HOT SHOT: Marilyn Bradbury's daughter, Tammy, in a blur of action and Marilyn at a more sedate pace

Marilyn and daughter - Western champions

CLUB champion Marilyn Bradbury has just spent five winter weeks with her daughter, Tammy, in Texas, where she is a major force in the world of cowboys – a world champion no less.
Tammy is a real life rootin’, tootin’ Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane with the ability to outshoot the men, while riding a horse at breakneck speed.
And Tammy, 42, is blessed with the same steely determination that has taken Marilyn to four consecutive singles titles in the more sedate arena of lawn bowls.
Marilyn is immensely proud – and rightly so – in her daughter’s achievements since she left Perth 20 years ago to pursue a career working with horses.
‘I knew absolutely nothing about it. She just said she was leaving for Texas as ‘there was no money in horses in Australia’,’ said Marilyn.
The pair did not see each other again until after Tammy was hit by a drunk-driver in 2012 and sustained serious brain injuries in a spooky sequel to an accident to her father when she was four years old. He was killed by a drunk driver, leaving Marilyn to bring up Tammy and her brother Clinton on her own.
Now Marilyn visits every year, doing all the cooking and helping Tammy with chores such as cleaning up the horse poo. Tammy has little time for food, which makes it a little bizarre that she featured on Andrew Zimmerman’s Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel.
‘Tammy has no interest in food except to keep her going. Her daily routine is unbelievable. It starts at 6am and finishes at 1 or 2am the following day.
‘She not only competes but covers events for magazines, social media, radio as well as taking photographs. Returning from a competition, we sat on the side of the road for an hour while Tammy worked on her laptop,’ said Marilyn.
Then when she gets home Tammy studies for a Masters’ degree in Organisational Leadership, after graduating, with honours, from Colorado State University, obtaining a BA in Science, Communication. ‘I have absolutely no doubt she will get it,’ said Marilyn. ‘Like me she is highly competitive, If she was playing Monopoly she would be desperate to win.’
As well as training and teaching mounted shooting, Tammy has pursued a career in equine marketing and is Director of Operations for Road to the Horse, the World Championship of Colt Starting, held annually at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington.
Tammy is a multiple Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association (CMSA) World Champion Cowgirl, a multiple CMSA National Champion Cowgirl, a two-time High Point National Champion, a National Rifle Champion and a Cowgirl Hall of Fame nominee. Tammy also claims Overall Championship titles from both the Western and Eastern U.S. Championships. Tammy has won the Texas State and South-Central High Point Championship for eight consecutive years.
Tammy was the first ever cowgirl competitor in CMSA to reach the Level 6 status, the first cowgirl to win an Overall High Point Championship, and the only person to ever sweep overall titles in all four major CMSA championships. She is one of only two cowgirls to ever win a CMSA Rifle championship, against the cowboys at a major competition and the only cowgirl in history to win an Overall CMSA National Rifle Championship.
If that is not enough, put Tammy Scronce into Google for a whole host of websites. PROUD MUM: Marilyn at Tammy's graduation
THEN AND NOW... Ian as a 20-year-old member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northen Ireland and enjoying his teenage years in Sri Lanka. Above: Ian's former antique shop in Subicao.
The pictures below show Ian and Maggie on their wedding day and Ian on his way to winning the singles title in 2017.

