“ I was born in May 1958 in Katoomba, NSW. One of my brothers, my sister and myself were all born in the same hospital room. When Mum was 6 months pregnant with me, a bushfire went through the Blue Mountains and it impacted on the family home so my parents were running around trying to protect the house and now I’m a volunteer fire fighter so there was fire in my blood from the get go.
I went to school at Blue Mountains Grammar which was a small school and the playground opened up to the bush, beyond that was the Wentworth Falls Lake. Growing up in Leura we were surrounded by bush so we would take off in the school holidays. It was a great childhood. I had 2 brothers and a sister but unfortunately my eldest brother and my sister who was younger than me have both passed away.
During holidays we would visit Sydney and on one trip a relative organised for us to go to the ABC studios to watch a comedy being recorded with a live audience. I was fascinated with the goings on in the studio, the boom mikes, the cameras and the lights. When we went back home I re-created a make believe TV studio in my neighbours abandoned chook pen.
We moved to Sydney and I went to Manly Boys High. At the end of school my older brother ended up in a job at the ABC and I was so jealous as it was the job I wanted. After I left school I got an apprenticeship at a television repair place which I thought might be a way of getting into the television industry. While there another relative saw an ad for a Trainee Operator in the paper. By the time they saw me the applications had closed and my Uncle said, put the application in and they’ll throw it on top of the pile, which is what they did. I made the shortlist for an interview and jagged the position of Operations Officer Trainee. There was 14 people selected out of 1400 applicants. I was so lucky.
The ABC were very particular about teaching the trainees every aspect of television production. I also had a couple of months stint in radio too so it was a great grounding in TV production. After the 3 year traineeship I scored a position in outside broadcast which I loved. I worked in that position for 8 years which was when the ABC used to cover a lot of sport. I’d cover the golf, cricket, concerts and opera in the Opera House and we travelled all over the country. In 1985 I covered the Midnight Oil concert on Goat Island. It was a competition put on by Triple J and the winners got to see ‘Oils on the Water’. The camera position I had was to keep Peter Garrett in frame all night. I was exhausted at the end of that as you can imagine with the way he dances (laughs).
During that time I was also working as a volunteer fireman at the Beacon Hill Brigade. This was in 1978. A few year later I was the Captain of the Duffy’s Forest Brigade. This is where Skippy was filmed and that set was still there. One of the previous Captains of Duffy’s Forest Brigade went on to be the Commissioner of the Rural Fire Brigade. That was Shane Fitzimmons.
As the cutbacks started to bite into the ABC the outside broadcasts were being scaled backa s were the staff, so they asked if any of us wanted to work somewhere else in the ABC. I put my hand up and said I would like to be a news cameraman. Within a week I was off to News. My whole life has been working outside and shift work. I’ve never had a 9 to 5 job. I really enjoyed doing the news. After 12 years I started to get a bit tired of it though.
I do remember one of the jobs we did. We flew out in the ABC helicopter to cover the Forbes floods. At that time we didn’t have the technology so we had to shoot the story, hand the tape to the helicopter pilot and he would fly it back to the station so it could go to air that night. I was walking around in flood water and got into the car. I saw a bunch of kids across the road ahead. I saw the last little kid fall down backwards and disappear into the water. I realised she’d been sucked into one of the drains. Fortunately there was a truckload of SES guys who saw the same thing and they sprinted for the channel on the other side of the road where she would emerge. I was filming all this and I saw one of the SES guys leap into the water 100 metres down the channel and drag the child out of the water. When I got there the SES guy was trying to resuscitate the little girl. She was about 4 years old. Backtracking here my father died on my 18th birthday. He actually choked on a bit of roast lamb in front of us at a family dinner. Ever since I’ve always been up to date with my first aid course. The little girl was blue and very still and the SES guy was struggling. I pushed him aside and I started resuscitation. This little girl must have been so terrified her eyes were clamped shut and her teeth were clamped so tight she couldn’t breathe. I had to prise her mouth open, tilt her head back and she took a big breath. I saved her life so that was an incredible moment. I had all these newspaper clippings of that story but I lost them in the Lismore flood.
