Had a few different jobs down the years, like most blokes my ilk and vintage.
Dumping wool bales, pumping petrol, making car batteries, cracking eggs, laminating timber, gardening, digging holes, sledge-hammering concrete, shovelling chook shite …
Had the dream job at one stage, for a kid raised on Tarzan jungle comics, that is.
Climbing trees. Pines, cypresses, oaks, trees I couldn’t name. Lots of them, planted years ago by the Chirnsides at Werribee Park.
Cream job among the RED scheme ditch-diggers I was working with between school and uni. Simple too. They threw me an offsider, a big Stihl chainsaw and a smaller one-hander, bushman saws, ropes, ladder, tractor and trailer, and said go for it.
They might have more presciently said, do your worst. Some trees still haven’t recovered.
These were the days of no harnesses, hard hats, plastic glasses, gloves, electric saws on 10-foot poles, cherry-pickers, fluoro… no brains really. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a mattock through one mate’s arm while digging out the stump of a tree we dropped. Snake run-ins, hostile possums scrambling from branches we dropped, a lightning strike splitting a cypress I vacated minutes before, a chainsaw incident that ripped my jeans but left my carcass unscathed.
Also, a few pub lunches that found us draped over the branches in post-prandial snoozes.
That’s a skill to be proud of, falling asleep in trees. Lot better than falling out of them. Which nearly happened when the wind picked up and you found yourself flailing around 30 feet up with a chainsaw buzzing in one hand and hanging on grimly with the other.
Can’t say I relished losing the skin clean off four knuckles at a time when the chainsaw hit a knot and belted your hand into a branch.
Got into strife when The Devil’s Playground was being filmed there. We drove our noisy tractor-trailer past a sensitive scene where two kids were getting to know each other rather intimately in some nearby bushes.
Had our tails properly kicked by the foreman. But he was later in strife himself for watching the film’s naked girls en masse romp scene from the tower. Ha bloody ha!
Interesting workmates. A Cat Stevens lookalike singer-guitarist who played Beethoven on piano. A happy-go-lucky Vietnam vet of two tours, who confessed to shooting a few blokes, perhaps kids, he wasn’t sure, in “him or me” standoffs.
Others included local yokel dropouts with spooky ouija-board stories, a photographer who liked flashing nude shots of his missus, ex-cons, Furry Freak Brother dope smokers, a Bible basher, bodybuilder, an armed bandit, couple of bikers and Orange People cultists. Neat lot of villains, really.
I was reminded of all this when a trio of tree-trimmers fronted home last week to clean up a 40-foot ash choked by ivy. Good bit different these days. Fluoro tops, cherry pickers, harnesses, helmets, visors … all very smart.
“Tree fellers,” my young bloke noted in an Irish accent, also very smartly.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 22August 2023
Image: Wikimedia Commons https://shorturl.at/msvLP
