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STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
OH 834/29
Full transcript of an interview with
TREVOR ROGERS
01 June & 16 August 2007
by Tony Rogers
for the
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY ORAL HISTORY
PROJECT
Access for research: Unrestricted Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study
Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library
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OH 834/29 TREVOR ROGERS
NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was donated to the State Library. It was not created by the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection and does not necessarily conform to the Somerville Collection's policies for transcription. Readers of this oral history transcript should bear in mind that it is a record of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The State Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview, nor for the views expressed therein. As with any historical source, these are for the reader to judge. This transcript had not been proofread prior to donation to the State Library and has not yet been proofread since. Researchers are cautioned not to accept the spelling of proper names and unusual words and can expect to find typographical errors as well.
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AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY
History Unit
Interview with
Trevor Rogers
Interviewer
Tony Rogers
1 June 2007 at Kent Town SA
Interview number: 07030
The History Unit is a volunteer group of experienced researchers and writers assisting the Bureau of Meteorology
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Interview with Trevor Rogers at Kent Town on 1 June 2007
Interviewer: Tony Rogers
Interview number: 07030rogers
Tony Rogers This is Tony Rogers at Kent Town talking with Trevor Rogers on the first
of June 2007as part of the centenary project of the Bureau of Meteorology. Thanks,
Trev, for agreeing to talk to us. I’ll give you a transcript and a cd of what we’ve
talked about and you can make any corrections that you want to. Can you tell me a
little bit, to start off with, about how you started with the Bureau because you tell me
you’ve been here a long time?
Trevor Rogers It’s a bit of a story in itself, I guess. I may be one of those weird sort of
people but I joined the Bureau when I was actually living in Sydney. I’d been in
Sydney and I was doing a bit of oil painting at the time and I was actually working
with Qantas and so that actually built steadily on the scientific approach which I had
adopted. A wonderful old gentleman said to me one day. I was actually living with his
son. I told him, I said: Gee, I’ve applied for a job with the Bureau of Meteorology, do
you know much about them? The guy said: No, but being a professor of geography at
Sydney University, I had the odd conversation with them. As a matter of fact there
was a fellow here, unfortunately he has passed on a couple of years ago, a fellow by
the name of John Armstrong. John Armstrong was the meteorologist here and he
knew the professor, John Hines, quite well. Anyway, the prof said to me: you can’t go
wrong, they’re pretty good to work for, but then profs have been wrong. He was a
very interesting bloke and I just signed up there and then. Then I got a letter from
them and they said you’d better come down to Melbourne being in Sydney at the
time. I knew all the training that they did at that time, which was a combination of
electronics type training and the weather type training as well, had to be done in
Melbourne. So it was goodbye to Sydney and off down to Melbourne.
Tony Rogers When was this?
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Trevor Rogers That would have been ’65 because I finished my training in Melbourne
around about August or September ’66. We graduated as people called Radio
observers which was a bit of a funny terminology, I guess, in those days. What used
to happen then was, you not only did the observing side of things, plotting charts, you
actually did all the synoptic observations, you did sonde flights and did the radar
flights, but on top of that, we actually had to maintain and run the equipment itself.
That necessitated us doing a little bit of a longer course than what the observing
people did at that particular time and we came out as so-called radio observers
whereas the other people came out being listed as weather observers. Some of the
gear that we used to work on then was pretty antiquated, certainly it didn’t bear any
remote resemblance to what it is actually now. Once again, I suppose, having been in
the establishment for 42 years and being a trained technician before I actually joined
the Bureau, I was dabbling in things like valves because transistors were never ever
heard of, or basically transistors had just started coming in. So when we got to the
Bureau we went backwards for a bit because the Bureau unfortunately, at that stage,
never had any transistorized equipment, it was all old valve equipment and a lot of it
was relics of the Royal Australian Navy, and a lot of it was 1942 to 1948 vintage
radar, 277 radar which was the old marine radar. It was a horrifying machine. It had
parts with electronics in it and it also had things like air relays so you were working
with compressed air as well as electronics at the same time and you often thought how
on earth can we get any information out of anything like this. At that time the Bureau
had a really good little training school going. They never had a lot of technical people,
so-called, and the technical people that they had, some of them were ex-RAN, and
amazingly enough at that particular time, I think the Bureau was going through a
phase where they were finding it incredibly difficult to recruit people in Australia.
What they did was run an overseas recruitment campaign, not for the so-called
weather observer people, but for the radio observer people because at that time there
was a lot of people who were at a bit of a loose end in Britain because lot of the
aircraft manufacturing industries, a lot of the radar type industry, hadn't really got
going. I always remember there was an advert in the paper, I think it was the
Melbourne Herald, and it was a half column advert advertising for these people in the
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UK, what they were being paid etc. etc. In the course I happened to be on there were
actually six people came straight out from the UK. There were eight of us on the
course, there were only two Australians, the rest were people who were brought out
from Britain to fill those positions that they couldn't fill from Australian resources at
that particular point in time. At the same time, I guess you realize, the Navy was
burgeoning out because they had all these new resources. The RAAF was scooping up
people and the poor old Bureau found it difficult. Anyway, the training course went
on for nearly eight months because we had to do all the extra training. at the end of
that we were posted out. We really didn't have much of a say in it because prior to us
coming through the ranks people did a quick course and then they were posted out to
all these different stations, basically the radar stations, the bigger stations around
Australia. When you look back on it, you think Gee whiz, people say it's all go now,
well, quite honestly, it was all go then, probably more so then because to a lot of
people that was new technology, technologies that they had never used for launching
weather balloons before and certainly in the modes of weather watch which was a
little bit on an unthinkable phase at the point in time.
Tony Rogers What do you mean by unthinkable?
Trevor Rogers Well, there were some vagaries around where they thought they might
have been able to use radar for a weather watch facility. No-one was really on top of
it and it was something they'd developed out of the material resources they had at that
point in time. The forerunner of modern day weather watch was in actual fact a radar
called a 277, which was a marine radar. It had some pretty rudimentary scanning
devices and things in it and the signals from it were not good. Operators had to shuffle
a lot of hand wheels around to get what they were actually looking at and then, and
only then, when they considered that they had it right, they actually took a photograph
of what they were looking at. The photographs were put on fax machines, or delivered
by hand wherever they had to go. I guess that was the first look at weather watch,
from the 277 radar.
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Tony Rogers Could I ask you a question about what you just said a little earlier. You
said you were on the course with six people from the UK as well as two Australians.
Were they a success, these imports?
Trevor Rogers Yes, they were all bar except one and one, I think, was a bit like a lost
sheep. He'd been through a lot in England and just couldn't pick up the transition
coming from the UK to Australia even though houses were basically found for them
and if they didn't want it they could find something else. Unfortunately, after about
five or six years, a couple of the other who were in that particular group, they dropped
out too. They didn't feel it was their line of work. The other interesting thing that
comes into it, is that's where people suddenly thought, Gee, now we've done this,
we've got to start using that knowledge and these people are going to post us to
somewhere where there might not be t he glamour and the glitter. One guy came from
Manchester and I suppose was quite used to the Manchester environment and ended
up going to Longreach in Queensland. Forty years ago that was a big step for anyone
in that situation. And that was true for a lot of people around that time. A lot of us
didn't think about it, we just got on with the job, but the people who came into the
country to do it, they did find it a bit hard because they'd left all their friends, relatives
and those sorts of things at home; The majority of them got over it and they were
good value, but unfortunately at that stage they weren't young people either, so their
lifetime in the Bureau was short, with the exception of one character, whose name
was Dave Granger, and everyone used to call him Grave Danger for obvious reasons
because we were always fiddling with EHT bits and pieces which you could get
zapped by at any time. Dave was very good value. Some of the others probably had a
life of about twenty years in the Bureau. Dave was a young guy. I think that's why he
lasted so long.
Tony Rogers Is he still around?
Trevor Rogers Yes, he retired - I reckon it would have been ten years ago Dave retired
in Victoria. It was always funny because we used to get these bits of paper flying
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around the place with Dave's name on the bottom and every time something came up
that required a bit of an outside voice, Dave would be there to give his comments. as a
matter of fact, he sent out a couple of newspaper clippings about four years ago. He
had obviously been looking at a bit of history himself and sent it across. It was the
advert that actually came out of the paper. I've got a copy somewhere myself but I just
haven't been able to put my hands on it. It's very interesting to read. The other thing
that was interesting to read then, and it's probably why people kept out of it, was the
wages people were getting. They were not great considering what they had to put up
with. That may have put people off to a certain extent too. Oh no, it was interesting
times and they were good times. Sure you had to take bad with the good, but that was
life and you got on with it. You felt that you had a significant contribution to m ake if
you could get somewhere and develop thing. At that stage the Bureau was susceptible
to people putting there ideas in and if they were tangible they would seriously
consider them. That was a good thing that existed then too. I guess that still exists
even today. People are encouraged to their ideas in. Coming from an engineering
background, we still do it today. I think that’s what makes the job so intriguing to a
lot of people, especially young people that we get now. But time changes. We know
that. Basically, I guess that is a bit about the early stuff.
