Some old photos

[willedoo]

Have been going through the process of scanning some old photos into digital form. I don't know what film format these are; Red would know. It's whatever type of compact camera one would have had in 1988.

 

A couple of photos for onetrack as it's sort of over his way in a roundabout fashion. Unloading at Legune Station, 1988. Legune is in the Territory up near the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf but is accessed via Kununarra and then up through the Ord scheme farmland. I remember well that horrible trip. I flew to Alice Springs and picked up the truck and machine and drove it from there all the way to Legune in hot weather with 55mph diffs and no lining inside the cab roof, just bare metal. For anyone who hasn't driven a B model, there's not much room between your head and the roof so it was certainly cooking the melon. To get anywhere soon, I had to push the foot down and with a very heavy throttle spring, the right foot was numb most of the way. One saving grace is that it didn't have 48mph diffs. That would have been too cruel. The plan was to go back to Alice springs and bring the second machine up, but fortunately they found someone else to drop it off at Katherine, so the second trip was only from Legune to Katherine and return.

 

The tractors were stick shift D7Gs with manual angle blade, rippers and scrub canopy, about 27 tonne in weight. The float was a side load float that swivelled sideways and you could pin it solid but nobody ever did. It didn't sway much out on the road unless you really cranked it around a tight bend. Not the sort of thing you do in a B model anyway. To end load it you needed a big bank or ramp as it had full size 20" wheels on the back, and was only done if loading graders. I learned to side load with this same truck and float four years earlier when the leader of our pack led us across a Quinyambie Station track on a trip from Toowoomba to Frome Downs. He wasn't the world's best navigator.

 

The track was passable for single trailers but had too many sandy dune crossings for doubles. Not high dunes, but just raw sand with no clay on the dune crossings. We had a 375 V8 R model Mack with a dozer on a float, and a second hay hauling trailer carrying a grader hooked on behind, and it got stuck on almost every dune for about 140 klm of the trip. He would drive until he got stuck, then I'd pull up behind him in the old B model with the single float and dozer, unload the dozer, then tow him over the dune, reload the dozer, then follow on to the next dune and do it all again. From memory it took about three days and I side loaded and unloaded that machine about a million times. I'd never side loaded before that trip. The old B model with the quad box was good in the sand dune country. You never get stuck for a gear in one of those. Just rattle the sticks round and round and it will always drop into a gear somewhere.

 

At Legune

 

 

The camera catching the blade as it's about to topple over. This is the second machine (with new tracks)

 

Retirement is good; there are some things I miss but I don't miss the flies and getting up at 4am..

[willedoo]

Another scan. William Creek Hotel, 1984. It's probably changed a bit and that pet donkey would be long gone. He used to wander around in the bar; I think he belonged to the pub owners.

 

 

[ClintonB]

I like looking through my dad’s old photos, that same square format, often on that embossed texture type material.

he had a lifetime of travelling the outback shearing from the age of 19. There are shots of a bunch of is mates and him drinking flagons crossing the Nullarbor for the first time, looked dirt still then, in a Hillman hunter sports sedan.

there are shearing sheds in the middle Queensland and many places I remember him describing to me as a child looking through the albums.

i kept these when I lost him as I found them more precious than the physical goods he had. I will sit down and show my grandson through them when he is old enough to understand what they are.

is their anyone on the forum who was a shearer in the 60’s and 70’s or around the big shearing properties back then?

[facthunter]

I Picked Cherries in the 50's at Orange.  and Dug Opals at Lightning Ridge. Nev

[facthunter]

Shearers have Nice soft Hands and need strong Backs. A good one can Make a lot of Money.   Nev

[willedoo]

More scans of old photos. It's great we have access to good, cheap digital photography these days. A lot of these old instamatic and compact cameras were woeful when you look back at it.

 

This is the fastest donkey in the west. The photo was taken out the driver's side window of the woopie doing 40 kph.. The donkey kept that speed up for a kilometre beside us before he tired of the game and veered off, which he is doing in this photo. Until that day I had no idea how much stamina and speed feral donkeys had. The location is near Lake Eyre South.

