Camping gear?
Who needs it?
Boots?
Nah.. old pair of black school shoes and a couple of pairs of socks.
Ken had a steel framed / canvas covered camp stretcher from Sherry's Disposals that I could sleep on under the stars. Might get cold... OK.. pinch an old eiderdown quilt from mum's spare room. Stock up on crap to eat, load it all into his mother's old Morris Major Elite and away the two of us go in search of adventure.
What could possibly go wrong?
How little we know at 15 it would seem.
Good Friday morning finds us loaded into the old car and heading south for the big event. Ken has no car radio but he does have a National Panasonic Transistor 8 on the dash and between the static and whine of the ignition system we get updates on the road toll form various car accidents over Easter. Half a century later I have forgotten the numbers, but at the time we are horrified to hear them.
Eventually.. the Lost World arrives.. or rather we arrive at the Lost World.
An amazing place... the famers had kept the grass between the creek and the road trimmed back so finding a camping spot wasn't that hard to do. Last time I was there about 10 years ago it was so overgrown so you could not leave the road. And finding a camping spot was easy. I mean back then we only had 1 million cars on the road in all of QLD. Now from memory it is in excess of 4 million.
So we make camp and then boil the billy. With hot tea in us we then decide what to do for the next 2 days.
Ken points out Buchanans Fortress way above us..... "We shall climb that tomorrow!"
"Yes mate.. let's do that.. how hard can it be?"
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| Buchanan's Fortress. |
In the meantime we waste the day discussing all sorts of crap, cars, girls, motorbikes, girls, hifi systems, girls, any snakes around here, girls .. well you get it.
After a wholesome dinner of tinned spaghetti (yuk yuk yuk) we bed down. Me on my canvas camp stretcher in a pair of shorts and T shirt covered by an ancient eiderdown quilt. Shit I froze. And then it got colder and colder and colder.. so I had to find some more timber to build the fire higher. What a miserable night.
But.. tomorrow would be better.
Finally the sun came over the horizon and as I started to warm up.. I fell into a deep sleep.
For about 5 minutes.... "Wake up Mark.. time to get up!"
About a half hour later finds us walking through really high scratching undergrowth looking for the the way up. And the funny thing I learnt that day is this.... When you pick out an object in the distance and decide to walk to it.... somehow it recedes into the distance as you approach it. You walk and you walk and you never get closer. Well not for a few hours that is.
Long story short is that we did get to the top and back down way after sunset. I don't have any pix from the top because... I left my plastic camera on my camp stretcher covered by the bloody eiderdown quilt.
Easter Sunday we lay around the camp as we were both stuffed. Had no idea how hard that was going to be.
Late Easter Monday night we pull up at Armagh Street and I am home. Jump into a hot shower and man oh man are my legs reacting to the hot water. Talk about covered in scratches, blisters all over my feet and bits of skin missing everywhere.
Could not believe how warm and comfortable my bed was that night.
And to think it was 50 years ago this Easter, yet fresh in my mind like just last week.
After that trip I started to buy better gear including Paddy Palin boots. My bushwalking days with Ken continued with a trip to Mount Barney later in the year and then to many other places including the Stinson crash site.
He was a good mate taken way too soon.
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| Ken at Mt Barney January 1970 |
