by Jim Eames
Although Burns-Woods and Bob Weekes served there some years apart, both have vivid memories of the frontier town. Weekes remembers a swimming pool and hot showers had been installed at the old Berrimah hospital for passengers, but staff had few luxuries. They were permitted to use the swimming pool when there were no passengers in residence, but, as with normal Qantas ‘tropical policy’, the hot showers were strictly off limits.
The single men’s quarters comprised several large rooms, each divided into four by three-quarter height partitioning, which meant that each occupant shared a quarter of the benefits of a sole ceiling fan placed strategically in the middle. Anyone completing a night shift sweltered while trying to sleep during the day as the concrete floor heated up. ‘The partitioning itself was so thin we used to say you could hear someone changing his mind,’ quips Weekes.
Things were slightly better by the time of Burns-Woods’s posting but, somewhat ironically, fourteen years later he would once again serve Qantas in Darwin—just in time to experience Cyclone Tracy.
While Darwin’s staff facilities certainly left much to be desired, a posting to the Middle East could mean a whole different set of challenges, some involving considerable danger. Charles Wade was appointed Qantas’s first representative in Cairo in 1956 and arrived several months before Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the precursor to all-out war. With tensions rising by the day, Wade soon discovered that not only was his mail being regularly opened by security services but everywhere he drove he was being followed by a black Citroen car. Eventually he decided to confront his ‘shadow’ and walked over to the car and told the driver that he needn’t bother following him as he only intended going to the Australian embassy. Embarrassed, the driver tried to make out he didn’t know him—but the black Citroen followed him to the embassy and home anyway.
With the political situation deteriorating, the British and French governments decided to evacuate the families of their nationals and Wade watched with disgust as the evacuees, among them women and children boarding Qantas flights at Cairo airport, were repeatedly harassed and humiliated by Egyptian customs officials. ‘They would pick up each passenger’s suitcase, tip it on the floor and then go through it with their boots.’ He saw one dignified old English veterinary surgeon who had spent 40 years practising in Egypt have his thick spectacles torn from him and crushed under a customs officer’s boot.
Things gradually worsened as animosity towards expatriates, particularly ones with British Commonwealth connections, led to little or no service in shops. Press censorship meant the only news available was that brought in by Qantas’s London-based crews. Wade realised it was only a matter of time before he too would have to go and had agreed with his London boss Russell Tapp to send a coded signal should it become too dangerous to remain. The signal would be sent via cable and would simple be a request for ‘permission to sell the company Ford’. Ultimately, however, London made the decision for him and, after an announcement that there would be a national strike in Cairo, Tapp ordered him to make his way to Iran before it became impossible for foreigners to leave.
As Wade drove to the airport he spotted an airport security guard he knew running by the side of the road. The guard explained that he had missed his bus and Wade’s offer of a ride was gratefully accepted. When they reached the airport car park, the guard thanked him and saluted before going on his way.
Minutes later, as he himself entered the terminal, Wade had a tommy gun stuck in his ribs and someone demanding to see his airport pass. He turned to see it was the same guard.
After a long struggle to obtain a clearance number, something required by all expats who needed to travel into and out of Egypt frequently, Wade finally boarded an Arab Airlines flight and left Egypt behind him.
On 29 October 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai, the UK and France subsequently joined in and the canal was blockaded. The invasion, denied any political support from the United States, subsequently led to the resignation of UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden. In a remarkably swift reaction to the crisis and one that subsequently received high praise from the Australian government, Qantas re-routed its flights through Teheran, Turkey and Greece to avoid Cairo.
A decade later, one of Wade’s colleagues, Peter Picken, arrived in the Middle East in time for another war. Picken had been sent to open Qantas’s representation in Beirut and had been there for three years when, in 1967, tensions again began rising, this time between Israel and Egypt. Concerned that Qantas services operating through Bahrain might be affected, Picken began to quietly reserve accommodation in Tehran, the airline’s alternative stopover point in the region.
