"OUR BUNKER" - 1988, Age 10-11

Our Bunker

Yesterday Tien, Ray, Sean and I made a bunker. It is made out of bricks that is 1/2 a metre long. The roof is made out of wire and branches on top. It has a dirt ground with weeds sticking out of the ground. The entrances is made out of old rags and branches that hang down.
   We have a fire place outside our bunker. We have some stones that we made our fire place out of. We found some tin and made a chimney. We cook our food on it in a fring pan. The fire is made out of sticks, newspaper, wood, bark and petrol. It is about a metre long. We keep some water nearby.
   We had a good look at the bunker. We thought we should put more detail so we went to the dump and we found a bed with muck all over and cocroaches crawling on it. Anyhow we brought it home and cleaned it and brought it back to the bunker. Now we can sleep the night on it. Now we didn't have any light so we went to the dump and found a lamp. Dad fixed it up. He brought it to the bunker. Dad found a table and gave it to us. We went home then. That night some punks came in and stole some things and wrote graffiti inside. The next day we went back to the bunker and we were mad. We made some traps around it and the next day we caught them and brought to the cops. The traps are some camouflage pits and a trip rope in front of it.
   The next day some bulldozers came into the bush a knocked the trees down. The bunker was gone forever. But we made a better bunker in a better place that nobody knows about.

**********

This scenario is mostly fiction, though I remember I did build my own above-ground bunker in our backyard garden at some point. It had a mesh fence roof, covered in leaves and palm fronds, propped up by trees at each corner. At the front facing the yard there was a long narrow horizontal gap to see through, and to point our toy guns out of. We'd pretend the dog was Viet Cong and "RATTA-TAT-TAT" at him (my favourite show at the time was Tour Of Duty I recall). A couple years later, when I was in grade 8, some friends and I did make a "hut" up in Toohey Forest. That comprised of weaved branches stretched across a narrow gully with a thick layer of leaf litter and pine needles to seal the roof. Turned out it's only real useful purpose was to keep our, er... 'literature' protected from the elements...