'Shackles" - a memoir of a Western Australian forester
Jim ‘Shackles’ Loverock (on the left) with his falling partner Norm Freemantle, in the Pemberton bush in the late 1930s before Jim joined the Forests Department as forestry officer.
One of the most memorable characters I met in my forestry career was the forestry field officer Jim ‘Shackles’ Loverock. For many years after World War II Shackles ran the forestry sub-district at Northcliffe, deep in the southern karri forest. His name is commemorated by the naming of Loverock Road, the main route running south-east from the town of Northcliffe towards the great Boorara and Babbington forests. However, the man himself is remembered today only by a few old-timers from the timber industry or retired foresters like me. It is yet another example of the reality that we are all forgotten, eventually, after we have gone, irrespective of fame or notoriety; only affection and respect survives a generation or two.
My affection and respect for Jim survives, but I am pretty sure it will not outlive me, so I will write about him now, while I can. By the way, I always thought of him as ‘Shackles’ the nickname bestowed on him when a young man (more of this in a moment), although I always addressed him as ‘Jim”. The names will be used interchangeably hereafter.
Jim was born in 1906, in Saskatchewan, Canada, to English parents. He came to Western Australia as a lad in the early 1920s, accompanying his parents who had moved back to the UK after the first World War, and then moved to WA to take up one of the Northcliffe Group Settlement blocks – virgin forest which it was hoped would be developed into a prosperous dairy farm. Jim was part of a big family with parents George and Elizabeth and siblings Winifred, Mabel, George, Doris, Hazel, Charlie, Ronald and Beryl.
Jim grew up amidst the chaos and backbreaking work of clearing heavy forest, and of a large family trying to make do with almost no income. Luckily, all the Groups had schools, and Jim was (at least partially) educated at one of them – a tiny one-teacher school in a clearing in the bush [Endnote 1]. As I have told elsewhere in these chronicles [2], the Group Settlement scheme was mostly a dismal failure, but at Northcliffe it was more dismal than just about anywhere else. The karri trees were immense, the undergrowth thick and resilient, the soils poor, government support was minimal, and the financial burden was crippling, especially after the 1930s Depression began to bite.
The Loverocks stuck it, but the situation at Northcliffe was untenable and when Jim was in his late 20s, the family moved to Pemberton and took over an abandoned farm in Group 26. This was still a struggle, and Jim, like so many of his generation, turned to the timber industry where hard work was rewarded with actual money on payday. Jim was big, work-toughened, could use an axe and a saw, was keen to work and prepared to take whatever was offered. This turned out to be a job with the logging crews providing logs for the big State Sawmill at Pemberton and here Jim soon worked his way up to become a faller. These were the days of falling with axe and crosscut saw, and the fallers were the Kings of the Bush. Jim had a reputation as a “goer”, a man who could go all day, but not as a skilled axeman. "Shackles did not so much cut the wood" his one-time falling partner Les Court told me once, "he hacked it out with brute strength". Les, of course, was widely known as the cleanest and prettiest axeman in the karri country and was also a champion racing log chopper (3], but his partnership with Shackles came later.
Before the war Jim worked with another famous axeman Norm Freemantle. Norm was a giant of a man, both respected and feared in the bush. He got into some serious trouble at one time, having his Timber Worker’s Registration cancelled [4], but this was later, when Jim was teamed with Les Court. Jim was a cleanskin in the bush, never in strife with workmates or forestry officers, well-liked on all sides.
Shackles Loverock and Norm Freemantle, crosscutting a karri log with a New Record drag saw, probably about 1939.
War service
When war came, Jim immediately volunteered, despite the fact that he was already 33 years old by then. He had a strong sense of duty and (as he explained to me once) had been brought up by his parents to admire and respect his British forebears, and to fight for his country if called. He could have joined one of the forestry companies that were recruiting timber workers and foresters to go to the UK and help with timber production at that time, but instead he decided to become an infantryman. Initially he was a member of 2/43 Battalion but later was transferred to the 2/28th Battalion, perhaps Western Australia’s proudest army unit and part of the famous 9th Division of the AIF. He fought with the 2/43d and the 2/28th in Libya and Egypt (he was a rat of Tobruk) and in the infamous Battle of Ruin Ridge in which the 2/43d was almost wiped out. Jim survived but was wounded. He fought again at El Alemein, the famous battle that many thought changed the course of the War. After Alamein, the 9th Division was recalled to defend Australia against the Japanese and Jim then participated in bloody fighting in New Guinea and the Islands campaigns. In December 1944 he fell ill, and spent some time in hospital, before being evacuated and discharged on medical grounds.
