The trial was scheduled to run for three weeks. I stayed up most of each night preparing my questions for the next day. I struggled initially to introduce evidence or make convincing arguments that would help my case. But as the third respondent, I really took a minor role and let the two main companies’ barristers dominate proceedings.
A few days in, everything changed. The other companies reached a confidential settlement deal, and it looked like the case was over. Relief flooded through me. Then I received awful news: the deal didn’t cover me. Now I was personally being sued for the full $75 million – by a company of which I was still a part owner. I felt even more wretched, sitting alone at the far end of a large table, now with two barristers and two solicitors opposing me at the other end. If I lost, I would be ruined financially, professionally and probably emotionally too.
But I’m someone who hates to give up, and now I had no choice but stand up and take control of my situation. Even though the suit and the impersonal legal system had battered my confidence, I had reservoirs of determination and self-belief left. There was no hiding on the sidelines now: it was all on my shoulders.
As the case went on, I started to get the hang of the courtroom. I was learning how to ask the questions that would help prove my arguments. I accepted that I’d had a conflict of interest, but the central legal issue was whether my dual role had hurt anyone financially. I was convinced it hadn’t – that the rebate had always been intended for the benefit of the cinemas, not for me or anyone else. Whether I was right was, of course, for the judge to decide.
Even though I had never studied law, or even finished my engineering degree, I could sense that my arguments were working. The judge, Michelle Gordon, who was later promoted to Australia’s highest court, seemed to genuinely believe in the right of citizens to represent themselves in court. She was never condescending towards me, and forgave my inadvertent breaches of court etiquette.
By the third week of the trial I believed I had elicited enough evidence through cross-examination that I was making headway. The other side agreed to settle out of court, which meant the judge wasn’t required to rule on the case alleged against me.
I hadn’t won. But I hadn’t lost either. The terms of the settlement do not allow me to disclose any of its details. I came to appreciate and understand that I had made errors while negotiating the deal. Although I didn’t agree with the allegations made against me, I accepted that I’d had a conflict of interest and, despite my best intentions, had not handled things correctly. But it was over now.
I woke up the next morning feeling like a new man. The last few days in court had been liberating, and the can-do person I had been before returned.
My passion for work returned too. But I knew things had to change. After the emotional trauma of the court case, I couldn’t go on as before. I had to ensure that I would never forget the lessons I’d learned, not just during the awful last three years but through my entire twenty-five years in business. I enrolled full-time in an MBA course, and a month later I began building the Sun Theatre’s final cinemas – the seventh and eighth.
The year 2014 was an incredibly challenging but invigorating one. I’d get up at 6 a.m. each day to study, before heading off to work in the late morning for the rest of the day, managing the building works and running our cinemas.
My health, my business and my family had suffered. But despite the turmoil, I felt like a survivor, and I was eager for my next two challenges. One was to complete the Sun Theatre, and that was now well underway. The other was rooted in an idea I’d harboured for years: to re-create one of the most romantic journeys from the dawn of the age of commercial aviation, a solo voyage in a flying boat from Australia to London. There were only two problems: I had little flying experience, and needed an aeroplane.
3.
Empire of the Sun
‘Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise.’
CROWD OF MARCHERS, LES MISÉRABLES (2012)
Every amateur historian has their favourite era, and mine was the 1930s. The Sun Theatre’s streamlined art-deco architecture reminded me of sleek ocean liners from that decade, when the Queen Mary, the flagship of the Cunard-White Star Line, sailed from London to New York City in record time. Settling in at Melbourne’s State Library, I researched pre–World War II history for parallels between then and now. When I learned that Qantas began the first passenger flights between Australia and England in 1938, the same year the Sun opened, an obsession began. I spent almost a decade researching what was known as the Qantas Imperial Empire route.
On the eve of a war that would threaten Australia’s sovereignty, Qantas was helping advance it by providing the fastest link for people and mail between outposts of the British Empire. It undertook the huge logistical challenge of keeping a small fleet of flying boats – dubbed ‘ships that flew’ – in service between Sydney and Southampton. This was one of the earliest opportunities for global sightseeing by plane.
The unpressurised aircraft did not fly above 12,000 feet. If they had, the pilots and passengers would have suffered from the lack of oxygen. Flying relatively close to the earth, therefore, clouds and storms posed a constant and unpredictable threat. The Qantas planes traversed Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe low enough for the passengers to see individual houses. The original pilots – there were three on each aircraft – wore naval uniforms, reflecting the nautical influence of these planes. They relied on compasses, maps and sextants. Knowing their approximate location at all times was the key to staying alive. If they got lost, their chances of getting to safety weren’t good.
Ocean liners invested heavily in passenger comforts in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in first class. Qantas had to compete by offering luxury of its own. Only sixteen passengers were accommodated on each flight in its double-decker flying boats, which were similar in size to the modern Boeing 737, which can carry up to 215 people. Tickets from Sydney to London cost the equivalent of the average annual wage at the time. They were more expensive than a first-class passage by sea, a journey that took four times as long. Passengers were assigned lounge chairs that would not have been out of place in my grandmother’s house, ate in a dining room and played minigolf on a promenade deck. The flights departed early each morning and flew all day, stopping twice for fuel. Overnight, passengers stayed at some of the world’s most luxurious hotels. The flights were more expensive, in relative terms, than flying first-class between Australia and Britain today. It was truly the golden age of air travel.