Tony Rogers Could I ask you – I don’t know if you have any opinion on this –at the end
of the second world war, and you came in twenty years after the second world war,
you had a lot of people who had been subsumed into the RAAF during the war,
because that’s what happened to meteorologists. They came out again and became a
part of the civilian one. You’ve got a carry-over from the wartime approach, or the
wartime atmosphere, because a lot of people had been involved then, but by twenty
years later, you might say you had a new guard coming in, was that apparent or am I
just putting things into what I’ve heard?
Trevor Rogers No, no. That was quite apparent to a certain extent. It wasn’t there right
from the word go, but I think that came from the caliber of the people that the Bureau
employed at that stage, because in our situation we were all basically qualified
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technicians. There were a couple of the British guys, they were army and two air force
people and the rest were naval, but there were very very few people other than those
sort of categories until I’d been in about five years and it did change. It changed quite
quickly and that was when the Bureau went through a phase of really developing their
own training school. They had a very good training school, but at that stage it was
basically converting people. People were qualified technicians before they came in
and their objective was to convert them onto the equipment that the Bureau was
running at that time. And that has never changed. That philosophy has never changed.
Even today young lads who come in have got to have an associate diploma in
electronic engineering, then they go to Melbourne and they learn all the latest radar
techniques, digital communications, remote sensing to a certain extent, so the whole
plethora of things is really opened up for them. I think that’s what makes it so
interesting for them. The other very interesting thing is the Bureau, voer those years,
has developed a good camaraderie between people because you’re all there for a
specific purpose. If I’ve got a problem or you’ve got a problem, you can discuss itr
with people on the same level that you’re at. I think was a great thing that the Bureau
encouraged, whereas prior to that, when the first people came through who had been
involved in the war effort, the camaraderie was probably there, but not to the extent it
was a little bit later. I guess that might have been that people had had enough by then
and this was something new that obviously the people coming in had never
experienced before and they found something, which really suited them. The system
worked really well. That’s despite having to get on tramcars and go out to Keeler or
the training school at Bowes Avenue out there, which is interesting within itself. It
didn’t bother people. If you were out in the mud or the rain or whatever, you were
there for a purpose an the purpose was to keep going and learn as much as you could.
about it because you knew, even in the nineteen-sixties when I first joined,
communications wee not all that they should have been. Certainly there were no
mobile telephones. Fax machines, Telstra had them but there again it wasn’t until
about probably ’72 or ’73 that the Bureau took them over from Telstra or the GPO at
that time. There was a very interesting guy in Melbourne who took that on off his
oww bat. He developed the fax aspect of communications in the Bureau and he was a
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terrific guy. Then, as techs, everyone had to come in, because we were out at
Bullamakanka – we were out at all the places that you’d like to name. You could pick
up a map and see where the Bureau is now and you can see that thirty years ago
communications would not, by any stroke of the imagination have been what they are
today. They were pretty interesting times. I can remember when I had to wake the
bloke up in the telephone exchange. If I was called out to fix something in the early
hours of the morning before the flight the following morning and people knew that
the gear was not operating, I’d have to come out and fix the radar at all hours of the
night and day. If you wanted to ring anyone in Melbourne or get something from
Perth, you had to wake up the bloke in the telephone exchange first because it was all
party line stuff and he’d have to put the call in for you. It was long distance calling. It
was trying but you got over that. You managed This is the terrific thing. You can go
through life without realizing it’s happening to you, but I’ve seen a lot of people come
along and they’ve been in a situation where they’ve doubted their own ability, but the
one thing in the early days that the Bureau depended on was people’s ability to think
for themselves and fix things for themselves. It wasn’t like going to the corner shop or
down to J-Car or Dick Smiths to buy bits and pieces. You might have been two
thousand kilometers away, especially up in the Pacific islands or, in New Guinea it
was even worse. In Antarctica it wasn’t so bad because you had a big cupboard you
went to and you opened the cupboard and all these things fell out. For a while people
were like kids in lolly shops.
Tony Rogers Something I meant to ask. You said you joined the Bureau in ’65, so you
would have been about 23 then. Where did you get your initial training before you
went to the Bureau? I did my initial training with weapons research here in Salisbury.
I then went from weapons research to the then GPO as a technician. It quickly
changed the name to the PMG. I used to travel the countryside then with a group of
people. We had a radiotelephone division and they were based down here at Caulfield
Avenue, down at Edwardstown. We used to scoot all round the place and do surveys
and hook up microwave links, the early microwave stuff. I started in Adelaide.
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Tony Rogers You grew up in Adelaide?
Trevor Rogers Yes I grew up in Adelaide, but the horizons had to be changed as far as I
was concerned. I was always a bit of an adventurer and I wanted to get out and about.
I went from being here in Adelaide and traveling through South Australia and went to
Sydney and signed up with Qantas. I was actually in ground engineering. That was
really interesting. We used to do all the early flight computing stuff on 707s and
Lockheed Electra aircraft. You’ll have to excuse the wry smile but one of the groups
we used to do maintenance for were Garuda who unfortunately had that big accident.
It was all get up and go. We used to work shift work there and then I joined a
company, you may have heard of them. They used to produce a lot of electronic
components and loudspeakers and radios. The old Rola and I joined them as a sales
rep in New South Wales. It was my job to go around to all the electronics companies
and see if I could flog off all these electronic components. It was interesting because I
think that’s where you developed. It wasn’t an intentional thing to do but you used to
be able to size up situations very very quickly because if you didn’t and you were
selling I don’t know how many thousand dollars worth of components to the big
manufacturers, EMI and the Ferris Radio people out at Kerrnindale, you weren’t in
the race. I was probably too honest for their requirements because one thing used to
really annoy me. Every Monday morning you’d be in a different purchasing officer’s
little environment and you’d have you little briefcase under your arm and you knew
that over there the guy came from Manufacturers Special Components and you had to
sell you components and all these other people sitting there. I used to think who’d be
telling the white lies that morning. I couldn’t do that because I thought that was
wrong. I’ve never been able to do that with people and I’ve not intention to do that.
Tony Rogers So joining the Bureau allowed you to be honest.
Trevor Rogers Yeah and I think that was a great thing. The reason I say that is that I
had depend on my own resources to a certain extent. I had to make my own opinions
and I had to very honest with people. If I rang you up two thousand kilometers away
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and I said I had some funny problem on my radar here, dah de dah de dah... If you’re
not honest with the person at the other end, then the person at the other end finds it
incredibly difficult to try and nut out and help you with you r problem. I guess that’s
where a lot of it came from too.
Tony Rogers So when you graduated from Melbourne, where did they send you?
Trevor Rogers My first posting was down to Hobart and it was the fright of a bloody
lifetime.
Tony Rogers Why?
Trevor Rogers Well, it was of the first times since leaving Qantas that I’d been on shift
work. I was the only one there on shift work. There was no one else there for miles
around except the flight service bloke who was in a tower about a kilometer and a half
away and a rust old telephone. And that was all you had and you had to get in there,
start the radar up, get it working properly, then do the early morning, the three o’clock
in the morning, balloon flights and stuff like that. And always remember there was an
instance down there which frightened the bloody daylights out of me. I was there at 2
o’clock one morning and went to start the radar up and it was finding it very difficult
to start up, the alternator and stuff. Then I noticed the lights in the building were
going on and off. I thought there must be a power surge somewhere. The next thing
the air service bloke phoned me up on this rusty old telephone and said, “Are you
having trouble over there with your power?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Well, look
across the paddock at what’s coming across the paddock.” It was the first time that I
had ever seen ball lightning. The ball lightning had come and conked out the power
line. They were wooden poles with wooden cross arms and the first pole it hit, there
was one hell of a bang and the next thing this cross arm was burning. this white ball,
about this big, was coming down the power lines.
Tony Rogers About a metre across?
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Trevor Rogers Yeah. I thought this is something wrong here. So I just shut everything
down and it hit another pole, which was about 150 metres out from the building.
There was one hell of a bang and it disappeared. I thought what have I just witnessed.
I’ve got to be seeing things. I rang the guy back up in the tower and I said, “Did you
see that?” He said, “Of course I saw it, you clown. I phoned you up so you could look
at it. I said, “What was it?” “No idea!” Anyway, I went from Hobart, I was there for
around about 4 or 5 months, I reckon, and I came quickly back here to Adelaide.
Things were all go when I got to Adelaide. I was the fourth person here in Adelaide
because at that stage there was person at Mount Gambier. There was also another
person posted to Woomera. There were about two groups ahead of me when my
group came through. We plodded on here. It was a good environment to work in.
