Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (5 page)

‘Sometimes the customers are a little nervous about flying for the first time,’ he said, ‘especially when they’ve put the kit together themselves. If they ask then I’ll go over and sit in the back. They’re easy enough to fly though, soft and gentle planes really. They can be a bit of a bugger to land, mind you, because of the length of the nose.’

‘How long have you been flying them?’ I asked, trying not to think of that last comment.

‘Since Mike started building them. He asked me to test the original Mark 25 and I’ve been there for the Mark 26A and B. This one’, he said, waving at old sharky, ‘is superb. It’s the biggest and fastest Mike has built. It climbs at 3500 feet a minute, and when you consider the weight difference, the 450 brake horse power is equivalent to the output they had from the old Griffins during the war. It’s quick, Charley, a real hot one.’

Rick had joined the RAF when he was seventeen. He flew fighters until 1981, then left the RAF, moved out here and joined the Australian Air Force. He flew Mirages and when he retired he slowed down a little and became a balloon pilot. He lived locally and Mike O’Sullivan had heard about him, so he asked if he would test the Mark 25.

Rick is a grandfather and his son and three grandsons have their own manufacturing business that supplies over seventy different parts for the Spitfire. I liked him a lot: he had that pilot’s confidence, the kind of ease I’d seen in Ewan’s brother Colin, who flew Tornados in the Gulf.

Rick said he would happily fly me up the coast as far as Maryborough, where we could skim the beaches at five hundred feet, and he would put down at an airfield, from where we could be on our way. A little later I laid out my sleeping bag. As it was getting chilly now, I decided to sleep in my clothes. The others settled down and as the lights went out, I lay for a moment thinking about the next day. I couldn’t quite believe I was lying in a moonlit hangar north of Brisbane, gazing at the silhouette of a Spitfire.

I THINK RICK WAS a little bit disappointed in me. I mean, there I was, a veteran of the Dakar and all those expeditions, and within twenty minutes of being in the air I was all but throwing up.

We woke to thick fog but he was confident it would clear, and so it did, although it took a little longer than he thought. Sam had gone ahead to Maryborough to make sure we had seats on the Tilt Train that ran from Brisbane to Cairns - the next leg of our journey. We were going as far as Rockhampton and, assuming we were on time for the train, we would cover some serious ground today.

We ate breakfast cooked on a barbecue in the hangar then pushed the Spitfire outside.

The fog hung around for another hour or so but finally it cleared and I was in the back of the plane, cramped and sweating, an old-style helmet on my head and the fuselage almost like a cage around me. I only realised just how small it was when Rick got in too, and I was hunched behind him with my elbows at my sides and my hands between my knees.

It was fantastic, though. This was a replica of the most historic fighter in British aviation history and I was about to fly up the coast. When my dad was making
Hope and Glory
, I remember reading about the Battle of Britain pilots, how they had been quite happy to get on with the job once they were in the planes; it was the waiting around for the call to scramble that set their nerves jangling.

Finally we were up and away, with Claudio filming from the open door of the chase plane. Rick was super-cool, so confident and very experienced. He told me that it was usually after about twenty minutes that people started to feel sick. He was not wrong. Even so, I don’t think he expected me to fail quite so spectacularly. There was another forty minutes to go and there I was with a hand to my mouth and my face beginning to resemble the emerald forests below. I didn’t actually puke, but cold sweat was dripping from the ends of my hair onto the nape of my clammy neck.

The chase plane flew in a straight line while we climbed and dived, with the odd barrel roll and one almighty loop-the-loop thrown in for good measure. We were flying over towns and farms, rivers and forests, and at one point we banked steeply across the side of a mountain before scything around it, like taking a corner on a motorbike with your knee down, only much, much faster.

I was feeling really crook now, and to be honest it was hard to appreciate just how lucky I was, and how fabulous the world looked from a fighter aircraft. I had to take my helmet off because it felt like it was pressing my skull into my brain. I realised that the last time I’d felt this ill was when I went to a funfair as a kid and ate mountains of candy floss before being whirled around on a waltzer. When the thing finally stopped, I stumbled off and threw up everywhere.

But that was a waltzer and this was a plane and I couldn’t just get off. We flew over Rainbow Beach with the waves breaking in white rollers only five hundred feet below. An hour or so in the air and I have to admit that, much as I loved it, I was not sorry to see the airstrip at Maryborough.

The TV must have broadcast where we were because when we taxied to a halt and I climbed out, there was quite a crowd to meet us. I signed a few autographs, still feeling pretty green, and then thanked Rick before jumping into a replica of a 1952 MG-TD driven by a wonderful old guy called Ron Stephenson. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat and handed me a black one, and like a couple of old desperadoes we drove four or five kilometres to the Maryborough Museum where John Meyers had an armoured car waiting.

Yep, an armoured car. It was a Ferret Scout and the steering was sort of up and under with the wheel horizontal to your knees rather than perpendicular. It came complete with machine guns and what they called a pre-select gearbox where you chose the gear you wanted then stamped on the clutch and it clicked in. The car was fifty years old, green and camouflaged, and was driven by a guy called Graeme Knoll. He actually had to drive it out of the museum and from there it was fifteen minutes to the station and the Tilt Train. I have to say I was looking forward to a bit of trainage. After being up in the plane for five hundred kilometres with my stomach in my mouth, I would be more than happy to sit for a few hours and let it settle.

I played machine-gunner as we drove up Maryborough High Street, then Graeme let me drive for part of the way. Of course I stalled the thing before we got going, but then it’s not every day you drive an armoured car. Anyway, I eventually got the hang of it and we made it to the railway station with six minutes to spare.

