"Whuffo" – the imported Americanism, short for "why for you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" – pretty much summed up the public attitude to the embryonic sport in those days.
In this interview, recorded in the late 1990s, Steve (later a senior instructor and, for a time, chief instructor with the SASPC) reflects on what attracted people to jumping in the early days.
Extracts from a transcript of a recorded interview with Steve Swann by Donna Berthelsen in 1997.
The interview was one of 45 recorded with early jumpers from all over Australia as part of an oral history project for the Australian Parachute Federation.
Steve made his first jump at Lower Light on May 17, 1969.
DB: So when did you start jumping and how did you come to start jumping?
SS: In 1969. The first parachute jump I ever saw, a guy jumped into the sea. They had what they called a yachting gymkhana which is a little bit like a Mardi Gras. It was one of the very early demos, I imagine, in South Australia.
They jumped into the sea about a mile and a half off Seacliff at the Yacht Club where I was a member in the early 1960s. I think it might have been Max Chaplin's group. He drowned a year or two later, doing a demo off Adelaide into water. But that must have sparked the idea of jumping in my head.
And then a few years later, after I had started work as a copy boy at The News, Laurie Trotter did a demo at a country show over on the West Coast [of SA]. That would have been about 1967 or 1968 – I saw it, and that interested me.
At that time all my mates (I’d left school) were playing football and that stuff. I had never been a great sporting type person at school at all – except for yachting – and I figured I'd never get anywhere playing footie, so I thought I would give parachuting a go. I don't know how I got on to them. I suppose I found them in the phone book or something.
DB: Who else started when you did?
SS: Somehow I got in touch with Col Parsons, who trained me. I was the only student. The training took two weeks, and I did my first jump at Lower Light. Then it was only a paddock. They had only just recently moved up from jumping south of Adelaide.
DB: At Parafield. Did they jump at Parafield do you know?
SS: Not to my knowledge. I know they were jumping down south and for some reason they had to move out of there. But obviously they had just found this paddock at Lower Light.
DB: Where is Lower Light exactly?
SS: North of Adelaide, about thirty miles. It was a bit remote then but they are still jumping there now. It is getting a lot of pressure because I was out there a few weeks ago with my son just to show him and it is now all little hobby farms and stuff like that so how they can survive there I don't know.
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| Steve lands next to Lower Light’s seaweed pit on a 28 ft 7-TU C9 “cheapo” in 1969. |
His land was located conveniently on the main road north of Adelaide, and George gave unstinting practical and personal support to skydiving when it was truly a minority sport. He graded air strips, mowed grass, moved livestock and set his entire cropping rotation to suit the needs of a handful of people who called his farm "the DZ".
Anyhow, that's where I did my first jump, which was a total disaster.
DB: Did you see yourself doing more than one jump?
SS: Oh yes. It's different now, with all the publicity and the tandem jumps – everybody is going to do one. But I certainly saw myself as doing a steady number.
I think that is probably the difference. Subsequently as an instructor, years after, I could always tell – if people arrived on their own to training, statistically you had a much better chance of keeping them. Whereas, if they rolled up in pairs or groups – you didn't have as good a chance of moving them on or retaining them beyond the first jump.
DB: So tell us about your first jump.
SS: I fell off the wheel. It was a disaster in the sense that Col Parsons had placed a Sentinel (automatic opener) on the reserve.
They had only had it a short time and there had been no discussion of it in my training. This thing went off at 1,000 ft (the student was supposed to turn it off after the main opened OK) and I had the reserve hanging all around me.
It didn't fully deploy but that was a bit embarrassing.
DB: So that was 1969. Do you remember the date or anything like that?
SS: It was May, because it was quite cold and it was out of a 172 – that was the aircraft in South Australia for years. South Australian parachuting laboured under the lack of aircraft for years, the 172s just couldn't get altitude.
DB: So the Chief Instructor was Col Parsons. How many people were around then?
SS: Regular jumpers every weekend – there wouldn't have been more than seven or eight. There was always a little tribe of students.
DB: But who were the seven or eight? Col Parsons ...
SS: Col Parsons, Leo Brogan, Phil Edwards, a guy who came from England called John Scott who was a regular for quite a long time, Trevor Burns. Peter O'Neill.
DB: So you continued jumping and got your B License. Did that take you long?
SS: Well, yes it did – it was characteristic of jumping in those days. We didn't get a lot done in a day. If you had three jumps in a day it was very good.
We certainly didn't jump both days of the weekend – it was just one day. I had eleven static lines because I just couldn't get my brain around it. Col was a real stickler – which is good – and as an instructor he didn't pass anyone who wasn't performing well enough.
