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Rockets in the house paddock

October 25, 2003

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Wild life . . . dead on the dog fence. Photo: James Woodford

Running through the desert heart of Australia is a 5400-kilometre Dog Fence, and in its shadow is a collection of hardy characters for whom second-hand missiles are more common than neighbours. By James Woodford.

I joined the navy when I was 17 and, within weeks of signing up, I found myself on a guided missile frigate off the South Coast of NSW with a group of other young recruits, to watch the launch of a million-dollar rocket. We were allowed to stand on the deck as the weapon took off from the ship with a roar. Within a second, all that was left of the missile was its vapour trail, which formed a strip of cloud across a brilliant blue sky. Its target was an object towed by an unmanned supersonic aircraft called Jindivik. Though I did not know it on that sunny, memorable day at sea, both the missile and the target were created and tested in the desert half a continent away, at the Woomera Rocket Range.

It is one of the strangest facts in Australian history that an area the size of England lies in the centre of the nation, off limits to all but authorised visitors (and sheep farmers), where rockets and weapons from around the world have been tested for nearly half a century.

Wayne Rankin's property, Twins Station, is within the rocket range and all his life he has collected as many of the fired missiles that have landed nearby as he has been able to find. The missile remains don't belong to him but Rankin has the look of a man who could easily stare down a rocket scientist. Years ago, many municipal parks in Australia had rusty steel-pipe rockets mounted onto concrete for children to climb inside and spin a wobbly steering wheel. Rankin owns the real thing.

The first stop on our tour of his backyard was a two-metre-square concrete slab. On top of it is a rocket, whose casing has been peeled back like a banana skin from the force of the impact as it slammed into a sand dune not far from the homestead. "I don't know what it is, but it had something to do with supernovas," he said. I was speechless to see such a high-tech piece of Australian space history being accorded the status of a garden gnome. The other missiles he produced from his shed were decades old but the nose cones were still in perfect condition.

The next stop was a white-domed observatory, which once would have housed a large telescope. It was retrieved from the rocket range one night after a few beers. "I got it for a cubby for my daughter," Rankin explained, po-faced.

I had been told that at Commonwealth Hill in the 1970s, staff would sit in bomb shelters and watch rockets fly overhead at night, as entertainment. These shelters are now more than 45 years old. The inside of the Rankin shelter has the atmosphere of a wine cellar, cool and dry, protected by thousands of sandbags piled on top of a semicircular steel frame and then covered with earth and grass. The shelter is oriented east-west and beautiful hay-coloured sunlight streamed in through the western end. At a princely cost of $127,000, 48 shelters were built to protect around 100 pastoralists, their families, staff and local Aborigines.

Wayne Rankin and his rockets. Photo: James Woodford

For a decade after they were built, the shelters were segregated. This fact is still a source of embarrassment for some of the pastoralists. Every bomb shelter and homestead in the firing line was also equipped with a telephone - a massive technological leap for some of Australia's most remote citizens. Thirteen thousand trials, mostly military, have been conducted on the range. Until the 1980s, more than 4000 rockets were launched and 3500 bombs dropped. There were 90 high-altitude parachute drops, six tests of ejector seats and 500 upper-atmosphere research flights, including 200 Skylark rockets, which "had no more guidance than a Guy Fawkes rocket".

Most people would not have tolerated such a bizarre combination of the space age and the Cold War invading their skies. Peter Morton wrote in his history of Woomera, Fire across the Desert, that the bomb shelters grew out of the tension between guaranteeing safety, keeping costs down and reassuring powerful pastoral families, without interrupting the testing. The original plan was to have a 30-kilometre exclusion zone around each homestead but it was thought that too many launches would have to be aborted. Another proposal was that World War II-style trenches should be constructed, in which bomb-weary sheep farmers would be asked to cower, sometimes for hours day after day. The surviving shelters were a compromise, designed to protect occupants from flying debris or a nearby blast. They were not made to protect them from a direct hit. Before a rocket launch, the graziers would get three warnings by telephone from the test headquarters at the "rangehead" - the final take-cover was 15 minutes before blast-off.

"At first, some of the residents dutifully retreated into them," Morton wrote. "Others quickly got transformed into games rooms or hay stores. When Black Knight [a series of tests starting in 1965] began to be launched in the hours of darkness, watching the fiery trails slashed across the velvet sky by the re-entry head as it plummeted to Earth became a popular activity all over the outback. By this time, practically no one was bothering to take cover."

