Thoughts on Being at Adelaide as a Pilot – Dave Rowley
We used to get these parcels from home, thanks to the Bransfield and the Biscoe and this…big heavy parcel arrived for me, and ‘What could this be?’ Opened it up and it was all these curry spices and a curry kit, as I say with a book of instructions and recipes, and this became the hit of the base when I was Duty Cook, well not only when I was duty cook, Allan Wearden who was one of the cooks we had down south. I think he had a go with this, but of course we only had dehydrated and canned meat and that kind of thing, but we did used to supplement it with the odd seal steak when we took seal for the dogs! And it’s a shame not to have a choice bit of steak off the back you know, and at it was gorgeous and the occasional penguin. Again, I think if I was still working for the Survey it would have been a bit, not political really to mention it to anybody in the Survey, but the occasional penguin would get the baseball bat treatment, and end up as a curry!! And so we did, yeah, we had Seal Curry and Penguin Curry and the odd Skua Curry and it was all very nice, but yes this Curry kit went down, it went down a bomb!
Talking about seal actually I was almost physically sick on my first seal chop, but at the end of my service with BAS I could single handed skin a seal in about quarter of an hour, very easy once you’ve got the technique and slit it down middle and get all the steaming guts out, and skin it and chop it up! And we used to feed the dogs as a matter of interest, not that I was a doggy man, I didn’t know a lot about it but we used to feed them two kilos of seal every two days in one meal, a big chunk! And that stopped them getting too fat and while they were spanned out up on the piedmont above the base, when they weren’t working. And yeah, I got pretty good at that.
Continuing from Adelaide 1969…..
We used to have ‘smoko’, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Everybody would pile into the hut, if they weren’t doing anything else obviously, and we’d be sitting around the table and there was one day, it was shortly after I got down there one season, one December, and they had to cut the seal up in the winter because it was frozen solid that you’d use a chainsaw and one of the Fids, I think it was a meteorologist, and he was sitting round the table and said, ‘I can’t get rid of the smell of seal’! And he was going on for weeks about this smell of seal and of course we all stank of it anyway! But he said it was really worrying him, it was overpowering.
Anyway one ‘smoko’ he was sitting there and he did this enormous sneeze and this big lump of blubber landed smack in the middle of the table out of his left nostril!! And it had been stuck up there from this chainsaw from mid-winter!
But anyway, yeah, that was Base life and we all mucked in and there were hairy moments when, I certainly remember one blow it was pitch black and daytime but seemed pitch black anyway, a hell of a hooley, and I just wanted for my own peace of mind to see that the aircraft were still there up on the piedmont.
So the Base Commander, I think it was Ian Willey or no, maybe it was Richy Hesbrook the next base commander, said ‘Come on then let’s go’, and we got in a muskeg and went up in this bloody hooley, nobody wanted to go outside and we got up to the airstrip and sure enough there were the aircraft sitting there on, tied down, on their deadmen and with the snow up to the, sort of halfway up the fuselage really snowed it but at least you knew they weren’t going to go anywhere!
There had been stories of, I think there was one incident where an aircraft got very badly damage during a blow on its tiedown points. Yeah, Ithink base life actually was – from my point of view – absolutely brilliant I just loved it, and Bert Conchie the last RAF pilot that the Survey employed just fitted in beautifully. I mean if all his predecessors had been the same, the same character and…he was a handyman and he fixed things.
He created for instance a melt pool up on the piedmont and laid out this black plastic just to use as cover really for equipment, laid out this black plastic sheeting on the snow and of course it melted in with the heat, the sun, and it became a permanent pool above the base, and he ran this black rubber hose down from the melt pool up on the piedmont down to base and we had permanent running water, in our last couple of seasons down there. Brilliant bloke….
Dave Rowley – BAS Pilot – 1969 to 1973 (with thanks to Allan Weardon, Jack Tolson and the BAOHP)