When you look at things now you wonder how on earth we got the work done. We
were basically working on kitchen tables down there at the West Terrace office. We
had two little rooms, right down the back of the offices at West Terrace that we had to
do all the technical work in when we weren’t out in the field. We had to fix these big
fax machines. The interesting thing was we had to bring these fax machines from
Western Offices, where the Bureau was also established. They had their forecasting
centre and their observational section in Western Offices. Now Western Offices
would have been two hundred metres across the road from the West Terrace corner.
We used to have to wheel these fax machines. Rain, hail or shine across the road and
hope that you were fast enough because the trolleys that we had these darn things on
were basically homemade things. Dodge in and out of the traffic and say to the
forecaster in Western Offices, “Here’s your fax machine. It might be a bit wet so
don’t turn it on for ten minutes. Just let it dry out.” At that time I never got down to
Adelaide airport very much because the other two guys used to go down to the airport
a fair bit and do that. Then I went up to Broome and that was absolutely horrifying.
Someone walked in one day and they said, oh, your next posting is Broome.”
“Pardon, where’s Broome?” “It’s up on the Western Australian coast.” I’d married by
then, but we didn’t have any kids or anything so we went up to Broome. My wife and
I were the young kids on the block, if you like. It was terribly cliquey place. It was
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amazing. At that stage I’d never walked into an atmosphere like it. It was as though,
because you were young, people looked down at you. What could you know? You’re
the young whippersnapper. You wouldn’t have too many clues. Once you got over
that it wasn’t too bad. The three other people were up there on the station, three
observers and I was the radio observer. I had to look after all the electronic stuff and
do half the weather observations and do a whole sequence of monthly returns. You
hear all these funny stories about people sleeping on shifts and all the rest of it. Well,
I thought this is not for me so it was then, while I was at Broome, that I enrolled in
Outreach, which is the arm of the University of Western Australia and I started doing
Geology because I was in a position that during my travels I used to go up to Derby
from Broome and I used to go out to Halls Creek from Broome because my
maintenance took me out there to fix all the gear out there. While other people were
doing their own things, I used to do a lot of night time study when I was on shift work
and not doing other things. Whenever I went across to Halls Creek I always used to
spend nearly a week there by the time I went through all the equipment, got it
calibrated and all the rest of it. They had a radar, they had solar radiation, they had
telemetry stuff. So there was a fair bit of equipment around. I’d do eight or nine hours
most days because I didn’t want to be there longer than I had to, I used to go out and
see the geologist at Pickings Mather who was really starting to open up the
Kimberleys at that time, mining. There was one thing that the outreach of the uni
could neve understand. I never ever told them until late in the piece either, because
they used to say: we can’t understand how you are doing this because you’ve never
attended one of our field weekends. I said: how can I. I’m up in Broome. I can’t just
fly down for a field weekend at Kalamunda or somewhere like that. They nearly fell
over backwards when I told them what I had been doing because I had my own
samples and everything that I’d developed through the cooperation of the young
geologists at Pickings Mather. Of course there was no TV in those days. All you had
was a bit of music to listen to, but that didn’t bother me. There’s always something at
most of these places that you can do and some of them are absolutely incredible and
some of the people that you meet are absolutely amazing. I think I may have
mentioned yesterday to you about Ernie Bridge. Now Ernie Bridge was a butcher in a
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side street of Oodnadatta. I used to get a sugar bag of meat whenever I went across
there because I used to fly. I used to fly there with MMA, and that’s another
interesting story in itself.
Tony Rogers What’s MMA?
Trevor Rogers MacRobertson Miller Airlines. They were the forerunners of Ansett and
TAA going up and down the coast. Ernie was a terrific chap. He as an Aboriginal and
he used to supply most of the people up and around Halls Creek with their meat. They
always said he was one of the biggest cattle rustlers in the Kimberleys, old Ernie. But
Ernie was one of those characters who was a great thinker and I used to sit down
sometimes for hours on end of a night-time, talking with Ernie and having a beer.
Ernie would be telling you all his expectations of life and what he’d been doing. The
interesting thing with Ernie, and this is what makes him such an interesting character,
was he actually ended up being the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Charles
Court government. That was a few years down the track and I hadn’t seen Ernie for
15 years, but I knew he was working at things and everyone took notice of Ernie, until
I bumped into him at Alice Springs airport. I said: how are you going, Ernie. You
don’t remember me, do you? He said: it’s funny you know. Your face is familiar. I
said: where did you remember me from? He said: Halls Creek. I said: you’ve got a
good memory because you were a butcher there, weren’t you? He said: how do you
know that? I said: because I’m the guy who used to buy your meat by the sugar bag
full. He was a tremendous bloke and I sued to always enjoy the trips to Halls Creek.
Mind you it took you away from your home environment, but you lived with it
because it was still, not engrained in you, but you still had a sense of being proud that
you were really doing something, really achieving something, and you were achieving
something on your own. Sure there were always people who would give you a hand. I
mentioned MacRobertson Miller Airlines because I used to fly from Broome. They
used to do a milk run through the Kimberleys. They used to go from Broome to
Derby, Fitzroy Crossing, Gibb River, Baralgo, Victoria River Downs, all the big
places. And if you've done much reading up there, you will also know that it was also
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the home of the Duracks. Now MMA was started by a group of people, and I always
remember, I was a young bloke then and I used to go to toe beach a lot. It was only a
kilometre and a half across from the back of the airport where the met off ice used to
be. Early mornings, Horrie Miller would be out there. Horrie Miller was the husband
of Mary Durack, the author who wrote Kings in Grass Castles and things like that.
Well, Horrie was always out at the beach playing golf and the other interesting thing
about Horrie was that he used to have Australia's only operational Wackett aeroplane
in a hangar. It was an Australian single engine aeroplane. the were two of them. One
series of single engine aircraft was called Wirraways and the others were Wacketts.
And Horrie had one of these things in a hangar there because of his affiliations with
MMA and whenever he was going to start one of these things up, Horrie would say:
I'm going it up today, do you want to come and see it? So you'd go out there. He'd
say: Open all the doors first. So you'd open up and there would be a cloud of bloody
smoke, like you wouldn't believe, and this thing would start up and Horrie would be
sitting in the seat there because he couldn't fly, he was too elderly to fly at that stage.
He was a marvellous fellow. He used to tell us all these stories about his early days.
Amazingly enough, what reminded me about that story was that last night ABC had a
story where they mentioned some of foundation members starting up these little
airlines, but they neve mentioned Horrie Miller and I was a bit put out because they
never mentioned his name. To supplement incomes from the Met, because the wages
weren't great. From memory, back then wages were about $4000.00 a year, and they
couldn't get a lot of people to do lots of jobs, so I actually also had a small BP
refuelling agency and I used to refuel a lot of planes that would come through doing
aerial surveys and things like that and they'd always come in to the Bureau to check
up on what the weather situation was up through the Northwest and things like that.
Later on it was the helicopter pilots because at that stage they were doing one of the
longest runs in the world. They were going from Broome, Rowley Shoals, Browse
Island, Ashmore and back. It was a bit of a feat. They were a good group of people
too. We used to have a bit to do with lighthouse keepers through the Met. We
certainly used to have a bit to do with the lighthouse keeper at Cape Leveque, which
is about 120 km north of Broome. They were good days in Broome and they were still
17
the days when you could come in and all your goods, seventy per cent of your good,
were actually delivered by ship. We used to have to put an order in from the big
companies in Perth and they would ship your stuff in what they called D-E boats
which were the freight ships going up and down the coast or the K boats which
carried the odd one or two people as well. We used to have to line up on the Broome
jetty, this was the new Broome jetty because we saw the last of the old Broome jetty
while we were there. I've got some photographs of that too somewhere. That was
intriguing because the boats would come in on a king tide, a thirty foot tide, and then
the boats would be left sitting on the sand just tied up to the wooden wharf. You've
probably seen pictures of that in schoolbooks and things, but that actually used to
happen and the maintenance people on the boats would go along and scrape barnacles
off all the rest of it. The Broome days were very very good.
Tony Rogers How long were you there.
Trevor Rogers I was there for nearly three and a half years in Broome.
Tony Rogers You said you ran a little BP agency. Did the Bureau approve of this?
Trevor Rogers Not really.
Tony Rogers Did they know about it?
Trevor Rogers Yes, and the reason why thyme knew about it was that I took over from
one of the guys who was already running it and the other fellow who was there. He
had the big one. He had the Mobil agency and that used to do all the Vickers
Viscounts that were flying up and down at that stage and the F27s, the Focker
Friendships. It was interesting. Someone just said to me one day: Do you want
something extra? I said: What's that? They said: Do you want to take over the BP
refuelling? One of the reasons that happened was that there was never a time that
18
there wasn't someone in the Met office, twenty-four hours a day. If a plane came in,
you were there and you could zip over for half an hour.
Tony Rogers The Bureau knew it happened, didn't really approve, but didn't object to it?
Trevor Rogers They never objected to it.
Tony Rogers There seem to be a number of things like that which used to happen. I'm
wondering whether the Bureau closed their eyes to it or just thought it was inevitable.