Intriguing times ahead in the Edgar era

THE term workaholic usually applies to people in their powerhouse years between 20 and 60-ish but for recently installed Merriwa president, Ian Edgar, it is a way of life whether in the home, the garden, the workshop or the bowls club… even at the age of 78.
Ideas come pouring out of Ian – and for the most part he rolls up his sleeves and does what needs to be done himself.
On top of his presidency, Ian is chairman of the greens committee and has stayed on as a selector after two years in the chair, which clearly suggests he relishes running the show It was the same at his only other bowls club, Hollywood-Subiaco, where he was president, treasurer and licensee.
This attitude to life goes back to his childhood in Northern Ireland and later in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), when he attained the highest honour in the Boy Scout movement – a Queen’s Scout.
‘As a scout, we camped out for 48 weeks a year. You soon learned how to cook and stay warm,’ recalls Ian. The cooking skills have stayed with him. He bakes bread, makes liqueurs and classic curries, having acquiring a taste for exotic cuisine in Ceylon during his teenage years
Born in Belfast in 1940, Ian did well to survive the early years as he explained.
‘The family home was in direct line with the Harland and Wolf shipyard (birthplace of the ill-fated Titanic) and an aircraft factory. My earliest memories are of air raid sirens and air raid shelters We saw a lot of bombing
‘A year after my father was demobbed, he re-joined the air force as work as a pharmacist was hard to come by. He was posted to Ceylon. I had a marvellous time. School was 8am until noon then we would go swimming and sailing. We had yacht races every Wednesday and Saturday. We also had a cook and a cleaner.’
On returning to Ireland, Ian joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary at 18 to become embroiled in the trouble-torn years when both Catholics and Protestants hated the police. He served for nine grim years of nightly petrol bombing, first from one faction and then the other. They were piggies in the middle.
This was not the place to raise a family and so the Edgars with son Duncan just 12 months old, set sail for Aus and arrived in Fremantle on St Patrick’s Day (March 17) 1968.
Ian swapped one cop’s uniform for another and, much to his disappointment, was quickly transferred to traffic. He became involved in major accident investigations, travelling across much of WA.
His thirst for knowledge took him to study law and that advanced his career as a police prosecutor. He particularly enjoyed cases of gold stealing during a spell in Kalgoorlie. ‘A lot of it went on and they required a lot of research. On the lighter side there was the case of a woman posing naked for a photographer on City Beach.
‘She was charged with ‘wilfully exposing the person’. Her lawyer argued that she should not be convicted because, as a woman, she did not have a ‘person’.
‘I won the case by quoting the case of Lady Godiva!’
Ian and his first wife also found time to run an antique shop for eight years. ‘Remember When…’ was based in Subiaco.
In retirement, Ian had a whirlwind introduction to bowls. ‘I retired on a Thursday, walked into Hollywood-Subiaco club on Monday and played pennants on Thursday. I had never played bowls before.
‘The club was run down and I soon took over as bar manager. I was the licensee for 15 years. I got very lucky as the nearby hotel closed down shortly after I took over quickly followed by the local tavern. We got all their regular drinkers and the bonus was that some of them became decent bowlers.’ Among the regulars was former Australian wicketkeeper, Adam Gilchrist.
Ian was president for five years and treasurer for 12. He was made a life member a year before he left to move into Merriwa.
His early Merriwa bowling form was little short of disastrous and he plummeted from the top team to the bottom, eventually leading for Ivor Thomas. Like others before and after, he found it difficult to adapt to the slow pace of the greens.
An indication that his bowling problems were over when he reached the 2014 singles final, losing to Steve Appleton.
FAR from seeking to preserve the status quo at Merriwa Ian wants to see the club progress. He has initiated a 'strategic plan' for the club which includes trying to recruit 40 new players.
Among the ideas that have come to fruition are the mass planting of pots to beautify the greens, sponsored jacks with members' names printed on them and a monthly website column.
​There is no doubt that more ideas will follow.
For the next season, his form again went into serious decline to such an extent that he thought of giving up.
In 2016 he started using an ‘arm’ which brought about a remarkable resurgence of form, culminating in an epic singles final win over Lindsay Marsh in 2017 and the good form continued into last season. He is arguably the best draw bowler at the club.
Ian found more than just good form at Merriwa, On April 19, 2015 Ian married Maggie Packer, who was just beginning her bowling career.
Maggie has comparable creative energy to Ian and the pair are now an ambitious Merriwa force as president and lady captain – should make for some interesting pillow talk…
All aboard the Skinner Express - Terry Skinner stokes the fire before getting up a head of steam, reaching a top speed of 10k an hour

