Bill Fullwood remembers Campbell’s Fire

On a recent visit to Tennant Creek, I was pleased to discover that the house the late Bill Fullwood used to call the Gunyah was still standing. Built by Bill in the 1950s, using recycled wood and sheets of iron found in Darwin in the 1950s, the house is a great example of the “scrounge” mode of building that was prevalent in Central Australia for many decades. Seeing the old house, which is still occupied, brought back memories of an afternoon I spent with Bill about 20 years ago while I was working for ABC Territory Radio.

Bill was born in London in 1910, and after his family moved to Perth when he was two, he later began travelling around the state, working in mines from when he was 18. After serving as an armorer  in World War Two, he moved to Tennant Creek in 1947 and worked in various jobs in the mining industry, including constructing shafts at Samuel’s Mine, developing the Whippet lease and managing the workers at Noble’s Nob Mine.

In his later years, living with his wife Marjorie at the Gunyah, Bill pursued his love of painting and music and became well-known for his landscapes of the Barkly region. When I met Bill he was more interested in showing me his “recording studio” which consisted of various tape recorders in his attic (where he also painted). Bill played a few instruments, most famously the piano accordion, and would lay down one track, and play it while quickly moving to another recorder to put down another track. On the day I met him he was recording some marching music for the coming Anzac Day parade in Tennant.

Bill had a quick and lively mind and a pretty sharp memory. He told me a few stories that afternoon, one of the most memorable relating to his role fighting the disastrous Campbell’s Store fire. This is how Bill remembered that terrible day in his own words:

I was surface foreman at the Noble Nob Mine in those days. I was in charge of all the unskilled labour in the mine. I’d built my house and was married by then. I got married in 1950. I told you how I came to get married. On my way to Queensland, I stopped here, put a couple of shafts down. My old mate died and I married his widow, with a ready-made family and a block of land, so I built a house on it, and that’s how I come to be here!

But anyway, you were talking about Campbell’s Fire. I had a bit of local notoriety for building septic systems, because in those days there was no sewerage. An old mate of mine was a tailor here,  Otto W., a German, one of the old pioneers here. I was installing his septic system and digging one of this trenches when I noticed smoke down the back lane. I was 200 or 300 yards away and I knew it was something more than somebody just burning rubbish in the back yard, so I dived down the lane and I found it was Campbell’s building. Arthur Campbell had converted a store into quite a big affair. He was agent for Shell and he had drums of spirit, and diesoline and petrol and he was the local agent for newspapers and all the rest of it. Anyway this place was on fire, and there was no water available immediately, but they did finally get a truck with a tank on it, and a pump. And of course I and the others got hold of the business end of the hose. We were waiting for the water to come through and the pump was giving some trouble. Finally it got going and we pointed the water at the base of this fire.

I noticed this greenish blue flame and I said to a mate next to me, Al MacDonald:   “That looks like a fracture burn.” Fracture is the prospector’s name for dynamite. It’s in sticks. I said that looks like fracture burning. Because it will burn, it doesn’t explode, it’ll burn. It only explodes if it’s given a sharp shock with with a detonator.

Al MacDonald said: “Yes that’s where he keeps his weekend fracture.” That’s about all I can remember. I got blown out in the middle of the road. My first impression was  of a tram coming down the hill and me trying to stop it. I must have been blown about 40 or 50 feet, and an empty drum followed me and hit me — that’s what broke one of my hips, and I also had some internal trouble with shrapnel that went in.

I do remember landing on the road and then of course I passed out. And an old friend of mine, the local schoolmaster, realised it was more than just a transient injury and he organised me to the hospital. There was three of us. One chap died, another chap lost a leg, another chap, his profession was a journalist and he lost his right hand. Another chap, strangely enough — it wasn’t anything to do with the fire, he was standing back but apparently he had his mouth open at the time of the explosion, and his stomach was ruptured!

Anyway the ordinary Adelaide to Darwin plane was due, the old DC3, and they got all the passengers off it and put us on. They took the chairs out and put the stretchers in it. There were eight of us as I remember. One died on the way up. It was late in November.

About three weeks later, after the operations I had to have, I was wheeled around the wards with a  piano accordion, playing music for the kids in the children’s ward at the Darwin Hospital!

It’s a long time ago, and the memory’s a bit dim now, but it’s an experience I wouldn’t like to go through again.

Bill Fullwood died a few years after this was recorded in 2005, aged 95. This picture shows the attic in The Gunyah, where he painted and made music in the house he built from scrap iron. It was taken last year.