I went bush many times with my dad and his mates from when I was about 6 years old. Dad was a faller, started with axes and crosscuts but by the time I was 6 the first chainsaws had come in. I carried the fuel and oil through the bush, he carried 2 chainsaws with 42" bars plus a bag of axes and wedges. At home I was allowed to clean his saws and file chains but never allowed me to run then.
When I was 9, on saturdays and school holidays I started riding shot gun on top of the fuel tank of one of the D9 bulldozers that hauled the karri and jarrah logs, from where dad had dropped the trees, back to the landing where the logs were loaded onto trucks. My job was to hang on for dear life because "Macca", the dozer and truck driver, was an alcoholic and had two speeds, flat out and stop. Macca would back the D9 up close to a log and was supposed to hook up a steel cable or chain around the log. Because Macca was also a fat and lazy I used to do the hook up - I was only allowed to ride the D9 with Macca if I did the hook up. The trick was getting back up on the dozer before Macca realized the log was hooked up otherwise he woudl just take off! He also taught me how to stand on a moving track and it would lift me up to the height where I could grab hold of the canopy frame and pull myself onto the fuel tank. I just had to watch out he didn't decide to go backwards.
Sometimes the bottom of the log would be buried in dirt so I had to lay out the chain or rope and Macca would roll the end of the log across the rope. Back at the landing I used to wrap the steel cables around the logs and he would pull them up onto the truck. I liked doing it, Macca paid me in cigarettes which I gave to my dad at a the grand exchange rate of a penny per ***. At the end of the week I also got a free lemonade at the mill workers club bar - that was it.
In winter and spring I used to light a fire and boil the billy for morning tea and even cook bacon and eggs or sausage links for lunch. In summer and autumn, when we couldn't light a fire we used to heat cans of baked beans and irish stew by tucking the cans in between the exhaust manifold and the D9 engine block. Sometimes a can would explode and the contents spray all over the manifold and exhaust and burn away making that charred food smell for the rest of the day.
It makes my skin crawl today when I think about it, but hanging around those guys but even at that age I learned so much. I had been going bush with dad since I was 6,
When I was 13 dad was injured in a log truck accident and we didn't have any saws around until my twenties when I started using my BIL McCulloch saws and taught myself.