When he recovered, Jim returned to Pemberton, where he was able to resume his job as a faller, this time with Les Court as his partner. There was one amusing and one disastrous incident during that partnership.
His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester, when he was Governor-General of Australia
The amusing (well, I thought so) incident occurred in 1948, when the Governor-General, the Duke of Gloucester (brother of King George VI, and a well-known grog-artist) visited Pemberton. Jim and Les Court were chosen to give a demonstration of tree felling for the edification of the Duke. A large karri tree was selected, Jim and Les scarfed and backed it down, the official party watching from a safe distance. The felling took about an hour. After the tree had been felled, the Duke signalled to Jim and beckoned him to come close. "I marched forward, stood to attention and saluted like an old soldier" Jim told me years later, “and waited to be congratulated by the Duke”. Instead, His Highness leaned forward and whispered to Jim through dense whisky fumes "Can you tell me where I can get a piss around here?" Jim was so dismayed at this vulgarity from a member of the royal family that he could not even stammer a reply. He was still outraged when he told me the story 25 years later.
Les Court (left) and his son Terry scarfing a jarrah tree. This was a demonstration tree felling for an ABC documentary, and Les was aged in his 60s by then … but still a beautiful axeman.
The second incident from those times was a disastrous one. There was an account of it published in April 1950 in the Manjimup and Warren Times. Under the headline “Fallers Loss” the paper reported:
On Thursday morning last, two fallers in the Pemberton bush, Messrs L. Court and J. Loverock, found that during the night fire had destroyed all their tools of trade, including a power saw.
Apparently everything was alright when they left work the previous night, but on Thursday morning all the tools, axes, saws and power saw had been destroyed. This represents a serious loss to these two fallers.
Neither Jim nor Les ever mentioned this incident to me, but I suspect that none of their equipment would have been insured. It seems likely to me that its loss was a factor in Jim giving up falling and accepting a salaried position with the Forests Department.
Joining the Forestry
In the late 1940s construction began on the big KTC sawmill at Northcliffe and this called for the development of a Forests Department outstation nearby so that the mill and its forest operations could be properly overseen. The first Officer in Charge (OIC) of the forestry at Northcliffe was Ernie Percival, but he was promoted soon afterwards and transferred to Pemberton. In 1950 Jim Loverock had been recruited to the Department’s field staff and appointed to the rank of Assistant Forester. His first job was in the Kirup district, but when a replacement for Percival at Northcliffe was required, Jim was an obvious choice; he knew the karri forest, he knew the timber industry and, above all, he knew Northcliffe. Nevertheless, there was an almost overnight transition from being a faller, to being a field officer with extensive responsibilities.
Readers might be surprised by this. In fact, it was common practice in those days for the Forests Department to recruit mature-age men to fill field officer positions, and fallers were preferred, because the main job of the field forester was treemarking, controlling log quality and timber inspection. An experienced faller was already expert or could become expert in these jobs very quickly. Jim’s former falling partner Les Court also became a mature-age recruit to the forestry field staff a decade or so later and came to be regarded as one of the best timber inspectors in the business [5].
Jim had married after he came back from the war, and when he and his wife Jean moved to Northcliffe it was into a near-new departmental house in the near-new forestry settlement, just south of the town on the Windy Harbour Road. Officially, he was now Assistant Forester and OIC of the Northcliffe sub-district, a position he held for nearly a quarter of a century.
Incidentally, Jim had been taught to shoot when he was a lad, and he became an expert rifleman. While still falling for the Pemberton Mill he helped form the Pemberton Rifle Club and he trained local Army recruits in the care and use of the rifle, and in sharpshooting. After the war he re-joined the Rifle Club and became Club Captain, a position he had to relinquish when he joined the department and moved to Kirup.
