I lost my licence due to elevated blood pressure and when you look back on it it’s not a wonder considering some of the pressures that were put upon me including my wife had divorced me due to my fault not her fault and of course I was very much attached to my children and this extra pressure really put my blood pressure up and as a result I lost my flying licence.

I went to Melbourne and when I got this news from the aviation people I immediately saw Captain Chapman who was the assistant general manager of TAA and a pretty good bloke and I told him I lost my licence and that I wasn’t going to get any compensation from the air pilots association which he thought was disgraceful . I asked him if there was any chance of getting a job on the ground. I knew there was a salesman’s position in Brisbane. He looked at it and said yes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t if you’re prepared to do the leg work and sell TAA I’m prepared to give you a job. That was the start of my new career

I stayed in a ground job in TAA  from 1961 through till 1983 when I retired, and I’ll go back over and tell you of some of the interesting things I did in that period.

I think I should record at this stage that in 1960, after my first wife divorced me, I married Grace Garlick who was a journalist with the Sunday Mail newspaper in Brisbane and had accompanied me on a trip round the Gulf Country and Channel Country. She and I became good friends to the extent we agreed we would get married and that was the start of a marriage I am still in and still enjoy, and in the meantime we have three more children – David, Peter and Mark.

That means I had six children altogether. Poor old John died a couple of years ago, which means we still have five.  They are each wonderful children in their own way and will certainly be a greater success than ever I was.

But a lot is due to the wonderful mother that Grace is. She is, as a friend described her, a treasure. She took after her own mother and is a wonderful mother and terribly tolerant and really how she has put up with me is more than I know. But there you go, that’s life.

To continue on the ground saga, my job in TAA at this stage I was a salesman carrying a bag around the streets of Brisbane and if you remember I was a big hero pilot and here I was cut down in wages and every other way to 50 per cent of what I was getting.  There were a lot of people anti me getting the job because I was ex air crew and the old thing of ground staff against air crew was still alive and they hated my guts. But there you are.

It wasn’t easy. I was given an area in the main city area looking after agents and commercial clients that lived in the city area. I tolerated it and obviously did the job well enough to be appointed after a couple of years to be manager for TAA in Mackay.

The main problem was finding a place to live. Initially Grace and I and the children went to live on a cane farm outside Mackay which was not very suitable but was the only thing available. Eventually TAA built a house for the manager up on Mount Oscar, the highest point overlooking Mackay. It was a lovely site. From that position you could see the airport and the whole of the city and it had a wonderful view out to sea. It was probably one of the best houses in Mackay. But of course typical of TAA when they built it they wouldn’t provide curtains and the salary for the manager $1500 a year on which you paid half towards your rent. Which was pretty hopeless and living in Mackay was not cheap.  However we stayed there for three years and we managed and it was a good learning experience.

There were certain rewards in working in the job in Mackay. We had a good staff there. I took over from Ken Davidson, the previous manager, and the hand-over was smooth. I had a staff of 11 or 12 in an office in Victoria Street in Mackay and I got to know the main commercial clients there.

The absolute star or reward that I had was meeting Captain Tom McLean who owned a fleet of Roylen cruises that sailed from Mackay every Tuesday morning. There were six of them and they departed on the cruises that left on Tuesday and returned on Saturday and TAA looked after the reservations and all booking enquiries.

Captain Tom was a wonderful person, and so was his wife Nell, and both were a great example to all of us. Tom helped me get into Rotary, and he helped me meet a lot of the important people which as manager for TAA was important because it was not an easy place .If you weren’t born in Mackay you were Johnny-come-lately even if you lived there for 20 years. Anyway for the three years we lived in Mackay it was a great learning experience. I had a good staff.  The office was in a central position in Mackay in Victoria Street and I was responsible for the passengers who used to come and go through to Brisbane, and also the people who came to Mackay to go to the different resort islands.

The resort islands were off Mackay or Airlie Beach. The one off Mackay was Brampton Island which was a beautiful island, 22 miles north east of Mackay with idyllic beaches and owned by Tom McLean. He was such a wonderful bloke all of the staff thought they were family. His son Fitz ran the island, with assistant manager Smithy who was quite a character. The resort hostess Hazel Naylor was the life and soul of Brampton and looked after everyone. She was a person of great talent and all of the staff and guests including my family all loved Hazel.

The other resort islands were South Molle, Daydream, Happy Bay, Long Island, Palm Island, and of course we would occasionally send people to Hayman. Hayman then was owned by Ansett, the opposition airline, and we didn’t send many people there but we did send some.

Each month each of these resort islands had to have a meeting, at a different island each month, and I suppose you could call it a booze up, but it was very enjoyable. That was the life of the manager Mackay.

While I was in Mackay Arch Smith, who was the manager of regional development TAA, came up to Mackay and looked at Brampton Island and considered we could build an airstrip there and if we could it would make a tremendous difference because a lot of people going from Mackay to Brampton used to get seasick and that was a deterrent. To be able to pick up an aircraft that took 20 minutes made all the difference.

