by Jim Eames
This will be conditioned a lot by the dress and general smartness of your traffic staff, and the same for your Darwin Hotel staff, when they meet and look after passengers and you will need to be very strict in your control . . . In other words you have got to feel positively hurt whenever you see any untidiness of whatever sort and not rest until it is mended.
Shannon’s comment on receipt of the letter is not recorded but given his daily struggles with the Darwin environment, little imagination is needed.
Some head office correspondence was easier to handle. Fysh’s secretary, Ida Isaacs, wrote in mid-1946 telling Shannon that a friend of hers was interested in opening a hairdressing salon in Darwin. Shannon found the time for a detailed reply, explaining that there were already two hairdressers in Darwin, ‘. . . one of whom is a Miss Richards who has the “Barbara” Beauty Salon and the other a Miss James who has the “Pamela” Beauty Salon.’ Politely and diplomatically he went on to explain the limited opportunities available in war-ravaged Darwin:
Owing to many of the hardships which have to be contended with, it is not considered that there will be a large influx of women for some time to come. It is therefore thought that the existing hairdressers should be able to cope with the clientele offering in Darwin for quite some time. Furthermore, it is most difficult to commence a business of any nature whatever in Darwin at present owing to lack of premises.
He obviously didn’t consider it necessary to point out that even such a critical amenity as the Darwin Post Office had only opened a month or two previously in a tin shed.
Occasionally the interruptions were welcome, helping to demonstrate to Shannon’s head office some of the challenges he was facing. One, unexpectedly, came from an author and old friend of Shannon’s, Frank Clune, gathering material on his way through to Rome for an audience with the Pope. Clune, both at the time and later in his book, All Roads Lead to Rome, left little doubt about what those in Darwin were battling. Describing Darwin airport’s poorly equipped rest room for passengers as a ‘disgrace’, Clune accused the Department of Civil Aviation of ‘being too mean to spend the money to put on a good show at Australia’s Front Door’, but at least had some kind words to say about the Qantas Guest House:
Considering the notorious isolation and bad climate in Darwin, the providoring of this excellent hotel in the jungle is a creditable achievement in civil aviation.
Even Shannon’s gardening prowess received a mention, with Clune waxing lyrically about Shannon’s ‘horticultural zeal transforming the barren-looking army camp of yore into a floral paradise, tropic style, where crotons, poinciana, frangipani and bougainvillea display their exotic beauties against well-kept green lawns’.
By the end of 1947 and into 1948, as Darwin operations gathered pace, the introduction of the Lockheed Constellation had seen off the last of the Empire flying boats and all the support requirements for the through-services were well established. Passenger handling, engineering and catering might not have had the outward appearance of their Sydney counterparts, but they were keeping the Qantas and other operators’ aircraft operating on time and efficiently. On one day alone Qantas catering created more than 3000 meals out of its Berrimah kitchens.
But the very success of the operation was tending to lead to problems of another kind. Darwin had had a less-than-honourable record of union activism even during the war years and Shannon would find himself in something of a life-and-death struggle with union actions which would threaten all the gains so far achieved. And for him and Joan it would have extremely personal overtones.
Shannon had had experience with the North Australian Workers Union while working with Defence in Darwin during the war when the union had tried to stop all aircraft and shipping handling in 1942 and 1943. With the Japanese knocking on Australia’s door, it appears to have taken a threat from Prime Minister John Curtin to throw all the union members into the army at five shillings a day to avert a potential disaster. Late in 1947 they began agitating again, this time with the aim of pulling out all of the Qantas staff. Never one to back away from an argument, Shannon gathered his staff together in the hangar and bluntly threatened to sack the lot of them if they went on strike.
‘You can’t do that,’ came a shout from the floor.
‘Just watch me,’ replied Shannon.
‘They went out anyway, so I fired them all,’ Shannon recalled years later.
