The top 15 m of Gardner Tree fire lookout, the cabin open to the four winds
“To bat the breeze”, according to the 1978 Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, is “to indulge in idle talk”. Readers will perhaps find that this describes the following story with exactitude ...
In 1960 when I was posted to the karri forest for field work at the end of my second year’s forestry studies, one of my jobs was lookoutman on the Gardner Tree Fire Lookout. I was accompanied on my first day’s climb by Ernie Percival, the Pemberton district’s veteran field man. After we had climbed into the cabin and Ernie had eventually overcome a grievous coughing fit (he was a heavy smoker) he gave me careful instructions on my duties and the use of the lookoutman’s equipment. I had previously worked briefly and had been trained by experienced towermen at the Carlotta Tower near Nannup, and up the famous Gloucester Tree, so I already pretty much knew what to do. But now I would be “flying solo”, as it were, with no instructor in the second seat. Ernie wanted to be sure I could be trusted.
Gardner Tree was unique in being the tallest (190 feet) and the most hair-raising to climb of all the karri tree lookouts. The top 50 feet or so of the tree was dead and riddled with white ants. The locals knew all this and refused to work on Gardner, but forestry students were considered expendable, and were naïve to boot. I remember the district storeman Paddy Evans giving me some reassuring advice the first time he delivered my weekly stores. Once I scrambled into the cabin and shut the trapdoor, he said, a feeling of security would come over me. “It will be false security” he added, “but this is better than none”.
It certainly had its moments. All of the lookout trees swayed in the wind, but Gardner also gyrated. I heard of one former lookoutman who had to give the job away because of sea-sickness.
It was also the oldest of the tree lookouts with the most primitive ladderway and equipment. One of the first things I noticed on reaching the cabin on that first climb was that the windows had no glass and were open to the skies in all directions.
Interior of Gardner Tree cabin, with log book, alidade (direction finder), map and binoculars. All of this had to be packed away when it rained, and overnight (Photo by Jack Bradshaw).
In addition to spotting bushfires, an important job of the lookoutman was to send in hourly reports of the weather, especially the wind strength and direction. Thus, one item of equipment Ernie showed me was Gardner Tree’s wind gauge. To my surprise, this comprised simply a length of binder twine, about 30 cm long, hanging from a nail above one of the open cabin windows. Ernie demonstrated how the angle of the twine from the vertical represented different wind speeds. These ranged from calm, where the twine hung straight down motionless, up to the point at which it stood out horizontal, representing a Force 10 gale. Privately, I thought that I did not intend to be up the tree, measuring the wind speed, at such a time. Old Ernie, by the way, had a dry, bushman’s humour, and I think he was quietly enjoying the expression on my face as he outlined all this.
I have no idea how Ernie had calibrated the twine wind gauge, but he was an experienced field officer and like most of his ilk, he knew just about everything about timber, trees, forests, weather and bushfires, so I accepted his advice. Anyway, over my time as lookoutman, I dutifully ‘measured’ the wind strength and direction on the hour, every hour. According to the declination of the twine, I would note down the direction and speed of the wind in the logbook, and report this by telephone to the young lady on the other end of the phone at forestry HQ.
Gardner Tree fire lookout was also unusual in that the first climb of the day had to be made so that you were in the cabin before 7.30 am (the other lookouts mostly started at 8 am). Being the most south-westerly tower in the WA lookout system and closest to the south coast, my 0730 report of wind direction and speed would be radioed up to Dwellingup where Alan Hatch, the Department’s fire weather forecaster could factor it into his deliberations on the day ahead. ‘Hatchy’ prepared two fire weather forecasts, twice every day during the summer months, one for the jarrah forest and one for the karri forest. These were broadcast over the HF radio to all forestry districts at 0745 and 16.15 hours, and they played a big part in our lives. I have sometimes wondered since whether Hatchy had any idea about the accuracy of the instrument I was using to acquire the wind data I was sending him. It didn’t seem to matter, as his forecasts were always of remarkable accuracy, greatly superior at that time to the “official” forecasts issued by the Weather Bureau.
My days as a forestry student, and as a fire lookoutman soon passed. I graduated from university, was appointed a forestry officer with the WA Forests Department and sent to work in southwest districts. All of a sudden I had serious responsibilities, but there was also the pleasure of learning something new and interesting nearly every day.