Trevor Rogers I think the attitude was that if you didn't tell too many people about it,
no-one would worry about it and you were so far away from real life situations that
you just went and did it because there wasn't anyone else in the town that was going
to do it and at one stage I was actually helping the ABC out. I used to be the Broome
correspondent with the ABC.
Tony Rogers How many people in Broome at that time?
Trevor Rogers Golly gosh, there would have been probably about 300 and pearling was
going like crazy. It was just at the beginning when Kirri Bay Pearl was first started up
there pearling and round at Port Keats, up from Darwin. Anyway, the Kirri Pearl used
to run radars on their boats. They could never get people to do the work on them, and
so, being a qualified radio tech I first bit my teeth on Farrino radar there. They'd ring
up when they came when they came in that they'd got a crook radar. "I can't get there
this afternoon, I'm on shift, so could I do it tomorrow morning before I go on the
afternoon shift?" No problem. They'd take you out to the boat, you'd fix the problems.
Normally they weren't really difficult. It was just that a bit of abuse used to occur now
and again and they were pretty easy problems to fix. That saved the company an
awful lot of money because they would have to fly someone up from Perth, which
could have taken two days, to get someone to do the job. I guess this was another
facet. You mentioned just a minute ago that you wondered what the Bureau thought.
19
Never once did I receive any cash payment for doing those jobs. I used to say nothing,
but you could almost guarantee that within one or two days of doing it that there'd be
this huge bag of prawns hanging on the back door, or a couple of enormous fish or, if
you could get three or four days off, "Do you want to come up to Port Keats." I'd say
that no I couldn't do that because at that stage my wife was actually running the out-
patients department at the Broome District Hospital. I couldn't just race off and leave
her. We were like ships in the night., She was on shift work, I was on shift work. One
would be home and one would be asleep, so you'd have to pussyfoot around a bit. The
house that we lived in, in Broome. Gee whiz people complain about houses now,
that's amazing! We only had half a dozen windows in the house with glass in them,
the others were completely open and, listen to this one, three of the windows, the
window in the end of the veranda, the window in the storeroom, and the kitchen
window over the kitchen sink, were lead. They were lead fly wire when we first went
there. That shows you how old the houses were. You never thought twice about it. It
was a house, it was a roof over your head, you could come and go as you pleased, so
no one really complained about it. I think I probably got the raw deal out of the four
houses that the Bureau had there. I got the oldest one, but it didn't bother us. It was
roomy, there was no air-conditioning, you just had ceiling fans.
Tony Rogers How did you wife find it? She went there because you did, not because she
had a job.
Trevor Rogers She was already a trained sister, nursing sister, and it was a bit of a
challenge for her. She was working down here at Ashford at the time and when I
came home in the afternoon and said, "Do want the good news or the bad news?", she
said, "Give us the good news first." "OK, we'll be here for tea tonight but, in four or
five days time, we're shift in real quick." It was about a week. She adapted to that, you
had to. there was none of this you're-hard-done-by like you get in a lot of situations
now. Or someone owes you something. That sort of situation never existed. You just
went there and you got on with it. We were there for three and a half years.
20
Tony Rogers Your wife liked it?
Trevor Rogers Yeah, yeah.
Tony Rogers She got a job there?
Trevor Rogers She was a trained sister. They lapped her up. They couldn't get good
people. It was quite amazing. The characters you meet. I tend not to dwell on them
because they're just so picturesque in the back of my mind. If you can remember those
people I think it's better than taking photographic pictures. One character I had a lot to
do with up there and so did my wife because he used to go to the hospital a lot. This
guy was a courier during the war. His name was Collinson. I can't remember what his
first name was. He said to my wife at the hospital. He heard what I did and she said,
"Well, he does everything." Anyway, he said he wanted a fence put up because he
said the kids were pinching his watermelons he had growing. So she said, "Would you
go round and see him?" I said, "Yeah, I'll go round and see him." I went round to see
him and he put the proposal to me, "Could you help me out with the fence?" I said,
"Look, I'll willingly do that for you. You get the materials organised and I'll come
around." He had callipers on his arms and he couldn’t belt things and wire things up.
So I did it and thought nothing about it. He was right on this little escarpment that
came down over Roebuck Bay and we used to sit there and eat his own goats' milk
cheese and drink his own homemade wine. This was enough reward for me because I
always thought he was such a marvellous bloke. I got quite attached to the old fellow.
He said to me, "You don't want any money." I said, "No, I'm not interested in your
money. The association we've had has been good enough." He said, "Right, you won't
take any money. It's been good. Here's a phone number. Ring this up." I had this
phone number for maybe three or four weeks and eventually I rang it up. It was
stockbrokers in Perth. I can't remember their name now. I've got it at home
somewhere. The guy said, "Oh, how is the old bugger going?" I thought they
obviously know him and I said, "Great, he's good. I've just put a fence up round his
place." "Oh, are you the bloke he's talking about." "He's mentioned me, has he?"
21
"Mate, he's really talked about things." I said, "Good on him, it's been good." The last
year we were there I kept going by the old fellow's place and there was always the
bank manager's car there. Then it stopped and I thought, "What's happened?" To cut a
long story short, the old fellow had dies and it was two weeks before someone found
him. He was at that stage the biggest shareholder, the biggest private shareholder, in
BHP, Western Mining and another crowd called Glass Containers who became part of
ACI and a few other people. A marvellous fellow and, six months after that, we left
and went down to Perth. It was all hustle and bustle down in Perth because it was
absolutely new. They had some more interesting equipment, they had some gear
down there they called Spherics. Spherics used to be a triangulation network that the
Bureau set up to do thunderstorm research. We used on that. We used to work on the
stuff at Guildford, which was Perth airport at that stage, and we used to have a
number of other maintenance runs. I had a maintenance run which took me from Perth
up to Geraldton and back. From Perth to Kalgoorlie, Esperance, Albany and back
home. That was a two-week trip. So you'd be away for two weeks fixing all the gear
up. The Bureau didn't give you a lot of encouragement because their attitude was -
they'd changed their attitude to a certain extent at that stage. I guess change is going
on all the time. You weren't allowed to work on Sundays. Sundays you couldn't work
at all. The then OiC of the Albany Met office said, the first time I went down there,
"What are going to do? There's not a lot you can do here at this time of the year. The
pilots come over here now and again to get a met briefing. There's one going out this
morning with Chain's Beach." Chains Beach used to be a whaling company operating
out of Albany. He said, "I'll ask the pilot if he wants an extra spotter." I said, "OK,
that would be good. I'll take some coffee and some sandwiches." He said, "You'll be
out for a while. You'll be up and down for about six hours, just flying p and down on
the Bight spotting whales." I went out doing that with them when I used to go down to
Albany. So that filled in a bit of a weekend. Then I used to have a bit of a look around
the place at the same time, then back to Perth. After I finished at Perth, the
opportunity came to come back here.
Tony Rogers How long were you at Perth?
22
Trevor Rogers About fourteen months. Then I actually jagged a job here in Adelaide.
At that time you didn't have a lot of say in what was going on. If a posting came up
you put in an application for it and if it came up then good-on-you. We came back
here and, amazingly enough, there were still the original three people who were here
when I was on a fleeting look-see before going to Broome. They welcomed you with
open arms. Then we had a merry bunch of four. Numbers were slowly building up.
The Bureau in those days was still endeavouring to push out most of the new little
forms of hat they were there to provide, services to the people and stuff like that. It
was great. And, of course, from Adelaide I just launched out onto all these other
escapades. You never thought about it. Someone would come in and say, "look,
Oodnadatta's broken down. Could you go there and in the next couple of days." You
knew you'd be away for a week so you packed a suitcase and off you went for a week.
My first sortie up there was in 1971, which was the first year when I went from here
up to Oodnadatta. Oodnadatta then was a pretty makeshift sort of place. In fact they
still had the original balloon-filling shed there which was a galvanised iron shed. It
used to horrify you went you used to think what people were doing. People were
making a gas that burns at about 3000 degrees Celsius and blows up at the drop of a
hat if you had a static spark. Here’s these people’s playing around with it in a bloody
tin shed. At that stage they had a really good office. They had a nice brick office and
the balloon-filling shed. They never used to old galvanised one after they got the
Brock building in. It was great. There are an incredible number of stories about things
that used to go on and happen.
Tony Rogers Such as?
Trevor Rogers I always remember the pub there. The pub was a pretty Spartan place
and the poor old publican was usually run off his feet because all the people would be
coming in from the surrounding stations and the people who used to fix the windmills.
There were some really good nights. Thursday and Friday nights were great.