DB: And Bernie Keenan – that’s who is I remember was particularly associated with South Australia. Did you start jumping after him or was that around the time?
SS: I was there on his first jump – I did my first freefall on the same load!
DB: So was Trevor Burns still here then?
SS: Trevor had a drop zone at Port Pirie ...
DB: So there were still two drop zones operating?
I'm not sure what their commercial relationship was, but they ended up being partners for a while in the drop zone at Pirie which was actually on the old airport – the old World War II hut type facility.
DB: That was before my time – well it wasn't before I started jumping – that was 1966. Oh no. no wait a minute 1970 there was the training camp before they went to Perth so the Coxes and Bob Morrison and Tony Curl were all at Port Pirie in 1970.
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| After the first freefall: Sentinel auto opener on the reserve. |
But I put my foot on the disk. I got up and she said "More arse than class” It was a term I had never heard before. She was quite correct.
DB: Where did you go from there in terms of your jumping - did you have particular interests?
SS: We went up to Pirie occasionally – it was at weekends – it was not all that far away.
But, you know, the thing that really struck me jumping in those days, and especially at Pirie, was the bloody hard landings and jumping on those cheapos – double Ls, the 7-TUs, also known as the Conquisidor.
The ground at Port Pirie, and Lower Light, was like concrete in summer – just unbelievable. Just inland from the sea – the sea breezes were awful.
We were often blown out – jumping was cancelled because of the wind.
DB: Sea breezes! I thought they were more like full scale winds weren't they?
SS: And with cheapos and then hitting the "concrete" – it was bloody awful!
DB: So when did you get your first high performance canopy and what was it?
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| Col Parsons (left) and Steve Swann in the seaweed on their PCs, 1970. |
It was a piggyback, and you didn't have a reserve on the front so you couldn't feel anything strapping you in at the front and I felt absolute freedom.
DB: The PC Mark II didn't have a good reputation actually – I'd forgotten about that.
SS: I don't know why. They said they didn't drive as well. I had a "Red Devil" – it was just all red. I found it always very reliable.
DB: But you had that for years and years didn't you?
SS: Yes. It used to get a lot of damage, which others didn't seem to, with their stabilisers. But it was okay.
DB: So when did you stop jumping. When did you give up jumping.
SS: I did the last jump it must be ten years ago.
DB: So did you just slacken off or . . .?
SS: I gave up a couple of times. I broke legs twice – I just drifted away from jumping - went hang gliding a bit - I just got sick of it. I was actually really interested in hang gliding which I did a bit of.
I came back to jumping after a year or so and it was about the stage they'd just started talking about canopy relative work. Ian Wark, a character in South Australian jumping, was really very good at it. He introduced me to it just after I made this comeback to parachuting.
DB: So that would have been about 1980 actually ...
SS: Yes. In fact up until then we had spent our time under canopy on getting apart, keeping a safe distance. It was a huge change.
I came back after having a year off and Warky was trying to get people into it, and I went up and did it with him and we really clicked. We did it quite well.
DB: It took a lot of strength though. I did probably half a dozen with people like Paddy, Dave McEvoy and stuff but wow! It just took a lot of strength. Amazing stuff.
SS: Well I really enjoyed it. But that was the first time I busted myself up.
DB: Did you have an entanglement?
SS: No, it was just bad judgment. It was during a newspaper strike and the Golden Arrows Parachute Display team (one of my big passions was promoting that team) – and I saw that strike as an opportunity to get a front page photo in The Advertiser, Adelaide's daily newspaper.
Ian Wark, Col Parsons and I built a triplane. I knew it was a guaranteed, dead set certainty to get the front page of The Advertiser if it was any good, and no one had really ever seen a triplane – the general public that is.
DB: According to the photo ...
SS: We had stars in our eyes. My canopy was partially collapsed when we docked. If we had flown all the way down, it might have been all right.
But we hadn't really learned how to land these things. I ended up getting dropped from about 30 ft.
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| A quadra-plane in 1982. Top to bottom: Ian Wark, Steve Swann, Col Parsons and Steve Boldog. |
Just silly. I had never injured myself.
Then I did it again a couple of years later. Three of us – out of helicopter in the Barossa Valley to raise money for Chris Sperou. We did this demo for nothing. The target was an oval in front of a winery. This time it was a broken ankle.
Afterwards I said to the surgeon: "I can't believe it – there was no impact", and he said he had a case only a few weeks before in which some guy had done the same break playing on a lawn tennis court.
