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 | The Very Early Days
entry by Doug
1/10/2005 1:52 PM
| MY FIRST DAY OF SECONDARY SCHOOL
As a teenager starting secondary school, I was surrounded by friends that were eagerly awaiting their first confrontation with school girls in short dresses. Other students were nearly peeing their pants while the cool ones were smoking cigarettes in “smoker's corner” with older friends or brothers. Not me. I had been dreaming of exploring the Northcote Tech Darkies, a 1.5m high stormwater pipe.
During the first recess of the first day of my secondary school career, I stood in front of the pipe that I had heard so much about. I had heard about The Bend, The Rocks and The Split although all I could see was a question mark.
Within a few minutes of the bell sounding to end my first day of secondary school, I was in the pipe with a few friends that I had coaxed into the idea. We entered the tunnel, only as naive children with a sense of adventure possibly could, without a torch and not knowing what lay ahead.
Soon we reached The Bend and the tunnel went into darkness. I loved the smell of the concrete and the spooky sound of the echoes. A scream by one of the party saw the three of us running blindly through the pipe, slipping over, getting wet, screaming and laughing uncontrollably. We came torpedoing out of the pipe and I slipped down the ten meter slide out the front of the tunnel grazing my knees and elbows. I stood up and looked at myself, my brand new school uniform, wet, ripped and covered in sludge and blood. I looked back up the slide and saw my two friends looking a little bit less ruffled, but not much. We all started laughing again... I was hooked!
As time went on, I went further than The Bend and passed The Rocks, a bit of a disappointment considering I was expecting a cave-like section of tunnel, not a section where old stones made the waterlevel uncomfortable for a hundred meters. We aptly changed the name from The Rocks to The Ballbreaker. The Split was where the pipe turned into a couple of meter high tunnels. You could exit the pipe via a gutter-box here and then sneak back to school before the bell.
Over the next four years, this pipe played a major part in my spare (and sometimes not so spare) time. When it was hot we would go and sit in the drain. When it was cold, we would light campfires out the front, and when water was gushing out of the outlet while it was raining, we would chuck huge logs or dumped rubbish; toasters, portable televisions, coffee tables... couches! Protecting the environment wasn’t a big issue in the early 1980s.
I was often caught in or near the tunnel or asked why my pants were wet up to my knees. “Did you fall in the creek Douglas?” the teacher would ask to which I would honestly reply “No Miss”. On one occasion, we tried to better our record of seventeen people making the journey to The Split. This time, the one kilometre trip was made by 27 students. We decided against exiting via the gutter-box as it would create a bit of a scene. We made it back to the outlet with only a few minutes of our lunch break left. The first explorer left the tunnel and covered his face from the bright sunlight with his hand. “Shit!” he said looking back at us, “We’re busted”. A teacher had heard us making a racket through the tunnel while he was on ‘creek patrol’ . The teacher had a big bushy beard so being the witty scholars that we Northcote Tech students were, he became known as Ned Kelly. “Out you come, you are all going to the Principle’s office” called out Ned. We left the tunnel single file sighing miserably as we saw the ugly sight of Ned Kelly writing all our names down as we walked by. First six then nine, twelve... “How many of you are there down there?” Asked Ned. “A few more yet Sir” said a friend smiling. Fifteen, eighteen, twenty one... “There’s only three hundred students in the school!” exclaimed Ned. By the time the whole 27 of us were out, the group was more numerous than most Northcote Tech classes. Ned shook his bald head and screwed up the bit of paper with our names on it. “Just go and pick up twenty bits of rubbish each”. I think Ned thought it was too much paper work.
I ventured into the pipe over three hundred times and never ever contemplated that there were other better tunnels around. Boy, was I wrong.
Going in drains is mainly considered to be a teenage boy thing and that is what it may have been with me. As a member of the Cave Clan for more than 30 years, I did not just go in drains. I explored them. As a teenager I did all the Australian teenager things. I played cricket and footy, got drunk on three cans of beer, pretended to like smoking and hang out with the cool people. In 1984, after hearing about other pipes in neighbouring suburbs, I tried talking a few of the keener explorers into forming a group of drain explorers. It was a novel idea as far as I was concerned. I did not realise that the Drainiacs were doing the same thing twenty five years prior to the naming of our group. We called ourselves the Tunnel Rats or something like that. We had planned to explore four other tunnels that we had heard rumours about, however, certain things occurred that put an
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end to the idea. A couple of us started getting into trouble with the law and another got his girlfriend pregnant. The Tunnel Rats were on hold.
Leading up till the summer of 1985/6, I started to realise that the group of people I was associating with were not really the right type. I was kindly asked to leave school towards the end of 1985 to which my mother said “Good, you’re old enough to get a job and make some money”, so I did.