It was as well he did. While Picken was watching his telex messages arrive one morning, the telex machine suddenly went dead. It didn’t take him long to learn why. What was to become known as the Six Day War had broken out and Picken suddenly found himself with a London-bound Qantas Boeing 707 full of passengers about to arrive in Bahrain and liable to be stranded there unless they could get it out quickly to Tehran.
The complicated politics of the Middle East left Picken few options. Most of the normal destinations in the region were now closing to airlines, either because they were regarded as war zones or because the politics of the Israeli–Arab conflict wouldn’t permit Qantas to land at them anyway. Unfortunately Bahrain was in the latter category and it soon became obvious that relations between Bahrain and Iran would never allow a direct flight between Bahrain and Tehran.
The only way out was to ‘inaugurate’ the first flight ever by Qantas between Bahrain and Doha in Qatar. The Bahrain–Doha flight, barely more than half an hour, would turn out to be one of the shortest Qantas international flights in the airline’s history.
Immediately the aircraft landed in Doha, its two port engines were briefly shut down so that the door could be opened, allowing Picken to pass the required paperwork to Doha Customs who stamped it; the engines were started again and the 707 was on its way to Tehran within minutes. Within hours, all airspace closed because of the war and other airlines, including BOAC, which had the misfortune to have aircraft in Bahrain at the time, remained stuck there for days.
Picken’s long Qantas career included postings to London, Hong Kong, Port Moresby, San Francisco and New York but, ironically, it would be Belgrade that would bring him some of his worst memories. Coincidentally, the man he would replace in the Yugoslav capital would be his namesake, John Picken, who, although no relation, had opened the station for Qantas several years earlier.
Belgrade was not a destination Qantas energetically sought out to serve, but when pressure started from the Yugoslav airline JAT to open services to tap the large Yugoslav diaspora in Australia, Qantas knew they had to match it.
Qantas’s lack of enthusiasm for opening a service to Yugoslavia was driven by the fact that it could see very little value in the service. They expected JAT, as the country’s own national flag carrier, would enjoy not only a preference among Yugoslavs but could be expected to dramatically cut fares on the route to levels Qantas would have difficulty matching economically.
In his pre-posting briefing Qantas’s director of airline operations, Keith Hamilton, told John Picken a Qantas refusal would also run the risk of the government giving the route to Australia’s domestic airline Ansett, thus finally opening the gates for Ansett to compete internationally with Qantas.
Hamilton obviously believed the service had doubtful long-term value for either airline! His instructions to Picken were blunt: ‘Get over there and do what you can to stop it, and if you can’t, stay there and run it for a couple of years.’
John Picken’s arrival with his family in Belgrade turned out to be an omen for what was to come. Despite adequate notification of his arrival, no one was there to meet him and neither were there any messages for him. With no phone numbers to call, he waited impatiently for an hour or so until, with all the buses to the city gone, he looked around for alternative transport.
Handicapped by an inability to speak the language, he finally located a small hire car facility that offered him the only car they had, a tiny Fiat that would hardly have carried their bags let alone his wife, two children and himself. When he protested, they came up with a dirt-covered Peugeot. With no maps and realising he would have to drive on the right-hand side of the road, he asked a nearby policeman for directions into Belgrade, only to find out twenty minutes later that he’d been sent in the opposite direction.
Neither did Picken have any idea where the Hotel Slavia was, his intended destination, but by sheer chance as they crossed over the highest part of a bridge arch, one of his children caught sight of the hotel’s sign. Finally, about to go to sleep after a hectic day, the family suddenly became aware of a vibration shaking the hotel and looking out onto the street below saw a line of Russian T54 tanks rumbling down the middle of the boulevard. Expecting next morning to find the nearby square full of military vehicles and soldiers, they soon discovered it had been a rehearsal for celebrations marking victory over the Nazis in World War II.