An aside: forestry officers
The Forests Department employed two classes of forestry officers. It was a system that had been designed by the public service, way back, and was based on the one that had evolved in the armed services over hundreds of years. There were ‘professional foresters’ equivalent to the commissioned officers in the Army (Lieutenants, through to Colonels and Generals), and there were ‘field staff foresters’ equivalent to non-commissioned officers (Corporals, through to Sergeant-Majors and Warrant Officers). Professional foresters were those who had a university degree in forestry; they were acknowledged as the leaders in the districts, regions and at Head Office. Field staff foresters did the work. They were the treemarkers, the timber inspectors, the bushfire specialists, the assessors, the research assistants and the supervisors of the forest workmen, the lowest rank in the department. Field foresters were employed by the Forests Department, not by the public service, and were recruited in two different ways: on the one hand, there were the “mature aged recruits” who were usually in their 30s or 40s, had a lifetime experience in the bush and were usually started at a mid-level position, like Assistant Forester. On the other hand were cadets, youngsters chosen from high school graduates who were given a special 2-year in-house training course, and then started on the bottom rung of the field staff as a Forest Guard. Field officers could move up through the ranks by passing promotional exams and performing well at the job but, in those days, they reached a ceiling that did not allow them to become senior officers running the department. This work was restricted to professionally trained foresters.
Forestry officers at Pemberton, 1969. Shackles Loverock is third from the right. I am second from the left, the OIC and the only professional officer in the district.
Jim was a typical mature-aged recruit, starting as an Assistant Forester (and finishing at the same rank many years later). He was not flashy, but steady, reliable, intensely loyal and good at his job.
Assistant Forester at Northcliffe
When Jim was appointed as Assistant Forester at Northcliffe he was already well known locally, having grown up there in the 1920s, but once he became forestry OIC he also became an institution. He was a big, rather untidy man, had an upright stance, a beaming, ruddy complexion and a cheerful outlook ... but he also had a strange, garbled manner of speech. This is how he got his nickname. When he had first started working with the logging crew at Pemberton the famous Bush Boss Griff Lunn had complained "I can’t understand a word you’re saying. You talk as if you've got a mouth-full of shackles!" So, it was "Shackles" Loverock from then on. He always answered to it and never seemed to resent it.
I could usually work out what Shackles was on about in face-to-face conversation, but over the old forestry telephones he could be almost incomprehensible, especially when excited about a bushfire. It was a strange argot: part Canadian, part English, part Northcliffe, part 1940s AIF, always delivered at about 120 km per hour.
Jim never aspired to promotion and was completely satisfied with his job at Northcliffe. He was intensely proud of his status and rank and always signed his official correspondence: "James H. Loverock, Esq., A/F, OIC". To some he was figure of fun, and there were many amusing stories about him. Some of his gang members (Don Harrison was especially good at it) could mimic him to perfection and would send him up when the gang was yarning at crib time, or they would play the odd practical joke on him (to which Jim never took offence). But you could not fault Jim's dedication. He would plough through thick scrub in pouring rain all day to get his treemarking done or stand for hours in the sun or rain down in the mill yard inspecting sleepers, cross arms or mine guides, year in and year out, and he was fearless at a bushfire. His men made gentle fun of him, but they also regarded him with affection, and being one of Jim’s men, a member of the forestry gang, had a certain prestige in the Northcliffe district. In return, Jim loved his men; he looked after them and they knew it.
A good example of his concern for, and interest in others, is John Sanders, a pioneering leader in private plantation forestry in WA and a first-class forester. John, like Jim, started life in the backblocks of Northcliffe, but was a smart young man, and smart enough to complete his high school education. He then found himself at a loose end and took a clerk’s job at the KTC sawmill in Northcliffe. John told me later:
I was sitting at my desk in the mill office one day in 1963, entering and adding up log volumes or some other boring and routine task, when Shackles came in. He had been doing timber inspection out in the mill yard and had some forms to complete in the office. I knew who he was – everyone on the Northcliffe side of the black stump knew Shackles – but I didn’t think he knew me. He looked me over and said ‘Hey, young Sanders, you can do better than this! Have you ever considered joining the forestry?”
I’m not sure how I answered, but Shackles added (in his usual garbled accents) “I’ll sort things out” and blundered out to his waiting orange and black Land Rover. The next thing I knew he had set up an interview for me with Superintendent Bruce Beggs at Manjimup. Then, with no initiative or paperwork from me, a week or two later l commenced as a forest workman at Shannon River, preparatory to joining the field officer Cadet School at Dwellingup. Two years after that I was a junior officer, and on the path to a life in forestry. Jim made this life possible.
