Armed with earplugs, a pair of goggles and a support team that uses a gentle paddle thwack to his head for navigation, Scott Gladman is taking on an unprecedented inland odyssey.
Scott Gladman says he is not a good swimmer, which shouldn’t be a major problem as he is a grain farmer in Victoria’s dusty north, where water sports are not a priority.
Which makes his decision to attempt to swim the 1650-kilometre length of the Darling River all the more curious.
While splashing down stream, he can’t rely on the current because, he says, “there isn’t any”.
Gladman says that when he swims he breathes on one side and hardly kicks. When his long-distance coach, marathon swimmer Mike Gregory, suggested he breathe on both sides during a practice session, “I think the pool dropped four inches from what I drank”.
There was a similar result when Gregory tried to teach him how to kick.
“He gave me a kickboard and said go 250 metres,” Gladman says. “I thought that would be easy. About 20 minutes later, I got to the end of the pool. He said we can forget about kicking.”
So why does a man who has to manage an 18,000-hectare cereal and legume farm in Natya (population 38) decide to swim Australia’s longest river system, which contains 46 breeds of snake, 50 native fish species, 31 types of frogs and three varieties of turtle?
Nine years ago, at the age of 54, Gladman, a local football legend who was still playing with a game count of 570, found he was living with a heart that was about to stop.
“The doctor told me I should be dead. The arteries were 95, 80 and 75 per cent blocked.”
After three stents were stuck in his chest to clear the blockages, it made him re-evaluate his life, or as he says, “I needed to get my head out of my arse. I was working for the almighty dollar and knew there had to be more.”
In 2022, his mate Russ Wardle was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. And Pat Russell, 36, a friend of his son, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND).
“I got a second chance, but these two blokes didn’t. I know how lucky I am,” says Gladman.
He hatched a plan to raise money for Fight Parkinson’s and MND Victoria, but wanted to do something different. He was drawn to the Darling River – where he had camped with his parents every September, and where he would swim and fish.
“They just loved the Darling,” he says.
To train, the grandfather would jump in his ute about 5am in the warmer months to drive to the nearby Murray River to swim. In the winter, he would drive an hour to a heated 25-metre pool at Swan Hill.
To put that in perspective, to replicate the Darling swim he would have had to swim 66,000 laps – or about 1,716,000 strokes – and there are no snags and nippy things in an indoor pool.
His biggest training swim was eight kilometres, but most days on the Darling he has to double that – day after day for months on end.
He began on September 1 literally at the back of Bourke near Brewarrina and hoped to leave the water where the Darling enters the Murray at Wentworth, 103 days later.
This week, he was closing in on the 1000-kilometre mark and was somewhere between Wilcannia and Menindee in NSW, with the temperature in the mid-30s.
Pat Russell steers a tinnie filled with food and medical equipment in front of Gladman – a lonely job for a noble cause.
No one has swum the length of the Darling for good reasons. There are weirs, dams, logs and shallow silt banks as the river meanders, often nearly turning on itself. And while Gladman wears goggles, he can’t see hazards as the river’s green tinge varies from pea soup to lime spider.
Expert river paddler Mike Bremer, who has paddled several rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, is Gladman’s eyes. “He has paddled the river and has his maps to guide me around the snags,” says Gladman.
Bremer stays on the side that Gladman breathes so that he is always in the line of sight. If they come to a blockage, the tinnie, kayak and Gladman have to get out and the team walk to the next deep hole.
The communication between Gladman and paddler Bremer is rudimentary at best. Gladman wears earplugs in the water and if Bremer needs to get his attention, he hits him on the head with his paddle. It works.
Gladman’s wife, Geraldine (known as George), runs the logistics, setting up the evening’s lodgings. “I wake at 6.30 and aim to be in the water by 8am,” Gladman says.
Many times the accommodation is donated, from motels to cattle stations. Failing that, it is a night under canvas.
