The Shot Read online

  Some boys thrive in a city suburb while others need some elbow room and are better suited to small towns where they run until they’re exhausted. I thrived in a small Aussie town. The biggest schism in my childhood was not leaving Scotland for Australia; it was being pulled out of rural South Australia and plonked down in the suburbs of Perth. At an earlier time it might have worked out for me, but this happened when I was sixteen: I was tall and strong and sports-mad and I had just discovered Aussie Rules football.

  At sixteen, I joined the Hatherleigh Football Club – an Aussie Rules club. I hadn’t played the game seriously before then, but because I was in South Australia it was the main game we played at school. So I joined up and pre-season training went well, so well that Hatherleigh threw me in as their number 13 – a full forward. I took to the game like the proverbial duck to water. I was physically confident, I could kick and I wasn’t easily intimidated. I liked the speed and aggression and the skills and fitness. I loved the team culture and it didn’t worry me that as full forward I was the target of a lot of attempts to knock me over, make me relinquish my ground. I rose to the challenge and as the year progressed the coaches talked about me playing for an SAFL team in Adelaide. Footy is a huge thing in rural South Australia and the people at that club were excited about the prospect of one of their own going to the big leagues.

  I didn’t talk about sport to my parents, though, and by the time I asked them to come and see a game – I think because I was being mentioned in the country newspapers – my folks had already decided to move to Western Australia.

  My dad had little appreciation of Aussie Rules football and he tells me he only knew how good I was because the first time he watched me play there were two supporters in front of him, crowing about something I’d done. And then one said, ‘That piece of pelican shit is our biggest scorer and his bastard father is taking him to Perth.’

  That game was so Australian: big open spaces, physically demanding, highly competitive and a bit of biffo to go with all that sledging. And then you have a can of drink with the other team after the match, and there’s no hard feelings.

  The hard feelings were all mine, towards my parents. My coach even approached them and asked if I could stay behind and board at his house. He planned to have me playing in the bush for one more season and then he was sure an SAFL team would pick me up. But my folks were worried that there were no opportunities in a small town and I was drifting. I was a larrikin who loved sport and I didn’t care about school. Dad encouraged me towards a trade – I could be a motor mechanic, he suggested – but I resisted, something I would regret in later life.

  So it was off to Perth, where I had to learn the hard way that I was more suited to small-town Australia than to being an anonymous kid in the suburbs. I did Year 11 at Lynwood Senior High School in the southern suburbs of Perth. I made no friends and I became a bit of a recluse. I wouldn’t talk to my parents, I’d stay up until 2 am watching TV and I never touched a footy again. I was bitter, disappointed and cut off from what I thought was my real life.

  During Year 11 I applied to join the air force, largely because my friend from Millicent, Andrew, had always talked about doing so. But the RAAF wouldn’t take me because my maths and science grades weren’t good enough. My parents, meanwhile, had bought a block of land in Kelmscott, south of the city, and built a house there. Because I couldn’t join the air force I went to Kelmscott Senior High School. I actually made some good mates in Kelmscott but at school I lasted two months before I abused a teacher and never went back.

  Like most teenage boys of that age I was rebelling against the world and my parents. I knew what was best for me, or so I thought then. How wrong I was. Moving to Perth was actually the best thing my parents could have done for me and my two little sisters.

  I got a job detailing cars for eight months then went to a job in Kenwick making fibreglass water tanks. It was hot, exhausting work but the two owners of the company were veterans of the Vietnam War and at smoko they’d tell their war stories. I worked hard, earned a promotion and a pay rise. But I enjoyed those war stories more than anything, so I started to think about the army.

  I went down to the recruiting office and the army gave me a date to sit my aptitude test. I was determined not to screw this up, so I got a mate of mine, Dave Simmonds, to tutor me. And when I went into that office and sat the tests with all these other young men, I was actually excited. It was the best I’d felt for a while, which I suppose was a good omen.

  I received a letter of offer ten days later, and that was it. I was off to a place called Wagga Wagga on the other side of the continent. I was eighteen and jumping out of my skin with excitement. I needn’t have been, really.