I was still playing football and despite trying I could not fit into the yobbo beer drinking, back slapping scene. I stayed playing football but abandoned my school friends. Not having being to Northcote Tech School, or more to the point the drain that ran under it for six months, I decided to visit it. On my way to the tunnel I went past the house of a student that was in my class. He was just about the only student that studied in our class... he was the teachers pet while I was anything but. Apart from that obvious difference, we still had a few conversations together. We had a similar sense of humour and we were both Aussies in a school that was seventy percent Greek so it was always the Skips against the Wogs. Most of the time I would succumb to peer group pressure and ignored or stirred him. The Greeks called him Woody but never really explained why.
I walked up Woody’s driveway feeling like a traitor. I knocked on the front door and a strange scary man opened the door, “Is Woody home?”... “Rrrnute”. After a couple of minutes he came to the door. “How ya going?” He asked. “Good, want to go up the darkies?”
Woody was brought up in the outer north-eastern Melbourne suburb of Diamond Creek. Diamond Creek had a series of old gold mines that he and his brother explored as children. I had a day off work for the Australia Day public holiday so we decided to check out the mines. As we left Woody’s house, his brother grabbed a bag and followed us. “This is my brother Sloth” said Woody, “They call him Sloth because he doesn’t say much”. That day we decided to start a group that explores mines, caves and other tunnels. That night we came up with the name Cave Clan.
THE CAVE CLAN
We had planned to spend weekends away exploring caves and mines but we soon realised that being 16 year olds, this would not happen. We needed a car. Woody worked on Saturday afternoons. Then we started doing the drains that we had seen and heard about. The Northcote Golf Course and “the toxic one that you should not do”. In the next year we spent most sunny Saturdays exploring or looking for drains. We started to find older tunnels made out of bluestone and redbrick as well as shapes other than the usual RCP (round concrete pipe) . I could not believe that there were all these really interesting tunnels, literally under our feet! After we found a drain called GOD, I started to feel something, like we were not just going in drains, we were starting to explore tunnels that were worth exploring. We were becoming more professional about the whole thing. We were finding tunnels of a high standard. I had been on guided tours through a variety of tunnels and seen many hours of documentary footage and the tunnels we were finding were better than many that I had seen. GOD started off as a 3m high RCP that had a huge stairway leading to a 6m high waterfall. Once beyond the waterfall the tunnel changed continuously. Bowl shaped bluestone, arch, square, then back to concrete. An old redbrick tunnel shoots off one way. The light pours in from the outside world through grilles in the roof. The rays of light play tricks with your eyes and the distant sound of a car running over a manhole cover echoes along the tunnel then hits you in the chest. Someone’s having a barbecue above in the real world and the smell of sausage seeps in through a gutter. Written in old black tar paint is the name ‘Alf Saddlier - 1948’. On this day, GOD is quite pleasant and there is even a cool breeze despite it being quite hot and humid outside. I remember sitting against the wall of the tunnel under a grille thinking how much I had loved Northcote Tech Darkies. Three hundred visits and look what I have been missing out on! Since finding the Great Oversized Darkie, I have not being back to the Northcote Tech Darkies and have no intentions of doing so. Over the next dozen years, even GOD would pale into insignificance.
During the next twelve months, the three of us continued on looking for tunnels although drains seemed to be our niche. I would spend many a day riding along creeks looking for tunnel outlets. Some days it would be raining and windy while other days it would be hot and humid. It did not make much difference to me, I just wanted to find new tunnels and the fact that Woody and Sloth were not too keen on the ‘finding’ part of drain exploration did not bother me. They still wanted to explore them and I loved finding them.
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One day, after studying a street directory for potential drains, I rode around the eastern suburbs of Melbourne for twelve hours looking for tunnels. It was hard work and not a whole lot was found. I had just about had enough. The final route was along Koonung Creek to the Yarra River then home checking the banks for tunnels. I rode along the busy Doncaster Road looking for Koonung Creek. After about ten minutes, I knew that I had missed the creek so I checked my map and rode back to the point where the creek should have been. There was no creek, only the new Eastern Freeway. I looked for the creek but could not spot it, that was before I decided to turn around, behind me was a gigantic concrete canal leading directly to me and under Doncaster Road. The canal did not continue on the other side of the road so I knew it must stay as a tunnel. I rode around and saw a tunnel that dwarfed all of the other tunnels we had found. I had gone from being so exhausted that I felt like lying down beside the road and going to sleep to being able to hear nothing but my heart beating. The tunnel was a five meter high, eight meter wide concrete arch. I took a deep breath at the entrance “Ah, sweet smelling drains” I thought to myself. I did not have a torch so I decided to head home. As I turned to leave I bumped into a group of kids who told me that it takes 15 minutes to ride through to the other end of the tunnel. I was disappointed at this as I was hoping for a tunnel that would go on for hours.