Gladman was in the water during his son’s wedding, was absent during harvest season and will be a postal voter in Victoria’s state election.
The fifth and final member of the “Fight the Current” team is Rick Hasty, whose partner is a friend of George’s. Hasty has worked the harvester at the Gladman property.
He is the wheelman, piloting a donated $40,000 compact all-wheel-drive Polaris vehicle along tracks to the river bank to pull Gladman, the tinnie driver and the kayak paddler back to camp and return for the next day’s swim.
The Polaris and other donated equipment will be auctioned at the end of the swim and added to the Fight the Current fund.
There is a reason the Naked City crime column is following Gladman’s marathon swim. Hasty, like his mate Scott, escaped an early grave by a stroke of luck.
We have known Hasty for 47 years, ever since he was a uniformed cop in Bendigo and caught Australia’s most-wanted man.
Hasty was a knockabout country worker who chose to join policing in 1971 to escape the uncertainty of a drought. He was a natural who dealt easily with different types of people and had an ability to observe, coupled with an instinctive talent to catch crooks.
In 1979, the armed robbery squad was investigating a series of related country stick-ups in which the bandit was able to disappear into the bush.
Over two years, 24 bank and TAB agencies were robbed by a lone gunman who always struck in the winter months when the early darkness would help the escape.
Sometimes there would be two jobs on the one day – spreading police resources and making escape easier.
Police reporter Geoff Wilkinson dubbed him the “After Dark Bandit” and the name stuck.
The breakthrough came because the bandit was a smart arse trying to rob a bank branch for the third time. It would prove almost fatal for another country cop.
On April 27, 1979, Peter Kay Morgan was set to rob the Heathcote CBC bank. This time he was confronted by the local policeman, senior constable Ray Koch, and the bandit shot him twice.
Morgan refused to abandon the robbery, dragging the wounded policeman into the bank before robbing it of $11,000. No one expected Koch to live – except Koch. Chief commissioner Mick Miller cut short an interstate trip to attend the funeral.
Doctors gave Koch 15 litres of blood, removed his spleen and repaired 17 punctures in his stomach and intestines. Only one bullet was recovered despite two entry holes. Ten days later, doctors discovered the second bullet was in his heart, having moved there through a blood vessel. Koch survived another 16 years.
Hasty was on duty in Bendigo, 46 kilometres away, that day and wanted to join the manhunt but was told he would be held in reserve.
While most police were out searching for the gunman the next day, Hasty was returning from visiting Koch’s wife, Jean, when he saw a man with a blue suitcase heading to the Bendigo railway station.
“I don’t know why, but I just knew he was the bloke who shot Kochie,” says Hasty. “And I also knew that he knew that I knew.”
Hasty, who was unarmed, made a U-turn and wandered up to the suspect.
“I thought, ‘That’s the bastard who shot Ray.’ I stopped him and asked his name. He said, ‘Peter Morgan – why?’ I said, ‘Because I run this f—ing town and I want to know who’s in it.’”
Hasty asked what was in the suitcase, and Morgan knew he was about to be exposed because inside was a shotgun, the Heathcote cash and his disguise.
Morgan grabbed the pistol he had in his back pocket and stuck it in Hasty’s stomach. Hasty flicked Morgan’s arm, and the gun fell to the ground.
The policeman was saved because the safety was on the wrong side of the gun for the left-handed Morgan. Hasty lived with the knowledge, “He couldn’t get the safety off to blow me in half.”
Back at the station, Morgan dropped a bombshell. There were two After Dark Bandits, with Peter working with his identical twin brother, Doug. Turns out they hated each other, and they still do. It is the best crime movie never made.
For 20 years, Hasty couldn’t talk about his near-death experience.
Now he finds solace in the bush and in helping others such as Gladman.
But even in his zippy Polaris on remote tracks, Hasty knows danger can be just around the corner.
“I ran into an emu. It came out of nowhere.”
John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