 

 

[willedoo]

That's east for you, onetrack.

[willedoo]

Here's that dreaded B model Mack again, stuck on a sand hill with a load of fuel drums near Lake Callabonna, 1984.

 

 

[onetrack]

Wow, that sure is, "make your own road country", Willie! Unfortunately, I have only a very small proportion of all the photos I ever took, I lost 98% of them in my house fire in 1982, which still grieves me greatly.

 

Here's a few I managed to save or scrounge off relatives. They're mostly "bogged" photos. Getting bogged was always good reason to bring out the camera.

 

This is one of my D7F tractors around 1974, bogged to the eyeballs, when doing clearing for road widening in the Wheatbelt, East of Kulin W.A., where I lived at the time.

 

 

Another contractor I worked in conjunction with, when doing clearing via chaining, had an Allis-Chalmers HD16. Here's one of his bogged episodes. Mid-Winter in the wheatbelt of course.

Having your 20 foot stick rake attached when you sank to the makers name, wasn't exactly much help, either.

 

 

Edited 4 hours ago by onetrack

[willedoo]

There's something about getting bogged that attracts cameras. This one wasn't my doing. What possessed the driver to think driving on to a salt lake was a good idea, I'll never know. Even in those days it was a serious environmental breach for starters. I got woken up at midnight after they'd been trying to dig it out for hours and given up on the shovel, so had to walk a machine for about eight hours, pull him out and then turn around and walk it back again. 

 

 

[willedoo]

Getting bogged can be connected to stupidity or sometimes to necessity and at other times, just bad luck. I'll own up to this one, just not sure which category it belongs in - necessity I think as a crossing had to be found one way or another. This is crossing the Macumba River in 1984 and it was like wakling through a minefield as you couldn't visibly pick the soft areas from the hard. I found the soft bit. The scary bit was looking at the flood debris in the tree tops on the opposite bank. Taking into account a 10' bank, that would put this machine about 30' under water in a flood like that.

 

Edit: the rippers are upside down as it had previously been ploughing explosive cord into the ground with one central ripper, similar to the way they lay cable.

 

 

Edited 4 hours ago by willedoo

[onetrack]

Oh, yes, salt lakes have claimed many a victim, I've seen a couple where the machine was never recovered.

 

Here's a bogged episode from 1966. You can see my near-new EH Holden ute in the first of the photos. Location, Bulyee, W.A. The brother was driving the D6C, enlarging a "Table" dam. A Table dam is where the wall is positioned about 4-5 metres away from the excavation.

This was a design used from the earliest days of "tank-sinking", when horses, camels, donkeys and even bullocks, were used to pull simple hand-operated scoops and road ploughs, to excavate dams.

The "Table" was made to allow the animals to turn around with the towed equipment.

In later years, when bulldozers appeared, it was a simple enough job to excavate the section where the Table was, to make a "straight-push" dam, and thus considerably enlarge the dam capacity.

 

The brother got caught by a pile of accumulated sand in the front corner of the dam, washed in over many years of filling up. But the accumulated sand pile sat on a layer of greasy, muddy clay.

So when he drove onto the sand pile, the entire pile "took off" down into the deep mud in the middle of the dam, sliding intact on the underlying greasy mud - so it carried the D6C out into the main mud-filled area, then broke up, and dropped the D6C "right into the sh**".

 

He was on hard bottom, but couldn't climb out, so local farmers arrived with their "big tractors" of the day - little Massey Fergusons! We even had a little International BTD-6 dozer helping - but they couldn't even get the D6C even halfway up the dam bank!

So then the Hills Bros rolled up with their "big hitter" tractor - a tandem International A-554! Two A-554's coupled together without front axles, and boasting a massive 110HP!!

 

The tandem A-554's made short work of dragging the D6C out - just by itself! The other tractors were still hooked on at the same time, but got left behind! Unfortunately, the photos of the A-554's and BTD-6 in action were amongst those lost - but the BTD-6 can be seen at rear in the second photo.

