As it was April the days were already shortening and I found myself arriving at Tocumwal just as the skies started to lighten. On the way I encountered a huge number of cyclists riding thru the night on the outskirt of Shepparton - apparently some sort of training exercise. Here is the Sportavia glider on the pole in town at dawn - nice!
Of course it was also starting to get rather cold in the mornings which suited me anyway as I would not end up so dehydrated from the heat !
When it was brighter I took some more pics. By now the dam had dried out and was home to a lot of hibernating lizards, frogs and all sorts of bugs, some of which gave me a fright when they came racing out over my gloves ! This is the edge of the dam by the side of the road - very heavily overgrown and with bits of wire and metal sticking out - if you didn't watch what you were doing you would end up on your bum very quickly !!
Here you can see my buckets to the right and the edge of where I spent most of my time working on during the year. Looks pretty messy, smelled dreadful and the thorns and prickles were a constant battle - but as you will se I think it was worth it !!
The area I was working on - the back wall of the dam. Already I have pulled out a lot of unsalvageable stuff, the time in the ground, moisture and salinity among other things has contributed to these parts demise. I pulled out Beaufighter ammo chutes and thought my Xmas had arrived but they literally fell apart in my hands :-(
However, what was fascinating and worth the effort, was the fact that I was discovering parts from the same aircraft all in one particular spot. For example to the upper right of the white buckets, there was a lot of all sorts on the top surface but about a foot down there was a cache of CAC Wirraway parts - flare chute tops, ammo chutes, u bolts, data mod plates etc etc. And then to the left of that there was a large lot of P-51 Mustang parts - again all undisturbed since the scrapping times. So you could work out a pattern where they would have been scrapping a load of P-51's and then getting the remains and tipping them out in that spot . These spots would continue to yield parts right up until the end.
There were also layers of ash and aluminium slag which I will put pics up of in a future post. To me, it looked like they covered sections with wood and then burnt it all again - this after being thru the smelters already. It's only a theory but makes sense as they would no doubt be trying to compact the scrap down as much as possible and the floor of the dam which was about two and a half metres down appeared to be covered by a decent amount of ally slag. But there were definite layers present - I am really glad I did not go in with anything other than my tools as backhoes etc would have destroyed all that.
Oh hey look - another canopy ! This is a CAC Wirraway - sure it's seen better days but it was there buried and left behind by many other treasure hunters from over the years - and in better condition than many of the ones I had seen!
Another day was done and it was time to head home (and drop into the SPC Cannery in Shepparton for some bargains as well) Once home I cleaned up a few bits to see what they looked like.
This is from a CAC Boomerang - yet to figure out what it is exactly. Looks like an ammo chute but very small - maybe some sort of air duct...
Man on a mission - standing on the road next to the dam at Tocumwal, April 2011 :-)
That will do for this week, still finding more pics to add !!!
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