When Frank Chulung was operating a scraper on the Snowy River Scheme back in the sixties he used to lift the gear box cover just to feel the warmth of the engine, such was the coldness of the mountains.
“It was so cold we’d do that just to get warm,” Frank laughs as he recalls working on one of the country’s most ambitious infrastructure projects.
“But the problem was then half of you would be bloody hot and the other half of you would still be freezing,” he says with smile.
While the climatic extremes of the Kimberley may be the opposite to those of the Snowy Mountains, the former heavy machinery operator – who also worked on construction of Ord stage one, reckons with air conditioning, GPS guidance and automatic controls the new breed of machinery operators working on the Ord expansion have got it easy.
“On the Snowy scheme I started on a model C water tanker and later on I started driving model B scrapers which had a 37 yard bowl and we pulled two of them together with two D9 dozers pushing from behind,” he reminisces.
“Back then we had the old manual five-gear gearboxes and when you were pulling 100 tonnes of dirt and driving up those hills you didn’t want to miss a gear otherwise you’d end up in the scrap heap,” he states in a mater-of-fact tone.
The local Aboriginal elder, who last week relived his machinery operating days getting behind the controls of a giant CAT scraper during a private tour of the Ord expansion construction site near Kununurra, said to see the project finally going ahead was an amazing sight.
“It makes me feel really good…I feel like going out there myself and getting a job on those machines,” he said.
Mr Chulung said after working on the construction of Ord stage one and all the years of false starts which had followed he had begun to think stage two would never happen.
“I was aware of the potential, but I didn’t know if it would ever come off,” he said.
A former chairman of the Kimberley Land Council, Mr Chulung has spent the past three decades working for Aboriginal land and civil rights and said he hoped the Ord expansion would create real benefits for his people.
In 1965, when he and two friends became the first Aboriginal students to complete high school at Wyndham, it was not compulsory for indigenous children to attend school.
Mr Chulung said back then he and other young Aboriginals did not have opportunities like those presented by the current expansion project.
“I wanted to study law when I finished school but back then the opportunities just weren’t there,” he said.
Mr Chulung said he hoped his people would make the most of the opportunities the $415 million Ord East Kimberley development package would create.
“What I really want to see is my grand children and other young Aboriginal children have a better life than what I did.”
By NATHAN DYER
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 Former Ord stage one construction worker Frank Chulung stands at the bottom of the massive Goomig Dawang irrigation channel being constructed as part of the Ord expansion. |
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