Written In the Sky

Mark Carr

• Publisher: Melbourne Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781925556780
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since childhood, Mark Carr wanted to fly, and fly he did... firstly as a naval aviator, a jet instructor and later, pilot with Cathay Pacific Airways. This 'techno-biography' is written for those who, like him, seemingly have hydraulic oil flowing through their veins. The book also gives readers of a non-flying background an insight into military and civil aviation. Sit in the cockpit with Mark and gain a rare insight into how these amazing machines work, and how the men and women in the cockpits and flight decks operate them safely and efficiently. His story is also entwined with historical context including his first-hand account of the infamous Australian Pilots' Dispute of 1989 and life as an expatriate in Hong Kong.

1

DUCK AND COVER

1957 – 1966

One of my earliest memories is the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was 1962 and I vaguely remember my father trying to explain something about President Kennedy and Cuba to me, a five-year-old boy. My parents had been listening to the ‘wireless’ a great deal (as radios were called). I only had a vague idea who President Kennedy was and that missiles were involved.

Kooringal was a dusty new suburb of what was an equally dusty town, Wagga Wagga, in the Australia’s New South Wales Riverina region. Grove Street, where we lived, edged with growing plane trees, was initially just a gravel road to be later surfaced with sharp brown stones embedded in tar that would cause many a graze after falling off bicycles, scooters or billy-carts (soap box racers). The street was almost without exception populated with young couples producing and bringing up ‘baby boom’ children.

The houses were recently built, wooden-floored, wooden-framed, clad with fibro (a form of asbestos-cement sheeting) and topped with uninsulated corrugated iron roofs. They were frigid in winter, and stifling in summer under blazing blue skies. However, most of the houses were owned, or at least being paid off, by those who lived in them. A lean-to carport, occasionally a garage, would be adjacent, but the backyards were generous in area.

Our house was painted pale blue and faced west toward Wagga’s Willan’s Hill. It had a carport to one side, three small bedrooms, a lounge room, kitchen and bathroom; but for many years, there was no inside toilet. Before ‘the sewerage’ came to Kooringal, the toilets were small fibro-clad backyard sheds with a commode inside that enclosed a can which was changed weekly by the ‘sanitary man’. A child’s night visit to the unlit toilet in the middle of winter was a dark, freezing experience, and the smell of it during the hot inland summers was powerful.

To the west, Willan’s Hill was prominent from the lounge room windows, and at dusk I often gazed out at it and the glowing western sky that beckoned beyond. A few years later, I would tear down its red, stony tracks on a bicycle or billy cart. Oceans of long grass rippled in the vacant lots a few streets away, in the paddocks beyond and out the back of our school, and, according to the season, they were filled with locusts, paddy-melon or yellow daisies. There was also the occasional snake. On hushed windless winter days, crows cawed mournfully from the gum trees under grey skies while the family huddled around the simple gas fire in the lounge. During the ferocious summers, a single electric fan constituted the family’s cooling appliances for many years. I would not live in a house that had an air conditioner until 1983.

My parents were hard working and ‘correct’, as most people were in the 1960s. My father was secretary of the local horse racing club and my mother was house-bound, bringing up my two younger sisters and me. As there was no television or internet, toys and playmates were important, but to me, books were equally as important and reasonably available. I was a voracious reader, and I read, or tried to read, anything I could get my hands on, including my parents’ novels that lay around the house, some subsequently confiscated with little explanation as to why. Early evening’s entertainment was sitting near the ‘wireless’ listening to children’s ‘serials’, stories and cartoon soundtracks that had been adapted for radio.

I attended Kooringal Public, a government school. It had the usual standards of the day: a good grounding in spelling, grammar and maths, strait-laced teachers, and lots of reading. There was corporal punishment – ‘the cane’ – but I recall being taught binary notation, set theory and other concepts, which were quite advanced for primary school. I was not good at, or interested in, sport. Clumsy and lacking stamina, I found it boring and pointless, and I attended school and extra-curricular sports training and games under sufferance.