The worst, however, was to come. Despite limited staff, Shannon and his management team, with some additional assistance flown in from Sydney, succeeded in keeping the aircraft operating, a situation which led to one of the leaders of the union movement ratcheting up the pressure on Shannon by spreading word around Darwin that Joan would be the target of several acquaintances he described as ‘muscle men’.
‘I couldn’t cope with that,’ Shannon recalled, so he rang his friend the police chief to check out the threat. The policeman didn’t mince his words: ‘There are some bad buggers here, Shan. I suggest you get your wife out of town.’
Joan was on that night’s flight back to Sydney.
Two weeks later Shannon was walking down Darwin’s Bennett Street when the union official, a grin all over his face, confronted him.
‘Ha ha, we got your wife out of Darwin. We’ll get you out in a week or two as well.’
That was too much for Shannon, who in his Defence Department years had been trained in unarmed combat. Toe to toe the pair went in the middle of the street and by the time the police arrived and dragged him off, Shannon was sitting on the unionist’s chest and repeatedly banging his head on the ground.
For years later Shannon could delight in explaining that no police charges ever made it to court, largely because the police were well aware of the perpetrator’s reputation. In fact, the police report described the incident as ‘the worst case of self-inflicted wounds’ they had witnessed up to that time.
Shannon and others closely associated with the union dispute were convinced the issue was largely one between the union movement and the federal government, with Qantas merely the meat in the sandwich and it was eventually resolved on those lines. In his eventual 32 years with the airline Shannon would face a number of serious strikes in Qantas ports around the world but could always boast he never had an aircraft stopped.
By 1950, when it became time for Shannon to leave, Darwin would once again be a prominent part of Qantas’ network with Constellations and Douglas DC-4s linking Australia with Indonesia, Singapore, Colombo, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Cairo, Rome and London, along with flights to Japan and Hong Kong. Before leaving, he had made a recommendation that would have a significant bearing on his future Qantas career. Qantas headquarters were looking for someone to move quickly to Jakarta to handle Qantas traffic through the Indonesian capital. Shannon replied that he had just the man for the job, a young traffic officer named Keith Hamilton, who he described as having ‘great potential’.
Not only would Hamilton succeed in Jakarta, he would go on to play a major role as part of a Qantas team charged with the formation of Malaysia-Singapore Airlines, the template for the future emergence of the separate entities of Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Hamilton’s work in Jakarta and in Malaysia would launch his rise through Qantas’ management ranks, finally to be appointed the airline’s general manager in the 1970s.
But if Shannon thought his work in Darwin would lead to a softer posting at some other Qantas port, he and Joan would be disappointed and they were soon on their way to Lae, New Guinea where, over a two-year period, and out of a vacant paddock, he oversaw the building of a Qantas mini-township, which would include a kitchen, a staff mess and accommodation for crews and other staff for what was becoming a substantial Qantas base.
Postings to Jakarta and other Qantas ports around the world followed until one afternoon in June 1971, Keith Hamilton called Shannon in to tell him he had a problem in San Francisco he needed him to fix.
Hamilton was concerned that some Qantas Australia
n staff in San Francisco had been ‘rorting the system’ and needed to be pulled into line. Apparently interminably long lunches and dodgy expense accounts were the norm, along with the occasional issuance of free tickets to ‘clients’ of questionable value to the airline. Hamilton told him they were generally excellent staff, they just needed a Mr Fixit of Shannon’s experience to knock them into shape.
Hartley Shannon arrived in San Francisco as regional director, The Americas, and on 21 July 1971 called his staff from all over the United States to a meeting at the Holiday Inn, Fisherman’s Wharf, where he was to announce his new organisation. His address that afternoon, which runs for twenty-two pages, has entered Qantas folklore. It outlined new staff appointments and responsibilities across the country, revenue targets to be met and expenditure limitations. It reads, in part:
The days of excessive drinking, especially during normal business hours, are over. Those culpable will know to whom I am referring. Unfortunately there are far too many among our ranks. If at fault, cut it out. If you do not I will start some cutting and pruning, which will be very permanent.