  2

  Becoming Ramo

  The Australian Army had a really good antidote to enthusiasm: it was called bastardisation. From the moment me and my fellow new recruits poured off the bus at Kapooka Army Base, the culture shock was brutal. Bastardisation basically means being reduced to nothingness, without identity or the ability to think, so you can be reconstructed into a form the army finds useful.

  There were twenty-five of us in 15 Platoon Bravo company. This was my recruit training unit at the Kapooka barracks where we were housed alphabetically in cubicles in which a divider wall separates four beds. The first lessons were when to sleep and when to wake up. Then we learned to eat, lining up three times a day to have food thrown on a plate, and then bolting it down as fast as we could. We were taught how to wash, dress and shave. We had to fold our underwear in a certain way and fold our socks with a ‘smiley face’ and the face had to be right way up and facing the instructor so it always appeared they were smiling back at the bastards. Every cubicle had a locker with a place to hang jackets, shirts and pants, a rack for boots and shelves for clothes and toiletries. The bed had to be made with hospital corners and the green sheet had to be a bayonet’s length – no more, no less – over the counterpane that featured the orange ‘Rising Sun’. And yes, they measured.

  PHOTO: GARY RAMAGE COLLECTION

  Gary, Kapooka Army Base, 1985

  We had spot inspections and routine inspections. A corporal or sergeant would come into the hallway and scream, ‘Hallway 15!’ and we’d have to drop everything and present ourselves at attention outside our cubicles. Then the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) would go over our cubes, and if anyone’s bed or locker was slack or out of line, they’d have to stand there and watch as the rest of the unit was punished. For the recruits who couldn’t get their act together, this was a tough time: ostracised by the unit and abused and humiliated by the NCOs.

  Lollies, chocolates and cigarettes were banned in the barracks. One time, Wayne, my cube mate, didn’t hide his smokes very well and the instructor threw everything in his cubicle out the window onto the lawn below.

  The dress code was harsh. There were several types of dress, from full ceremonial (known as ‘A1’) down to our greens. Anything black had to be very black and very shiny; anything brass had to be mirror-like; anything made of fabric had to be clean and pressed flat. There were fifteen-eyelet general purpose (GP) boots, and you had to spit-polish them and polish the laces with black Nugget to ensure they matched the boot leather. There were ankle boots (AB) which went with gaiters on several formats of dress. Spit-polishing in the movies is done with a piece of rag; in the Australian Army you have to use your finger and a cloth or you can’t get the depth of shine required by the instructors. If you couldn’t get the shine to the level they wanted, they’d destroy your locker and throw your shit out into the hall or out the window. And you couldn’t leave Brasso residue on the buckle. That was lazy and disrespectful – they’d destroy your locker for that, too.

  We’d iron our shirts to the army standard and stack them the army way, and the pants would have to be ironed with the creases in precisely the right line, and then hung in such a way that the crease stayed in place. Nothing could be tatty, so we were issued sewing kits and they taught us
to sew. You couldn’t present for inspection with any fuzz on your face, so we had an old-school screw-down razor, a box of double-edged blades, a brush and a stick of shave soap. And they taught us the army way to shave, but the instructor had no blade in the razor when he showed us. When I tried his technique myself I almost tore off half my face and was loudly abused for the gash it left on my cheek.

  I avoided any big mistakes and stayed out of fights (of which there were a few) and bashings (of which there were many). In our sister platoon, which had arrived at the same time, there was an attempted suicide and some of their guys didn’t fare so well. Our instructors were hard bastards. Really hard. This especially showed itself when it came to the physical stuff, such as the obstacle course, ten-kilometre fitness run and push-ups. And, of course, the marching. Lots and lots of marching with a pack on your back. The guys who couldn’t hack it were back-squadded to a later intake, to see if they could get the times on the obstacle course.