Unfortunately, they still had a patch of earth floor in the pub. I'll never forget it
23
because one of the local ladies was looking in through the window giving everyone a
mouthful of cheek. This night the poor old publican had obviously had a bit of a torrid
week, so he said, "If you do that once again, lady, I'm going to get you." Of course,
"come and Get me" sort of thing. He said, "You watch this." We were standing at the
bar. There was no running water and they washed the beer glasses in tins. He grabbed
one of these and walked out from behind the bar out of her line of view because she
was looking through this window and Whoomph! Straight up and over her. then he
says, "Now get your cake of soap and go and have a proper wash." I thought this is
not on. Things like that used to happen all the time. We used to go out in the clay
pans. Once again, you weren't allowed to work on the equipment on Sundays, so we
used to go playing cricket on the clay pans. That was a great thing. An esky out on the
clay pans, fantastic. That was where I bumped into Bill Wentworth. When I first met
Bill Wentworth out there, he was then Minister of Aboriginal Affairs in the Liberal
government. He was up there trying to suss out with the people what was their real
problem. Trying to do the right thing by them. I could see that the discussions weren't
getting anywhere, in fact they were getting quite uptight, this was in the hotel, so I
said to him, "Look, why don't you call a meeting tomorrow morning over at the
railway yard?" It had a little building over there. "Get all the people together over
there and I'm sure they'd really like to give you their opinions." He came to me after
ten minutes talking to his little entourage. He said, "How come you know so much
about this place?" I said, "Well, it's like this. I've been coming up and down here for
twenty years, and I know a lot of the people." They had their little meeting and really
got some good information. The people had their say in what was going on. It wasn't
until years after that I met Bill Wentworth and he was then retired from politics and
he was driving beach buggies across the Simpson Desert with four or five other
people. Same pub, round about the same time of the year and I just happened to be
there and I walked in with one of the Met people and I just walked straight up to this
bloke said, "Bill Wentworth, how are you?" He looked at me, he had this funny way,
and said, "To whom am I addressing myself?" I told him. He said, "My goodness me,
doesn't time fly." That was the second time I met him. He was a marvellous
gentleman. He came across to a lot of people not as a very nice sort of person, but he
24
was a great guy. I can't say that the Met's been harsh, although I've had my ups and
down times, but on the whole it's been good. It's a product of how you feel about the
situations you've been thrown into. I think psychologists will tell you that the more
you think about a place, probably the worst time you're going to have is when you get
there. Whereas, if you go to any place and you're not biased in any form about what
you're going to find, how people are going to react, or whatever, then you really have
a great time. But you don't have a lot of facilities with you. You're not taking a lot of
stuff with you, you're not travelling with a lot of baggage, and it's great. But
nowadays nowadays, the whole emphasis has shifted and well be it so, it's changing
times I guess. I used to go to Giles. I used to go in and out of Giles like clockwork. It
might have been just after I went to Oodnadatta in 1971. It was very Spartan as you'll
see in the photographs but it was a good environment to work in because you did it
all. You had to do it all because help was so far away and that didn't matter whether it
was everyday life, whether it was medical problems or whether it was engineering
type problems, or whether it was weather type problems. You were there and you had
to deal with those things because in those days, when I went up there, all we had was
a radio link; no telephones, no nothing. You had to get on the radio and all your
weather observations, your stores and that were all ordered up over the radio and you
had to go from Giles to Woomera, because Woomera would ring all the voice-over
stuff, the messages, and they would send a telegram down here and people would get
their act together and send all these bits and pieces up on the next supply run,
whenever that happened to be. It was all AM radio stuff. Then we went to single
sideband stuff. We used to have a whole hut, up there at Giles as big as this room, and
we used to have all the AM stuff because we used to have all these different
frequencies. We could talk to the Flying Doctor, we could talk to an aircraft coming
in, we could talk to Adelaide on about four or five different frequencies. It was a full-
time job, but I used to go up there and, when I first went there, it was for a period of
three months. I had to run the diesels, do the powerhouse, run all the diesels and stuff.
I had to do vehicle maintenance, all the air conditioning, and all our own equipment
because the Bureau took this on and in full capacity. The last of the WRE people had
left because long range workers were running it then and you had to make what you
25
could out of it. Look there were good times and there were bad times. There were
punch-ups, there were all sorts of graft and nonsense going on from time to time. If
you put that in the back of your mind and you thought, as I had to say to groups of
people up there on numerous occasions. You sit down at a table having a beer or
something like that. I'd say, "Listen, we're all here. If we can't get on, we've got a
problem. There's the table. Everyone put their cards on the table."
Tony Rogers How many of you would have been there?
Trevor Rogers Six. There was a cook, a mechanic and the other four were observers. I
used to just come in on a maintenance basis or when the Bureau could not get a
contracted mechanic up there to run the diesels or to do the work.
Tony Rogers The guys who were up there, they were on one year contracts or six
months?
Trevor Rogers They were on six month contracts.
Tony Rogers Six month contracts and you would come in for maybe three months or
less.
Trevor Rogers No. I would do the odd stint, which would go for three months, but
normally I would go for two weeks.
Tony Rogers So you were sort of the in-comer.
Trevor Rogers I had to go up there and fix the mess half the time and, mind you, there
were a couple of occasions when I walked in to some absolute disasters.
Tony Rogers Emotional disasters, you mean? People mess?
26
Trevor Rogers No. There were more messes than just people too and I had to try and
sort those things out. I always remember that one day there was a group of workers
out from the Department of Public Works in Alice Springs. They were out there
putting in some squatter’s tanks because the old ones had had it. I was out there
helping them do some pipe work and we could hear the nonsense going on from
where we were and we must have been 30 or 40 metres away from the mess. One of
the Works Department blokes says to me, "What's going on in there?" I said, "Well,
OK I'll find out. If I don't come out the door come and see what's happening." So I
went in the door and there are two people inside having a go at each other. One of the
observing peoples, in fact it was the then OiC. I'm not going to name anyone but, as
far as I'm concerned, I don't know how they picked these people in those particular
days. He was arguing with the cook. The cook was a very experienced fellow. He'd
been cooking on oilrigs and all round the place. He was a marvellous chap. When I
walked in there was the cook chasing this bloke around inside the kitchen with a meat
cleaver, and, if you've seen any early pictures of the Giles mess it's a sight to behold. I
walked in on this and my immediate thought was to get everyone in there and to get it
sorted out. Then I thought that I could do it myself. So I stood there, bloody knees
knocking together and I said, "Stop now, both of you. Bloody stop your stupid
childish antics. Do you realise what you are doing?" In an instance there was silence
and I said, "Isn't that incredible. That's marvellous. All we've heard for the last two
hours is you two blokes carrying on like pork chops in a synagogue." Anyway, I got
them separated and I said to Cooky, "What on earth happened?" Cooky told me
straight out. "He deducted my pay." "Pay? How did that happen?" Then I said to the
then OiC, "Get out of here. You're useless. What caused this?" He said, "He wouldn't
cook my breakfast this morning." I said, "Really." I knew what had been going on. I
said, "Did you ever stop and think what day it was?" "No, I don't have to worry about
that." I said, "I think it's the first thing you should consider." He said, "What is it.
You're so smart." I said, "It's Cook's birthday. Last night is of all you people sitting
round the bar getting horribly drunk and, because Cooky slept in and wouldn't cook
you your breakfast this morning, you've gone off the deep end and are having a go at
him. Why don't you wake up to yourself? You're a menace to yourself, let alone
27
everyone else." I went over to see Cooky, 'cause Cooky locked himself in his room.
He wouldn't speak to this bloke. So I said, "What's happened Cooky?" Cooky tells me
what had happened. For months and months, and I'd seen it myself because I'd been in
the mess, Cooky was there at 5 o'clock every morning without fail to cook those
people a cooked breakfast, should they have wanted it. No one wanted it. They used
to get up, do what they thought they had to do, then go back to bed and wake up later.
It didn't bother Cooky. Cooky was still there. On this particular morning, for some
reason or other, this bloke wanted a cooked breakfast and he demanded a cooked
breakfast, but Cooky stayed in bed because he had a headache. And that's how it
started. Those little incidents, they used to happen time and time again.
Tony Rogers Did it get solved, that one?