I came flying down the side of Woody and Sloth’s house. “I have found this huge darkie... it’s fucken big!” I squealed. By now it was eight o’clock in the evening (I left home at eight that morning). I told them about my day whilst I was having a Pepsi and a crappy pie. I was exhausted but within one hour, the three of us were standing in front of the huge tunnel, torches in hand, ready to go in. It was a lot like my first visit to Northcote Tech Darkies; all I could see was a question mark... mind you, it was a five meter high question mark this time!
We could not believe the size of this tunnel. We could not understand why it was built so big. It was a big drain and ‘big drains’ is what the Cave Clan wanted.
We heard some motorbikes at the start of the tunnel so we rushed through the drain in a mad panic expecting Hell’s Angels to come flying through at any moment. We left the tunnel and headed home. {INSERT SECURITY GUARD STORY HERE}We named that tunnel Tenth after the fact that it was our tenth drain explored (a lot of time and effort went into naming the tunnels we explored). We continued to find massive tunnel systems. The Maze that ran under Hawthorn was aptly named. The tunnel had loops and various entrances and outlets. Some expos (expeditions; groups of members exploring tunnels) would spend up to eight hours in this tunnel. There are a dozen different styles of tunnel in this system as well as many features; rooms, splits, junctions, chambers, waterfalls, slides, stairways and grilles as well as the tunnel being made out of concrete, redbrick and bluestone. The tunnels are amazing. Many systems as detailed, but totally different, were found over the years; The Great Stairway, Sloth’s Tomb, Clantomb, Dweller’s Tomb, The Dungeon, Anzac Tunnel and Glass Creek to name but a few.
THE DRAIN DWELLERS
At our first anniversary (26/1/87), we thought we had done just about everything that there was to do. We decided to quit. “We’d be eighteen years old soon”.
No sooner than had we decided to give it away, my brother told me about a message written under a bridge; “Cave Clan, contact the Drain Dwellers. Ask for Shane”. I phoned the number a few times until finally I got a hold of Shane. Shane was called Blade and he explored drains with his next door neighbour Cobra. After talking to Blade on the phone a couple of times, we agreed to meet at the Northcote Golf Course Darkies (a tunnel that was located halfway between the two groups). I showed up with Woody a bit before the agreed time. I went into the tunnel and called out “Hey, Drain Dwellers!” but the only answer I got was my continuos echo. I looked through a gutter-box (the slits in street gutters that lead into the drains) to tell Woody that they were not here yet when I could hear voices talking to Woody. I looked through the gutter-box and could only see two sets of legs dressed in full camouflage including army lace-up boots. “Oh shit!” I thought to myself. Then I heard a voice call down the gutter to me “Ayyy, Dougo”. Blade and Cobra explored drains with us for a couple of years and rejuvenated our enthusiasm. I think we all agreed that it was a pleasant change to explore drains with some new faces. We were telling them about all these cool tunnels that we could take them to. At first there was this obvious “we know more about it than you” attitude but I think they soon realised that we were fairly hardcore. Blade soon moved to country South Australia but Cobra joined the Cave Clan and became a hardcore member for a few years. Looking back, some of my most humorous experiences in the Cave Clan were with Cobra. He had a Greek background and a funny sense of humour. He made me laugh anyway.
