RISKY BUSINESS
We’ve been tidying up the family archives and came across some old photos that might be of interest. They were taken before I discovered the photographer’s mantra of “get closer, get closer still”. Nevertheless, they are a record of a remarkable job: how they put the handrail on Ayers Rock (Uluru). The dust has settled and the handrail has now gone (AG 151), but I have photos of its beginnings.
In September 1964, my parents and I arrived at an eerily deserted camping ground with only one other party present. The next morning, I set out early to beat the wind and reach the summit of Uluru, but it had picked up considerably, so I had to clamber about on all fours to avoid being blown off my feet.
On the way up I was amazed to discover two workmen installing steel posts and a chain to help tourists up the initial pinch. They had a jackhammer that was connected by a heavy, lengthy air-line to a noisy compressor at the foot of the rock. They worked on a steep slope that made it difficult to stand, let alone work, with a heavy jackhammer. Any slip might result in an uncontrollable deadly slide to the base of the rock. It was apparently difficult to start each hole, the jackhammer’s cutting edge tending to glance off the surface if hammered from above.
The workmen had solved this ticklish problem. The assistant lay face down, spread-eagled on the rock, and the operator, standing above, used his assistant’s shoes to hold the hammer’s cutting edge against the rock and thus gain a purchase. I worried that the assistant’s feet might be accidently hit hard enough by the hammer’s end for him to be propelled to his almost certain death down the steep face of the rock. The danger was real; I had been told that 13 people had already been killed falling off it by 1964. I wonder what were the names of those intrepid engineers who built the original Uluru handrail?