Miss Australia 1978 – Part Three of Four

From the cockpit, Captain Australia (the world’s first marsupial superhero) announced that we would be landing in Naples, Muscat, Bombay, Singapore and possibly Perth for refuelling purposes only. Why only possibly Perth? Was there a chance that we wouldn’t make it that far? I would have liked to have got off the plane for half an hour at each of these to send postcards to Jimmy. Many years later, as a daily commuter on my way to work, I was reminded every morning of the pilot’s words as the computer generated station master at Chippenham advised passengers that the train would be calling at Bath Spa, Oldfield Park, Keynsham and Bristol Templemeads. Great Western Trains didn’t give us complimentary snacks as we pulled away from platforms but then, on the other hand, I never had to endure a wait of thirty-plus hours, despite the seemingly perpetual problem of signal failure on the Corsham side of Box Tunnel. The round-the-world stops that Qantas provided came with much better things to see from the window than the Monday to Friday 7:50 give-or-take-half-an-hour service that trundled across bits of Wiltshire and Somerset ever did, and comparing the five different arrangements of palm trees, fuel tankers, cigarette wielding ground staff, dense clouds of black smoke and fire engines helped to pass some of the time on this journey to New South Wales.

In the late 1970s, airline seating configuration was such that no matter where you were sitting there was sufficient room for you to get up and walk around without disturbing other passengers, even those sitting right beside you. So a little time could be passed stretching the legs on the way to the generously sized toilet cubicle (complete with shower and Jacuzzi but sadly no bidet) or to a window to look at the generously sized ocean below or to go and chat with the people in the area designated for smokers which was much more generously sized than the no smoking seating area. Without any physical partitions, there always seemed to be cigarette smoke everywhere in an airline cabin so I could never understand why they went to the trouble of even attempting to impose such segregation. But the inconvenience of the inevitable suffering from respiratory diseases was probably outweighed by the luxury of being able to walk about up and down the aisles, which I’m sure must have improved passengers’ blood circulation and would have averted the threat of deep vein thrombosis had it existed back then.

What I hadn’t anticipated was spending twenty of the twenty-six hours talking to the well spoken English lady from a leafy suburb of Surrey who was on her way out to visit her daughter who lived in a leafy suburb of Sydney and was looking forward to seeing her new granddaughter for the very first time. She was a very interesting woman who told me many things about Australia including the best way to get to and from it by plane. As a frequent visitor she said that she preferred to take the flight that only took twenty hours to get there from London but usually she went for the twenty-six-hour service because it was ‘loads, loads cheaper!’

Eventually the lights went down and the in-flight projectionist began to project the in-flight film onto three big white canvas screens unfurled mechanically and as if by magic from the ceiling, each a third of the length of the cabin apart. So although listening to it wasn’t compulsory, watching it was. Like Big Brother in reverse, there was nowhere you could go where you couldn’t see it. To make things worse, it was the newly released classic, Smokey and the Bandit that later won Academy Awards for the picture with the best use of citizens’ band radio jargon, the best police car chases in which at least a dozen cars with a dozen chickens on their back seats are overturned and/or driven off bridges into shallow rivers and the best people going ‘Hmmmphhh!’ Burt Reynolds’ basset hound called Fred (playing himself) was nominated for the best leading actor award but Burt Reynolds wasn’t.

By then I was sick to the back teeth of Ena Sharples, Lester Piggott and Abba from the entertainment package; if the truth is to be known, I had already become sick of them many years before I boarded the plane. So I unplugged my headphones and the Surrey lady did the same and we chatted for a while about ships and travelling and the Rolling Stones and better films than the one on the screen in front of us until other passengers who were enjoying the film on the screen in front of us told us to ‘Shush!’

I closed my eyes and silently cursed Jimmy and Jim over and over again. It must have been like a sort of frustrated shipping company employee’s counting sheep exercise as eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up an hour or two later I found that my new friend was asleep with her hand resting on my arm and her head tucked into my shoulder. Was this an accident or did she have some sort of intentions? Oooooh!!! Guessing that she was in her early forties I had told her earlier that she didn’t look old enough to have grandchildren. She smiled and I thought nothing more about it, but maybe I had made a mistake. I was a young merchant seaman less than half her age, trying to build up the bad reputation that was one of the requirements of my chosen profession. I couldn’t possibly become emotionally involved with a young middle-aged, well spoken, well educated, amusing and attractive woman with enough money in her pocket to travel to Australia two or three times a year. Eighteen months later on a rainy Monday morning I found my personal circumstances had changed somewhat as I sat on a number nine bus on Leeds Ring Road wishing that I’d offered her my red hot chicken and vegetables in a little foil dish and asked her for her phone number. But I hadn’t done, and she’ll be in her late eighties now if she’s still about.

I was glad when the plane landed in Sydney. I said goodbye to Miss Surrey and with a big smile she told me that she’d probably see me again on another flight out from London. I tried to appear sad about our parting but my arse and I were so glad to be not sitting down anymore after more than a day of sedentary suffering that I probably wasn’t very convincing.

I was pleased to see my Rolling Stones cassettes and Leeds United scarf again, although they were encased in my suitcase along with the clean clothes that I was absolutely desperate to see. If suitcases could express human emotions I’m sure I would have got a barrage of ‘and where the hell have you been for the last two days?’

