.
They worked, slept and ate in the toughest and remotest working conditions fathomable to open up the Strzelecki Track and Cooper Basin for oil and gas exploration.
Years later, Barra-based Gordon has released his recollection of those backbreaking times, in a fascinating look back into a bygone era in his new book, Outback Road Builders: Opening up the Strzelecki Track and the Cooper Basin.
Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book which can be purchased by emailing Gordon’s daughter Tasma at tasmahrt@shaw.ca.
We start making the road
We brought with us the maps that they had for the recon trip.
Showing where the old stations were and the location of all the wells and bores from Mumpy north.
Art had a rough idea where the mail track used to go and a general direction where he thought the new road should go. He would go out ahead in the morning and work out where the road should go.
In the afternoon or evening he would arrive back and he and I would go out and peg a section using large discs on a length of pipe or sometimes he would use 44 gallon drums put on top of sand mounds.
The front dozer would go from one sighter to the next. The large track dozer TD18 went first knocking the tops off the sand hills.
The rubber tyre dozer LW16 came next dozing it into shape making it like a road and the correct width.
The grader came next making it two blades wide. Sometimes on a calm morning or evening we would set a tyre alight ahead where we had to go then we would peg towards the smoke I had many jobs when we first put the road through. I helped peg the road, cart fuel from Lyndhurst, cart water, transporting operators and helping fill up their machines, or anything else that required doing.
It was thought we may be able to use the water in some of the wells for drinking if they were cleaned out. The first lot of water that we got for the camp came from a dam on Mumpy. No one in the camp knew that we had to wait for the cattle to move out of the dam before we could pump the water into a tank on the truck.
While we were camped at Lake Crossing, I went into Lyndhurst to get a truck load of fuel. The creeks had been washed out between Hopeless and Mumpy. Going in empty was OK but coming out with a load was another story.
In one of the creeks between Mumpy and Blackwater I was having trouble getting up one of the creek banks. After several tries and some digging, I got through but not without pulling the muffler box off. I could not get the muffler back on so I drove without it. The Commer Knocker without a muffler, the noise was something you could not describe.
It was about an hour from the time that the people in the camp first heard me until I arrived. Everybody was outside, they could not believe how loud it was. I done the same trip many times by myself to get fuel and to deliver and pick up mail.
We did not bother to look for Lake Crossing well, water no good for drinking, but the water in Box Flat well was ok to drink according to our info. Box Flat was reported as four metres twenty cms deep, two metres by one metre twenty cms wide, timbered with twenty cm by five cm Jarrah, and had a depth of a metre of water. It had nine metres of galvanized iron troughing, iron windlass and stand, iron doors, wire rope with a ten gallon bucket.
While the plant kept working I spent some time trying to find Box Flat well, with no success. It wasn’t until the next trip back that we found it.
We stopped at Lyndhurst and asked a local identity Murty Johnny. Murty was the only surviving full blood of the Yantruwanta tribe. His brother, who died in 1944 always claimed he could remember Burke and Wills.
We also stopped at Mumpy and asked Burt Napier. He came out the next day with one of his Aboriginal stockmen to show us where it was.
The well was only thirty metres away from my track I had left, I was on the opposite side of the sand hill. The stockman found it by lining up certain land marks in the sand hills. We never used the well after it was found. It was filled up with white sand.
We were soon at Monticollina artesian bore. So we shifted our camp to this spot. Hot water coming from the ground out of an eight cm pipe and then running away. It was drilled in 1903.
We dug a hole with the dozer and let the water run into it.
This we used as a swimming hole and a place to have a hot wash.
At nights we used to lie in the water near the edge waiting for the rabbits to come for a drink, then we would try to grab them.
The Boss came in one night and said that he had found a wooden windmill in the sand hills but the road would not be going near it. The road was going from Monticollina to a spot about thirteen kms downstream from Tinga Tingana station. We went past Willow well with the road but there wasn’t much left there.
Just past Monticollina to the Strzelecki creek the road was running with the sand hills up the valleys, occasionally crossing over or around them. Most of the time heading up the hollows.
It was strange to see the dingoes following the plant up and down the road in the sand hills. Sometimes they would just stand on top of the sand hills and watch. The hawks would also fly around the plant and also the camp.
On the track dozer Lofty Hall used to tie tree branches on the side of his dozer to try to get some shade. That tractor also blew the heat from the motor onto the operator.
With water bag hanging on the side, tin of Salvital near the seat, and plastic cup on the air cleaner (pre-cleaner catch), Lofty drank lots of Salvital.