 

 

The people operating the train (which is the fastest in Australia) were really accommodating. As soon as we got on board they told us they had arranged for me to be up at the front with the driver. The train is powered by electricity and very quiet; so quiet, in fact, that the driver told me it sneaks up on you before you know it and people at level crossings have to be careful. It can clock 160 kmph and sucks the juice from the tracks as it accelerates, then puts some of it back again when it slows down. I could just about take it all in, but I was still feeling pretty queasy, and after half an hour or so I went back to our compartment and, closing my eyes, dozed for half an hour. By the time we made Rockhampton I was feeling much better, and with almost a thousand kilometres covered since we left Watts Bridge airfield, we’d made quite a leap up the Australian coastline.

We were heading for Cairns to hook up with the flying doctors, which I was really excited about. Our plans beyond that had changed a tad, though. Apparently there was a big festival taking place in Papua New Guinea and we wanted to try to make it across to Port Moresby a day earlier. But first we had to get to Cairns.

Some time ago I’d heard about the ute culture that is so popular in Australia. Utes are pick-up trucks, many of them styled like cars only with truck beds, tailgates and fibreglass covers. Their owners like to customise them by lowering the suspension, changing the wheels and supercharging the engines. We thought it might be fun to travel some of the way in a customised ute, so we had been in touch with the website
Utez.com
before we left London. Three guys had agreed to meet us at the Old Station, a cattle ranch which was fifteen minutes by plane from Rockhampton.

 

 

The Old Station is exactly what it sounds like, one of the oldest cattle ranches in this part of Australia. It was first established 140 years ago and is home to a nice guy called Rob, who runs it with his wife Helen and their two kids Samantha and Matthew. We’d been invited to breakfast with them, having spent the night in Rockhampton, and drove up to the Aero Club to meet Rob and his Cessna 185.

‘G’day, Charley,’ he said as he came round from the pilot’s door. ‘How you going?’

He was in his thirties, lean and sinewy, wearing a baseball cap and jeans. I’d flown in a few planes that were not dissimilar to this and I have to say it was much more my kind of flying: six-seater, with me alongside the pilot instead of being crammed in the back like I had been in the fighter.

Rob loved to fly, but this wasn’t just a hobby. His plane was a working vehicle on the cattle station - he said the place was so vast there was no more efficient way to cover the distances.

‘How big is it then exactly?’ I asked him when we were up in the air.

‘We own twenty-six thousand acres and run about three thousand head of cattle.’

‘Wow, that’s enormous.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You can see why we need the plane.’

The property was gorgeous, surrounded by scrub hills and situated in the middle of a stunning basin, fed by a creek that flowed even during the summer. The station had five separate irrigation licences which meant its pastures had water all year round, which was vital. Australia is the driest continent in the world, and when we were here the last time, we had seen what happens to a cattle station when there is no water.

Interestingly, from above the land looked quite wet: great swampy areas and tributaries seemed to drift out from the river. Crossing a line of hills, Rob told me that the Old Station covered the entire valley below; it was lovely country with good grazing and ragged hills covered with spindly trees.

‘This Cessna’s a tail-dragger,’ he told me. ‘You saw that just now, right? You want the two-wheels configuration at the front because it makes it easier to land in the bush.’

We put down on a rough strip close to a clutch of single-storey houses; Rob and his family lived in one and there was another for his parents and brother and a third for Rob’s best mate, Kiwi, and his wife Lee. Kiwi had come to Australia from New Zealand when he was nineteen, and had been on the station for seven years. Apart from him and Lee it was pretty much just family. I couldn’t believe that that was enough people for three thousand head of cattle.

The cows looked similar to the kind Ewan and I had seen in Africa: russet-coloured with smallish heads and long drooping ears. We got acquainted with one in particular, an orphan Helen had reared by hand and called Sausage - because that was almost certainly how part of him would end up.

Kiwi cooked the breakfast in a massive outbuilding; it was a bit like the barbecue we’d had in the Spitfire hangar. We ate on the veranda with the sun beating down. It was so warm, even though it was still winter - I shuddered to think what the heat would be like in the dry season.

After breakfast Helen asked me to help her muster a couple of hundred ‘weaners’ - young cattle that had been away from their mothers for a few weeks and were in the process of being ‘educated’ before they were shipped out to various paddocks across the station.

‘We teach them how to muster,’ Helen told me. ‘We put them into corrals then use the dogs to get them to move from one side to the other. Cows are quick learners and they like routine. Once they know what the dogs want them to do, it’s quite easy. After a week or so moving them from paddock to paddock they understand, and one person on a horse can easily lead two hundred.’

This was ranching Australian-style, and it was amazingly efficient. Helen and Rob had a big place but like most ranchers they were hardly cash rich and could not afford to employ lots of stockmen. Sometimes when I’m travelling I come across people living a way of life that, when I catch a glimpse of it, is so appealing I can see myself doing it. It’s happened a few times, and it’s the tranquillity, maybe, the security of knowing what you’re going to be doing tomorrow. Perhaps that’s particularly appealing when I’m on the road, rarely staying in a place for more than one night at a time.

Anyway, I climbed onto the back of a beautiful chestnut horse to help Helen muster the weaners. ‘OK,’ I said to my mount. ‘Here we go. I haven’t done this for ages, my love, so look after me.’

‘It’s a boy, Charley,’ Helen called out, ‘a gelding.’

‘Boy,’ I said, ‘right.’ I patted the horse’s neck. ‘OK, we’ll have a few beers together or something, buddy, shall we?’