The shipping agent met me, as expected. He told me that because there were a few hours to wait for my connecting flight to Newcastle from the other Sydney airport, and because there wasn’t much to do at the other Sydney airport, it would be a good idea to have a beer in the bar at this Sydney airport. As a consequence of the lengthy delays and the crossing of countless time zones, my brain was having great difficulty establishing what time of day it was and after a bit of conferring with my liver and kidneys, it settled on the likelihood that it was early morning. If only my vital organs had collectively been able to adjust my wristwatch I might have returned to the real world a bit sooner. I wasn’t really in the mood for alcohol so I asked for a coffee.

The woman behind the counter at the bar/works canteen sort of place said, ‘The coffee ran out a few days ago but we’ve got beer.’

‘Can I have a glass of milk?’ I asked, giving away the secret that I wasn’t the slightest bit antipodean.

‘Sure! What flavour?’ She seemed only slightly shocked.

Nervously I enquired, ‘What have you got?’

She offered me a wide choice. ‘Strawberry, banana and… err… chocolate. Though I think we might be out of chocolate.’ 

‘I’ll just have ordinary unflavoured milk please’ I said, bewildered by the range available.

‘Ah, you mean cow’s! We don’t sell that’. This time she sounded a bit more shocked.

I ended up with a can of an ice cold, fizzy, locally manufactured, Coca Cola type beverage, suggesting to my shipping agent friend that it should be called Coca Koala but he didn’t see the joke because he didn’t know what it was because he only ever drank beer.

‘Only Sheilas drink Coke,’ he said, ‘… in their gin!’

Feeling suitably refreshed (well he seemed to be refreshed even if I wasn’t) he helped me and my belongings to his car and dropped me off at Sydney’s domestic airport with almost two hours to spare before my flight was due to leave. Taking in its terminal building that had the appearance of a modern semi-detached suburban house and its runway that looked like a modern semi-detached suburban street, I felt that I had stepped into a more relaxed world.

There was no sign of a departures board but there was a woman wearing an AeroPelican Airlines baseball hat who was able to tell me ‘Your plane’s delayed two hours because of the bad weather. You can have a beer while you’re waiting.’

A bit startled at suddenly finding myself back in airport hanging about mode, I hesitated to speak and a cold can of Toohey’s lager was thrust into my hand. It was so cold that it stuck to my skin so even if I had decided to decline the woman’s offer I would have had to wait an hour for it to defrost before I could give it back to her.

As we sat together on the bench outside the terminal building in the warm sunshine, I said to her, ‘What bad weather?’

She answered, ‘It was icy this morning so it wasn’t safe to fly until the sun had been on the plane for an hour or two. It’s the first frost we’ve had in Sydney since 1942. Because of this the early morning flight only left here forty minutes ago. If you’d got here an hour sooner you’d have been on it’.

I apologised for my earlier absence, pointing out that it was due to the fact that I had been drinking carbonated kangaroo body fluids with the shipping agent in the bar at the international airport.

‘Shame.’ she said, ‘You would have been in Newcastle by now, having a beer!’      

Having boarded the final aircraft of my arduous journey I was able to calculate accurately that only twenty percent of the seats were occupied. Two ladies, with more luggage than Scottish explorer John (not Jimmy) McDouall Stuart had with him on his 1862 expedition to find Alice Springs, and I occupied three of the seats, leaving the other twelve empty. It was the smallest plane I had ever travelled in. Without moving I could see clearly out of the windows on both sides but struggled to avoid the blow-by-blow account of the two ladies’ shopping expedition in the big city.

The pilot shouted through the curtain from the cockpit to let me know that if I could wait until we were in the air his mate Gazza would get me a beer. I politely said no to this and as the plane took off I noticed that Gazza was not on board. Gazza must have been employed by AeroPelican Airlines for the sole purpose of handing out cans of beer to passengers and, because of my responsible attitude to drinking alcohol, he had a day off. During the short flight the plane didn’t seem to rise very far above the ground so the pilot was able to shout me the names of the hills and creeks in the beautiful, mostly forested national park below, adding a few amusing snippets of local history; tales based mostly on hungry crocodiles, thirsty Sheilas and more Toohey’s lager than you could fit into a rowing boat; the story told around the latter being something that he knew for fact to be true because he and Gazza had once tried it.

Kev, the second shipping agent of the day shook me by the hand on the runway at Newcastle airport, which wasn’t quite as flashy as the airport at which I had boarded the plane in Sydney. I thanked the pilot, wondering if I should give him a tip, before Kev helped me and my big bag of Rolling Stones and Leeds United paraphernalia into his car.

‘You look like you could do with some sleep’, he astutely observed.

‘Aye, just a bit,’ I replied without going into detail. I suspected that he already knew much of the detail because he would have been in touch with Jimmy in Glasgow and in this part of Australia there wasn’t much going on so the tale of my desperate plight gave him something to talk to people about. For the first time in my life I was hot news.

He took me to a small but modern hotel which I think may have been his sister’s house because, as he introduced me to her, he told me that she worked there round the clock and he seemed to be on very friendly terms with her two young colleagues; a young boy and a young girl, both with similar facial features to everybody else except me. He led me to my room, removed the key from his pocket where it had probably been sitting for a few days and proudly introduced me to the mini bar that was heavily laden with ice cold cans of Toohey’s.

‘Get yourself off to sleep and I’ll come over around five o’clock and take you for something to eat’ he said over his shoulder as he left.

It was already something like one in the afternoon but I did what he said, luxuriating under a warm shower and lying in a soft comfortable bed for the first time in a number of days. Days that I estimated to be about three or four.

Link to part four...

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/miss-australia-1978-%E2%80%93-part-four-four

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion – The AeroPelican passenger terminal at Newcastle Airport in New South Wales.