Arch Smith took over the engineer for Mackay Harbour. His name was Don Clarke. He looked at the project and he said if you give me the contract I’ll resign from the harbour board and I’ll take on the contract which was too good to refuse. He took on the difficult job of building the airstrip which he did very well.

The airstrip length was 2600 feet and it was big enough for a Beechcraft which is a twin-engine aeroplane and carries 12 to 14 people. It was quite a useful aeroplane, and made by Beechcraft, and the best of the small aeroplanes available for that sort of work. DCA didn’t approve of it very much but had to go along with it because the airstrip was there, the aeroplane was there, and in refusing it they were knocking back quite a slice of tourist business. So we went ahead with the Beechcraft and it made such a difference to Brampton. The number of passengers increased immensely.

During the time I was manager in Mackay, Tom McLean invited the Prince of Wales who was then going to school at Timbertop outside Geelong, to go fishing on one of his Roylen cruises, which he did.  On the way back he was supposed to catch the Viscount aircraft at Mackay to fly on to Brisbane. However there was a bomb scare on the aeroplane he was supposed to fly on and he was delayed in Mackay. Of course I was happy when the Royal protectors said they were planning to fly him on a Beechcraft from Mackay to Brisbane and a lot of the elites, including the Australian governor general, tried to stop his flight on a Beechcraft. But the party with Prince Charles had made up their mind and as the governor general rang up, I was able to hold out the phone up and said, “look you can hear the plane taking off now and Prince Charles is aboard.’’ And that was that.

Later in my stay in Mackay we opened up a second airstrip in Shute Harbour. This meant that the aeroplanes we were using on the Mackay Brampton service were able to extend to Shute Harbour and carry passengers for Daydream, South Molle, Happy Bay, and Palm Bay and this was a considerable help to all the Whitsunday Islands.

For three years, I worked in Mackay and the revenue for the place increased, the staff were good, and I enjoyed it except I was losing money every year, so eventually Arch Smith who had his office in Melbourne asked if I’d like to come and work in Melbourne. The salary was so much better I jumped at the idea, and at the end of 1966 I went down to work for Arch Smith as assistant to the manager regional development. It was quite a step up in salary and we managed to find a house to rent at Deepdene which is not too far out of Melbourne. It meant I could move the family there and the kids went to school there at the Deepdene School.

I stayed in Melbourne for three years and I was really not impressed with Melbourne. I went to work in the dark and I came home in the dark. I worked on the 12^th floor of the building there in Franklin Street. It’s a hell of a place. At the end of three years I said to Arch Smith I’m going back to Queensland, this is not my territory. He thought about it, and after about three months’ consideration he said to me, look you can go back to Brisbane and work for me based in Brisbane, because most of my work with the resorts and the airstrips and all the other conditions were mainly in Queensland so back I went to Queensland very happily. Grace and the family moved into the house I had kept at Aspley and the children went to the Aspley State School.

I remember the family asking me if they could go to school in their bare feet. I said, “Too right. That’s what I came back to Queensland for.’’

We still live there today, at Maundrell Terrace, Aspley. I enjoyed working on the different airstrips.

We built an airstrip on Keppel Island. Keppel was the island closest to the Sydney Melbourne market. Even though it wasn’t as tropical as Brampton or some of the Whitsunday Islands it was still quite a good resort island and Don Clarke was the engineer who built that airstrip. It wasn’t an easy construction. It was about 2800 feet long and had a slope of two and a half percent, quite a good airstrip, and it meant that passengers coming up to Rockhampton could catch a connecting flight with Country Air and fly across to Keppel.

This meant we now had airstrips at Keppel, Brampton and at Shute Harbour and eventually we took over the Dunk Island airstrip. Dunk was the gem in the northern resort chain, a luxurious tropical island. We took it over from Avis and with the help of other people we got Dunk Island going and we resealed the surface of the airstrip.

This meant we had four resorts and they were all doing very well. With TAA a large marketing operation they were able to sell all of these resorts and with the help of the airline, of course, were offering package deals to all of them. It turned out the resorts were making as much money as TAA airline itself was, a considerable achievement and a credit to Arch Smith and TAA management.

I continued working in this job looking after the Dunk, Brampton, Shute Harbour and Keppel airstrips and made certain that all of them met the requirement standard set by the Department of Civil Aviation. I made certain that I knew all of these regulations and I always made certain that I took the local airstrip representative from the local airports closest to the airfields so that they could come over with me and check out airport markings and so on. It meant if we had an accident on the airstrips we were fireproof. We had approval from DCA and I made certain that they gave me the approval for every clearance I had on each of the resorts.

I continued in this job until 1983 when I retired.

During the period I was there a huge cyclone came through and wrecked South Molle Island and it just about devastated it. It was almost the end of South Molle. However it was purchased by a keen-eyed developer and he rebuilt it and put it back on the market.

Arch Smith eventually got quite ill and left his job and I had a new boss in Ernie Menadue, who was based in Brisbane, but no one took my job because I had the operational experience of looking after the airstrips and no one else had that experience. In 1983 when I retired from TAA I continued in that job, and the general manager of TAA Lyn Mackenzie and I agreed that I had the best job in TAA. It was certainly worth having and I enjoyed every moment of working in it.