The end of the war came in 1945 and it is now perhaps a good time to look at how my life went from that stage on to now.

I am now 82 and it is 2004, so it’s a matter of looking back something like 59 years and thinking there were some areas in my life that may not have been as correct as it could have been. I could put it down to wartime stress, or too many hormones or too much grog which I think I was drinking heavier at that time of my life than I should have been. However, enough of excuses because it was as it was and I think it has got to be described from here on.

When I left ANA I almost immediately got a job with Qantas flying on their Brisbane Darwin run and also doing a course in flying doctor work out of Charleville and Cloncurry as well as doing the Normanton run in a Fox Moth which meant flying in an open cockpit aeroplane with three or four people inside in the front and occasionally giving them a loop when specially requested.

At that stage I was a bit of a big head and also thought I was a wartime hero which I bloody well wasn’t.

During this period I think there’s a story that should be told. It was somewhere around 1946/47 and there was a Dutch aircraft that went missing between Cloncurry and Darwin. Despite looking for it with many aeroplanes nobody could find it until one day on a Qantas aeroplane flying on the direct route from Sydney to Darwin, a passenger happened to look out of the window and see the wreckage of an aeroplane which he told the steward who immediately advised the captain and he came back and circled the area and notified Darwin of the position of this aircraft wreckage.

It was somewhere around 60 miles east of Katherine and a search party was sent out from Katherine, a police search party with black trackers, and when they got to the wreckage the insurance assessor who was with the group told me that the police sergeant sent back a black tracker to Katherine, a two-day trek for him, to tell the sergeant that they had found the wreckage and that the people were all alive and they had eaten their dog but other than that they were all well.

A couple of days later a black tracker came up to the sergeant at the search party and said, look Jacky has arrived at Katherine. When I questioned the police sergeant about how his friend knew that Jacky had arrived at Katherine, the police sergeant said look, don’t ask me, they know. The insurance assessor was a bit sceptical and when he got back to Katherine, he said to the police sergeant there, “what time did Jacky tell you about the wreckage?” and the police sergeant said it was 8 o’clock on Saturday morning because I remember the news was just coming on. This was the time the other black tracker had told the police sergeant about Jacky. Really they have a lot of intuition or whatever you like to call it that white people do not have.

I went on flying for TAA until 1961 and up to that stage I had been fortunate enough to go to Holland to bring out a Friendship aeroplane as a crew member. I enjoyed the trip very much.

While I was there I went over to Ireland, and when I came back to London the captain of the aeroplane who was going to fly us out, Jimmy James, talked me into cutting my holidays short and coming back to Holland with him to have a look at what they were doing with the manufacture of this aeroplane. It was great experience and a great trip and once again we drank far too much and enjoyed ourselves far too much. There you go, that’s life.

We flew out from Holland in VHTAJ Friendship in October 1959 with three crew and quite a number of migrants that we brought out for the Australian Government.  The total flying time to Melbourne was 55 hours and 20 minutes including the test flight (Amsterdam/Skiphol)  There were times when we had to make some concession about the weight we carried because we decided not to fly on unlimited fuel to fall within the Australian regulations of all up weight, and there were times we used to fill the tanks up and head off to the next destination.  There was some indication that we may not be as safe as we should if we didn’t have enough petrol. However that was another story.

At the end of 1961 by this time I was a captain on Friendships having flown Friendships, DC3s, Dragons, Drovers, Fox Moths and of course a lot of aeroplanes in the air force. I had a total of 14,500 flying hours.

Thanks to the Civil Aviation Historical Society (link) for permission to use photos of the Fox Moth and Friendship on this page.