I had experienced television during yearly visits to grandparents’ homes in Melbourne. In the evenings, especially at my paternal grandparents’ home in West Footscray, the lounge rooms would be darkened and the hushed extended family would gaze at the flickering black and white images. Eventually would come the long drive back to Wagga and for me it would be back to school, my books, playing outside, my beloved Meccano set and model railway, and the after-school or evening gathering around the wireless. I relished visits to Wagga’s new library, and a book as a present was rarely greeted with an inward groan. I had a growing collection of them in the shelf in my bedhead.

Finally, in 1964, television came to Wagga Wagga. After-school life changed. Cricket games were still being played in Grove Street (the cars obligingly slowed down while the pitch was cleared), along with the then-normal childhood games of ‘cops and robbers’ and the politically incorrect ‘cowboys and Indians’. Children still pelted down Willan’s Hill on bicycles and billy carts, but even with parents and teachers wary of this new medium, most of us became avid watchers of television.

When bored with the other games, we played one that was simply called ‘war’. We were products of our time. Many fathers were veterans of World War II, and some families had lost relatives during the global conflict. There was gratitude to our armed services for delivery from the Germans and the brutal Japanese. Not long after World War II came the Korean conflict, and now in the sixties there was a war in Indo-China. I recall a neighbourhood backyard party on a sweltering, still night in Kooringal, a farewell for a group of young men who had been conscripted for army service as part of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Aside from this proxy to the actual Cold War, the arms race between the Soviets and the West was in full swing. Australians were overwhelmingly of British or European descent, conservative in outlook, and stood when the national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen,’ was played before the start of the films at the ‘pictures’. The communist threat was taken very seriously by most.

Then there were the toy manufacturers.

For boys, ‘war toys’ were readily accepted by society, and lucrative for the producers and the retailers. Plastic weapons were available in all shapes and sizes: pistols, rifles, grenades, daggers, bayonets, machetes, machine guns. Toy shops were full of them. Many looked vicious, and some fired projectiles with varying degrees of potential for injury. We couldn’t get enough of them! Wagga was a military town that hosted two military training bases: Kapooka Army Camp lay to the west and later notably for me, not far from Kooringal, was Forest Hill RAAF Base. Military bands featured at many social and civic events, men in uniform were common in the main street and there were open days and air displays at Forest Hill. Another early memory is a visit to a display at the air force base and nervously standing under an immense four-engine aircraft. I later worked out that it was a ‘long nose’ Avro Lincoln patrol bomber, its extended ‘glasshouse’ nose towering overhead, angled to the sky. Under-stimulated by the routines of school and household, and with the advent of war movies and a series called ‘Combat’ shown on television, I started to become obsessed with war and the military.

The obsession became unhealthy. After school it was straight into my green combat suit, complete with a plastic helmet. On went the belt with a plastic dagger and a pistol, then I grabbed the plastic or wooden rifle and went out to find my playmates, who only to a degree shared my interest. Murderous assaults were launched on the ‘Krauts’ or the ‘Japs’, to the backdrop of vocalised gunfire and explosions.

There were other aspects to a childhood in Australia in the 1960s. Radio news was barely understood by a child, but when the family’s Pye television showed images of missiles, atomic tests, fuzzy images of goose-stepping Russians in Red Square and talk of ‘Civil Defence’, a more thoughtful and sensitive boy couldn’t help but absorb the general unease and concern about nuclear war. I don’t think that the infamous Duck and Cover cartoon was shown on Australian television, but it was certainly taken seriously in the United States. This grotesque short film encapsulated the madness and danger of the Cold War. Opening with a cartoon turtle marching along to a corny jingle, it was designed to educate American children and civilians on the importance of recognising, and reacting immediately to, the flash of a nuclear detonation: ‘duck and cover’. Then, a sudden bright flash appeared from off screen; children, my age, ducking under school desks; pedestrians diving into doorways; a man covering himself with a newspaper!