Yet the service wasn’t funded primarily by its rich human cargo. A desire to speed written communications between Great Britain and Australia led both governments to underwrite the development of the planes and the research for the route. Some 1300 kilograms of freight and mail was carried on each flight – more weight than that of the passengers. The Empire Air Mail scheme cut the average turnaround for letters and replies between England and Australia from three to four months to less than a month, an improvement in the late 1930s of equivalent importance to the introduction of public email in the 1990s, not just for individuals but for commerce.
When World War II broke out, the Qantas Flying Boats were requisitioned by the defence department. Soon the route through Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia became too dangerous for passenger flights. In the service of the RAAF, the flying boats were deployed to transport mail, dignitaries and military officers from Perth to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The secret route, which was conducted in complete radio silence, took an incredible twenty-eight hours. The planes left just before sunrise and landed the following morning, which meant passengers saw the sun come up twice. One of the flight crews decided to create the ‘Secret Order of the Double Sunrise’, which was awarded to all who flew on these missions.
Overnight, Australians’ perception of distance and their connections to the world shifted. Instead of six weeks by steamer, London – the most important city in the world, economically, politically and culturally �
� was less than a fortnight away. I wished I could have done the trip in 1938, but I was born at least thirty years too late.
Flying boats were for the elite. The Sun Theatre was for the working classes. Both in the 1930s symbolised a new era for Australians: a time when the world became closer, culturally and physically. Anne and I had resurrected the cinema, and next I wanted to find a way to re-create aviation history. Even before I had chosen a plane, I knew what I wanted to call her.
Sir Charles Kingsford Smith famously flew the Southern Cross into the history books by crossing the Pacific. I had an idea to modify the symbol of the famous constellation for a highly personalised name. While private planes are rarely named these days, boats almost always are, so I figured a flying boat destined for a grand adventure deserved a name. The sun had by now become a central theme of my professional life. A stylised neon sun rising over the Sun Theatre was our corporate logo. I liked to suggest, half in jest, that the Sun’s patrons were worshipping the sun when they gathered as a community to share stories told through film. Thirty kilowatts of rooftop solar panels helped power the building – the sun powering the Sun. We also owned a cinema in the Victorian town of Bairnsdale, and we named it the Sun too. In East Timor we operated a mobile cinema named Loro sa’e, which means ‘rising sun’ in the indigenous Tetum language. We had invested in a solar farm along the banks of the Murray River, so we could harvest the sun, and even had a small solar-powered electric riverboat, which we christened Ra, the name of the ancient Egyptian sun-god. So when I chose a seaplane, it felt appropriate to name her the Southern Sun.
Symbolically, the perfect year for the trip would have been 2013, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Sun Theatre and of the inaugural Qantas Imperial service. But that was the year of the court case, and my son Tim was in his second-last year of high school. Leaving on an adventure would have been unfair on the family – even if I wasn’t embroiled in litigation.
Circumstances were more favourable two years later. The Sun Theatre project was complete. Tim was entering his first year of university. His older brother, my stepson Jack, was studying the final year of his arts degree. For the first time in fifteen years, Anne and I didn’t need to get up in time for the school day. As 2014 went on, my aspiration grew into a plan.
Apart from one unavoidable exception and a different starting point, I decided to follow the route of the Qantas pioneers. I would leave from the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria, on the Williamstown foreshore of Port Phillip Bay. I was one of the club’s past commodores, and still regularly sailed there on the former America’s Cup yacht Kookaburra. I planned to fly to London via Rose Bay in Sydney, Longreach and Karumba in Queensland, Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Darwin, Dili in East Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Crete, Italy, France, and Southampton in England.
In Iraq the Empire flying boats had refuelled on Lake Habbaniyah and the Shatt al-Arab river in Basra. Not only did the Iraqi officials deny me permission to land in Iraq, let alone on the lake, I was derided for even asking. Areas around the lake were controlled by the Islamic State movement, which was at war with the Iraqi government and being bombed by Australian, American and British air force pilots. The Sun’s engine was the same as those used in Predator drones, which increased the chance of a misidentification.
My plan wasn’t simply to fly from airport to airport, or seaport to seaport. I also wanted to visit the same renowned hotels as those adventurous travellers eight decades earlier. Some were the most famous and luxurious in the world, such as Raffles in Singapore. I planned to spend two or three days in each town or city, exploring and soaking up its history.
There was an educational angle too. For my MBA I was required to write a thesis. I had decided to analyse the perceived value of cinema to communities – using a random sample of cinemas that happened to be located along the route of the first passenger flights from Australia to Britain.
It would be a busy trip after a busy year. The Sun’s eighth cinema, the Roxy, was ready just in time for the 2014–15 summer holidays, when the theatre was packed with children and teenagers. As well as managing the development, I had spent many evenings for months working out the detail of my route and seeking permission to enter the airspace of each country. As Christmas approached, I made an important decision: I would set off in April 2015.