  Still, I got through and then we did the passing-out parade, got the rank of private and were going to be allocated to our employments. It had been an agonising four months, but I was happy. After being cut adrift in Perth and feeling alienated, in the army I had a new group of mates. Most important, I felt like I was good at something.

  ***

  When I look back on those four months at Kapooka, I see a young man who needed to spend some time in a structured environment before he pushed out again and developed his own personality. This may sound self-contradictory for a person who goes out and does a job like photojournalism in conflict zones. But actually a lot of young men go into the army and find that they can subsequently thrive because they were first broken down and rebuilt. I don’t claim to understand exactly how it works, but it might be that if you take a youth who’s a bit directionless and lacking in confidence, and remake him with a core of discipline, you might be giving him the foundation to develop his own self-confidence. In my case, the daily acts of being properly presented, having to overcome physical pain and follow simple rules was actually liberating. In the army, the phrase ‘get your shit together’ is a specific and urgent requirement of everyone in the unit. It has stayed with me all my life and has given me the ability to operate in some very dangerous environments. Whether I wake up in a forward operating base in Uruzgan or in my house before I go to Parliament, I get my shit together. The army gave me that habit and focus.

  But basic training is just the beginning in the army. Once you’ve completed basic, you’re assigned an ‘initial employment’ and sent to a base to learn it, be it engineering, hospitality, communications or whatever else the army needs. When I left Kapooka they were lacking infantry soldiers, so I went with the flow. We were supposed to be bussed up to a base in Singleton in the Hunter Valley to undergo IET – Infantry Employment Training – but just before we were due to leave they told us, ‘Change of plans, lads,’ and we embarked on a much longer bus ride to Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane. It seemed the famous 6 RAR battalion, which fought the battle of Long Tan in Vietnam, needed men in boots. So we’d skipped the notoriously brutal IET at Singleton and were in an express lane straight into a battalion. It was a lucky break of the kind that would follow me for the rest of my life. As the old NCOs would say, ‘Ramage, you were kissed on the dick.’

  ***

  Enoggera was a great score. The barracks were in good nick, and the kitchens and gyms were too. And we did our infantry training in three months, within 6 RAR. It was battalion life, so there was none of the bastardisation we would have received as trainees at Singleton.

  I was six foot one and strong and fit by the time I got to Enoggera, so they made me the machine gunner. I was trained on a Vietnam-era general purpose machine gun (GPMG) called the M60, also known as the Widow Maker. Because of my surname and the fact I was carrying around this belt-fed weapon, my nickname was obviously Rambo. Everyone in the army gets a nickname and you just have to wear it. Gradually I managed to get people to drop the ‘b’ until I became Ramo, a name that stuck with me for the rest of my army days (along with a few other names I’d rather not go into).

  We did a lot of exercises in the bush, one of which lasted six weeks. Being the machine gunner is exhausting. The GPMG ammo alone was so heavy that I had a ‘second’ assigned to carry it. The heavy ammo belts were carried in bags by the second and in big canvas pouches on the gunner’s webbing. The pouches were World War II era and the straps on them were designed so you couldn’t close or open them with one hand – incredibly inconvenient when doing exercises. We had to carry surplus rounds because a GPMG on full throttle goes through a hundred rounds every few seconds. And as for the movies, when Rambo struts around with the ammo belts in bandoliers across his chest? That doesn’t work. That just gets dirt and other crap in the breech and then the weapon jams. And in the army the machine gun always has to work. That meant I had to be able to fix any jam, any malfunction in the field under any circumstance. I learned to break down and rebuild a GPMG and then I learned to do it blindfolded. This isn’t a macho army trick, it’s so you can fix a machine gun in the dark with a minimum of noise. When we got to the end of a day in the field and harboured up, the other soldiers went into the nightly routine, while I had to strip, oil and maintain the machine gun. It wasn’t a wasted skill: as a photographer I would follow the same discipline, cleaning and checking my camera gear thoroughly every night before I packed it away, and I could break it down and rebuild it with my eyes shut. That sounds a bit over the top, until you have to unjam a film camera on a moonless night on patrol in Afghanistan.