Jim also did me a good turn once. Noting my inappropriate dress for working in the bush in a Northcliffe winter, Jim suggested I buy a bluey jacket. These were rough, heavy woollen button-up jackets, dyed blue, made in Tasmania and sold in the Sate Sawmills store at Pemberton. They were warm, thorn-proof and waterproof. I wore mine daily for years – Jim was never without his. I gave mine to my brother when I went overseas in 1965 and never succeeded in getting it back.
Shackles (wearing his bluey jacket) inspecting karri mine guides at the Northcliffe Mill, circa 1971. Ron Kitson in the background. Karri mine guides were cut from the finest logs and exported to South Africa.
Although he reported to the DFO at Pemberton, who would visit him about once a week and who provided professional guidance, Jim looked after the Northcliffe district completely by himself, with just an overseer and a gang of four or five forest workmen for support. His work involved treemarking and supervising the timber industry, timber inspection, seeing that roads, firebreaks and telephone lines were maintained, controlled burning and firefighting, regeneration of areas that had been logged, supervising fire lookouts, running the settlement and HQ, all local financial and administrative matters, and dealing with the community. He took his responsibilities utterly seriously.
When I was a young forester working at Northcliffe over the summer of 1963/4, I lived in the single men's hut at the back of the forestry depot, and I used to see a lot of Jim. He was not really a drinking man, but he liked to go to the pub on a Friday night and have a few beers with old army mates. His wife Jean did not approve, and if Jim was late home, she would lock him out (quite understandably – but she always relented after a couple of hours). Then Jim would wander down to my hut, and we would spend the evening together, Jim smoking my cigarettes (he smoked, but only other people’s), drinking my coffee and regaling me with stories of his war-time experiences. I have dined out over the years on some of his tales. He was one of the few ex-soldiers I ever met who loved to talk about his fighting days and he would do so with relish. He despised the Japanese but respected the Germans and Italians against whom he had fought in North Africa. Some of his stories were quite chilling:
At once stage during the fighting around Alamein [said Jim] we were in trenches and the Italians were in a trench only about 100 yards away. The order came down that we had to charge them. Our officer was a smart bloke. “Fix bayonets” he ordered. Then he told us to raise our rifles above the parapet and turn them about so that the sun glinted on the sharp steel. The Italians saw this and immediately ran up a white flag. Everyone was pretty happy about this, especially our blokes, as the Eitis had machine guns and a lot of us would have been mowed down if we had charged over the open ground.
Jim was also a great help to me on the job at that time. He knew every inch of the Northcliffe district and every farmer personally, and could give me detailed historical background on the old abandoned groupie blocks which I was assessing. Later when I was the DFO at Pemberton he reported to me, and many were the days I spent in his company in the bush. It was from Jim that I heard many of the first-hand stories of the original groupies and their tribulations and this started my life-time interest in this history.
The great Boorara Fire in March 1969 was a watershed for Jim. It was perhaps the nastiest and most difficult fire I ever experienced, starting on a farm on a hot, windy day, and burning into long-unburnt karri forests that were carrying heavy fuels. We almost caught it on the first night, but early the next day a powerful nor’wester struck and the headfire took off, running almost to Crystal Springs, near Walpole. Thousands of hectares of beautiful forest were devastated. I think Jim suffered as much as the forest. I remember how he was heartbroken over the loss of "his" karri trees, and how he took the whole catastrophe personally. His health declined rapidly in the wake of the fire, and eventually I arranged for him to be transferred to Pemberton to take on a permanent role as a timber inspector. This was responsible work, but less arduous than running a district, and he no longer had bushfire responsibilities. Jim retired when he turned 65 in 1971, but he never recovered his health, and he died not long afterwards.
In some ways it was a surprise he lived as long as he did. He survived numerous near misses in the bush, fell off logs and ladders and had frequent accidents while driving (he was a terrible driver, his mind on something else). But he always miraculously survived. His one-time overseer Johnny Jay once told me a story that demonstrated this.
There was a fire on the KTC road [said Johnny] and a tall marri tree caught alight on the wrong side of the road. Don Harrison and I had the job of falling it. The tree was going to hit the road, so we had parked the gang truck to stop traffic from one direction and Drafty Hunter was blocking the other end with his D6 dozer. It was gloomy, just on dusk. Don had just started backing down the tree when I saw Shackles driving along the road exactly where the tree was going to fall. He had bypassed the parked truck and had driven in to see what was going on. I reached out to tap Don on the shoulder but too late, the tree was on its way. It crashed right across the road fair on the vehicle. I turned to Don and said I think we just killed Shackles. We could see the headlights of his Toyota Landcruiser shinning from among the branches. When we got out to the road we could not believe our eyes. The main trunk was lying alongside the vehicle with a large limb both in front and behind with small branches hanging over it and not a scratch on it. Shackles was unscathed. We had to cut up the tree so Drafty could shift it with the D6. Shackles finally emerged. “That was close” he chortled, before driving off.