Trevor Rogers It got solved, but, at the same time, I got no backing from the Bureau to
solve that. When I thought about it afterwards, I thought that was a pretty silly thing
to do because Cooky still had the meat cleaver in his hand when I was talking to him
and all he had to do was lift the meat cleaver and I'd have been lamb chops, or
whatever it was, for the evening meal. That's a people issue and you had to deal with
those people issues. Unfortunately, the Bureau then had a series of young people
come through who I really don't think.... When Weapons Research had it, they had a
camp manager. When the Met took it over, no camp manager. I guess they were
saving money and didn't think they needed one. That was a big mistake that they
made. They really did need one because, if they'd got rid of that facet, what they
should have done was sit back and say OK, we'll have a camp manager in here to
solve all this sort of problems. That was not an isolated incident. I spent three and a
half years of my forty-two in the Bureau up at Giles alone. That's a big slice out of
someone's life just at the one spot that the Bureau had. That's how I got to know so
much about it. When I first went there, too, indigenous people were marvellous. You
never saw them. No-one carried on about them and all the rest of it. They'd come up
and ask could they have some water and we actually put a tap in for them, away from
the building so that, if they didn't want to come near the building, they could just get
28
water from a tap, fill their little tins up and disappear. There were only about four or
five families living there when I first went there and they were good people. They
taught me a lot. In all the visits I had there, on and off, it's absolutely amazing what I
learnt from them. But I think you had to.... Don't get me wrong here but I've always
been against do-gooders because I think do-gooders in society have done more
damage than anyone else that I've seen, put together. Giles unfortunately was a classic
case of it, the way it started off. People would not listen to you. We had to deal with
these people and we dealt with them in a good way. They didn't want a lot, they
weren't invasive or anything like that until a lot of white community officers got in
there and said, "You start pushing for this, that and something else." That's when the
trouble started and it's sad to see that. It didn't only happen there. I've seen it happen
in other places too. I can pride myself in so much as I could sit in the dirt with them
and I could be accepted by them. It didn't matter who they were. A classic instance of
that is... I laughed. You may remember this. A few years ago - I forget the guy's name
was, but he was an anthropologist who was working out of Hermannsburg and he was
collecting Sheringa stones, which are history stones basically. Well I probably knew
about them before he did because people would sit in the dirt and show you these
things and show you the message sticks. One day they came to me up in the garage
and they said to me, "You have these." I said, "No; no. I can't take that. That's your
history." I knew what they were. "No. You take this and you buy us a truck" I said,
"No, I can't do that for you. That's wrong." Oh. We've had others do this. I said, "I
don't know where the others came from but I'm not doing it. But you've got me
interested and I want to know about them." I knew I was coming back so the Old
Fellers said, "Here, you take." So I took this thing and I went t o the guy who was
looking after the anthropological section here at the museum. I walked in there this
day and this bloke eyes lit up like neon signs when he saw them. "Where did you get
them from?" "Never mind where I got them from. Can you tell me a bit about them?"
And he told me. He waffled on a bit there. I said, "Thanks very much but I think I’ll
learn more from the people I'm going to return these too." "Are you going to return
them?" "Of course I am." Two weeks later I went back there and the Old Fellers met
me when I got off the plane. As soon as I opened my bag and pulled out these things,
29
I had them wrapped in newspapers, the smiles on their faces! Well, I've never seen
people smile like that before! Obviously they knew they could trust me. I never had
one iota of trouble with them. We always got on famously. But I know a lot people
did have a lot of problems with them. As I said, they showed me an awful lot. I would
never have had that experience if I hadn't willingly gone there, open-minded in the
first place, to help the Bureau out. That's it. Like I said, that's life. There's another
classic instance there. One of the families, the Mitchells. Grace, she'd done a little bit
of nursing. We had a week of foul weather. It rained and it poured. Grace came
knocking on the door one night and she said, "We've got a sick woman." I said,
"What's happened, Grace?" I used to do a fair bit of the medical stuff up there for
them too, because it wasn't as easy to get the Flying Doctor in then as it is now. I went
down to this wurlie at the end of the runway. It was a properly made wurlie with a
little bit of canvas over the top to keep it a little bit dry and Grace said, "She's in
there." I said, "Well, before I go in, Grace, what's happened? Do you know a bit about
it?" Grace said, "Yes, the woman was out chopping, chopping wood, and the axe
slipped and she's cut her foot." When I got there, she'd cut her foot alright. She's split
the foot almost right up to the ankle. I said, "When did this happen, Grace?" She said,
"Early this morning." This was nine o'clock at night. It was a funny situation. You go
into auto. Even though in the place where they were there was the most atrocious
smell because there were dogs in there, there were people in there and a foot was
rotting. She'd got gangrene. I didn't have to be a Flying Doctor to see what was going
on outhere. Anyway, I said, "Righto, look, I'm not too sure about this weather but, if
we clear the back of the truck out, we can take you down to Docker River because our
district is out. The flying Doctor's not going to come in here." So I got on the radio,
there was still no phone there in those days and said to the Flying Doctor in Alice
Springs, "We've got this lady here. She's got a bad foot injury. Could we meet you at
the Docker River airstrip in the morning, please." "Yeah," he said. "No problem at
all." He was a bit uppity about it. I got impression that he thought someone had rung
up at some ridiculous hour of the night asking help. I suppose I'm a bit the same way
sometimes, I don't know. We got this woman. What normally would be a two-hour
trip took five hours. We got bogged twice and it was a hell of a thing. We had three or
30
four of the other Aboriginal people there. They were hitting their heads with rocks.
It's a sympathy thing that sometimes starts up among them. Anyway, the Flying
Doctor landed and the first thing he said to me was, "Where in the hell have you
been?" I thought, "Hey Flying Doctor, didn't you take the bloody Hippocratic oath or
whatever it is." I said, " Why are you saying that to me?" And he said, "Oh, you
know." I said, "OK, you've had a bad night. You just come round the other side of this
aircraft." I lit into him. I shouldn't have, but I lit into him. I couldn't stand his attitude.
Anyway, he walked away and looked around as though nothing had happened and the
sister came over to me and she said, "I heard what you said. Good on you. He's had it
coming for some time." That was just another little incident that you had to put up
with; road accidents...
Tony Rogers How did that woman cope. Did she get better?
Trevor Rogers No, she lost a foot. Just above the ankle, she lost it. I saw her, I'd reckon
it would be two years after that and she was hobbling around alright. I thought
something must have been done right. Those sort of things came up too. Then I can
remember, it must have been about 1974, the whole of central Australia got almost
flooded, rainfall-wise. At Giles, we woke up after a night of torrential rain and we
were on an island. It was amazing. There were all these little islands popping up out
of this lake. I'd never seen anything like it before. Another chap, who was a bit of an
adventurer, and myself, got a tractor tube. From the Giles camp down to Sladen Water
where it goes through the Rawlinson Ranges would be about five km, I reckon, and I
reckon we were down there in half an hour sitting on the rubber tube. There was that
much water running out through the Sladen Water gap. A week after that, the water
had all gone and you would have sworn you were in the tropics sitting on pure white
beach, crystal-clear water, only the trees weren't palm trees, they were ruddy gum
trees. You thought, where am I. Basically, those things used to happen at Giles all the
time and you just did your best. And then in the nineteen-eighties, things started to get
a little bit better. Radios were improved and then in the mid-eighties they actually got
an arterial [?] link out there, a satellite link. Things looked up a bit. Then again, I
31
think people had that much time to do things that they tended to become bored out
there. That camaraderie that existed prior to that disappeared. I think that was a bit of
a tragedy in a way. It became very businesslike and you wondered what you had
walked into. The regional director came to me, Friday of one week. He said, "You
know a lot about Giles, don't you?" I said, "I know a lot about Giles, what's your
problem>" He said, "We haven't heard from them for three days." I said, "Pardon,
what do you mean you haven't heard from them for three days, you've got all the radio
gear and stuff in the world, how come you haven't heard any messages come out for
three days?" An he said, "Well, I don't know, but we've got this problem. Could you
go up and help find out what's wrong?" So I jumped on a plane, got to Alice Springs
at eleven o'clock at night. I was picked up at about 5 o'clock the next morning by the
pilot from SATASS [?] and went out. Luckily the RD had said to me when I left
here< "I'll give you the authority to keep this plane on the ground for two hours. Don't
let the pilot hurry you along a bit. I don't what you're going to find." I said, "Thanks
very much."
Tony Rogers Who was the regional director then?
Trevor Rogers A gentleman by the name of Brunt, Alan Brunt. I got up there and I
knew straightaway that there was a big problem. Everything was quiet, there were no
engines going, there was nothing. To cut a long story short, I got the engines going.
They'd shut down just because the batteries had boiled dry on the alarm systems on
the engines and they couldn't generate any power. I said to them, "What's the problem
with that? You've got a little petrol generator. Why can't you start that? You can run
two refrigerators and the radio gear off that. Is that too much trouble?" So we got that
going and we went to use the radio. It was all going well until I found that someone
had kicked it around like a football in a mad fit. I said to these guys, "You're your
own worst enemies because you haven't realised is that people are getting very
concerned that hey haven't heard from you for three days. What's the score? You've
got to now prove to me what the cause is behind all this." Well, there was a lot of
nonsense going on. One of the things was that before I got this little Honda generator
32
going, I said, "Where's this portable generator?" He said, "Dunno." He wouldn't tell
me anything. Anyway, I just got on with the job. I was down in the workshop and I
walked up to the table, pulled the drawer out and all these butterflies, receipts, fell out
of the drawer onto the floor. I picked them up. The second one I picked up is 'Hire of
a generator to the Blackstone community.' I thought: What? Where did they get the
generator to hire out? I walked back up 200 metres back to the office. "You've got to
tell me what's going on here because the plane has now got thirty minutes left to sit
the end of that runway before I've got to get back on it to get to Alice Springs before
last light, so, if you can't be honest with me, I think the door's going to slam." So one
of them said to me, "We hired it out to people." I said, "I can see that. It's on the
receipts here. I tell you what. I'll get rid of the plane if you people can get on to the
radio and you can get that generator back here first thing in the morning. No questions
asked." Which they duly did, but, for three or four days after that, they wouldn't speak
to me because I'd caught them out. This refers probably to what you may have said
originally about did the Bureau know what was going on at that stage. I think the
Bureau did have an idea of what was going on, but the Bureau didn't want to do
anything about it. And that was sad because if they had done a few simple things in
the first place it would never have got to the proportion that it got to.