Mrs Flo Crombie, who ran Mount Eba Station and was regarded as one of the range's toughest characters, told range superintendent Dick Durance: "They sent us a notice. Black Knight was going up. First it was 72 hours, then 24 hours, and at last they told us to take cover in the shelter. 'Course, we weren't in it. In fact, the whole household was standing on top of it to get a good look. The rocket went up in the dark but it produced flashes every few seconds so you could see it climbing. It went up and up and everyone was enjoying the show. Then it turned over and began to come down. All the stockhands thought it was falling on them, and it did fall only a few miles away. I turned round to speak to the men and there wasn't a bastard there, Dick, not one bastard, and I was washing underpants for a week after!"

By the early '60s, some properties were ordered to take cover every day and the pastoralists started to work right through the firings. Some took their phones off the hook and others refused to take calls after 11pm. "You just get used to it," Rankin said. "And if one landed on you, it would be instant death. It's part of our life, we live in this area and this area is a rocket range. We just have to change our lives a little bit."

The rockets and the miners I had seen that afternoon were reminders of the nature of the tenure the Rankin family have over their pastoral lease. They do not own the land, they share it.

I asked Rankin, as a grazier, what he thought of the Dog Fence. Without it, he told me, he could not survive. He sees the structure only a few times a year, even though it runs for 80-odd kilometres along his boundary. "I have seen dingoes living with sheep for three or four months without killing one," he said. "We could see the tracks among the sheep, and when we finally saw him, we shot him."

Rankin's point is that not all dogs are sheep killers. "If they're starving, they'll try and kill sheep, and if there's lots of pups around, they'll chase sheep for fun. The dingo pup is exactly the same as your sheep dog. Even in a chihuahua, the instinct to kill is there."

A golden rule at the Twins is that if you cannot be certain of hitting a dingo when you shoot it then leave it. "Otherwise they get gun-shy," Rankin's wife, Sharon, said. Last year, she saw a dingo inside the fence and chased it across the paddock in her four-wheel-drive, tiring it out before running it over. Dingo numbers have been low in recent years and only five were shot the previous year by station staff.

An hour down the road is Mount Eba Station, the centre of South Australia, the former stop-off point for domestic planes flying across the continent and the home of Rosslyn "Toss" Nitschke.

The Rankins had told me to make sure I saw Toss's father's baggy green cap. Slinger Nitschke played in the 1931-32 Australian cricket team, which included the great Donald Bradman. Toss opened the door in her dressing gown - a tall, blonde woman with a strong voice and a friendly face. While she went to dress, she invited me to wait in the kitchen. Once, Mount Eba was a small township consisting of dozens of staff for the rocket range, the Crombie family, a bookkeeper, governess, housemaid, cook and about 30 stationhands. Today, there are three permanent staff and two casuals. I passed the dining room where Flo Crombie, whom Morton described as a "Rabelaisian woman who was awed by no one", gained even greater notoriety in the late 1950s: "Mount Eba was visited by no less a person than the governor-general, Field Marshal Sir William Slim. With some ceremony, Slim and his party were ushered into the old homestead, with its fortress-like walls to keep the heat out, and thence to the cool and spacious dining room at the centre. They stared in wonderment at the ceiling lined with blue-painted canvas and the vast mahogany dining-room table, capable of seating a couple of dozen. Slim was a distinguished soldier who had led the 14th, so-called "forgotten", Army to a great victory in Burma. But he was very British, patrician and somewhat stiff in manner. He made a valiant attempt to establish some rapport with his hostess: 'Well, well, Mrs Crombie, this is absolutely marvellous, marvellous. Here am I, in the middle of a desert, sitting at comfort at the head of your table.'

" 'My bloody oath you're not!' was Mrs Crombie's stout reply. 'My old man's the one who sits at the head of the table. You're down here.' "

Toss had recently lost two working dogs to the 1080 poison baiting, designed to kill dingoes. A staff member had left baits too close to the homestead, which were then eaten by one of the dogs. That night, when it was locked up, it vomited as it died. The other dog ate the vomit and was also poisoned. Even with new precautions, there is no guarantee that her dogs are safe. "It's very hard to live with this poison bait - even the crows can move it close to the homestead."