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Back in 1988, we had found this flooded tunnel outlet that lead into the Merri Creek. We blew up a rubber boat and paddled towards the mouth of the tunnel. Once inside, we realised we were in a 2.5m mummy (sarcophagus shaped tunnel, flat bottom, slanted walls with a round top) tunnel that was about 1.5m deep. We also realised that just a short distance in, a concrete wall blocked the tunnel. There was a dunny lid (a hinged plastic gate that covers some pipes) just under the waterlevel but neither of us were very interested in diving into the filth. We decided to find another way in. The section of tunnel beyond the concrete wall was the original route of another system known as Northcote High Darkies. They had changed the route to make the tunnel outlet come out where it would not cause as much erosion to the creek’s banks. What we were looking for was a way into a 500 meter long section of tunnel that was blocked at both ends. I started searching the area and found a grille in a nearby laneway. That night Cobra and I lifted the grille and headed into a one meter high RCP. We each had a cheap torch that were not really water proof. I also had a Polaroid camera. We crawled along the pipe heading in the direction of the old section of tunnel. The tunnel was dry for the first fifty meters or so but it gradually got deeper... and deeper. Soon, we were up to our chests in water. We were laughing as the water got even deeper. Soon it was up to our necks and I was holding my torch in one hand above the waterlevel and my camera in the other. I asked Cobra to hold my torch and camera while I rested my arms which he did. Cobra had the problem of strict parents. He was wearing a gold watch and about $700 worth of clothes. His parents would go crazy at him when they smelt his soaking wet clothes (nothing smells as bad as wet drain clothes). Despite all this, he just wanted to know what was ahead, “Ayyy, Dougo...” he said in his strong Greek accent “...mayyyte, this better be good man!” I looked at Cobra and smiled. A second later I was not smiling, I was looking at my camera and the two torches under the water. While we were resting, Cobra had slowly accidentally lowered his hands into the water. “The camera!” I screamed. We continued on until I needed to turn my head on to its side. One ear was scraping the roof while the other was in the water. “I’m going to wait here man” said Cobra. I continued on until I could see where the tunnel got bigger. The waterlevel stopped only a few centimetres from the top of the small pipe we were in. I slid into a huge redbrick pipe with Cobra clambering through not long after. We went with the flow to the mummy tunnel and to the concrete wall then back against the flow back past the pipe we had entered. The tunnel went up a little slide and dried up. We reached the other end which was a bricked up wall. We marked our names and the date. “We are probably the first people to conquer this section of tunnel since it was blocked up” said Cobra, “this is what exploration is about” he continued, “Oh, and sorry about the camera”.
After that night, Cobra would leave ‘drain clothes’ at my flat so as to avoid the wrath of his mother. He continued to explore with the Cave Clan until his mother found some photos of him in tunnels. Cobra translated her cries and hand gestures to me as “my boy, he goes in the tunnels of darkness. He goes with the Devil”. His parents took him away to a farmhouse in the country and he was forced to live with a priest for six months. The next time I spoke to him, he was different. He spoke in much the same way that the Born Again Christians who pull you up on the street talk. It was as if the ‘fun part’ of his brain had been removed.
We had a way of meeting other drain explorers (now that we realised there actually were other drain explorers). Whenever we explored a tunnel, we would leave a message explaining how to meet us. It would tell other explorers how to get to Northcote Golf Course Darkies and to leave a message and a date to meet at The Pillars. We would check The Pillars, a section of Northcote Golf Course Darkies where four tunnels met up at a room that had five golden pillars supporting the roof, every week for messages. On one occasion there was a message from a few guys from the other side of town, down south. They left a message to arrange to meet over Easter 1988. We met up without much commotion. We took them up the tunnel talking about the different tunnels we had done. I slipped over in a section that was marked in paint “SLIPPERY SHIT”. I stood up, my pants totally soaked and noticed some more graffiti “PEOPLE WHO HAVE SLIPPED IN THE SLIPPERY SHIT” followed by a list of about a dozen names. I sadly added my name. We ventured up the tunnel until it started to become small and uninteresting and decided to turn around. We walked back continuing our stories of our exploring extremities which only stopped when I slipped over in the ‘slippery shit’ again. The seven southerners laughed themselves silly. Here I was, supposedly their ‘guide’ and I was the only one to slip all day, and I did it twice! Rusco, Vandal, Trinity, Gilligan, Mosh and Cougar became the foundations of the Cave Clan’s southern branch. This is how we met many groups of explorers. We would also leave message bags (plastic bags with Cave Clan information in the form of text and an audio cassette) tied to ladder rungs. Groups would find them and freak out. “Should we take it?” one explorer told me that after grabbing it, he left the tunnel as quickly as possible and waited until they were on a train heading home before opening the bag. Only then did he realise that the bag was meant for him. We met another group from the eastern suburbs; Critt, Yogi, Gobledox, Knightstalker, Popcorn, Sparx, Slasha and friends soon became the eastern branch of the Clan. The Cave Clan was actually becoming a clan. We continued recruiting members this way for many years. The people who were joining the Clan were already exploring drains so we were not encouraging the youth of the time to risk their lives as the MMBW (the water board, now Melbourne Water) often told the press.
There were lots of little groups of drain groups but we were the only ones that travelled. The others would explore the few tunnels in their area then see our message or find our message bag. They would contact us, then join, a group of five would see the main one or two remain in the Cave Clan while the other less interested would fade away. This was the case in nearly all of the smaller groups that we assimilated.
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The latest edit was to change '20 years in the Clan' to 'more than 30 years in the Clan' as I originally wrote this about 15 years a go.
[last edit 7/23/2018 7:20 AM by Doug - edited 4 times]
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