period, hundreds of pairs of shoes pounded along the grey or brown linoleum of the corridors that smelled of stale sandwiches and floor polish. Locker doors slammed, and adding to the din was the traffic on the busy Nepean Highway outside. I knew nobody and found it hard to make friends, my angular skinniness and massive overbite not helping. The buildings were grey, the sky was often grey, the asphalt was grey and the uniforms were grey; but slowly, things got better.
Eventually I found others in the same situation. Tony, an immigrant from Britain, was one. I also began to realise what a mixing bowl a big government high school can be. Many children were bussed in from the hinterland and villages of the Mornington Peninsula, some with backgrounds significantly more humble than my own. One boy, Peter, had a scarred cheek and I do not think his home life was particularly pleasant. He was a tough customer but generally kept to himself, and no one would take him on in a rumble. He once surprised me when he surreptitiously showed me some artwork he had done, worried that the others would laugh at him. He left school early and I do not think that he ever got to make use of his talent. Whenever I was outside, especially at school, I always looked skywards at the Fokker Friendship and Douglas DC-9 airliners when they alternately droned and jetted across the sky, climbing out towards their cruise altitude from Melbourne Airport to destinations in Tasmania. What a life of flying and travel those pilots must be leading!
One day I reread On the Beach, which had never been far from my consciousness as an impressionable and sensitive child. Now we lived in the same area where much of the story was set. I became familiar with places from the novel: Frankston and its railway station, the beaches of Port Phillip Bay, and not far away was Berwick, where my parents occasionally visited friends. There were outings to Phillip Island. Much of the book had been set on the shores of the Bay, and family trips to Sorrento and Portsea gave glimpses of the roiling waters of the Rip, through which the fictional submarine USS Scorpion passed. It was to be scuttled with the crew outside the Heads, watched from the land by the heroine, Moira Davidson, pale and sick, before she took a suicide pill while sitting behind the wheel of her parked car with the last humans on the planet about to die after the northern hemisphere’s nuclear war.
My aviation enthusiasm continued unabated. I did jobs for neighbours in order to put a few cents aside for a model aircraft every few weeks: on those days, school would pass agonisingly until that last bell. Then I would pedal down to the shop on a corner in Main Street where row after row of model kits, most of them unaffordable, waited enticingly. I bought any aviation magazine I could afford and devoured books on flying. I could not see myself as becoming anything other than a pilot.
My parents had tracked down a local boys’ group for me, the Peninsula Air Cadets. Once again I found it awkward to start with but apart from the usual bully one may find in any youth group, it was generally well run by the adults. Unlike the Air League, its focus was on civilian aviation rather than the air force. Out-of-date Department of Aviation publications such as the Visual Flight Guide were given to us to study, and one avuncular instructor would read to us excerpts from the ‘Crash Comic’, the respected and long-gone Aviation Safety Digest. Thanks to this publication, even at the age of thirteen, I was beginning to understand the implications of flying aircraft in cloud or at night without suitable qualifications – it seemed that every second fatal accident in the Crash Comic was summed up as ‘… the pilot continued flight into weather conditions for which he was not qualified’, or words to that effect. There was also talk of actual ‘flying days’ for the Air Cadets, funds permitting. Despite this, I was still finding it difficult to adjust to my new life but on a visit to my paternal grandparents’ new house that lay in bare fields at Melton South on Melbourne’s western fringe, I was in for a day I would never forget. After years of reading about, modelling, spotting, sitting in, and talking about aircraft, I had never actually flown in one.
A Fuji FA-200 waited on the grass on a sparkling Easter day at Fogarty’s Field, near Melton. My paternal grandparents were with my parents and me at the airfield, and I think they had arranged the flight. I was allocated the front seat next to its pilot, an older white-haired gentleman, maybe one of the Flying Fogartys himself. Two other passengers sat behind, and I was off on my first ever flight. With its little engine roaring and the propeller buzzing, the Fuji accelerated along the grass. The rumble of the undercarriage diminished and this was it – airborne! The ground fell away and I gazed, fascinated – yet nervous – at the dwindling trees, fields, houses and fences as the Fuji, a Japanese low-wing four-seater, climbed.
The air was smooth, but the feeling of being airborne was one of fragility, yet wonder. The greenness of the paddocks, the tiny cars and the cattle! The lengthening afternoon shadows of the trees on the earth beneath! When the pilot made a few gentle turns, I marvelled at how the horizon ahead tilted but, thanks to his correct flying technique, we still felt normal in our seats, with no tendency to fall sideways. Looking down along the wing during the turns at trees, fields and the occasional house was intoxicating. Then the pilot came in to land, easing the Fuji onto the grass with its wheels rumbling once more and the aircraft bucking until it slowed and was taxied in. The propeller stopped and in the silence I climbed out, shaking with excitement, telling anyone who would listen for weeks afterwards, that I had ‘been up’.
The Peninsula Air Cadets were coming into their heyday, and funds became sufficient to organise occasional flights for the boys at Moorabbin and Moorooduc. Each flying day was looked forward to with great anticipation and the education provided by the Air Cadets and my own reading made these flights more than joy rides. Instruments started to make sense and the sensation of being suspended by an invisible gas, our atmosphere, never lost its wonder, but became more familiar and predictable with each flight.
I worked diligently at school and still read widely. In my mid-teens my mother began hounding me to get a job, which coincided with my teenager’s requirement for cash. A few hundred metres from our home, sitting in the middle of green fields with a treed perimeter, was a large but exclusive restaurant called John Thornton’s. Wide full-length windows were framed by arched brickwork. Plush red carpets set off snowy linen tablecloths and red cloth napkins in two separate dining areas. Prints of English hunting scenes adorned the walls.
One day in the early seventies, a sound from the sky reached my ears but it was nothing like the noise of any aircraft that I had ever heard. A tiny dot grew into an oval-shaped bubble that sprouted a slim tail boom, skids and a rotor. It was a Hughes 300 helicopter. Its tiny two-seat cabin with an engine revving furiously behind was attached to an open framework. It was on approach to the restaurant! I pedalled down to John Thornton’s to watch it land. It started to operate into the restaurant every few days, and during holidays and weekends, I was like that classic kid with their bike against the airport’s fence, but this was at a restaurant’s helipad!
The helicopter pilot also owned the restaurant. An imposing man with many business interests, Richard ‘Dick’ Thornton patiently answered my many questions about the machine. One wondrous day, he motioned me over to it after landing and with the rotor still turning, I clambered in. He whisked the machine up into a short circuit of the area to another landing. I started reading up on helicopters and how they flew. One day I plucked up the courage to ask him for a holiday job in the restaurant, and in a few months I had progressed from serviette folder, gardener and menial kitchen worker to drinks waiter and single-handedly waiting on diners during weekday lunches. I was now fifteen. Over the next few years the restaurant prospered and much of my non-school time was taken up with working at John Thornton’s. It was often hard and constant work, especially during holiday periods, but the overtime payments were put to good use: I could now afford the biggest model aircraft on sale at the Variety Centre on Main Street, and I could also start thinking about learning to fly!
Outside of the village of Moorooduc, then just a ‘co-op’ store and a few houses in lush fields to the east of Mornington, was its eponymous airfield, a north-south grass strip with towering she-oaks at one end. It was home to ‘The Pilotmakers’ flying school. Its owner and chief pilot