Planes, then boats, now trains for Terry

BOYS love their toys - and in Terry Skinner's case that means owning and driving a steam locomotive.
It is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream that goes back to the 1950s in Essex, England, when his dad drove a train for the British Army along a five mile track from the River Thames to Terry's home towen of Shoeburyness.
'It was a garrison town and dad picked up live ammunition from a barge of the Thames,' said 74-year-old Terry.
'I used to ride on the footplate with 40 truck loads of ammunition for the barracks. Strangely I never wanted to be a train driver - I dreamed of being a motor mechanic.
'There was a garage at the end of our street and from about the age of ten I used to sit on a fence and watch the mechanics working. They eventually came over and asked me if I wanted to have a job. I was about 12 and used to get home from school, change into old clothes and worked there until it was dark.'
He spent a lifetime tinkering with engines and that's the appeal of joining the Castledare Mininiature Railway Society, which houses not one but two trains owned by Terry.
First he bought a scale model of a Victoria Shunter engine from a seller in Tasmania about a year ago but that now plays second fiddle to a steam locomotive built by a fellow Castledare member, Roger Matthews.
'Working on the engine gives me a greater buzz than actually driving it,' said Terry,a member of Merriwa for four years, having never played any other sport. His other passion is building remote-controlled model boats, a follow-on from model aircraft. 'The trouble with model aircraft is once they crashed that was it. Building new ones all the time became a bit too expensive.'
Since its opening in 1963, more than a million people have ridden on the various trains with as many as 1,200 on a single day.
Terry is not yet licensed to carry the public but is able to carry family and friiends along a labrynth of tracks that takes in Wilson Park for the fully qualified drivers.
The Barron family was taken on a trip alongside the Canning River in carriages designed for young legs. Julia and I enjoyed the experience but were glad to stretch aging limbs, while the kids eagerly accepted Terry's invitation for an encore.
Public days are the first and third Sundays in the month at $6 a head ($3 for children) with thousands raised for charrity over the past 54 years.
HOME SWEET HOME: The Nissen Hut (far right) that was the family home for Peter and Mavis and three of their children. Peter and Mavis are with their seven children on Wolverhampton railway station in England and all together three months after arriving in Perth

From £25 to $500,000 home - living the Aussie dream

MAVIS and PETER PRICE arrived in Perth on July 4, 1968, with four suitcases, £25 and seven children, knowing that as soon as they got here the family would be split up.
Peter, who suffered rheumatic fever at the age of 14, was the prime mover in coming to Australia in the hope that the climate would help give him respite from the pain in his joints. But he had a complete change of heart once he discovered the price that he and Mavis would have to pay... at least in the early stages. ‘There was no way I would allow my children to be taken away for goodness knows how long. As
far as I was concerned it was a non-starter,’ said Peter. He had not bargained on the determination of his children, whose ages in 1968 ranged from four to 12, to see out the Australian adventure. ‘Unbeknown to us,’ said Mavis, ‘the kids had a meeting and decided which ones would go it alone (at a place called Fairbridge Farm).’ (In 1912, Kingsley Fairbridge and his wife Ruby arrived in Albany, Western Australia, from England and made their way to Pinjarra to establish the Fairbridge Farm School. The school opened on 19 October 1912. Kingsley wanted to see "little children stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the farm.". From 1913 until 1982, the school assisted 3,580 children under various child migration schemes. The school provided education in task-learning, husbandry, metal work and wood work)
Forty seven years later Peter is so grateful that the kids took that stance. The one sad note is the death of Jacqueline, their first daughter. The other children are Derek, Paul, Angela, Andrew, Christine and Sandra. There also 31 grandchildren and 39 great grandchildren. Big families run in the family so to speak – Peter is one of 16 and Mavis one of 11. The father of four of their great grandchildren is former Perth Wild Cats basketball legend, the seven-foot Paul Rogers, who retired in 2010 after representing Australia in two Olympic Games in Sydney and Athens.
Peter was born on February 3, 1934, in Wolverhampton, a Midland town at the heart of the Black Country, so named because of its roots in the Industrial Revolution while Mavis is a country girl from nearby Codsall. She was born on October 8 1936. Peter and his many siblings lived directly opposite the William Butler Brewery and he followed his father in working there.
Mavis and Peter set up home in a ramshackle cottage in Codsall with precious little money. The Prices have a stack of stories to underline their plight like pushing a pram five miles with a wardrobe on board. ‘I was eight and a half months pregnant and I said to Peter I couldn’t help to push it back. He told me to get into the pram and then to our horror we saw three girls sitting on a bridge we had to cross. When they came over to look at the ‘baby’ they squealed with laughter.’
The propaganda films about the joys of living in Australia persuaded Peter to make the 10,000 mile move in the certain knowledge that his health would benefit from leaving behind the cold and damp for the wall-to-wall sunshine. The July Perth winter was an instant hit. ‘We would be in shirt sleeves and couldn’t believe that people were wrapped up in jumpers, overcoats and scarves. We thought it was summer,’ said Peter.
Technically ’Ten Pound Poms’, the Prices came here by plane courtesy of the Fairbridge Society and the Australian Government. The Prices did not have to pay a penny, a little different from today. They arrived at midnight in pouring rain and the four destined for Fairbridge Farm life – Paul, Jacqueline, Angela and Andrew – were whisked away immediately to spend 18 months working in a community that included a cinema and a church.
Peter, Mavis, Derek, Christine and Sandra were housed at Graylands Migrant Centre in a Nissen hut, once part of army barracks. In between spells with the Water Board, Peter apparently had more than 20 jobs in six months, one of which lasted just five minutes. He was due to deliver a consignment of steel to Safety Bay but got no further than one street from the depot when he had to take evasive action to avoid hitting a woman driver. ‘The brakes were virtually non-existent. I told him to stick his truck, it was a death trap.’
Peter has one jaw-dropping story when he was in charge of a gang of six. ‘They had worked well one morning so I gave them an extra half an hour in the pub at lunchtime. I didn’t drink, so I sat in the van. They were long overdue so I was in a bad mood when I ordered them out.’ Peter got into an argument with one truculent worker and threatened to throw him in the Swan River when they got to the old Swan Brewery. ‘Unbeknown to me he had stripped down to his underpants and when I stopped the van he got out and jumped into the river. Unfortunately for him the tide was out. He was sprawled out unconscious on the rocks. He was lucky he didn’t kill himself but he did spend three days in hospital with concussion.’
Mavis started at the bottom of the employment ladder cleaning out the centre’s toilets. She stayed 20 years, eventually ending up in charge.
The family was reunited when a friend gave them the use of a house he intended to knock down. Another friend loaned them $500 for a deposit on a Housing Association house in Girawheen, bought for $10,000 and sold for $80,000. Now in retirement Peter and Mavis have realised the Aussie dream with a house in Clarkson worth close on $500,000 – the mortgage long since paid off. They have birds in aviaries outside and tropical fish in tanks inside. A touch of their old life in England remains with a washing line stretched across a garden that is dominated by dozens of roses
Bowls has been a major part of Peter and Mavis’s life for more than 30 years. Peter’s first club was Osborne Park followed by Nollamara, Wanneroo and Merriwa. Mavis joined him at Wanneroo and is now a Merriwa first team Pennant skip. Their house is full of bowls trophies. At Merriwa Peter has won the pairs, triples and fours and Mavis has won the triples (twice) and the fours (three times). They were the first winners of the mixed pairs in 2001/02 and won it again in 2005/06.
Peter is as formidable an opponent on the green as he was at work. He took the Water Board to court – and won – when they tried to short-change him in his wage packet. He retired at 55 and has no doubt that emigrating to Australia was the best decision he ever made - a better standard of living and quality of life. A sentiment he shares with thousands of other...
THREE PHASES OF VAL'S LIFE: A fresh-faced recruit in the Royal Australian Air Force and (right) on manouvres in the Bush as a WRAAF reservist with husband Darryl and (above) in her RFDS office at Jandakot airport

