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AN INCH AT A TIME
A story by Roger Vaughan
Dawn was trying to push through a heavy mist that boiled off the river as it snaked through a deep valley a thousand foot below. Sunbeams shooting through clouds and mist mixing in a slow dance to the waking song of Kookaburras Crows, Magpies and Parrots .The air is heavy with scent, horses cattle and sheep steaming as the first warmth creeps through and the Wandoo starts to let its pungent presence be felt.
Sitting in such a place is an intense experience and the spell was soon broken with the arrival of a very large truck that roared up the hill with great assurance and pulled up with spectacular amounts of smoke and noise. Out jumped a small square middle aged Sicilian, very brown, very strong, very capable as it turned out, and of the old style –no long intros,” Whatta the fuck we doin here” ?
A month before this day, the meeting had been with one of Perth’s Squillionaires -same time, about dawn but he glided soundlessly up in a Mercedes and emerged in a deep blue Power suit in clouds of Cologne and early morning bonhomie.
His dream was about increasing the level space around the house which large as it was, took the whole top of this very steep-sided hill. The existing garden was wild and beautiful set in enormous natural rockeries that basically formed the shape of the whole hill.
It effectively gave him about an acre of level ground including house and sheds sitting on top of 400 acres of hill and dale. We were working important stuff out, like creating a big enough space for an enormous ‘marrying off’ marquee, and getting rid of those bothersome boulders, getting some paved paths through, and mainly building stone retaining walls around the whole hillside, some 800m times an average height of three meters with steps in a number of areas.
This was a huge challenge because there was already a stunningly beautiful garden of very old Marri, Wandoo and old Prunus trees scattered through the many levels created by the boulders some of which were hundreds of tons.
Weaving a large enough wall to do the job without damaging these old trees root systems or burying them, lead to many onsite planning days. Planning where this wall was going to go was difficult, quantifying and engineering was complicated and costing was a nightmare but in the end it was down to financing a large landscaping exercise indeed. Lucky the owner was a big thinking man and committed us along this new adventure trail.
The first step in the works looked to be one of the hardest; to get a very large excavator up an impossibly steep slope in order to create access tracks and benches to begin the walling process with bobcats and tip trucks having to get the materials up to where they were needed.
Enter Angelo-the Sicilian earthmover –“ Well whatta the fucksa you fuckin want to do out here? Looksa like a D9 jobba to me “!
‘Keep your bulldozer at home Angelo –we’re going to build a wall around the top of that hill’.
He looks at me hard, “What ayou fuckin on? What ayou won the fuckin Lotto? Whatsa this guy doin –growin fuckin Italian tomatos?”
We walk, scramble and climb over the site and after a while Angelo says ‘When we going to start?
‘Is it going to be that easy Angelo?’ There was still no way that I could see a machine even getting close to the job.
‘How? asks I.
‘Easy’, says he,’ A fuckin incha atta fuckina time, you know how they built afuckina Roma, the only fuckina way-one fuckin inch at a time!
It turned out to be one of those rare pearls of wisdom that has stood the test in all arenas- of course he was right, how hard was that? Its not rocket science, but its easy to forget when overwhelmed by the scale of a challenge, whatever its nature.
Some weeks later sitting on top of the hill in a Bobcat, watching Angelo with his 40 ton Excavator with an enormous rockbreaker on the end of its arm carving our benches and tracks out of solid rock we looked at each other and roared with laughter –he could read my mind!
A year later, after having gone through three teams of stonemasons who all thought it was just too hard, Angelo and I had another big laugh when he said it again-‘See Rocha, we fuckin done this thing all right eh? One fuckin inch atta one fuckin time – eh?
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