Most nights, there were grainy black-and-white images on the TV news of Australian soldiers and airmen operating in Vietnam. Floppy-hatted troops, laden with gear, leapt out of Iroquois (what the Americans called ‘Huey’) helicopters and, bent double, ran through overgrown rice or grass that rippled in waves from the rotors’ downwash.

But I was still always looking for something to read. There were several novels by Neville Shute on my parents’ bookshelf. Desperate for something new, I took his most famous book, On the Beach, from the shelf. The Cold War was never far from the news, even in Wagga Wagga, and Shute’s post-apocalyptic portrayal of radiation from a nuclear war slowly drifting south from the northern hemisphere to Australia, the metamorphosis from normal life to creeping radiation sickness followed by the self-euthanising of the protagonists had me, at eleven years old, turning the pages in fascinated terror. At the time, I thought that the haunting verses from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men that Shute included as an introduction had been written especially for the book.

A by-product of the Cold War, however, was the exciting ‘space race’. I had an understanding of what the American ‘Project Gemini’ was, and I knew some of the astronauts’ names. Eventually, to my parents’ (and some teachers’) relief, my avid reading and the few television shows relating to soldiering that I was permitted to watch began to portray army life to me as dull, dirty and boring. Children’s television dramas were becoming more sophisticated as the decade wore on, and the machines in the famous Gerry and Sylvia Anderson puppet productions Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet held me spellbound after school, particularly those of them that flew. I started to assemble model aeroplanes.

One day, a game of war turned into space commander, and a lifetime obsession with aerospace began.

2

LOCATE AND CEMENT

1966 – 1969

Along with the ‘war toys’, in every toy shop were racks of ‘Airfix’ models. These were among the first plastic model aeroplanes, assembled using Airfix’s proprietary pungent, corrosive glue, which came in a blue and white tube. ‘Are you right for glue?’ was on the lips of every shopkeeper when a child or parent appeared at the counter with their latest purchase. A ‘Series 1’ kit came in a plastic bag stapled to a paper flap which, on the front, showed a thrilling image of the subject aircraft, usually shooting or dropping some form of projectile, and information with facts and figures about the real thing on the back. On the inside were the instructions: the classic ‘locate and cement’ written directions, in English only, which accompanied the drawings.

There were no pictograms or multiple languages as most model kits provide now. I learned some of the language of aviation – ‘nacelle’, ‘tailplane’, ‘cowling’ and ‘aileron’ – through the solemnly worded assembly sequence of an Airfix model. My construction of a single seat fighter usually commenced with liberal coatings of glue applied to the backside of the pilot to attach him to the seat. Eventually the model would be complete, its polystyrene pilot almost indistinguishable through his canopy under smears of hardened glue. The model would be embellished with those decals that had not floated away or became wrapped around my fingers and broken, but oh boy! Another sleek fighter for the collection.

I began to live and breathe aircraft. During meals, the Observer’s Book of Aircraft was always beside me and, because I was often bored and causing trouble, this was tolerated by my parents; it kept me quiet at the dinner table. I borrowed books on flying from the Wagga library, many of them quaint British hardbacks printed on shiny paper. One urged me to construct a primitive control column and rudder pedals to practice the movements, which I duly did using Meccano. I was given a copy of Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters, which I read and reread. I could quote tracts from it. My bicycle was named after Australian pilot Micky Martin’s Lancaster bomber, ‘P for Peter’ which he had nicknamed ‘P for Popsie’. I didn't know what a ‘popsie’ was until I was much older. I gave ‘lectures on flight’ to anyone who would listen. Silhouettes in the Observer’s Book were memorised; any appearance of an aircraft on the television news was accompanied by a shout from me as to what type it was, only to be shushed by my parents who would be concentrating on the television news of the day, after a life of gleaning world events from newspapers, cinema newsreels and the wireless.

Later in the sixties, the new City of Wagga Wagga prospered, as did my father’s ‘turf club’. Money became available for some basic house improvements, and an annual holiday additional to the visits to the respective grandparents in the Melbourne suburbs of McKinnon and West Footscray. Long drives interstate were made over successive summers in an un-air conditioned car containing three restless and occasionally fighting young children....