Tim Harvey, YHS 1971 You might remember Tim’s memories in the last newsletter (Part 1 - Water)....here is Part 2 - Fire: The first group of recollections in this series started with one of the classical elements - water, and it seemed fitting to move to another – fire. Yallourn was overlooked on three sides by symbols of fire and was bounded by a fourth. The first of the three was the chimneys of the power stations, or rather the series of them. The annual reports of the SEC spoke proudly of the smoke pouring from the chimneys. In the fifties, it was a sign of progress. In the sixties, it was a sign of industry. In the seventies, it was a sign that no-one was on strike at that particular moment. I remember going on class trips to the power stations on several occasions. Being scared of heights, I hated the grill floors and the highlight of each trip was peering into the tiny windows into the boilers and seeing the sheets of flame. Let’s be fair here – there wasn’t much else to see. Everything else was in casings and behind walls, protecting the high-energy contents from the outside world. It was high-tech, it was engineering at its finest. But it really wasn’t much to look at. The second was the chimney of the briquette factory, that vertical red stripe on the SW corner of the town. All the years I spent in Yallourn, I don’t think I ever got to look around the briquette factory. I know I used to stare (from a good distance) at the ladder that ran up the side of the chimney and boggle at the idea of someone actually climbing it. The third sentinel was - and still is - the tower on Coach Road hill. I remember my Dad telling me about how frightening the fires of 1944 were, when he was only a lad. The Cut caught fire, as did their back yard in Westbrook Rd. I couldn’t quite connect with the idea. I knew Yallourn and its surrounds. There were traces of trees and bush but not much to worry about, surely? But of course, the countryside I knew was largely shaped by the fear that those dreadful times instilled. The bush was savagely cut back until only a few pockets were left. Aerial pictures of Yallourn from decades before show the town surrounded by miles of bush on all sides. And the little wooden houses most of us lived in would have taken only a few breaths from a decent firestorm. So the tower on Coach Road hill stood watch. It was a risky assignment as, over the years, it has fallen prey to fire itself several times. As the highest point on the highest hill, it is periodically visited by fire from the sky. They say that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. That’s because the same place isn’t there any more. And neither is the tower. Same location, same general shape. But periodically the design changes - or is orcibly modified. In a flash, as it were. The fourth was the Open Cut, that creeping maw that eventually ate its way around and through the town itself. And the slightly sickening thing is that the coal under the town was used in preference to that of the Eastern Field only because it was nearer and, thus, slightly cheaper. It saved the SEC and the Victorian taxpayer the princely sum of $40m, if I recall correctly. Forty million dollars - the equivalent now of about two week’s tolls from City Link, not adjusted for inflation. And, having done the arithmetic and felt totally annoyed all over again, I will now compose myself and try not to utter any rude words. But, frankly, I am not going to try too hard. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Bum. The Fire station. Even from this distance in time, I remember the Fire Station as a rather elegant building. Light grey, the square tower with chic horizontal vents near the top. It had character, even if it was fairly minimalist. Not art -deco-ish and sculpted like the original Yallourn Tech. Not stolid with subtle curves and flourishes, like the Theatre. Not sleek and modern like the Methodist Church. It just seemed to be balanced, functional and pleasant to look at. Unlike most of the public buildings in Yallourn which looked more like English two-up-and-twodown’s that had been scrunched together by bulldozers. I suspect the architectural department of the SEC only got to cut loose on the two weeks the boss was on holiday. They did the Tech, the Theatre and the Methodist Church, and then caught merry hell when he got back. (“Make ‘em boring, lads! Like when you were a kid – a box with a triangle on top for a roof!”) So, we ended up with the shops, the banks, the Health Centre, the Primary School, the High School, the Guest Houses, the Hotel, the Hospital, the Police Station and St Therese’s school. All boxes, all with a triangle for a roof. And all designed as though there was a special for buying in bulk that week. But the Fire Station was different. I only went there twice, as I remember, both times as a class excursion. They gave us a lecture on fire, then lit up some petrol in a big metal pan and put it out several times. And we all got a hell of a shock from the noise of the CO2 extinguishers – everyone does. But I remember they also showed us these new tiny extinguishers, yellow in colour. They didn’t look much bigger than cans of hairspray, but they worked amazingly well. Better than CO2 and less fuss. They were revolutionary. They were the Halon extinguishers, now banned for chewing holes in the ozone layer. [sigh] Fireworks. In 1605, Guy Fawkes and some friends attempted to blow up King and Country. Well, the King and the country’s MP’s, anyway. And with a logic matched only by the perverse celebrations of the rest of the year’s major holidays