Val naturally biased about work of Flying Doctors

IF ever you’ve groaned about forking out $1 for sending down a wrong bias, groan no more.
One member of the club, Terry Skinner, is eternally grateful that we make an annual donation of around $800 to the Royal Flying Doctor Service – because the money helped to save his life.
On April 14 Terry arrived at the nickel mine where he works as a maintenance man and within hours was experiencing the first signs of a heart attack. He was a sick man in a remote place, exactly the sort of situation that caused the Flying Doctors to be created back in the 1930s.
The plane arrived at 4 30pm and the flight back was a heart stopping moment... literally. ‘ My heart stopped as we started the flight and I had to be resuscitated.
GRATEFUL: Terry Skinner (left) for the Flying Doctor and Lindsay Marsh, a big fund raiser for the RFDS
When I got to the Fiona Stanley hospital the specialist said the Flying Doctor team had done an excellent job,’ said Terry, now well on the way to recovery.
Terry is one of more than 270,000 people who annually benefit from this uniquely Australian innovation that has even inspired a television soap opera that ran from 1986 to 1992. One of its employees for part of that time was Merriwa bowler Val Ikin, who was based at Jandakot, the busiest secondary airport in Australia situated in the Cockburn suburb of Perth.
Val joined the RFDS on November 1, 1990, as an account clerk after 20 years in the Royal Australian Air Force as teleprinter operator and then, after giving birth to her son Dean, as a reservist.
Val was featured in the Flying Doctor in-house magazine in which she described her role.
‘My position at RFDS is base administrator/medical chest officer. I like to see myself as the mother hen looking after the brood. I ensure that medical equipment maintenance is carried out and consumers are ordered for bases around the state.
‘I also provide administrative support to the doctors, flight nurses and pilots around 14 people in all.
‘The flight crews do a marvellous job. The conditions they work in can be harsh. They are so dedicated. I think my role is to try and make it as easy as possible for them to carry out their life-saving work.
‘The other part of my job, which is very satisfying, is looking after medical chests. Currently there are 667 medical chests state-wide at stations, mine sites, roadhouses and police stations.
‘The holder of the medical chests order their drugs through me. It is very rewarding helping out people in the Bush. After a while you build up a rapport and tend to know them by name. My husband an I recently went north on holiday and it was nice to pop into a couple of the roadhouses to put a face to a name. A lot of tourists don’t know that medical chests exist and yet in many cases they are the people who need and get help.’
The West Australian RFDS started on June 14, 1936. The RFDS was the dream of the Rev John Flynn, a minister with the Presbyterian Church. He saw the daily struggle of pioneers living in remote areas where just two doctors provided the only medical care for an area of almost two million square kilometres.
Rev Flynn’s vision was to provide a ‘mantle of safety’ for these people and on May 15, 1928, his dream became a reality with the opening of the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service (later renamed the Royal Flying Doctor Service) in Cloncurry, Queensland.
The Rev Flynn is permanently honoured with his picture on the Australian £20 bill.
By the 1950s, the RFDS was acknowledged by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies as ‘perhaps the single greatest contribution to the effective settlement of the far distant country that we have witnessed in our time.’
Until the 1960s, the Service primarily used contractors to provide aircraft, pilots and servicing. Today, it owns a fleet of 61 with the latest in navigation technology. It operates 21 bases across Australia and the pilots annually fly the equivalent of 25 round trips to the moon.
Five of those bases are in WA as are 15 aircraft along with five highly qualified nurses, five pilots and three doctors. In 75 per cent of cases a nurse does the job alone.
The last six of Val’s 18 years RFDS service were spent fund raising. Another Merriwa member heavily involved in that pursuit was former flying school proprietor Lindsay Marsh, who took part in the annual Outback Air Safari with the specific aim of helping the RFDS.
'We receive government funding but we also rely heavily on all the organisations and individuals who work so hard in raising money on a regular basis. All the aircraft are purchased from money we get from donations.' said Val, who has spent the last two years on the Merriwa ladies match committee.
ALAN AT WORK AND PLAY: On his motor bike (in the white helmet), with his ambluance crew colleagues and (below) with a home bred German shepherd