Tony Rogers What about the bar at Giles?
Trevor Rogers The bar? That used to be an amazing thing. You know I saw people sit at
that bar and I saw each one of those six people who were there walk away with
$6000.00 in little airline bags and my boss, who was with me at the time, who didn't
know much about Giles, said to me, "What's happening here?" I said, "This is their
big divvy up from their bar profits and all the rest of it." There was a little bit more to
it than bar profits, I can tell you. The bar used to be a real calling point because all we
had there at that stage was some rollies, the movies. We used to get a couple of those.
There were still no TV and videos in the early days there. You know, everyone would
be there having a few beers. Even in the early days people would be there singing a
few songs that they might have know, albeit that some of them weren't too good for
33
some peoples' ears. It was that camaraderie and the bar created that, but the bar did
turn over a lot of money. then they went into printed t-shirts and all the rest of it and
all that money went through the bar. Most of the tourists who used to come along
liked to pop in. They'd have a beer, a cool drink, or whatever, but of course that was
before the ruling came in that said they weren't to have alcohol there. I can remember
the Aboriginals coming up there and breaking into stores and walking away with
cartons of beer and all sorts. It was a thriving metropolis. People would come up from
Warburton. People would come down from Docker River and for any tourists who
used to come past it used to be like a Mecca at the bar. Some of the stories that used
to emanate from around that bar, they were absolutely amazing. There'd be the normal
bar type things. People would build can castles. The only thing would be that the can
castles wouldn't be sitting on the bar, they'd be sitting on the roof because there was a
ginormous fan, suction fan up there, and it would suck all the beer cans up onto the
roof. So you didn't build from the tabletop, you built from the ceiling-top. They had a
pool t able. When I first went there they actually had a library too. They had an old
library with all these old books in it and some of them were really interesting old
books. She was a throbbing metropolis, the old bloody bar. It was absolutely bloody
amazing. And the people that you used to see come through there was absolutely
incredible. One sticks in my mind without a doubt as being an incredible fellow. I
knew of his escapades long before he became a governor of South Australia. I'm
talking now about Sir Mark Oliphant. Now, Sir Mark Oliphant just before he finished
his tour of duty here did a tour around South Australia and called in. Giles was one of
these places I suppose he'd heard of and he and his entourage, they called in. I always
remember it was a pretty cool night and I was down in the workshop, working away
and there was this little knock on the door. I thought who'd be knocking on the door at
this hour of the bloody night because work was finished. Low and behold, there was
Sir Mark standing there. He said, "Would it be alright if I came in?" I said, " 'Cos it
would. Come in out of the cold." I had the radar dismantled on the bench and I had
the section of the radar that has the magnetron and the klystron on it. Now, Sir Mark
Oliphant during the was the developer of the klystron and the magnetron. That's how
the Brits got their first radar systems up and running. He talked for two hours, almost
34
non-stop, probably like me. He talked for two hours telling me. I knew that too
because I'd read his autobiography. He used to work at the Cavendish Laboratories in
the UK. He worked with Lord Rutherford on the nuclear stuff too. It was so funny
because he disappeared for two hours and there was a sudden knock at the door. He
said, "Don't answer that." I said, "What do you mean, don't answer it?" He said, "This
has been the most precious two hours I've had for donkey's ages. I had to get away
from those people up there. Sometimes they drive me barmy." This is the governor
telling me that. He was a marvellous bloke. I've got his autograph in book at home
somewhere. In fact it's in his book I've got at home on the mantelpiece about his
autobiography. You meet characters out there. Len Beadell, you might have heard of
Len Beadell, he used to go up there a lot with Dick Lang's Desert Trek. I used to
bump into, have a yarn with him every time I saw him up there. He autographed a
couple of postcards for me. There's a picture in there of Len in his old army boots. I
think he used to like to give the tourists their value for money. He thought it was the
thing, still the done thing, to have his cold showers in the morning and walk around
without his socks on in these old tan coloured army boots.
Tony Rogers A bit of a showman, was he?
Trevor Rogers He was in a way, but I think people put him up to that as well. I know he
used to do a lot of work with Dick Lang's Desert Trek tours. I think they used to egg
him along a bit. He was a great bloke and he actually painted some of the murals on
the wall in the mess at Giles. He actually painted them. One of our techs, who retired
about four years ago, Len Beadell did a watercolour sketch of him too where it
showed a picture of someone sitting in the dish, the radar dish, the WF2 radar dish
that was up there. All those things used to happen, for goodness sake. You can go on
and on.
Tony Rogers When was the last time you went to Giles?
35
Trevor Rogers I went up there just before we relinquished it. I think it was '86. We used
to administer it from down here, I didn't make it up to their reunion. They had a
reunion not so long ago. Someone said to come up. There was just too much going on
around here and my wife was a bit crook at the time so I couldn't just race off and
leave her. One day I might get back up but I've always found that the places you go to
the second time around are never the same. I think that being the type of person that I
probably am, I'd find that very disappointing because I've got such vivid memories of
good times, and bad times. It tells you more than looking at photographs.
Tony Rogers Those times you went to Giles you were based in Adelaide. Were you
based in Adelaide always after you came back here?
Trevor Rogers After I came back here I was with the exception that I had one of the
longest stints out at Willis Island. I had eight months out there and when we came
back that was the last time the Cape boats, that were operated by the Department of
Marine and whatever - they finished. We were signed off when we got back to Cairns.
Tony Rogers What did your wife think of you going away for eight months to Willis
Island? She presumably didn't go.
Trevor Rogers I think she came to find at a very early stage that I've always been one of
these people, not with a sense of adventure but.... She got used to it, I guess. That's
probably a selfish way of looking at it but you try and make amends in other ways.
Interestingly enough I know my boys, I've got three lads, they've always said to me,
"Gee whiz, why don't you write a book?" And I've said, "No, I couldn't be bothered. I
just really don't have the time to sit and do it." Maybe if I retired one day, I could. My
life has been full and it's been great to get out there and do those things.
Tony Rogers It's been full of the Bureau really, hasn’t it?
36
Trevor Rogers Yeah, with the exception of a short period with PMG, or Telstra, or
whatever you call them now, and just a few little stints. I think if you can put your
mind to anything, or be open about it, you can almost just about anything. I've always
looked at things as being a bit of a sense of adventure, I suppose. I used to do rock
climbing, kayaking, and all the rest. I think it's what keeps you going half the time.
You can turn off and go and do those sorts of things. In fact, I still teach young people
now and again rack climbing.
Tony Rogers You said you went to Macquarie. When was that?
Trevor Rogers That was in about '79, '80, I'll have to check up on that. When we were
picked up from Macquarie. I used to do these projects down there. I said the one
about the stomach contents of cat’s rabbits. We used to trap rabbits but we didn't used
to worry about stomach contents.
Tony Rogers So when you went down to Macquarie, your wife stayed here and you had
kids at that time. Did she find it difficult?
Trevor Rogers It wasn't too bad. It wasn't easy, but my wife is the type of person who
realises someone's got to do these things and the support is there.
Tony Rogers Did you go home and say, "I'm going to Macquarie" or did you say, "What
do you think about my going to Macquarie?"
Trevor Rogers I just said I was considering it. What did she think about it? She
basically said, "OK, you're probably better off to do it now than what you are later
on." Even though I had three kids. The amazing thing about that is when I went down
there, you could talk to them over radio-telephone network and every month you
could send a coded message that was delivered to them. It was interesting to see the
attitude of the kids. It was like walking out of their lives for twelve months, but being
able to talk to them now and again. They always had this concept that you could
37
always bring a penguin back, and they'd be happy with that. All they wanted was a
penguin. You'd say, "that's a good thought, but where are you going to keep it?" They
had all this worked out. They were going to keep this penguin in a bath and keep it in
a refrigerator, there was an old refrigerator out he back, and I thought that showed a
bit of lateral thinking on their part.
Tony Rogers How old were they then?
Trevor Rogers Oh, gee. The eldest bloke would have been 8. Then they went eight, six
and about four at that time. I used to make moccasins. Tan the rabbit skins and make
moccasins out of them and use penguin knuckles for a little bit of decoration on the
front of the moccasin. They were tickled pink. These moccasins went to school and
goodness knows what.
