Upgraded venue attracted shooting’s best - Cawarral range

The Morning Bulletin, Page: 30. Tuesday, July 8 2008

In a quiet setting just outside the Cawarral township some of the finest marksmen in Australia gathered for a big shoot-out.
The four-day event they attended was the 2008 National Hunter Class Championship and while this sport might not attract huge spectator interest, those who did attend could not help but be impressed.
The Cawarral range, or should we say ranges as there are five on the site, is set in a clearing a short drive from the small township.
It is worth the effort to visit this upgraded facility. Arriving between shoots it would have been easy to think you were at the wrong venue as the first sounds were those of laughter.
Not the nervous laughs you often hear from competitors but the good-natured joking normally heard from mates standing around a barbecue.
An announcement over the loudspeaker system informing there was just a couple of minutes before competition commenced ended the joking.
Laughter was replaced by total concentration.
Last minute adjustments to their expensive rifles, most costing between $5-8000 and the order came to begin firing.
As the ammunition in this event is of a 22-calibre there is less of a deafening bang but rather loud popping sounds as the marks8men carefully fire at the small targets.
The only real evidence of the intensity of the competition being the number of spent cartridge cases on the ground and the quantity of targets with neat holes, usually very close to the centre, hanging up for inspection.
Giving me a guided tour of the facility was the Hunter Class discipline captain Steve Blaine, who travels to the range every couple of weeks from his home near Toowoomba.
Blaine explains that the trick to this class of shooting is reading the range and conditions.
The colourful windmills forming lanes the length of the range are certainly not for decoration but allow the marksman to gauge the varying wind directions which are affected by the surroundings and the undulating terrain.
After viewing a selection of the spent targets it is obvious these guys read the range rather well.
"There are four Hall of Fame shooters here this weekend," Blaine said indicating the quality of competition.
Over the four days of shooting there are a number of different competitions with shooters firing at targets over set distances, 50 metre, 100 and 200 yards. An exciting moment for organisers came in the Rimfire Hunter Class where Brisbane marksman John Cook’s score broke the long-standing record over a 50-metre course.