DB: So how many jumps did you end up doing?
SS: A few over 1,000 about 1,060 odd.
DB: So you gave up in about 1986. You said about 10 years. So you never got any family pressure to give it away?
SS: No never, not at all.
DB: The Golden Arrow Display team, who was on that?
SS: Colin Parsons and Leo Brogan, Phil Edwards and Trevor Burns were the people I remember as associated with it.
They invited a few of us juniors to do demos with them here and there. It just gradually evolved and it was always good fun. It was doing something different and earning a bit of money for the club. But we never really earned a quid out of it. We charged money but ...
DB: Cover your costs you could be lucky!
SS: In the end it was a bit of joke. We'd do it for nothing, just for the honour and glory. But it was good because for a long time South Australia really only had one parachute display team.
DB: Tell us about how you got involved with Australian Skydiver magazine.
SS: Trevor was publishing it out of Port Pirie. I was interested because I was a young journo but I was really a newcomer to parachuting and I wrote a couple of silly little pieces.
I was only eighteen or nineteen. He had me do it probably because he was desperate for material. Then he moved and started printing it in Adelaide, a company called Automatic Printing. I just drifted into it.
DB: Stay interested in some of the political things without biased comment!
SS: I am trying to remember the train of events you know. I got really frustrated with Trevor because nothing happened with the magazine for a while there. Trevor didn't publish it for eight months or so – now, in retrospect I can see why. Trevor was another volunteer working for nothing – nobody ever made any money out of it, least of all me.
But I was young and coming out of the newspaper industry I thought "why isn't this guy putting it together?" I thought it was very important that it was published and so we put it to Claude Gillard. Trevor really decided that he wasn't going to publish it anymore.
Claude formed a group called Parachuting Communications which I think was him and Bruce Towers – put some money up to cover the costs of printing and posting it and we published the first edition which actually just used a lot of the material that Trevor had already had at that stage.
The politics? There weren't any real politics. I think Trevor just didn’t want to do it anymore.
DB: So you and Bernie then took it on? I am a bit vague on this. So when about was that?
SS: The early 1970s. And Claude's involvement really was to guarantee the publication of it. He actually wrote an editorial in the second issue because in the first one I was a bit hard on Burnsie. But eventually I basically ended up in the same situation as Trevor did.
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| Steve and Bernie Keenan at Pakenham after an APF Board meeting in the mid 1970s. |
But apart from being the guarantor and writing the cheques, Claude really didn't have any input into it. I was very much the editor, publisher and the whole thing really, with Bernie.
I used to sit down at lunchtime at my office and get a golf-ball typewriter from one of the secretaries. It had a carbon ribbon and I got coated proof paper which I used to pinch out of the printing department downstairs, and type it up in long galleys (rows) – set the width – and of course the typewriter wouldn't justify so I'd have to draw a line and see how wide it was.
And then we'd go in at night, Bernie and I and often, if we were really pushing deadlines, my wife Jill and Bernie's wife Sue, to my office and cut these galleys up and stick them down.
You'd just paste the whole thing up – shoot the negatives and do the whole layout. No computers, no desktop publishing!
DB: So okay so you were editor for Australia Skydiver from when was that say till when from about ... Can you think vaguely of the year.
SS: 1972 to 1976.
DB: Well that's his complaint now, it is really what concerns him.
In a thing like putting the magazine out he mightn't have had to do the day to day work. But he was the one who put his own money up. He used his own money to guarantee its publication.
DB: But it must have cost you money as well didn't it?
SS: Well only in kind – we weren't paid for it.
DB: Who used to do the mailing out and stuff like that ...?
SS: We used to sit around in our lounge room (or Bernie's) and drink piss and write out and stuff the envelopes.
DB: So during the 1970s the parachuting organisation in South Australia was like, Col – although he dropped in and out of bit of jumping for a while didn't he?
SS: Well I guess the hierarchy was really Col Parsons and Bernie Keenan and Steve Swann and Phil Edwards. He was a colorful guy ...
Compared with parachuting nationally, we never had a real lot of people here but perhaps that’s just a reflection of the population base.
We didn't get a real lot of champions that came out of Adelaide but then I only ever went to one Nationals.
DB: Which was that?
SS: It was at Labertouche in the early 1970s.
DB: Yes I can vaguely remember you and your wife and Bernie. Yes it was a real foursome. So that must have been the year of 1973-74.
SS: Yes. And we competed in it which was fun but – I can't remember where we came – a bit down the line, I'm sure.
DB: So you competed style and accuracy or? You had a rel team there too, didn't you?