Tony Rogers So they kept an interest in what you were doing while you were down
there. I'm interested in that because different people's wives, because it's been mainly
males that have talked about it, have had really different approaches to the Bureau.
Some, like your wife, coped - coped with you, I suppose...
Trevor Rogers She coped because her background was that originally she came off a
farm and, I think, living a farm type existence taught her at a very early age to be
independent of lots of things that were going on. Maybe, if you didn't have that
background, it may well have been a bit more difficult, but she had always been a
relatively resourceful person and independent. So, if the chips were down, she could
cope. A lot of people do have a lot of trouble as you probably can understand, but a
lot of that comes because I think things have not been discussed properly in the first
place. There's not that feeling between people. There's "This is my thing and I'm
going to do it regardless of what's going on out there." That's the wrong attitude to
start with. If you get people involved in what you're doing, there's no doubt about it
that it works ten times better. It certainly works better in your family situation and it
works better in every other situation that I've ever walked into. But that's not to say it
38
wasn't difficult. Yes, it was difficult and then when I went to Willis that was a bit
difficult too because my mother died and they flew me back and I couldn't get back to
Willis straight away because it was during the cyclone season and I ended up working
in Cairns for a couple of weeks before they could fly me back out to Willis. At the
same time you look back on that and your wife had to cope with most of the business
side of things while you're not there and I think it teaches them too to expand out a bit
and be a bit more independent. I might be a weird one but I think people do get to be
too dependent on each other to a certain extent. That's probably just me. It's all your
friends. I think it's your friends who probably make it difficult too. I've always been in
a situation where I've never had many friends, I'm a loner, I prefer to be that way. I
could count the number of friends I've got here on one hand because there are so few.
That's not to say that you don't have a certain type of camaraderie between people, but
that's different from having a direct relationship with someone. I think you've got to
learn to give and take a bit too. Life in the Bureau has not been all beer and skittles,
but, at the same time, we as ordinary people tend to look more at the good times than
the bad times so therefore you tend to draw the conclusion: it's been great. I would
never have got to the places that I've been, I would never have met the people I have
met, and seen things going on in this country that I've seen going on, if I hadn't been
employed by an instrumentality, if I can call it that, like the Bureau. I think it's a great
thing, it's a great forward-looking thing to drive people, and I think that, even today,
it's the way a lot of young people come into the Bureau because you get that sense of
being able to move around and being able to come up with the goods when it's
required, and that sort of thing. It's great, it really is, but the stories go on and on. It's
amazing if you sit and think about it. I've just jotted some notes here but I've covered
most of it.
Tony Rogers You've done a very good job. I was going to ask you about Macquarie but
I'm just thinking that we are talking for quite a long time. I want to look at your
photos. Maybe we could talk about Macquarie later and bring this part of the
conversation to an end. If we can look at the photos, maybe I'll leave the recorder on
while we talk about them. Then if I could copies of some of the photos.
39
Trevor Rogers You work it however you want to work it because all you've got to do,
I'm downstairs anyway if I'm not away, you can come down and find or we can work
something out and that won't be a problem.
Tony Rogers So this is the end of our conversation at this stage on the first of June with
Trevor Rogers and we will look at some photographs. I'll leave the recorder on
because, if I can get some copies of them I can tie your comments about the
photographs in with them. So let's have a look at them and keep your notes in case
you haven't covered everything.
Trevor Rogers I haven't!
Edited descriptions of photographs follow, interspersed with additional anecdotes
Early Giles. 1973 b + w of G. Old diesel generators - easiest to use.
Bailey Huts where people lived. Looks attractive - top spot.
Bore water, plus a bit of rainwater.
Colour - says '83, but earlier.
Mess and rec area; kitchen at very end plus cold room and little patio. Cages under trees
have parrots. Across is laundry and old library, plus people could stay there.
Plane taxis right up to buildings. Transmitter hut was full of equipment in old days.
Caravan belonged to IPSO (Australian Ionospheric Prediction people). They'd send
signals to analyse ionosphere. Various other groups came and went.
90 foot radio antenna. Trevor would climb to top.
Various views of living huts with quadrangle at end.
Postcard shows part of Bluestreak rocket.
Countryside is beautiful with terrific escarpments. Exhilarating place. Road now good
but used to be terrible.
The famous bar - not very big! See fan above bar.
Rawlinson Ranges 6km away. Walkedup them Sundays because not allowed to work!
40
Mid-winter dinner includes Peter Clements and Brian Cowrill [?].
Docker river and Kintor.
Old office at Oodnadatta; town itself; market garden; race course; railway bridge.
Pub at William Creek.
Trevor Rogers This is Cook on the trans-railway. We used to have to go out there and
fix a synchrotap. It's an anemometer. It registers wind direction and wind speed. I was
out there an there's nowhere to stay. One of the Australian Inland Mission sisters out
there said sleep in the hospital and I had a guy out here with me. At 3 o'clock in the
morning there was this great scream. I thought someone had been murdered. This girl
came running in with her all-standing up on end. She said, "Somebody just had a go at
me." I said, "What do you mean somebody just had a go at you?" "Oh, they came out
from behind the bushes mumbling." What happened was that the guy who was with
me went over to the Workers Club, got a belly full of beer, couldn't find his way back
to the hospital where were both supposed to be staying the night and he flaked out in
the bushes. He woke up at 3o'clock in the morning. The girl went to do the 3o'clock
observations from the screen, and coming back with her obs book, this guy stepped
straight out from the bushes and said, "How are you going?" Needless to say, it
played on him nest day. I couldn't find this bloke anywhere until I found him flaked
out in an old dentist chair at the back of some old buildings (see photo).
Tony Rogers Did he apologise?
Trevor Rogers Yes, he did. It all got sorted in the end. It was just one of those little
things that sort of happen.
Tony Rogers So you've been to Cook as well. I always thought Cook only had one
building. It's a lot bigger than that, isn't it.
Trevor Rogers Well, it was when we were out there. Cook reminds me of Forrest. I
went out to Forrest when I was based here in Adelaide on the Trans-railway to help
41
refurbish a radar there and to stop the train to pick you up, or to get anything dropped
off it, you had to wave this lollipop like the people on school crossings. You waved
this lollipop in the hope that the train stopped. It was about half past four in the
afternoon. I remember waving this lollipop and the blokes I'm with are in the truck.
They're going to pick up all the parts we need from the brake van. I'm wondering why
they're taking off and I'm thinking, I'm waving this lollipop to stop the train and off
the take in this truck thinking the brakeman's going to finish up down there. It was
only half the story. They got about 200 metres down from me and the next thing,
there's a couple of them standing up in the truck trying to look through the train
windows. I thought what on earth's going on here? What had happened that they must
have seen some lady sun-baking because they were on the western side. The train
came in and it was nice and warm. This lady must have been sun-baking on the bed in
the carriage. Someone must have seen what was happening and they decided they
were going to have a look through the window before the train stops. They'd forgotten
all about me. They got the goods from the brake van and came back. And told me.
Early one of office at West Terrace
Tony Rogers Who was regional director when you first started?
Trevor Rogers A colourful character by the name of John Hogan.
Tony Rogers He was there. You knew Doc then. What did you think of him?
Trevor Rogers He was a very fair man, but everyone used to think he was very harsh.
I'll tell you a story. I used to shift at Adelaide Airport sometimes. Doc Hogan used to
play golf at the Glenelg golf links. I was there one Sunday morning and there was
another chap behind the black curtain that used to go around the radar. The door flew
open and this little dog raced in, piddled on the curtains, barked, stood up on its hind
legs and the bloke from behind the curtains comes out and says, "What in the name of
fortune's going on here." In the meantime Doc Hogan came in the door. The poor
42
bloke behind the curtain was swearing and carrying on about what had happened
because someone had to get the mop and mop the dog wee off the floor. The guy
behind the curtain says to me, "Who is it at the door." I said, "I don't know but it's a
man with glasses." "Tell him to bloody come in here, I'll tell him." Of course it's Doc
Hogan. the curtain goes back and Jack Fry flies out from behind the curtain. "Well,"
he says, "this is a good start for a bloody Sunday morning anyway. I hope I've bloody
ruined your golf day." Doc Hogan said, "I'm sorry fellows. I didn't intend to call in
but it's an hour before I can tee off at the golf links and I thought I'd just come across
and see what was going on." He was a good bloke, very fair and he sat and listened. I
never found him a problem. A lot of people did. I remember we put an old
anemometer up in his backyard. He'd finished then. When I first arrived here in
Adelaide he was there. By the time I came back a second time he was gone.
pix of Willis Island.
Old Adelaide offices. On front tower used to be a Beckley-Robinson anemometer. Over
200 years old. Did it up and still have it in BoM.
Mural that Len Beadell painted on kitchen wall at Giles.
Pix of dingoes and story of their stealing wire insulation.
Inside Oodnadatta office.
Tony Rogers I should turn this off probably after 2 hours and 23 minutes.
End of interview
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