(rabbits and chocolate eggs for Easter, Santa and presents for Christmas), we commemorated that unsuccessful detonation by blowing things up ourselves. Considering that in my lifetime, we started celebrating such non-obvious events as Valentine’s Day and Secretary’s Day – principally for the benefit of large retailers - it is perhaps surprising that this celebration was allowed to die. But it was a blessing too, like the passing of milk bottles. Because just as milk bottles repeatedly put kids into hospital with awful damage to their hands, so November the fifth always did the same thing. Buying fireworks was essentially unregulated and you could walk in at almost any age and buy stuff that had fearsome power. Penny bungers were big enough to do serious damage, and Atomic Bungers and their ilk would easily destroy neighbourhood letterboxes. I know because we lost a couple that way. So, at our place, Dad usually took charge of fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day and let off the crackers and the rockets and the Catherine Wheels while we were shepherded back to a safe distance. This generally worked well, except for one particular year. Our dog, upset by the proceedings on sensory levels which we could never appreciate, was barking wildly and bravely at any sputtering or fizzing as things went off. As kids, we thought this tremendously amusing up to the point where Dad set off a skyrocket. The dog, incensed by the mad hissing from the milk bottle, leapt at it, knocking it over just as the rocket ignited. The rocket described a graceful horizontal arc over the dividing fences and blew up with what seemed unnatural violence in our neighbour’s yard. Next to their brandnew car. We beat a hasty retreat inside and hid. That was pretty much the end of the Guy Fawkes experience as I remember, although for some years, Dad kept a shoebox full of very small crackers. Yallourn was a very pet-friendly town, which was good because we had lots of our own. Except that most of the neighbourhood cats ended up fighting with our cats in our yard at night and generally making a hell of a racket. Dad would gently ease open the bedroom window and, sitting on the floor, would light a cracker and quietly flick it into the midst of the furry melee outside. A short, sharp blast and the melee would instantly vanish in all directions never to re-form. (They should try that in the AFL - now that would bring the crowds back to the footy.) The lounge room heater. The SEC was, in many ways, a wonderful landlord. At one point, they got rid of our old lounge heater and replaced it with the then-equivalent of a big flatscreen TV. It was sleek and modern and recessed into the old fireplace. And it had an electric fan. But like most things firerelated in Yallourn, it was fuelled by coal, or more specifically, briquettes. The wussy heaters of today (Coonara and suchlike) have big warnings on them telling you specifically that they are not to be used with briquettes, because the heat will buckle the metal baseplate. By contrast, our heater in Yallourn was born to EAT briquettes and spit out heat. And boy, could it spit out heat. We would bask in the power of our new toy by closing the lounge-room door, cranking up the fire and the fan and getting the room like a dry sauna. It was stifling, but pleasantly invigorating. (Although in retrospect, it probably did the valves in our old black and white TV no good at all - they were forever blowing and needing replacement.) My grandma walked into the lounge room unprepared a couple of times and nearly passed out. After that, we kept the heat in the lounge room at more sensible levels. Autumn leaves. The trees in Yallourn were beautiful, of course. We lived on the corner of Fairfield Ave and Uplands Rd. We had a giant pin oak on the Fairfield Ave nature strip running eastwest and a couple of claret ash trees on the Uplands Road nature strip. And in autumn these trees turned their leaves beautiful shades of yellows and reds and burgundy. Or sometimes just rusty brown, depending on how wet the previous season had been. But inevitably, this show would be completed with an almost audible thump as the leaves fell as one to the ground. Autumn was the official time to rake them all into the bluestone gutters and set fire to them. Composting was not a concept that had reached the colonies at that stage and the only way to keep the world safe from the annual invasion of the Dead Leaf Creatures was to burn them. And for most people, this was more or less doing on the weekend what they did most of the time at work anyway, just using a different fuel. There was an art to it, so it didn’t go up all at once in a bright smokeless flame, nor so that it made so much smoke that passing automobiles would run blindly into trees or one another. There was a happy medium of air and leaf that generated that marvellous haze of autumn we now know is so bad for us, the environment and civilisation as we know it today. But it had a wonderful smell, and was another childhood marker of he passing seasons. And I miss it still.