There was also the occasion Jim had to report a bushfire and this was in the days before forestry vehicles had two-way radios. He did, however, carry a portable telephone that could be hooked into forestry single wire telephone lines. These were “party lines” which often were linked in to local farms, and they were well used by the farmers and their wives. Jim had come across a fire outbreak in the bush and desperately wanted to get word to DHQ. He didn’t have a ladder but found an old railway sleeper and propped this up against the telephone pole. This he precariously mounted, and connected up his phone – to find the line was choked with the happy chatter of local women having some sort of talk-fest. Jim was outraged: “Get off the line in the name of the Queen!” he bellowed, before missing his footing and crashing to the ground. A second bellow was heard all around the district.
There is another story about Jim I always enjoy. Back in the early 1960s Jim and then-DFO Barney White arranged a meeting with the Boyup Brook cattleman Woody Pearce, who wanted to discuss access to his coastal cattle lease at Coodamurrup. Woody’s proposed access road would cross State forest. Barney and Jim arrived early at the rendezvous place on the old Chesapeake Road near Lake Maringup. It was a typical Northcliffe mid-winter day, with a steady drizzle and a bleak wind coming in from the coast. Jim built a good fire to warm them up while waiting (there were no heaters in forestry vehicles in those days), and the two foresters huddled around it in their woollen bluey jackets. When Mr Pearce arrived he quickly summed up the situation. Opening the back of his Land Rover he pulled out a sugar bag of lamb chops and a bottle of whisky. Both were consumed while business was done.
Nine months later to the very day, and on the same day, both Mrs White and Mrs Pearce gave birth to twins. Jim always claimed that Mrs Loverock would have done the same, if only he had got his share of the whisky. Barney and Woody maintained that the reverse was the case ...
Finally,
Jim ‘Shackles’ Loverock represented a breed of public officer we will not see again. He grew up on a hard-scrabble farm, was toughened by years of war service overseas and as an axeman in the karri forest, was appointed a mature-age forestry field officer and then spent years in the responsible position of single-handedly running a departmental outstation. He had his little ways, but you could never fault his dedication, good humour or loyalty. Above all, he loved Northcliffe: the people, his colleagues, the bush, the farms and the coast. As he put it to me once, he was never happier than when he was "south of the Dombakup and west of the Shannon", a geographical entity that encompassed all he needed, or sought out of life.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Graham McKenzie-Smith, John Sanders, Jack Bradsaw, John Jay and especially Ian Wilson for helping me with this story.
Endnotes
1. Jim’s education might have been minimal, but he could read, write and do arithmetic far better than most of the university graduates I employed 40 years later.
3. Les Court’s axework was so good, it was said he did not have to put his faller’s brand on his logs. The bloke at the mill landing could recognise a Les Court log by the ribbing of the scarf. Les was also famous for winning The Prince of Wales log chop at Pemberton, observed by the Prince of Wales himself, later the ill-fated King Edward XIII.
4. Back in the day, all timber workers involved in logging operations on State Forest had to be registered by the Forests Department. The registration cost almost nothing, but it was a powerful instrument of regulation for forestry officers, and a serious constraint for timber workers – if your registration was cancelled, you were banned from the bush and lost your job. I well remember one time when a faller was found to have been felling trees that the forest officer had not marked and which he had wanted to retain. The faller lost his registration and his job.
5. One of the legislated responsibilities of the Forests Department was to inspect timber products produced by sawmills and ensure they met prescribed standards. Different timber products, for example railway sleepers, or electricity cross-arms, had minutely-defined specifications in terms of dimension and quality. There was also “export timber” going overseas to Great Britain or New Zealand, where the buyers laid down discrete specifications and demanded government inspection and certification. Most forestry field officers were also trained timber inspectors and would spend a day a week in the yard of the local mill, checking and authorising or rejecting the timber products. If the timber met prescribed standards, the forester would stamp it with a special branding iron.
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