Mullumbimby Madness

For Pumpkin and Mark. Never Forgotten

This is a short story of an imbecile (me) who bowed to pressure from a psychotic group of friends and subsequently threw myself out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft. 

It’s 1985 and I’m living with fellow army aircraft mechanics Danny “Lizard” King and Ray “Tosca” Maynard at 39 Long St, Toowoomba, Qld. We are working at the Army Aviation Centre, Oakey approx. 30 mins west of Toowoomba. Ray and I are both footballers and played in a Riverina League Premiership together in Wagga Wagga 2 x years prior whilst studying. Ray is now a playing coach of South Toowoomba locally and I’m playing in my second year with Coorparoo in the QAFL, Brisbane. It’s a 2 x hour drive on Friday arvos to train, 2 x nights at the coach’s house, play Sunday and a 2 x hour drive home Sunday night. 

The Long St house is a typical drop in centre for our friends to catch up and a couple of those regulars were Mark “Carts” Carter and Peter “Pumpkin” Sherry. Along with Danny, these 3 are obsessed with skydiving. Not tandem jumping. Freefall.

The boys were participating in their desired recreation at the now extinct Golden Beach Skydiving Centre in Byron Bay, 3 ½ x hour’s drive away. Over the previous 12 months it appears that the visits to Long St become more frequent and the banter and enthusiasm towards the sport is reaching manic proportions. 

One night whilst these lunatics were cheering and screaming at a VHS of skydiving manoeuvres, I appeared from my bedroom and said something to the effect of, “Cut it out you idiots! Anyone could do that!”. The reply came quickly. 

“Oh yeah, why don’t you come to Byron this weekend?” 

“I’ve got footy on, can’t do it.” 

“Hang on, isn’t it a long weekend? You and Ray should both have byes shouldn’t you?”

“Ummm…”

“Yeessssss!! (singing) You’re coming to Byron, Willow’s coming to Byron. Tosca’s coming to Byron.”

Frankly Ray didn’t care, in fact he was up for most things of an adventurous nature but me? I was terrified of heights. Seriously shit scared. The drive to Byron on the Friday night was numbed by alcohol but there was no way out. The weekend would consist of sleeping in the aircraft hangar which doubled as a bar, a 4 x hour training session on Saturday morning, followed by the actual jump on Saturday afternoon and a celebration on Saturday night that we were assured we would never forget at the Mullumbimby Hotel, about 30 mins drive from Byron.

The jumps that are advertised and executed mostly these days are tandem jumps attached to an experienced skydiver and from an altitude of 10,000 ft. This allows for a solid 30-50 seconds of exhilarating freefall. In those days we did a jump solo called a “static line” from approx. 3000 ft. You were attached by a cargo strap connected from your parachute to the fuselage of the aircraft.

When instructed, you climbed from the aircraft in flight and gripped the strut which connects the wing to the fuselage, then hang there in mid-air until ordered to let go. You then freefall for a few seconds and hope to hell the cargo strap opens your chute. If it doesn’t, you are relying on remembering the 4 x hours of training you’ve completed, to enable you to access and pull the emergency chute.

The owner of the Golden Beach Skydiving Centre was a crazy-eyed ex-SAS Captain, Ron Llewelyn. He didn’t fly the Cessna we leapt from, but owned and flew an ultra-light aircraft. He was funny and intense. When the weather fell foul in the afternoon of Saturday after our training, he insisted that “the weather will be ok tomorrow so we will jump then, but for now we must party!”

We were hoarded into a mini bus and driven to the Mullumbimby Hotel, sat on a long table that accommodated a medieval army, ate a feast and played drinking games. Mullumbimby was notorious for its locally grown potent cannabis called suitably, “Mullumbimby Madness“ and strangely enough there seemed to be a bit of it going around. Inextricably, despite my protestations, I must have managed to inhale some secondary smoke. 🙂

I remember finally going to bed about 4am when suddenly we were woken at 7am with Ron illegally low flying his ultra-light metres above the hangar. He parked the plane and came into the hangar yelling for us to get up. It was jump time. Myself, Ray and a lovely woman from Sydney I’ll call Beth, were all intoxicated. I was about to face my worst fear, barely able to string 2 x words together. 

I can remember on the flight up asking Ron what he’d do if I decided to not jump?  He replied, “I have a 100% record. Everyone exits.” …Fair enough. 

To be fair, the fear wasn’t as bad as I thought, only because the earth below is somewhat surreal from that height…and possibly because I was in an altered state. Put me on the roof of a house or on the edge of a cliff and I would most likely freeze up. The other factor that helps is the amount of noise which comes from the aircraft engine and the wind movement. I saw a doco once where some British Commandos in training couldn’t jump from a balloon because of the silence. I understood that at that moment. 

Once hanging from the strut it was one look inside and Ron yells “Go!” then I released my hands. In the training that seemed so distant at that point and therefore completely forgotten, you are supposed to push your arms back and count, “1 x thousand, 2 x thousand, 3 x thousand.” If your chute hasn’t opened, you need to execute the emergency chute procedure which drew a total blank in my now scrambled head. The only action I took when I let go of the strut was to scream quietly to myself through clenched teeth, “F..k I’m dead.”

With eyes shut  I felt a jolt and I looked up for the first time to see an inflated parachute. I then looked down 2000 ft over Byron Bay and took in the view trying to control my breathing. Given that I’d been trained the previous day on how to land, that was now a blur so I crash landed into a paddock 200m from the target, lucky not to break a leg. I dragged my wretched body to the hangar and went to sleep for a few hours, only woken to get in the car to drive back home.

Here are some photos of the madmen in question:

Here is the photos of before, during and after the jump. Piece of piss! Never in doubt.

This is a photo of Danny and Pumpkin prior to doing a nude jump:

A couple of footnotes: 

• The Cessna we jumped from was in a terrible condition which also assisted in the decision making process to let go of the strut upon seeing the rust on the flight controls! Pumpkin had it flown to Toowoomba where he restored it to its former glory in exchange for 500 x jumps.
• The pilot of the Cessna was a nice young bloke in his mid 20’s. He died choking on a bone at a wedding reception where the bride and groom were a doctor and a nurse respectively and therefore the room was filled with their peers. Sadly no one could save him. True story.
• Both Pumpkin and Carts have passed away and left beautiful families behind. Both were outstanding tradesman, rugby players, skydivers, husbands and dads. They were fearless and would be the first “to jump into a trench” to help. We all miss them terribly. 

A few weeks ago Lynda and I did a road trip to Mullumbimby to see my youngest daughter Mia, some 35 years from that fateful weekend. Little has changed other than it’s much busier. Mullum is still a home for alternative lifestyles and the preferred mode of footwear is either barefoot or Birkenstocks. The roads are a disgrace and now that the locals are paying rates on houses that are a minimum $1m for a shack, they have every right to kick up a stink. The weekly market is understated and relaxed. It’s interesting to see how thin everyone was. It’s probably because there is no fast food chains and they eat so healthily.  It reminded me of the citizens of the 60’s and 70’s prior to the proliferation of KFC and Maccas. Well worth a visit if you’re up that way. 

Here are some photos from Mullumbimby and Mia with George her 3 x legged cat George: