Adrian Porter Pulls No Punches (continued)

The heat at Giles was the first I had encountered of that intensity. It was hot enough to heat a spanner to be untouchable if left out in the sun when working on the radar. The myth was that you could cook an egg on the WF2 radar distribution console; I never tried it, but I saw burns on the arm of an Observer who had come into contact with the panel. That visit we bolted a weather wall to the back. That fixed it for the Observers; thereafter they were wearing jumpers in the radar.

Then and now my handicap as a 'tech' has been air-sickness, and later sea-sickness. I lost too many breakfasts and lunches to ever remember, much to the disgust of light aircraft operators. Later in life this problem has not been as demonstrative as in the past; there is less vomiting, but the sick feeling and fuzziness is still there.

I found how to cure this in a later stay at Giles. While travelling home I was asked to fly the plane. This was a thrill as it meant for the first time I had control of the speed bumps in the sky-way. I flew the plane all the way back to Alice and had to shake the pilot over Pine Gap. She said she had flown her maximum hours and had proceeded to fall asleep after handing me the controls as we left Giles, following a five minute 'crash' course on flying and navigation.

Removing the mercury barometer and Synchrotac anemometer from the Kingston, South Australia, lighthouse took great personal willpower in the sea-sickness stakes, as the cray fishing vessel we used stopped all stations pulling up pots. Wallowing about it the bay was not my idea of technical work. Tony Robertson, an experienced sailor who accompanied me, passed on the trick of looking at the horizon as a way of overcoming sea-sickness. Needless to say I did not see much of the crays being pulled up. However, I did see the conger eel that was waved in front of my face by the excited fisherman as he chucked it back.

Life in all Regions and also in Head Office has its internal politics and personal intrigues. South Australia was no less a place when I arrived. Mike Rowell, however, would never get into politics and was the oil that could smooth the troubled waters of discontent with his dry sense of humour. I guess for me during that time he kept my head focussed on the lighter side of work aspects. We crossed paths again later in life, at Davis in Antarctica and at remote trotting tracks across Australia when I least expected it.

Bureau of Meteorology