1966 Yarloop Rifle Club
In Carnarvon Greg Smith’s dad Doug had introduced me to rifle shooting. I bought a .303 which was in a case with the requisite rod for cleaning the barrel after a shoot and a book on how to succeed in the sport. I was only in Carnarvon for a year as my father died just after Christmas and I was transferred to Waroona Junior High School so I could live at home and help my mother and youngest brother.
I joined the Yarloop Rifle Club and enjoyed the weekend shoots. I assume they were on a Sunday morning. I was quite good at the sport and kept it up for the two years I was in Yarloop but towards the end of the two years the sport became very expensive because the rifle to use was changed to one using different ammunition which was 7.62mm. Whereas the 303 ammunition was of negligible cost because the Army had mountains of the ammunition that they could sell to us at a low price the new bullets were about a dollar each. It made the sport expensive and coinciding as it did with my moving to Perth to work at John Curtin Senior High School I gave it up. By then I had two rifles that I gave to Reg Eastcott. He and Stan Hayes are the two people I remember as running the club. Both had students I taught at the Waroona school.
We shot at a variety of lengths including 200 yards, 500 yards and 700 yards. I favoured the 500 yard range. On one occasion we went to Roelands to shoot as they had a 900 yard range.
In my second year at Yarloop I won a number of prizes for my shooting. Basil Blackburn who I will have mentioned elsewhere because I worked for him on his dairy farm helping doing the milking when I was a student had donated, or was going to donate, one of the prizes I won. He came up to the range on a subsequent weekend to observe the shooting. Unfortunately it was raining and I had trouble even seeing the target. My score was woeful. As a result Basil’s prize was similarly woeful. The other prizes I was asked to go shopping and buy items I would value. I only remember the leather record holder I bought that would hold a dozen records. It kept the records in it in pristine condition. Actually all my records I valued and kept in pristine condition. Why that is relevant is when I was clearing everything out of the house in Bateman after it was sold in 1992 I took the records over to Jim Miller’s place because I would no longer have a record player and he had one. His wife Betty relegated the pristine records to the garage.
So that is two people who upset me even though they were twenty five years apart. Back in 1967 two others tried to upset me. That was the Jovanovich brothers. They were driving a Ford Falcon or something similar. I was in my Mini. I was taking Marjorie Petersen back to Perth after having her come down to the Rifle Club annual dinner to see me get all my prizes. We had been an item for a little while after my cousin Joanne introduced us. This was the second time that year that Joanne had tried to do something to help me in the pursuit of the opposite sex. Soon after Marjorie headed off to Papua New Guinea. Anyway Tom and Alex would pass me and then slow down so I would have to pass them and then they would pass me and repeat the process. My little Mini had no power to escape from them. I cannot remember the conclusion but I assume they got tired of it.
Yarloop was a small mill town with the Rifle Club, a Bowls Club and a Darts Club. There may have been others but the only one I had joined was the Rifle Club. There was an annual competition where the members of the three joined at each others venue to try their hand at the others sport. I assume I was woeful at the darts but I found the bowls to be interesting because of the camber on the ball and found I mastered it quite well.
After the weekend shoots we would meet at the Yarloop Hotel for a drink but I had a problem with that activity because my father had enjoyed it much too much and the result was that I did not enjoy drinking at the pub. It was not until about ten years later when I joined Jaycees in Ipswich in Queensland and one of the members managed the hotel where the meetings were held that I became a XXXX beer drinker. Nowadays I only see the low alcohol Four X for sale but in those days the only drink was XXXX.