Toss also has several rockets but larger relics of this period are a kilometre away - derelict buildings that once contained top-secret radar and computer technology. I could have wandered around all day, looking at unplugged pieces of space-age machinery sitting alongside century-old rabbit traps. What had the young, brilliant rocket scientists sent to Mount Eba thought of the place? I had travelled 1500 kilometres to limber up for the shock of its isolation.

An hour later, I arrived at Billa Kalina Station, the home of the Greenfield family and my meeting place with fence patrolman Keith Beelitz. There was just time for a quick sandwich with Lorraine Greenfield in her immaculate kitchen before Beelitz arrived. I had parked my car in the yard and left the doors and windows open to let some hot air escape. When I returned, I discovered that my thermometer had exploded. A strange blue chemical was all over the passenger's seat after the bulb burst at the 50C mark. Amazingly, within 15 minutes the stain had vanished - I assume it evaporated.

Beelitz and I had to drive only 20 kilometres that day, but the country was so rough it would take at least 10 hours. I grabbed a few essentials and squashed into Beelitz's car, my knee pressed against his rifle.

Beelitz, 59, seemed the least likely-looking boundary rider I had seen. Silvery haired, slightly built, with a gentle face that you would expect to see in an office rather than the desert, he had been a clerk for eight years, a computer engineer for 23, a farmer for 10, and on the Dog Fence for 2 years. This was to be his final run. When we reached the fence, he confessed: "It's the sort of job that destroys your mind, driving along the same bloody fence repetitively every second week."

The wire passed like static lines on a television set. "When I first started, I would be sleeping and see wire meshing flashing past," Beelitz said, without taking his eyes off the fence. "Sometimes, you almost sense a hole before you actually see it. It does become slightly mesmerising - it's like being a cricketing fielder. You are standing there, standing there, and then when the bloody ball does come, you're not watching."

All patrolmen have tales of driving past big holes in blissful ignorance. "People's minds can create meshing where there is none. The fence can make you feel sleepy because it does have a slightly hypnotic effect." Patrolmen call the condition "hole blindness".

The landscape was coated in stones ranging from the size of pebbles to boulders. Beelitz's fuel tank had been reinforced in case a rock gave way and the chassis dropped onto a sharp stone. Tyres get shredded and even the toughest last only a few trips. This section is measured in kilometres per day instead of per hour. He is not paid a wage, but $6.50 per kilometre. His total run is 286 kilometres. If there is work to be done, then he must stop and do it - a significant job considering the numbers of kangaroos and emus that tear holes in the netting. A heavy rain can sweep away kilometres of the Dog Fence and patrolmen must get in as soon as the mud has formed a crust strong enough to carry a vehicle.

The essence of Beelitz's contract is simple - the responsibility for keeping his run dog-proof is his alone. Like all South Australian fence patrolmen, he is a contractor who tendered for his run and must supply his own four-wheel-drive, equipment, tyres, food and communications gear. The only exception to this is patrolmen privately employed by station owners to maintain some sections of the Dog Fence.

The patrolmen often find themselves scapegoats for any perceived inadequacies in the fence structure. Some pastoralists have been known to not tell a patrolman about a hole to test whether it is detected. Beelitz is a sensitive man and these factors have left him with a sense of injustice. He sees maintenance as a strategy to prevent problems arising, whereas the resources of the Dog Fence Board really only allow them to be fixed. "As a computer engineer, you try and keep the computer going 99.9 per cent of the time, and my attitude is that you don't wait for a problem to occur, you nip it in the bud."

Only once in 2 years has he encountered anyone else while on his run along the fence. He has never met the patrolman to the west nor the man to the east. "The chances of meeting the other bloke are one in a million because you are only at the beginning or the end for a couple of minutes."

Everything about that gibber stretch was extraordinary because it was such a pristine environment. One of the striking features of stony deserts is that in most places the top layer of rock is only a few stones deep. Beneath are heavily leached, impoverished sands sucked dry of every last nutrient. The gibber stones themselves looked as though they had been enamelled. I had not expected to see anything beautiful out here, yet, day after day, I had passed through magnificent deserts. I realised that, in 1500 kilometres, I had not seen a dingo or a single sheep within sight of the fence. Beyond the structure was cattle country or wilderness, yet I had not spotted a cow on the fence, either.

This is an edited extract from The Dog Fence, by James Woodford (Text, $30).

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