. . . the days of selfish individualism are over. The days of pinpricked feathers, unwarranted personal clashes which become costly to Qantas and prancing prima donna acts, are over.
The days of two to three hour, non-productive lunch hours, are over. Lunch hours will be restricted to one hour, unless sales staff are with clients, planning increased revenue.
The days of dishonest entertainment and travelling expense claims . . . an attitude of anything goes, are over.
The RORT at Ginos [a well-known local restaurant] . . . main offenders several members of the Australian contingent . . . a great buddy-buddy togetherness . . . then back to the office . . . hustle through a pile of business cards . . . then transcribe to the swindle sheet. Result . . . Qantas robbed . . . revenue down . . .
And on it went. They got the message. Qantas revenue was up the following year.
While Shannon’s efforts—starting from nothing—in Darwin at the end of the war would be one of his proudest achievements, his part in the introduction of the Boeing 707 into Qantas service and later the first Boeing 747 services to the United States would remain high points in his 32 years with the company.
No one present that afternoon of his address has ever forgotten his speech and, in the 1990s, long after Shannon’s retirement in 1975, in an ironic twist, a small group of the ex-San Francisco staff formed a luncheon group in Sydney. They called it the Qantas ‘Rorters’ Club’ and within weeks of its foundation they’d tracked down Shannon and invited him to be the club’s patron and later to be appointed chairman of ‘RortAir’, as a further reminder of their ‘rorting’ reputation.
RortAir still meets today and has its own letterhead and a regular newsletter, which lauds the advantages of flying on its ‘digitally remastered DC-4s’. ‘Shan’, as he was affectionately known, never missed a meeting, and only months before his death at 93 in 2009, surprised them all by tabling his original Fishermen’s Wharf, San Francisco speech from 1971.
4
Papua New Guinea and clouds with hard centres
Training grounds don’t come any harder
In contrast to the vast open spaces and long distances of Australia, the island immediately to our north presents a whole different dimension when it comes to the challenges and opportunities for the development of aviation.
Papua New Guinea represents a flying experience of a totally different kind and for that reason alone has cast a continuous spell over Australian aviation, not only in the respect afforded to its early air pioneers, but as a training ground for whole generations of Australian airmen.
Thousands of kilometres and at the end of the earth from the popularly regarded world centres of air transport in the northern hemisphere, in the early years of the twentieth century Papua New Guinea created records of its own in freight uplift under flying conditions which would have turned the hair of the average aviator in most other parts of the globe.
The discovery of gold deposits in the Bulolo Valley in the mountains west of Lae in the 1920s started it all. There was no doubting the phenomenal richness of the finds. The problem was how to get the gold out. Papua New Guinea is a country made up of more than 600 islands, atolls and reefs with a cordillera of mountains, the Owen Stanley Ranges, bisecting the entire length of its mainland. There are numerous high peaks along the Owen Stanley Ranges, with the highest reaching almost 15 000 feet, matched on the country’s eastern side by peaks up to 13 500 feet on the Finisterre and Saruwaged ranges. Between these towering ridges are a series of rich highland valleys, themselves often four or five thousand feet above sea level. Bulolo was one such valley and Guinea Airways was the Guinea Gold company’s answer to its transport problem.
Until early in 1927 the only means of communication with the coast was by the use of native carriers over a 56-kilometre journey into the mountains from Lae, which took ten days, through a combination of thick jungle, numerous treacherous stream crossings and over three different places where the ranges climbed to 4000 feet. As if the terrain wasn’t hardship enough, unfriendly tribes along the way often lay in ambush of those intruding into their territory.
Then there were the poor economics. A carrier’s load was usually around 22.6 kilos, which would include his own food for the ten-day journey, so by the time he reached his destination half his load was consumed. Added to that were the recruiters’ fees and the native wages, making it an expensive exercise, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the staple native diet purchased at Salamaua, the starting point on the coast, at ten pounds per tonne, translated to a hundred pounds per tonne at the goldfields.