In the weeks that followed, while he struggled to assemble his office, John Picken found Yugoslavs, with few exceptions, generally hostile, with a default position to say ‘no’ to everything. By the time his namesake Peter Picken came to replace him he at least had been able to find suitable housing accommodation after months of living in the hotel.
So while Peter Picken and wife Joan might have been lucky in one sense, they found other aspects of the posting far from satisfactory when, eighteen months into their two-year posting, Joan was confronted by a man brandishing an AK-47 trying to break into their house. With Joan screaming hysterically over the phone for assistance, the man was in the process of shattering the front-door glass when help finally arrived.
Police later revealed he’d been discharged from prison that morning but the Pickens never found out what his original crime was, why he was trying to smash their door down, or, for that matter, what later became of him. Picken first suggested that a still-distraught Joan come back to Sydney while he served out his two-year term but the company decided otherwise. They both returned to Sydney only to find there was no job there for him. He left the company soon afterwards.
14
SPIES, BOMBS AND BICYCLES
If he thought opening an office in Yugoslavia was a difficult proposition, John Picken was fated to get a glimpse of the world’s other brand of communism with his posting to Hong Kong in 1969. It was the time of China’s Cultural Revolution when Mao’s Red Guards were rampant. He remembers sitting in a restaurant one lunchtime when, just as the soup had been served, an enormous explosion on the street below blew out the windows at the far end of the dining room.
‘Someone at our table, presumably startled by the blast, dropped his spoon on his plate with a clang which could be heard over the bang and tinkling of falling glass.
‘The Englishman sitting next to me had not spilled a drop of soup and had shown no response at all to the blast, but at the sound of the spoon falling had leaned across to one of his equally unfazed colleagues and said condescendingly of the spoon-dropper: “Must be an American.”’
Charles Wade too experienced the worst of the Red Guard period in Hong Kong. At the height of the crisis, security guards and police were employed to protect passenger and crew buses to Kai Tak airport. On one occasion the security alert was so high Qantas was forced to take passengers by launch to the end of Kai Tak’s runway where they were transferred to the terminal.
‘One day they would be attacking buses and letting off bombs in Happy Valley, the next day it would be the same thing in Kowloon,’ Wade recalls.
A favourite tactic of the Red Guards was to cut a hole in the floor of a small car, then, when stationary in traffic, drop an airline bag with a bomb inside onto the roadway and drive off. On one occasion Wade was travelling along Nathan Road when his driver, Lau, spotted what appeared to be a bomb in the middle of the road. Shouting for Wade to open the windows and lie on the floor he swerved and avoided the mystery package.
Such road obstructions certainly were not to be messed with. One Saturday afternoon an off-duty Hong Kong policeman spotted a bag on the tramline and when he tried to remove it the bomb exploded, killing him instantly.
Across the border from Hong Kong, in the ‘other’ China, memories of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution were still raw when Paul Miller arrived to open Qantas’s Beijing office in the early 1980s. Just married, Miller and wife Judy lived for eight months in a hotel room while Miller and his small expatriate team established the ground handling, operational and sales requirements for a once-weekly Qantas service.
Qantas made no secret of the fact that, looked at in airline terms, the commercial viability of air services between Australia and China would be marginal to say the least, but an approach to the Australian delegation by their Chinese counterparts at an International Civil Aviation Organisation meeting in Montreal in 1983 set the political hares running, with Foreign Affairs pointing to ‘strengthening ties and stimulating activities in various aspects of the bilateral relationship’—the euphemism normally applied when commercial realities need to be ‘adjusted’ to match government interests.
With only a six-month course in Mandarin before leaving Australia, Miller readily accepted the suggestion by his Chinese hosts to employ a translator, a local taxi driver, and when they finally moved into an apartment, a domestic aide as well. Miller initially assumed the trio were there to learn from the foreigners but it soon became clear they were actually there to keep an eye on the Millers!