SS: Most of our jumping in Adelaide was out of a 172 – we really treated ourselves if we had a Cherokee 6.
DB: So what rel did you do? Did you do a lot of rel work?
SS: Oh yes – in those days it was just three-mans. But Bernie and I were real classic base. They weren't dragged out in those days.
But then I guess, we just sat there just looking at the others coming in.
DB: So what about near misses in parachuting? How many near misses have you had or what have been the most memorable jumps.
SS: I had three mals in the whole time I was jumping and they were all on one canopy, which was a Sled. [an early 5-cell ram air]
DB: Oh yes – tell us about the Sled?
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| The Sled at Parafield in 1976. |
An interstate visitor arrived with this Sled and I did a jump on it, and I thought it was great. So I bought one.
It was a great, rattling, plasticy thing – made a hell of a lot of noise and I did forty or fifty jumps on it before anything went wrong with it and then it gave me three mals – two of them in a row, one after the other.
It was just a bag lock on the first one. I'd done 700 jumps up until then when I never had anything, just a few pilot chute hesitations.
And then I looked up at this thing – and I remember exactly where I was – just over the road at Lower Light towards Quigley's farm. I looked up and this thing is just sitting in the bag – nothing came out of it.
So I just hopped off it – one and half shot capewells so it was nice and clean. I had a GQ reserve.
I used to have nightmares – I still do sometimes – about GQs you know, although I never had any real problems with them myself. But Bernie had one that he lent to someone and it got badly damaged on opening. Blew several panels.
The funny thing on this Sled malfunction was all I wanted to do was follow my kicker plate down. They were worth $10.
So I landed next to the kicker plate which landed quite close to the bag and I looked over – and all that was holding it shut was a single rubber band – it was weird.
DB: Yes it had a lot of lines on it or something that people subsequently cut off . I can't remember exactly ... but yes!
SS: But all that was holding it together was this one rubber band and on the next jump it did it again.
And then about twenty jumps later I had another malfunction – a real spinning one and I started to get a lot of reports from interstate about it as well, so I just put it away and bought something else.
I've seen it several times since – not for a few years – appearing around the parklands in Adelaide. It just sat in my shed for years and I considered myself lucky to sell it to someone who wanted to fly it as a kite for his kids.
DB: Well there you go! What about big rel jumps have you ever taken part in any?
SS: No I didn't. Bernie did quite a few – he went interstate more than me – he went to Corowa and Labertouche. No, I think about the biggest I did in South Australia was a ten-man and so I never did much big stuff.
DB: I am interested in the Australian Skydiver magazine because I think that was an important contribution that South Australia made – so can you think of any other salient issues around the Australian Skydiver – its development or issues in publication – how much time did it take to ..... it was published what four times a year?
SS: No, no we did it every two months. If you look at it now it doesn't seem that much. But it took a hell of a lot.
Soliciting material was hard – some issues it was really hard to get stuff. People like Andy Keech used to be great – he was a great supporter of it. If you look back through it there are so many American photographs throughout it.
They were his; he was a really great supporter – he sent a heck of a lot of stuff.
There weren't a lot of people who you could really rely on. There were good regulars like Bruce Bramhill, Chris Fowler, Louis Johnston, Tony Dale in WA, John Middleton, Dave Smith, Graham Hill, Tug Malony and Gene Birmingham. So that was a challenge – but just the physical production of it was a big job. There were no home computers, desktop publishing or databases to do postage labels.
DB: So when did you finish up – how did you pass it on – how did that happen?
SS: I started to drift out of parachuting and I did a couple of issues and they started to get a bit late. Instead of typesetting it all myself at one stage I said to Claude – this is too much and we paid to have it professionally typeset by the company that I worked for.
They did it quite cheaply and it changed the whole look and feel of it. The size shrank but as I said in the editorial at the time – just because the magazine was smaller didn't mean there was less in it to read.
I just didn't want to go on with it and I made it clear to Claude that I was giving up jumping or drifting out it and I think the whole thing died and the guys from Queensland took it up.
DB: So you don't feel tempted to return to jumping?
SS: Well sometimes. When I'm out in the garden and hear an aeroplane of the right size – I look up instinctively – just waiting for the motor to power off. But no, not a great deal anymore. I went out Lower Light a couple of months ago just show my son around.
In the time that I was there which was 1969 into the mid 1980s there was a lot of community minded spirit – but like all clubs, there weren't a lot of people who did it, but those who did, did a lot. They built a strong organisation and they lived for it.
DB: So your club was called?
SS: The South Australian Sport Parachute Club.
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