 

The last two photos are of another bogging event with the D6C, when extending another dam. A stunt we used to use regularly when deeply bogged, was cutting a decent-sized log from any nearby whitegum, generally about 250mm in diameter and about 3M long - then digging down at the rear of the tractor (easier access at the rear), then dropping the log into the dug-out area, then tying the log to the tracks using old 1/2" (12.7mm) steel wire rope.

Once the log re-appeared at the front of the tractor, you'd cut the SWR with a few accurate blows with a sledgehammer, where it sat across a grouser (the rib on the track shoes), and the log would then fall away.

 

We would keep short lengths of SWR on hand for de-bogging missions where a log tied on was needed. Usually, just one log was all that was required. Two logs required, was a REAL bog disaster!

 

Edited 4 hours ago by onetrack

[willedoo]

Great photos onetrack. Flash gear in it's time but we're probably talking about collector's items now. I can remember hauling out sugar cane with one of those Massey 35 tractors with the little Perkins, but if you told someone in the game nowdays they'd think you'd gone loopy. Those D7Gs we had look old in the photos now, but back then they were the latest and greatest. All good old tractors.

 

Here's another old beast we had back in 1982, a D8H 22A. I've got an idea they were built or assembled in Scotland, but I could be wrong.

 

 

[onetrack]

Incidentally, the brother has only recently found this D6C, the very first Cat, and the first new bulldozer we ever bought (out of about a dozen dozers in total), and it belongs to an old prospector in the W.A. Goldfields, and it's still fully operational!

It's probably done around 50,000 or 60,000 hours by now. We bought this tractor new in November 1966, and sold it in 1972 (traded on a new D7F), and it had done over 13,000 hrs, back in 1972.

[onetrack]

Yes, the 22A prefix D8H's were built in the U.K., from 1959. They were the early "low HP" D8H's, rated at 235 engine HP, later on the mid-60's they were upgraded to 270 engine HP.

[red750]

Interesting photos Willie. I played around with a couple of them. Firstly, the donkey. I clicked on the image to enlarge it a but, then used the Windows Snipping tool copy just that part of the photo. In the preview window of the snip, I clicked on the option "Open in MS Paint". I could then slide the magnification slider until the image just started to pixilate. I took another snip of the enlargement and saved it. Then I closed Paint and Snipping Tool. Click on this image ti see the final result. This is the easiest method to enlarge small objects in a photo.

 

 

Then I took the bogged dozer and played with the brightness, exposure, contrast, and took out a little of the red colour cast.

 

[willedoo]

2 minutes ago, red750 said:

Then I took the bogged dozer and played with the brightness, exposure, contrast, and took out a little of the red colour cast.

Once lightened, I had to have a good look to make sure I wasn't asleep in there.

[willedoo]

This one is Macumba Station in 1984. That was a big year for work. I did a lot of 10 week on/ 2 week off hitches that year and one bloke I knew spent six months straight in the field without a break. Not that he did much work anyway, but it's still a long time away. We started the year working at Lake Frome, then up around Lake Callabonna, over to Lake Eyre South, then at Macumba up the west side of Lake Eyre, then finished the year off around the top of Lake Eyre and north of there towards Kalamurina.

 

 

[willedoo]

16 minutes ago, red750 said:

Firstly, the donkey. I clicked on the image to enlarge it a but, then used the Windows Snipping tool copy just that part of the photo. In the preview window of the snip, I clicked on the option "Open in MS Paint". I could then slide the magnification slider until the image just started to pixilate. I took another snip of the enlargement and saved it. Then I closed Paint and Snipping Tool. Click on this image ti see the final result. This is the easiest method to enlarge small objects in a photo.

I use Paint a lot to resize photos down in size; I find it really easy to do in Paint.

[willedoo]

How all this scanning started was that an old close mate I'd known since 1971 passed away recently and I've been looking for photos of him from the old days to scan and forward on to his daughters. Scanning old photos is a bit like letting the genie out of the bottle, then down the rabbit hole you go.