"The first thing that struck me when I arrived at the shooting range and looked over the scene, was how minimalist and retro it appeared. Like a bare-bones outdoor theatre set. I don't really know what I expected to see, but certainly somewhat more than I encountered.
Apart from a couple of two-toned, raggy flags wafting around on long lengths of pipe and two large white boards with obvious, jet-black dots painted on them, there did not seem to be any other necessary or vital infrastructure required for the performance.
Not, for example, like a golf course with designer fairways, manicured greens, buggy-bays, ball-washers, etc. etc., The rifle range really looked like the no-frills tractor of sports venues.
The next thing was the odd-ball bunch of characters lined up for the afternoons activities. What a raggle-taggle lot! Casual-khaki is still definitely in vogue. A closer look revealed a uniform of sorts, in a Farmer-Brown rather than Scarecrow-Joe kind of fashion, that included an assortment of very battered broad-brimmed hats, shonky shirts and knakkered boots. The dozen or so, mainly male, club members there on this particular day fitted no formula that I could see, being all shapes and sizes, heavy and light, rough and less-rough, loud and less-loud, and aged from around twenty up to some dignified old gent in his mid eighties.
They had unloaded their cars and laid their equipment on the ground, spread out for everyone to see, as if it was all for sale in an impoverished flea market. There were telescopes, coats, mats, rifle cases, pencils, little green books and a myriad of small, assorted sized boxes that held all kinds of oddments like springloaded screws, see-through discs of coloured plastic, home-loaded bullets and such like that either went onto, or came off, their rifles.
Ah! Yes.... the rifles. Obviously their pride and joy. Cushioned and cared-for as a musician would a Stradivarius violin, they nevertheless revealed themselves to be, somehow surprisingly, nothing more than a hand sculptured length of wood with a piece of pipe screwed on with two tiny bolts. I'm not sure what I expected one of these precision instruments, capable of such an horrendously explosive noise, to acturally consist of but I was nevertheless somewhat shocked at the simplicity of the thing.
Now, if there is one unwritten law at this rifle club that is blatant to any onlooker it is this: no one must wear, use or possess anything that in shape, colour, kind or texture can be mistaken for anyone else's. Or, except for the rifles, even lookd remotely desirable to anybody at any time, no matter how desperate. Thus every hat, every mat, every coat, every kind of nut or bolt was as dull as, yet as distinctive from, everybody's else's as could possibly be. No standard safari-suited, pith-helmeted, by-the-ranks, all-matching, lined-up, club-coloured clones in this sport. No way. A cool, yet calculated casualness encoated the whole proceedings.
It didn't look too difficult to me ...... at first.
That is until all the details became slowly revealed. Little things: like not being able to bolt the telescope on top of the rifle, the sheer damn weight of the simple piece of pipe when you rest it on your upturned palm, and the amazing way the big black blob suddenl;y shrinks to the size of a constipated fly orifice as you start to aim at it. Helpful and all as everyone was, what with all the fussing about: adjusting some sweaty old dunger of a shooting cap somebody had jammed down over my ears so that the sun did not get me in the eyes. And the tightening of the leather strap that went from the rifle around my left arm: so that I wished that I had brought my chiropractor along to rejoint my shoulder afterwards. And the peculiar thrill of having someone unknown, but hopefully one of the lady members, mainuplate my legs apart in order to be 'more comfortable'. Thanks for that: but any comfort would have been welcome........
Of course this is all in order to explain the embarassing fact that I missed not only the black blob but the whole white square.
But having finally gotten into the position with the help of so many people I could not stand the thought of all the trouble it would take to get out of it again, so I continued..........
And realized a startling aberration of Nature: that the circular black dot KNOWS it is being aimed at!
So it dodges about. This is true! If you look up over the sighting device on the back of the rifle, then it stays perfectly still and just sits there enjoying the sunlight. But, creep your head down, no matter how slowly and squint at it in 'aiming'mode' and it immediatly begins to dance around like a bumblebee with it's backside on fire........
What sort of perverse sporing pleasure is this supposed to be?
Thinking about it afterwards, the closest thing in my experience that I could liken this type of activity to is dropping spit onto a hot brick from a third story balcony.
Position is most important: you have to be leaning over just so far. You have to let the spit slip away smoothly: without any jarring of the head. You have to aim for the very center of the brick and keep your eye on it at all times. And wind is important: or else your well-aimed spit-shot is wasted by whacking some innocent ant on the noggin as it takes it's shopping home to mum.
It's undoubtedly a precision-based performance.
But when everything works just right at each step of the proceedings, and you allow just enough of this, and just enough of that, in order to hit the brick dead-center: then it's like nothing else.
And I did it.
I eventually plunked a pinhole fair in the middle of that bloody black blob and scored a 'center bullseye'!
What a shooter! What a marksperson! ..... What amazement on everyones faces!
It was great fun.
And, when the strut starts to go out of my step and all the family, and few remaining friends, get well and truly sick of hearing about my prowess as a 'big-bore' rifleman, and I just become a big-bore, then I'll go back to the Gosford Rifle club range and with some help of course, do it once again.........
