|
Bert Cramer
|
|
The Comet Chaser of the Never Never 21 July 2000 by Stan Deyo Bert Cramer is 72 years old this year. For over 13 years he has worked the land and livestock of Temple Bar Station (Ranch). His station is one of the very few properties which butt up to the property line of the mysterious Pine Gap "Space base" - as the locals call it. Bert is not a wealthy man in material terms nor is he a man of "fancy education." He is, however, my friend, a seasoned rancher and a Christian man of great faith which speaks volumes of his character. He has run range cattle and dairy cows in some of the harshest land (the never never) in outback Australia. The locals of the "Alice" some 15km away (a stone's throw from him really) think of him as a bit of a "character" because of his insistence that he has located nearly 30 impact craters in the center of Australia. One can get a learned discussion flowing in the local water hole (pub) by bringing up the subject these days. Now, Bert is no formally trained geologist; but when you listen to his reasoning on some of the bigger impact craters (like those 100s of km in diameter) you have to start wondering if he's not onto something unusual out there. He has found some pretty interesting caves - even one with layers of small silicate beads lining it. He has tried for years to get officialdom to let him show them the craters he has found but as he was "just a rancher" they have - for the most part - politely dismissed his claims. It may well be that his impact craters can be explained by some phenomena other than asteroid or comet impacts. However, this will have to be something that history judges as Bert has reached the age where he cannot push as hard as he used to do. His bones do feel the early morning chill more than before so he has a "sleep in" more often - till it warms up . He has a party line phone with his family out on his station and if you are game to talk to the old timer his phone number is: [61](8) 8952-1946. He was the one who commissioned the huge photo of Pine Gap and Temple Bar Station I have on the Pine Gap page. he has written a small book called the Kidd Skin Manuscript. Not a bad effort for a Comet Chasing Cocky from the Alice. |
|
LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE PINE GAP SPY BASE by KIERAN FINNANE Speaking to Local Identity: Bert Cramer From The Alice News 22 October, 1997 The frustrations of hundreds of demonstrators over the years, trying to invade top-secret Pine Gap, climbing fences and getting chased by security men and women, aren't shared by Bert Cramer. When he turns up, in his own interpretation of Territory Formal, to the annual "thank you, Alice" party at the Space Base, a security detail is dispatched to the back gate in the man proof fence to - with due ceremony - admit the local character. So while the prominent citizenry of Alice Springs rocks up at the normally hermetically sealed front gate, and is admitted with surprising lack of fuss, Bert gets it even easier. The Joint Defense Facility clearly spares no effort to welcome its next door neighbor, the irrepressible pastoralist of Temple Bar Station. When Bert receives his invitation, he puts a call through to Pine Gap's security: "I'm not driving all that way. You can bloody well meet me at the gate." The Alice News asked Bert what it's like, apart from getting a lift once a year, to be living next-door not only to Alice, but also to Pine Gap. Bert received his first visit from Pine Gap representatives a few days after moving in, some 10 and a half years ago. "It was Anzac Day," he remembers, launching into a characteristic circumnavigation of the topic. "It was the same day as we got a message from Queensland from our daughter that they'd had their first baby. A father remembers some of them dates ... "They came over [from Pine Gap] for a cup of tea and introduced themselves and a few of the big boys came over from time to time. "We see very little of them now but there was times, demonstration seasons if you could call it that, that they used to have access, they've got four or five "back doors" to keep functioning." [Alice News editor Erwin Chlanda, covering a story about a particularly hostile determined at the FRONT gate, intent on stopping the usual convoy of busses, wondered aloud to then base chief Don Kingsley how the transports had obviously gotten inside, unnoticed by the demonstrators. "That was easy." said Don. "We used our stealth buses."] Back to Bert: "The part what [the demonstrators] were worried about was attracting an atomic attack. I thought they were crazy. "Fancy sending one of them things over here, except for a practice run, when a hippy can take in a milk tin full of plutonium in his guitar. "You don't need a fancy piece of technology to blow it up atomically, if you must use atoms - there's that much plutonium gone bush on the planet long before then! "We've got to realize that it's a defense thing, it's military, and if it wasn't as secret as what it is, well it wouldn't be worth their salt working there, why have it? "I saw it as a big joke. "When we moved here, we found out that at long last we had better neighbors than we ever had before. "At the other place we had a total of five caravan parks around us and we couldn't keep our cows in order with people walking their dogs and letting them run loose and couldn't control them - it ended up killing our dairy "Our neighbors over there did not respect our boundary, the boundary was an inconvenience where you had to get under the barbed wire and Bob's your uncle! "We're on talking terms, me and the big boss [of the JDF], we're working together on getting the Mexican Poppy out of our creek system here, and things like that, I've got no reason to complain apart from their freelance flamin' boundary jumpin' sometimes! "A couple of times there's a few stunts which you reckon they're stepping over the bounds, what the hell they doing around that end of the place putting the fence down, going over with the cars! "They come up with a hair-brained weak little excuse saying, "Oh, we found someone on your place and chased them.' Like bloody hell they did! "Both cars came out of Pine Gap, pulled our fence out, lifted the posts out, lay it on the ground. "They were doing one of their Blues versus Reds exercises. They fixed it up again, but like I say, they're not telling you true. "That's happened more than twice, but not hundreds or dozens of times, maybe three or four times. "We went around afterwards and tracked them up, I'm not bloody stupid, you know where they've been and where they've come from. "We [wouldn't] mind if they told us they were going to have war games here for an afternoon and will it be all right and we could say yes but don't go in such and such a paddock. "The humbug afterwards is, 'Who the hell's been here?' "It's Joint Defense - it is military, run by a lot of civilians. "As a country we've got our guard down very badly. "Pine Gap will play a role in [our defense], from what they've told us on a television program, they're picking up everything that's radio-oriented, taping it, pallet loads of flamin' tapes go away to America for analysis, they've got it all taped, they're probably listening to this by some tunnel-visioned voice picker upperer, you better believe it! "When they play it back to you might be amazed, this is what gives Big Brother the edge on anybody they want to control." There you have it. |
|
All photos and text contained on this website are copyrighted to the owners who are listed below. By law, written permission to reproduce or otherwise use any of the images or text must be obtained from them at the email addresses below,.... Thank you. © Copyright Stan and Holly Deyo 1997 - 2002 |