  After eighteen months of being the gunner in a Queensland infantry unit, I was in better shape than I’d ever be again. I was twenty, and lucked in again when I was chosen to be part of a small group sent down to Singleton to do the Pioneer course. This was essentially construction engineering for battalion HQ. It got me out of infantry exercises with that dammed machine gun and into building bridges, setting up bunkers, using flamethrowers and chopping down trees. It was a great time with fantastic people. A couple of years ago someone from those old days put up a photo of us on Facebook, at an exercise site. We’re built like professional athletes and we all have six- packs. My wife jokes that she missed out on my good years because now rather than a six pack she gets to look at the keg!

  The Pioneers opened up amazing opportunities. In 1988, for the Bicentenary, there was a program to have Aussie soldiers stand as the Royal Guard in front of Buckingham Palace. They sent one hundred of us down to HMAS Albatross in Nowra, on the south coast of New South Wales, and brought in a Welsh regimental sergeant major (RSM) to teach us. He spent a month with us, and I can tell you that the Aussie digger sense of humour had virtually no translation into Welsh. We got off on a bad start because this Welsh RSM arrived with the Royal Guard kit: the full crimson dress uniform along with highly polished hobnail boots.

  ‘Wonderful,’ we said, picking up the boots. ‘We gonna wear these things or put them in a museum?’

  The Welshman didn’t see the funny side, and told us that even the soles of the boots had to be polished. And the thing about showing no emotion, remaining absolutely blank-faced while you stand at your post? That’s real and, yes, we were trained for it.

  Anyway, we had a great trip to the UK, which included a small reception at Windsor Castle for the Aussies, where we were introduced to the Queen and the Queen Mother.

  The stirrer side of me was quite evident even in the army. Me and my Pioneer buddies had made a few informal comments about the fact we were made to wear the crimson coat and busby hat, when it was the Australian bicentenary. The Army RSM Lofty Wendt must have agreed because when we finally stood guard over Her Royal Highness, we were dressed in slouch hats and Australian Army uniforms (including boots). And there was not a Welsh RSM in sight. Sometimes the digger has the last laugh.

  3

  Learning the Trade

  The thing about being kissed on the dick? The way lucky breaks work for me reall
y showed through in how I got into photography. While in the Pioneers, I needed to have an operation on my toes. I wasn’t very mobile for a month after the procedure and, being a bit restless and pushy, I started gravitating towards the intelligence section of the battalion. One of my mates worked in intelligence as the battalion photographer, and photography happened to be something I enjoyed and I knew about. It also struck me that a career in infantry could easily be undone by a small physical problem, and then what? Photography and intel work, on the other hand, didn’t seem to put the same strain on the body.

  So here I was, twenty-two years old with almost three years left on my army contract of six years, and keen to retrain. They knew I was handy with a camera – not professional, but handy – and my mate was moving on. The intelligence section needed a replacement for him and after a bit of needling and persuasion they accepted me and sent me to the Army School of Military Survey in Albury-Wodonga.

  The army’s photography course at Albury-Wodonga was much deeper than anything I’d learned before. By the end of that course I could have bluffed my way into a job as a photographer, darkroom technician or even something in basic graphic design. The army can’t have photographers in the field with gaps in their ability, so they teach you everything and test for proficiency. I learned how to frame a shot, about focus, shutter speed, aperture, focal depth and light; I learned how to break down a camera and rebuild it; how to develop film, process it, crop it and print it. From portraiture to action; from night shots to time-lapse. I learned photo cataloguing and subject indexing – which is important in the battalion intelligence role so you can find any print or negative with a subject search.

  After six weeks in Albury, I went to the battalion’s intelligence cell as an intelligence duty man, and the commanding officer of the battalion – Lieutenant Colonel Jim Molan – signed off on my secondment to the PR section for twelve months. I was placed under unit photographer Warrant Officer Class Two Terry Dex, at the Defence Centre in Brisbane. Terry changed my life and he’s a shining example of why certain types of people – like me – can thrive under a mentor.