However, the days as a lookoutman left a legacy. One of the things I now had to take a close and daily interest in was the wind - its speed and direction, the forecast wind, and its accurate measurement. This was a lot more than just having a keen awareness of the environment around me. Wind forecasting determined bushfire preparedness. Wind data was a critical input to calculations of the intensity and rate of spread of a bushfire, in the design of the ignition pattern for a prescribed burn and to assist weather forecasting. Already by the mid-1960s we had fire behavior tables into which the wind data would be fed, and the outputs used for very serious business relating to bushfires. By this time, I am glad to say, wind measurement had moved well beyond the angle of the dangle of a piece of binder twine.
Forest Ranger Sonny Cave with a field weather station. He is using a Whirling Hygrometer to measure relative humidity and nearby is the Cup Anemometer which measures wind speed
In fact, like most foresters and firies, wind became a 24-hour a day preoccupation for me. Indeed, I think I became almost a connoisseur, indeed an afficionado of the wind. It was something of which I was always aware, listening to it, smelling it or watching it, or just thinking about it. What would the wind do, later today, tonight or tomorrow? If the wind shifted this way, or that, was I prepared for the consequences? Especially during the summer months, I lived from hour-to-hour with (metaphorically speaking), a moistened finger to the wind, nostrils twitching. Being able to predict the direction and timing of wind changes and the strength of the wind, was make or break.
With experience (plus, attending an excellent training school run by a meteorologist) I soon learned the key lessons. For example, how wind direction varied with the passage of the high-pressure systems that swept across the southwest every 7-10 days during summer, or what happened when the High was blocked in the Bight and we would be on the receiving end of winds generated in the Central Deserts. I became familiar with the terminology, for instance a “backing wind” shifted anti-clockwise, while a “veering wind” was the reverse. I came to understand how the patterns of wind movement varied during the day and night, especially along the Darling Scarp, and how a north-easterly would back into the north-west, and strengthen, just before a Low-Pressure trough moved inland. Then there was the relationship between “open wind velocity” – the speed of the wind over the treetops which drove a crown fire - and the ramped-down wind measured on the floor of the forest. I came to know about winter gales, summer cyclones, willy-willies, dust devils, fire whirlwinds and Cock-eyed Bobs.
Like some early woodland Druid, praying to the Wind Gods, I welcomed the good winds and feared the bad winds. The former were the summertime south-westers bringing showers, and the latter the gale-force nor’westers with dust and smoke in their teeth.
Without a doubt, the worst wind I ever experienced was Cyclone Alby, which set the southwest on fire in 1978. This was the time my family, as well as my forest was threatened (a story for another time). The most awesome wind I actually saw, was a fire whirlwind generated within the intense heat of a regeneration burn in the karri country. I even got a photograph of it:
The whirlwind waltzed and weaved about within the 200-ha burn in a tightly spinning spiral of smoke and flame, maybe 100 m in height, throwing burning material high into the sky. Every now and again it approached the edge of the burn, causing me serious alarm, but then veered back into its sustaining heat. I had read of phenomena like this during the fire storms generated by incendiary bombing during the War, but hoped I would never see one. [Incidentally, that was back in about 1975. The area where that regeneration burn was conducted is today a dense and beautiful 50-year-old karri forest].
An aside
Speaking of fire, forests and wind, my friend and fellow-forester Oliver Raymond once told me a good story. He was working as a consultant in Bonkol in Sabah (at the northern tip of Borneo) at the time, advising the locals on protection from forest fires of their Acacia mangium plantations. One of his early challenges was to design a wind gauge, no instrument being available, or even obtainable in that remote region.
Oliver Raymond, Victorian forester, comrade in arms, and bushfire specialist
Oliver remembered:
I had been called in as a fire protection “expert” because one of their foremen had burnt down the local village by lighting a pre-establishment fire to clear the blady grass from the area to be planted. He narrowly escaped death at the hands of the locals and had to “disappear” for a couple of weeks until the rage died down. Meanwhile the plantation owners decided they needed the input of a bit of fire management expertise.
The first thing I discovered was that the plantation had a fire tower (a crude little four-legged structure on a high point), but no instruments with which to grace it. At the very minimum, a wind gauge was needed to support prescribed burning or bushfire suppression operations. There was no alternative but to create a crude wind speed gauge myself.
I took a square of plywood and hammered a nail into the top left-hand corner. To the nail I tied a short length of light fishing line with a triangular sinker at the end. The sinker hung just above the bottom of the plywood.
Then came the calibration.
We found a reasonably trafficable stretch of road, and two of us climbed into the tray of a 4wd ute, while a third was behind the wheel driving. It was early morning of a windless day.
My off-sider held the plywood into the slipstream above the cab of the ute and I clutched a felt-tipped marker pen.