‘Once we became used to being spied upon, you could use it to your advantage as I could stand under the main light fitting in the office and complain loudly about some small matters the locals weren’t able to fix,’ Miller recalls.
‘That often helped.’
Miller soon discovered the household domestic had never used a vacuum cleaner, washing machine or even a steam iron. ‘The poor soul would ring the interpreter and say the washing machine and iron were broken because when you opened the lid or stood the iron on end, they ceased working.’
Transport, in a country where there were few cars, presented an early problem. It took several months to acquire a new Toyota Crown station wagon for the office and a Toyota van for the airport that, in a Chinese capital with thousands of bicycles, presented its own hazards. The purchase of the Toyota Crown came with the requirement for Miller to get a driving licence and, despite the bicycle onslaught and the fact that Chinese drove on the right-hand side of the road, Miller was confident he could handle it. But the ‘skill’ test for the licence proved to be totally unexpected.
Directed to attend Beijing’s General Hospital on a Thursday morning, designated as ‘foreigners’ day’, Miller soon realised what was required for a licence was not a test of one’s driving ability, but a medical test instead. After sitting in the waiting room surrounded by around a dozen others waiting for the call, Miller was finally ushered into the side room. A doctor appeared and told him to strip down to his underpants.
‘Problem was the room had no door and I was soon surrounded by the dozen or so Chinese who had obviously never seen white skin with hair on the chest and other than black hair on the head,’ he says. Hooked up to blood pressure machines on both arms and acutely embarrassed as his new-found Chinese ‘friends’ explored every part of his torso and face, Miller found that his blood pressure went through the roof. He was told to return the following week.
Determined to avoid a repetition of his first outing, Miller sought out the only Western doctor in Beijing, a GP from western Queensland attached to the Australian embassy who prescribed a relaxant to assist him through the next week’s ordeal. ‘Unfortunately I took more than the recommended dose and I vaguely remember almost sliding under the front door of the hospital and impersonating a rag doll during the examination.’ But Miller passed and was now given the good news: not only did he receive his licence
but he was now also allowed to swim in a public pool!
As Miller expected, driving was not to be for the faint-hearted. ‘Many of them had never seen a metal car with four wheels and seemed to assume it was a mirage. They’d ride their bicycles into it!’
But at times, that ‘something new’ had an unexpected effect on a people who had experienced little contact with the West. Asked by the Australian embassy if he could provide the Australian expatriate children with a special treat for Christmas, Miller had the company’s two-metre koala suit flown in from head office, planning to wear it while handing out the presents. Padded out in the right places and with a large head, the suit was a popular attraction among children at Qantas functions in Australia but when Miller decided to give it a trial run in his office before Christmas, it had an unpredictable effect. As he sidled up and put his arm around Mr Leong, their humourless interpreter, the fellow froze on the spot, never having seen a koala, let alone one so large. Things only got worse when Miller, thinking he could calm him down, talked quietly to him from inside the suit. ‘That sent him into a frenzy as he’d never encountered a talking bear before!’
Miller still remembers with affection such moments, which demonstrated how China’s remoteness from the rest of the world brought such simple reactions from its citizens.
Miller’s driver, Mr Wu, became a valuable member of the team and essential in getting around a city with no street signs in English and few Western-style shopfronts, meaning finding the right address was a constant challenge. When one of Miller’s staff returned from a trip to Australia with a copy of the George Formby classic—‘Oh Mr Woo, what can I do …’ —and presented the tape to the driver, the Chinese Mr Wu naturally assumed the song had been written in his honour!
Mr Woo would also become something of a ‘Mr Fix-it’.
When the first Qantas flight touched down at Beijing in late 1984, it brought with it the traditional first flight covers, which had been stamped by the post office in Sydney and were to be stamped by its Beijing counterpart, an important aspect of every inaugural flight. Despite the best efforts to ensure security, the box containing the covers went missing, finally traced three months later to the back corner of a cargo shed.
