When I first joined the Army at the ripe old age of 17, I became friends with a guy called Dave Gall. "Gally" was a tough little Scot who came from Glasgow and had been a ship builder there before emigrating to Oz in the early 1960's to escape the British "National Service" (the "draft" in the US) and sadly arrived just in time to be conscripted (drafted) into the Australian Army to fight in Vietnam.
If Gally had any sort of luck, it was all bad. He was a drummer in a Scottish band in the early 1960's who came a close second in a "Battle of the Band's" competition to another virtually unknown English band, called The Kinks. Shortly afterwards, he emigrated to Fremantle in Western Australia to work in another shipyard, painting the inside of ships hulls with his mate Bon Scott, before being sent to Vietnam, much against his will.
A few years after I met him he did his back after falling out of an Army truck, and was medically discharged, probably with little or no compensation back then. He moved his family back to WA, and got a job in an Asbestos mine. Only a couple of years of work at the mine he was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, but when the surgeon opened him up he discovered that Gally was full of cancer, and quickly closed him up again. Dave died a few months later.
Midnight oil released the song "Blue Sky Mine" after Gally appeared on "A Current Affair" several times in an ongoing story about Asbestosis, but never credited the song to Gally, and of course the Blue Sky Mine at Wittenoom had closed down years before Gally contracted cancer at another lesser known Asbestos mine in WA.
Gally was always pretty "Happy go Lucky" kind of guy, but I can't help wondering if when he realised that he was about to leave his mortal coil, did he look back on his life and feel ever so slightly pissed off? RIP Gally.
