#keith michell

This [return flight] was undertaken from a station paddock-cum-airstrip in a rather old Avro Anson. There were several press people who had arrived by various means, some of whom elected to fly back with us - a merry crew, as the saying goes, having taken full advantage of their host's very generous hospitality in liquid form.

(I don't know what model of Avro Anson was involved, but here's a MKI)

The plane was in fact overloaded, or rather, proved to be overloaded under the circumstances. My interest in aircraft (modeling them was my main childhood hobby) was rewarded by my being allowed to crouch between the two seats in the control cabin and assist in the manual cranking of the undercarriage winch. It was just after the said undercarriage had left the ground that I was struck by the thought that the line of gumtrees across the end of the paddock seemed a bit high and a bit close, so I turned inquiringly to the pilot and beheld, for the first (and I hope last) time, a singular phenomenon. Within a fraction of a second, and simultaneously, his face went white and drops of sweat literally burst through the skin; immediately my body went cold and my breathing stopped, although I was quite unable to take my eyes from that transformed face, and it was only the unpleasant tearing sound made by the undercarriage collecting a few top branches of a gumtree that broke the spell.

We were still in the air, however, and climbing, accompanied by the yodeling high spirits of the cabin passengers, who were quite unaware of our contretemps. With unspeakable relief, I asked in a suddenly rather shrill voice whether it was time to crank the landing gear up; very properly the pilot, deciding that is was probably best to leave well alone, said, 'No, that's O.K., she'll be all right,' and turned on course for a Sydney that all at once seemed a very long way away. But after a little, as the two fliers appeared to have quite happily relaxed, I settled to enjoy the brilliant scenery. The comparative calm was not to last. The port engine developed hiccoughs. With an unloaded aircraft, I believe that this would be of small matter, flight could be sustained on one engine even if the other stopped altogether; but with our pickled passengers of the Press (whose loud, high-spirited ignorance of events provoked powerful mental images of cargo-dumping), it was asking too much of the aging ship.

There were, at intervals down the coastal strip, airstrips constructed during the war intended to facilitate provision for emergency landings for the busy air-traffic to and from New Guinea. Apparently the Government had not yet got around to allowing the farmers on whose land they lay to convert them back to proper use, and as we staggered at low altitude from one to another (the port engine, fortunately, never actually stopping) it was to discover that resentful landowners had decided that if they couldn't use their own land, nobody else was going to either, obviating the use of the strips by hammering lines of stakes across them or scattering them with oil-drums and tree-trunks. There was a gradual and inexorable loss of height, possibly aggravated by the undercarriage trailing its bouquet of arboreal souvenirs, but our pilot was ex-R.A.A.F. and a good one. He chose every suitable valley and deep enough depression that was pointing our way in the all-too-slowly-unwinding landscape, and dived into them at the near end, thus gaining valuable air-speed and corresponding lift; and in this manner brought us safely to Mascot aerodrome. There was a temporary return of the disturbing sensation of my heart trying to find a way out through my bowels, brought about by the unknown state of the landing gear, but it was firm and all was well. I am asked occasionally why I prefer to travel by boat.

Just a cute shot of Jane mugging:

*One of the cutest details in the first part of the story is that the kids, living in the middle of nowhere, were psyched see a real plane and real actors up close. In fact, some of them were apparently so excited that they’d each grab an actor to show them their school desk or invite them to sit in it.