The ute was driven at a steady 10 kph down the road. The wind blew the weight on the fishing line back, and I marked the angle of the line on plywood. The vehicle was then turned around and driven at a steady 20 kph in the opposite direction. Once again, the angle of the line was marked.
We didn’t have the courage to repeat the exercise at 30 kph. It was the smoothest road in the district, but was still extremely rough, and quite unsafe at 30 kph.
We then made intermediate marks for the 5 and 15 kph speeds and, in the interests of safety, made an intelligent projection of where the 30 kph line would fall.
Oliver’s Land Cruiser ute parked by the fire tower. This is the vehicle in which he calibrated the Mark I “Raymond” Wind Gauge
Oliver continues his story:
It was crude, but undoubtedly closer than getting the towerman to guess the wind speed, especially as the towerman was a local man who was suffering from severe TB. He used to go up to the tower early in the morning, rig a hammock between the legs of the tower, and lie at ease with the radio on until we called him to climb to the cabin and undertake towerman duties. His family came with him for the day, and happily played around the base of the tower, his wife cooking the mid-day meal on an open fire on the ground below the tower.
There was only one fire tower on the plantation, so instead of calling in a triangulated distance and angle to a smoke, he called in a guess as to the location of the fire. This was usually extremely accurate. And he could give us a wind speed reading, using my gauge, which would indicate to us the urgency of the response required.
I enjoyed Oliver’s story, as it demonstrated ingenuity and a simple solution to what could have been a tricky or at least an expensive problem. “Proper” wind gauges (by then known to us as ‘anemometers’) had become a routine tool of trade in my forestry work, used almost daily in the field when we were checking conditions for a burn or when firefighting. There was an automatically-recording anemometer mounted at the weather station at forestry HQ at Pemberton when I worked there, and there were smaller, but still sophisticated instruments in all the fire lookouts.
But I still remember with nostalgia that piece of binder twine in the cabin of the Gardner Tree, and the serious way old Ernie Percival instructed me in its use.
Ironically, Gardner Tree was eventually a victim of wind. Although it was no longer in use, the top of the tree with its towerman’s cabin snapped off during Cyclone Alby in April 1978. When I heard about this, I can remember feeling sad about the loss of an icon of the karri forest, but happy that nobody had been up there when it happened, especially me.
Finally …
… all these years later, now long retired from the forest and the fire front, my sub-conscious memory does not allow me to forget the lessons I learned about wind back in the day. A nor-wester in March will keep me awake at night, fearful of the disaster it might bring, and anxious for the noble men and women out there somewhere, facing the unstoppable. Or I smile with quiet pleasure as I stand at the window, filling my nostrils with the beautiful and pungent aroma of summer rain on hot ground, remembering the times a southwester brought a heavy downpour to the karri forest on Christmas Eve or Good Friday.
Apart from Cyclone Alby, I can remember only one occasion on which wind got the better of me. Back in my tennis playing days I once participated in an interclub match at a small bush tennis club south of Quairading in the WA wheatbelt. It was autumn, and the courts were surrounded by recently ploughed paddocks, awaiting the first winter rains for seeding to begin. Being a clear and hot day, I was well-plastered with sunscreen on face, legs and arms.
Half-way through the first set, a violent willy-willy started up in the nearby paddock and it ran straight at us and onto the tennis courts. Swirling red dust enveloped and blinded us. In our neat tennis togs and heavy sunscreen, we were sitting dogs. The thing spun around us for about a half a minute, crossing and recrossing the net and lifting off our hats. Then it swirled out into the car park, and curvetted off in a south-westerly direction, kicking up its heels.
My overpowering memory of all this was being thickly coated in muck, an amalgam of sunscreen, sweat and red dust; I didn’t quite know what I looked like until I examined my partner – only his eyes were visible through the mask of red gunk. I also remember that our opponents, all local farmers, did not flicker a moment of interest .... this was clearly a feature of their tennis environment to which they were adapted. A local weapon, as it were. They wiped off with towels and got stuck into us while we were distracted.
According to bush tradition, the day’s tennis ended with a BBQ and beer. The beer was rendered even tastier than usual, I recollect, as it washed away the last remnants of salmon gum topsoil, with which my throat was still encrusted. It’s an ill wind, they say …..
A quick commercial
For anyone interested in bushfire detection, fire towers and aircraft, I mention my recently-published book Eyes in the Sky. This is a history of fire detection in WA forests and covers the development of the lookout towers, the evolution of spotter aircraft and a description of how the system works.
Contact me (yorkgum41@outlook.com) to buy a copy. The price is $29.50, including postage, and all proceeds go to the Bushfire Front to support their campaign for effective bushfire management in WA
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