The Sun Theatre’s twenty-year journey to success had prepared me well for the Southern Sun’s voyage. I’d always known renovating a rundown cinema was going to be a big project, but initially I hadn’t expected to open even one screen. I’d certainly never imagined the cinema could support eight. The development had evolved over time. I have always been willing to see potential and give it a go – but also to change tack when needed, and follow a course that better suited the conditions.
I was confident I could make it – too confident. I believed in my abilities to such an extent that an even grander challenge lurked at the back of my mind – one that I wouldn’t express aloud, even to my closest friends. Even to Anne, let alone myself.
4.
Inception
‘What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? . . . An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold in the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.’
COBB, INCEPTION (2010)
I had a plan. I just needed a plane.
Using the internet, I scoured the world for second-hand seaplanes. Even though they carried historical, evocative names – Gooses, Widgeons and Albatrosses, Buccaneers and Renegades – most were decades old. They would require constant maintenance and would be both difficult and expensive for the mission I had in mind. I had to be realistic about my budget, which was not large by aviation standards, and my limited flying experience, which meant I didn’t have the skills to fly a sophisticated aircraft, even if that would be safer than the small craft I could afford.
A decade earlier I had owned a second-hand two-seater Searey for a couple of years. It was easy to fly, fairly reliable and could land on water – useful if you were planning to fly over oceans, and lots of fun over lakes and rivers. I contacted Progressive Aerodyne in Tavares, Florida, the company that manufactures Seareys. Progressive’s founder, Kerry Richter, had designed the aircraft in 1991. The modestly priced plane wasn’t a blockbuster by Cessna standards: about 500 had been built over twenty years. But it was the most successful amphibious aircraft on the market. It could land on water, cruise to the bank, deploy a wheeled undercarriage and drive up onto the land, kind of like James Bond’s underwater Lotus in The Spy Who Loved Me (except without the fish smugly dropped out the window).
The Searey’s cruising speed is around 80 knots, which is 150 kilometres an hour. In plane terms, that’s really slow. The longest single leg on the trip to London would be 800 nautical miles, around 1500 kilometres, which would take ten hours in good weather conditions. For safety’s sake, I wanted twelve hours’ flying range. The standard Searey’s 100-litre tank covers about five hours of flying. Unlike most light aircraft, the fuel is stored in the hull rather than the wings for simplicity and to help keep the plane balanced on water.
Kerry agreed to provide a Searey to my personal specifications. Instead of building a plane from scratch, the company modified an already-assembled prototype for a factory-built version of the kit model. The main change was that the plane needed larger fuel tanks, so it could fly for twelve hours nonstop. Kerry was the only person at the factory who knew I was planning the longest trip ever taken in a Searey. His engineers were told the extended fuel tanks were needed because Australia is such a large country and I wanted one day to fly to New Zealand.
The range could be further extended if you replaced the passenger seat with a large fuel bag, connected by a hose to the fuel system. That seemed an anti-social measure and I didn’t expect it would be necessary. Even though this was a solo voyage, I didn’t wan
t to give up the extra seat unless it was absolutely necessary. Having a bag of fuel next to you isn’t very nice. It is also harder to fill up than a regular tank, and takes up space that can be used to store a bag and your in-flight catering. Having the extra fuel tanks built into the hull would make the cockpit much more pleasant. Kerry and I worked out that a forty-litre fuel tank could be installed on either side of the main tank, which would add four hours’ range. The extra tanks would be in the middle of the plane’s centre of gravity, which would maintain her finely tuned balance.
But even more fuel would be needed. The Searey’s hull is shaped like a boat’s, and we worked out that another tank could fit into the bottom of the hull, in the chine between the stringers. A long and slender sixty-litre tank was complicated to build but an elegant solution to my range problem: now I had 5 + 4 + 3 = 12 hours. Buono!
The airframe was reinforced to carry extra loads, a strength now standard in every factory-made Searey. I designed the fuel system so it would always feed the engine from the main tank, which would be topped up through hoses from the secondary tanks by an electric pump. Because the fuel tanks that supply an engine can never be allowed to run dry, or else the engine tends to stop, this arrangement extended the aircraft’s range a little. Just in case, plumbing was added for a seat-mounted fuel bladder, although one wasn’t made at the time because I didn’t think I would need it.
We put a lot of thought into the ergonomics and layout of the dashboard. Modern commercial aviation is conducted mainly by autopilot. Because today’s airlines are so big and sophisticated, pilots may directly control their aircraft for only a few minutes on a transcontinental voyage. The Searey was low-tech. There would be no autopilot. I would have to control the aircraft for every minute of the trip, which would require me to be mentally alert for hundreds of hours in the semi-reclined seat. I would have to be constantly aware of the aircraft’s location, direction and altitude. I would have to think about the weather at my destination, which could be ten hours away, and along the route; I’d also have to communicate with air-traffic control and calculate how much fuel was left. I would have to know what my emergency options were at every moment while airborne. All my body’s physical functions would have to be carried out sitting down, often in a sealed drysuit.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 3