Happy Arters drawn to the sun

HAD Merriwa coach Alan Arter achieved his ambition of being a teacher, he would quite likely have ended up a headmaster.
Throughout his 78 years, English-born Alan has enjoyed helping others but his intended path of swapping one side of the classroom for the other was diverted when he had to take over his father’s business.
‘I had been planning to take my entrance exam for Oxford or Cambridge University but it never happened. My father, who was a wonderful role model, was taken ill and died,’ said Alan.
In 1955 he started his two years National Service in the RAF and was stationed in Germany. It was during this time that he met Hazel, who he would marry on March 19, 1959, the couple going on to have four sons.
After the air force, Alan would spend all but 15 years of his working life as a salesman - not always with products that proved successful in the UK - such as the Scandinavian central heating system. It still hurts that house designers did not share his enthusiasm.
It was on the recreational front that Alan’s leadership qualities came to the fore - first as a football referee. He was a right winger in the amateur leagues in the Hornchurch and Dagenham areas of Essex until cartilage trouble forced him to retire at the age of 27.
He was encouraged to become a referee and after moving the family to Bognor Regis, Sussex, on the south coast, he went on to head up the training programme for new referees. Some years later he took on the role of helping referees become better at what was becoming a more a difficult job as attitudes towards officialdom started to deteriorate. In preparation for taking this on, Alan attended a week’s residential course at Lilleshall Hall, now the National Sports Centre, but then the site of the Football Association youth academy, where the English senior side trained before international matches. At the end of the course one person was chosen to lecture to a packed auditorium that included 1974 World Cup final referee Jack Taylor, who famously awarded a penalty in the first minute to Holland against West Germany. Alan was the chosen one.
‘It was the most nerve racking thing I’ve ever done. My knees were knocking, I was stuttering and my mouth was dry. But I recovered and the talk (on the offside law) went well,’ said Alan.
A juicy perk of belonging to the Referees’ Association was to attend England’s internationals at Wembley as a steward. It was in this capacity that he was able to see for free the 1966 World Cup, won 4-2 by England against West Germany and featuring arguably the second most controversial goal in the compeition’s history behind Diego Maradonna’s infamous ‘Hand of God’. It was scored by England’s Geoff Hurst in extra time and decades after the event it is still shown on German television to a miffed nation that will never accept the ball crossed the goal-line. Alan has no doubts - ‘it was definitely a goal’ - spoken like a true Englishman.
At 47 referees are put out to grass and Alan was happy to go. He’d had quite enough of the verbal abuse by then, particularly from parents at kids’ matches.
Meanwhile, Hazel was not content to just being a housewife. She bought a collie and joined a dog training club with Alan watching from the sidelines. His competitive juices soon kicked in.
‘I just thought I could do a better job. Some dogs would want to bite the others and many of the owners were quite nervous. I used to say give me the dogs for five minutes, I promise I won’t hurt them even if it looked as if I was. I used a choke collar and dogs are pretty intelligent. They soon realised who was in charge,’ said Alan who eventually became disillusioned as club members were not interested in entering obedience competitions.
Hazel developed her interest by breeding collies as well as German Shepherds, qualifying once for the world famous Crufts Dog Show. Three of the last litter she bred also got to Crufts with their various owners.
At the age of 50 Alan was introduced to lawn bowls, initially at the Middleton club in Bognor and then at Hotham, also in Bognor,, where he won the singles title. The latter was virtually on the edge of the English Channel, giving Alan had an early taste of playing in windy conditions. A few miles down the road are the public bowling greens of Worthing, where the men’s national championships were held until very recently
Playing bowls in the UK often requires the use of waterproofs and umbrellas and when he retired from driving an ambulance - his job for the last 15 years of his working life - Alan craved to spend his latter years in the sun.
In 1988 - long before retirement - Australia’s bicentenary celebrations, given massive exposure in the UK, prompted son Kevin to head south. As Kevin built up a successful painting and decorating business, Alan and Hazel would visit every 18 months, whetting their appetite more and more for the Aussie lifestyle.
With only one child of four in the country they did not qualify for a parent visa but such was their determination they persuaded two more of their children to make the big move, although one has since gone back to the UK.
After a brief interlude touring around Europe and living in Cyprus, Alan and Hazel arrived in Perth 11 years ago, the last five spent at Merriwa, which came about after meeting the Leicesters, the Kers and the Barrs at Winter Sun caravan park in Carnarvon, where the Arters still go to escape the Perth winter ‘cold’.
‘We were invited to the club dinners and to the Mudlarks show. We liked what we saw and the people we met. Hazel was not sure about the move but it has exceeded all our expectations.’
The decision to move into a retirement village has not dulled Alan’s competitive edge or the desire to take more than a passing interest in others - selector, coach and singles champion in 2013 are proof of that.
Hazel, a talented artist whose pictures adorn the walls of their home, admits to missing a few of the simple pleasures of the UK, the daffodils in spring and the bluebell woods. Alan waved a dismissive hand until he remembered his motor bikes and riding round the narrow English country lanes with Hazel on the back.
It was the only discernible pang of nostalgia - as Edith Piaf sang je ne regrette rien...
ART OF THE MATTER: Hazel Arter and two of her passions - breeding collies and painting animals

'It was mayhem
down there and
when we tried
to get out
someone was
closing the
hatch from
above - the
integrity of the
ship was of
more concern
than a few
lost lives...'