I met my partner Francois on line after September 11. He liked that I was a fireman (laughs) and we moved to Surry Hills. I got a new job operating the equipment that transmitted back to the station live. It was an old van with a pneumatic tower that went up 10 metres and we would point the dish to Sydney Tower. They introduced some satellite uplink equipment which came in 4 large suitcases so we could travel to the site and put it together like a lego kit. We could then do very remote stories. The first time we used the equipment was for a story on the Port Lincoln bush fires. Through obstacles we finally found the satellite and the pictures finally arrived back to the studio. It was pretty nerve wracking.
Francois and I used to come to the Northern Rivers for holidays and we loved the feel of the place. We did that for quite a few years. I got to the stage with the ABC that I could apply for an early retirement at 55. It was part of my Super package I had signed in 1978 having no idea what I had signed up for. Being that I was retired I had less ties with Sydney. We had been renting in Surry Hills for 12 years and the rent was constantly being put up in the last few years. Sydney was too expensive so we started looking up here. Coincidentally we were at a dinner at Eltham Pub and we met you (me). We became FB friends that night. You had done a story on Marie and Nikki who were selling their house in Girards Hill and we fell in love with it. We decided to buy it. Within a month we packed up and moved to the Northern Rivers.
After retiring from the ABC they contacted me to see if I was interested in Freelance work doing the same job casually. I bumped into an old colleague who suggested I contact his company as they were looking for experienced satellite operators. Shortly after I was driving around NSW and further afield. When I told my boss I was moving to Lismore I thought I’d have to give up the job but my bosses said they would fly me down when they needed me and I’m still doing this work.
When I moved here I transferred from Duffy’s Forest Brigade to the Caniaba Brigade up here and after a year I was made Deputy Captain. I was here for the terrible 2019 fires. At the moment I have a big truck with a satellite dish parked out the front of our house. (see comments). I’m just about to embark on a big trip from Sydney to Kempsey to Mt Isa and then Darwin to cover all type of sports. I’ve covered the Tour Down Under and the Australian Open a couple of times, the Tamworth Country Music Festival and the Phillip Island Bike races to name but a few.
Two years after moving to Lismore we had the 2017 flood. This was the first time we lived through a flood. As it turned out it got to half a metre below the floorboards upstairs. We lost boxes we hadn’t yet unpacked since we moved. After that we came up with a good flood plan. When the February 2022 flood was coming we were ready and prepared. We listened to the warnings, there was nothing downstairs and we also had friends staying with us at the time on the night of the flood. At about 4am I saw someone across the road wading through water so I woke Francois and our guests. We told them to take our dog Holly and go to our neighbours Deepak and Luke up the road. We said, we’ll see you in 15 minutes when we close everything. In that 15 minutes the water rose from knee height to where we had to swim out in the dark. Watching the forecast they kept increasing the height level. Even as we evacuated the level kept rising. We left at 12 metres, then 13 and then it rose to 14.4. We had no chance. No-one did. It came over the top of our doors so we lost everything. We had it all stored upstairs stacked up and it was all washed away. The waters had come through like a washing machine and all our possessions were covered in mud.
Thank God we live in Lismore because the moment we could enter our house all our friends and neighbours came in to help us. If you had to do this by yourself it would absolutely break you but the generous and kind support from everyone including strangers was so incredible. We had so many people offering love and support. Some took away our clothes to wash, others took away towels and curtains and others took bags of muddy, sodden everything, cleaning and holding it for us till we could return. We had storage boxes, some floated and some sunk. Unfortunately Francois had one float that was bank statements and the other that sunk had all his photographs.
For us it was so important to move back so we did and we went crazy cleaning, we were camping in one room and then the second flood hit. The way it started was so similar and it brought everything back. Luckily it wasn’t as bad and we didn’t have many possessions left anyway. We could handle the next one. The CBD was harder hit than us as they were in the process of recovering and had to start again.
When we moved here the opportunity to move Mum came as well so she’s moved into Caroona Nursing Village in Goonellabah and the care and attention she gets at Caroona is amazing. We love having her nearby. We took on Mum’s little dog Holly who has recently passed from heart complications. She got to pass away on the bed between Fran and myself which was her favourite spot.
We are back in and comfortable. Francois and I have been together nearly 22 years and we love living here. We don’t have a date but the first full moon in October is our anniversary. We love living here. It has made us realise how attached we are to this community and it would be very hard to replace living somewhere else.”