From the first Guinea Airways flight into a makeshift aerodrome at Wau in March 1927, the whole concept of transport in New Guinea changed to the aeroplane. For a time in the years that followed, into the 1930s, Guinea Airways would become the largest air transport operator in the world, carrying more freight by air than the rest of the world’s airlines put together.
And human passengers and supplies were only something of a by-product as their tri-motor Junkers aircraft carried everything from cars, tractors, horses and even a piano. Their main achievement, from the mining point of view, was the transport, piece by piece, of the giant steel dredges, as well as a hydroelectric plant of several thousand horsepower into the goldfields.
Manoeuvring heavy, cumbersome dredge components into the restricted confines of any normal aeroplane’s fuselage appeared to be an insurmountable problem until the design engineers at the Junkers came up with the solution. They offered to adapt their G-31, three-engine machine used by the national airline, Lufthansa, to carry passengers, into a pure freighter aircraft with the ability to load the largest and heaviest items via crane through a massive hatch in its roof. What was to follow made aviation history as the Junkers carried 2500 tonnes of dredging machinery into Wau in the twelve months between April 1931 and March 1932. In all, eight dredges were carried into the fields by air.
Their destination, Wau aerodrome, would create something of a template for airfields which were to open Papua New Guinea to future commerce and industry. The aerodrome was a grass strip with a slope of one foot in twelve at the foot of a mountain, so all landings had to be made uphill and take-offs downhill. Wind indicators were therefore unnecessary as there were no other runway directional options for a pilot to choose from. Despite the steep incline some pilots regarded it as easier to land on than a normal, level aerodrome. They simply flew straight at the lower end and the slope did the rest.
However, in those days before radio communications, as more and more aircraft began to operate into Wau, it became apparent that some form of traffic control was necessary, if only to prevent arriving aircraft from clashing with another aircraft taxiing up the slope to take off. Thus a large venetian shutter was established as a signalling device at the top end of the airfield, allowing a lever to be operated which showed either a green or a whi
te surface when viewed from the lower end of the aerodrome. When an aircraft was on approach the surface would be thrown to white, signifying no aircraft on the ground was to taxi up the slope or attempt to take off until the landing aircraft had touched down and the board display thrown to green.
Papua New Guinea’s earlier pioneering pilots, like Pard Mustar and Ian Grabowski, took all this in their stride. They would be followed by others who would also test their skill and judgement on a daily basis because, in the case of New Guinea, the lack of either attribute offered no second chance.
There were certain rules that had to be followed because flying through valleys with steep-sided mountains on either side required visual reference with the ground. It was not enough to be confident that you knew your way through a cloud-covered mountain pass into another valley. If you were in any doubt you turned back, because rising ground beyond the mist often outpaced the aircraft’s ability to climb over it. Either way, flying through cloud was a risk not worth taking as too many of them had what pilots cynically referred to as ‘hard centres’.
Despite the dangers there were some who saw the value of the New Guinea experience and who ventured north from Australia to earn a living through establishing their own aviation organisations or simply to gain experience in a unique aviation environment. Laurie Crowley was one of them, perhaps typical of a brand of aviation pioneer who, despite the challenges of climate and terrain and a constant battle with bureaucracy, went on to establish a successful aviation business along with passing on his hard-won flying experience to others.
Crowley had seen wartime service as a mechanic with the RAAF No 458 Squadron, working on Wellington bombers and US Air Force Liberators in England, North Africa, Suez, Malta, Italy and Gibraltar. He came back from the war looking for an opportunity to fly but had to contend with hundreds of already qualified wartime pilots with the same idea. So he gained his private pilot’s licence in Sydney in 1946 and went off to Coffs Harbour to work as a mechanic with New England Airways. While he was having lunch one day in 1948 an aviation entrepreneur named Sam Jamieson landed at Coffs airport. Jamieson’s Avro Anson had a mechanical problem and he asked Crowley to help him fix it.