Captain Bob and the 'killer' ship

EVERY inch the Navy man and chilling out with his mates (Bob is on the extreme right). Above ist the damage inflicted on the Melbourne by the collision and Bob today as Merriwa captain and with wife Joy
HMAS MELBOURNE, once the pride of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), was given the chilling soubriquet - the Killer Ship. And Merriwa men’s captain Bob Gillian was asleep in his bunk in the bowels of the aircraft carrier on the morning of June 3, 1969, when the second nortorious chapter in the ship’s jinxed history was about to unfold.
The Australians and Americans were on joint exercises in the South China Seas when disaster struck just after 3am. The Melbourne was in collision with the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans of the United States Navy. The American ship sailed under Melbourne's bow, where she was cut in two.
It was a deadly encore to an incident five years earlier when the RAN destroyer HMAS Voyager was split in half by the Melbourne while on manoeuvres off Jervis Bay, killing 82 of the 314-man Voyager crew. On neither occasion did the Melbourne suffer any loss of life.
Bob, who was 22 at the time of the second incident and had been in the Navy for five years maintaining its fighter planes, takes up the story. ‘The first inkling that something was going on was when we got the message ‘Hands on Emergency Stations’.
‘I put on some shorts. We did n’t sleep in much as the ship had no air conditioning and it was always stifling hot. Then came a message we’d never heard before - ‘Hands on Collision Station.
‘Just as we were thinking, where the hell is that, came an almight bang. I was sent tumbling head over heels before crashing into a steel wall. I thought we’d run aground and wondered how that could be as were nowhere near land. We were not at war so I knew we couldn’t be under attack.
‘It was mayhem down there and when we tried to get out someone was closing the hatch from above - the integrity of the ship was of more concern than a few lost lives. Fortunately the guy relented and we managed to get out and on to the flight deck.’
The Evans had been ripped in two but its back end was lashed to the Melbourne and every American from that part of the stricken boat was rescued. Those on the front end of the ship were not so lucky. It was pitch dark with just one beam from the Melbourne lighting up the area where men were fighting for their lives. Seventy four did not make it.
There was no chance for Bob or his colleagues to help in the rescue as they were ordered below deck as non-crew members. As the drama unfolded Bob sat in the ship’s cafeteria along with about ten Chinese tailors, who were sleeping on the part of the ship close to the impact point. They had been taken on board to measure up men for suits etc... and doing a roaring trade, according to Bob. They all survived but must have been scared out of their wits.
Melbourne stopped immediately after the collision and deployed her boats, liferafts, and lifebuoys, before manoeuvring alongside the stern section of the Evans. Sailors from both ships used mooring lines to lash the two ships together, allowing Melbourne to evacuate the survivors in that section. The bow section sank quickly; the majority of those killed were believed to have been trapped within. Members of Melbourne's crew dived into the water to rescue overboard survivors close to the carrier, while the carrier's boats and helicopters collected those farther out. Clothing, blankets and beer were provided to survivors.
Bizarrely, the ship's band was instructed to set up on the flight deck to ‘entertain’ and distract the survivors, all of whom were located within twelve minutes of the collision and rescued before half an hour had passed, although the search continued for fifteen more hours.
At the subsequent inquiry, it was revealed that both ships had tried to take evasive action. The Evans's commanding officer, Albert S McLemore, was asleep in his quarters at the time and charge of the vessel was held by Lieutenants Ronald Ramsey and James Hopson; the former had failed the qualification exam to stand watch, while the latter was at sea for the first time. No-one from the Melbourne was charged with wrongdoing.
The incident has left no scars on Bob. ‘I didn’t lose any mates. We never met any of the Americans so there was no emotional involvement.’
Bob spent two of his 22 years in the navy on the Melbourne and witnessed other dramas such as planes failing to make lift-off, some with fatal consequences.
The skills he learned in the navy were put to good use in his post-serviceman career working for Quantas and yet his life could have been so much different if there had been more carpentry work for his father’s business. Bob was appenticed to him but was let go and then laid carpets for a brief period until his cousin suggested they join the Navy.
Much of his time on board the Melbourne was spent writing to his girl frined Joy - ‘the best moments were when the post arrived. You were gutted if there was no letter from your sweetheart.’ Bob wrote a lot of letters back and they were married in 1971 and had three children, Chrissie, Andrew and Nicky. A few months ago their first grandchild was born, Thomas Charles.
Joy still has Bob’s letters but they are for her eyes only...

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